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August 07, 2007
Celebrating the Warrior
I don't often do this but I'm reprinting an entire article from The New York Times. I'm surprised that they published this piece but I get the impression that Edward M. Rothstein has a great deal of editorial freedom.
In any case, the book he reviews and ponders The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West sounds fascinating and I've already ordered it. Rothstein muses on the necessity for the West to make ruthless war on the jihadists in order to triumph — an argument Seraphic Secret has made time and again. We urge all our readers to read this essay and we look forward to devouring the book that triggered such common sense thinking.
I have highlighted the passages in bold-type for they strike me as particularly powerful and relevant.
Reconsidering the Role of the Warrior in Our Post-Enlightenment World
by Edward M. Rothstein
August 6, 2007
In one of the final events of the recent Lincoln Center Festival, a lone Mongolian bard named Burenbayar came onstage and chanted The Secret History of the Mongols. He had memorized the 13th-century text during long hours grazing animals on the steppes of Central Asia. And as is true of many ancient sagas, he sang of arms and the man — that is, of warfare and heroism.
His subject was Genghis Khan, a conqueror of many peoples who was both barbarically ruthless and soulfully sentimental, reveling in revenge by tearing out an enemy’s heart and liver with his bare hands while also forgiving, again and again, the bloody treachery of an envious childhood friend. He was at all times a warrior whose goal was conquest and whose demands could not be assuaged, except by victory.
Almost every culture has such figures in their past, men like Odysseus, King David, Muhammad and Aeneas, whose triumphs were often attained through extreme, horrific battle. Such founding figures often also display powerful streaks of sensitivity and elevated vision along with prophetic abilities; on their broad chests and battle-readiness rest the later triumphs of their civilizations. But warriors don’t have to display such qualifying attributes; throughout history they are revered.
Except for now, it seems, and particularly in the West. Today we are so wary of the warrior that we would find it unthinkable to celebrate him with elaborate descriptions of the beheading or disemboweling of his enemies. Instead we think of the warrior as a fanatic, an extremist with a streak of the berserk.
In The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West (Basic Books), a new book in which the idea of the fanatic warrior plays a central role, Lee Harris points out that the word berserk comes from Icelandic accounts of Norse warriors of the 12th century who were so fierce in battle they fought without armor and raged like wolves. They were called “berserksgangr.” These days we tend to think of all warriors as berserk.
It isn’t that we don’t recognize, at some level, a need for warriors. At least in our cinematic fantasies warrior heroes abound. But they are kept on a short leash; they need a license to kill. Though they keep testing constraints on acceptable behavior, when they violate them, people around them tend, as the films put it, to “die hard”; freelance warriors like those played by Bruce Willis pay a steep personal price.
It is a measure of how distant we are from the ancient Greeks, Mongols and Romans that the most complete contemporary incarnations of the warrior are supervillains. Such evildoers display, as their ancient models do, a fierce tribal loyalty; a scorn for any life that stands in their way; a blood lust that megalomaniacally affirms human expendability. “Do you expect me to talk?” James Bond asks Auric Goldfinger, who has strapped Bond to a table where a knifelike laser beam gradually approaches his crotch. The villain laughs in amazement and says: “No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die.”
We watch these figures or read about their exploits with a certain sense of superiority. We like to think we have transcended this kind of ruthlessness; we are no longer tribally bound, but universally concerned; we don’t imagine eliminating our enemies in battle, we imagine driving them to the bargaining table. The West, riven by tribal and religious wars for centuries, imagines that humanity is capable of overcoming that past. Genghis Khan has been superseded by Jimmy Carter. The world’s remaining barbarians, even those in our midst, will eventually come to learn the virtues of the Enlightenment, the powers of reason and the prospects of a democratic future.
On the other hand Mr. Harris’s arguments should give us pause. And his book demands close attention even by those who would mistakenly consider him another form of berserk. By taking a long view of history Mr. Harris argues that the modern view of how to vanquish enemies is based on false ideas: first, that history progresses; second, that it progresses toward greater influence of reason; and finally, that reason, through its powers, can overcome all opposition. Our smug disdain for the warrior, he suggests, is based on a mistaken view of the powers of modernity and the Enlightenment.
In Mr. Harris’s view these errors are affecting the crucial confrontations now taking place between jihadists and Western liberal culture. We keep straining, he says, to see terrorists as if they were just slightly more extreme versions of ourselves, reflecting our own convictions, as if the jihadist were advocating destruction in the name of a version of liberalism.
A Palestinian blows himself up in a pizza parlor, a Shiite drives a car bomb into a crowded plaza of Sunnis (or vice versa), videotapes display beheadings and Internet sites herald massacres. Such horrific deeds are taken almost as proof of suffering, poverty, frustration. The surest cure for terrorism, the argument goes, would be to ameliorate injustice; in the meantime violence can be curbed with well-considered policing.
But Mr. Harris suggests that the jihadist is more accurately thought of as a fanatic, a warrior of the old school, whose technique has been remarkably successful over the centuries. Such warfare accepts no rules other than fealty to the tribe and accepts no compromise other than victory. Islam, he points out, has made “permanent conquests in every part of the world into which it has expanded with only three exceptions: Spain, Sicily, and certain parts of the Balkans”: three areas where Islamic fanaticism was confronted with opposing fanaticism.
Mr. Harris argues that by failing to characterize Islamist warfare accurately, the West deludes itself, even employing another Enlightenment idea — tolerance — to grant harbor to those who seek to destroy it. And the West implicitly affirms that, in the end, reason will triumph.
But why? The Enlightenment had inordinate faith in itself and the evolutionary progress of history. But look closely at the few places in the world where these ideas have triumphed, Mr. Harris writes: their success is more fluke than destiny. Democracy and reason displaced warfare and fanaticism not because of their superior powers, but because of rare historical circumstances difficult to replicate (including, he argues, in Iraq). Their survival, far from being inevitable, is always tenuous; liberal societies will always need to live with war.
So Mr. Harris mounts a challenge, and even if we harbor less apocalyptic visions, that challenge is considerable. If we believe, as Mr. Harris affirms, that the societies that have arisen out of Enlightenment ideas, whatever their flaws, really are morally superior to others, if we are convinced that the values of the West are rare and crucial and fragile, then to what extent are we willing to make a stand on their behalf?
In the most extreme case, how does a liberal society embrace the practices of the warrior, which are inimical to its most fervent beliefs? Wouldn’t this destroy precisely what’s being defended? Mr. Harris can’t fully imagine the ways in which liberal society will evolve under such circumstances, but he believes we will soon need to find out. And one way or another somebody like Genghis Khan will be involved.
Posted by Robert J. Avrech at August 7, 2007 09:45 AM
Comments
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Rothstein's always been something of an outlier. 20 years ago he was the music critic of the New Republic. I really started paying attention to him when participated in a Commentary symposium about Israel in (Feb?) 1988. I remember that he made a point that I'd wondered about: If the Palestinians were so oppressed how'd they afford all those faux-Eiffel Tower television antennas?
I don't know how long Rothstein's been a cultural writer at the Times but he's always been good for an article that doesn't fit into the rest of the paper.
Posted by: soccer dad at August 7, 2007 12:40 PM
I go way way back with Ed and even though I doubt he shares all of my current paleolithic political beliefs there exists no finer mensch and a brilliant mind.
Also, I believe in the early eighties he wrote about how CD's were inferior to vinyl, so I'll be he's a crypto-conservative who doesn't know it yet.
Posted by: Real Name at August 7, 2007 12:51 PM
It occurred to me today, while listening to Tom Tancredo explain his suggestion of bombing Mecca on Mike Gallagher's radio show, that most of our pretensions to "understanding" how jihadists think are just that - pretensions.
Posted by: Jeremiah at August 7, 2007 01:13 PM
The Unbearable Lightness of the Heart of Darkness:
You have to men who are moral and at the same time who are able to use their primordial instincts to kill.
- Col. Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now
Posted by: Jeremiah at August 7, 2007 02:35 PM
Soccer Dad:
Thanks so much for the unique POV of Mr. Rothstein. I've always read his essays and been struck by his searing intelligence and the obvious shunning of the typical NY Times arch liberal bias in his articles.
Posted by: Robert J. Avrech ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.seraphicpress.com/nav-commenters.gif)
at August 7, 2007 03:02 PM
Real Name:
Rothstein prefers vinyl to CD. Now that is interesting. There's an entire subculture of audiofreaks given over to this belief. Some have even revived tube amps.
Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 7, 2007 03:08 PM
Jeremiah:
The only thing we need to understand about the jihadists is this: no compromise is possible, there is nothing to negotiate, nothing to talk about. This is a life and death struggle. We have to kill them before they kill us.
Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 7, 2007 03:12 PM
Robert,
I've been reading less of The Times for better or worse, so thanks for this link. Along similar lines, I might recommend going out and buying the July/August issue of The American Interest, which explores similar themes. In his article "Forgetting the Obvious," Robert D. Kaplan talks about faith and the warrior ethic, and he notes that a society that believes in nothing will fight for nothing. In his article "To Ph.D or not to Ph.D," Gen. David H. Petraeus claims that civilian grad programs are good for soldiers. In contrast, Ralph Peters argues that too much grad school destroys the warrior ethic.
Peters cites a great example of a strategy that achieved positive results in Iraq: An officer strapped dead Iraqi terrorists to a tank, which was then driven around an Iraqi town. Yet due to "political correctness," a high-ranking officer steeped in the "social sciences," was unwilling to consider such methods. Peters notes: "Wars are won by officers who know the smell of the streets, not by those who swoon over political science texts."
And in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, Azar Gat of Tel Aviv University also argues that the triumph of democracies in the 20th century was indeed due more to "fluke than destiny," as Lee Harris notes. The article, "The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers," makes this claim: the rise of non-democratic great powers (China and Russia) is more problematic than Islamic terrorism.
Finally, I'll leave you with an interesting quote from The American Interest issue that I mentioned:
"(A)ny people wishing to make war on the Arabs must accept...I think that all means ought to be used to devastate the tribes...that we must do this..."
Believe it or not, that's from one of France's great liberal thinkers -- Alexis de Tocqueville. If only we had such liberal thinkers today, huh?
Posted by: David at August 7, 2007 09:44 PM
David:
Thanks so much for all the fine articles. I'm a big fan of Robert Kaplan's work and will get hold of his article and all the others ASAP.
Great quote!
Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 8, 2007 12:22 AM
Rob, seems like much of the 'Just War' stuff that came around these past centuries has done a lot to cripple peoples' ability to actually wage war justly.
I don't remember the argument, but Just War taken to its logical conclusion makes the only just war the war that God himself starts, more or less, which I guess for us Christians would be the second coming.
Seems kind of lame, in my book, as success of human societies is based partly on their ability to overcome their enemies, some of whom can not be negotiated with. Strategy dictates that if you cannot fight you will have to at some point run.
Not to tangent too much, but the success of Christianity or Judaism relies not just on a good book of teachings but a society that carries the understanding of those books and important traditions. In other words, "Being in the world but not of the world." A moral society is useless which cannot maintain itself to transmit said morals.
I would argue that there are four 'castes' of man, (which I don't mean in the vertical sense but more in the sense of general talents/affinities) one of which is the warrior. (The other three are merchant, intellectual, artisan.)
Democracy works in part because it is natural for men to fight, and it channels that instinct into discourse to improve law and governance rather than into bloody rituals or contests.
So even these people of 'reason' are simply 'transcending' and not eliminating their instinct to fight and overcome. We cannot escape what we are, but we can make the best of it.
The warriors keep up the ethic of honor and courage, which filters through society in all manners of conflict. If our conflicts are so lame (which the latest YearlyKos kerfuffle is an example) it is because we're trying to forget how to fight. Instead, we all just fight like girls ;)
Or, like a bunch of bratty children, anyway.
We will get our butts kicked by primitive savages no matter how fancy our weapons are if we don't have a warrior ethic.
Posted by: RiverCocytus at August 8, 2007 08:50 AM
River:
Agree with you completely. A just society desperately needs a strong and focused warrior class who maintain a strong warrior ethic. Societies that lack this class descend into barbarism. See the Gaza as the perfect petri dish of what happens to a culture riven by primitive clan warfare.
Posted by: Robert J. Avrech at August 9, 2007 01:43 AM
A good opportunity for me to plug one of my favorite books, "Until the Sun Falls," a novel aobut the Mongols invading Europe. Fantastic book.
Posted by: Yehudit at August 19, 2007 08:26 PM