Victor David Hanson on Western Military Dynamism

This past Thursday The Ohio State University hosted Victor David Hanson who spoke on “Western Military Dynamism and its Antidotes.” Hanson, in addition to being a conservative commentator, is one of the leading classicists of this generation. His presentation was a bit of both. I must admit that some of his comments made me uncomfortable and I suspect that I was one of the more conservative people in attendance. While I am willing to use the terms "West" and "East" for convenience, I think there is someone rather arbitrary about them and do not see them as reflecting hard reality. Here are my notes from the lecture; I am curious as to the thoughts of my readers. As usual all mistakes are mine.   

This talk is about the “western way of war.” When the term was first used twenty-five years ago it brought numerous objections. Today it seems there is a problem with even using the term the "West." Until 1950, it simply was a geographic term. The Romans used it in an expansive sense. It was enriched through the adoption of Judeo-Christian values, the Renaissance and the spread of Colonialism. After 1950 the West became a state of mind. Japan and South Korea are Western in ways that Egypt is not. A Western can be of any race but has an allegiance to constitutional government, freedom of the press and religion. The claim is not that one can draw a straight line between ancient Athens and the present. There were detours like the Inquisition.

Jared Diamond argues that there are no values just geographic determinants. He argues that the Greeks and Romans had a head start and even today Europe has an advantage. Hegel and Schopenhauer believed that there was a West but that the Romans were contaminated by other cultures. It was only in Germany that Western values were maintained.

There something intrinsic to this notion of the West; it is something cultural, but its relevancy extends even to military matters. From the Greeks onward, when these larger protocols were applied to battle, we begin to see a paradigm of superior technology. This is not merely finding a technology; gun powder, triremes, and stirrups were invented outside the West. The key issue is figuring out how to best use it. After the battle of Lepanto in 1571, many of the best Ottoman galleys were taken from the West. The Ottomans stormed Constantinople in 1453 with guns manufactured in Germany. In contrast, Hernan Cortez was able to make gunpowder out of ingredients he found in Mexico and even forge cannons. The Aztecs had access to this same material but were unable to make any use of it.

The West has been able to find a way to employ capitalism. Natives flocked to Cortez to sell him the necessary supplies. The U.S. coalition in 1991 had more bottled water than the Iraqis. Instead of defining bravery in terms of personal kills (Homeric values), starting from the Greeks Western countries defined bravery in terms of units. An extension of this demotion of individual military heroes is the ability to remove generals. Gen. Douglas MacArthur was sacked during the Korean War. All the leading generals in ancient Greece were at one point audited or even sacked by their home city.

(This does not apply to the medieval warfare, which focusd on individual knights. I guess Hanson views the Middle ages as a "detour" in western history. While I agree that there is something important to this notion of a military tradition of an "esprit de corps", it contradicts the notion of Western "individualism." If the West values the individual then how did it come to take a more collective view when it came to the military? No matter how one answers this question, one would have to give up either individualism or military collectivism as "western" values.) 


Other systems needed to find ways to counter the West. This was often done by turning to asymmetrical warfare, where you change the ground on which you are fighting. The West seems less able to take casualties. We can see this in the ancient battles of Salamis in 480 BCE and Gaugamela in 331 BCE to the modern-day war in Iraq. Another check is parasitism where one uses lethal weapons which one did not have to invest as a culture. This goes for Native Americans or Zulus with guns to Iraqi insurgents being able to nullify an Abrams tank. One does not have to understand the ballistics behind these weapons or even how to repair them. One can just fire these weapons until they break down.  A third check is the ability to challenge the notion of a monolithic West. In truth, there is no monolithic anything. It is certainly hard to unite western cultures. You can resist a western power with the help of another western power. Persia was willing to interfere with Greek city-states. More French and British soldiers died in Verdun and Somme than in ninety years of colonialism. Americans lost more soldiers in the final year of the Civil War than they ever lost in conflicts with Native Americans. Finally, opponents of the West have been able to rely on the empathy of some in the West. Long before Michael Moore compared the Iraqi insurgents to the minutemen and said that Bin Laden should have attacked a red state, you had Lysistrata and Euripides’ Trojan Women, which was a damning portrayal of the Greeks.

War is the same, regardless of the technology. Modern war is change speeded up. The issues remain the same. Why is this true? One turns to Thucydides, that the nature of man is the same. We are in a situation in which those who oppose the West do not wish to counter us on the battlefield. We are discovering ways to check those who wish to check us even as we desire to fight a more conventional war. Where does this lead us? There are certain disciplines that are invaluable in times when others are losing their sanity in this speeded up world. If you want to understand why people want to kill there is no better discipline than history.

Unpolemical Narratives

RVA responded to my previous post with a long comment that I believe deserves a posting in its own right:

I find both of your following contentions persuasive, that – a) History should be taught from an unpolemical stance and that we should try to understand historical events from the perspectives, rationales, and narratives which individuals in that era would view the world; and b) that we inevitably transform history into a narrative with identifiable heroes and villains.

I find attractive your theory that history should be taught from an unpolemical perspective (inasmuch as possible) because we need to equip children with analytical and critical thinking skills, rather than imposing values upon them (i.e. capitalism is good and inevitable, democracy is without flaws, etc.). Values are which are 'learned' and 'understood' are much more powerful, durable, and influential than those which are imposed upon us. It is essential that we teach our youth the ability to understand both sides of an argument, rather than pushing them to become ideologues who lack the ability and skills to analyze the effects and implications of their beliefs. It is better to teach children why communism/Nazism/fascism is attractive, and then have them internalize that perspective, which will allow them to understand why Germany voted in the Nazis, or why Lenin became a Marxist; because it will then allow students to learn the lesson that ideologies which may be attractive in theory may turn out to be dangerous in practice, or that good ideas which gain popular traction can become corrupted and perverted by leaders who succumb to the temptations of power. We often try to "otherize" the Nazis and Communists; but instead we should seek to understand that they were human and that their decisions were driven by human instincts; rather than dehumanize them, we should try to understand what aspects of human nature led to their misguided decisions and results, which can only be done by internalizing their perspectives, so that we can learn and comprehend the lessons to be learned from the history of the 20th century. Students who lack the skills to internalize the perspectives from past historical eras will be more prone to be misguided by demagogues and ideologues because they will lack the tools and skills to withstand the imposition of social and political narratives which they encounter.

I am also very intrigued by your theory that history is often turned into a narrative with identifiable with heroes and villains. I would go further and speculate that humans have an intrinsic need, desire, and addiction for narratives; that our species inevitably tries to make sense of all external stimuli, and that our common vehicle of understanding an incomprehensible universe is to turn empirical reality into narratives, into stories which cater to our desire for a) intrigue, b) triumph of good, c) finality & resolution, and d) meaning to our existence.

In this sense, the two doctrines are in conflict: First, that we should unpolemicize history; Second, that humans inevitability tend to "narrativize" history to fit our cultural and societal values. You write, "We wish to find that hero who took on the forces of darkness and forever changed the world for the better. We want it so badly that we will write him into history, running over any inconvenient facts in the process." This seems persuasive. But given that premise, I must ask you whether it is really possible for historians to write histories which are unpolemical? Even if historians are capable of writing unpolemical histories, will they have enough traction to become persuasive to other historians, or even to the general public? Does the structure and composition of History departments at American universities allow the writing of unpolemical histories? Is it possible to teach a course which doesn't implicitly assign valuations to historical events or historical figures? Is it inevitable that historians "narrativize" history? Are there societal benefits to the polemical teaching of history which outweigh an unpolemical approach? Are there benefits to making history into a narrative?

I could not have said this better myself. As historians, when we try to explain why Nazism and Communism may have been attractive to reasonable, rational and moral people we are not defending Nazism and Communism. Quite the contrary, we are trying to stop these ideologies from ever reentering the world stage. If all I understand about Nazism was that it was intolerant than I will not be able to recognize it when it comes to tempt me in real life with its offer of national unity, pride, order and the advancement of civilization. I would also point out that this applies to religion. Religious groups often make the mistake of thinking that they can shut their children away from the outside world and create straw-man images. This works up until the moment that the child comes in contact with the real outside world and realizes that his parents and teachers have misled him. In my experience there is not a more powerful way to convince a person to abandon his previous beliefs than to allow him to realize that the authority structure which he has followed has been less than honest with him even about some small issue. If my parents and teachers will lie to me about one thing what else might they have lied to me about?

As to the issue of the importance of writing non-polemical history and our need to write narrative, yes there is a conflict. We are fighting against a deeply rooted part of our nature. To make matter all the worse, we are up against the desires of a society that does not have historical interests at heart. Textbooks are passed through committees made up of non-historians who wish to use history to lobby for their own group interest. It is for this reason that I refuse to teach out of a formal textbook. Writing non-polemical history is not going to be easily accomplished if at all. This is one of the reasons why we need professional historians, who have spent years immersing themselves not just in historical documents, but in historical reasoning as well. Some gentlemen scholar writing history in his spare time as a hobby is just not going to cut it; it will get us Gibbon.

 I do believe that it is at least theoretically possible to transcend our human biases and write non-polemical history. The first thing is that history is about a method and not a narrative. As long as we are simply using the historical method to analyze texts we get around the issue of narrative and do not have to worry about bias and polemics. The second thing is that when we do eventually come to write narrative, which we must in the end, we can avoid the standard narratives. Instead of talking about conflicts with heroes and villains we can talk about evolving processes that have arisen between contesting sides. In this, Hegel was onto something, though I would not accept his attempt to enforce meta-narratives over all of history. Even if the two sides may never have been able to reconcile in life, the historian understands both sides and therefore makes a sort of peace between them.

If you are interested in the topic of historical narratives I would recommend you read Hayden White's Metahistory.

Does History Have any Utilitarian Value? A Response

In Part II you state, "The humanities have no utilitarian." In Part III, you state that history-buffs are of "no practical use to anyone" because they do not analyze primary/secondary sources and do not use the historical method, which in turn implies that the work of historians does have practical value. In Part IV, you challenge post-modernists who do not believe that the humanities have intrinsic value. My confusion may be cleared up if you could explain the relationship between those statements. Does your assertion that the "humanities have no utilitarian value" exclude history (i.e. Does history have utilitarian value? Practical value? Non-utilitarian value?). Also, is History part of the Humanities or is it a Social Science? Does it make a difference as to whether History has utilitarian value if you classify it as one or the other? 

I view history as part of the humanities and not as one of the sciences, social or any other. As part of the humanities, history has no utilitarian value; it does not produce any goods with direct empirical benefits for human beings. Also, history is outside of the sciences as it has no predictive value. During the nineteenth century, it was quite common to view history as a science and to formulate specific laws. Hegel and Marx are good examples of this. In fact, Marx wanted to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin, because he saw what he was doing for history what Darwin had done for biology. This endeavor to find laws for history and create an overarching narrative has failed. Admittedly there is still the popular notion that one can learn from the past. But you will find about as many professional historians who believe this as you do scientists who reject evolution. In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series there is a character named Hari Seldon who, through his study of psychohistory, is able to formulate laws as to how human societies work to such an extent that he is able to predict the future with mathematical precision. He foresees the collapse of the Galactic Empire and a Dark Age lasting thirty thousand years. Through the creation of the Foundation, Seldon hopes to preserve the knowledge of the Empire so that the Dark Age would last only one thousand years. (Asimov essentially took Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and turned it into a series of science fiction novels.) No historian can do what Seldon does. We are just as clueless as everyone else. History as a science, therefore, is going to have to stay, for now, in the same realm as hyperspace travel, in science fiction. 

So what purpose does history serve that we bother to have students waste some of their valuable time studying it? The most obvious answer, and in my view the least important, is that history is useful for giving context for present-day events. For example, it is reasonable to expect that young people participating in our recent election of Barack Obama should know something about the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It may also be reasonable to expect that they know something about the history of American slavery, about the Civil War and about Abraham Lincoln. It is reasonable to expect that, with all the discussion about the recent downturn in the economy, people should know something about the Great Depression. Again this is not learning lessons from the past, this is just being able to put events into a certain context. The key difference between lessons and context is that context does not point and say that this happened in the past therefore you should do … . (whatever action fits into the ideology of the speaker) This understanding of history justifies at the very least that students in elementary school and high school should have to take some basic history courses taught by a teacher with a degree in education but not history. 

For me, history is important for three reasons. The first is that history is a method of thinking, a way of interrogating texts that is of vital importance for processing present-day issues. When I read a newspaper or listen to a public speaker, because I filter everything through the historical method, I read and hear a very different text. One that the authors of the text usually do not want me to pick up on. This interrogation of texts is quite similar to a police interrogation of witnesses and suspects. While it is possible to learn this method without studying history, I would say that history is a very useful setting because it allows you to step away from the issues of your day. For example, most people living in modern America have no particular strongly felt convictions one way or another as to who was right in the Hundred Years War, the English or the French. This leads to my second reason. History, when properly taught, encourages one to transcend issues. While the English and the French fought the Hundred Years War, for the historian, neither side is right or wrong. Both sides are products of their specific place in history. The historian, in his own mind, gets to bring both sides together and make a sort of peace between them. Imagine a generation of politicians trained on this sort of historical thinking and imagine how different our public discourse would be. (For more on this concept see Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History.) The third important thing that history does is that it forces one to confront a culture whose values are not one’s own. Not only is one forced to confront this different culture but one also finds oneself, in some sense, being drafted to defend this culture, now dead and buried, to a world that has passed on. In one sense this is very conservative as one is defending the past; in another sense, this is very liberal as it involves challenging present norms in society. 

With these three reasons in mind, I can affirmatively say with a clear conscious that history is an important field of study. Important enough that not only should children study it in elementary school and high school but that they need to be taught it by a teacher trained in the historical method and not an education major staying a chapter ahead of them in the textbook. Furthermore, history is something that should be a requirement in universities. Finally, for a select few, history and the historical method should become a way of life that they devote themselves to mind, body, and soul.

Jonathan Rosenblum’s Non-Haredi Defense of Haredism

Jonathan Rosenblum is a highly gifted speaker and writer and is without question one of the most effective apologists the Haredi community possesses. There is a certain irony to this when considering Rosenblum’s background and mode of thinking. This is made all the more poignant in light of his recent speech at KAJ. As I will demonstrate, the fact that the Haredi community relies on someone like Rosenblum highlights a fundamental weakness within Haredi ideology.

In many respects, Rosenblum’s case parallels that of R’ Yakov Horowitz of Project YES, a Haredi organization that works with at-risk teenagers. As I have already discussed, in earlier posts, R’ Horowitz’s analysis of the problems in the Haredi community and his recommended solutions are insightful and to be admired. The problem is that, in practice, they go against the very basic fundamentals of the Haredi worldview; if the Haredi community was to seriously implement what R’ Horowitz suggests they would be finished. Rosenblum is, if anything, a more extreme example.

Rosenblum is effective as a Haredi advocate precisely because he is not a product of the Haredi world and is someone who, by definition, could never have been produced by that world. He did not grow up Haredi. In fact, he did not grow up Orthodox at all, but only became religious as an adult. Rosenblum is not a product of Mir or Lakewood but of the University of Chicago and Yale. Rosenblum’s background is important to understanding his work. If Rosenblum had grown up Haredi and had gone onto the University of Chicago and Yale he would have been cast out. More importantly, when reading Rosenblum’s work you find an American conservative, not all that different from William Kristol or David Brooks. Like them, he is a product of American academia, who rebelled against its liberal culture. While Rosenblum is not a secular Jew and has made common cause with Haredim, his mode of doing so is a product not of the Haredi community but of American conservatism.

Because Rosenblum’s mode of thinking is distinctively non-Haredi, it should not surprise anyone that his beliefs are somewhat different from what one would expect to find in the Haredi community. His speech at KAJ is an excellent example of this. Judging from his speech, Rosenblum is a Hirschian; he assumes that Hirsch’s methodology is legitimate in of itself and not simply as a tool to hook people into Judaism. This is not a position acceptable to the Haredi community in terms of what matters most, as a position to be accepted internally within the community. I would love to see him try to give the same speech at an Agudath Yisroel convention.

Rosenblum, because of the situation that he is in, seems to twist himself into all sorts of interesting positions. For example, during his speech, he talked about his teacher, the late R’ Nachman Bulman, and how Rabbi Bulman, a Gerrer Hasid, was a supporter of R’ Hirsch. After the speech, R’ Yosef Blau pointed out to me that Rosenblum was being somewhat disingenuous when he referred to Rabbi Bulman as being a Gerrer Hasid. Rabbi Bulman might have come from a Gerrer family and maintained contacts with Gerrer all his life but he also went to Yeshiva University and, unlike many others, he never denied it. So while Rabbi Bulman might have been a devoted follower of R’ Samson Raphael Hirsch, he was hardly a representative figure of the Haredi community and he did not pick up his Hirschian ideals from them.

As a final example of the incongruity of Rosenblum’s position I would point to a comment he was kind enough to write about my earlier post in which he defends Rabbi Mantel:

In any event, the central point that Rabbi Mantel made is, in my opinion, incontestable: no one should think that the Hirschian derech is one easily followed and unless one is vaccinated with Rav Hirsch's pure yiras shomayim [fear of heaven], it is fraught with danger. I felt that he offered a necessary corrective, or Hegelian antithesis, if you will, to some of my remarks.

First of all, Rabbi Mantel went much further than simply saying that to be a Hirschian one needs to truly be motivated by a fear of heaven; doctors, lawyers, and professors can also fear heaven. Secondly, I would like to call attention to the nature of the defense that Rosenblum uses, that there is a need for a Hegelian antithesis. Officially, in the Haredi community, one is not supposed to be familiar with the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) beyond what you need to pass the Regents exams in high school. My guess is that Rosenblum did not pick up his knowledge of Hegel in a Haredi yeshiva. More importantly, the notion that a society needs to be balanced by contradictory viewpoints is a distinctively non-Haredi idea. A Hirschian or a Modern Orthodox worldview can grant a legitimate place to its opponents, even to Haredim, but if you are going to be Haredi you have to assume that all other positions are inherently illegitimate; there is the opinion of the Gedolim and everything else must be rejected.

Ironically enough, while the Haredi community may reject Hirsch they need him, possibly even more than Modern Orthodox Jews do. Hirsch provides an essential loincloth for Haredi outreach because he can appeal to people outside the community. So, as with the theory of evolution, it is okay to accept Hirsch when you are trying to make people religious as long as you do not make the mistake of taking him too seriously and become a personal believer. Similarly, the Haredi community requires people like Jonathan Rosenblum to defend them. Rosenblum is very effective at presenting a Haredi world that irreligious people can respect and appreciate. The problem, though, is that Rosenblum’s Haredi community has little to do with the Haredi community as it actually exists; if they were, they would cease to be Haredim and become Hirschians instead.