Why Do Wealth and Peace Exist?

A friend asked this question, and I wrote an answer.

Wealth exists because we invented agriculture, which gave us year-round access to stores of food from which some people can exclude others. This is why poverty exists, too, incidentally. I see wealth and poverty as two aspects of the same thing: scarcity. Foraging societies (like the Hadza in Africa) don't have the artificial scarcity that we civilized folk have, because every individual (including even fairly small children) knows how to go out into the bush and get food, shelter, and friendship (the basics we all need for survival: they don't call this wealth; it is simply life).

Peace exists when depopulation (from disease, famine, or war) gives agricultural societies breathing space to grow their wealth without having to protect it from other people. I see peace and war as fundamentally the same thing, complementary expressions of agricultural demographics. When foraging societies settle down to live in villages and cities, they become more fertile (producing more people in less time: this is peace--e.g. the Ara Pacis in ancient Rome, with pictures of motherhood on it). More humans (the outcome of greater fertility) means we need more stuff (wealth). Since we are sedentary and can only get wealth by access to land that we own (fence and work extensively)--we have to go out of our native habitat (overcrowded and overworked as it is) and occupy other land (virgin land). Eventually, we encounter other people--and the outcome of that meeting becomes war (not just the feuds of individual hunters and clans, which transcend agricultural society, but the organized genocide that is civilized war: we don't want mere revenge or justice or whatever; we want your land, and its wealth). 

Mercantilism and colonialism (or in their latest guise, globalization) allow us to enjoy peace and war, poverty and wealth, simultaneously. I send troops to Peter's land to take it or its wealth for me, and then sell that wealth on a "free" market to Paul, who has no idea that his diamonds come from the death of child-soldiers abroad. Poverty and war are outsourced to the frontier of civilization, so that the rich urban center can enjoy wealth and peace. To quote one of my favorite historians on the essence of peace: Auferre, trucidare, rapere falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.  

In sum: wealth and peace exist because somewhere someone died (often miserably and involuntarily, sometimes voluntarily or otherwise nobly).

Apocalypse

Chris Hedges.  War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.  New York: Perseus, 2002.  ISBN: 1586480499.

This is a sobering book, packed with insightful observations of the human condition at its worst.  Hedges writes from the perspective of a seasoned war journalist, well aware of all that his job entails (especially the evil).  Here are several passages that really struck me.  Even though the first is quite long, an extended reflection on war built around anecdotes from modern conflicts (especially the Persian Gulf War), it is worth quoting entire (pp. 146-150).

It is hard, maybe impossible, to fight a war if the cause is viewed as bankrupt. The sanctity of the cause is crucial to the war effort. The state spends tremendous time protecting, explaining, and promoting the cause. And some of the most important cheerleaders of the cause are the reporters. This is true in nearly every war. During the Gulf War, as in the weeks after the September attacks, communities gathered for vigils and worship services. The enterprise of the state became imbued with a religious aura. We, even those in the press, spoke in the collective. And because we in modern society have walked away from institutions that stand outside the state to find moral guidance and spiritual direction, we turn to the state in times of war. The state and the institutions of state become, for many, the center of worship in wartime. To expose the holes in the myth is to court excommunication.

Edmund Dene Morel, the British crusader against Belgian atrocities in the Congo, denounced World War I as madness. He argued that through a series of treaties kept secret from Parliament and the public, Britain had become caught up in the senseless and tragic debacle. His fight against the war saw mobs break up his meetings with stink bombs and his banners ripped down. He finally could not rent a hall. His friends deserted him. Police raided his office and his home. The wartime censor banned some of his writings. He was flooded with hate mail. The government finally jailed him in 1917. It was only after 8.5 million dead and 21 million wounded that he was proven correct--the treaties did indeed exist. The war was a needless waste. But by then the myth of the war was no longer needed, since the fighting had ended.

The moral certitude of the state in wartime is a kind of fundamentalism. And this dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal, has come increasingly to color the modern world of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, used to tell us that we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or as he liked to say, "the Christian fascists." He was not a scholar to be disregarded, however implausible such a scenario seemed at the time. There is a danger of a growing fusion between those in the state who wage war--both for and against modern states--and those who believe they understand and can act as agents for God.

History is awash with beleaguered revolutionaries and lunatic extremists who were endowed with enough luck and enough ruthlessness to fill power vacuums. The danger is not that fundamentalism will grow so much as that modern, secular society will wither. Already mainstream Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lie defeated and emasculated by the very forces that ironically turned them into tolerant, open institutions. In the event of massive and repeated terrorist strikes or an environmental catastrophe, an authoritarian state church could rise ascendant within American democracy. The current battle between us and our Islamic radical foes can only increase the reach of these groups.

But whether the impetus is ostensibly secular or religious, the adoption of the cause means adoption of the language of the cause. When we speak within the confines of this language we give up our linguistic capacity to question and make moral choices.

The cause is unassailable, wrapped in the mystery reserved for the divine. Those who attempt to expose the fabrications and to unwrap the contradictions of the cause are left isolated and reviled. We did not fight the Persian Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, but to ensure that we would continue to have cheap oil. But oil is hardly a cause that will bring crowds into the street.

I was with young Islamic militants in a Cairo slum a few weeks after the war. They no longer attended the state school because their families did not have the money to hire teachers to tutor them. The teachers, desperate for a decent income, would not let students pass unless they paid. These militants spent their days at the mosque. They saw the Persian Gulf War for what it was, a use of force by a country that consumed 25 percent of the world's petrol to protect its access to cheap oil. The message to them was this: We have everything and if you try to take it away from us we will kill you. It was not a message I could dispute.

We allied ourselves with some of the most despotic regimes in the region during the war, including the Syrians, who sponsor an array of terrorist groups. Damascus demanded $3 billion as the price for sending its troops to support the war effort. The morning the invasion began, I traveled with a Marine detachment past the Syrian soldiers. They were drinking tea. They waved us forward. None of them ever saw any fighting. We did not see Syrian soldiers again until they were passed through our lines after the combat was over so they, and our other Arab allies, could "liberate" Kuwait City. The ecological devastation to the region, the fact that Saddam Hussein remained in power to slaughter thousands of Shiites who rebelled with our encouragement against his regime and then were abandoned by us to their fate, the gross corruption and despotism of the Kuwaiti rulers, who did not move back to Kuwait City until their opulent palaces were refurbished, were minor footnotes to a stage-managed tale of triumph. As in most conflicts, the war, as presented to the public, was fantasy.

When those who commit crimes do so in the name of a cause, they often come to terms with the crimes through an ersatz moral relativism. Facts are trimmed, used, and become as interchangeable as opinions. The Muslims may say the Serbs shelled the marketplace in Sarajevo while the Serbs may say that the Muslims fired shells on their own citizens there to garner international support. Both opinions, if one sits in a cafe in Belgrade, may be valid. Both the facts and the opinions become a celebration of ignorance, and more ominously, a refusal to discredit the cause that has eaten away at one's moral conscience.

Destruction of honest inquiry, the notion that one fact is as good as the next, is one of the most disturbing consequences of war. The prosecution of war entails lying, often on a massive scale--something most governments engage in but especially when under the duress of war. The Serbs who were eventually able to admit that atrocities were carried out in their name explained away the crimes by saying that everyone did this in war. The same was true among the elite and the military in El Salvador. All could match an atrocity carried out by our side with an atrocity carried out by the enemy. Atrocity canceled out atrocity.

Hannah Arendt noted this attitude in Germany after World War II, calling it "nihilistic relativism." She believed it was a legacy of Nazi propaganda, which, unlike that of non-totalitarian states, was based on the concept that all facts could and would be altered and all Nazi lies should be made to appear true. Reality became a conglomerate of changing circumstances and slogans that could be true one day and false the next.

Illusions punctuate our lives, blinding us to our own inconsistencies and repeated moral failings. But in wartime these illusions are compounded. The cause, the protection of the nation, the fight to "liberate Kuwait" or wage "a war on terrorism," justifies the means. We dismantle our moral universe to serve the cause of war. And once it is dismantled it is nearly impossible to put it back together. It is very hard for most of us to see the justice of the other side, to admit that we too bear guilt. When we are asked to choose between truth and contentment, most of us pick contentment.

In these pages, I feel that Hedges touches all the problems that define my personal struggle to exist in society as a moral individual, somebody with real moral integrity.  His rhetoric comes from physical battlefields, where people kill and dismember each other in the flesh, but it applies also to metaphorical battlefields, where fanatics wage "culture wars" to kill and dismember the souls of people whose existence makes them uncomfortable (for reasons that are usually specious).  I grew up rather close to the Christian fascism that Hedges mentions, hearing a lot of talk as a youth about my duty to wage war with the devil--and "the world" (meaning people with no affinity for the particular brand of fascism I was meant to identify with the will and cause of God).  I was told that the devil would use "the world" to destroy me, that I had to band together with God's faithful to resist him--with money, labor, votes, whatever God's generals wanted.

As a trusting kid, I gave those generals everything they asked.  I took my marching orders, and I went to the battlefront (or "the mission field," as it is also called).  There I saw everything Hedges describes--less immediately and awfully revolting, but revolting nonetheless.  I saw that "the world" were mostly just people like me--fools following orders, idiots trying their best to make sense of the mess that is human society, and (yes) a few malicious criminals playing the fools against the idiots to get power and swag. I saw people condemned to hell-on-earth by God.  I saw them redeemed by the devil (and "the world").  I saw families ruined by specious "defenses of marriage" (which somehow required me to attack all the intimate human relationships that God's generals disliked, for reasons that amount to nothing objectively defensible: I know this because I tried to defend them--to good people, to myself, with words and deeds of integrity, words and deeds I could not and cannot find).  The immediate outcome of this experience was that I became alienated from Christian fanaticism.  The long-term outcome is that I am permanently alienated from human society on the large scale.  I mistrust all institutions too big to treat me, and individual people like me, as having more than statistical significance.

My experiences with religion led me to disaffiliate with organized churches on the large scale.  I can join small groups of people doing work I believe in.  I cannot and will not join a world-wide church (or movement).  I do not believe in world-wide movements as offering on balance more reward than risk, more good than evil.  I also disaffiliate with political movements on the large scale.  I will support politicians to whom I might matter as an individual.  I will not support factions (Left or Right, Republican or Democrat, communist or fascist).  There is a certain amount of calm that comes with this resolution of mine, a resolution that has some integrity.  But that calm is undercut by the realization that worldwide movements exist and use me, even when I wish to depart from them permanently and absolutely.  I am too weak still to take the road trodden by Diogenes of Sinope, and others whose attitude toward society (in the collective) I admire.  I aspire to be a good person--not a good Mormon, or a good Christian, or a good American, or a good capitalist, or a good global citizen (unless that is something I do by refusing to recognize any meaningful collective as acting for all people everywhere).

To the extent that I do participate still in society at large, I recognize that I am complicit in all kinds of political crime (that Hedges writes about in his book) and religious thuggery (that I write about on this blog).  I don't believe there is any way to exist in society at large without leaving a messy footprint, unfortunately.  I try to balance the evil I cause (when I must rely on large corporations in society) with good (that I do with small groups of people close to me), but I fear it is not enough (and never will be).  I have at last come to the place where the lines of the lyric poet Theognis (425-8 Gerber; Bible-readers should compare this with Ecclesiastes 4:3) make sense to me--become something I might think, feel, and say for myself:

Πάντων μὲν μὴ φῦναι ἐπιχθονίοισιν ἄριστον
    μηδ᾽ ἐσιδεῖν αὐγὰς ὀξέος ἠελίου,
φύντα δ᾽ ὅπως ὤκιστα πύλας Ἀΐδαο περῆσαι
    καὶ κεῖσθαι πολλὴν γῆν ἐπαμησάμενον.

This brings me to my other citations from Hedges:

It has been rare in every war I have covered to find a reporter who did not take sides. I believed--and still do--that in Bosnia and El Salvador, there were victims and oppressors in the conflict. But along with this acknowledgement comes for many a disturbing need to portray the side they back in their own self-image. The leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the rebels in El Salvador, the African National Congress, the Muslim-led government in Sarajevo, or the opposition in Serbia were all endowed with the qualities they did not possess. The Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr warned us that moral choice is not between the moral and the immoral, but between the immoral and the less immoral (p. 144).

"I, too, belong to this species," J. Glenn Gray wrote. "I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation's deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man" (p. 176).

To be a human being, it seems to me, is to be a dangerous animal. We need certain things in order to live.  To put it simply, we need death. Something must always die so that we may live, and the inevitable outcome of that reality is that we create evil. We embody evil. It is not something separable from our entity. It is precisely the same, in purely material terms, as the good we embody. If I am not careful, my love (of humanity, of God, of justice, of family and friends) becomes hatred (of humans unlike me, of others' gods or the devil, of injustice, of my tribe's enemies).  Even if I am impassive, resisting the transformation of love into hatred, others must still die so that I (or the collective I associate with) may live.  Plants, animals, bugs, ecosystems, and other people.  They will all die to support me, sooner or later, until it is my turn to die for them.  That is Nature's way (or God's or the devil's or whatever: they are all the same to me).

The moral dilemma in all this mess, as Niebuhr recognizes, is not to find good and maximize it.  It is to find evil and make it as small as possible--without eliminating it entirely, because that would destroy humanity.  God and the devil are really the same, it turns out.  We cannot have one without the other.  Love implies--creates, demands, is even--hatred, or at least indifference.  This remains true even when we deliberately set out to love all things.  "I love all things, including all those things that just died because I wanted to go on living."  We might feel justified in such love.  It might improve our quality of life.  But it does not change the reality that that life is built from death, death in which we remain complicit as long as we live.

If you are not the sort of person to care about this kind of thing, on an emotional level anyway, that is fine.  I have always felt somewhat guilty for existing, I confess.  I was inclined to read Theognis, even before I had learned to feel the pessimism and cynicism he expresses so eloquently.  I felt the evil of man early in my heart, and my experience in the world has confirmed my fear that human good is also evil.  I still love humanity--and myself, too.  I just cannot join the choruses of people working to fight terror (politically), to defend marriage (socially and religiously), to educate us all in the one true path to virtue, etc.  I believe that all such endeavors are fundamentally evil, and that that evil compounds awfully as movements gain traction in society--spreading from small groups to large factions like a deadly plague.  I hate it when people find me with some cause, political or economic or social or religious (they are all the same), and invite me to join the mob.  "Solidarity!" They cry.  "Let's all get in this together!"  My soul abhors this, the wild abandon with which we throw ourselves into the latest lemming charge--as though the past never happened, as though we know nothing of our condition as social animals (and indeed, many of us are clueless, naive in a way that is cute when we aren't heavily armed and full of deadly moral conviction).

"What keeps this misanthrope in society?" the reader might legitimately wonder.  "Is he a hypocrite as well as a miserable wretch?"  I stay for many reasons.  My family.  My friends.  Inertia.  My aptitudes and frailty (I have no love for death, no Stoic conviction as strong as that of Cato the Younger, and I lack the means to survive without civilization).  There is also art:

All great works of art find their full force in those moments when the conventions of the world are stripped away and we confront our weakness, vulnerability, and mortality. For learning, in the end, meant little to writers like Shakespeare unless it translated into human experience.

"As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our lives is salutary," Proust wrote. "It becomes dangerous, on the other hand, when, instead of awakening us to the personal life of the mind, reading tends to take its place" (p. 91).

I love life, even though it is sometimes an awful thing.  I love it, though its fabric is woven with death.  I do not desire life without end, life without death, heaven without hell, etc., for I know now that such a thing is impossible (for gods as well as men: I speak here of the life and death known to men, of course, not some life and death too remote from our experience to mean anything to us).  I desire merely to paint the best little portrait I can with the life I have, a life made of death, a life that some will legitimately hate or ignore, though I love it.  I desire to make my life and death a work of art, something that points to realities beyond me that I will never fully comprehend (realities that we point to vaguely with words like love, virtue, integrity, health, work, and even divinity or justice).  I don't want to force others to live my life.  I don't want the death that builds my life to arise in conditions where it is unwanted (though I know beings have died unwilling to keep me alive thus far, and they will do so again: still I will that my life be built of willing deaths, and I will that my own death find me eager for it; I want to give myself back to the world as ransom for all that I have taken from it). So I remain a man among men, an active participant in society, even though I can never again embrace any society (anytime, anywhere) as purely good (or just or fair or divine, etc.).

I love the process of making mistakes, even though these are sometimes catastrophic, and then struggling to overcome them.  I love combining the thoughts of other writers with my own personal experience, and then seeing what comes out--even when that is not always what I want or expect.  I love striving for virtue, even when I fail to achieve it, sometimes even when I see good reason to deem it unachievable (in certain domains).  I see how this love of mine is similar to the alcoholic's love of whiskey.  Let him die of his poison, and I will die of mine.  I wish us both happy, but not so bent on happiness that we die killing one another.  Better to die doing what we love than to waste time trying to convince the other to be like us.  He isn't, and he never will be.  Let him be, and make art of your own life, not his.  Muérete jodido, como quieras, sin joder al mundo entero, como haría un santo o un demonio.

Understanding Identity Loss

Jonathan Lear.  Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.  ISBN: 0674023293.

The following passage comes from Lear's book, a very interesting study of the collapse of the Crow culture (in the American West). Throughout the book, Lear tries to explain what the Crow chief Plenty Coups might have meant when he said, "[W]hen the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."  This explanation of Lear's really touched me:

Imagine that pieces of a chess game had inner lives.  And imagine that each took itself to be a center of agency.  I am a knight!  I see myself in tribal terms: I am a black knight!  I am proud to be a black knight!  We shall fight a glorious battle and capture the white king!  I think strategically in terms of my possible moves: two up and one to the left.  Perhaps I should wait here quietly for several moves, and if that white rook comes my way ... I understand all the other members of my tribe in terms of the roles they play: and I understand that we are all aspiring to excellence in the sense that we are trying to win.

Unbeknownst to me, my world exists because it is protected by a group of humans.  These are the guardians of the chess world, who insist that the only acceptable moves are moves that are allowable within the game of chess.  From my point of view as a thoughtful knight, the humans are as unknowable as the transcendent gods.  But suppose these chess-guardians were one day just to give it up: as a historical phenomenon, humans got bored with playing this game, and the game of chess goes out of existence.  My problem is not simply that my way of life has come to an end.  I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world.  I understand the other pieces in terms of their roles, but there are no longer any such roles.  Perhaps I am found attractive by humans as a physical object.  I am put on a bookshelf as a curiosity, an objet d'art.  I might sit for generations on a series of bookshelves--get traded as what humans call an antique--and all this while I am in utter confusion.  I have no idea what is going on.  This isn't primarily a psychological problem.  The concepts with which I would otherwise have understood myself--indeed, the concepts with which I would otherwise have shaped my identity--have gone out of existence (Lear, pp. 48-49).

I am that knight.  Outside the various games I have played over the course of my brief life, I have no identity.  Historical circumstances have forced me beyond those games--the game of being a good family man (as I understood it), the game of being a good Mormon, the game of being a good Christian, the game of being a good academic.  I am simply a curio now, a museum piece, a disoriented bit of misshapen matter that aspires to be part of a work of art--a game that it cannot find.  I need a game, a place to identify with, a geography to occupy--to contend for with others who see things that I see as mattering in some sense.  My fellow contenders and I don't have to agree precisely on everything, of course, but we need to share a sense of value, integrity, honor, culture.  We need to value the same kind of information, and to value the intellectual process that the other uses to address it--even when that process is not our own.  It might be hostile to ours, as the Sioux were hostile to the Crow: that hostility actually gave their lives meaning, as the hostility between black and white gives meaning to the game of chess.

American Mercenaries

Shawn Engbrecht.  America's Covert Warriors: Inside the World of Private Military Companies.  Washington, DC: Potomac, 2011.  ISBN: 159797238X.

This book is fascinating.  It outlines the history of modern US mercenaries (which arose out of the armed forces' need for a supply train, and the lack of government companies prepared to step into that role: this reminds me of the private companies that used to bid on government contracts in ancient Rome; essentially, it is the same system, with the same benefits and demerits).  Engbrecht, who has served as an American soldier and a PMC/PSD mercenary, offers a unique and realistic window onto what actually goes on abroad under the authority of the federal government of the United States.  Some of it is heroic, in all the best senses of that word, and some of it is as despicable as anything you could imagine.  Like other people, soldiers (public and private) are human: some of them react badly to adverse conditions (which can be unspeakably harsh: Engbrecht is quite good at putting them into words, as good as anyone else I have ever read on war; I especially like how he uses verbatim quotes from extensive interviews with soldiers and mercenaries).

According to Engbrecht, the essential problem with PMCs up to this point in time has been the carte blanche that they have "enjoyed" since the Bush administration: they are not accountable for the bullets they shoot, the equipment they lose, or the people that they kill.  Some of them, mostly those with military training and good morale, are OK with this kind of freedom: they can be accountable to themselves without turning into marauding orcs.  Others are emphatically incapable and devolve into angry apes with heavy artillery.  They get drunk all the time (for reasons that make sense when you read Engbrecht's description of war: it sucks), wreck equipment, steal the taxpayers' cash (outright or through bribes and graft), and shoot at any Iraqi that steps within range of their weapons.  Engbrecht says that no army, public or private, can maintain morale without accountability.  I think he is right.  His plans to make PMCs accountable seem like good ones, insofar as they propose means whereby American mercenaries become answerable in the same way that American regulars are.  War is one thing that our federal government has learned how to do better than private militias, and the reason for this (recognized by Engbrecht) is accountability.  American soldiers know that they are on the hook for every bullet they fire, every dollar of public money they spend, every person (civilian or hostile) that they shoot.  While this does not make them perfect, it does render them much less wasteful and damaging to American interests than their private counterparts in the PMCs.  Engbrecht gives the numbers and the personal anecdotes to back this observation up.

A real problem with the PMCs is that they are run explicitly for profit.  Some friends may be sad when I say this, but it seems to me that there are situations where problems cannot be wisely monetized (or at the very least, something has gone very wrong in our attempts to monetize them to date).  Consider the following observation from Harvard-educated Kuwaiti businessman providing financial backing to one of the PMCs whose behavior Engbrecht found particularly atrocious.  Asked why he did not care about the crimes his mercenaries were committing, he replied as follows:

You would have to kill and report over ten dead civilians a month for the next two years before I even came close to spending what you suggest I dispense with now.  There is no financial justification in sending these men home [for blowing up civilians without provocation].  There are no criminal activities that they can engage in that I can possibly be held liable for as they are in fact immune from prosecution.  The truth of the matter is that it costs less for me to allow your men to continue to allegedly kill Iraqis than it does to replace them with those who won't shoot everything in sight.  A dead Iraqi has no monetary value to me, especially at the reported rate of one a month.  I would like to remind you that we are fighting a war and that casualties such as what you purport to have seen are sadly inevitable.  Besides, they are probably all insurgents anyway.  Therefore, you may fire one or two [of the unhinged cowboys] at your discretion to provide an example, but only after their replacements are here in the country.  As for the rest I strongly suggest you check to see if you are tough enough to deal with the kind of situation we have here.  This is a war and people die -- even civilians (111-112).

Money has relative value.  So does life, admittedly.  But for the sake of our souls (individual and collective), we need to find a way to value life that does not allow it to become as cheap as it appears here.  The Kuwaiti quoted above was a Shia Muslim, and the Iraqis whose lives he didn't value were Sunni.  The mercenaries he employed were a mix of Americans and foreign nationals.  All of them valued life instinctively, the way all people do, but they had managed to convince themselves that Iraqis were different, that their lives didn't matter, that they could be wantonly gunned down without consequence.  Engbrecht is right to call this out for a lie.  There are circumstances in which you are justified in killing another person.  Moral people do not identify these circumstances by profit margins: acceptable as these might be (arguably) for deciding what stock to purchase, they are no substitute for moral judgment in a shooting war.

I do not think you can create laws that will make people behave the way you want them to.  But the least you can do (as a legislator) is hold people responsible, in theory.  If you send armed mercenaries onto the battlefield to represent the United States (or her government, at least), you can hold them to military standards of professional conduct.  They won't all fall short of the standard: most of them will appreciate it as a useful tool, a familiar piece of humane civilization in a world of savage chaos where ordinary humanity seems to have come unraveled.  Respecting people's right to individuate doesn't mean letting do whatever they please, wherever they happen to be.  Groups of people, to be effective, are always going to have "laws" (morals, behaviors, written and unwritten codes by which they judge themselves and others, for better or for worse).  Engbrecht is right to argue for accountability, which is the essence of moral integrity, as I see it these days.  I answer for myself, for my actions, for my ideas, for everything that I am -- for better or for worse.  I don't pass the buck to somebody else ("war is rough!").  I accept it as my own ('war' doesn't shoot innocent civilians: people armed with guns do that; if I carry a weapon into a war zone, I am answerable for how I use it there).

Here are some of the stories Engbrecht tells that I found most poignant.  The first is from his own experience: 

There was one man I knew who on the surface appeared helpful and kind.  Somewhat obese, he was forever giving out candies to the Iraqi kids near our camp.  He was the original roly-poly Santa Claus type.  A devout Christian, he carried a small Bible with him and prayed briefly every night.  He seemed to be pretty solid.  One day, we overtook an Iraqi vehicle.  It was the typical rattletrap sedan, occupied by an adult couple with two grimy kids in the backseat.  In other words, they were no threat.  Insurgents do not bring their children along to wage war.  It was obvious they hadn't seen us, which is not surprising as we were doing about 2.5 times their speed and were well in advance of the main convoy.  We began to slow down, in preparation to indicate to the driver to move to the side of the road for the convoy to pass behind us.  Without warning, as our truck pulled abreast, Bob (I shall call him Bob) leaned out the passenger side window and speared the Iraqi with the muzzle of his rifle.  No warning, no wave, nothing.  Just harpooned him like a fish in a barrel.  The driver of the sedan, eyes wide and blood pouring from his face, hit the brakes as his car swerved to the side of the road.  As we pulled away, Bob fire two shots, one into the ground and the second squarely into the radiator of the vehicle.  Steam began to erupt from the grille while a very panicked family cowered behind the dashboard.  Upon questioning, he simply stated that he had thought he had seen a threat and had acted accordingly.  By the literal interpretation of the rule book, he was entitled to have done what he did.  But we had a hard time buying his concept of what 'threat' meant.  But that was becoming the norm as opposed to the exception, and no action was taken (116-117).

Bob proclaimed himself to be a former Special Operations Command soldier -- from First Ranger Battalion, no less, which happens to be my alma mater.  So, as old soldiers do, we conversed about the good old days.  Only problem was Bob couldn't recall the name of his company commander, first sergeant, or even the name of the drop zone where we made about 80 percent of our parachute jumps.  It quickly became evident that Bob was lying (118).

Bob was a bully -- nothing more, nothing less.  All he could talk about was combat, explosive devices, and threats.  He was scared shitless and, because he was scared, vented his fear on the innocent.  He had no right to be there, and yet there are thousands like him who consider the Arabs literally as "Untermenschen," meaning subhumans fit for the gas chamber.  His laptop contained a huge collection of war porn portraying violent death.  But he still gave candy to the kids on the other side of the wire, was perfectly jovial in the chow hall, and prayed to be a good person every night.  He was far too quick on the trigger and always aimed to destroy the vehicle, knowing full well it was all most Iraqis had.  Why?  Because the prick could get away with it.  Here, he was king.  For him to return home, he would at best be a shift manager at Burger King.  I believe power can be utterly evil.  When I look at him, I am reminded of how seemingly normal men became concentration camp guards.  Pat one child on the head and then shoot his parents.  Had he been born eighty years ago in Germany, doubtless he would have found his way to Auschwitz.  Bob was eventually quietly released and has since returned to the United States (118-119).

This account is eerily familiar to me.  Like Bob, I too have found myself in positions where I affected a kindness belied by my behavior.  I try to be kind to my kids, but I am sometimes short with them.  While there is a place for deviation (no one is perfect), there are standards.  I do not have carte blanche with my kids, and I should not.  I am answerable to my wife, to the rest of my community.  No one should ever have carte blanche.  No matter how good we aspire to be, what matters in the end is how we turn out.  I can preach kindness all day and even practice it a little (Bob gave the kids candy), but all my goodness goes out the window when I take those aspirations and turn them into vicious, unprovoked attacks on innocent people.

If I want to be a moral person, then I have to hold myself accountable to more than just myself.  I have to care about other people.  I have to apologize to them, when I should, and mean it.  It does not matter where I am in any hierarchy: if I am president of the country, dictator, or the leader of a religious sect, then my responsibility to others is the same.  I cannot pretend that the "mantle" of my authority gives me immunity from common standards.  I cannot say that people wouldn't understand, that people have to accept my decisions unquestioned because I am powerful and mean well.  I need to give reasons for my behavior.  I need to own it.  I need to recognize when it causes harm, and adjust accordingly.  That is what a good person does.

The next story comes from a friend of Engbrecht, another private military contractor interviewing a potential recruit for his company:

I recall asking him how long he had been in Baghdad and how much ammunition he fired off on a weekly basis.  My company was at that time getting into one or two serious fights a month so I had a good idea of what to expect as far as ammo expenditure went.  I nearly fell off the chair when he told me, in all honesty, about a thousand rounds a week.  That was more than what I had used up in the last four months, and I had been on the road nearly every day!  I was dealing with somebody who enjoyed dropping the hammer, and that was a very bad sign. 

I took a closer look at him.  He was a black kid from Detroit, maybe twenty-four or twenty-five.  Lots of gold.  Former Navy with an 'other than honorable' discharge.  He was also carrying three different Glock pistols on his body, in both .40-caliber and 9mm caliber.  Two on his vest and one in a useless ankle holster.  This was in addition to his custom AK-47 with a seventy-five-round drum magazine.  In all my years in the Ranger regiment, I had never carried more than one weapon.  I asked him why all the pistols. 

"In case they get too close or I am out of ammunition," was his response. 
"Why three?" 
"In case one or two don't work," was what he told me. 

I was pretty sure by then he was a gangbanger.  Just a punk who could pull the trigger when he felt like it.  If he did this shit back on the block in Detroit, he would be in jail.  But over here he was some kind of fucking hero.  The only people who carry a multitude of weapons are those who are scared shitless.  Lack of confidence in both yourself and your weapon so you make up for it by carrying multiple backups.  I had seen it before, but this case was extreme.  I asked him how many ambushes he had been in. 

"Four and a half." 
That was a new one for me.  "How did you get in 'half an ambush'?" 

He replied that he had been in the vicinity when an army unit got the chop up the road so he figured he was entitled to say that he was in a 'half an ambush.' 

We didn't take him and told him to go look for work someplace else. 

I only saw him once more, a few months later, just off a big intersection on the way to BIAP.  He was taking photos of a shot-up car full of dead Iraqis.  Probably his own handiwork.  I couldn't see any weapons on the bodies.  But there was nothing I could do, so we just drove on (121-122).

What stands out to me here is the remark on fear made by Engbrecht's friend: the bad recruit was afraid, so he packed way more heat than he needed and shot at anything that moved.  This fear is something that we all experience.  It is what causes us to react thoughtlessly, angrily, when people do things that make us feel uncomfortable.  There is some truth to the saying that fear makes cowards of us all.  It makes us forget about integrity.  We become so focused on survival that we lose our reason.  We lose the ability to see real threats, and we waste our time (and ammunition) shooting up civilians (or fighting against gay marriage).  We confuse a subjective experience ("I feel sick") with a categorical moral imperative ("Iraqis must die!" "gay people cannot get married!").  The competent warrior has faced his fear and conquered it.  Making his way through dangerous circumstances, he does not give way to instinctive terror and pour lead into every potential threat that presents: he saves his bullets for clear and immediate dangers (like the federal deficit, the housing bubble, the education bubble, the need for cheap and sustainable ways of living). 

People often play on our fears to get us to do things that we might otherwise be hesitant about.  We are surrounded by prophets predicting the end of the world ("apocalypse now!") and demanding our immediate, passionate support in suppressing imminent threats to society -- including many threats that are entirely fictional when viewed in the light of sober reason.  As a result of my personal experiences, I have determined that fear is not useful in making long-term decisions (like how much heat I am going to pack around Baghdad, how I am going to view sex and marriage, what moral values I am going to live by and be remembered for).  Fear can get us out of a little jam fast when we might otherwise croak, but it is only a stop-gap -- even then, it is better to be a cool hand, as Engbrecht proves with story after story (including the detailed account he gives of a routine fire-fight between PMC mercenaries and Iraqi insurgents lying in ambush).  I strive not to be scared of government, of the "secular" left, the "religious" right, the police, the military, the mafia, the gays, the straights, or people in general: that doesn't mean that I am careless or fearless, only that I try to see past my fear (having learned by experience that it is irrational, as likely to harm me as save me).  I do what I think is right and let the cards fall, whether I am terrified or not.  I try to focus on cultivating the good I believe in, looking past the bugbears invoked by prophets of doom (who exist all over the place, not just in one organization or ideology).  Eventually, I will most certainly die, just like civilization and the universe: but that fact does not mean that we should blow everything up prematurely.  Life right now is good, more precious for being temporary and precarious.  Don't waste it being paralyzed with fear of the inevitable.  Meet your fate with a joke and a smile, having done your level best to live a beautiful, fearless life.

The last passage I am going to quote here from Engbrecht comes from one of the "good guys" in the mercenary trade -- one of the quiet professionals who did not shoot up civilians or steal money or otherwise debase himself in the horror that he survived.  I was really moved by his words:

Combat strips one bare.  There is no room for prejudice or preconceived notions.  Everything is subjugated to the one end: survival.  It does not matter that the man beside you is black or Hispanic or rich or fat or good looking.  Nor is it important what type of car he drives.  What is important is his ability to shoot, move, and communicate.  One gets to know one's comrades far better than one knows lifelong friends or even family.  Infantry combat is a white hot furnace that bonds men for life because the price of failure is death (190).

War does different things to different people.  Some become remote while others party as hard as they can.  I have found that I actually have become much more compassionate, generous, and overall more caring.  I stop to feed the squirrels and tend to seek intelligent, intimate relationships as opposed to having a revolving door on my bedroom (190-191). 

What a lost cause.  We have become a nation (or perhaps we always were and I just never caught it) of fat voyeurs vicariously living out their childish fantasies by viewing inane and idiotic reality television shows.  We equate material consumption and wealth directly to happiness, which is a colossal error as the two are completely separate entities.  We focus on the superficial -- the types of cars, breast enhancements, hair removal, the newest technical gadget -- all meaningless.  I am not even remotely materialistic anymore (191).

And the longer I stay at home the more I realize the less in common I have with everybody else.  For it is not society that has changed, it is I.  When one returns from far-flung fields of horror, a couple of things occur.  The first is that I am overwhelmingly grateful for what I have and the lifestyle I am able to lead, with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the first three chapters.  When one undergoes serious travail, the meaningless barbs of everyday life are pushed to the margins of importance.  But it is the second one that causes angst.  For in learning gratitude and appreciation for life, we become intolerant in the ways of a society that takes it for granted.  It is both the bane and the boon of great democratic civilizations: our forefathers have striven mightily to construct the foundations of just and free societies, only to have their grandchildren grow up to take them for granted ... the children are rich and fat enough to become consumed with the trivial and inane (191).

So I live in a big house by myself, rarely venturing to go out, alone in a sea of thousands, which makes it all more lonely still.  The hardest part is having to forgive society.  I cannot judge you for you do not know.  How can you possibly be expected to have more emotional depth when the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to you is having the air conditioner break for an afternoon?  I must forgive America for her being obsessed with the trivial, the mundane, the idiotic.  It frightens me that so few of you have ever had to fight for it, to viciously engage in mortal combat with those whose sole desire is to eliminate you from the face of the earth.  You may hear my words, but they do not register, for you have no scale upon which to to measure the reality of them.  I must forgive you because you do not understand.  And I am glad you do not understand because that means that you will hopefully never gaze upon a small boy trying to rearrange his internal organs that lay spread on the ground all around him.  I do not wish for you to see that, ergo I must forgive your ignorance.  Which makes me even lonelier, the mournful wolf padding softly through the snowy forest under a full moon, while the rest of the world sleeps.  With a bottle of whiskey.  I love you all.  Now fuck off and leave me alone (192).

This is pretty much my view of the world right now, though I don't have a soldier's excuse.  The last words are particularly poignant, capturing how I often feel towards the LDS church, my mission hierarchy, politicians, and even on occasion the academic institutions I have worked for: "I love you all.  Now f*** off and leave me alone!"  (The university has thus far been the institution most accommodating to my simultaneous need for communion and solitude.  I get free rein to go my own way, provided I turn in all drafts on time and attend classes.)  And the earlier words about forgiveness are spot-on.  Not to mention the wish that more of us looked for life beyond trivial materialism.  Philosophically speaking, I am a materialist, now, but not the kind of materialist who thinks that we should all shop till we drop.  I wish we could live sustainably, cheaply, at peace with nature and ourselves.  I don't demand air conditioning, automobiles, brand-name clothes, a cushy white-collar job, a nice house, an expensive education, or whatever other bread and circuses are currently on offer.  I am interested in other things: authenticity, integrity, sustainable wealth (which does not require all the props of modern business: you can be wealthy with few possessions, as long as you have the right tools and know how to use them).

I feel stripped bare quite a bit, these days.  Only I don't always have comrades in arms.  The closest thing are my friends and family, the people I interact with personally on a regular basis.  These are the people I would do anything to help.  These are the people who really care about me.  I certainly don't want to push them away: I value them, even (perhaps especially) when they don't see things precisely the way I do.  They matter to me in a way that society at large cannot, ever.  They are the faces that keep me accountable -- not the laws, or the police, or whatever other mechanisms society at large deploys to keep us all in line.  The reason I am as honest, faithful, and true as I am (not perfect, but striving) is because I care about these people.  I want to be there for them.  I want to help them -- really help them, not just have vague hopes or aspirations to help them.  I respect their autonomy.  I love them for it.  I respect them.  They are wonderful people, and I am proud to know them.

Honest Economy

I have been reading a lot of Lewis Mumford lately (of which more anon), and as a result I have some more thoughts about solving the problems of civilization (income inequality, class warfare, starvation, imbalanced use of resources -- a whole constellation of ills which can be neatly characterized as "boom and bust," meaning gluttony for some and famine for others).  Here are my thoughts (provisional thoughts, not definite conclusions):

(1) It is impossible to create a system in which there is no boom and bust.  Nature goes by fits and starts.  Animals live (and die) with feast and famine.  Systems fluctuate.  Stuff changes.  Organisms adapt (or die, and dying is nothing to be paralytically afraid of: when it happens, it happens).  Ever since the agricultural revolution, humanity en masse has been attempting to build a collective "too big to fail."  We have constructed tribes, cities, city-states, federations, nations, states, and the modern nation-state -- increasingly bigger collectives offering a bigger "social buffer" between the individual organism and catastrophic failure (death).  In every instance, nature has flouted us: our collectives could absorb some (relatively minor) shocks better by growing larger, but when they fell, they fell harder.  My toddlers are little guys.  They fall all the time, and they get hurt.  Compared with them, I am large.  I fall less.  But when I really do fall, I get hurt much worse than they do (just as an elephant hurts worse than I when it falls).  The fact of nature is that we are all going to fall (just as we are all going to die): the question is not how to avoid this eventuality, but how to optimize it (make falling -- and death -- as pleasant as possible).  It is silly to design systems "too big to fail" when history shows us (repeatedly) that every system fails.  Some systems do fail better than others, but it can be hard to see that fact when you are not looking for it (as many of us are not, because we are too busy looking for the impossible system that never fails).

(2) When it comes to dealing with failure (death) and success (not dying), people are (historically, understandably) irrational.  If the negative driving humanity to civilization is fear of failure (death), the positive is love for life (not dying).  While death (failure) is concrete, definite, and somewhat final, life (success) is not so easy to pin down.  To put it another way, we all know more or less what too much failure looks like, but we don't have a clue what too much success would be.  Another meal means more life.  Does that mean we should never stop eating, given the chance?  Historically, having things stockpiled can tide us over natural periods of famine: does this mean that bigger stockpiles are always better?  A little sex keeps society happy and alive (staving off failure): does that mean we should do it all the time?  These are serious questions that most people never ask -- they are too busy trying not to fail to wonder whether there might be such a thing as too much success (i.e. a point at which the bow of Heraclitus -- see frr. B48 and B51 DK -- converts success into failure).  As a species, humanity has consistently pursued success as something good by definition (as though it were concrete, known, and pure, such that it never turns into failure and could never, of itself, produce anything bad).  And we keep coming up against this brick wall (which we don't see, because fear of death is more powerful than any nagging doubts we might have about our love of life, which after all is the major obstacle keeping many of us from death, as we think).

(3) Irrational approaches to success cause problems.  We stockpile way too much stuff, then fight over our piles (and decimate them, sometimes utterly destroying them).  We value consumption for its own sake, and actively produce items whose "survival value" is nil (e.g. most plastic toys, sneakers with lights in them, luxury cars, most clothing items).  We try to produce all the time, eat all the time, have sex all the time, etc.  We are never satisfied (as a species): no matter how much we may have eaten at nature's table, we always want more (collectively).  This is an understandable reaction, given our aversion to famine (failure, death), but that does not make it good (for us or the world).  Perhaps the worst aspect of the whole process is that we are innately competitive and possessive, meaning that we naturally compete to see who can amass and keep the biggest pile of junk (as though this were the apex of success).  Historically, this means that we give war a very high value.  Today, we already know how to make nuclear bombs, but our collective knowledge of agriculture (particularly sustainable agriculture) remains pitiful (and in many cases has shrunk, meaning that as a civilization we know less about safe, sustainable cultivation than our forefathers).

(4) Solutions to the problems of civilization have to be organic.  While there is nothing inevitable about the way we live today -- it could change tomorrow -- change is not as simple as electing the right politician or voting for the right referendum.  The engines that drive the modern nation-state (as an institution) are engines of waste (overproduction, overconsumption) and war (which is the one thing the nation-state does well all over the world).  Looking at the historical events that gave us the nation-state, it appears to me that we are unlikely to force it to change by means of sweeping legislative reform (vel sim).  Laws recognize sea changes in human morality: they do not cause them.  (Lawmakers are emphatically not the teachers of mankind, but poets, novelists, musicians, and other creators of culture -- including scientists -- can be.)  Some people will disagree with me on this point, and will want to pursue legislative reform.  That is fine.  I do not oppose them.  But I do not believe in their work, either.  Or at the very least, I don't see that I have anything useful to contribute to it.  What we need is a not another constitution, another parliament, another nation-state -- but a new way of life.  We need a way of life that lets us cultivate success without courting disastrous failure.  We need a way of life that emphasizes not "being to big to fail" (overproduction, overconsumption, war) but "being just big enough to survive inevitable failures" (intelligent production, consumption, and competition).  We need new definitions of success, and we need to make those definitions so present in the public consciousness that people naturally get behind them (at which point, if we ever reach it, legislators will take note and change their books).

For me, the fourth point above is the most exciting.  I think we already have many better definitions of success available throughout the world than appear reflected in the policies of most nation-states.  I think many people are already "on the right side" and are working for what will be a better world (if the rest of us don't cut them short by blowing them up, and if nature decides to renew our lease on life).  I think there are many good communities rising up that value intelligent approaches to success, failure, and resource management.  I don't want to stifle those communities.  I don't want to put any kind of damper on their approaches to the problem(s) I have outlined.  I think a crucial part of outgrowing the irrational part of our human reaction to failure (death) will be learning to let go of the idea that there must be a single, unitary line in the sand to which all people everywhere must hew to make a better world.  The ideal world contains many people, many ideas, many different kinds of communities, and many different solutions to the problems posed by life.  It does not demand universal adherence to an imbalanced "good" that all must worship.  It knows all kinds of goods, and it sees the reality that any good will go bad under certain circumstances.  It frees people to recognize and adapt to their own unique situation in the dance of life that holds us all together.  So, follow the beat of your own drummer -- just be sure to listen to him very, very carefully.