Our Forgotten Father

I caught Victor Davis Hanson on Book TV (C-SPAN 2) talking about his new book The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (click on the title of this post for more). He argued that we have no stomach for war because we are therapeutic, affluent, and technological.

Westerners have fought wars because they believed that life was supposed to be hard and to win a war you had to be harder. But in a therapeutic culture this worldview falls on "hard" times. Being affluent, we enjoy leisure and war and leisure don't mix to well. A long protracted struggle in the dessert is not our idea of the good life. We also expect wars to be manageable by technology. The Enlightenment dream is that we can wrap our machinery and communication around war and control every facet of it. When we run up against the unknown, which war inevitably is, we don't know what to do. When it comes down to fight we seek flight. Hanson argues that until recently our civilization knew that wars were a test of will.

Someone asked him if he would still support the war in Iraq given what we know now about the absence of weapons of mass destruction. He answered that there were many more reasons for going to war against Sadam than WMDs. But George W thought that would be the best way to present the security threat to the American people, so he hitched his simplistic wagon to the wrong horse.

I also got the sense that Hanson was saying we must return to the just war tradition. If we don't have a just war policy, the world will try to get away with unjust war. Without a deterrent, people and nations will try to push you around. Hanson defined a deterrent as a strong military and the will to use it, even preemptively. The question isn't pre-emption or not, unilatereal or bilateral, but who you're dealing with. If it is a bad guy who is committing crimes against humanity and plans on including you, then you have grounds for a just war. But this requires a definition of such things as good and evil, which is problematic in our post-modern world.

Hanson also point out that we have a post-modern president dealing with pre-modern dictators. Dealing with them, he argued, is like dealing with his neighboring farmers (yes he farms!) When they want to take your irrigation for themselves, and you tell them its my turn, they look at you as if to say, "Stop me." Then, he said, you have to convince them it's not in their best interest.

My lone criticism of Hanson's presentation is based on the Micah mandate, which he did not address, but perhaps it's in the book. Micah 6:8:

He has showed you, O man, what is good.

And what does the LORD require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.

We haven't tended "to act justly and to love mercy" but build up our military and do whatever we want. We aren't Hanson at the irragation ditch. We're usually the guy stealing the water! We demand that third world countries repay their debt to us while we continue to rack up our own in the trillions. We comfort ourselves by saying nobody will come calling because we're too important to their economy. If they do we can bomb them to kingdom come. I actually had somebody explain it this way to me about three weeks ago. We may think we're righteous because we give more than any other country to world relief, but we give less as a percentage of GDP than any other first world country. If we tithed ten percent of our military budget we could end world hunger within our lifetimes. Read Hope in Troubled Times by Goudzward, etc.

We will never be able to fight a just war without an eternal perspective. As long as we're affluent, therapeutic consumers who worship at the altar of technology, we will be bound to a temporal perspective. This means that it will be difficult for us to conceive of just war or bear the cost of one for our neighbor. In order to fight for justice we will also have to learn how to do justice and love mercy and might I put in a plug for a chastised Constantinianism--walk humbly with our God. Then we may be able to create a new world climate of love instead of fear.