Who in Their Right Mind Wants War? Violence, Death, and Meaning

Despite the fact that we pride ourselves on being a rational species, warfare appears to be one of the invariable constants in human history. From William James's (1910) The Moral Equivalent to War to the recent highly acclaimed book by Chris Hedges (2002a) War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, those seeking an end to the institution of warfare have been suggesting that internal, spiritual factors are at least as important in contributing to our addiction to warfare as are external, material factors. This article discusses this tradition with special focus on interpretive insights drawn from psychological works of Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, and Robert Jay Lifton.

Early in the twentieth century, in his essay “The Moral Equivalent of War,” William James (1910) drew dramatic attention to an aspect of human thought that many in his time would rather have ignored, namely, the paradoxical human attitude toward war and violence. James's astuteness here is seen in hindsight as all the more amazing, given that he was writing at a time when his progressive colleagues in America and Europe largely assumed that in the modern world, major armed conflict between nations was a thing of the past. War was stupid, irrational, counterproductive, and made obsolete by the exponentially increased destructive power of modern weaponry. This was clear to any right-minded person, it was thought. Unfortunately, as we know only too well from the subsequent history of the century, the coming decades brought not the peace and prosperity such progressive thinkers expected, but the most terrible wars of human history, in which the exclusionary lines between combatant and noncombatant were simply erased. Over the course of the