Barbara Ehrenreich - Blood Rites

S ome years ago I had occasion to need a theory of war. The occasion, fortunately, was only a literary one: I had been asked to write the preface to the English translation of a book about the twentieth-century German warrior elite, Klaus Theweleits fascinating Male Fantasies. I was flattered to be asked, but felt inadequate to the task. After all, my only qualification was that I had written a book about men and masculinity (The Hearts of Men), and nothing in that had touched on the subject of war.

I soon found that there are no theories of war ordepending on what you are willing to accept as a theoryfar too many of them. Ask a scholar for an explanation of war, and he or she will most likely snicker at your navet in expecting that something so large and poorly defined could even be explained. Ask a nonspecialist, however, and you will get any of a dozen explanations, each proffered with utter confidence: It is because of our innate aggressiveness or because of innate male aggressiveness or because of imperialism and greed or overpopulation and a shortage of resources or manipulation by evil, bloody-minded elites or it is simply a manifestation of unknowable evil.

Our understanding of war, it occurred to me, is about as confused and unformed as theories of disease were roughly 200 years ago. At that time there was no consensus among men of science as to whether disease arose from sources within the afflicted individual, such as ill humours and bad habits, or whether its source lay in something outside usin the night air, for example, or dangerous miasmas. Among the public at large, sinwhich played the same role in early theories of disease as innate aggressiveness plays in those of warremained a popular explanation. None of this would be cleared up until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the discovery of a heretofore invisible and unsuspected agent of diseasegermswould open the way to seeing all diseases as biological afflictions, traceable to molecular and cellular events, though of course embedded in the social ecology of cities and classes and migrations and conquests.

In one way, our prospects of understanding war are far bleaker than the prospects of understanding disease were two centuries ago. At least at that time, the period of Enlightenment in Western thought, educated people were convinced that a theory was discoverable and well worth the effort of seeking. Today there is no such self-confidence among the people most entitled to possess it. The social scientists to whom one might naturally turn for some understanding of an institution like war have, in all too many cases, given up on big questions and sweeping theories of any sort and are engaged instead in narrow empirical studies or, what is safer yet, critiques of studies already done.

But the silence of the academics can only frustrate the curious layperson. There is something in us, or at least something in some of us, that urgently seeks to make sense out of disconnected data and unassimilated experience, to draw links between people like us and people not at all like us, between what happened long ago and what is happening right now or could happen next. The urgency increases when the subject at hand, like war or disease, involves life and death, including the potential death of all people on earth. We need to know, and we need to know something more than piles of unrelated observations.

So the reckless amateur rushes in where the prudent scholar fears to tread. Eleven years ago, prodded by the assignment of a two-thousand-word preface to a book unknown in my own country, I began my study of war. Unrestrained by loyalty to any particular academic discipline, I read widely and at first almost randomly, puzzling over ethnographic and historical detail, savoring the sweeping perspectives of those few who dared to propose them. Being a journalist as well as an amateur scholar, I not only read peoples books and articles but also tracked down the authors at their homes or offices and pestered them with my questions. I shamelessly borrowed from my childrens higher educations, studying over their shoulders, as it were, anthropology at Oxford and religious studies at Brown. I gave talks which were initially mostly questions, and left with new insights and long lists of suggested readings.

In keeping with my original preoccupations, as well as with Theweleits theme, my suspicions first centered on the theme of gender. Wars, after all, have been fought, in almost all cases, by men, and sometimes for the stated purpose of making them men. But as I pressed back further in time and broadened my inquiry to include other forms of organized and socially sanctioned violencesuch as rituals of blood sacrificea deeper and far more ancient explanatory theme emerged. This was not something I had ever thought about before; in fact, it lay entirely outside my conceptual framework and analytic approach to the world. What it amounts to is a new evolutionary perspective on war and related forms of violence, butif I am right about the direction in which the relevant scholarship is tendingone that will not remain new and startling for long.

This is a theory about the feelings people invest in war and often express as their motivations for fightingwhere these feelings might have originated and how they have played out in history. I should emphasize at the outset that human feelings do not account for all that we might want to know about war or particular warswhy they start, in each instance, or end in the ways that they do. On the question of what causes war or any particular war, Tolstoy still has the last word:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more of them we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.