Who benefits? Who profits? Who lobbies in Congress to keep them in operation or to attract new plants where there are none? If you say it is the Pentagon, do not forget the local merchants and manufacturers, the local labor unions and employers, and the local Congressman whom we put there and whom we can recall. Who pays for our present military budget of $84 billion? The taxpayers—who also have the vote.
Traditionally, the American Army has considered itself the neutral instrument of state policy. It exists to carry out the government’s orders and when ordered into action does not ask “Why?” or “What for?” But the more it is used for political ends and the more deeply its influence pervades government, the less it can retain the stance of innocent instrument. The same holds true of the citizen. Our innocence too is flawed.
The fundamental American premise has always been civilian control of the military. The Vietnam war is a product of civilian policy shaped by three successive civilian Presidents and their academic and other civilian advisers. The failure to end the war is also, in the last resort, civilian, since it is a failure by Congress to cut off appropriations.
And where does that failure trace back to? To where the vote is. I feel bewildered when I hear that easy, empty slogan “Power to the People!” Is there any country in the world whose people have more than ours?
To blame the military for this shameful war and renounce with disgust any share in their profession is a form of escapism. It allows the anti-war civilian to feel virtuous and uninvolved in the shame. It allows someone else to do the soldier’s job, which is essential to an organized state and which in the long run protects the security of the high-minded civilian while he claims it is a job too dirty for him.
Certainly the conduct of this war, perhaps because it is purposeless and inane, has led to abominations and inhumanities by the military which cannot be forgiven and for which the West Pointer with his motto of “Duty, Honor, Country” is as much responsible as the semi-educated Lieutenant Calleys commissioned through OCS. But as one officer said, “We have the Calleys because those Harvard bastards won’t fight”—“Harvard” being shorthand for all deferred college students.
Perhaps if there had been more college bastards instead of Calleys, there might have been mutinies or sitdowns instead of My Lais—certainly a preferable alternative. As for the Regular Army, it is likely that with morale so near ruin, there is nothing the professional officers want more than to get the ground forces out of Vietnam as quickly as possible, which is perhaps one reason why President Nixon is doing it.
The liberal’s sneer at the military man does himself no honor, nor does it mark him as the better man. Military men are people. There are good ones and bad ones, some thoughtful and intelligent, some dimwits and dodos, some men of courage and integrity, some slick operators and sharp practicers, some scholars and fighters, some braggarts and synthetic heroes. The profession contains perhaps an over-supply of routinized thinking, servility to rank, and right-wing super-patriots, but every group has undesirable qualities that are occupationally induced.
It is not the nature of the military man that accounts for war, but the nature of man. The soldier is merely one shape that nature takes. Aggression is part of us, as innate as eating or copulating. As a student of the human record, I can say with confidence that peace is not the norm. Historians have calculated that up until the Industrial Revolution belligerent action occupied more man hours than any other activity except agriculture.
Human society started with the tribe—with a sense of “We” as opposed to “They.” Tribe A can have no sense of identity unless it is conscious of the otherness of Tribe B. All life and thought and action, according to the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, is based on this state of binary opposites: heaven and earth, earth and water, dark and light, right and left, north and south, male and female. These poles are not necessarily hostile, but hostility is inherent between the poles of We and They. When the tribes become conscious of otherness, they fight—for food or territory or dominance. This is inescapable and probably eternal. Students around the country and sympathetic faculty will not make it go away by chasing ROTC off campus, no matter how understandable the motive.
Freud called it the death wish, meaning self-destruction. It could just as well be called the life wish because it is an active instinct, a desire to fight, to conquer, and if also to kill, then to kill not self but others. The instinct says, “I shall conquer, I shall live.” It is also a male instinct. Women, being child-bearers, have a primary instinct to preserve life. Probably if we had a woman in the White House and a majority of females in Congress, we could be out of Vietnam yesterday.
“Our permanent enemy,” said William James in 1904, “is the rooted bellicosity of human nature. A millennium of peace would not breed the fighting instinct out of our bone and marrow.” Has anything occurred in our century to suggest that James was wrong?
What this suggests is that we should face the military element rather than turn our backs on it, learn about it, even participate in it through ROTC. If the college-educated youths become the reserve officers upon whom the Army depends, then they are in a position to exert influence. That is the place to pull a strike. If all reserve officers walked out, the Army could not move.
Recently a retired Army colonel suggested that all Army career officers, not only reserve officers, “should be obtained through civilian college scholarship programs and direct entry from college ROTC.” Now if that could be arranged, the educated civilian would really be at the controls. If the young want to make a revolution, that is the way to do it. Oliver Cromwell did not spend his time trying to close down Oxford. He built the New Model Army.
Our form of democracy—the political system which is the matrix of our liberties—rests upon the citizen’s participation, not excluding—indeed, especially including—participation in the armed forces. That was the great principle of the French Revolution: the nation in arms, meaning the people in arms as distinct from a professional standing army. The nation in arms was considered the safeguard of the Republic, the guarantor against tyranny and military coups d’état.
The same idea underlies the fundamental American principle of the right to bear arms as guaranteed by our Bill of Rights for the specific purpose of maintaining “a well-regulated Militia” to protect “the security of a free state.” To serve the state is what the Constitution meant, not, as the Gun Lobby pretends, the right to keep a pistol under your pillow and shoot at whomever you want to. To serve under arms in this sense is not only a right but a criterion of citizenship.
To abdicate the right because our armed forces are being used in a wrong war is natural. Nobody wants to share in or get killed in an operation that is both wicked and stupid. But we must realize that this rejection abdicates a responsibility of citizenship and contributes to an already dangerous development—the reappearance of the standing army. That is what is happening as a consequence of the changeover to an all-volunteer force. We will have an army even more separate, more isolated and possibly alienated from civilian society than ever. Military men have always cherished a sense of separateness from the civilian sector, a sense of special calling deriving from their choice of a profession involving the risk of life. They feel this separateness confers a distinction that compensates them to some extent for the risk of the profession, just as the glitter and pomp and brilliant uniforms and social prestige for the officers used to compensate the armies of Europe.
For the United States the draft was the great corrective—or would have been if it had worked properly. The draft has an evil name because it would have dragged young people into an evil war. Yet it remains the only way, if administered justly, to preserve the principle of the nation in arms. The college deferrals made it a mockery. The deferral system was as anti-democratic and elitist (to use the favorite word of those who consider themselves equalizers) as anything that has ever happened in the United States. I may be happy that it kept my kin and the sons of som
e of my friends out of Vietnam, but I am nonetheless ashamed of it.
We need to re-admit some common sense into conventional liberal thinking—or feeling—about the military. It seems to me urgent that we understand our relationship to the soldier’s task free of emotion.
I know of no problem so subject as this one to what the late historian Richard Hofstadter called “the imbecile catchwords of our era like ‘repression’ and ‘imperialism’ which have had all the meaning washed out of them.” Those who yell these words, he wrote, “simply have no idea what they are talking about.”
The role of the military in our lives has become too serious a matter to be treated to this kind of slogan thinking, or non-thinking.
* * *
Commencement Address, Williams College, June 1972.
Historical Clues to Present Discontents
I SUPPOSE NO ONE WILL DISPUTE the fact that the world in mid-twentieth century is in serious, possibly desperate, trouble. You, the students, are heading into it while I am more fortunate in being on the way out, but we share the disadvantage of having been born into a disoriented age, a period of extreme disturbance and small encouragement. The last volume of the Cambridge Modern History covering 1898 to the present is entitled The Age of Violence—which, considering the not inconsiderable violence of previous eras, is quite a distinction.
The physical aspects of our troubles—pollution, war, overpopulation—you know all about, and equally the intangible aspects—that is, the general discontent and uneasiness, dissatisfaction of the young, bewilderment of the old, crime and tension, collapse of standards both aesthetic and ethical, the sexual wilderness and obsession with sadism, and so forth. The catalogue is long and very familiar and I need not run it down to the bitter end. My purpose is not to discuss the condition but to try, as a historian, to locate the cause.
Doubtless some of you will think this a meaningless endeavor, on the theory that the past is unimportant and that what counts is today. I gather from occasional excursions to the campuses that the young are passionately concerned with the present and inclined to shrug off the past as irrelevant. They want to know all about Kafka but not Plato, Sartre but not Shakespeare, Black Power but not the French Revolution, and they believe American history began with John F. Kennedy. Each student wants instant relevance from every subject, and he wants every subject to “hook in,” as I heard it expressed at another university, to his own personal problem, whatever that may be. Narcissism and now-ism—the self and the present—are the two governing concerns of the campus at the moment. The advantage of history is knowing that there is as much relevance to be found in the Peloponnesian War as in yesterday’s newspaper; more relevance in the Socratic dialogues than in some hastily concocted course in social psychology. What is relevant, after all, is human experience, and this has been accumulating for quite some time. Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway. It seems to me perfectly obvious that we can no more escape the past than we can escape our own genes. “Others fear what the morrow may bring,” said a Moslem sage, “but I am afraid of what happened yesterday.”
History, which is my discipline, has been defined as the means by which society seeks to understand its past. Toward that understanding, I would like to offer the following proposition: that as a result of the historical experience of the twentieth century so far, man has lost faith in himself, as well as lost the guidelines he was once sure of, and that this loss is primarily responsible for our current distress.
To be specific: We have suffered the loss of two fundamental beliefs—in God and in Progress; two major disillusionments—in socialism and nationalism; one painful revelation—the Freudian uncovering of the subconscious; and one unhappy discovery—that the fairy godmother Science turns out to have brought as much harm as good. With the exception of the loss of religious faith, which began its modern decline about a hundred years ago—let us say for the sake of convenience, with Darwin—all the rest has occurred within the twentieth century. That makes for quite a load of discouragement in seventy years or approximately one lifetime.
As long as man thought himself the son of God, containing the divine spark and created by the finger of God as in that wonderful gesture pictured by Michelangelo on the Sistine ceiling, he had respect and even a little awe for himself; he could feel there was a purpose in his being here and even a concealed purpose in the evil that befell him or in the evil that he wrought; that, come what may, he was a part of the divine plan. Without wishing to offend individual beliefs, I would say that as a historical factor determining man’s image of himself, this view no longer holds. We are on our own now, “a poor bare forked animal,” in King Lear’s words, and it is very uncomfortable.
Until the twentieth century opened, the idea of progress was the most firmly held conviction of the nineteenth century. Man believed himself both improvable and improving. He had acquired the enormous help of science—especially medical science—and of the machine, doubling or, rather, infinitely multiplying his work capacity, his health, comfort, and freedom of movement. Household plumbing and running water, the steam engine, electric light, refrigeration, sanitation, anesthesia and antisepsis, typewriters and lawnmowers, telegraph and telephone—the world was running over with new benefits. Material betterment was expected to bring moral progress. Living in better conditions, man was expected to become a better person. This was the credo of that energetic, optimistic age.
The terrible gulf between that expectation and current reality is at the bottom, I believe, of the malaise of today. Since the new century began, humans have been living better and behaving worse—see the welfare state and the Third Reich—than ever before in history. Subconsciously, or even consciously in some cases, we have become frightened by our own record. Let us look at the record.
The new century was born brawling with three wars under way at once in 1900: British fighting Boers in South Africa, Americans fighting Filipinos, and a mixed bag of foreigners fighting Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion. These were all small affairs on the periphery, but still not a happy omen.
At about the same time, we acquired a new way of looking at ourselves that stripped off the protection of Victorian draperies. In 1900 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, beginning the process called the Freudian revolution that over the next decades was to display before man the dark dimensions of his soul. As Macbeth was shown his murderous instincts in the witches’ caldron, modern man has been shown what his unconscious holds—and this too has not been reassuring. Actions he had allowed himself to think were noble and generous turned out to be ignoble or selfish. Devotion to his mother was not admirable but Oedipal. If the unconscious could lead us into all these perverse and wicked ways independently of will, then man was not the captain of his soul that he thought he was. Confidence in our capacity to control our own destiny has been consequently undermined. Further, we have lost that convenient scapegoat, the Devil, as we have lost God. Formerly, when a person behaved badly or oddly he was said to be possessed by the Devil. Not any more. That divestment of responsibility is now denied us; the source is inside ourselves.
Applied to political behavior—that is, to man in the mass—the new knowledge of human nature destroyed confidence in a favorite concept of democracy: the ultimate common sense of the common people. Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this principle liberals defended extension of the suffrage toward the goal of one man, one vote. But a rise in literacy and in the right to vote, as the event proved, did nothing to increase common sense in politics. The mob that is moved by waving the bloody shirt, that decides electio
ns in response to slogans—Free Silver, Hang the Kaiser, Two Cars in Every Garage—is not exhibiting any greater political sense than Marie Antoinette, who said, “Let them eat cake,” or Caligula, who made his horse a consul. The common man proved no wiser than the decadent aristocrat. He has not shown in public affairs the innate wisdom which democracy presumed he possessed.
Even before 1914 a whole school of English political philosophers and social psychologists, including Graham Wallas, author of the phrase “The Great Society,” was overtaken by pessimism as a result of their studies of mass political behavior. One of them, William Trotter, in his book Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, published in 1908, found the mob or herd instinct springing from the same dark and sinister well of the unconscious uncovered by Freud. Describing the herd instinct as an irrational force, “imitative, cowardly, cruel … and suggestible,” Trotter concluded his famous essay with one of the most somber sentences ever written: “The probability is very great that, after all, man will prove but one more of Nature’s failures.”
In 1914 came the Great War, the event that begins our time, which was, so to speak, its womb. Summarizing its causes, an English historian, F. P. Chambers, in 1939 wrote, “The universal expression of belligerent will at this time is perhaps a phenomenon whose uniqueness history has not yet taken sufficiently into account. It was as if expanding wealth and multiplying population, as if the unconscious boredom of peace over nearly fifty unbroken years, had stored up a terrific potential which only waited for an accident to touch it off. Far from being innocents led to the slaughter, the peoples of Europe more truly led their leaders.”