Posts Tagged ‘war’
less testosterone? – such a worry

the Chinese Testosterone Party – ‘let’s wear boring western outfits and shit on “western values” – that’ll fix em’
Okay, so back to the real stuff, testosterone. The inimitable Sabine Hossenfelder, of the dry humour and sexy German accent, has explored its supposed reduction among humans and how it is deplored among the wannabe macho fraternity.
So first of all I must go straight to bonobos, our more or less female-dominant cousins. There’s precious little data on bonobos and testosterone, but see my previous piece, referenced below. A 2005 study of wild bonobos found, unsurprisingly, that ‘the alpha male had the highest circulating levels of T’, though a comparison with chimp T levels would have been useful. And when I say ‘little data’ I should qualify that – there’s not much data that can be made sense of (by me), it’s so complicated. For example, testosterone levels in female bonobos are just as important as in males, and they vary with age and circumstances. What seems to be the case, which I suspected all along, is that testosterone levels follow rather than lead social aggression and lifestyle patterns, which is why I’ve always been interested in the social development of humans along bonobo lines, so to speak, without worrying about hormones too much.
Now, returning to Sabine, who does a great job of summarising the pros and cons of having too much or too little T. Her most important point, which is well-known but can hardly be stressed enough, is that testosterone levels drop when males are holding or playing with a child (or maybe even thinking of doing so, or having pregnancy fantasies, or just wearing his favourite little black dress…), and they rise after divorce – which may help to explain some restraining orders. But these effects are relatively small for most males.
The evidence is clear, though, that T levels really are falling (oh frabjous day!). Sabine provides graphic, heartening evidence, at least to this dweeb. But there are downsides – both men and women are becoming physically weaker, slower and fatter, especially in the WEIRD world. High protein diets are more common than ever before, and weight gain lowers T, which in turn results in weight gain. And even the abandonment of cigarettes reduces T somewhat – another pleasant, if bizarre, surprise. Of course, as Sabine points out, all this is far from pleasant to some, such as the perennial dweeb who would be otherwise, Tucker Carlson, but others, such as myself, call it progress. Sabine winds her piece up with a most excellent quote from the sadly missed Carl Sagan which I’ll set down here for my own delight:
Why is the half of humanity with a special sensitivity to the preciousness of life, the half untainted by testosterone poisoning, almost wholly unrepresented in defence establishments and peace negotiations worldwide?…. Testosterone also causes the kind of aggression needed to defend against predators and without it we’d all be dead…. Testosterone is there for a reason. It’s not an evolutionary mistake.
Testosterone won’t disappear, in humans or bonobos. If we have more need of it in the future, it’ll probably mean bad news, as Sabine points out. Meanwhile we have the near-apoplectic Mr Poo-tin (a sobriquet for which I’m most grateful) and the Chinese Testosterone Party as ongoing examples of the downside of T.
So while T isn’t an evolutionary mistake, evolution doesn’t stand still. Indeed social evolution is a more accelerated version of earlier forms. It took a couple of million years, at most, for bonobos to depart from chimps in terms of their happy, sharing-and-caring lifestyles. Humans, so much smarter and quicker off the mark once they’ve grasped the benefits (think Deutsche’s The beginning of infinity), have just started to move towards a more female-empowered society in the last century or so, at least in the WEIRD world. And it’s largely females in collaboration that have made it happen, just as occurred, I’m sure, in bonobo society. Of course, this is still too slow for those of us growing older and more impatient. However, horrible as this is to admit, super-macho events such as the ‘great wars’ of the first half of the 20th century, Japan’s half-century of brutal slaughter and rape in the East, and now Poo-tin’s crime against Ukraine, lead to a quickening of positive responses – the United Nations, international monitoring agencies, defensive alliances, and the like. Global human-caused problems are leading to globally-negotiated attempts at solutions, and the lure of global trade dollars also has its benefits.
We need also to learn from previous mis-steps. Here in Australia we commemorate Anzac Day every year, and we hear kids saying ‘they died to save our country’ or ‘…that we can be free’. In the USA we hear praise of Vietnam vets, who fought ‘to defend our country’ or ‘our values’. Against the Vietnamese? It’s such arrant bullshit. The US was in Vietnam first at the behest of the French, who decided to quit their overlordship because it wasn’t delivering enough benefits – to the French. And of course it was impossible for the locals to govern themselves, in spite of having inhabited the region for millennia. It’s just another story of the powerful against the powerless, stories that go back to the dawn of civilisations. As to the ANZACs, fighting the Turks on the other side of the world, what was that about? Certainly nothing to do with Australian freedom. Australia just happened to be much more closely linked to Britain in 1914 than it is now, and two imperialisms, Britain with its quite vast empire, and Germany, the late-comers, spoiling for more power and influence, and a great muddle of other countries trying to work out which side would best suit their interests, came to blows in much the same way as two troupes of chimps have been known to do, but with much more horrific consequences. And blind patriotism, and its fanatical encouragement, didn’t help matters. The ‘Great War’ was an avoidable catastrophe and all our remembrance should surely be focussed on this avoidability.
To accentuate the positive, we are getting better. Yes, there’s the horrors in Ukraine, Iran, Burma and a number of African nations, which have diverse roots. Often it’s to do with the powerless rising up against their disempowerment, having virtually nothing to lose. Such conflicts have been going on for millennia, but we shouldn’t turn our backs o them. None of us get to choose whether we’re born in a rich or poor country, or a rich or poor sub-section of that country. We need to always bear this in mind. Of course it’s hard. It’s estimated that there are between 10,000 and 50,000 bonobos left in the wild. Humans number 8 billion. Even if we turned our backs on 99% of them, that would leave us with millions to worry about. And we all have our own problems… but sympathy and sharing seem to do us all a power of good. Vive les bonobos!
References
solving the world’s problems, one bastard at a time..
Canto: Let’s talk about something more gripping for a while. Like, for example, the global political situation.
Jacinta: Mmmm, could you narrow that down a bit?
Canto: No, not really… Okay, let’s take the most politically gripping issue of the moment, the possibility of nuclear annihilation for thousands of South Koreans or Japanese – and then North Koreans – due to the somewhat irresponsible launchings and detonations of massively destructive weaponry by a guy who we can reasonably assume to be intoxicated with his own power – and I do believe power to be the most toxic and dangerous drug ever conceived. And then we can talk about all the other issues.
Jacinta: Well as for the Kim jong-un issue, I suspect I can speak for a lot of people when I say I oscillate between dwelling on it and dismissing it as something I can do nothing about. What else do you want me to say. To say I’m glad we’re not in the way of it all would seem inhumane…
Canto: Do you have any solutions? What should we do from here?
Jacinta: We? You mean ‘the west’? Okay, from here on in, I’d cease all direct communications with Kim – all threats, all comments, everything. That only seems to make him worse.
Canto: But it can hardly get worse. Don’t we need to act to remove his threats, which are a bit more than threats?
Jacinta: Well of course the best solution, out of a bad lot, would be to have him disappear, like magic. Just deleted. It’s impossible, but then I’ve heard some people do six impossible things before breakfast.
Canto: He’s only 33 apparently, and according to Wikipedia he’s married but childless…
Jacinta: I’m not saying deleting him would be a good option, it’d presumably cause chaos, a big power struggle, a probable military takeover, unpredictable action from China, and all the weaponry, such as it is, would still be there. And we have no idea how to do it anyway.
Canto: I’m sure they have some plan of that type. The CIA’s not dead yet.
Jacinta: Yeah I’m sure they have some back-drawer plan somewhere too, but I wouldn’t misunderestimate the incompetence of the CIA.
Canto: So what if we follow your do-and-say-nothing policy? Don’t aggravate the wounded bear. But maybe the bear isn’t wounded at all. NK just detonated something mighty powerful, though there’s some controversy over whether it was actually thermonuclear. Anyway it’s unlikely the country just developed this powerful weapon in the few months that Trump has been acting all faux-macho. Who knows, this may have taken place if Clinton or someone else was in power in the US.
Jacinta: Interesting point, but then why are so many people talking about tit-for-tat and brinkmanship? They may have had the weapon, and maybe a lot more, but Kim’s decision to detonate it now, to show it, seems to have been provoked. It’s classic male display before a rival. Think of the little mutt snapping at the mastiff’s heels. Fuck you, big boy, I’ve got teeth too.
Canto: Yeah, but this little mutt has teeth that can wipe out cities. In any case, now he’s been provoked, and it’s unlikely that Trump and his cronies are going to damp down the belligerent rhetoric, the rest of us seem to be just sitting tight and waiting for this mutt to do some damage inadvertently/on purpose, and then what will happen? Say a missile goes astray and lands on or near a Japanese city? Untold casualties…
Jacinta: I think China will be key here. Not that I have any faith in the Chinese thugocracy to act in any interest other than its own.
Canto: Or the Trumpocracy for that matter.
Jacinta: I suspect China might step in and do something if it came to the kind of disaster you’ve mentioned. Though whether they have a plan I don’t know. I wouldn’t be surprised, actually if they’re having urgent closed-door talks right now on how best to take advantage of the crisis.
Canto: Well don’t worry, Trump and our illustrious leader are have a phone call today to sort it all out.
Jacinta: I’m really not sure what there is to talk about. An American first strike would have horrific cascading effects, and upping the tempo of military exercises in the neighbouring regions will just make Kim more reckless, to go by past experience. So if we don’t have any communication directed at him, he might continue with building bombs, but he would’ve done that anyway. So, though we’re not making matters any better, neither are we making them worse, which we are doing by goading him. Meanwhile we should be talking around NK. It’s like the elephant in the room. No sense talking to the elephant, he doesn’t speak our language (actually that’s a bad example, as intelligent mammals elephants have a lot in common with us…). Anyway we should be talking to significant others to try to build a team that can deal with the elephant.
Canto: Teamwork, that seems highly likely.
Jacinta: Yeah, I know everyone has a different agenda with regard to the elephant, but surely nobody wants to see anyone nuked. And the US shouldn’t be wasting its time talking to Australia, though I suspect Trump will be talking to Turnbull re troop commitments rather than any serious solution.
Canto: And by the way, we’re talking about Trump here, he’s never going to quit with the macho bluster. That’s a given.
Jacinta: All right so all we can do is hope – it’s out of our hands. But it seems to me that all his advisers are telling him a first strike isn’t an option, so maybe he will listen.
Canto: Maybe he’ll listen about the first strike, but he won’t stop the bluster and the goading. So Kim will continue to react by testing missiles and such, until something goes horribly wrong, and Trump will feel justified in delivering a second strike, and things’ll get very bloody and messy.
Jacinta: Okay, you’re getting me depressed, but if I can return to teamwork, the thing to do is get the team on board – the UN as well as the key players, China, Russia and of course South Korea and Japan. That means putting aside all the bad blood and really working as a team.
Canto: To do what? Get NK to stop producing nukes? Putin has already said that would be a no-goer, given their position.
Jacinta: Right, so that would be a starting point for discussion. Why does Putin think that, and what would be his solution, or his advice? And China’s? I’m assuming everybody’s uncomfortable about NK, though some are clearly more uncomfortable than others. So get a discussion going. What does Russia think the US should do about NK? What does China think Russia should do? Does anyone have good advice for South Korea?
Canto: You’re being hopelessly naive. I suspect Russia and China would approach this issue with complete cynicism.
Jacinta: Well let’s be well-meaning rather than naive. I think we’re inclined to be a co-operative species. I think cynicism can dissipate when confronted with a genuine desire to listen and co-operate. You know I’ve described all of the main actors here – Trump, Putin, Li Keqiang and his henchmen, and of course Kim Jong-un, as macho scumbags and the like, but maybe its time to appeal to the better angels of their natures, and ours, to find a peaceful resolution to this mess.
nationalism, memes and the ANZAC legend
Canto: Okay, I get livid when I hear the unquestioning and unquestioned pap spoken about the Anzacs, year in year out, and when I hear primary teachers talking about their passion for Anzac Day, and teaching it to impressionable young children. Not sure how they will teach it, but when such remarks are followed by a middle-aged woman knitting poppy rosettes and saying ‘after all, if it wasn’t for them [the Anzacs] we would’t be here’, I’m filled with rage and despair about the distortions of history to suit some kind of nationalist pride and sentimentality.
Jacinta: Yes, that sort of thing leads to innocent, impressionable young children parroting the meme ‘they died so we could be free’.
Canto: Or in this case the even more absurd ‘they died so that we could exist’…
Jacinta: On the other hand, to be fair, many young people go off to Anzac Cove to commemorate their actual grand-fathers or great-great uncles who died there, and they’re captivated by their story of sacrifice.
Canto: Yes, and this memory should be kept, but for the right, evidence-based reasons. What did these young men sacrifice themselves for, really?
Jacinta: Well as we know, the reasons for the so-called Great War were mightily complex, but we can fairly quickly rule out that there was ever a threat to Australia’s freedom or existence. Of course it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if the Central Powers had won.
Canto: Well it’s hard to imagine them actually winning, but say this led to an invasion of Britain. Impossible to imagine this lasting for long, what with the growing involvement of the US. Of course the US wasn’t then the power it later became, but there’s little chance it would’ve fallen to the Central Powers, and it was growing stronger all the time, and as the natural ally of its fellow English-speaking nation, it would’ve made life tough for Britain’s occupiers, until some solution or treaty came about. Whatever happened, Australia would surely not have been in the frame.
Jacinta: Britain’s empire might’ve been weakened more quickly than it eventually was due to the anti-colonisation movement of the twentieth century. And of course another consequence of the Central Powers’ victory, however partial, might’ve been the failure or non-existence of Nazism…
Canto: Yes, though with the popularity of eugenics in the early twentieth century, master-race ideology, so endemic in Japan, would still have killed off masses of people.
Jacinta: In any case your point still holds true. Those young men sacrificed themselves for the British Empire, in its battle against a wannabe Germanic Empire, in a war largely confined to Europe.
Canto: But really in order to understand the mind-set of the young men who went to war in those days, you have to look more to social history. There was a naive enthusiasm for the adventure of war in those days, with western nations being generally much more patriarchal, with all the negative qualities entailed in that woeful term.
Jacinta: True, and that War That Didn’t End All Wars should, I agree, be best remembered as marking the beginning of the end of that war-delighting patriarchy that, in that instance, saw the needless death of millions, soldiers who went happily adventuring without fully realising that the massive industrialisation of the previous decades would make mincemeat out of so many of them. I’ve just been reading and watching videos of that war so as not to make an idiot of myself, and what I’ve found is a bunch of nations or soi-disant empires battling to maintain or regain or establish their machismo credentials in the year 1914. With no side willing to give quarter, and no independent mechanisms of negotiation, it all quickly degenerated into an abysmal conflict that no particular party could be blamed for causing or not preventing.
Canto: And some six million men were just waiting to get stuck in, an unprecedented situation. And what happened next was also unprecedented, a level of carnage never seen before in human history. The Battle of the Frontiers, as it was called, saw well over half a million casualties, within a month of the outbreak.
Jacinta: And so it went, carnage upon carnage, with the Gallipoli campaign – unbearable heat, flies, sickness and failure – being just one disaster among many. Of course it infamously settled into a war of attrition for some time, and how jolly it must’ve been for the allies to hear that they would inevitably be the victors, since the Central Powers would run out of cannon fodder first. It was all in the maths. War is fucked, and that particular war is massively illustrative of that fact. So stop, all teachers who want to tell the story of the heroic Anzacs to our impressionable children. I’m not saying they weren’t brave and heroic. I’m not saying they didn’t do their best under the most horrendous conditions. I’m certainly not saying their experience in fighting for the mother country was without value. They lived their time, within the confines and ideology of their time, as we all do. They played their part fully, in terms of what was expected of them in that time. They did their best. And it’s probably fair to say their commanders, and those above them, the major war strategists, also did their best, which no doubt in some cases was better than others. Even so, with all that, we have to be honest and clear-sighted and say they didn’t die, or have their lives forever damaged, so that we could be free. That’s sheer nonsense. They died so that a British Empire could maintain its ascendency, for a time, over a German one.
Canto: Or in the case of the French and the Russians, who suffered humungous casualties, they died due to the treaty entanglements of the time, and their overlords’ obvious concerns about the rise of Germany.
Jacinta: So all this pathos about the Anzacs really needs to be tweaked, just a wee bit. I don’t want to say they died in vain, but the fact is, they were there, at Gallipoli, in those rotten stinking conditions, in harm’s way, because of decisions made above their heads. That wasn’t their fault, and I’m reluctant, too, to blame the commanders, who also lived true to their times. Perhaps we should just be commemorating the fact that we no longer live in those macho, authoritarian times, and that we need to always find a better way forward than warfare.
matriarchy – surely it couldn’t be worse than patriarchy?
In one of the international English classes I occasionally teach, we have an opportunity for debate. Here’s a debate topic I’ve thought up but haven’t yet tried out: If 90 to 99% of the world’s business and political leaders were female, instead of male as they are today, would the world be a better place to live in?
It’s not a question that’ll find a definitive answer in the foreseeable future, but my strong view is that the world would be better.
Why? I’m not entirely convinced that women are the gentler sex, and I’m very wary of succumbing to a facile view of women as inherently more calm, co-operative and conciliatory, but I think that on balance, or statistically, they’re more risk averse, less impulsive, and, yes, more group-oriented. Whether such tendencies are natural or nurtured, I’m not at all sure. It’s a question I intend to investigate.
So to stimulate myself in pursuing the subject of patriarchy and its obverse I’m reading Women after all: sex, evolution and the end of male supremacy, a rather optimistically-titled book by an American doctor and teacher, Melvin Konner. It’s one of many sources of information I hope to access in the future. It argues that there are fundamental differences between males and females, and that females are the superior gender. I’m not sure about the ‘fundamentals’, or categorical differences, but I agree that the current differences can and probably should be interpreted in terms of female superiority. Certainly, given the needs and responsibilities of humanity in this time, woman appear to have more of the goods than males for facing the future. After all, if we look back at the last 6000 or so years of human history, it’s dominated by male warfare, and if we look at today’s most violent and brutish cultures, they’re clearly the most patriarchal.
Of course if you believe that women and men are fundamentally different, as Konner does, then it becomes straightforward to argue for women being in control, because it’s highly unlikely, indeed impossible I’d say, that these fundamentally different genders are precisely equal in value. And given the devastation and suffering that men have caused over the period of what we call ‘human civilisation’, and given that women are the (mostly) loving mothers of all of us, it seems obvious that, if there is a fundamental difference, women’s qualities are of more value.
On the other hand if you’re a bit more skeptical about fundamental differences, as I am, and you suspect that the idea that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is as applicable to women as it is to men, you’ll feel rather more uncertain about a profoundly matriarchal society. And yet…
I draw some inspiration for the benefits of matriarchy from the closest living relatives of homo sapiens. There are two of them. The line that led to us split off from the line that led to chimps and bonobos around 6 million years ago. Chimps and bonobos split from their common ancestor much more recently, perhaps only a little over a million years ago, so they’re both equally related to us. Chimps and bonobos look very very alike, which is presumably why bonobos were only recognised as a separate species in the 1930s – quite extraordinary for such a physically large animal. But of course bonobo and chimp societies are very very different, and vive la différence. I’ve written about bonobo society before, here and here, but can’t get enough of a good thing, so I’ll look more closely at that society in the next few posts.

I think I’d rather be a bonobo
was the invasion of Iraq justified?
“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
― Mahatma Gandhi
In 2003 I protested against the impending attack on Iraq, along with so many others, though I don’t like being involved in mass protests, because they tend to over-simplify the response. A lot of the protesters were saying things I didn’t agree with, as is often the case. For example, some were using the national sovereignty argument, which I have little time for. Others were saying that war is always wrong, but I think war can be justified if it results in less harm than non-intervention, though this isn’t always easy to determine. As a humanist, I don’t think national or cultural boundaries should interfere with what we owe, ethically, to others, though I recognise as a pragmatic fact that they often do.
To me, the Iraq invasion has always been a clear-cut case of a criminal act, resulting in a loss of life – hardly unforeseeable – far greater than that suffered by the USA on September 11 2001. Furthermore, the September 11 atrocities, without which the invasion clearly would never have occurred, were in no way connected to the Iraqi regime. In the lead-up to the invasion, at the time of the protests, I was incensed, like others, at the Bush regime’s bullying treatment of the weapons inspectors in Iraq, and Hans Blix in particular, because their findings didn’t fit with the story Washington was trying to sell. This bullying proliferated, of course, to the leaders of major European nations such as France and Germany. The response of the French government to the possibility of war still seemed to me the most sensible and prescient one. In January of 2003, their foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin said ‘We think that military intervention would be the worst possible solution’, even though the French government felt at the time that Iraq wasn’t being truthful about WMD. In an impassioned speech to the Security Council only a few weeks later, Villepin spoke of the “incalculable consequences for the stability of this scarred and fragile region”, whose overwhelmingly Moslem inhabitants had sound historical reasons for suspecting and wanting to resist western interventions. He said that “the option of war might seem a priori to be the swiftest, but let us not forget that having won the war, one has to build peace”. He also reported on the intelligence of France and its allies, which failed comprehensively to support links between al-Qaeda and Hussein’s regime. Of course, Villepin’s speech was roundly rejected and disparaged by the US and UK leadership, and the rest is the history we’re making and trying to make sense of today.
I’m returning to the subject for two reasons – a philosophical summary of pacifism and just war theory in a recent issue of Philosophy Now magazine (issue 102), and the views of British leftist but pro-Iraq war writers such as Nick Cohen.
In 2006, a document called the Euston Manifesto was produced in Britain. A leftist document, it was designed to draw the line against what its authors and signatories claimed to be an overly-indulgent, cultural relativist tendency in a large sector of the leftist commentariat. The document focused largely on the positives – upholding human rights, freedom of expression, pluralism, liberalism, historical truth, the heritage of democracy, internationalism and equality. It expressed opposition to tyranny and terrorism, racism, misogyny and censorship. In more specific terms, it supported a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict and opposed anti-Americanism – though in a somewhat backhanded way:
That US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones does not justify generalized prejudice against either the country or its people.
This is all outlined in the manifesto’s ‘statement of principles’ (section B), none of which I have any issue with. Section C, ‘elaborations’, addresses the Iraq war, inter alia, and is a little more problematic. Just before the Iraq campaign is dealt with there’s a paragraph on the September 11 attacks, which is uncompromisingly hostile to the view that it could be in any way justified as payback for US policy in the Middle East. Again I completely agree.
The paragraph that follows is interesting, and I will quote it in full, always remembering that it was written in 2006, before the execution of Saddam Hussein, and not long after the first parliamentary elections. Much has changed since then, with Iraqi governments becoming less democratic, and the contours of instability constantly changing.
The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.
Since this post is precisely about the arguments over intervention, I should say something in justification of my writing it. While we can’t predict precisely the outcome of an intervention or invasion or liberation (words are so important here), there are often broad and quite obvious signs to indicate whether such an event will advantage or disadvantage the targeted population. In analysing these signs we utilise history (or we should do) – that’s to say, we pick through the rubble of previous experiences of intervention. The question of whether the invasion (or whatever you choose to call it) of Iraq was justified is therefore a question about the future as well as the past. How, in the future, and in the present, should we, as humanists, deal with oppressive, reactionary, murderous regimes, such as exist today in North Korea, in Myanmar, and in the wannabe state of ‘the caliphate’? Not to mention so many other dictatorial regimes whose likely ‘murderousness’ is hard to get data on, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and other Asian and African tyrannies large and small.
I also have a quibble with the view that all good liberal leftists, regardless of their position before the war, should jump on board with the invaders to ‘remake’ Iraq into a democracy. The obvious problem with this view is that many of the anti-war protesters were concerned, and deeply so, that the reason for the invasion wasn’t democracy-building. The stated reason for the invasion, after all, was a defensive one; getting rid of WMDs to make the world a safer place. Other reasons were suspected, including simple restoration of US pride, and economic exploitation. The bullishness of the invasion rhetoric didn’t sound much like an attempt at democracy-building.
But I think the overwhelming reason for this deep concern – it was certainly my concern – was the suffering and harm that the invasion and aftermath would inflict on the people of Iraq. Nations invaded by foreigners tend to fight back, regardless of how much of a basket case the invaders think the nation is. This is even more the case when the ‘liberators’ are seen as having values antithetical to the target nation. Think of the consternation caused by the threatened invasion of England by the Spanish in the 1580s, or the French in the early 1800s, surely mild compared to that felt by the overwhelmingly Moslem Iraqis, fed for decades on tales of western decadence and double-dealing. An invasion would be fought bitterly, Hussein or no Hussein, and democracy isn’t the sort of thing to be imposed from above. So it’s understandable that those opposed to the invasion, and crushed by their failure to stop it, didn’t rush to join hands with those whose motives they so distrusted in an enthusiastic experiment in nation-restructuring.
I’m no pacifist, and I’m concerned and demoralised by brutal dictatorships everywhere – many of which we know little about. I would like to see interventions wherever murder and oppression are the weapons of state control, but that’s a big ask, and where do we start, and how do we do it? Warfare is one of the most problematic options, but will a siege of sanctions be effective? A united, internationalist front which will offer credible threats – desist and democratise or else? And should we start with the tinpot dictatorships and work our way up to the giants? Which leads back to the question, why Iraq in the first place?
Muddled motives and intentions lead inevitably to muddled and contradictory outcomes. Indeed the stated motive for the intervention, dismantling WMDs and making the rest of the world a safer place, didn’t consider the Iraqi people directly at all. On that basis alone, the war could hardly be justified, because it was clear that even if Hussein’s weapons existed, they were not an imminent threat, with the dictator doing everything in his power to placate the west. Hussein was brutal and nasty, but his instinct for self-preservation was paramount, and it was clear in the last days of his regime that he was saving his sabre-rattling for his domestic audience while bending over backwards to comply with international demands.
One argument being put at the time was that anything was better than Saddam. But is this really the case? Consider two polar scenarios; a failed state in which there are no government regulations, and no police or legal institutions, an anarchic free-for-all; or a rigid dictatorship in which freedom is highly circumscribed and much that we value in life is sacrificed just for survival. Which is better? Well, with that very slight sketch it’s impossible to judge, but neither is very palatable. In the case of Iraq it would be comparing a ‘known’ with an ‘unknown’. The result of deposing Saddam was unknown and poorly planned for, but clearly it would unleash violent forces, and we knew from organisations such as Human Rights Watch that the day-to-day dictatorship, though repressive, wasn’t murderous at the time of the invasion.
My concern then, was saving lives, or more broadly, minimising harm. One thing I’ve always loathed is the ‘big picture’ politics of certain world leaders who like to redraw maps and bring down regimes with grand strategies, with very little thought to the ordinary struggles for survival, the lives and loves of people who suffer the consequences of those grand plans – including death and destruction. Of course, harm minimisation is fiendishly difficult to quantify when you’re talking about such variables as freedom and opportunity, but at least we can try. Just war theory might help us with some guidelines.
Duane Cady, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at Hamline University, Minnesota, provides a two-part outline of just war theory as currently understood. I’ll focus only on the first part, which seeks to answer the question – When is it justified to go to war?
Going to war justly requires meeting 6 conditions:
1. The war must be made on behalf of a just cause
2. The decision to go to war must be made by proper authorities
3. Participants must have a good intention rather than revenge or greed as their goal
4. It must be likely that peace will emerge after the war
5. Going to war must be a last resort
6. The total amount of evil resulting from making war must be outweighed by the good likely to come of it.
I hardly need to go into detail to show that a number of these conditions were not met in the case of the Iraq venture, but I’ll briefly discuss each one.
For condition 1, if WMDs were the cause, then it wasn’t just, as there weren’t any, and the best intelligence showed this. Other causes, such as getting rid of a despot, bringing about democracy, lead to the question – why Iraq? Why not Syria, or Saudi Arabia? Why pick on any Middle Eastern country where western interference would be fiercely combatted?
For condition 2, there are supposed to be strict rules regarding such decisions, though of course they’re unenforceable. In September 2004, the then UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan declared the Iraq invasion illegal from the point of view of the UN’s charter, presumably because of insufficient numbers in the Security Council agreeing to it. If you consider the UN the proper authority to make such final decisions – and if not what would be? – then condition 2 hasn’t been met.
Condition 3 goes to intentions, which might be muddled or concealed. My view is that revenge, or wounded pride, had much to do with it on the US side. People may disagree, but nobody can seriously argue that the Bush administrations’s intentions were clear and humane.
Condition 4 gives no timeline. ‘After’ is a long time, and peace might achieved at the cost of maximal loss of life. The condition is a little too vague to be useful. Certainly, a quick peace looked highly unlikely, and I think that was a major concern of protesters worldwide.
Condition 5 clearly wasn’t met. The term ‘last resort’ infers something else – a last resort before x occurs, that x being something catastrophic and to be avoided at all costs. Whether there was an x in Iraq’s case is highly questionable.
In the long view, I think, or fervently hope, condition 6 will be met, but that’s only because I’m a ‘better angels of our nature’ advocate, and anyway the lack of a time-frame attached to the condition renders it essentially meaningless. Is Europe now more humane and peaceful as a result of the Thirty Years’ War? To what degree is our greater tolerance of diversity a direct result of the Nazis’ homogenising race policies? There’s no doubt that the most horrible wars can result in massive lessons learnt, leading to accelerated positive outcomes, but that in no way justifies them.
So, okay, the Iraq war was a disaster. However, I thoroughly agree with Alex Garland, the writer and film-maker, who referred briefly to the war in a recent Point of Inquiry interview. It’s too late to wonder about whether the invasion of Iraq was a good idea, and it was essentially too late even when the protests began in 2003, as it had a horrible inevitability about it. Trying to work out the consequences, to minimise the negatives and maximise the positives, and to take responsibility for those consequences, is much more important. Particular nations, including Australia, imposed this invasion on the Iraqi people. Those nations, above all, should take most of the responsibility for the consequences. I don’t think that’s really happening at the moment.
1914 – 2014: celebrating a loss of appetite
I’ve read at least enough about WW1 to be aware that its causes, and the steps made towards war, were very complex and contestable. There are plenty of historians, professional and amateur, who’ve suggested that, if not for x, or y, war may have been avoided. However, I don’t think there’s any doubt that a ‘force’, one which barely exists today, a force felt by all sides in the potential conflict of the time, made war very difficult to avoid. I’ll call this force the appetite for war, but it needs to be understood more deeply, to divest it of its vagueness. We know that, in 1914, lads as young as 14 sneaked their way into the militaries of their respective countries to experience the irresistible thrill of warfare. A great many of them paid the ultimate price. Few of these lambs to the slaughter were discouraged from their actions – on the contrary. Yet 100 years on, this attitude seems bizarre, disgusting and obscene. And we don’t even seem to realise how extraordinarily fulsome this transformation has been.
Let’s attempt to go back to those days. They were the days when the size of your empire was the measure of your manliness. The Brits had a nice big fat one, and the Germans were sorely annoyed, having come late to nationhood and united military might, but with few foreign territories left to conquer and dominate. They continued to build up their arsenal while fuming with frustration. Expansionism was the goal of all the powerful nations, as it always had been, and in earlier centuries, as I’ve already outlined, it was at the heart of scores of bloody European conflicts. In fact, it’s probably fair to say that the years of uneasy peace before 1914 contributed to the inevitability of the conflict. Peace was considered an almost ‘unnatural’ state, leading to lily-livered namby-pambiness in the youth of Europe. Another character-building, manly war was long overdue.
Of course, all these expansionist wars of the past led mostly to stalemates and backwards and forwards exchanges of territory, not to mention mountains of dead bodies and lakes of blood, but they made numerous heroic reputations – Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II of Spain, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Frederick the Great of Prussia, Peter the Great of Russia, Louis XIV of France and of course Napoleon Bonaparte. These ‘greats’ of the past have always evoked mixed reactions in me, and the feelings are well summed up by Pinker in The Better Angels of our Nature:
The historic figures who earned the honorific ‘So-and-So the Great’ were not great artists, scholars, doctors or inventors, people who enhanced human happiness or wisdom. They were dictators who conquered large swaths of territory and the people in them. If Hitler’s luck had held out a bit longer, he probably would have gone down in history as Adolf the Great.
While I’m not entirely sure about that last sentence, these reflections are themselves an indication of how far we’ve come, and how far we’ve been affected by the wholesale slaughter of two world wars and the madness of the ‘mutually assured destruction’ era that followed them. The fact that we’ve now achieved a military might far beyond the average person’s ability to comprehend, rendering obsolete the old world of battlefields and physical heroics, has definitely removed much of the thrill of combat, now more safely satisfied in computer games. But let’s return again to that other country, the past.
In the same month that the war began, August 1914, the Order of the White Feather was founded, with the support of a number of prominent women of the time, including the author and anti-suffragette Mrs Humphrey Ward (whom we might now call Mary) and the suffragette leaders Emmeline and Cristobel Pankhurst. It was extremely popular, so much so that it interfered with government objectives – white feathers were sent even to those convalescing from the horrors of the front lines, and to those dedicated to arms manufacturing in their home countries. Any male of a certain age who wasn’t in uniform or ‘over there’ was fair game. Not that the white feather idea was new with WWI – it had been made popular by the novel The Four Feathers (1902), set in the First War of Sudan in 1882, and the idea had been used in the British Empire since the eighteenth century – but it reached a crescendo of popularity, a last explosive gasp – or not quite, for it was revived briefly during WWII, but since then, and partly as a result of the greater awareness of the carnage of WWI, the white feather has been used more as a symbol of peace and pacifism. The Quakers in particular took it to heart as a badge of honour, and it became a symbol for the British Peace Pledge Union (PPU) in the thirties, a pacifist organisation with a number of distinguished writers and intellectuals, such as Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and Storm Jameson.
There was no PPU or anything like it, however, in the years before WWI. Yet the enthusiasm for war of 1914 soon met with harsh reality in the form of Ypres and the Somme. By the end of 1915 the British Army was ‘depleted’ to the tune of over half a million men, and conscription was introduced, for the first time ever in Britain, in 1916. It had been mooted for some time, for of course the war had been catastrophic for ordinary soldiers from the start, and it quickly became clear that more bodies were needed. Not surprisingly, though, resistance to the carnage had begun to grow. An organisation called the No-Conscription Fellowship (NCF), consisting mainly of socialists and Quakers, was established, and it campaigned successfully to have a ‘conscience clause’ inserted in the 1916 Military Service (conscription) Act. The clause allowed people to refuse military service if it conflicted with their beliefs, but they had to argue their case before a tribunal. Of course ‘conshies’ were treated with some disdain, and were less tolerated by the British government as the war proceeded, during which time the Military Service Act was expanded, first to include married men up to 41 years of age (the original Act had become known as the Batchelor’s Bill) and later to include men up to 51 years of age. But the British government’s attitude didn’t necessarily represent that of the British people, and the NCF and related organisations grew in numbers as the war progressed, in spite of government and jingoist media campaigns to suppress them.
In Australia, two conscription bills, in 1916 and 1917, failed by a slim majority. In New Zealand, the government simply imposed the Military Service Act on its people without bothering to ask them. Those who resisted were often treated brutally, but their numbers increased as the war progressed. However, at no time, in any of the warring nations, did the anti-warriors have the numbers to be a threat to their governments’ ‘sunken assets’ policies.
So why was there such an appetite then and why is the return of such an appetite unthinkable today? Can we just put it down to progress? Many skeptics are rightly suspicious of ‘progress’ as a term that breeds complacency and even an undeserved sense of superiority over the primitives of the past, but Pinker and others have argued cogently for a civilising process that has operated, albeit partially and at varying rates in various states, since well before WWI, indeed since the emergence of governments of all stripes. The cost, in human suffering, of WWI and WWII, and the increasingly sophisticated killing technology that has recently made warfare as unimaginable and remote as quantum mechanics, have led to a ‘long peace’ in the heart of Europe at least – a region which, as my previous posts have shown, experienced almost perpetual warfare for centuries. We shouldn’t, of course, assume that the present stability will be the future norm, but there are reasons for optimism (as far as warfare and violence is concerned – the dangers for humanity lie elsewhere).
Firstly, the human rights movement, in the form of an international movement dedicated to peace and stability between nations for the sake of their citizens, was born out of WWI in the form of the League of Nations, which, while not strong enough to resist the Nazi impetus toward war in the thirties, formed the structural foundation for the later United Nations. The UN is, IMHO, a deeply flawed organisation, based as it is on the false premise of national sovereignty and the inward thinking thus entailed, but as an interim institution for settling disputes and at least trying to keep the peace, it’s far better than nothing. For example, towards the end of the 20th century, the concepts of crimes against humanity and genocide were given more legal bite, and heads of state began, for the first time in history, to be held accountable for their actions in international criminal courts run by the UN. Obviously, considering the invasion of Iraq and other atrocities, we have a long way to go, but hopefully one day even the the most powerful and, ipso facto, most bullying nations will be forced to submit to international law.
Secondly, a more universal and comprehensive education system in the west, which over the past century and particularly in recent decades, has emphasised critical thinking and individual autonomy, has been a major factor in the questioning of warfare and conscription, and in recognising the value of children and youth, and loosening the grip of authority figures. People are far less easily conned into going into war than ever before, and are generally more sceptical of their governments.
Thirdly, globalism and the internationalism of our economy, our science. our communications systems, and the problems we face, such as energy, food production and climate change, have meant that international co-operation is far more important to us than empire-building. Science, for those literate enough to understand it, has all but destroyed the notion of race and all the baggage attend upon it. There are fewer barriers to empathy – to attack other nations is tantamount to attacking ourselves. The United Nations, ironic though that title often appears to be, has spawned or inspired many other organisations of international co-operation, from the ICC to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
There are many other related developments which have moved us towards co-operation and away from belligerence, among them being the greater democratisation of nations – the enlargement of the franchise in existing democracies or pro to-democracies, and the democratisation of former Warsaw Pact and ‘Soviet Socialist’ nations – and the growing similarity of national interests, leading to more information and trade exchanges.
So there’s no sense that the ‘long peace’ in Europe, so often discussed and analysed, is going to be broken in the foreseeable future. To be sure, it hasn’t been perfect, with the invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the not-so-minor Balkans War of the 90s, and I’m not sure if the Ukraine is a European country (and neither are many Ukrainians it seems), but the broad movements are definitely towards co-operation in Europe, movements that we can only hope will continue to spread worldwide.
perceptions of war and fighting and other things
Oscar Wilde once wrote: As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar it will cease to be popular.
This remark might seem trivial perhaps because Wilde himself is sometimes seen as a mere wit and because the word vulgar is now no longer popular (it has a certain vulgarity about it), but with different phrasing I’ve often thought along similar lines. In exasperation I describe to myself the current horrors in Palestine and Iraq and Syria as the acts of religious primitives, and fights in bars as the acts of bogans. I’m really talking about what used to be called vulgarity. it’s partly this way of thinking that makes me annoyed about the so-called war on terrorism, as if these were warriors, with their inherent fascination, instead of vulgar criminals.
Take cigarette smoking for example. When I see smokers on the streets these days, I think of sad sacks and the left behind. My zeitgeist-tinted specs see them as wash-outs and losers, adjusting my focus to catch clearly the ever-changing face of the properly vulgar, as it was once termed.
a brief history of pre-20th century European violence, part 2
In my first post in this series I wrote about the 17th century and wars. In this post I’ll look at the wars of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Britain was more or less at peace in 1700, but it was soon involved in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14), a messy dispute, ostensibly about who should succeed the mentally and physically incapacitated Charles II on the Spanish throne. The death toll may have reached a few hundred thousand, but of course little clear data is available. The war divided Spain itself, but essentially it pitted the France of Louis XIV against its neighbours, including the British, the Dutch and the so-called Holy Roman Empire. It brought to an end the Habsburg dynasty in Spain.
Meanwhile elsewhere in Europe the Great Northern War (1700-21) was being fought. The Russian Tsar Peter the Great and his allies were fighting to curtail the power of the Swedish King Charles XII. Sweden had created an empire for itself out of the devastating Thirty Years’ War, but the Great Northern War finally ended Sweden’s dominance and established Russia as a major power. Again the casualties numbered a few hundred thousand – many dying of famine and disease. The Battle of Poltava, won by the Russians, was the most decisive single event.
Queen Anne’s War (1702-13) was arguably not a European War, or arguably a fully European War fought on American soil, often with most of the combatants on both sides being American Indians. Casualties, however, were relatively light. Also, during the War of the Spanish Succession there was an internal revolt of Huguenots (Protestants) in the isolated Cévennes region of France. The Huguenots had been persecuted for decades, but in the case of this uprising, known as the Camisard Rebellion, atrocities were committed on both sides. Hostilities began in 1702, and the ‘troubles’ weren’t settled until the death of Louis XIV in 1715.
Further east in Hungary a group of noblemen enlisted the aid of Louis XIV to bring about an end to Austrian Habsburg rule in the region. The consequent conflict is known as Rakoczi’s War of Independence (1703-11), a complex affair which also involved the Ottoman Turks, who had only recently given up all their Hungarian territories. Rakoczi, one of the noblemen, was unsuccessful, but he’s considered a national hero by Hungarians today.
The Russo-Ottoman War 1710-11 broke out largely as a result of Russian pressure on the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed III to hand over Sweden’s Charles XII, who had taken refuge at the Ottoman court during the Great Northern War. The conflict drew in Cossacks on both sides, and the Swedes aligned with the Turks. Some 50,000 were killed.
The Ottoman-Venetian War of 1714-18 was the seventh of that name. The Republic of Venice had, up to that time, been a powerful state for a full millennium, but it was in decline having lost its greatest overseas possession, the island of Crete, in the late 17th century. It had, however, captured the Greek Morean Peninsula from the Ottomans, who were determined to regain it. They mustered a huge army, and were often savage in victory, but the Venetians were saved from complete humiliation by the intervention of Austria in 1716.
In 1715 the first Jacobite rising saw a number of battles fought in Britain, including Sherrifmuir and Preston. The Jacobites were supporters of the ‘Tory’ James Stuart, son of the deposed King James II, against the Whig George I. The Catholic Jacobites also featured in the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718-20), in which they supported Spain against the quadruple alliance of Britain, France, Austria (representing the Holy Roman Empire) and the Dutch Republic. Savoy joined this alliance later. This was the only occasion in the 18th century that Britain and France were on the same side. The war was also fought in America. The allies were victorious, unsurprisingly, and Philip V of Spain soon sued for peace.
The Russo-Persian War (1722-3) was a result of the expansionist policies of Peter the Great, and of his concern about Ottoman expansion in Safavid Persia. Thousands died in these ‘manoeuvres’, which today would be a matter of diplomacy. All the territory gained by Peter was ceded back to the Persians by Empress Anna of Russia in 1732, to secure Persian support in the next great conflict with the Ottomans.
A brief Anglo-Spanish War (1727-9) saw the Spanish lay siege to Gibraltar while the British blockaded Porto Bello, both unsuccessfully. The Treaty of Seville at the end of this ‘war’ saw everything returned to the status quo, though of course thousands of lives were lost, mostly, as usual, from famine and disease.
One of the bloodiest wars in the first half of the 18th century was the War of the Polish Succession of 1733-8, not to be confused with the 16th century war of the same name! This war saw France, Spain, the Duchy of Parma and the Kingdom of Sardinia rallying in support of one aspirant to the Polish throne, while the Russian Empire, Habsburg Austria, the Kingdom of Prussia and Saxony supported another. The casualties, which may have numbered around 100,000, were mostly French and Austrian. It resulted in the Treaty of Vienna, the ascension of Augustus III to the throne, and various transfers of territories in the endless carving and recarving of the meat of Europe. Meanwhile the Austro-Russian-Turkish War (1735-9), a struggle between the Russians and Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire, ended largely in a stalemate, with several tens of thousands dead, almost entirely of famine and disease.
One could go on, and on. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-8) involved, again, most of the European powers and resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Between this and the French Revolutionary Wars at the end of the eighteenth century, which killed an estimated 1 million people (one historian, James Trager, estimated 3-600,000 deaths in the suppression of the Vendee revolt within France in 1793) there were of course numerous conflicts large and small, including the bloody Seven Years War (1756-63, though many historians argue for a longer period), which also saw at least 1 million dead.
The Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century built on the warfare habits of the French revolutionaries. There are no accurate figures, of course, in any of these wars – any more than there are accurate figures on the deaths caused by the US invasion and occupation of Iraq today – but an estimate of 2 million dead as a result of Napoleon’s campaigns is regarded as moderate. This was certainly the largest death toll of any war or campaign of the nineteenth century. Of the other wars of the century, the Crimean War (1853-6) killed about 300,000, three more of the many Russo-Turkish Wars (1806-12, 1828-9 and 1877-8) each killed about 200,00, a conservative estimate, and the Franco-Prussian War killed anywhere from 200,000 to above 700,00o, depending on various historians.
I’ve only included here the major conflicts civil and international, within Europe, but of course European forces were in conflict in Africa, Asia and the Americas throughout the century. It’s also never been easy to determine the eastern boundary of Europe. The ethnic cleansing of the Circassian peoples on the north-eastern shores of the Black Sea was undoubtedly one of the most murderous campaigns of the 19th century, with wildly varying estimates claiming up to 1.5 million deaths. Whether or not this was a specifically European holocaust is obviously a trivial question.
Although there was something of a lull in warfare at the end of the nineteenth century, attitudes towards war, its manliness and its character-building nature, were still dominant, as we can see in much of the rhetoric that preceded and influenced the so-called Great War. It was the carnage of that war, it seems, that first started to change attitudes, reflected in the war poets and in the criticisms aired thereafter. The Second World War, and particularly the horrors of Nazism, had a catalysing effect, and the culturally decisive decade of the sixties (and another war in South East Asia) succeeded in irreversibly changing attitudes to war, manliness and much else besides.
So ends part 2 in this series. Next I want to go back over that 300-year period from 1600 to the beginning of the twentieth century to look at domestic and other forms of violence within European society.
a brief history of pre-20th century European violence, part 1
A few years back I read Niall Ferguson’s The war of the world: twentieth century conflict and the descent of the west. It was published in 2006. More recently, in 2011, Steven Pinker’s The better angels of our nature was published, and it would seem that the two books are talking almost exactly opposite tales. I’ve not read Pinker’s book, but I’ve heard him talking about it, and I understand the thesis pretty well. In fact I largely shared Pinker’s view even before he wrote the book, and before I read Ferguson’s. Not that Ferguson’s book wasn’t interesting and full of incident, but the central thesis of the west’s descent into a quagmire of violence struck me as unconvincing. The huge numbers killed in the 20th century’s two world wars, and in other conflicts such as occurred in Rwanda and Cambodia were partly the result of greater killing technology, partly the result of a massive population increase, and partly the result of ideological fixations being played out to their logical conclusions. Of course all these features – the technology, the population and the ideologies – are still with us, but other forces have gradually risen, at least in the ‘west’, to keep them in check. I’d like to look at those forces in detail in another post, but for now I want to take a look at violence, both domestic and national-political, in Europe over the past few centuries, because I think Ferguson’s greatest error in his book was selectivity. He chose to focus on the twentieth century, and his treatment of earlier centuries was cursory at best. Naturally he argued that there was an extended period of peace before the outbreak of the Great War, but even that limited claim probably wouldn’t stand up to close scrutiny. We’ll see. I’ll begin my overview of violence in Europe at around the year 1600, for no reason other than I have to start somewhere, and I don’t want the post to be too long. So I’ll be covering some 300 years, with the obvious understanding that life was no less violent before this period. I’ll start with war violence, and finish with the more complicated picture of state-sanctioned, public and domestic violence.
the violence of warfare
In 1600 Elizabeth was still on the throne in England, and Spain was probably not yet fully conscious of its decline as a European power. There were plenty of tensions between these two countries, one newly Protestant, the other staunchly Catholic, but Spain had other concerns. In July 1601 the Flemish city of Ostend, in what is now Belgium, was subjected to what turned out to be one of the longest sieges in human history. Some 35,000 were killed or wounded by the time the Dutch surrendered to the Spanish in September of 1604. Considering that the total population of Europe was about a tenth of what it is today, that’s a significant figure. And it was only one event, albeit a particularly bloody one, in a long war, the Dutch War of Independence, also known as the Eighty Years’ War. A year before the siege, the Battle of Nieuwpoort, which the Dutch ‘won’ – their casualties were fractionally less than those of Spain – resulted in some 4,500 casualties. The long conflict – it lasted from 1568 until the end of the Thirty Years’ War of middle Europe, in 1648 – obviously resulted in many thousands of casualties, but merging as it did with the Thirty Years War of 1618-48, it’s hard to find a separate estimate.
The Thirty Years’ War itself was the most horrific internal war ever experienced in Europe, to judge by percentage of the total population affected. Estimates of the death toll range from 3 to 11.5 million, an incredible figure, though nothing compared to the Mongol slaughter of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which saw between 30 million and 60 million dead, a veritable emptying of the Eurasian population.
The Treaty of London, signed in 1604, brought to an end what historians now call the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585-1604. Arguably this wasn’t so much a war as a series of battles or raids separated by years of tension and intrigue. The execution of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots accelerated the conflict, the main events of which included the raid on the Armada by Drake in 1587, the destruction of the Armada in 1588, the disastrous campaign of the ‘English Armada’ in 1589, and a number of inconclusive skirmishes in the region of the Spanish Main in the 1590s. Casualties are of course hard to determine, but it’s estimated that some 25,000 died in the English defeat of the Spanish Armada, many of disease and hunger in the aftermath.
Spain was also a belligerent in the Irish Nine Years War, which came to an end in 1603. This was an uprising of Irish clans, supported by the Spanish, against English rule. It resulted in more than 100,000 deaths, mostly Irish, and mostly of resultant famine and disease. Meanwhile, the Polish-Swedish War (1600-11) saw another waste of resources and manpower. It was largely due to the ambitions of Sweden’s Charles IX and the Catholic Sigismund II Vasa, and the truce that followed years of battle was short-lived. The resumption of hostilities was just another aspect of the Thirty Years’ War. I can find no clear account of casualties, but in one famous battle, the Polish-Lithuanian victory at Kircholm in 1605, some 6000 Swedes were apparently wiped out.
In 1606, the Peace of Zsitvatorok brought to an end the Long War (1591-1606) between the Habsburg Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire, the first serious encounter between Christian and Moslem forces in eastern Europe since the Hungarians were slaughtered by the forces of Suleiman I at Mohacs in 1526. Significant events in this war included the Battle of Calugareni (1595), a major Wallachian (Romanian) victory, and the Battle of Keresztes (1596), a horribly bloody affair with massive casualties on both sides, with this time the Ottoman army scoring the victory. These two battles alone resulted in around 60,000 deaths. 17th century battles (since we’re supposed to be working from 1600) include Guruslau (1601) and Brasov (1603). War losses were heavy – certainly over 100,000.
The War of the Julich Succession was a convoluted Middle-European conflict (1609-14) between forces supporting and opposing the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II’s attempts to expand Habsburg Territory. It involved a number of sieges and skirmishes and was another precursor to the Thirty Years’ War.
The Polish Muscovite War (1605-1618) was essentially a series of incursions into Russian territory by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at a time when Russia was wracked by civil conflict. Important events included the Battle of Klushino (1610) and the Siege of Smolensk (1609-11), which resulted in great loss of life, especially on the Russian side.
The Ingrian War (1610-17) was an attempt by Sweden to also take advantage of Russia’s internal conflicts. It ended with the treaty of Stolbovo which stripped Russia of access to the Baltic Sea for about a century.
These are the main European conflicts leading up to the Thirty Years’ War, which sucked most continental conflicts into it, up to mid-century. However, there was another conflict that can be clearly separated from it; the English Civil War (1642-51). This conflict directly killed more than 80,000 in England alone, at a time when the English population was around 5 million. As usual during this era, disease killed more people than combat, and war-related deaths are estimated at around 190,000. Related conflicts in Scotland in the period killed around 60,000 out of 1 million, and in Ireland the devastation was by far the greatest, with the best estimate put at over 600,000 dead – about 40% of the population. These conflicts are sometimes known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-51), though the conflicts continued until the Restoration under Charles II in 1660.
You might think that an exhausted peace would prevail after these massive British and European conflicts. You’d be wrong. The First Anglo-Dutch War (1652-4), an entirely naval affair, saw at least 5,000 deaths, and 1652 also saw the Battle of Batih, in which an estimated 8000 Polish forces were massacred by Crimean Tatars. But even before that there was plenty of conflict. In 1648, the year the Treaty of Westphalia brought to an end the Thirty Years’ War, civil wars erupted in France. These events have become known as the Fronde, and they lasted until 1653, when Royal authority was restored. Though the death toll was comparatively small, the turmoil was disturbing enough to cause the incoming monarch, Louis XIV, to move his residence out to Versailles.
In 1654 the Battle of Shepeleviche marked the beginning of the Russo-Polish War, which ran until 1667. Smolensk was again besieged during the conflict. In one battle alone, the Battle of Okhmativ (1655), some 9000 died on the Russian side. 1654 was also the year of the first of the ‘Battles of the Dardanelles’, part of the Cretan War (1645-69), also known as the Fifth (yeah, that’s right) Ottoman-Venetian War, fought between the State of Venice and its allies and the Ottoman Empire. This one was fought over Crete, hence the name.
Shortly after the Thirty Years’ War, Sweden, which had emerged from the devastation as a semi-great power, made a series of attacks on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, itself weakened by war with Russia and the Cossacks. These attacks became known in Poland as the Swedish Deluge, which reached its height between 1655 and 1660. Approximately one third of the Commonwealth was wiped out, and Swedish casualties too were very high. Sweden’s warmongering King, Charles X Gustav, also attacked Denmark to precipitate the Dano-Swedish War of 1558-60, but Dutch forces and later those of Brandenberg, Poland and Austria came to Denmark’s aid, and after the Swedish king’s death in 1660 a peace treaty, the Treaty of Copenhagen, was signed which decided the borders of Sweden, Norway and Denmark, the same borders that exist today.
Meanwhile in Portugal, a revolution in 1640 had deposed the 60-year Spanish Habsburg monarchy, leading to skirmishes and more serious warfare with Spain, up to the Treaty of Lisbon in 1668. This 28-year period has become known as the Portuguese Restoration War. Portugal was already sporadically at war with the Dutch, mainly in relation to territories in Africa and the Far East, with the Dutch keen to muscle in on Portuguese Territories (complicated by the fact that the Portuguese were under Spanish dominion at the time). The Dutch-Portuguese War, largely a naval affair, lasted from 1602 to 1663. The Dutch were assisted by the British until 1640 when the Brits switched sides.
In 1667-68 France, under their young and ambitious King Louis XIV, chose to invade and take possession of lands in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands, presumably because it was the done thing for a mighty Prince to prove himself on the battle field. The French were successful enough in this ‘War of Devolution’, but a Triple Alliance of England, Sweden and the Dutch Republic, together with other stakeholders, forced Louis to realise the limitations of his power, and he had to hand back most of his gains. This pointless but hardly bloodless campaign clearly indicates the fashion for warfare of the time.
Louis wasn’t finished with the Netherlands, though. He sought to break up the Triple Alliance by seeking the support of the British against the Dutch Republic. He knew it was a shaky alliance because only months before it was made, the British and the Dutch had been at war. He also knew that Britain was concerned about Holland’s rise as a naval power, so he put all his energies into war preparations and alliance negotiations. In 1672, four years after the ‘War of Devolution’, the French army marched into what was then called the Dutch United Provinces, a month after Britain declared war. The consequent conflict, known as the Franco-Dutch War, lasted until 1678. The French gained a lot of territory, but lost the support of the Brits early on, and by war’s end most neighbouring nations had hostile relations with France. Again, virtually impossible to determine casualties, but military pundits claim 20,000 to 30,000 dead from one battle alone, at Seneffe (1674).
Swedish involvement in the Franco-Dutch War, on the French side, led to the Scanian War (1675-9), in which Denmark-Norway responded to a call for support from the Dutch United Provinces by invading areas of Sweden still in contention along the borders of Norway, Denmark and Brandenberg. Of course it was, as usual, a grab for power and territory. Scania is an area of what is now southern Sweden. The Danes scored most of the victories in the war, which further eroded Swedish power in northern Europe, but the Danes were forced by the Treaty of Fontainebleau (dictated by the French) to give up all their territorial gains. Another exercise in bloody futility.
Meanwhile on the other side of Europe, the Polish-Ottoman War (1672-76) – aka the 2nd Polish-Ottoman War – arrayed the forces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth against those of the Ottoman Turks. After a number of battles and sieges and such, the Commonwealth was weakened to the extent that a number of foreign powers were encouraged to take advantage of it. However it rallied and scored some notable victories in the 3rd Polish-Ottoman War (1683-99), after which both Poland and the Ottoman Empire went into steep decline. The Ottoman Turks had also made war on the Russians (the Russo-Turkish War, 1676-81) to little effect, apart from much loss of life. In fact the period from 1683 to 1699 is referred to by historians as the Great Turkish War. The Turks lost a lot of territory in the period, but in spite of such disasters as the Battle of Zenta (1697), in which about 30,000 Turks died, they weren’t finished yet.
In England the Monmouth rebellion of 1685, against the newly crowned but highly unpopular king, James II, a fanatical Catholic, was a harbinger of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, inaccurately described as a bloodless revolution, which deposed James II and snuffed out the last hope of a return to ‘official’ Catholicism in Britain.
1688 also marked the beginning of the Nine Years’ War, not the last conflict of the seventeenth century but the last one I’ll describe here. This was a conflict between James II’s powerful successor William of Orange (William III of England) – allied with a number of other powers such as Charles II of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I – and the ever-ambitious Louis XIV. James II had fled to the French court after being deposed, and he sought French assistance to regain the British throne. Louis was in the process of wreaking havoc in the Rhineland – his forces completely destroying some 20 large towns, including Heidelberg, Mannheim, Worms and Speyer, and numerous villages – but he was still inclined to help his fellow Catholic regain his god-given throne. Other European leaders (both Protestant and Catholic) rightly or wrongly imagined Louis had hopes of make James a ‘vassal king’. Louis was probably sincere in his desire to see a Catholic returned to the British throne (I’ll write about his revocation of the Edict of Nantes and its aftermath when I come to state-sanctioned violence), but he also wanted to distract William from protecting the Low Countries (nowadays Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of north-west Germany) from his incursions. He also believed, apparently, that William’s invasion would meet with greater hostility than it did, and that England would likely be plunged into civil war by the event.
Of course, the campaign of James II, mostly in Ireland, backed by French gold, ships and generals, was a dismal failure. The continental campaign of the French waxed and waned, with notable victories at the Battles of Staffarda (1690) and Marsaglia (1693), and plenty of stalemates and stand-offs. The Wikipedia account of the Nine Years’ War is particularly good, IMHO. In the end though, with god knows how much loss of life, nothing much was achieved, and it ended with Louis XIV more or less back where he was territorially at the beginning of his reign.
So I’ll end my tale of 17th century European war violence here. The tale I’ve told lacks flesh and blood, and the complexity and depth of human motives, decisions and uncertainties, but it was merely intended to show that hardly a year passed in Europe in this era without some battle or siege or skirmish in which large volumes of blood were shed. War was a commonplace of diplomacy, and a commonplace feature of the adventurous male life, and the disease and suffering attendant upon all these battles and struggles no doubt formed the lifeblood of everyday conversation. ‘Were you really at the siege of Namur, uncle? Really? Tell me, what was it like…?’
In the next part I’ll look at the eighteenth century.
Why is theology so boring? Stanley Hauerwas
These are the posts where I get to be a not-so-nice guy. Theology is one of my principal bugbears, for many reasons, one of which is that I’ve rarely encountered a modern theologian or Christian apologist who can resist lashing out at atheists.
I suppose I should feel sorry for them, they make such soft, or frail, targets (they’re mostly elderly), but they do insist on making themselves targets, so I’m happy to oblige. Before today I’d never heard of Stanley Hauerwas, so imagine my lack of interest in encountering this soft-spoken elderly gentleman being interviewed on my favourite ABC this arvo. Well, not so much lack of interest but mild willingness to be interested – a willingness quickly dashed by some of the first remarks I heard Hauerwas utter (I didn’t know at the time that he was a theologian). He was being interviewed for all of ten minutes on the ABC show One plus One by Scott Stephens, the ABC’s ‘online editor for religion and ethics’. I now recall Stephens having conducted a series of soft interviews in recent times with prominent ‘believing’ Australians such as David Cappo and Clare Bowditch, but I didn’t recognise him immediately, otherwise I might’ve dodged this. Unfortunately I listened – well, ok, I do have a combative interest in what theologians say.
So here’s the little interview in total, together with my commentary and summing up. The interview material is in italics. Enjoy.
Stephens: You’ve written some very interesting things in your recently published memoir. You’ve admitted for instance – ‘you don’t need to be a theologian to be a Christian, but I probably did’. At the end of your memoir, you then say that the whole reason you’re able to call yourself a Christian is because your friends name you as such. In a time that values self-reliance and even fetishizes self-made men, it’s a very strange series of admissions to make from someone who is renowned as one of the most important Christian thinkers in the last half-century. How did you come to that conclusion?
Hmmm. What makes me think all this was in order to introduce Hauerwas as the best thing since Christians invented sliced bread?
Hauerwas: By necessity. I can’t imagine coming to it just by individual reflection, because I don’t trust my own subjectivity at all. So it’s exactly by discovering what I believe through friends who tell me that this is what I believe that I discover that I am a Christian. Umm, it’s not a natural thing for me to be, I oftentimes point out, hell I’m a Texan (laughs) I mean it does not come easy for Texans to become Christian in the way that I think we must be as faithful followers of Christ, that is, to be non-violent. But I think that it’s through friends that you are enabled to live that way.
All of this sounds unproblematic on the face of it, but I have two criticisms to make.
First, the Jesus of the gospels wasn’t an entirely consistent construction. Yes, he said ‘blessed are the peacemakers’, and I say hurray to that, but he also lashed out at the moneylenders in the temple, sending tables and chairs flying (Matt 21:12), killed a fig tree for not producing fruit out of season (Mark 11:12-14, 20-25, Matt 21:18-22), and damned for all time the townsfolk of Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum, villages in his own neighbourhood, for not listening to his preachifying (Matt 11:23, Luke 10:13-15). So much for love your neighbours, never mind love your enemies.
Second, Hauerwas describes what people ‘must be as faithful followers of Christ’, rather than what we, arguably, should be upon reflection. It’s all about following the leader, apparently. I’ve written about this before, but the difference between the ‘follow my lead’ approach of Jesus and other preachers and sermonizers, and the Socratic method of constructive engagement, getting the interlocutor to ‘go deeper’, is key, and should be key to the whole framework of modern education. It’s because of this approach towards independence and ‘ownership’ of ideas that religion is fading, methinks.
Stephens: Now this is interesting to me, because one of the themes that you’ve been exploring throughout your career is that, even though it might seem, looking from the outside, that the church is in a pretty good position here in the USA, it’s precisely because American culture is so saturated with Christianity – you’ve spent the better part of your professional career trying to convince Christians in the United States that their cosy relationship with American culture is pretty hazardous to its own health.
Hauerwas: Absolutely. I say I represent the Tonto principle of Christian ethics. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were once surrounded by 25,000 Sioux in the Dakotas, and the Lone Ranger looked over to Tonto and said, “What d’you think we should do Tonto?’ and Tonto said, “What do you mean we, white man?’ and I’m trying to help Christians in America recover the Christian ‘we’, which has been very much occluded in the celebration of the relationship between Christianity and America as the presumption that American democracy is the equivalent of what it means to be Christian.
Stephens: One of your great critiques is that it’s not simply just, say, a cultural issue, that many Christians assume that what it means to be American is to be Christian, and in turn what it means to be Christian is to be American in some sort of deep level, but you’ve even, in some ways you’ve also upped the ante. You’ve said that one of the great problems facing American politics and also Christian identity, is the assumption that the American god is the Christian god.
This American stuff is of course a bit of a yawn to me, but I will say that there’s no such thing as the Christian god – or rather, no clear-cut thing. In the same sense, there’s no such thing as the American god. There’s the god of Bush junior, who’s different from the god of Obama, etc etc. These are fantasies you can tailor to your individual personality and needs. Apart from that, I’m happy to let American believers simmer in their theological idiosyncrasies.
Hauerwas: Right, yeah, I think, that the reason – I mean, atheism is so uninteresting in America. I mean, atheism in general is uninteresting in our world, because the god that is being denied isn’t very (laughs), isn’t the Christian god. That’s the reason why Americans think it’s very important that you believe in god, irrespective of what ‘god’ names. I find it extremely uninteresting whether you believe in god or not. The god I worship is not some deity, but the father the son and the holy spirit. That makes all the difference in the world for a people that are identified as not religious America. So I want Christians to be able to recover that kind of theological integrity in a world that makes it very hard to even identify it.
This is the passage I first heard – ‘atheism is uninteresting’. Again, I’m endlessly amused that theologians and religious apologists just can’t help having a go at atheism, and so revealing their ignorance as well as their anxiety. And of course their denialism of the fastest-growing movement vis-à-vis religion in the west. Of course, in one sense Hauerwas is right, atheism is totally uninteresting when you compare it to being the pet project of a supernatural being who’s also the creator of the universe, created just for you. It’s a bit like being personally chosen by the Doctor as his lifetime companion in all his space-time adventures. Great japes! Only Doctor Who is a science fantasy TV show, not a religion (with apologies to the Whovians out there).
Yes, rejecting the existence of supernatural entities is not intrinsically interesting, but the point is that atheists don’t go around being atheists. If I can give a roll-call of some of my intellectual heroes – Aristotle, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Hume, Stendhal, Darwin, Russell, Einstein, Sagan, Attenborough, to name a few – I don’t so much care whether they were atheists, though clearly many of them were/are. What attracts me is their this-worldly concerns. None of these ‘uninteresting’ people are interested in theology, they’re too fascinated by how the real world – and its inhabitants on this tiny planet – works. We live in enthralling times – for exploring human origins, for exploring the world within and beyond our solar system, for exploring neurophysiology and consciousness, for exploring nanotechnology. So many realms opening up for exploration, it’s just endlessly fascinating. I just can’t see how ‘faith’ and theology, the eternally fruitless but entirely self-serving speculation about non-evidence-based supernatural entities, can possibly compare.
Stephens: What you’re saying, though, truly runs against the grain of the assumption that many people believe today, kind of guarantees a kind of social peace and cohesion, the assumption being that, if you wanna be religious, fine, just make sure your religiosity remains a form of inwardness, or even just, probably a better term would be sentimentality. Now, almost everything you’ve written is pitted against the reduction of religion to sentimentality, or ‘god’ to some sort of general deity.
These remarks of Stephens are simply intended to introduce the term ‘sentimentality’, a term that Hauerwas has apparently twisted out of all recognition to feed his theological concerns. I should simply remind readers that the currently agreed dictionary definition of sentimentality is something like ‘an appeal to shallow, uncomplicated emotions at the expense of reason’.
Hauerwas: Absolutely, I say the great enemy of Christianity is not atheism it’s sentimentality. and the deepest sentimentality in our culture is the presumption that we should have children in a manner that they do not have to suffer for our convictions. I think it drives people – it drives children absolutely crazy for our parents to think that they ought to raise children in a manner that when children grow up they get to make up their own minds. I mean, what kind of conviction is that, why did you have them in the first place, if you want them to make up their own minds? They don’t have minds worth making up until they’ve been trained. So exactly how to overcome those kinds of sentimentalities that, interestingly enough result in great violence, I think, is exactly the kind of challenge that Christianity presents to the world in which we find ourselves.
So Hauerwas has defined sentimentality, or one aspect of it, as ‘raising children so that they get to make up their own minds when they grow up.’ Imagine how Socrates would deal with such a distortion of a concept!
Maybe somewhere in his theological works Hauerwas has presented his views more cogently than here, but I have little appetite for anyone’s theology, so I must presume to limit myself to this little interview. I’m far from denying that human children need (and get) training, as do all social animals, including dolphins, elephants, wolves, lions and hyenas, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t have minds of their own, and that independence of thought isn’t a desired outcome. The trouble is, Hauerwas’s god only knows what he means by ‘being trained’. I suspect the worst, bearing in mind his remark that children should suffer for their parents’ convictions. This sounds to me like he thinks Christian parents should bring them up strictly to be Christians, and make them suffer if they stray. No Darwins, no… (name just about every significant thinker of the last century) would ever get to emerge in Hauerwas’s world it seems, they’d all be trained out of their independence of mind until they were black and blue. But I’m being mean – Hauerwas is an advocate of non-violence.
In any case, none of this has anything to do with sentimentality. We bring children into the world for a whole host of reasons, not all of them worthy, of course. We hope to contribute to their becoming good people and happy, but we don’t need to have read Pinker’s The Blank Slate (another boring atheist) to be aware that kids do indeed have minds of their own from day one. I have no idea what Hauerwas could possibly mean by saying that encouraging independence of spirit leads to great violence, but obviously he’s no student of history. Our modern education, which tries to combine a certain degree of training in the basics, without which children are unlikely to succeed in modern society, with independent analytical skills of the type that have created the scientific and technological explosion we’re currently witnessing, has, in fact, helped to create a less violent society than at any time in human history. And that’s not spin, it’s well-supported fact.
Stephens: Weeks before the terrorist attacks on September 11 2001, Time magazine named you America’s best theologian.
Hauerwas: Actually it was September 10, 2000 the 11th, by the time the magazine came out it was the day before, which was wonderfully ironic, because then no-one noticed.
Stephens: But after September 11 you issued many of your most public, most notable, and for many people now even most infamous critiques of the American response to that attack.
Hauerwas: That’s true. My response was, one, you could have done it as a just warrior. I said, you know, the most fateful words that were uttered after September 11 was George Bush’s ‘we are at war’. Now, I think that that was a deep mistake on ‘just war’ grounds. What happened on September 11 was murder, and you don’t go to war against a murderer. As soon as Americans agreed with George Bush, we are at war, you gave Bin Laden exactly what he wanted. You made him a warrior, not a murderer. I think then, the problem…. I think George Bush’s response was a pastoral response. The American people felt at a loss, we didn’t know what to do. We know war, so to say we were at war made this a comforting claim that gave us a sense that we knew what to do – we had to find someone to kill (laughs). So Afghanistan and Iraq were destined to be wars that we had to fight against the infidel. If we had been able to say ‘this was murder’, and how do you respond to murderers, it would have been… it would’ve required a patience that the American people find very hard to enact. I was recently asked, what would I suggest if I wanted America to be more thoughtful and possibly even non-violent, and I said the return to the draft. That we have the situation, we now have is because we have a paid military in which we expect very little cost from the broad American middle class, and it would be very interesting to have a return to the actual sacrifice necessary in order to pursue a legislated war against terrorism. It’s very… I think the Obama administration is to be credited with toning down the war against terrorism, because they understand that’s a war you can’t win in that way. But, generally the American people bought into that, and we paid big prices for it.
Okay, in this latter part of the interview we’ve left theology far behind, thankfully, and we’re into straightforward ethical issues. Apart from the remark about a ‘pastoral response’ from George Bush, there’s nothing in Hauerwas’s argument that owes anything to religion, it’s all secular ethics, and it’s the same ethical argument that myself and many others, such as Geoffrey Robertson, have been putting for years – that so-called acts of terrorism should be treated as criminal, police matters and dealt with under criminal law rather than glorifying them, inadvertantly or otherwise, as acts of war.
So Hauerwas seems to have some reasonable ideas, and a few dodgy ones (he’s a Texan, after all), but it’s unlikely that any of his best ideas emerge from Christian theology. Don’t be a faithful follower of anyone – or anything, except evidence.