Clausewitz, Conflict, And Human Nature - War As A Permanent Feature Of Human Society

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means.  Every empire, nation, kingdom, and regime has kept their armories full, their armies at the ready, and their populations prepared for war, for it has always been an inevitability. 

 

Wars have been a constant since the first human settlements, growing in size and number as technology improved, as geopolitics became more complex, and as the prizes became more valuable. The Trojan War, The Mongol Invasions, the Peloponnesian War, the Hundred Years War, the Greco-Persian War, the Punic Wars, the War of the Roses, and the Taiping Rebellion are just a few.  World War I and World War II were continuations of the trend, and lesser wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and now Iran - never miss a beat. 

Wars are a permanent feature of human society and will continue ad perpetuam, ad infinitum. In fact there is no better expression of the innate, hardwired, ineluctable forces of human nature than war. Until and unless that violent, aggressive, territorial, and self-interested nature is no more, wars will continue. 

A sequela of this axiom is that peace has only resulted in two ways - first, if one nation, empire, dynasty, or kingdom has complete and utter military and economic control, i.e. Pax Romana; and second, if two nations are equally matched, i.e. the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War.  Otherwise conflicts, skirmishes, wars by proxy or by frontal assault will continue unchecked and unabated. 

There is no difference between the playground antics of toddlers - 'That truck mine!' - marital squabbles, municipal disputes, regional conflicts and all-out wars.  They all arise from the same valuation, desire for hegemony, and the willingness to fight for it. 

If violent human conflict is not hardwired as part of a Darwinian imperative, then what is?  Conflicts over territory, power, money, and influence are endemic in individuals, families, clans, tribes, and nations.  Why should anyone ever assume that they will ever disappear? 

History takes no sides - human events have never been moral or immoral, but amoral only, the result of swings and sways of power and influence.  'To the victors go the spoils', and in the give and take of geopolitical conflict the winners established their culture, their language, and their religion until they were the defeated.  Things have a way of sorting themselves out. 

In such an inevitable world, the advice of two preeminent thinkers is pertinent - that of Clausewitz who accepted the inevitability of war, and as such nations should always be prepared to fight; and that of Machiavelli who said war, while inevitable, should be fought only in cases of national self-interest. 

If competing forces are not looked at as evil, immoral, or anti-social but simply extending their national interests, they can be stopped, delayed, or mitigated.  Nations that understand this fundamental motivation will also always be ready for war. 

 

Those who preach world peace, Utopianism, and compassionate progressivism only do a disservice to nations which should be listening only to Clausewitz and Machiavelli.  When Josef Stalin was told that the Pope might contribute his moral authority to discussions concerning post-war Europe, he said, 'How many divisions does the Pope have?' He, Stalin, and his Red Army were the ones who defeated the invading Nazi forces at Stalingrad, not the Pope.  There is no room for moral questions in matters of war. 

Mao Zedong thought no differently. 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun', he said, always putting national interests, geopolitics, and territorialism first and foremost when it came to national sovereignty. 

It is revisionist historians, especially those educated and raised within the moralistic culture of today, who talk of Stalin and Mao's 'evil'; but they were only following their natural human inclinations.  More brutal than most?  Hardly.  Genghis Khan when he marched from the steppes to conquer the world from Japan to Europe left only mayhem and ruin in his wake.  Millions were slaughtered in his Mongol-Turk conquests.  

 

'Peace in our time' was the infamous statement of Neville Chamberlain whose idealism and political myopia grossly misjudged Adolf Hitler and the Nazi threat; but he has not been alone.  The same idealism and historical blindness have infected generations. 

Vicki Parker was a lifelong advocate for world peace and felt sure that it could be achieved.  If we all just reasoned together, she said, worked out our differences, sat around the table and listened, conflicts could be avoided.  She believed this heart and soul, but there was always that niggling doubt, memories from childhood

Ever since she was a girl she had been aware of the aggressive and territorial nature of animals.  She was awakened in the middle of the night by hissing, screeching cats in the back alley.  In the morning her cat came in bloodied.  Patches of fur had been bitten off, and one day he had only half an ear.

Dogs were no different, and in those days they roamed as freely as cats. Most dogs had only one eye, half a tail, and a scarred snout.  They roamed in packs on Arch Street where most of the Chinese restaurants were, and fought over pieces of lemon chicken or stringy beef gristle. They fought among themselves for dominance, females, and food; and fought enemy packs who tried to invade their territory.

Blue jays are an invasive species, fearless of taking over other smaller birds hunting grounds; but Vicki watched sparrows, starlings, and buntings dive bomb the jays when they entered the yard.  Squirrels chased each other and bit. Fighting fish were best sellers at the pet shop, and if left in the same water for too long they would both be ragged, torn, and dying. Vicki's good friend Filler liked birds and wanted a companion for his cockatiel. His parents bought him a budgie, and despite the difference in size, the budgie beat up on the cockatiel until he had plucked his plume and all his head feathers.

Territorialism, aggression, and brutality were the hallmarks of the animal kingdom. Ant colonies were the most impressive.  The battles between soldier ants of different competing colonies were fought to the death.  There were advance scouts, rear guards, forward phalanxes, and lines of supply.  They used implements, chemical warfare, and the use of overwhelming force.

Everywhere she looked there were pigeons with their throats ripped out, birds nests taken over and occupied by invading interlopers, gnawed squirrels, and swarms of dead ants.

Vicki never got over these childhood images; and even at her  most passionate about World Peace, the images of the insatiably barbaric animal kingdom were as vivid as ever; and the comparison with human societies could not be more appropriate and relevant. Human beings were just as aggressive, territorial, and warlike as ants, baboons, or piranhas. War and hostility were as integral to human society as reproduction.

Yet there was something morally wrong about America's blasting Tehran to smithereens, killing its leaders, destroying its arsenals, military infrastructure, and supply depots.  The sight of fiery explosions, clouds of billowing smoke, and the rain of debris was upsetting, and she tamped down all thoughts of human nature and her earlier convictions that aggression was at the very core of human expression.  

This was untenable.  War was untenable; and so out into the streets she went, down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House where she stood with her sisters defying the President. 

Where does such idealism come from? For one thing it is related to longevity and the expectation of living a long life.  When Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and recreated the Battle of Borodino where Russian and French troops fought a decisive, pitched battle, the life expectancy was only a little over thirty.  One expected to die young so why not go out in a blaze of glory rather than from a foot infected by stepping on a thorn? 

Life was valued differently then and human life was calculated within the same algorithmic context as animal life.  Jack London's 'Law of Club and Fang' or its corollary the law of tooth and claw were life's only permanent axioms, and in an age when death came sooner rather than later, they were embraced.  Why look for peace in a world designed, organized, structured for conflict. 

When Darwin arrived a number of decades later, these assumptions were codified.  Not only was conflict part of life, it was responsible for its evolution.  All the more reason to leave aside the airy nostrums of peace. 

In a world where we expect to live to ninety, of course we become risk averse and look at peace as a means of prolonging our lives; and so Vicki's remonstrances are understandable - vain and senseless given the trajectory of history and the fundamental nature of human activity, but expected. 

She felt good about demanding peace in our time and found no irony in advocating for it. Although the Iranian theocracy was no different from Naziism - the ayatollahs and Hitler had the same inspiration, motivation, and purpose - and the reasons for going to war should be clear enough, Vicki still resisted. 

'This can't be all there is', she said; but of course it was.  However, peace was not irrelevant or impossible. It could happen under either of the two enduring conditions, Pax Romana or the Cold War  but even those required the force of arms.  Nothing comes without a price. 

Idealism is another permanent feature of human life.  There has always been a tendency to ignore reality and believe in something detached from it.  Do this at your peril, is the lesson of course, but that did not deter Vicki who kept up the White House vigil until well after dark. 

The Viral Infection Of Trump Hatred - Why Political Hysteria Is Catching And Is Now Epidemic In America

Vicki Edison had been brought up in a quiet, reserved, respectful family - modest in practice and aspiration.  They were patriotic but never xenophobic, Republican but centrist, ambitious but never greedy, religious without possession. 

This was the ethos of the times, and while there were murmurs of dissent, ragged fringes to such settled, reasonable behavior, they remained out of sight; and as ethos has it, it was assumed to be permanent, the way things should be.  Neighborliness, national pride, politeness, courtesy, and good nature were more than just social currency, they were absolutes.  It was as if everyone drank the same elixir from the same goblet from the same shelf. 

 

Arthur Edison was a pharmacist and compounded his own drugs.  This was in the days before national chains and before pharmacies were all-purpose convenience stores, and Mr. Edison was more than just a technician. He was there to counsel, to advise, and to prescribe.  In most cases bad colds cured themselves, flu ran its course, constipation, flux, and catarrh resolved themselves with diet, time, and patience, but Mr. Edison was considered a minor miracle worker. 

One would never think of not tipping one's hat to passing ladies or opening doors for them.  Handshakes between men were sincere, not hail-fellow-well-met routine.  Children were allowed to play by themselves but never talk back.  Church was a place of spiritual asylum and community association. 

No one had to enforce these practices, for they were accepted by all.  There was no moral police, no vigilantism, no need for a harsh word.  Trash was disposed of properly, traffic rules were obeyed, and voting was a privilege. 

Coming from this background of rectitude and good citizenship, it was particularly difficult for Vicki to make her way in today's world - one as far removed from the temperance and good will of her youth as she could imagine - but in many ways it suited her.  As a child she was never really happy in white organdy, First Communion, piety, and discipline.  There was something missing in the settledness of it all, something dampening, something unpleasant. 

 

She made her way from a good Catholic childhood to serious student to campus unrest thanks to that restiveness - that sentiment of individual worth, identity, and the conviction that personal investment in social change mattered.  By the time she was on her own, she had left the harness and traces of her past behind and embarked on a life of activism.  

At each step of the way and in each distinct period of her life, there was the same sense of zeitgeist and ethos.  The Sixties were no different than the Fifties, for there was the same assumption of righteousness, community, camaraderie, faith, and American ambition.  There was a canon, a liturgy, a prescribed order, and received wisdom, and few denied it.  One belonged to a social religion in the Sixties just as one did in the Fifties. The new generation was drinking from the same chalice, on the same altar, using the same incantations. 

Vicki lived in an urban commune in the East Village, had indifferent, incidental lovers, despised the bourgeoisie, and joined Columbia students in their takeover of the university.  It was a heady time, one like the Fifties, where everyone belonged to each other. 

The elision to progressivism was smooth.  The well-meaning, principled, but inchoate convictions of the Sixties became more codified.  Social reform needed organization, structure, rules, and leadership.  At the same time, this post-revolutionary period was just as generic, shared, and righteous.  Once again, everyone prayed at the same communion rail. 

Vicki had her ups and downs, doubts and highs, but kept the course; and before she knew it she was part of the new American political scene - an angry, contentious, and deliberately mean one.  There was no room for compromise or accommodation in the Donald Trump era.  The future of the black man, the environment, the lesbian, and the farm worker was at stake. 

Like all periods before it, this one had its own communal solidarity all built around hatred for the President.  Contrary to the past where social reformists had a positive agenda, a definitive program for progress, today's activists were negative in spirit and purpose.  Of course they didn't think of themselves this way, and felt that they were beacons of hope for the future of an America with no kings, peaceful, and accommodating to all. 

There was something in this feral hatred, this implacably vicious animus, and this universally condemning culture that set it apart. While the same viral effect was felt - an infection that spread widely and fast - the symptoms were disturbing.  It was more hysteria than commonly-held beliefs spoken forcefully.  It was voodoo drums, candomblé, war dances, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and totems.  It was if the whole country - or at least the most ferocious believers - had been possessed. 

Before she knew it, Vicki was one of them.  She boiled with hatred for Trump, shouted j'accuse! at anyone who strayed, spat on American flags, transparent symbols of MAGA membership, gathered in basements, on the Mall, and on streetcorners to vent their anger. 

Everywhere in University Park, the leafy upscale Northwest Washington neighborhood where she lived, people shook their heads, gave each other knowing smiles, talked about 'him' with no reference needed, walked with confidence knowing that everyone was in solidarity.  The virus had completed its rounds, was now endemic and spreading. 

However, this brain disease was taking its toll on Vicki.  At times she could not hold back her tears.  She could no longer speak coherently but spluttered.  She felt all tight and wound up inside as though a time bomb were ticking and about to explode.  The very thought of 'him' produced uncontrollable rage, and she felt like running into the street, tearing off her clothes and shouting. 

She was not alone in her anxiety and febrile hatred.  Her neighbors were feeling the same possession, the same uncontrollable hatred, the same frustration and indignity.  The whole of University Park became Bedlam, an insane asylum without bars and screened windows. 

Vicki was close to delirium as she wandered from bath to garden, in the front door and out the back, muttering, slamming her fist against the wall, beseeching God for salvation, tearing her hair, and imagining the most horrible, murderous thoughts. 

Her fortitude cracked, her crucible of hope split apart, her whole world rocked and tilted and finally crashed.  She emerged from a drug-induced stupor to realize that she was not home, but at St. Elizabeth's a state mental hospital in Olney.  She tugged at her restraints, shouted for help, and was sedated once again. 

She was one of the lucky ones, institutionalized before she harmed herself or others; but how many more like her were on the verge of madness, at the tipping point hovering between insanity and political rabidness?

The hysteria shows no sign of abating and women like Vicki are still parading the streets demanding the demission of Donald Trump.  They wanted to see him in a tumbril headed for the guillotine, getting his final due, freeing the good people of America from his tyranny.  Their faces twisted into maniacal grimaces, their hair as wild as Medusa's, arms flailing, spittle flying; but there is no paddy wagon big enough to carry them to Bedlam, no battalion large enough to corral them all, tether them, and get them off the streets once and for all. 

'Where am I?', Vicki asked the attending physician on duty in Ward C, the violent ward; to which she received only a smile, a pat on the head, and a dose of clozapine. 

You Can't Go Home Again, But You Never Give Up Trying - Thomas Wolfe And The Oases Of N'djamena

Berkeley Arnold had led a successful life.  He had won no military victories, led no nation, nor probed the mysteries of the quantum world but he had been a good father, and a respected teacher and that had to count for something. 

Or did it? He should have been on the concert stage or in the operating theatre.  What was a life led within some vague Hobbesian existential notion worth?

 

Doing mattered little in a short, nasty, brutish life - there were no such things as happy anodynes only fictions, religious faith, progressive idealism, fairy tale mornings.  No, the best that the philosophical world could offer was Epicurus or Nietzsche, and he was no Ubermensch. 

Vladimir Nabokov was a self-styled memorist - a man who understood that the present was only a matter of microseconds and the future only a probability at best.  Only the past had some substance, some relevance, some clue to meaning and identity.  

So, from a very early age he did his best to capture those moments of the present which he knew would be defining and essential to give meaning to his later life.  He deliberately fixed Cannes, Biarritz, St. Petersburg, and Paris in his memory, playing scenes over and over again until they were indelibly fixed to be recalled years later. 

And so it was that Berkeley Arnold, now an older man with few adventures ahead of him, embarked on his journey into the past.  He had not fixed events, lovers, scenes in his memory like Nabokov and relied only on mnemonic devices for recall - returning to N'djamena, Nairobi, Port-au-Prince, and St. Tropez would resuscitate the past and be the inspiration for recovering it. 

Lovers of course were at the center of his return journey.  What had happened to Artemis de Meuron a young Swiss cartographer in the mold of Almasy, the model for Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, a man mapping the desert but hoping to find a world without maps?  She had arrived in the Chadian capital without caravan, seconds, or equipment more than a compass, early 20th century maps drawn by German adventurers, and inspiration. 

She was brilliant, a prize, so far removed from the debutantes and Park Avenue arrivistes of his youth that she would have stood out anywhere; but here framed against the unimaginable beauty of the Sahara, she was a visitation. 

Their affair was brief - just a taste - before she went off into the desert, bound and determined to follow the old salt routes of Arab traders and find the mythical Wadi-al-Haroon.  Where was she now, Berkeley wondered.  Did she ever make it out of the desert? Was she still alive?

N'djamena today of course is not what it was.  Thanks to decades of corruption, mismanagement, and amoral disregard for the governed, the capital had become a palace and a sinkhole side-by-side in horrific irony.  The Hotel de la Paix, the small pension-like hotel run by French ex-colons from la France profonde no longer existed, nor did the Lebanese restaurant where Berkeley and Artemis enjoyed meze, grilled lamb and vin gris.  The streets of the capital had been paved but never maintained and were thoroughfares in name only, patches of asphalt amidst the potholes and ruts. 

Most importantly was the air of mistrust everywhere, an insecurity, the fragility of being a foreigner where foreigners were not wanted.  There would be no soft, Sahara wind, no courtesy, no affection for each other in this last outpost of civilization.  Whatever romance there had been, it was gone. What had he been thinking?  Why did he return, and why didn't he keep the memories as is, unbothered by what had come afterwards?

He thought of travelling to Bern where Artemis was from - a small chance of finding her but what worried him was not the failure of the search but the success.  Did he want to see an old woman scrubbing the stoop?  Better leave well enough alone.  It was bad enough that the images of their idyll had been ruined - defiled - by the reality of N'djamena.  If he were to see an old Artemis, the entire vision would be erased. Thomas Wolfe:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood...back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame...back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory 

He had met Blanche de Castille, namesake and descendant of the medieval queen of France, in Port-au-Prince during the period of the Duvaliers.  He met her at the Olaffson, the old Victorian hotel made famous by Graham Greene in his novel The Comedians and as attractive a place as he described - rum punches on the verandah, the martinet Petit Pierre, the sounds of voodoo drums in the hills above Kenscoff...and the gingerbread houses, meringue, the dancehalls of Carrefour, and the beaches of Les Cayes. 

 

This cannot have changed, thought Berkeley.  This was the heart and soul of Haiti, the Afro-Caribbean culture, vestiges of Dahomey, candomblé and voodoo, zombies and mock funerals for the dead...It could not change; but of course it had.  Haiti today is as chaotic and lawless a place as Somalia - ruled by gangs and drug lords, a city in name only, a miserable, desperate, feral place. 

He and Blanche had stayed in the Douglas Fairbanks suite of the Olaffson and never left.  With the windows open, Haiti was there.  From the rooftop they could see the harbor, the downtown, the cruise ships and the port; and from their balcony see the far hills above the city.  

The affair was as it should be - brief, temporal, but permanent - the kind of affair that is indelible, a Nabokovian one, one easily recalled.  Berkeley knew that he could not go back to Port-au-Prince but certainly he would be able to find Blanche in Paris or Versailles where the family lived in the same chateau as their famous ancestor; but what would be the point?  

Of course there was the chance that they both could suspend disbelief, forget their old bones and relive the memories of the past.  That was all Berkeley was after, not a recreation of the past but to relive it in whatever way he could. Yet she might not have been captivated by the day and nights at the Olaffson as he had.  It might not have met the same thing, and the Lawrentian epiphany that he hoped for might be only his desire, not hers.  The successive years after the Olaffson might have intruded in ways that erased it completely. 

 

After his affair with Petra, he replayed it in detail in his head again and again.  It was like replaying a videotape, rewinding it, and replaying it again, stopping to correct a detail, recalling a smell, a view or words.  He did this for months until he forgot to do it, and when he tried again, things got muddled, events reversed, extraneous bits had intervened, disrupted the flow, turned it into a travelogue; and then he never bothered with it.  A trip to Copenhagen, like to Haiti or N'djamena might revive it, her, the place and time; but probably not, a hopeless vanity. 

'There are all kinds of love in the world', wrote Fitzgerald, 'but never the same love twice'. True enough thought Berkeley; but when age had take its toll and there were to be no more future, different, engaging loves; and when there was only the past to rely on, then what?

'The past is a flimsy excuse for the present' wrote Antiochus. Perhaps, but as life fades and the present is just 'a waiting room for eternity' what else is there?