Violence

The readings this week were wonderful and challenging for me. I had read All Quiet before but had never read Arendt. In fact, I've never read any political theory before this year and have found it a fascinating challenge. Along with philosphy, I didn't anticipate an interest as deep as I have for them.

Unfortunately, I missed the class on this topic, but I got some of the notes. It seems like the class, an interesting phenomenon this semester, veered into the personal on this topic as well. Like dislocation, many people in the class have had experiences with war and violence in their lives that I have escaped in mine.

But I can see where "All Quiet..." would provoke that response, however. I found it such a deeply personal, deeply felt, account of soldiering that it was impossible not to respond personally. What was of great interest, of course, where the dynamics of rage that accompanied the violence. Firstly, as Arendt makes very clear, the implements of war had already begun to outstrip and outsize the human scale, reducing the soldiers to the size and vulnerability of bugs on the battlefield. While they still went into hand-to-hand combat, they seemed to view their enemy with a certain bureaucratic distance. The only thing that really provoked anger was when an enemy was "unfair", and used "cruel" weaponry like a jagged bayonnet. Otherwise, they charged and killed each other out of a certain dumb, autonomic response, winning and losing small patches of meaningless ground, and only after being rendered senseless by artillery. Violence is possible only with implements, and emerges from rage, which can only be triggered by a sense of injustice. But since there is no injustice in an imperialistic impulse, one must be created by the commanders and channeled toward an un-characterized enemy.

And so the personal rage was directed at their superiors and the army, the "Tyranny of none", as Arendt calls it. Most likely this happens because they are the only identifiable, personal target for rage available to the soldiers. But it fits perfectly with Arendt definitions of power and violence. And they also had only one outlet for feelings of love and bonding in the face of death, which were with each other. Their past life had been relegated to sentiment, which Arendt refers to as "the perversion of feeling" (p. 64).

And this is the interesting thing, for me. This junction between death and the political is a fork in the road. Arendt describes it clearly as a differentiation between the Greek quality and the modern one: To the Greeks, "it was the certainty of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed and word and that prompted them to establish a body politic which was potentially immortal" (p.68). But to us in the Western world, it seems that "Death, whether faced in actual dying or in the inner awareness of one's own mortality, is perhaps the most antipolitical experience there is." (p. 67)

We're watching this play out right now in "The War on Terror". We have an enemy that has created a pantheon of heroes who find immortality in death and have created an immortal order to rule on earth, versus us, who or not so political, but who fear death to the point that we will band together to fight them, focussing more on our own common bond and desire to survive. "Support the Troops", even if you hate the war.

This last point was also of interest to me in terms of Freud. Freud's theory that man has a natural destructive instinct, which even he had trouble supporting wholeheartedly, is given life by Arendt with her definition of violence begetting from rage which begets from a sense of correctable injustice. Rather than a primal urge, it is one now engaged in a specific circumstance. Rage becomes a tool for change, rather than just an impulse.