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Why Does War Exist?Library of Social Science oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.com via uark.edu |
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![]() oanderson@libraryofsocialscience.comWHY DOES WARFARE EXIST?
by Richard A. Koenigsberg | Warfare is a culturally-defined institution or form of behavior that has existed within many societies throughout history. But why has warfare existed? Why does it continue to exist? What is the “function” of a societal institution that has produced massive destruction and self-destruction? Why have human beings created ideologies of war? And why do we enact these ideologies?
Are we to believe that each instance or manifestation of war has unique, idiosyncratic causes—that can be uncovered or revealed only through a study of the particular cultural and historical contexts in which a given war occurs? Or does war manifest a fundamental complex—a dynamic that is enacted in similar ways—at many times and in many places?
The Psychological Interpretation of Culture I suggest that—in order to answer this question—what is required is a psychological approach to the study of ideology, culture and history. This approach seeks to identify the sources and meanings of society’s cultural formations. For any ideology or institution, I pose the question: “Why does it exist?”
Speaking broadly, contemporary cultural theory postulates that mind is shaped by discourse. Warfare constitutes a particular mode of discourse: an ideology or way of thinking about the social world. But why does the discourse of warfare exist? Why is the ideology of warfare a “dominant discourse”?
Cultures are social constructions. But constructed on what foundation, and for what purpose? To understand an element of culture requires uncovering the psychic function it provides or performs. For any belief system or institution within a society, one may pose the question: What psychological work does this element of culture perform for members of the society? What is the nature of the gratification that it provides? An ideology or institution comes into being—and is embraced and perpetuated—insofar as it does something (psychologically) for individuals within that society.
We tend to assume that there is a reality that exists “out there” (constituted by language, discourse, etc.). We feel that the “external world” exists separately from the minds of the human beings who experience this reality. Of course, each of us is born into a symbolic system that is present before we exist. Thus, we say that mind is shaped by discourse.
Still, we may pose the question: Why does any particular symbolic system exist in the first place? Why does each symbolic system assume a particular form? Why has this particular ideology been perpetuated (and not others)? Or—in the old language of cultural anthropology—why are certain ideas and institutions “passed along” (while others are not)?
Because we experience symbolic systems as overwhelming in their impact, we imagine that they constitute “objective realities”—separate from actual human beings. We experience society as an entity “out there”; up above us. Based on this experience, we forget the human source of our social world. We embrace cultural creations, but forget that we have created them.
Psychic Determinism: The Human Source of Cultural Forms Freud’s analysis of dreams, slips of the tongue and psychosomatic symptoms was guided by the principle of psychic determinism, which asserted that there are no accidents in the life of the mind. Our mental life is the source of the images we dream at night, the mistakes and blunders of our everyday life and the pains in our bodies.
A psychological approach extends the principle of psychic determinism into the study of culture. We examine belief systems, ideologies, institutions and historical events based on the assumption that these cultural forms and events have not arisen by chance. We are the source of that which exists.
Why do people imagine or pretend that ideologies and institutions have a “life of their own”: as if they exist and are perpetuated independently of the human beings who create and embrace them? Why do we experience culture or society as something that descends upon us from above, as if it constitutes another domain of existence—separate from human beings?
Societies were created by human beings, and continue to exist in certain forms by virtue of the fact that we embrace that which we have created. Cultural forms exist to the extent that they allow us to externalize, work through and come to terms with our deepest desires, fears, conflicts and fantasies. Cultural ideas and institutions are not separate from the psychic functions that they perform.
Norman O. Brown: Culture as Shared Fantasy Norman O. Brown (1959) suggests that culture exists in order to “project unconscious fantasies into external reality.” By virtue of their projection into the cultural world, we are able to “see”—and attempt to master—our fantasies. The creation of culture is thus analogous to the creation of the transference in the psychoanalytic situation: inner desires and fantasies become externalized into objects in the world.
Culture or society functions as a canvas—or transference screen—into which we project our desires, conflicts and existential dilemmas, seeking to enact our fantasies in the external world. Weston La Barre (1954) stated that man in culture is “man dreaming while awake.” To understand a particular culture, therefore, is to decipher the nature of the dream or dreams that define that society.
Dreams and desires, anxieties and fantasies—are the source of our cultural creations: “We are that.” We are not separate from that which we have created. It is not as if society—those inventions, ideologies and institutions that constitute society—are independent of human beings, although often we prefer to believe that this is the case.
We have little trouble acknowledging that we are the source, for example, of air conditioners. Writing an essay during the summer is far more pleasant working in a room where the temperature is 75 degrees rather than 100 degrees. It’s clear that we human beings created air conditioners because we wanted them to exist.
Air Conditioners Fulfill our Desires. What About War? Air conditioners fulfill a need. This cultural creation articulates a human desire. We are the cause of this creation. We brought it into existence. The same can be said of light bulbs, airplanes and numerous other inventions that fulfill—in an obvious way—human needs, desires and fantasies. We have no trouble acknowledging—in these cases—that we are the source.
When it comes to the institution or cultural form of behavior called “war,” on the other hand, we are less likely or willing to recognize that we are the source; that we have created and embraced warfare because it represents the fulfillment of human desires. We tend to experience war as originating in a place outside of the self, as if warfare manifests against our will. Wars “break out.” They seem inevitable. They happen because they have to happen. Wars have always happened. This is the way things are. We are not responsible.
The unconscious becomes conscious, Brown says, only through “projection into the external world.” We project our fantasies into the world—share our fantasies through an ideology—and thus create reality. Ideologies are constructed based upon shared fantasies that are projected into the world. Warfare represents the enactment of a shared fantasy. By virtue of the enactment of a shared fantasy, war becomes a form of reality.
What are the nature of those desires and fantasies that give rise to warfare? How does the ideology of war represent a response to human needs? Why have we created an ideology or social institution whose main consequence is destruction and self-destruction? What is the nature of the fulfillment that warfare provides?
When I speak of “awakening from the nightmare of history,” I’m referring to the process of becoming aware of the desires, fantasies, anxieties and psychic conflicts that give rise to the ideology of warfare, and to enactments of war within specific societies at specific times and places. Many people are “against” war. We assume that we know what war is. But do we really?
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· ![]() · ![]() · ![]() 1. Tomgram: Beverly Gologorsky, My Neighbor, War [Note for TomDispatch Readers: We have a special offer as the holiday season approaches. The author of today’s post, Beverly Gologorsky, the sort of wonderful fiction writer you don’t often encounter at this site, has just had her new novel, Stop Here, published. Set in that classic American institution, the diner, it takes you directly down the rabbit hole of American life via a set of cooks and waitresses, their children, lovers, spouses, and assorted others. I read it and was riveted. It's truly one of a kind. For those who want to offer this website a little extra holiday cheer, a contribution of $100 (or more) will get you a personalized, signed copy of Gologorsky’s remarkable new novel, a book I suspect you’re going to hear a lot more about. If you want a sense of it, check out this striking review at the website Full Stop by Scott Beauchamp (who catches the spirit of the book when he calls it “a literary Hopper painting”) and then rush to our donation page to check out our offer. Tom] In the years when I was growing up more or less middle class, American war on the childhood front couldn’t have been sunnier. True, American soldiers were fighting a grim new stalemate of a conflict in Korea and we kids often enough found ourselves crouched under our school desks practicing for the nuclear destruction of our neighborhoods, but the culture was still focused on World War II. Enter a movie theater then and as just about any war flick ended, the Air Force arrived in the nick of time, the Marines eternally advanced, and victory was ours, a God-given trait of the American way of life. In those days, it was still easy to present war sunny-side up. After all, you couldn’t go wrong with the Good War -- not that anyone called it that until Studs Terkel put the phrase into the language and the culture dropped the quote marks with which he carefully encircled it. And if your Dad, who had served in one of the great draft armies of our history, sat beside you silently in that movie theater while John Wayne saved the world, never saying a word about his war (except in rare and sudden outbursts of anger), well, that was no problem. His silence only encouraged you to feel that, given what you’d seen at the movies (not to speak of on TV, in books, in comics, and more or less anywhere else), you already understood his experience and it had been grand indeed. And then, of course, we boys went into the parks, backyards, or fields and practiced making war the American way, shooting commies, or Ruskies, or Indians, or Japs, or Nazis with toy guns (or sticks). It may not sound pretty anymore, but take my word for it, it was glorious back when. More than half a century later, those movies are relics of the neolithic era. The toy six-shooters I once holstered and strapped to my waist, along with the green plastic soldiers that I used to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima or Normandy, are somewhere in the trash heap of time. And in the wake of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, who believes that America has a God-given right to victory? Still, I have a few relics from that era, lead Civil War and Indian War-style soldiers who, more than half a century ago, fought out elaborate battles on my floor, and I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that holding one for a moment doesn’t give me some faint wash of emotion from another age. That emotion, so much stronger then, sent thousands of young Americans into Vietnam dreaming of John Wayne. These days, post-Vietnam, post-9/11, no one rides to the rescue, “victory” is no longer in our possession, and for the first time in memory, a majority of the public thinks Washington should “mind its own business” globally when it comes to war-making. Not surprisingly, in an America that’s lost its appetite for war, such conflicts are far more embattled, so much less onscreen, and as novelist Beverly Gologorsky writes today, unacknowledged in much of American fiction. There was nothing sunny about war, even in the 1950s, for the young, working-class Gologorsky. If my childhood was, in a sense, lit by war and by a 24/7 economy in which the same giant corporations built ever larger cars and missiles, television consoles and submarines, hers was shadowed by it. She sensed, far more than I, the truth of war that lay in our future. That shadowing is the essence of her deeply moving “Vietnam” novel, The Things We Do to Make It Home, and her just-published second novel, Stop Here, a book that comes to grips in a way both subtle and heart-rending with the Iraq and Afghan wars without ever leaving the environs of a diner in Long Island, New York. Tom In the Shadow of War
Life and Fiction in Twenty-First-Century America
By Beverly Gologorsky I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that -- a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside -- from the novels that are generally published. For at least a decade, Americans have been living in the shadow of war and yet, except in pop fiction of the Tom Clancy variety (where, in the end, we always win), there’s remarkably little evidence of it. As for myself -- I’m a novelist -- I find that no matter what I chose to write about, I can’t seem to avoid that shadow. My first novel was about Vietnam vets coming home and my second is permeated with a shadowy sense of what the Iraq and Afghan wars have done to us. And yet I’ve never been to, or near, a war, and nothing about it attracts me. So why is it always lurking there? Recently, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just why that might be and I may finally have a very partial answer, very modestly encapsulated in one rather un-American word: class. Going to War in the South Bronx I come from -- to use an old-fashioned phrase -- a working class immigrant family. The middle child of four siblings, not counting the foster children my mother cared for, I grew up in the post-World War II years in the basement of a building in the South Bronx in New York City. In my neighborhood, war -- or at least the military -- was the norm. Young men (boys, really) generally didn’t make it through life without serving in some military capacity. Soldiers and veterans were ubiquitous. Except to us, to me, none of them were “soldiers” or “veterans.” They were just Ernie, Charlie, Danny, Tommy, Jamal, Vito, Frank. In our neck of the urban woods -- multi-ethnic, diverse, low-income -- it was the way things were and you never thought to question that, in just about every apartment on every floor, there was a young man who had been in, would go into, or was at that moment in the military and, given the conflicts of that era, had often been to war as well. Many of the boys I knew joined the Marines before they could be drafted for some of the same reasons men and women volunteer now. (Remember that there was still a draft army then, not the all-volunteer force of 2013.) However clichéd they may sound today, they reflected a reality I knew well. Then as now, the military held out the promise of a potentially meaningful future instead of the often depressing adult futures that surrounded us as we grew up. Then as now, however, too many of those boys returned home with little or nothing to show for the turmoil they endured. And then as now, they often returned filled with an inner chaos, a lost-ness from which many searched in vain for relief. When I was seven, the Korean War began. I was 18 when our first armed advisers arrived in Vietnam. After that disaster finally ended, a lull ensued, broken by a series of “skirmishes” from Grenada to Panama to Somalia to Bosnia, followed by the First Gulf War, and then, of course, the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. I dated, worked with, or was related to men who participated in some of these wars and conflicts. One of my earliest memories, in fact -- I must have been three -- is of my anxious 19-year-old sister waiting for her soldier-fiancé to make his way home from World War II. Demobilized, he finally arrived with no outward signs that war had taken a toll on him. Like so many of those “greatest generation” vets, though, he wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about his experiences, and remained hard to reach about most things for years afterwards. His army hat was my first military souvenir. When I was eight or nine, my brother was drafted into the Korean War and I can still remember my constant worries about his well-being. I wrote my childish letters to him nearly every day. He had been assigned to Camp Breckinridge, Kentucky, given a pair of lace-up boots, and told he’d be training as a paratrooper. He could never get past the anxiety that assignment bestowed on him. Discharged, many pounds thinner and with a bad case of mononucleosis, he came home with a need to have guns around, guns he kept close at hand for the rest of his life. My first “serious” boyfriend was a sailor on the U.S.S. Warrington. I was 15. Not surprisingly, he was away more than home. He mustered out with an addiction to alcohol. I was 18 when my second boyfriend was drafted. John F. Kennedy was president and the Vietnam War was, then, just a blip on the American horizon. He didn’t serve overseas, but afterwards he, too, couldn’t figure out what to do with the rest of his life. And so it went. Today, I no longer live in the South Bronx where, I have no doubt, women as well as men volunteer for the military with similar mindsets to those of my youth, and unfortunately return home with problems similar to those suffered by generations of soldiers before them. Suffice it to say that veterans of whatever war returned having experienced the sharp edge of death and nothing that followed in civilian life could or would be as intense. Rejecting War It’s in the nature of militaries to train their soldiers to hate, maim, and kill the enemy, but in the midst of the Vietnam War -- I had, by then, made it out of my neighborhood and my world -- something challenged this trained-to-kill belief system and it began to break down in a way previously unknown in our history. With that mindset suddenly in ruins, many young men refused to fight, while others who had gone to war, ones from neighborhoods like mine, came home feeling like murderers. In those years, thinking of those boys and many others, I joined the student antiwar movement, though I was often the only one in any group not regularly on campus. (Working class women worked at paying jobs!) As I learned more about that war, my anger grew at the way my country was devastating a land and a people who had done nothing to us. The loss of American and Vietnamese lives, the terrible wounds, all of it felt like both a waste and a tragedy. From 1964 on, ending that war sooner rather than later became my 24/7 job (when, that is, I wasn’t at my paying job). ![]() During those years, two events remain vivid in my memory. I was part of a group that opened an antiwar storefront coffee shop near Fort Dix in New Jersey, a camp where thousands of recruits received basic training before being shipped out to Vietnam. We served up coffee, cake, music, posters, magazines, and antiwar conversation to any soldiers who came in during their off-hours -- and come in they did. I met young men from as far away as Nebraska and Iowa, as close by as Queens and Brooklyn. I have no idea if any of them ever refused to deploy to Vietnam as some soldiers did in those years. However, that coffee house gave me an education in just how vulnerable, scared, excited, unprepared, and uninformed they were about what they would be facing and, above all, about the country they were invading.Our storefront hours ran from 5 pm to whenever. On the inevitable night bus back to the Port Authority terminal, I would be unable to shake my sadness. Night after night, on that ride home I remember thinking: if only I had the power to do something more to save their lives, for I knew that some of them would come back in body bags and others would return wounded physically or emotionally in ways that I remembered well. And for what? That was why talking with them has remained in my memory as both a burden and a blessing. The second event that stays with me occurred in May 1971 in Washington, D.C. A large group of Vietnam veterans, men who had been in the thick of it and seen it all, decided they needed to do something that would bring national attention to the goal of ending the war. The method they chose was to act out their repudiation of their previous participation in it. Snaking past the Capitol, an extremely long line of men in uniform threw purple hearts and medals of every sort into a trash bin. Most then made a brief statement about why they hated the war and could no longer bear to keep those medals. I was there and I’ll never forget their faces. One soldier, resisting the visible urge to cry, simply walked off without saying a word, only to collapse on a fellow soldier’s shoulder. Many of us watched, sobbing. Breathing War In those years, I penned political articles, but never fiction. Reality overwhelmed me. Only after that war ended did I begin to write my world, the one that was -- always -- shadowed by war, in fiction. Why doesn’t war appear more often in American novels? Novelist Dorothy Allison once wrote, "Literature is the lie that tells the truth." Yet in a society where war is ever-present, that truth manages to go missing in much of fiction. These days, the novels I come across have many reference points, cultural or political, to mark their stories, but war is generally not among them.” My suspicion: it has something to do with class. If war is all around us and yet, for so many non-working-class Americans, increasingly not part of our everyday lives, if war is the thing that other people do elsewhere in our name and we reflect our world in our fiction, then that thing is somehow not us. My own urge is to weave war into our world, the way Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, once wove apartheid into her novels -- without, that is, speechifying or pontificating or even pointing to it. When American fiction ignores the fact of war and its effects remain hidden, without even brief mentions as simple markers of time and place, it also accepts peace as the background for the stories we tell. And that is, in its own way, the lie that denial tells. That war shadows me is a difficult truth, and for that I have my old neighborhood to thank. If war is the background to my novels about everyday life, it’s because it’s been in the air I breathed, which naturally means my characters breathe it, too. Beverly Gologorsky is the author the just-published novel Stop Here (“a literary Hopper painting,” Seven Stories Press). Her first novel, The Things We Do to Make it Home, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book. In the Vietnam years, she was an editor of two political journals, Viet-Report and Leviathan and her contribution to feminism is noted in Feminists Who Changed America. Copyright 2013 Beverly Gologorsky SUBSCRIBE You'll receive 3 to 5 mailings per week and we'll never sell or share your email address. SUPPORT US
WAR PROFITEERS DONATE It’s all good news for the war contractors, whose profits skyrocketed after 9/11 but dipped when the Iraq War ended, and whose surrogates are all over the corporate media urging us to send more weapons to the Middle East. Today, while the radical warrior cult that now calls itself Islamic State (also known as ISIS) is taking over large swaths of Iraq and Syria, our tax dollars are simultaneously supporting ISIS militants in Syria (who have been siphoning off aid intended for more moderate rebels), bombing ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq, and arming Syrian rebels and the Kurdish peshmerga to fight ISIS. It’s all a win-win for the war industry and a lose-lose for the American taxpayer. Corporations are amoral by design. While many good and decent people sit on corporate boards, their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize returns for shareholders, not to do right by the American people. This is why alliances between corporations and the state are historically so dangerous. Yet we have allowed corporate interests to capture both major political parties and to drive public policy, with disastrous results, including perpetual war. Americans have spent trillions of dollars and seen thousands of our young people killed or maimed since 9/11, only to see the terror threat spread like a cancer. All of this is very bad news for the American people, who will suffer the blowback from the new generation of kids in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq who will grow up hating the United States and its missiles and drones. But it’s all good news for the war contractors, whose profits skyrocketed after 9/11 but dipped when the Iraq War ended, and whose surrogates are all over the corporate media urging us to send more weapons to the Middle East. Real diplomacy was once embraced by the press. Recall the famous handshakes between Nixon and Communist Chairman Mao Zedong, or Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Today, ideas with any potential to resolve conflict (and threaten profits) are sabotaged, shouted down or shut out of the debate. Just look at the relentless efforts to derail the treaty under negotiation with Iran to end its nuclear weapons program. A belligerent Iran in pursuit of nuclear weapons may be dangerous, but it’s also good for the war business. While efforts to remove corporate influence from public policy through campaign finance reform are failing, there is another way. We can demand an end to war profiteering. Filling government contracts should be a form of public service, like serving in the military. Contractors, like soldiers, should be paid a fair wage but should not expect to get rich on the backs of the U.S. taxpayer. Today, residents of the D.C. Area enjoy the highest median household income of any metro area in the country, thanks in large part to the river of taxpayer cash flowing to federal contractors. Here’s one alternative model: The federal government contracts private lawyers to represent indigent criminal defendants. These lawyers are paid a fee that covers all basic overhead. Any significant additional expenses, such as private investigators or experts, must be pre-approved. Most of these contract lawyers provide high levels of service, despite knowing that these cases make them rich. .S. taxpayers is probably not worth developing—or, if it is, the development should be done in-house by scientists earning government salaries. The government/corporate alliance we have now is producing more innovations in graft than in technology. Just look at the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter designed by Lockheed Martin. It is the most expensive weapon ever built, predicted to cost taxpayers more than a trillion dollars—enough to buy a mansion for every homeless American, as Hayes Brown of ThinkProgress has calculated. Yet the F-35 can’t even fly without catching fire and spewing toxic fumes, and its costly stealth technology is easily defeated by radar systems that have been widely available since 1940. Today, the most expensive weapon ever built mostly just sits in its hangar. If we can take the profit out of war, we will protect the wallets of U.S. taxpayers, free up resources for projects that actually benefit us, and interrupt the cycle of perpetual war LEONARD C. GOODMAN Leonard Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense lawyer and Adjunct Professor of Law at DePaul University.
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