The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,148

from their orbits.”118

Even thinkers who opposed war, such as Kant, Adam Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, H. G. Wells, and William James, had nice things to say about it. The title of James’s 1906 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” referred not to something that was as bad as war but to something that would be as good as it.119 He began, to be sure, by satirizing the military romantic’s view of war:Its “horrors” are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative supposed, of a world of clerks and teachers, of co-education and zo-ophily, of “consumer’s leagues” and “associated charities,” of industrialism unlimited, and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor any more! Fie upon such a cattleyard of a planet!

But then he conceded that “we must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings. Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built.” And so he proposed a program of compulsory national service in which “our gilded youths [would] be drafted off . . . to get the childishness knocked out of them” in coal mines, foundries, fishing vessels, and construction sites.

Romantic nationalism and romantic militarism fed off each other, particularly in Germany, which came late to the party of European states and felt that it deserved an empire too. In England and France, romantic militarism ensured that the prospect of war was not as terrifying as it should have been. On the contrary, Hillaire Belloc wrote, “How I long for the Great War! It will sweep Europe like a broom!”120 Paul Valéry felt the same way: “I almost desire a monstrous war.”121 Even Sherlock Holmes got into the act; in 1914 Arthur Conan Doyle had him say, “It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”122 Metaphors proliferated: the sweeping broom, the bracing wind, the pruning shears, the cleansing storm, the purifying fire. Shortly before he joined the British navy, the poet Rupert Brooke wrote:Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping.

“Of course, the swimmers weren’t leaping into clean water but wading into blood.” So commented the critic Adam Gopnik in a 2004 review of seven new books that were still, almost a century later, trying to figure out exactly how World War I happened.123 The carnage was stupefying—8.5 million deaths in combat, and perhaps 15 million deaths overall, in just four years.124 Romantic militarism by itself cannot explain the orgy of slaughter. Writers had been glorifying war at least the since the 18th century, but the post-Napoleonic 19th had had two unprecedented stretches without a great power war. The war was a perfect storm of destructive currents, brought suddenly together by the iron dice of Mars: an ideological background of militarism and nationalism, a sudden contest of honor that threatened the credibility of each of the great powers, a Hobbesian trap that frightened leaders into attacking before they were attacked first, an overconfidence that deluded each of them into thinking that victory would come swiftly, military machines that could deliver massive quantities of men to a front that could mow them down as quickly as they arrived, and a game of attrition that locked the two sides into sinking exponentially greater costs into a ruinous situation—all set off by a Serbian nationalist who had a lucky day.

HUMANISM AND TOTALITARIANISM IN THE AGE OF IDEOLOGY

The Age of Ideology that began in 1917 was an era in which the course of war was determined by the inevitabilist belief systems of the 19th-century counter-Enlightenment. A romantic, militarized nationalism inspired the expansionist programs of Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan, and with an additional dose of racialist pseudoscience, Nazi Germany. The leadership of each of these countries railed against the decadent individualism and universalism of the modern liberal West, and each was driven by the conviction that it was destined to rule over a natural domain: the Mediterranean, the Pacific rim, and the European continent, respectively.125 World War II began with invasions that were intended to move this destiny along.