Why Should We Study War?

[Valin]

Defining Ideas

Military history tells the story of human nature at its great heights and terrible lows.

Bruce Thornton

11/26/13

 

In the latter years of World War I, Winston Churchill met with the novelist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a winner of the Military Crosshe single-handedly routed 60 Germans and captured a trench on the Hindenburg Lineand a fierce pacifist. Sassoons reminiscences of that meeting reveal how odd my title question would have struck most people before our time. He recalled that during their conversation, Churchill gave me an emphatic vindication of militarism as an instrument of policy and stimulator of glorious individual achievements.

 

After Sassoon left, he wondered, Had he been entirely serious . . . when he said that war is the normal occupation of man? t had been unmistakable that for him war was the finest activity on earth. Churchill, remember, had served under fire in India, Sudan, Cuba, and South Africa even before his service in the trenches, so his comments were not the braggadocio of the armchair militarist unfamiliar with the horrors of war.

 

Many of us moderns, of course, find Sassoons beliefs, expressed in his poems and novels, about the futility and misery of war more attractive than Churchills idealization of it, and consider such enthusiasm untoward, if not sinister. Such attitudes have made war a disreputable topic of study. Once vigorous in the academy, military history programs are rarely found at universities and colleges today, even as peace studies programs have proliferated. Reasons for this change are not hard to find. Americas historically unprecedented military power, its enormous wealth, and since 1865 its freedom from battle on its own soil and from foreign invasion have all insulated Americans from war, and enabled the perception that rather than a foundational and ennobling experience of humanity, war is an unnatural anomaly, a species of barbarism from our benighted past, and hence an unsavory topic of formal study, even as it remains a lucrative (and, to many people, low-brow) subject for books, movies, cable television channels, and video games.

 

In contrast to the modern disdain for studying war, most people before the twentieth century would have found Churchills comments unexceptional, indeed banal, and they would have considered self-evident the answer to the question raised in this essays title. The ancient Greeks were one of the most civilized, artistic, and cultured peoples in history. But they never questioned the eternal necessity of war. War is the father of all, Heraclitus said of the original creative destruction. Plato in the Laws has Cleinias say, Peace is only a name; in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other. The arch-realist Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War has an Athenian ambassador tell the Spartans that states fight one another because of the constants of human nature such as fear, honor, and self-interest, and invoke higher ideals such as justice only when they cannot achieve their aims by force.

 

(Snip)