The God of battles was against us, and we were defeated, but not dishonored nor disgraced. We returned to homes in ruin, our fortunes gone, and nothing left but honor, pluck, and energy.
— James A. Jones, “About the Battle of Shiloh”
A common adage would have us believe that “war is hell.” While clearly not without merit entirely, this expression is not exactly true. For one, wars end. For two, it’s pertinent that the phrase is attributed to William T. Sherman, who not only waged perhaps one of the most hellish military campaigns on American soil, but did so in what is often considered the first modern war. Even further, it should be noted that this expression was drawn from the lips of the victor and may have represented an only nascently emerging opinion at the time. If war wasn’t hell before, modernity has certainly blurred the line between war and hell in ways of which our forebears in antiquity lived and died in blissful ignorance.
And therein lies the problem, the blurring of lines. As a matter of fact, warfare used to be all about lines. The American Civil War was among the last wars on earth to prominently feature formations which modernity has convinced us were trite and foolish, in which men stood rank and file in the open field to lob volleys of lead at one another. We are quick to celebrate the scrappy innovation of those seemingly ahead of their time in the Revolutionary and Civil wars who used cover, stealth, and other more modern tactics to offset the advantage of sheer numbers. Consequently, these tactics are ingrained in America’s heart and soul. The Revolution is notable for such traditionally unchivalrous maneuvers as shooting of officers, and the Civil War for the development of the modern role of the sniper, to name some noteworthy examples.
Is it tactically stupid to stand directly in front of an opponent today, especially given advancements in ballistics that make hitting the target a much more viable prospect? Quite possibly, yes. But, the more important question, is hitting the target all that counts? The pragmatism of modernity would tempt us to say so, but everyone knows better than that. We understand broadly, for one, at least through the persistence of the linguistic distinction, the difference between a soldier and an assassin. I would posit that modern technological and strategic evolution has pushed every soldier closer to being an assassin.
Snipers are one example, but the more frightening is perhaps the kind of unmanned aerial drones that, as Hugh Gusterson notes, simulate Zeusian thunderbolt strikes from the heavens, offering immunity to the operator and instant obliteration to the target — truly an apex predator, aptly named, of the Nuclear-and-Information Age. Three technological hallmarks converge and coalesce to contribute to the horror of these god-impersonating machines: flight removes the combatant from the earth, remote control removes the combatant from combat, and guided weapons provide unprecedented precision. That precision, however, in combination with the lack of accountability afforded by the former two elements, bizarrely coincides with a truly nasty penchant for collateral damage in drone warfare. Modernity can be seen in this example to render war simultaneously clinical and brutal.
To the earlier question of the importance of hitting the target, I remember for most of my life scoffing at the duels of Victorian yore in which stuffy aristocrats would fire smoothbore pistols at each other from laughably close range, seemingly either to die of gangrene from an otherwise non-fatal wound or to die of old age waiting for the duel to be over. Many of us have probably had a chuckle at the absurdity of these duels, but deep in our bones I think, once again, we know better. Why else would Hollywood cowboys do the exact same thing against melodramatic orchestral backgrounds, not to the scorn, but to the adulation of moviegoers? Why else would superheroes face off against world-ending threats in open, medieval melees rather than from afar? Even movie spies and secret agents are often involved in bombastic gunfights and brawls rather than more realistic assassinations, subterfuge, and engagements by proxy, separated from the target by miles.
Of spies in particular, our imposition of romantic gloss on the real thing reveals one truth and conceals another. We long to see the world in drama, but so much of the real thing is banal. Victorian men did not stand in the field to shoot each other, but rather to be shot at. They understood the ritual duel to be a display less of marksmanship and skill, but rather bravado and firm constitution. In fact, it was generally considered less impressive to fire the first shot than to stare it down. Soldiers today obviously operate upon principles that more closely resemble those of a spy than those of a Victorian aristocrat, and the banality of this is too much to bear. Hence, we dress up spies on the silver screen to parade the enlightened practicality of modernity in the garb of yesteryear. In short, we pretend collectively that a man can be a figure of old-fashioned dignity and romance without also being one of old-fashioned honor and principle, a knight who shines without armor. Given any serious scrutiny, the illusion is as unrealistic as it is magically convincing.
I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she develops her idea of the banality of evil. As she enacts the Jewish people’s grappling with the horrors of the Holocaust, an event inseparable from the last great modern war (great in scope, hardly so in any other category), she uncovers the droll, dispassionate, bureaucratic character of the catastrophe of her people. As I work my way through Arendt’s thus far provocative and uniquely heavy story, it is increasingly my opinion that the seemingly worsening banality of warfare, evident especially in its civil consequences in World War II, betrays an underlying evil.
Lines feature prominently here. One of the fundamental issues of our time is the loss of the orienting mythology of Christian tradition. The creation account in Genesis can be quite helpfully viewed as a drawing of distinctions or delineations, existence from non-existence, light from dark, waters above from below, good from evil, and so forth. The Gospel of John’s creation story, with a different theological pivot, insinuates that the same cosmic Order sought by the wisest of Greeks is identical with the incarnation of God Himself. All this to say, the Christian view posits that the world is made up of distinctions, of lines drawn by God, and that those distinctions are a (verbal) expression of the divine Order. What the current secular moment misses is the transcendent, divine nature of those distinctions. Ontology is not merely an arbitrary cognitive game, but a reflection of the image of God. Adam has the authority given by his Creator to name the kinds of beasts, to imitate his Father in drawing lines.
These fundamentals seem wholly necessary to establish in order to make the following admittedly not-too-modest leap from the horrors of war to the even more banal horrors of sexual “liberation” (and they are, indeed, banal horrors). Secular progressivism insists that lines and distinctions are not objectively real, but merely subjective constructions of the mind. Further, some on the more extreme end of this ideology will, as though puppeteered by the spirit of Marx, suggest that such distinctions are constructed in the false consciousness concocted by the bourgeoisie in order to oppress those beneath them. Sexual mores, even the sexual dimorphism of human kind, are suggested to be imaginary and even harmful. This is why, even if they don’t know it, so many on the opposite end of things instinctually respond to this willful ambiguation by repeating, “Male and female created He them.” Distinctions are real because they are imposed by transcendent Truth. The dismantling of these distinctions brings en masse the very anguish and death it purports to stave off.
Here, I say, lies the same evil underlying both the sexual revolt and the deterioration of war. War has never been good, but it doesn’t have to be as bad as we’ve made it. I am convinced there is such a thing as a just war. It is the right and responsibility of the state to punish evildoers. Therefore, distinctions surrounding this function are real. When we do not respect the reality of distinctions, or rather the distinctions of reality, we flirt with the dissolution of the most basic line, that between being and non-being, life and death. See the serpent blur the one moral line drawn in Eden, and the catastrophe that transgressing that line invited. To cross from good to evil, in that one primeval instance, was to cross from Paradise to wilderness. One cannot eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and simultaneously the Tree of Life.
Our failure to view warfare as a divinely delineated right instead of a socially constructed means to an end has consequently not made warfare more humane, but less so. If the twentieth century is not evidence of this, I do not know what is. What “enlightened” thinkers thought would bring utopia led to machine guns, poison gas, and atom bombs. Without its context anchored in the heavenly logos, without being informed by the lines of the real, warfare becomes a tangled web of arbitrary and self-destructive distinctions that worsen its hellish symptoms rather than ameliorate them.
The current “order” of global geopolitics can credit its precariousness largely to being caught in this web. The line between honorable and dishonorable combat is blurry beyond recognition, the line between soldier and civilian is tragically almost eradicated, the lines between nations and peoples are ever ambiguous. The hell-on-earth of the atom bomb created the Cold War, a non-war within which many smaller “policing actions” took place — since war is too foul and primitive a word for modern people. Since in 1945 the U.S. gave Japan, a nation at the time obsessed with honorable warfare, a glimpse of warfare in which there are no distinctions, in which destruction has no boundaries, in which there is no such notion as honor or glory, humanity has been more afraid of war than ever. Rather than return to traditional notions of honor, we’ve attempted to bury warfare under artificial arbitrations and rules. This, again, has not made war better, but far worse. Bureaucracy, suffocating legalism and calculatedness have not only facilitated greater cruelty, but also greater contentment in it.
Instead of appreciating the value of peace, and thus understanding the necessity of war, we’ve cultivated a pretended peace in which war is always kept far enough away that we need not look at it if we care not to. We have become willing and able to destroy without ever risking our own destruction. We send money and arms to others to fight causes that we consider worth their lives, just not ours. We make warfare about sacrificing others for ourselves rather than vice-versa. We develop rockets and rifles and robots that can let a man kill without ever having to see the humanity of his opponent, having to consider the weight and worth of what he’s doing. The honor of war is not in what stands to be taken, but what stands to be lost. If a man is not willing to risk his own life, he has no right to take one.
Something to this effect is said in Pierre Boulle’s The Bridge Over the River Kwai regarding a rather grim and sober perspective that a soldier who cannot fight with a knife is not morally ready to fight with a gun. The book and its film adaptation are very provocative in their explorations of the limitations of codified honor, but perhaps the former and much more so the latter are both limited by their being told from the respective points of view of two societies who famously paved the way into modernity by casting off the chains of such codes long ago. The American character inserted into the Hollywood version makes the filmmakers’ take on the story clear: any honor that comes from beyond an individual’s own sense is impractical and therefore silly and useless. While the injection of this character evidently changes the outcome of the mission in the story’s end, perhaps we ought to count the cost of this 20th century sentiment as we see it in the proxy-fied, technological, clinical warfare of the 21st.
Again, the advent of the Atomic Age seems like a critical point in this regard. The thesis of the atom bomb is that the ends justify the means, that victory is infinitely more important than the manner of its attainment, that it is better to win dishonorably than to lose with dignity. Employed to the desired effect against the nation who once thought the reverse to be true, the United States’ doomsday bomb essentially dragged Japan down to her level. What good was bushido if there was no Japan? A living dog is better off than a dead lion. The atom bomb convinced generations to come that honor was the game of fools, and victory was the prize of the ruthlessly innovative. Brian C. Pohanka writes that the Civil War, as “the last of the old wars” and “first of the new,” marked “reluctant acceptance” of total war. That reluctant acceptance in America found its logical conclusion at Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the conclusion with which the world has been grappling and suffering ever since.
But, then again, maybe you’re not as compelled by history or geopolitics as I am. Fair enough. For such a person, I suggest you consider, nonetheless, the way in which the underlying venom in this global phenomenon is as visible in civil life. The blurring of traditional boundaries such as work and home, formal and informal, social and parasocial, authority and peer, and even of the covenantal bonds of matrimony all augment the same deleterious consequences on a smaller scale. Truly, those who cannot be trusted with little cannot be trusted with much, and so a society that cannot properly describe and demonstrate honor in these civil arenas can hardly be expected to do so in the much grander arena of global conflict. Tradition proves itself in these things to be “a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems.”
Remove not the ancient landmark, which thy fathers have set. — Proverbs 22:28 (KJV)
Now these are the nations which the LORD left, to prove Israel by them, even as many of Israel as had not known all the wars of Canaan; Only that the generations of the children of Israel might know, to teach them war, at the least such as before knew nothing thereof; — Judges 3:1-2 (KJV)
Being Kindled 
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