Sunday, July 6, 2014



The Abortion Dilemma: Finding Common Ground

           


            When my brother was seven years old there was a decidedly vicious streak coiled  inside his pasty-freckle wrapping.  Even though it seemed only I could see it, it was definitely there: an avatar snake contained in the envelope of his adolescent body, a  perceptible sliver of reptilian breath leeching through his throat, scales occasionally regrouping in peristaltic waves of  amber, red and  indigo beneath semi-translucent skin.  He was a demon--a fact undeniable in his manifest power to confuse my parents, to mesmerize them with the flicking of his icy-tongue, to engorge them with the idea that not only was there nothing wrong with him, but that he was even (and I still feel bile in my throat) ”their little darling.”  I was fundamentally disoriented—how could  something that glowed so hotly with the fire of hell traipse so unopposed through my family’s  “leave-it-to-Beaver” home?  It was my first lesson (I thought) on the banality of evil; my first comprehension of the truth that cruelty could exist as easily as it did, and that I could expect no justice.  No abject revulsion for my brother by my parents, no expulsion for him to the fringes of the neighborhood play-circle, no hope of a sudden thunderclap and the sizzle of smoke-and-ash in a hole where his chair had been.
Which segues us now to the subject of abortion.  Nowhere in modern politics will you find a controversy more saturated with ill-will, nowhere will you find one more inclined to contort its participants in cramps of anger.  There is a belief among the sides in the abortion controversy that the opposite view embeds both boundless stupidity and bottomless malevolence.  In what has become nothing less than a polemical melee, each side condemns the other in intensifying cycles of derogation, cycles that  tighten so fitfully they begin to evoke hallucinations similar to those I had seen framed in the entity of my brother.  Those involved begin to think they sense a trace of evil in the other side, of demon-scales lying semi-opaque  beneath the white of the opposition’s skin, of a wisp of sulfur and half-rotted flesh in the oppositions breath, of  a red-gleam in the core of the other side’s narrowed eyes.  Contempt breeds contempt, and the argument spins in violent pirouettes until everyone is convinced that the gates of hell have opened, and that the demon Pithius has climbed up onto the surface of earth to contradict them—vocally, stridently and falsely.
In the chapter on abortion in Contemporary Moral Issues in a Diverse Society, editor Julie McDonald anthologizes a sampling of views that cohere around the phenomenon of human abortion.  In an attempt to clarify the core disagreements that form what has become one of our most powerful controversies, McDonald presents voices from each side, allowing them to alternate in a kind of see-saw juxtaposition of perspective.  If readers however begin with hope that such even-handed toggling of the arguments will allow them to determine a dialectical winner, they will ultimately be disappointed.  It turns out that the stew of fact, belief and emotion that perforate the cultural framework of abortion are far too complex to easily detangle--at least this is what seems to emerge as the fundamental epiphany of the text.  But it is a realization that need not, in the final analysis, arrive in the ashes of disappointment, because it forms what can only be seen as a sliver of common ground.  By comprehending and acknowledging the complexity and at least temporary intractability of the debate, all sides can find a theoretical starting point from which to speak to each other.  Because no matter how right each side believes itself to be, no matter how morally or logically superior, they can and should concede that the physical and spiritual nuances surrounding the abortion controversy are deeply layered.   In this, at least, they can chance giving a nod to their antagonists, finding in that a respectful edge from which they can quietly but persistently speak to each other.
In the first reading of the anthology, Abortion and the Concept of a Person, Jane English traces an argument that seems to adhere to just such a position of compromise.  The brunt of her argument burrows through the Byzantine complexity of the abortion question, adumbrating how each position seems solid enough at the outset but begins to fray and split into successively intricate layers of both physical and metaphysical contradiction.  Abortion, she shows, is not just one question and one dilemma, but rather a polemical peel of fundamental complexity:  is abortion OK?  Well, that depends on if it is killing.  But does it really?  Because killing is sometimes justified.  Or is it? And what about killing a human being?  But what is a human being?  And is even killing a human being always wrong?  English takes her reader on a dizzying ride through the loops of  moral reasoning (especially those pertaining to the “personhood” of a fetus) that saturate the abortion question, ultimately deciding that since there can be no clear coherent answer to a question that is itself not clearly coherent (at least in simple yes or no form) , the best we can do as human beings will have to be whatever it is that we end up doing—that is, we must ultimately quit pretending we can squeeze out an answer and finally set out to formulate a compromise.   We must in effect agree that both sides have been prosecuting an untenable polemic because, short of God (or an equivalent) appearing as big as the sky to clear it all up, rightness and wrongness on abortion may never be solidly comprehensible. 
In Choosing Disability, Laura Hershey configures the abortion question as it pertains to our views on disability and congenital defect.  It turns out that groups opposing legalized abortion have generally (and falsely) assumed a sort of natural affinity of the disabled for their cause.  It is an assumption grounded in their belief that the disabled must at least share their horror for the termination of an anomalous or diseased fetus, since this is what many of the disabled had themselves once been.  This conclusion is simplistic, because as Hershey comments, although “some activists have accepted the anti-choice message because they find it consistent with the goals of the disability rights movement,” others like her “recoil at the ‘pro-life’ movement’s disregard for the lives an freedom of women.” (98) .  
Hershey’s text acknowledges in this a deep almost schizophrenic ambivalence in the minds of many of the disabled regarding abortion—although many resent the imposition of male-dominated cultural restrictions on their rights as women regarding pregnancy, they also abhor the culture’s easy acceptance of fetal disability as a valid and even recommended reason for abortion (when it is legally permitted).  She quotes for instance a 1992 CNN survey in which “70 percent of respondents favored abortion if a fetus was likely to be born deformed.” (98)  According to disability rights organizer Diane Coleman, in this statistic slithers the abhorrently pervasive “rejection of people with disabilities, and the conviction that it would be better if [they] were dead” (99).
At this point in the text Hershey launches into a diatribe on the validity of a disabled life that to be honest is also where she can begin to lose the reader.   Not that I deny or even doubt her point that “thousands of severely disabled people are surviving, working, loving and agitating for change” (98).  But when she claims that when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy “expressly to avoid giving birth to a disabled child, she is buying into obsolete assumptions about the child’s future,” that she is making a “statement about the desirability of the relative worth of such a child,” (99) I find myself feeling like I’ve been intellectually serenaded, only to be suddenly startled by the interjection of what seems like an atonal refrain.  Hershey has toggled her argument into two broad and irrational generalizations: the first being that because she is disabled, she understands what it is like for all those who are disabled, and that this understanding includes the omniscient certainty that all disabled lives are worthwhile and fulfilling.  In this she is implying that her particular disability somehow recapitulates or anticipates the experience of all human beings who are born with physical abnormalities, an implication I find hard to believe (there are for instance defects that are known to cause intense, debilitating and incessant pain).  Congenital defects occur in almost innumerable form and combination—simply because Hershey’s story is one of a satisfactory and even fulfilling life, it is teasing a bigoted view to claim that her experience is the norm or even common. 
The second doubtful generalization in Hershey’s argument is that a woman who chooses to abort a defective fetus is making a judgement-by-proxy on the worth of a disabled person’s life—a jump in logic so broad it seems to need no explication.  A woman’s reasons for abortion, even of a potentially disabled child, are multifarious and complex.  There are seemingly far more likely alternatives to the relatively bigoted reason posited by Hershey, such as  reasons based on the financial and emotional strain posed by a disabled child, a strain some women may simply know they cannot bear.   In making her claim, Hershey becomes guilty of the same error she accuses the non-disabled of committing—of simplistically assuming they know the details of another’s experience; they of the fundamental quality of a disabled life and she of the fundamental motivation in a woman who aborts a potentially disabled fetus.  
In the end, although Hershey makes lucid points about society’s relationship vis-à-vis the disabled, she seems to only dilute those points by forcing them into the framework of abortion—she seems, in doing this, to be plowing the wrong field.  The clarity of her feminist position on the abortion question seems to become muddled in such an endeavor, as Hershey herself admits when she says that “when we object to positions that implicitly doubt the humanity of children born disabled, we are accused of being anti-choice.”  Although she tries to dismiss this confusion by appending her rhetoric with the claim that “I wouldn’t deny any woman the right to chose abortion, but I would issue a challenge to all women making an abortion decision whether to give birth to a child who may have disabilities,” (103)  the effort feels limp.  Finally one is left feeling that Hershey would like to have her cake and eat it too—that as a feminist she wants no restrictions on abortion but as a disabled  person she wants to impose what can often be a far more potent influence on behavior—social disapprobation.
In the third essay, Why Abortion is Immoral, Professor Don Marquis of the University of Kansas prosecutes an argument against abortion based on the concept of equivalency—that is, that abortion shares equivalency with what are already considered prima facie abhorrent behaviors (such as murder) in what amounts to its eventual effect: the thwarting of a human future.  His argument formed an interesting nexus for me personally, since it traced a perspective I had already once held and then abandoned a few years ago.    “What is the difference,” I would tell my friends, ”between me killing you now, or inventing a time machine, going back to the time you were a fetus, and convincing your mother to abort you—in the end I have achieved the same thing, namely that you at a point one hour from now no longer exist.  In this abortion is the same as murder.”  But there are potent contradictions in this view that eventually led me to abandon it —most powerful of which is the recognition that it becomes a slippery slope of regressing first causes.  By this I mean that I realized if I could say that abortion was equivalent to murder in its denial of a realized human future, than I could also say that convincing a mother to use contraception amounted to the same thing.  And if that was equivalent to murder, so was preventing parents from meeting, or preventing them from being born, or their parents and so on ad infinitum.  Although the argument against abortion framed in the “depriving” of a human future seems initially compelling, especially in its ability to disassociate the abortion debate from its most confusing element (that concerning the personhood of a fetus), it seems to naturally dissolve into ridiculous permutations concerning when such a “depriving” could theoretically take place. 
I wondered if  Marquis might manage to logically dismantle (at least for me) the recursive logic that seems to plague the “depriving of a future” argument against abortion, especially that which seems to make even contraception equivalent to murder.  It turns out my anticipation was misplaced--although Marquis acknowledges the recursion, he dismisses it with a perplexing wave of his hand:  “The ethics of killing in this essay would entail that contraception is wrong only if something were denied a human future of value by contraception,”….(and now the dismissive shrug)…”nothing at all is denied such a future by contraception, however” (115).  The statement seems to appear out of nowhere, and frustratingly, the text continues with only a hurried, semantically convoluted “clarification” of why this is so, one that ultimately feels forced.  Its as if Marquis recognizes the problem with his view’s illogical expansion, but instead of reconfiguring his view to deal with it, he generates a desperate a priori decision to simply not allow contraception to be considered the same way.  Tellingly, my copy of the anthology containing Marquis’ essay is a resale, and I was not surprised to see that a previous student had also been taken back by the suddenness of the forced logic: there, inscribed in the margins of my copy, is the definite semi-circle and subordinate period of a hurriedly scribbled question mark.  It seems that more than one of us responded to the professor’s argument with an irresistible and inquisitive “huh?”
In a quick aside, it is important to note that this was not the only destabilizing leg of Marquis’ argument--only the most salient one.  There is also a problem enmeshed in his other a priori assumption that by terminating a pregnancy, you are depriving a human being of a future of value:  “The effect of the loss of my biological life is the loss to me of all those activities , projects, experiences and enjoyments which would otherwise have constituted my future personal life…therefore when I die, I am deprived of all the value of my future” (108).   By doing this, he is burrowing (inadvertently I think) beyond his own argument on abortion and into what amounts to a metaphysical claim as well:  he is assuming that death itself is the termination of a “future.” It is a claim that, though seemingly obvious, that has never been proven.  Regardless of his view on the existence or not of a human soul, on the truth or not of an eternal spiritual existence (one that might theoretically be better than this one ), his argument embeds the assumption that it is only this future, the one he and the reader can see, that exists and has value.  It is an assumption many would deny (including Socrates, who ridiculed his enemies for assuming he would be afraid of death: “To fear death, gentleman, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know…there is good hope that death is a blessing" (Apology)).   I am not arguing of course that Marquis cannot ground his argument in such an assumption, but he should, at least for the sake of logical rigor, concede that he is doing so. 
In Feminism and Abortion, the next essay in the anthology, Sally Markowitz develops an argument on abortion that expands its scope, moving outside the question of the rights of a fetus to delve into the rights of the women who carry that fetus.  Moral purists may resist the attempt to frame questions of right and wrong, murder and autonomy, beyond simple and immediate definitions—if a fetus is a living human being (whatever we decide that means), killing it is murder, if not, well then it is not.  In this view, the morality of the practice could never have anything to do with the social framework in which it occurs.  Markowitz however makes a compelling and highly pragmatic argument: even if we ultimately decide a fetus is a “person,” there will remain a fundamental tension between its rights and the rights of the woman whose body it inhabits, especially in a society which misogynistically frames women’s rights as  subordinate to those of men.  In a sense, Markowitz is challenging all those who are opposed to abortion to put their money where their mouth is, to make the radical social changes necessary to free women and thus make abortion not just morally wrong but practically unnecessary.  “I hope my discussion brings to light,” she opines, “a dimension of the abortion issue too often ignored by philosophers: the relationship between reproductive practices and the liberation (or oppression) of women” (125).  “If we sincerely believe,” she goes on to say, “that abortion is at least prima facie wrong because it violates an overriding right of the fetus, our views should provide all the more incentive to change society so that women are no longer oppressed” (125).
In the next essay in the Contemporary Moral Issues anthology, Susan Sherwin argues that the feminist framing of the abortion question into the context of a broader cultural misogyny are too simplistic, as is also the alternative pro-choice insistence that abortion rights are only a question of personal autonomy.   In Feminist Analysis of Women and Abortion,  the professor of philosophy and women’s studies at Dalhousie University claims that what is needed is what Kathleen McDonnell called an implicitly “feminist morality” of abortion, one rooted in a “deep appreciation of the complexities of life, the refusal to polarize and adopt simplistic formulas” (127).  In service of this goal, Sherwin dissects the tangled relationship that exists in the singular phenomenon formed by a woman and her fetus.  In her adumbration, there is a pathology injected into the abortion debate on the one hand by a  culture that sees the “fetus as distinct individuals who are physically, ontologically and socially separate from the women whose bodies they inhabit,” (131) and on the other hand by the inclination of some feminists to feel “pushed to reject claims of fetal value, in order to protect women’s needs” (132).  Both positions are too simple, the first because “efforts to speak of the fetus itself, as if it were not inseparable from the woman in whom it develops, are distorting and dishonest” (133), the second because the fetus does exist as a relational being, even if only in the context of its relationship with its own mother: “A fetus has a primary and particularly intimate sort of “relationship” with the woman in whose womb it develops” (133).   This forms a two-pronged epiphany in the construct of Sherwin’s argument.  First that society, especially a male-dominated one, should never demand aegis over the fate of any individual pregnancy, since it could never comprehend the tangled relationship constructed inside of it.  And second, that feminists should never “deny that fetuses have value,” but should insist instead that “fetuses be recognized as existing within women’s pregnancies and not as separate isolated entities” (137). 
At the beginning of this essay,  I related the story of my strained relationship with my brother, one that probably seemed like a strange and desultory tangent--the subject is after all abortion, not the vagaries of familial tension.  But by evoking the subjectively tortuous dynamic of my sibling relationship, I was indeed attempting something relevant.  (If you are expecting a dark punch-line about abortion and wistful fratricide, that is not where I am going).  The gist is this: my brother and I highlight an ominous propensity of our race—the bent we have as human beings for inflating the significance of every “pinkie-finger” insult, for framing every conflict in cosmic terms and every contradictory opinion as malevolent, daemonic and threatening.  In a world where undiluted evil is just as illusory as undiluted good, we seem (even from our youth) damnably determined to pretend like we see both everywhere.
I could try to argue a position in the abortion controversy, but I don’t see the point.  If this review of a sampling of the opposing arguments has taught me anything, its that they embed a complexity of perspective that is not ever likely to be overcome.  In short, I’m convinced the dilemma can never surmount its fundamental nature as a cyclic and frustrating recursion of he-said/she-said.  But if we are ever to find a stone of an answer resting at the center of the abortion question, we must at least let go the disdain that infects the argument.  We must admit to the complexity of the dilemma over what constitutes human life and death, and suffocate our reflex for excoriating those who, embracing different nuances than us, form our opposition.   Because in our anger what we seek is an epiphany, a revelation of the truth embedded in all the nuances of what it means to be human and what it means to kill, and no side can ever own such an epiphany.  This is the understanding that must become our common ground—that the abortion question is stunningly complex, perhaps as nuanced as any human issue had ever been, tunneling as it does through almost every mystery of the cosmic condition.  What is life?  What is a human being?  And what exactly does it mean to be such a thing?  What, in a word, is everything?  Our common ground needs to be this recognition, and our response must eventually rest in nothing more ambitious than a considerate yet bold compromise.    
As a postscript, I would like to note that in the years since we were children, my brother has come to abdicate his inheritance as scion of Satan.  We still fight, but our  words fall more lightly, and there is the wisp of a hint of a smile at the edge of both our lips.  So fundamental has  the change been that last month we even went on vacation together--voluntarily, without parents to separate us to either side of an imaginary line running across the perpendicular center of the taxi’s backseat.  He may have even rolled his butt once or twice to my side, or even turned his head in my direction.  If he did, I can’t say I even noticed. 

Sunday, November 24, 2013



Twist Bone (experiment 2)

Tight-cudgels of leather-draped men  drew up set-jawed on their horses and fronted the house.   There was McCabe riding front, pressed on each side by Jim Winters and his brother Edgar.  Close behind followed a phalanx of locally drawed up men:  the Blacksmith Merlon and his Brother-in-law Stewarrt, , the three McCallister boys, and finally to the rear a group of itenirent cowboys who’d just happened to be in town that night looking for adventure.   Each man in the posse was a sinewey pocket of muscled consciousness:  each was a spitting and simmering block of flesh and dirt with violence in their hearts and a still inchoate plan to pummel the glow of life from a randomly pointed-out human being.   This was the 19th century  apotheosis of the western edge of human expansion:  a ragtag collection of men  clever enough to anneal barrels of steel and projectiles of lead in the fires of their industry, but with still stone-age fingers simultaneously itching to pull-and-fire the annihilation of another man’s life—possessed of a  demon to split another man’s flesh and to obliterate his existence with the crack of a trigger-hammer.    In the galloped high energy  of their hoof-and-horse cabal they only knew they felt a hatred, a hatred that smelled like gin and soil, and that cored out their insides  with a relentless and ravening hunger for someone’s life.   

Inside the loose-tacked shack the mood was not as jaunty.  Tuck sat beneath timbers that drooped so low they touched his hat.  His close-torn nails tapped slowly on the open oak grain of the table, marking a random cadence.  His hat canted deeply forward, the shadow that filled his face was deep and  opaque, completely closing his expression to revelation.  Only the raspy sound of a light snorting  through nostrils emanated from the center of the shadow on that face, a sound that could barely be heard by the other man hunkered down at the other side of the same table.  Ernie was old—at least old for these parts—nothing more than a collapsed flesh-sack of knotted-joints and rutted hide:  small and almost inscrutable as a man beneath the folding cloak of his deep wrinkles.  He was bird-thin, and his old skin seemed to be in the process of swallowing him all the time, like a python on a chicken bone.     

A bullet  whistled through the six inch space between them, and the crack of a rifle seemed to arrive a half second later.   Splinters exploded in slow motion and hurled through the cabin, pattering like light rain on the floor and covering Tucks's hat.

“Listen Up!” came a surly voice unimpeded through the thin slat walls.  “You kin walk out on your own, with your hands in the air, or we kin rain the justice of hell down on you right through  these walls. “  There was a pause, “You got yourself exactly five seconds to re-cipro-cate.”    
  
Ernie peered towards Tuck, waiting for a move, but none came.  Tuck stared straight ahead, the only sound coming from the prairie wind susurring  around the corners of the cabin, and the intermittent  jangle or tinkle of a random metal piece on the fence or on a boot or stirrup in the group of men outside.      



Sunday, November 17, 2013



Prologue

Jonathon Niedermeyer was exactly who you’d think he was—given his name of course.  And the fact that with a name like that he was pretty obviously human.  

Actually not so obviously in Los Angeles, where people name their dogs Richard Nixon and their cats Mr.Pritchard  and their cockatoos Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and sometimes even their  body parts after philosophers, scientists, famous Disney characters,  chewed-up child stars or even sober and perfectly constructed media intellectuals from one of the three cable news channels or their local affiliates.   Because living in Los Angeles is too much like living on the surface of a ball bearing, where you only stick if you compress your whole prone body around its smooth, hard circumference, and hold on for dear life, and then distract yourself from the existential terror of falling off by being ueber-not concerned.  

Ueber Not- concerned enough to pretend like naming your animals or your body parts or even your scat after famous people, or listening to the nothing-scatter of half-inch deep techno-punk-god-forbid-it-pretends-to-mean-anything music where disingenuously “loose” women with open cleavages and closed empathies construct a money gobbling machine of fame and name-recognition that is exactly shallow enough to make your ball-bearing clinging surface in Los Angeles seem as deep as it ever gets—ueber not concerned enough for pretending that.  

So you cling white-knuckled to the ball-bearing and pretend not to be scared by effulging your West coast Ueber-not concernedness that repels and repulses any god-forbid empathy real people might feel for you.  Because that would mean you are living an empty existence.  And that would mean it indeed all means nothing and Nietsche is dead and God didn’t have the last laugh because oh by the way.  Pause.  God IS dead.  

And you suspect it deep in your plastic cartoon-Christian hearts.  

Which makes every tablespoon of air you vacuum into the back of your throat a brutal act of terrorism because it keeps you and your existential nothingness alive just long enough to continually re-not-feel your existential nothingness.  Water-boarding in reverse.  But worse.  Life-boarding.
Only real option for human beings in the gulag of daily terrorism that is the West in the 21st recorded century :  Ueber-not-concernedness.  
   
But Jonathon happened to have been born with a particular and elemental deficit in the spiraling loops of his 32nd chromosome pair that left him with a curious and highly rare neurotype. 

The genetic defect had led during his embryogenesis to a iterative cascade of chemical interactions that ultimately resulted in an under-provisioning of his left sub-parietal-cortex with sufficient myelination and neurogenesis.  This weakened his propensity for self-absorption and denial, and simultaneously his ability to encode and solidify the relentless media-cavitated neuroprogramming of a 21st century human upbringing.  In short, unlike others, he could not bludgeon back his empathy instinct.

This in turn made him feel the wanton brutality of the gleaming antisepsis of life in Los Angeles moment by moment and thought by thought.  It made him remain empathic even against the incessant alienating and desensitizing instructions of the tyrant of his culture.  In other words, it made him a singular example of archetypal  human genuineness in the fractured and atomized center of an Ayn-odized American fiduciary and financialized world. 
     
It turns out that Jon Niedermayer was destined from birth to become and remain a grotesque pariah in the world.

Sunday, November 10, 2013



 War and the Primal Heart


“Warfare is almost as old as man himself, and reaches into the most secret places of the human heart, places where self dissolves rational purpose, where pride reigns, where emotion is paramount where instinct is king” (John Keegan, The History of Warfare).

         Not a human being exists who would deny that warfare and aggression lodge deep in the seedbed of human history.  Traces of collusive violence strew like crash debris across the planet’s archaeological field; crushed bones, bent weapons, crumbling mortar ruins of cities belligerently pounded free of human life.  And even while the world effulges still with the echo of musket and cannon, we wheel in new weapons to shatter and smash the refuges of our enemies, to obliterate all the human lives that offend us  An embarrassing primordial immaturity still afflicts us even while we try to incandesce with our sentience.  Scrutiny of the human race inevitably leads to the horrified recognition of an elephant in the room, one that trumpets and ruts noisily against the sofa—it is the glaring disconnect between the posturing of our intellect and the overt reality of our brutalizing violence.  Why, after eons of evolution and centuries of civilization, do we still so easily slide into the decomposing bog of primal aggression? 

         The question naturally bifurcates its answer, as the monster of war bears two natural heads—a political head that swells with national warring anger and a military head that snaps when ordered into the real combatant flesh of war.  These are fundamentally different beasts attached to the same trunk, each writhes with its own mien and meter from the same muscled neck.  Volumes have been written on the spasmodic vagaries of the political head of war-- most war histories are in fact pathologically preoccupied with the political and strategic dynamics that feed and direct national belligerence.  John Keegan’s title-quote shifts focus back to the other monster-head of aggression, back to the deep psychological current of real combat and the propelling impetus of violence in the individual soldier.  It is an important distinction, as warfare needs both a political and military head to survive as corrosive incubus in the human experience—national pugnacity dissipates in its own vapor if no one can be found to implement its vulgar threat, a fact most elegantly expressed in the words of a bumper-sticker I saw in a still superpower-wedged Austria in the 1980’s: “Picture this-- there’s a war somewhere, and nobody goes” (Stell dir vor—es gibt krieg, und keiner geht hin). 

          So what exactly is John Keegan’s point?   His argument forms the concision of four analytical end-prongs: that warfare occludes reason in a para-rational epiphany of the self, that it feeds on the marrowbone of pride, that it expresses itself in arcs of uncorrupted emotion and that it taps into the sump-water of the primal, instinctive heart.  While the psychological truth of violence lies in its complexity outside the ambition of our understanding, Keegan’s statement circumscribes that truth in the rough focus of approxiamating comprehension.   

         One of the most frustrating concepts in warfare is that concerning the locus of the Self—where in the chaos of smoke and blood and shattered bone can the Self be found?  Does it disappear in the flood of relentless violence, in the primal movement of the human herd as it sweeps through the field in a stuttering ferocious pulse?  Or does it do the opposite, ballooning into its first real apotheosis, logarithmically magnified so that the soldier becomes in battle a monolith of self-expression and self-knowledge?  The complexity of the question peels into the complexity of its answer, because both intuitively antithetical possibilities seem to be simultaneously true—war seems to at times soaringly extrapolate the coherency of Self, and at others to perfunctorily consume it.  

History is filled with examples of self-glorification as abiding agent in a soldier’s impetus; from the swooning expostulations of bravery and the brave in the Epic of Gilgamesh to the modern  come-hither promises of heroism wrapped in the recruitment campaigns of the U.S. Marines, there is an organic understanding in human culture that war can chisel a soldier out from the tar of anonymity, can toggle him into fame, can transmute him from ephemeral, inchoate being into focused heft of Self and celebrity.  So pervasive is this phenomenon that it is accepted as understood, and is revealed in modern scholarship mostly as parenthetical aside.  In The Face of Battle for instance, Keegan anecdotally comments that in the Hundred Years War, “men-at-arms” were unwilling to “cross weapons with archers, their social inferiors, when the chance to win glory in combat with other men-at-arms presented itself” (98).  

In All Quiet on theWestern Front, Erich Maria Remarque lyrically expressed an even deeper evocation of self than that construed in the glory of battle, namely that prosecuted in the sharp, immediate and life-threatening aegis of the battlefield: “The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums.  My limbs move supply, I feel my joints strong. I breathe the air deeply.  The night lives, I live” (33). 

 The phenomenon of Self potently-evinced in the crucible of combat is an organic constituent of the human experience of war--half a century after Remarque’s meditation on the First World War, letters from Vietnam revealed an identical experience for soldiers both culturally and temporally disconnected from those described in Remarque’s book.  In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brian expounds on the burgeoning of Self wrought in the jungles of Southeast Asia in his temporally shifted memoirs:  “I can feel my blood moving, my skin and my fingernails, everything, it’s like I’m full of electricity and glowing in the dark—I’m on fire almost—I’m burning away into nothing—but it doesn’t matter because I know exactly who I am” (111).

But the combat-self is a schizophrenic self—at times effulging in leviathan self-aware contrast against the world and at others disappearing into the summed beast of a unit’s human mass.  Remarque, in alternate pages of his novel, incorporated the diametric sense of both the construction of the self (as in the previous example) and its rabid disassembly in the masses of combatant men.   “I belong to them and they to me;” he wrote, “we all share the same fear and the same life” (212).  In his essay The War of Steel and Gold, Henry Noel Brailsford also elegantly encapsulated this self-annihilating dynamic of warfare: “Men can be got to shoot at other men with whom they have no quarrel, only because they have first been taught to lay aside their own personality, their own judgment, their free choice between good and evil. They become automata which shoot at other automata as little conscious of what they do as the rifles in their hands.”

Related to the dynamic of self exercised in the pulsing vagaries of war is the dynamic of pride, or more specifically of the potential loss of that pride in the abasement of shame.  Even a cursory dissection of warfare reveals shame to be a superlatively potent and persistent aspect of combat psychology—it seems that cowardice is the scarlet letter loathed and assiduously avoided in the social dynamic of militancy.  Even men fundamentally opposed to war have found themselves suddenly (and despite everything) caught up in combat, spewing guttural screams in the sweat-frothed forward rush of violence, because ultimately they could not bear the cultural suspicion of  cowardice.  

Shame is a powerful theme throughout the annals of war history, its avoidance cogently dissected as a war-motivator from Homer to Thucydides, Sun-Tzu to Clausewitz.  John Keegan describes it as the soldier’s fear of “losing the one thing he is likely to value more highly than life—his reputation as a man among men” (73).  Remarque described the relevance of shame in the call-to-arms of World War I, his protagonist Paul Bäumer commenting that “there was one of us who hesitated, and did not want to fall into line.  But he did allow himself to be persuaded, otherwise he would have been ostracized…at that time even one’s parents were ready with the word ‘coward’” (11).  Tim O’Brian elongates the theme, pulling it into our century in his expostulations on the Vietnam war: “In my head I could hear people screaming at me.  Traitor! They yelled.  Turncoat! I felt myself blush.  I couldn’t tolerate it.  I would go to the war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to” (59). 

The third component of  flesh-and-blood warfare refracted through Keegan’s lens is the  emotion that phosphoresces in the molted heat of combat.  Rank, disorienting, blood-pungent feeling effervesces through nearly all first-hand accounts of war.  In Keegan’s analysis, “the soldier is vouchsafed no well-ordered and clear-cut vision.  Battle, for him, takes place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment…for minutes or for hours, he may feel in turn boredom, exultation, panic, anger, sorrow, bewilderment, even that sublime emotion we call courage” (46).  

Remarque describes a First World War so brimming with emotions distilled in fear, soldiers swing wildly from elation to morose despair, gasp at the beauty of a smoke-reddened sunset, than double-over in vomitus extremis at the sight of a serrated corpse.  Following are just two examples of the extremes he lyrically illustrates: “Haie laughs so much that he dislocates his jaw, and suddenly stands there helpless with his mouth wide open.  Albert has to put it back again by giving it a blow with his fist” (83)…”The guns and the wagons float past the dim landscape of the moonlit landscape, the riders in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is strangely beautiful and arresting” (57).  

This emotional aspect, like the others drawn out in Keegan’s quote, is a constant concomitant of  war—the American experience in Vietnam revealed no less a combat-apotheosis of consuming, soul-singeing feeling.  Tim O’Brian’s “Carried“ condenses the phenomenon in the lyrical exegesis of his own Vietnam experience: “Any battle or bombing raid has…a powerful implacable beauty…after a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness…you feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self” (81).

Instinct is the final psychological aspect of war parsed by Keegan’s pen, saved until now because it encompasses a phenomenon that is simultaneously so fundamentally true and so ultimately unfathomable.  Instinct exists before consciousness, lodges in a brainstem unavailable to awareness and superordinate to language.  Any attempt to comprehend instinct, and its role in battle, is doomed to evaporate in frustration as layers can only be peeled back to recursively  reveal  their looping selves…what lies beneath lies also above and can never be adequately dissected.  

But historians and writers have to a degree managed to hedge it in; have, if not fully managing to pin-down instinct’s core, have managed to fence its understanding into the crude corral of linguistic approximation.  Keegan avers that the “sensations and emotions” of war, though dormant, are “part of every human being’s make-up…are the product of some of men’s deepest fears,” and that they “touch upon some of man’s most violent passions; hatred, rage and the urge to kill” (16).  He continues that “easy killing does seem to generate in human beings symptoms of pleasure…which zoologist Hans Kruuk has tried to relate to the compulsive behavior of certain predatory animals” (283).  

The Face of War extrapolates the point, burgeoning with examples--such as that from World War I, when “One Australian, about to bayonet a German, found that his own bayonet was not on his rifle.  While the wretched man implored him for mercy, he grimly fixed it and then bayoneted the man” (47).  Or another describing an event from the Battle of the Somme: “An officer came out of a dugout…he held his glasses out to S … and said ‘Here you are Sergeant, I surrender.’  S said ‘Thank you Sir,’ and took the glasses with his left hand.  At the same moment, he tucked the butt of his rifle under his arm, and shot the officer straight through the head” (48).      All Quiet on the Western Front reflects Remarque’s painful disillusionment with the civilizing pretension of modernity, persistently diagramming the vulgar operation of base instinct in the Great War:  “At the sound of the first of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years…We reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human animals” (56). “Some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked out with their own sawbayonets.  Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust” (103).  “We have become wild beasts” (113).  “The menace of death has transformed us into unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct” (275).  

We can also look through the lens of Vietnam to dissect the role of instinct in the belly of our own generation in war.  The constant undercurrent of primal aggressive instinct in the primordially-reminiscent sump of the rice-paddies, for instance, is illustrated in the following O’Brian anecdote: “Strunk’s nose made a sharp snapping sound, like a firecracker, but even then Jensen kept hitting him, over and over, quick punches that did not miss” (62).   Instinct seeps through the interstices of Vietnam, becomes an accepted para-rational component of the soldier’s psychological world: “Mitchell Sanders turned and looked at me, not quite nodding, as if to warn me about something, as if he already knew” (71).  O’Brian even analyzes the compelling contagion of the dark impulses of instinct in someone like himself, who had fundamentally opposed the war before being drafted: “I’d turned mean inside.  Even a little cruel at times.  For all my education, for all my fine liberal values, I now feel a deep coldness inside me, something dark and beyond reason” (200). 

The complexities inherent in the psychological and political intersections of war may in fact exceed our ability to dissect and understand them.  While it may be impossible to completely detangle the intertwined knots of martial consciousness and aggressive instinct, we can excise some limited understanding of war in the delimited scrutiny of combat.  John Keegan’s statement embeds his ultimate comprehension of warfare--that theories on war mire and sink in the quick-loam of the battlefield, that the complex articulations of their hypothesis evaporate in the scalpel-sharp clarity of the soldier’s instinct, emotion and pride.  In battle, speeches fall short, trumpets go mute, the drum-beat of war concusses feebly back to silence.  There is sudden and breathtaking simplicity—only the raw intersecting arc of the primordial self remains to fight for glory and for survival.  In a word, the shell of civilization peels back and only the animal at the human core remains:  “In every man, of course, a beast lies hidden-the beast of rage, the beast of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the beast of lawlessness let off the chain” (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 73).
     

Works Cited:

Brailsford, Henry N. “The War of Steel and Gold: A Study of Armed Peace.” 2006. BYU.edu.
         20 Nov 2006. 

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Brothers Karamazov.

Keegan, John. The History of Warfare. New York; Penguin, 1976.

O’Brian, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York; Broadway Books, 1990.

ReMarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.  New York; Ballantine, 1928.