Tomorrow the bells will toll for fallen soldiers. Cities and towns will have parades. Members of the American Legion and VFW posts will place flags on graves of servicemen and –women. Politicians will make speeches. Veterans will offer remembrances of fallen comrades. At Arlington National Cemetery taps will be played, wreaths will be laid, and the tomb of the unknown soldier guarded in solemn ritual. And all the while war will rage on.
The fallen soldiers, airmen and -women, sailors, marines, guardsmen and –women barely whisper from their graves. Quieter still are the fallen civilians.
There is little more sobering than poring over the faces of war dead. Inch-square portraits, row upon row filling pages of The Washington Post, The Globe or The Times. Such earnest visages rendered in miniature as if their lives, their call to service and their wrenching deaths could be contained in an image the size of a thumbprint. While the photos momentarily arrest us, like a lock of hair falling forward we brush from our eyes, the battalions of images have yet to indelibly inscribe the futility of war.
Of course there have always been pacifists among us. One of my favorites within our tradition is John Haynes Holmes, born in 1879 in Philadelphia and raised Unitarian. John Haynes Holmes helped found the Unitarian Fellowship for Social Justice and what became the American Civil Liberties Union. But for most Unitarians of his day, Holmes’ absolute pacifism went too far, and he disassociated himself with Unitarianism during World War I. In 1925, John Haynes Holmes authored his tenth book, Patriotism Is Not Enough, published by my grandfather. In it Haynes wrote, “The result of all this sacrificial heroism was—what? Death, destruction, despair—the bankruptcy of nations, and the wrecking of civilization…little was won; well-nigh everything, material, ethical, spiritual was lost.”
It’s fair to say Holmes, like the other absolute pacifists among us fall out of favor with the majority, who may dislike war, but nonetheless believe in its efficacy. Of course the profiteers of war, the military industrial complex identified by President Eisenhower, may not dislike it, but most of us on a gut level understand the profits war generates come at tremendous social cost.
Yet beyond the circle of Gold Star families and veterans who know first hand the “death, destruction and despair,” beyond the hundreds of millions of non-combatants worldwide who have suffered the physical, political, economic and environmental devastations of war, the rest of us may register such ravages intellectually yet we assent with our silent acceptance, our complacency and complicity.
I am not suggesting we like war or approve of it, even though we may have the utmost appreciation and respect for the valor of fighting forces. Some may harbor frustration that killing even in the name of national defense gets valorized because killing on foreign soil or sand begs the question: what risk to our life or limb are we defending? And what spiritual and ethical principles do we sacrifice in the process of increasingly roboticized warfare where the faceless enemy becomes even more abstract?
We all know the stories of a Christmas ceasefire where young troops in Europe paused in their trenches, smoking cigarettes, singing “Silent Night” together across enemy lines in English and German. Probably far less chance wary young Americans in Iraq or Afghanistan will pause to set down arms and sing Qu’ranic verses with local combatants whether they long for safety and self-determination, too. Surely no songs fill the air beneath predator drones.
As staggering as war is for combatants, it victimizes women and children beyond compare. The rapacious hunger for oil, minerals and other resources has turned their torsos into battlefields.
In her eloquent and moving keynote address to the 2010 Women’s Nobel Initiative International Gender Justice Dialogue, social psychologist, writer, and Benedictine sister Joan Chittister said at the turn of the last century, civilian casualties were 5% of the war dead. In World War One, 15%. World War Two, 65%. By the mid 1990s, 75%. Today, civilian deaths comprise over 90% of war deaths. “If you want to be safe,” she suggests not as sardonically as it sounds, “join the military.” Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former commander of UN peacekeeping forces in the eastern Congo concurs when he states, “It has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in armed conflict.”
I will spare you the grim list Joan Chittister provides but in summary, she calls the sixty million civilian deaths in the twentieth century “an orgy of war and civilian slaughter.”
It is not that the deaths of our military should go unnoticed, unheralded, it is that for each tiny portrait published in the newspaper, another dozen faces or more, belong in those pages. For while we may distinguish between the patriotism, or economic need of men and women who enlist, who join officer training programs or the National Guard—over and against those who simply die in the line of fire—the breath of life than animates each of us, the cosmos that bears us, the creative wellspring that brings us into being weeps no less for the lone boy ambling across the road, the elderly couple hiding in their home, or the hundreds of thousands of women and girls broken by systematic rape meant to brutalize them and shatter their communities with the blunt force of shame.
It is not simply that war happens, Joan Chittister tells us, it is that entire societies are organized around war. “Our generation, yours and mine, has made the whole world into prey but only some are armed.” Where, she asks, in the monuments we erect to the war dead, are the monuments to those whose lives have been denied not just from stray bullets and bombs, from predator drones and landmines, but from soil erosion, deforestation, diversion of water and food and natural resources used to fuel combat? Consider the children who go uneducated, the women who remain illiterate, the houses that go unfinished, the roads that go unmade, the minds and hearts and bodies untended because there is war—not in our yard but in our name. And not just ours, for there are many nations with denizens so depleted it takes nothing to grind them into fodder of war. Yet so often the line of connection ensnares us.
Sixty Minutes recently reported on “conflict minerals” in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to the broadcast, there are over a million displaced people, over 200,000 women raped, and five million deaths in eastern Congo from a civil war “being fueled by a multi-million dollar trade in minerals that go into our electronic products.”
Cell phones, computers, even jewelry bears the bloodstains and misery of a nation despoiled. Sixty Minutes interviewed a woman in a refugee camp who told of her village destroyed in 2007, where 280 people including her parents and husband were burned alive. Later three of her children were shot dead and she suffered rape by uniformed men armed with machine guns. Her story, horrifically, is common in Eastern Congo where there are no monuments to war dead, only mineral exports that supply our demand for instance access and communication.
It will not be parades or statues, wreaths or speeches that absolve us or honor the dead. In the words of Joan Chittister, “It’s not what the mind knows; it’s what the heart knows that changes the world.”
In 2009, a Democratic representative from Washington State, Jim McDermott introduced legislation to “put in place a system of audits and regulations that would help stop companies from importing conflict minerals into the United States,” though the bill has not gained passage. As important as that piece of legislation may be, what lies before us is the willingness to re-see war, from the heart not the mind. Our analytical, ever-reasoning brains accept the inevitability or war. Some of us see it as a sad signature of being human. Other species may be predatory but aside from wily ants, we don’t see much that looks like war.
It is excruciating to see in the cell phone we use to call home in an emergency, in the laptop I use to write this sermon, the inconceivable costs of war from the pillaged earth and polluted air to rape and child labor, burning flesh to immolated villages, to displaced millions in despair. It is hard enough to watch The Hurt Locker and imagine negotiating a landscape pocked with IEDs.
But as Joan Chittister and John Haynes Holmes dare to assert, war is not the inevitable consequence of evolution. It comes from a willingness, in some cases couched as patriotic fervor, and sometimes in complicit assent. If it is “only with the heart that one can see rightly,” if “what is essential is invisible to the eye,” (Antoine de Saint Exupery) we will have to look beyond the convenience to its costs. We will have to listen more closely to what the soul knows and the mind denies. Too often we have conflated entitlement with God’s grace, ingenuity with providence, war with religion.
Joan Chittister says, “Violence defines religion consumed more by the national than the universal.” John Haynes Holmes sharpens the image:
Patriotism has its holy days, its saints and martyrs, its sacred books and documents. In its national anthems it has hymnology, in its ceremonials of the flag, a ritual as august as the mass.…And it is this religion of patriotism which denies and defeats the ideal of brotherhood, the love of all mankind.
In 1986, an international group of scientists in fields ranging from neurophysiology to behavioral genetics, ethology to psychology addressed the question of whether scientific theories and data can legitimately justify the claim that war is hard-wired into us. These scholars concluded it is not. In a statement on violence adopted by UNESCO, they arrived at five propositions:
1.It is scientifically incorrect to say that we have inherited a tendency to make war from our animal ancestors.… The fact that warfare has changed so radically overtime indicates that it is a product of culture.… War is biologically possible, but it is not inevitable, as evidenced by its variation in occurrence and nature over time and space. There are cultures which have not engaged in war for centuries, and there are cultures which have engaged in war frequently at some times and not at others.
2. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behavior is genetically programmed into our human nature. While genes are involved at all levels of nervous system function, they provide a developmental potential that can be actualized only in conjunction with the ecological and social environment.
3. It is scientifically incorrect to say that in the course of human evolution there has been a selection for aggressive behavior more than for other kinds of behavior.… Violence is neither in our evolutionary legacy nor in our genes.
4. It is scientifically incorrect to say that humans have a “violent brain.” While we do have the neural apparatus to act violently, it is not automatically activated by internal or external stimuli. Like higher primates and unlike other animals, our higher neural processes filter such stimuli before they can be acted upon. How we act is shaped by how we have been conditioned and socialized. There is nothing in our neurophysiology that compels us to react violently.
5. It is scientifically incorrect to say that war is caused by “instinct” or any single motivation. The emergence of modern warfare has been a journey from the primacy of emotional and motivational factors, sometimes called “instincts,” to the primacy of cognitive factors. Modern war involves institutional use of personal characteristics such as obedience, suggestibility, and idealism, social skills such as language, and rational considerations such as cost-calculation, planning, and information processing. The technology of modern war has exaggerated traits associated with violence both in the training of actual combatants and in the preparation of support for war in the general population. As a result of this exaggeration, such traits are often mistaken to be the causes rather than the consequences of the process.
The signatories of this research statement conclude:
that biology does not condemn humanity to war, and that humanity can be freed from the bondage of biological pessimism and empowered with confidence to undertake the transformative tasks needed…Although these tasks are mainly institutional and collective, they also rest upon the consciousness of individual participants for whom pessimism and optimism are crucial factors. Just as “wars begin in the minds of men,” peace also begins in our minds. The same species who invented war is capable of inventing peace. The responsibility lies with each of us.
This Memorial Day we can do something far more meaningful, far more consequential than marching or attending a parade, more lasting than placing a wreath, flag or flower on a grave. We can begin the task of changing our own consciousness, of undoing a lifetime of cultural imprinting that has stamped the inevitability of war on our brains. Joan Chittister reminds us: “War is not inevitable. It is chosen; it is planned.”
The great Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry asks:
Who has invented our enmity?
Who has prescribed us hatred of each other?
Who has armed us against each other with the death of the world?
Who has appointed me such anger that I should desire the burning of your house or the destruction of your children?
Who has imagined that I would destroy myself in order to destroy you, or that I would improve myself by destroying you?
Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you, or laugh with you, or visit in your house and go to work with you?
The silenced soldiers in their graves, the civilian dead, the scarred earth. and the living “whose souls have been disfigured” by war beseech us to answer. Amen.
Closing words:
“There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.
There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.” (Wendell Berry)
