War, bin Laden, and “the aura of the consequential”
Timing is everything, they say, and Civil War historian and Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust certainly enjoyed auspicious timing when she delivered the 2011 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities on Monday night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Jefferson Lecture is the federal government’s most prestigious award for intellectual accomplishment in the humanities.
Faust’s theme, elaborated as the airwaves were full of nothing but the operation to take out bin Laden, was on humanity’s fascination with war narratives. As recounted by the Chronicle of Higher Ed story:
“When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it was influenced in no small part by the desire—even need—to transform the uncertainty of combating a terrorist enemy into a conflict that could provide a purposeful, coherent, and understandable structure, a comprehensible narrative,” Ms. Faust said. “We expect wars to come with endings; that is part of their story. The language of war made Americans protagonists in a story they understood rather than the victims or potential victims of forces beyond their comprehension and control.”
Ms. Faust traced what she called “the seductiveness of war” to its location on the “boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman,” and the possibility it offers of transcending “the gray everyday” of life. “Stories of war are infused with the aura of the consequential.”
That argument is sobering given that it leads us to fixate on, and exalt, conflicts, be they on battlefields, blogs, courtrooms or playing fields. (Or on miracles, as when the Peruvian president claimed bin Laden’s death was a miracle that should be credited to newly-Blessed John Paul II.)
But Faust’s argument certainly rings true to me, both at a visceral level and as I watch the coverage of the bin Laden story as well as the prognostications about the political boost–or not–that this episode might give President Obama. Polls show Obama getting a predictable bounce, though I tend to be among those who believe that will wear off quickly and by next year the story will be so last year and of little consequence in the election.
But maybe it will have an impact. Andrew Sullivan wondered how bin Laden’s death could not be a defining moment for the Obama presidency, as he ticked off his many other accomplishments: rescuing the economy, passing health care, promoting gay rights and a host of other genuine victories. Yet those triumphs were in the gray area of legislation and process and politics, areas of compromise and no clear winners, and long-term outcomes. Nothing as clear and satisfying as the death of bin Laden, and no victory that couldn’t be recast by political opponents. Obama’s earlier middling approval numbers reflected that dynamic, I think.
Will our romance with battlefield heroics prove of greater consequence than congressional battles, such as the one over health care, that are of arguably greater import?
The problem is that it was much easier to control the narrative in days past. Now we have instant communication and it will be interesting to see how the stories start playing out. Americans are less innocent now than they were but there is a limit…
Already the Whitehouse is choosing not to release further information of the raid. At the same time family members who were there are telling their stories. I don’t see a huge clamour to hear their perspective.
And America does want to make sure that their purity is maintained. Already, the mythology that this was a capture OR kill mission (as opposed to solely kill) is spreading and it will probably become fixed.
Hi, David.
I love President Faust, but surely she’s a poor example of why we should not fixate on battlefields.
I didn’t read her last book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, because I knew it was too good, too heartbreaking.
Some other books by the great Civil War scholar, Drew Gilpin Faust:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=drew+gilpin+faust&sprefix=drew+gilpin+faust
I wonder whether war doesn’t lose more fans with every passing generation. It seems to be a guy thing, and guys are increasingly less in control of the world’s levers of power.
But Faust’s observations sound simplistic. Explaining war as largely the product of people’s need to have life explained to them as a comic book – a “narrative” – sounds condescending, a view from the ivory tower of what makes the grubby people tick in the world beyond the academic elms.
Faust’s observations may sound simplistic. I don’t think they are. And I don’t think they are aimed at us ordinary folks but at those in power who took us to war, invading Iraq. Hers is the best explanation for that invasion I’ve heard yet — in over eight years. We think we understand war, the old kind. So we morphed the police action of getting bin Laden into a good old war. Big mistake. How did we get him? With essentially a SWAT team, not our massed armed forces. We should have kept to police action.
“Stories of war are infused with the aura of the consequential.”
There are wars and then THERE ARE WARS! Lincoln’s war (the Civil War, 1861-65) was, from his perspective, a redemptive war, employing redemptive violence. Lincoln believed we could not make a better representation or token to ourselves of Old Testament warfare than by the view of the Union Army fighting the Confederacy, to rid America of secessionism and slavery. Lincoln, at least in his speeches, infused the Civil War with the divine “aura of the consequential,” to quote historian Faust. Unlike Charles V, who during the Thirty Years War attempted to keep Central Europe — his empire — from permanently splitting into Catholic and Protestant regions, but eventually gave up, Lincoln would not give up on his belief; would not tolerate separation, breach, division. If the Civil War were fought today, the casualty list would be over 6 million. Now that is consequential “transcending the gray everyday of life”!
I doubt, however, that President Obama feels the same way about our current wars and the death of bin Laden. Our wars are slowly destroying the survival value of Lincoln’s ratiocination for a redemptive war or for redemptive civic death on a large scale. Instead of “transcending the everyday gray of life,” our wars are only exhibiting a greater efficiency in the grind or business of mutual extermination (certainly in regard to our resources, the environment, the poor of the world). No one is ultimately winning in our wars.