As we counted down earlier to the centenary of the 1918 armistice, it was important to focus on things like the evolving meaning of empire, and the technological revolution of the last century, for which World War I put up the prototypes and foreshadowings to an extent few may remember.
In more recent years, the significance of why we fought – why we fought, uniquely, as a civilization against itself – came to the fore.
In 2024, I see another emphasis emerging. It has to do partly with the idea of “hybrid war,” or what we used to call “asymmetric war.” When war can be war without necessarily looking and sounding like “war”-war, how do we know it’s war? How do we recognize when it has started?
Of equal importance, of course, is how we know when it has ended. Can we predict or expect that it will end, if we prosecute it effectively?
This question is implicit in the usually-shallow treatments of “why America doesn’t win wars anymore.”
The answer is extremely simple and indisputable, upon examination. It’s because we’re not trying to. “Winning” hasn’t been the goal for a long time.
This is not a wearisome, tediously shallow reference to the “military-industrial complex,” theoretically driving everything toward war to serve its end of greed and power. That, to the extent it matters, is a symptom, not the cause.
Nor is the not-winning mindset really about the ultimacy of nuclear war, and not wanting to skirt too close to it in an insistence on winning. Very often the risk of nuclear war is slight to non-existent.
Rather, the question why we don’t try to win wars has more to do with a tolerance built up in the consciousness of the peoples for wars that are always going on in a background we have mental awareness of. Wars are on our horizon now, even when we’re not in them. We grow complacent about them. They don’t alarm us the way they once did, when everything and everyone felt further apart, and we didn’t experience war going on somewhere – always war going on somewhere, in our news, filling our information space every day – while our lives at home were little touched.
Indeed, the touching of our lives has come to be more from disasters and unhindered migration, the latter mostly of combat-age men who tip the scales toward increased crime, social unease, and un-safety wherever they enter in droves.
In some ways we have gone from war being, in Karl von Clausewitz’s formulation, “the continuation of policy by other means,” to policy on things like migration and public order being war by other means. Many citizens of cities like New York, Baltimore, Chicago, San Francisco, and Portland (and Amsterdam and London and Paris!) would agree with that characterization.
A juggernaut ideology in the West has paralyzed us in place to accept that form of hybrid war – a war that could undermine nations and transform lives of rights and freedoms out from under us – as a sort of civil war.
In the face of that prospect, I’m reminded of writing I have done on the “tower of Babel” story (here, here, here for starters). The “common language” that was broken up and scattered in that story from Genesis is like the juggernaut ideology that has held us in thrall in the post-modern era of Western civilization. Like that common language and the common project of “building a tower” to reach and conquer Heaven, the juggernaut ideology, which we now call “wokeism,” demands unity under it, everyone speaking the same words with the same implied definition of ideas, and a conquest of “heaven.”
The strange – but inevitable – goal of the world’s peoples now is to figure out how to break that juggernaut by “scattering in place.” In the Babel story, the scattering was geographic. People literally moved and evanesced in polities out into a less-inhabited, less closely-ruled landscape.
But such a landscape no longer exists on earth in that form. Now the enterprise is more one of repairing borders – the only way to enforce national, civically-oriented ways of life within them – and getting out of other nations’ business.
How to do that in a world grown as close and mutually involved as it is today is a conundrum. It’s made harder by every pious call for an ill-defined “unity” that sounds good, from an emotional standpoint, but in reality is pretty much all about giving up liberties and rights.
This project, the human world has not been faced with before. Even 110 years ago, when World War I started, there was a lot of dry land remaining unclaimed for defended nationhood: land administered as colonies, but not organized and operated for diverse nations. Now every square inch has been claimed, or interest in it formally declared (e.g., at the poles) in ways recognizable to Westphalians. There’s no more walking a scattering tribe into a vast area guarded only by a handful of Brits asleep at a sentry post.
Yet people after people rejects the enterprise of “globalism.” No one wants the visionaries of globalism informing him that his life will be lived inside 600 square feet in a high-rise, owning nothing and spending his outdoor time in carefully delineated spaces with dozens or hundreds of other people, having no effect and expecting no other future.
In a sense, America electing Donald Trump was a blow for scattering in place, to restore the rights and liberties of nationhood, and decriminalize diverse languages. The effect of triumphing over the ideological juggernaut – a goal not yet achieved – is that of winning a war. It settles a question, at least for a time, of how we will live on the lands where we find ourselves.
There’s also a sense in which winning hybrid war has to be an enterprise of not-war, and defeating a juggernaut ideology has to be an enterprise of not-ideology. That doesn’t mean competing ideologies aren’t useful as thinking tools. Ideology is about application to life, and some measure of it is always necessary. (There’s no Second Amendment, for example, without an ideology of meanings inherent in the Bible to make defense of life a God-given right for the individual.)
But requiring human activities to unfold in an ideological template that sets up competition with other ideologies takes on a life of its own, and becomes, in effect, a supreme juggernaut.
Donald Trump’s appeal to his supporters starts and persists outside that juggernaut. It does the opposite of demand that humans come to it with the ideology mindset.
This is a very, very strange place to be waging what is, in effect, a war to set the course of our future. But it’s the war that we are in. We might see the progression as the Cold War having been a war between ideologies, and the war today as a war against ideology – at the moment, that of wokeism – as a false scripture, or a false narrative of meaning and existence, trying to deny us other ways of seeing.
What we must be particularly careful about, as much as if not more than what we believe and prioritize, is perceiving when we have to shed blood over it. I see the scattering in place as a timeout for just that purpose. It’s for us to get our minds and hearts un-seared from the tolerance of perpetual war, and reclaim the truth that that is the torch we were supposed to catch, all those years ago, from the Dead in Flanders fields.
I’ve left both the 2022 and the 2021 essays in place, because the comparison of thought across these few years seems to me significant enough to feature all of it. Please read as little or as much as you would like. There’s an inspiring musical offering at the end.
It feels like we are passing through a singularity in time because we are. I don’t know that we’d agree today that “war,” as Heraclitus said, “is the father of all, and the king of all.” But I think we’d agree that war is the companion of all. The difference is that we can choose whether to be born of it, and ruled by it.
For respect and honor of our citizen-warriors, slow to arms but mighty in battle, may we understand this task well, and choose wisely.
{Reposted from the author’s site}
