War

By George Elder, 10/9/24

“War is hell,” we sometimes hear. It gives the impression that normally we are at peace while war is an interruption. In world history, however, human beings have been fighting each other much more often than they have been peaceful. Thus, William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, said that “History is a bath of blood.” (“Moral Equivalent of War,” 1910)

We have actually become better at killing each other over the millennia, with more efficient weapons and larger, better-organized armies, capable of being deployed on land, sea, and eventually air. The international conflict of 1914-1918 was a World War that caused 10 million deaths, although some argue for a different number of lives lost. The historian Jacques Barzun says that trying to find the right number is pointless “because loss is a far wider category than death alone”:

The maimed, the tubercular, the incurables, the shell-shocked, the sorrowing, the driven mad, the suicides, the broken spirits, the destroyed careers, the budding geniuses plowed under, the missing births were losses, and they are incommensurable. (From Dawn to Decadence, 710)

Tolstoy says the same thing about the Napoleonic Wars in his novel, War and Peace. Picasso depicts the “incommensurable” horror of the Spanish Civil War in his painting, Guernica, anticipating WWII.

So why do we do it? Most military analysts argue that economic factors are paramount. Like all animals, human beings are forced to struggle for limited resources in order to survive. That means the struggle for land where those resources are found. Thus, the Indo-Europeans conquered their way from the Caucuses west into Greece and east into India in search of better pasture for their cattle—on chariots driven by horses (the ancient equivalent of the tank), against which populations on foot were no match. The Vikings raided south in long boats in search of salt to preserve their fish and meat—but took back with them slaves and concubines to work their farms in Norway. (Richard Overy, Why War?) Here, we see that the resources deemed necessary may not be territory but mobile materials, even other human beings.

The Spanish conquistadores’ brutal conquest of the Americas show us that the materials sought in war may not actually be necessary and merely desired. They wanted gold, for themselves and for their royal patrons in Europe—who wanted gold as a measure of wealth, to adorn their extravagant palaces and their persons, and to pay for more ships and armies to bring back more gold. This is what Bruce Lincoln calls the “prestige economy” as a motive for war:

that exists not only side by side but intimately interwoven with the material economy of any given people, and warfare provides a convenient means of reaping rewards in both. (Death, War, and Sacrifice, 138).

Of course, prestige touches upon psychology.

In a famous poem, Poe wrote: “To the glory that was Greece. / And the grandeur that was Rome.” The lines tell us that Alexander the Great did not really have to fight all the way to the Indus River nor did the Caesars physically need more empire than the Mediterranean basin. It was for glory, for grandeur! These are the immaterial spoils of war. And they redound not only to country or empire but to the warriors who have the skill and courage—and are violent enough—to achieve them. Soldiers in the Iliad speak often of personal “fame,” alive or dead, even “immortality.”

And well they should since the immortal gods are traditionally on both sides of a battle. All pantheons include gods of war—Indra, Odin, Ares, Yahweh, etc.—who are called upon in prayer to assist in the slaughter. We read in the Bible:

When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than your own, you must not be afraid of them; Yahweh your God is with you. . . .” (Deuteronomy 20:1)  

In fact, the Lord may have called for this “holy war,” and the soldier is offering pious service. It may even be that God does the fighting himself: “Vengeance is mine.” (Deut. 32:35)

That is how early Islam understood its militant sweep out of the Arabian Peninsula. Allāh had proclaimed through his prophet Muḥammad a “holy war” (jihād; literally, “effort”):

slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they repent, and perform the prayer, and pay the alms, then let them go their way; God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate. (Qur’an, Sura 9)

Well, not entirely “compassionate”—as this passage touches upon the dark side of God (of which I have written). Still, there is no greater reason to go to war than to fight for the victory of Justice over Iniquity, of Good over Evil.

Need we note that human beings also go to war to defend all these resources or to recover them, that wounded pride is also a reason to fight back?

It seems, then, that war is “built in” to civilization, despite the apparent contradiction. After all, the Warring States Period of ancient China that lasted three centuries was the very cradle of high Chinese culture. As Heraclitus noted, “War is the father of all things.”

Jung knows that the human body shares with animals a physiological instinct for aggression. It is expressed by the willingness and capacity to attack or defend—to keep territory, to satisfy hunger and mating, to protect the young. This instinct is almost always self-limiting, however, with a specific external goal. It usually involves a pair of combatants or perhaps a raid of several animals against one or a few to limit casualties. Seldom is this behavior what we associate with war.

It is human psychology, added to instinct, that is responsible for warfare. 1) It comes first of all from the ego. Not that the ego is “bad.” In fact, it centers consciousness, that precious fruit of human development. But the ego’s fight to become free of the unconscious (imaged as “St George in full armor slaying the Dragon,” etc.) can get out of hand and become ego-tism. Jung says of this exaggerated ego:

Egotism always has the character of greed, which shows itself chiefly in three ways: the power-drive, lust, and moral laziness. These three moral evils are supplemented by a fourth which is the most powerful of all—stupidity. (CW 18, par. 1398)  

In a single individual, these evils would not lead to war, but in an individual leader they could—since groups are highly suggestible. Hermann Göring made the point: “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” (Wikipedia, “Nuremberg Diary”)

2) That works, however, because the shadow of the leader and of the group is nearly always unconscious. Nobody knows what is happening. For example, Hitler had no idea that beside being a spellbinding orator with the courage of his convictions, he was—as Jung expressed it—“an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies.” Nor did he want to know that. The German people didn’t want to know that they had put their trust in such a person lest they see their psychological stupidity. Jung writes:

It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow. But how could the Germans be expected to understand this, when nobody in the world can understand such a simple truth? (CW 10, par. 454-455)

Also, when the shadow is very unconscious, it is projected onto others: the “others” are evil and stupid—and need to be eliminated. That justifies war, rooted in ignorance. It is why Matthew Arnold closed “Dover Beach” with the line: “Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

 3) Yet there are “gods” of war, i.e., archetypes in the collective unconscious that support warfare. That means that the desire for war and the capacity for waging war is “built in” to the human psyche from which we cannot escape. In fact, I am glad (perhaps the wrong word) that the deepest reaches of the psyche supported the American Revolution, helped Lincoln decide to go to war against secession, that we entered WWII. All of that was horrible, yet necessary. And I am glad there are highly-skilled brave warriors standing by to protect our nation.

Nevertheless, Jung called all wars “psychic epidemics.” He wrote in a letter, “I am absolutely opposed to war” (Letters, 9/30/32). But he also wrote several years later:

We have to be ready for the worst. . . . But no attack! Under no conditions! . . . . You shoot when you are threatened in your very existence, not when you are merely hurt in your feelings or in your traditional convictions. The accumulation of weapons, though indispensable, is a great temptation to use them. Therefore watch the military advisers! They will itch to pull the trigger. (9/23/49)

The point is that we need a good relationship to our biological instincts for self-preservation. We also need a good relationship to the archetypal psyche in order to determine the right course of action.

That does not mean being merely an obedient “child” of God as in the following disturbing observation:

It is the psyche of man that makes wars. Not his consciousness. His consciousness is afraid, but his unconscious, which contains the inherited savagery as well as the spiritual strivings of the race, says to him, “Now it is time to make war. Now is the time to kill and destroy.” And he does it. (Jung Speaking, 74)

Instead, we can rise at least to the psychological level of Abraham who bargained with Yahweh not to destroy all of Sodom and Gomorrah if he found fifty, forty . . . ten just men in those cities. (Genesis 18)

Of course, that more “adult” relationship to the collective unconscious requires the conviction that there is an archetypal psyche, that it is more powerful than the ego (more powerful than egotism), and that we are still dealing with divine forces that have not disappeared. We may, in responsible dialogue with these Forces, be able to direct them away from external warfare—from history’s usual “bath of blood”—to a more internal battlefield, the difficult struggle for self-knowledge.

Religion has actually supported this creative “canalizing” of violent energy. The Buddha, born into the warrior class, required non-violence of his monks. Arjuna questioned Lord Kṛṣṇa’s insistence that he kill his kinsmen—not that this had much influence on Indian warfare. Jesus said we should love our enemies, not fight with them—radical advice that did not much influence Christendom. Yet Jesus echoed what the early prophet Isaiah heard in a vision: that Yahweh’s own goal was a “Day of the Lord” when humanity “will hammer their swords into ploughshares, their spears into sickles. Nation will not lift sword against nation, there will be no more training for war.” (Isaiah 2:4). Ṣūfī Islām redefined jihād as “the greater jihād” between truth and evil within each of us. (Encyclopedia of Religion, “Nonviolence”).

Jung wrote soberly of these developments: “Man’s warlike instincts are ineradicable—therefore a state of perfect peace is unthinkable.” (CW 10, par. 456)  But he added: “It is surely better to know that your worst enemy is right there in your own heart.” Nations do not sit down and reflect on these matters, but individuals can. And when there are “enough” individuals—wary of egotism, withdrawing shadow projections, and testing the “spirits” before acting—a new world view appears. The stakes are high since global suicide is now a possibility.