Understanding War and Making War on It

Review of Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997. ISBN: 0805050779, 292 pages, $25.00.

Barbara Ehrenreich, former student activist leader at Columbia in 1968, author of the wonderful book, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989), and well-established journalist of the left who has recently broadened her horizons to include work as a regular essayist for Time, has expanded her interests once more, this time to the subject of war.

She tells us that the inspiration for this book was being asked to write a preface to Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies (1987), a work of considerable psychohistorical interest. She describes herself as “unrestrained by loyalty to any particular academic discipline” (p. 3) and a journalist and amateur scholar. But she does manage to come quickly to what psychohistorians would consider the important questions in need of engagement when it comes to seeking a thoroughgoing explanation of the motivations for war; namely, that what we need to understand most is the “passions of war,” including the “highest and finest passions humans can know: courage, altruism, and the mystical sense of belonging to something larger than ourselves” (p. 238), or that “the mystery lies in the peculiar psychological grip war exerts on us” (p. 8). In the first and perhaps, from the psychohistorical point of view, most interesting chapter, “The Ecstasy of War,” she gives full due to the sacrificial aspect of war, particularly the power of the ideal of self-sacrifice for the noble cause. Again she asks the salient psychohistorical question, “What is it about our species that makes us see war as a kind of sacrament?” (p. 20). The questions are strong and the first chapter sets up some hopeful expectations that are, unfortunately, disappointed.

To answer her central question regarding the origins of the passions of war, she turns to a “just so” story, in the same way that Freud told his story in Totem and Taboo of the primal horde and the rebellion of the sons against the tyrannical father. Like Freud, she first labels her thoughts as speculative but then proceeds to treat them as

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serious assertions about historical reality. In other words, she has embarked on the enticing enterprise of creating an origin myth. The story she tells is about what life might have been like for our hominid ancestors of the early Paleolithic: basically, that long before we became a species of mighty hunters, we lived as weak and frightened prey at the mercy of more powerful predators. Some 30,000 years or so ago, we managed the transformation from prey to predator and developed some very inventive blood sacrifice rituals (both animal and human) to commemorate this awesome event. In the fullness of time, the ritual re-enactment of war, as we know it, evolved.

Dr. Ehrenreich does a good job in marshaling what meager evidence there is from physical and cultural anthropology, evolutionary and socio-biology, as well as some historical sources, in support of her hypothesis. As far as the plausibility of the thesis, since the historical record concerning events in the Paleolithic is so thin, we are in the realm of fantasy and myth where rules of evidence, whether scientific or historical, apply less then do the aesthetic appeal and emotional resonance that a particular metaphor or myth has on us. Her bibliography has Martin Bergmann, Walter Burkert, Rene Girard, Henri Hubert & Marcel Mauss, Eli Sagan, and Patrick Tierny — but no Hyam Maccoby or Nigel Davies — on sacrifice and ritual violence. There are Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, James Frazer, and Robert Graves on religion and mythology. But there are no references to Freud, or to a number of others writing within the psychoanalytic tradition such as Norman O. Brown, Edward Glover, Melanie Klein, Roger Ernle Money-Kyrle, Vamik Volkan, or Martin Wangh, all of whom have much to say about the “passions of war.” There is also no Lloyd deMause, or any other psychohistorian, or any psychoanalyst who has written on sacrifice, scapegoating, group trance, group fantasy, or even the psychology of group process — all of which are of crucial importance to understanding the emotional life of war.

Ehrenreich closes the book with a rambling chapter mixing a fuzzy-minded and quasi-mystical blend of highly speculative evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence theory, and the psychology of traumatic enactment where war comes to be seen as taking on a life of its own, a self replicating “meme” (from Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene [1989]) which parasitically feeds on us while trapping us in a symbolic re-enactment of the traumatic battles our ancestors fought against our ancient enemy, the predatory beast.

Reverting to what she is best at, Ehrenreich closes the final chapter of her book with a wonderfully creative and hopeful suggestion for freeing ourselves from the grip of our nemesis — that if we could make war itself the enemy, bringing to bear all of our passions, including our urges toward self-sacrifice, to the struggle against it, as in William James’ call to the “moral equivalent of war” — then there may be cause for some optimism. The book closes, in the best leftist tradition, with a passionate exhortation to make war on war.

Ultimately, the book suffers from a lack of a coherent frame of reference. Ehrenreich moves from anthropology, to biology, to psychology, to religion without trying to anchor her ideas to some level of explanation that she regards as fundamental. When it comes to examining the passions involved in war, the lowest along with the highest, psychoanalytically grounded psychohistory remains the most sophisticated and both intellectually and emotionally satisfying approach that has yet been articulated.

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