James Carroll, an occasional op-ed writer, is a Catholic theologian and son of a former very-high-ranking defense official. Here (original in Boston Globe, Sunday 3/9) he discusses Teilhard de Chardin’s theory of war’s seductiveness to those who haven’t experienced it, and even to some of those who have:
He doesn’t quite go so far as to claim that the generation of draft-dodgers who now actually state their regrets at missing a life-altering experience might now be trying to gain it vicariously - but I will. Teilhard de Chardin explains how this faction, who place such great store in simplicity and “moral clarity”, might actually see a chance to grasp it in war - he saw it in himself.
Do you think the Bushies, the true decision-makers among whom avoided Vietnam service to whatever extent possible almost to a man when it was their own time to decide about their own lives, are feeling this temptation, or do they really understand what this war, or any war, truly means?
I think they have a grasp of what war means.
What they lack is the basic empathy for fellow human beings.
Remember that all these people are corporate ‘crooks’.
You don’t easily get very rich if you don’t have a lack of respect of the people ‘below’ you, the rules or the law.
In a word, these people are sociopaths.
If Bush is getting his jollies by declaring war, then it would stand to reason that he was having a grand ol’ time right now, correct? If this is the case, why does he always look so damned weary nowadays? Is it those all-nighter keggers he throws with his pro-war buddies in the war room, where they chug beer and anticipate all the wanton destruction looming ahead?
Sorry, but this is a stupid theory, even by the standards of most of the “chickenhawk” arguments.
Jeff
It ain’t about getting jollies, Jeff - it’s about feeling an escape from mediocrity, and looking for something to feel important and responsible about. Just reread the quote, if not the full article.
The straw-filled argument you’re decrying would indeed be “stupid” if it had been presented. Got a thoughtful reply instead? Eve, I have no idea what you mean, but apparently you’re disappointed. Sorry about that.
No. You incorrectly equate jollity with self-satisfaction. Many things in life that are difficult, stressful, and tiring are also the most personally rewarding.
Me too either! I’ve heard of “hawks” and “Doves” but never a chicken hawk in reference to war. (Oh…and the Foghorn Leghorn thing, which is funny, yet sick.)
‘Chickenhawk’ is also slang for someone in the country’s leadership who avoided military service but is quite willing to commit the military to war. The implication is that this is a hypocritical stance.
Oh, I thought that, apart from it being an actual bird, it rather referred to someone just pretending to be a real hawk. You know, going for harmless chickens, an easy target.
Now, on to the subject. I swore up and down that I wouldn’t get involved in this stuff again, but this is too much.
Since you’re so eager to score points by calling people chickenhawks, I’d just like to point out that almost to a man (or woman), the members of the US Armed Forces are in favor of this war.
I’m afraid that the people who you are unable to call “chickenhawks” trump your antipathy toward Bush, since we do, in fact, realize what a war truly means.
It means that we may come home in a flag-draped box.
It means that we have to spend extended and uncertain periods of time away from our families.
It means that after it’s over we’ll have to help to fix the country.
It means that we will do our duty while you second guess everything we do.
It means that you can spit in my face or call me a murderer with impunity because you don’t like what we do or what we stand for.
“I’d just like to point out that almost to a man (or woman), the members of the US Armed Forces are in favor of this war.”
This is actually not true of the senior leadership who have the most information about the situation. All through 2002 there have been reports in the Washington Post and NYT about how many senior soliders have been skeptical of the need for a war. Of course they will back the President in public but many of them have made their opinion clear in private. Just a couple of months ago Time ran an article which said that one third of senior officers were still skeptical of war.
Airman, I don’t doubt you know what war means.
And, believe me, I do sympathize (not the best word for it)with you lot on the ground.
I have some good friends that may be deployed.
The question was, however, what Bush’s feelings were. Do you think those responsible for the whole thing have a grasp on what war means?
This Op makes a fascinating study in several different ways.
It’s a good example of what has become a classic theme in GD. Liberal enemy of George Bush/Conservatives/War abandons the abundant reasonable and intelligent objections to war and instead arbitrarily assigns motivations to those he disagrees with in order to demonize them and build a strawman worthy of contempt. Nothing knew in this.
On the other hand it is a profound exercise in the willful pursuit of ignorance to promulgate a partisan agenda.
Let’s examine the basic theme.
According to James Carroll’s interpretation of Teilhard some people, most notably those that evaded war and some former soldiers perceive a glory and clarity in war that they seek to fill a sense of mediocrity in themselves.
I will suppose that this idea is possible and posit that such people may exist.
Then somehow Elvis through Carrol through Teilhard seem to conclude “clearly” that bush et al are just such people and that therefore this is the motivation for the war.
I would consider the jump from “possibility” to “actuality” to be quite a big one and it would need to be founded on something better than the word “clearly.” (BTW if there are other reasons stated I can’t read them. The link doesn’t work.)
Pop psychology and the arbitrary assigning of motivations is fun stuff.
For example:
[bullshit hat on]Some people feel the need to strike out at public athority figures because they suffer from a strong Oedipal complex. They secretly hate their father and wish to have sex with their mother. This hate for the father figure is founded by a perceived competition for the mother’s affections as a small child and may be exacerbated by neglect, early withdrawal from breast feeding, and may be further compounded if the person in question maintains an unusually small penis through adulthood and envies the larger member of his father that he inevitably glanced during childhood.
By his behavior, Elvislives is “clearly” one of these people striking out at the perceived athority/father figure of Bush.[bullshit hat off]
This is basically the argument the OP and presumably the article is making, and it is obviously patently false and worthy of simple derision on the face of it… Just like the OP.
This is the Op’s claim. To support it we have two words attributed to Teilhard De Chardin which might refer to just about anything. But anyway Teilhard De Charding is the ultimate athority that supports this entire argument.
In order to completely clear the ignorance here we’re going to have to discuss Chardin and how his arguments have been taken out of context and butchered.
First off, I will take issue with the OP’s calling Chardin’s ideas concerning war a “theory.” Much of what Chardin wrote defies categorization, but I am assuming that the arguments being relevant here are those in his posthumously published book Writings in Time of War This book is the hardest of Chardin’s to categorize or place as the bulk of it was written while Chardin was a young man and a stretcher bearer in heavy combat during WWI. Some of these writings contain the genesis of Chardin’s later ideas but these writings could not honestly be described as “theories.” “Philosophies” probably isn’t even close either. “Musings” is probably accurate.
In this book Chardin does indeed describe the clarity of perception he felt during war, the exhilaration, the simplicity and he assigned it a mystical meaning.
Personally, I think Chardin is assigning overimportance to a phenomenom felt by many young men in protracted stressful and dangerous situations. Chardin’s descriptions of this have a clear analog for myself in something I term “The Joyful Scream of Rage and Pain,” and have referred to in other places.
Chardin assigns a certain genuineness to this feeling which in a complicated way that we really don’t need to talk about later leads him to a thesis in other writings about the romanticization of war as a rushing to the “Omega” or the “Godhead,” but that’s getting somewhat off topic.
The experience being referred to is almost certainly that familiar to any adrenaline junkie or thrill seeker.
Now I’m not sure while Teilhard is necessary to this thesis other than to make it sound athoritative, but basically if we cut through the bullshit, what the Op and the article is proposing in a complicated and obtuse fashion is that Bush et al are adrenaline junkies who are rushing to war for the thrill of it particularly because they’ve never experienced it.
You can assign this opinion whatever merit you think it has.
Now, I am an admirer of Chardin. He had many interesting and fascinating ideas. He was also quite frankly something of a flake.
Remember the Piltdown hoax? According to Stephen J. Gould the noted biologist, this deliberate hoax was masterminded by Chardin.
Chardin’s writings were profoundly mystical as he attempted to reconcile science, biology, evolution with the Godhead. His basic synthesis is that evolution and biology are some kind of proof a la Behe’s black box thinking that mankind is inevitably evolving into a community mind which approaches and becomes the Godhead and joins the mind of God. He had lots of visions and stuff.
He also thought the Nazi Germany was a step in the natural evolution of this compassionate society and community mind and even after the war he was pretty extreme with his adherence to evolution. He thought certain groups were better than other groups and that some kind of ruling class was necessary along with various eugenics programs to accelerate the evolution to the Godhead.
He also thought that because the earth was round it compressed people together in such a way that would force them to be compassionate and loving and that this roundness and compression was also a proof of God.
Do I sound like I’m making fun of him? I’m not. He was quite the visionary and outcast and some of his ideas were quite profound and prophetic. For example, he very clearly prophesied the internet. Somehow he extrapolated the idea of radio, saw where it would lead and went on to describe what the internet would be like in great detail. He called it the Noosphere.
He made several important contributions to philosophy, geology, biology, and is probably the unwilling founder of the new age movement as well. He was also a heretical Jesuit priest and possible womanizer (either that or a practicer of perfect romantic chaste love, I can’t decide) who had a great love that endured his exile to China and his eventual break with the Catholic Church.
Teilhard is an important and interesting character in the history of ideas. While I can’t read the linked article I suspect either Elvis or Carrol (I suspect the former) is taking extremely strong liberties with Teilhard’s ideas (although you really can use Teilhard to argue just about anything. His mysticism is pretty ambiguous and you can read a lot into it.)
Anyway, Teilhard’s philosophies and opinions on war even when stated correctly and judiciously are hardly an athoritative psychological source. Quite the opposite.
Elvis does not impugn members of the military in his OP; he merely suggests that the administration’s policies might be inspired by less-than-noble motives. In addition, in a strange way, your response almost provides an example of the strength of his argument.
As to your claim that the members of the US military are “almost to a man (or woman)” in favor of war, do you have any evidential support for this generalization, other than your own anecdotal experience? Even here at the SDMB, the inestimable greco-loco, a military analyst with 16 years of experience under his belt, has expressed grave misgivings about the mess being made by the current administration.
I mustered out of the US Army just a month or two before the first Gulf War started up; my company, a support unit, was actually involved in the action. I escaped that little escapade by the skin of my teeth, but many of my friends who were sent down there changed their stripes (i.e., their opinion of war) very quickly after having a taste of combat-like conditions. In particular, one friend of mine, loyal and patriotic, who always claimed that he would be ready to fight for his country, and who was planning a career hitch as an NCO; we had long discussion about these sorts of things. I tried to convince him that one never really knows how one will react when the shit hits the fan, and that in the heat of action things might not seem as noble or glorious as they appear to be in one’s fantasies. After the war, he abandoned his plans for a military career and mustered out at the first opportunity; mutual friends informed me that his change of heart was profound. (Good luck André, if you’re out there, and God bless; I haven’t forgotten you!)
Speaking for myself, I had a rude awakening as well, but early on, in a conversation with our company NBC man. He made it very clear to me that, having now joined the US military, my life was completely worthless – that I was, in effect, cannon fodder. He also made it clear that he might use me as such – send me off on some dangerous mission, in the event of combat, just to save his own ass – and that if I refused, he would consider himself well within his rights to shoot me in the head as a “traitor.” It is a strange feeling to suddenly realize that your own life is so worthless that it can be taken away by the powerful at a whim, or even by mistake or poor judgement, just so that they can maintain their positions of power and wealth.
War does funny things to people, I guess. Another of my friends, who’s head wasn’t screwed on all that tight, went a bit loco in the desert and refused to come out of his tent for fear of all the chemicals. One of the sergeants, who was also loco, unholstered his pistol and threatened to shoot him. Everyone present thought it a very weird experience indeed.
My own direct superior was a tired, out of shape, middle-aged career sergeant with the IQ of a piece of plastic lawn furniture. In combat, she would certainly have gotten us killed at the first opportunity, and yet I had no choice but to follow her orders like they were the word of God. I could tell you stories about her, and the army in general, turn your shit white, man.
*My point is that many people who are in the military have in fact never seen combat, and so, despite their beliefs, actually don’t know what war truly means. Of course, you may be an exception. Anyway, this isn’t relevant to the OP, because Elvis is talking about the administration leadership, not the military.
*In other words, it means that you can experience “clarity, energy, and freedom,” and that you can “escape from mediocrity” by defining your purposes “ in the high rhetoric of honor and glory”? I see.
It is in fact important that those who serve in the armed forces frame their view of the world in terms like yours, above. If they understood their mission in the sense that I, arguably the worst soldier of modern history, did, they would never bother to fight at all. I think the reason my friend changed his mind about the whole procedure was because he became disillusioned after Desert Storm: he moved from the frame of reference you express above, to the frame I expressed earlier. YMMV.
Anyway, to my knowledge, no one here is spitting in your face or calling you a murderer; and you should be proud of the fact that you live a country, and defend a system, that promotes others to “second guess” you. That’s what your striving to protect, innit? Citizens of Iraq certainly have no right to second guess their military, after all. Scylla:
Well, he’s suggesting an argument, or a speculation about the motivations of certain conservatives who are running the show right now, and asking for critical commentary (or at least so it appears to me). I thought that was the point of GD?
It’s not unreasonable to speculate about the motivations of the powerful who make the real decisions in the US, even if this particular slant appears something of a stretch. For example, see Norman Mailer’s latest addition at the New York Review of Books.
Embarrassingly, I must admit that I don’t view your suggestion as “patently false or worthy of simple derision….” There might in fact be people out there who’s political positions are unconsciously determined by such factors. Elvis might even be one of them (sorry, Elvis). But of course, in this context, you must also go from making such a claim to defending it with evidence – and since the claim is more than a little offensive, as well as personal, maybe a message board wouldn’t be the best place for such an argument. At any rate, it’s not “clear” that such unconscious factors are an underlying motivation for Elvis’s political orientation – at least not to me.
Otherwise, stunningly good response. You remain one of the few conservative posters on this board for whom I have any respect, because you seem sincerely interested in truth first, and politics second – as opposed to the many who spin any evidence so as to fit their worldview.
Even if you do sometimes pick on my pal elucidator.
P.S. Your Freudian analysis of the left’s anti-authoritarianism has inspired me as well. Perhaps it is not Elvis who is jealous of the size of his father’s penis, and expressing that envious rivalry by opposing Bush administration policies. Rather, perhaps it is Bush himself who envies/fears the size of Saddam’s penis. After all, he’s the one who wants Saddam to destroy all those “missiles” (talk about phallic symbols of male potency!). Clearly, Bush’s envious rage and underlying fears of impotence have led him to insist on the symbolic castration of his “rival.”
Airman- I happen to oppose the war because I do not believe Bush has made a credible case for its necessity. But if it comes, I’ll be pulling for as many of you and your fellow servicemen to come home alive and well as possible. I won’t be calling you a criminal or a murderer, you’re all just doing your jobs as best you can and we civilians appreciate your efforts.
Back to the OP, no I don’t think Bush has any comprehension of what he’s getting into. Getting into this war is easy, but what is the exit strategy? I don’t have a clue, and I don’t think Bush does either.
Mr. Svinlesha, you’re dead on, and thank you very much.
Airman, we all pray you and your compatriots don’t have your names put on a wall because of leaders’ arrogance and obsessions. By no means was there any implication to the contrary, and I apologize for any ruffled feathers on that point - the topic was about the psychology of those sending you, not you yourselves. Certainly it is possible to honestly and sincerely think the war is necessary and that the world will be better off as a result, as it is possible to honestly conclude the opposite, even without any rancor.
But it is always necessary, I would hope you agree, to be aware of why one is making decisions a particular way - and the topic is about fear that the decisionmakers may not be using enough self-honesty.
Scylla is another example, sadly, of someone so unprone to intellectual self-examination as to be hostile about the very subject. Hint, pal - glibness is not a substitute for reason, and you cannot fool everyone all the time with it. If you think you know what war is vicariously, try taking it up with those who know it first-hand - like Carroll and Teilhard, for instance. But you don’t have any more experience with it than any of the millions of us who also have veterans in our families, despite your pathetic attempt to wrap someone else’s cloak of glory around yourself.
