Tragedy or Therapy?
Defining ourselves.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
October 9, 2001 8:30 a.m.

t the universities, throughout the national media, in our suburbs — and perhaps unfortunately inside the State Department — there are very dangerous ideas floating around about Mr. bin Laden and this present war. We would do well to cast them aside and look to our past.

War for most of the past 2,500 years of Western Civilization was seen as a tragedy innate to the human condition — a time of human plague when, as the historian Herodotus said, fathers bury sons, rather than sons fathers. In others words, killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people. But it did and so was "a curse from Zeus," the poet Hesiod concluded.

Conflict does and will always break out — and very frequently so — because we are human and thus not always rational. War is "The father, the king of us all" the philosopher Heraclitus lamented. Even the utopian Plato agreed: "War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state." How galling and hurtful to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace, not war, the real "parenthesis"! Warfare could be terrifying ("a thing of fear" the poet Pindar summed up) — but not therein unnatural or necessarily evil.

No, the rub was particular wars, not war itself. While all tragic, any of them could be evil — or good — depending on the cause, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. The defense against Persian attack in 480 B.C., as the playwright Aeschylus says, (who chose as his epigram mention of his service at Marathon, not his dramas) was "glorious." Yet the theme of Thucydides's history of the internecine Peloponnesian wars was folly and senseless butchery. Likewise, there is language of freedom and liberty associated with the Greeks' naval victory at Salamis, but not so with the slaughter at the battle of Gaugamela — Alexander the Great's destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III's empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

If war was innate, and its morality defined by particular circumstances, fighting was also not necessarily explained by prior exploitation — or even legitimate grievance. Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, can be envious — and even rude and pushy. And if they can get away with things, they most surely will. Thucydides says they battle out of "honor, fear, and self-interest." How odd to think that the Japanese and Germans were not starving in 1941, but rather were proud peoples who wanted those they deemed inferior and weak to serve them.

To the Greeks, such bad guys also fought mostly over tangible things — more land, more subjects, more loot. Wars were a sort of acquisition Aristotle said. Bullies, whether out of vanity or a desire for power and recognition, took things from other people unless they were stopped. And if they were to be halted, citizens — among them good, kind, and well-read men like Socrates, Sophocles, Thucydides, and Demosthenes — fought to protect their freedom and to the save the innocent.

In this classical paradigm, the present crisis, I think, looks something like this. The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, invites envy because of the success of its restless culture of freedom, democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets. That we are often to be hated — and periodically to be challenged by those who want our power, riches, or influence — is to be listened to, more often regretted, but always expected. Our past indulgence of bin Laden did not bring us respect, much less sympathy. Rather our forbearance invited ever more contempt and audacity on his part — and more dead as the bitter wages of our self-righteous morality and tragic miscalculation.

The enemies of free speech and intolerance — German Nazism, Italian fascism, Japanese militarism, Stalinist Communism, or Islamic fundamentalists — will always attack us for what we are, rather than what we have done. Only our moral response — not our status as fighters per se — determines whether our war is just and necessary. If, like the Athenians, we butcher neutral Melians for no good cause, then our war is evil and we should lose. But if we fight to preserve freedom like the Greeks at Thermopylae and the GIs at Normandy Beach, then war is the right and indeed the only thing we can do. Caught in such a tragedy, where efforts at reason and humanity fall on the deaf ears of killers, we must go to war for our survival and to prove to our enemies that their defeat will serve as a harsh teacher — a least for a generation or two — that it is wrong and very dangerous to blow up 6,000 civilians in the streets of our cities.

That depressing view of human nature and conflict is rarely any longer with us. It was not merely the advent of Christianity that ended it; centuries ago the Sermon on the Mount fell by the wayside to the idea of "just war" — once a beleaguered West realized that pacifism meant suicide. More likely, the 20th century and the horror of the two world wars — Verdun, the Somme, Hiroshima — put an end to the tragic view of war. Yet, out of such numbing losses — and our arrogance — we missed the lesson of both world wars. The calamity of 60 million dead was not because only we went to war, but rather because we were naïve and deemed weak by our enemies well before 1914 and 1939 — at a time when real resolve could have stopped Prussian militarism and Nazism before millions of blameless perished.

The deviant offspring of the Enlightenment — Marxists and Freudians — gave birth to even more pernicious social sciences that sought to "prove" to us that war was always evil and therefore — with help from PhDs — surely preventable. Indeed, during the International Year of Peace in 1986 a global commission of experts concluded that war was unnatural and humans themselves unwarlike! Unfortunately, innocent people get killed from that kind of thinking. We are now convinced that war always results from real, rather than perceived, grievances — mostly the poverty arising out of the usual sins of colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, et al. In response, dialogue and mediation have been elevated to the grand science of "conflict resolution" theory, a sort of marriage counseling or small-claims court taken to the global level.

Rich and smug Westerners simply could not accept the idea that more people in the 20th century were killed by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao off, than on, the battlefield. How depressing to suggest that the Khmer Rouge, the Hutus, and the Serbians went on killing when left alone — and quit only when either satiated or stopped.

In our new moral calculus, bin Laden figures out to be no Xerxes or Tojo. And he is not even an inherently evil man who hates us for our clout and our influence. Far too few of us believe that he wishes to strut over a united Middle East under his brand of Medieval Islam that makes decadent Westerners cower in fear. Instead, we insist that he is either confused (call in Freud), or has legitimate grievances (read Marx), and so we must find answers within us, not him — Western importation of Arab oil? Stolen land from the Palestinians? Decadent democracy and capitalism? Jewish-American women walking in the land of Mecca? Puppet Arab governments? Take your pick — he has cited them all.

The tragic Greeks would make ready the 101st Airborne, but we must chit-chat with him (thus Reverend Jackson), fathom him (our professors and novelists), or accommodate him (the Clinton State Department). Seeing war as "Zeus's curse" in this age of our greatest learning, wealth — and pride — is to descend into "savagery," when our sophisticated brag that prayer, talk, or money can yet prevail. But if we deem ourselves too smart, too moral — or too soft — to stop killers, then, we have become real accomplices to evil through inaction. Generations slaughtered in Europe, incinerated Jews, massacred Russians and Chinese, and the bleached bones of Cambodians are proof enough of that.

Make no mistake about it, bin Laden knows all this — hence his boasts that we are cowardly and decadent. Yet, for the moment, he is still puzzled. And perhaps, just perhaps, he is even afraid: people are fleeing Afghanistan; Pakistan has suddenly proved a most fickle host, his coconspirators, the Taliban, suddenly are not so defiant, and jihad is falling on so many deaf ears. Does this new American rhetoric of war mean, bin Laden wonders, that there are still Greek moralists in the land of Wal-Mart and Britney Spears? Are there still left men like Lincoln and Roosevelt, with stern Grants and Pattons as their great captains, whose creed is victory and terms only unconditional surrender?

Mr. bin Laden — for the first time in his life — is now unsure whether we are a tragic or therapeutic society. We too shall find out shortly in the momentous days ahead.