War is a force that gives us meaning

These days Chris Hedges is mostly writing about Gaza, but he cut his teeth in journalism as a war reporter in the bloody civil wars of Central America. In 2002 he published War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a book that seeks to explain humankind’s predilection toward warfare. I would highly recommend this talk in which he summarizes the contents of the book, but to spare you the hour-long lecture, I would like to relate a few things from his talk that I thought were particularly remarkable.

In the first place, Hedges asserts that in our society war is pornography. He is unapologetic about the way that television images of war are fascinating and thrilling. Television news, in the interest of decency, shows war from such a distance that does not disgust us with its horrors, but instead titillates us with its power. Indeed, the sexual metaphor is the most fitting, as Hedges argues that the observance of modern warfare is almost always beautiful and erotic and violent, an indulgence in the lust of the eyes.

This very fact makes antiwar art conflicted. Even as they are put to use to attack war, images of war’s destructive power are perversely appealing. The enticing beauty of warfare is the reason that movies about war are so compelling, even if they are thematically opposed to violence. Hence, in their portrayal of warfare, antiwar films and documentaries contain within them the powerful seed of their opposite. As Hedges says, “The prurient fascination with violent death always overpowers the message.”

War engages the part of us that is self-destructive and destructive of others, and as we experience it, we come to depend upon it for relief. Hedges tells stories of both war correspondents and of soldiers who became addicted to war as if it were a drug. These people were often so changed by their experiences of war that they were unable to return to normal society and senselessly returned to areas of conflict. It is horrific how we can be intensely aware that war eats away at our humanity, but we continue to flirt with its release from the tedium of normalcy. “War is necrophilia,” Hedges claims.

Ultimately, Hedges seems to think that there is a component of the human being that is unable to turn away from the consideration of death. In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad calls this same desire "the fascination of the abomination." Again and again, humans look back toward the nothingness from where we came. Like the wife of Lot, we are unable to peal our eyes away from the spectacle of destruction.