June 21, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    As a child of seven or eight in war-torn China, I used to think that newspapers were designed to report on wars and that once these came to an end, so would the newspapers. Unfortunately, seventy years of life have taught me that wars never come to an end—that somewhere on earth one group of human beings is gleefully slaughtering another. Does this mean that war is inevitable, that it is grounded in human nature? Whatever the answer, war does one thing well: it heightens the emotions and projects people out of the dullness of their lives to participate, however humbly, on the stage of history. War elicits the worst and the best in people—unspeakable cruelty, uninhibited indulgence in violence, blood lust and orgies of power, but also supreme acts of courage, self-sacrifice, and even—in certain moods—compassion for the wounded and dying, including those of the enemy. Good and evil, normally enacted only in such small doings as helping an old lady find her car in the parking lot, or short changing the government on tax returns, giving blood to the Red Cross, or slandering a colleague, take on heroic proportions in the heat of battle. We become larger than life—and that can be intoxicating and addictive: hence one war follows another, and history is always designated "pre-war" or "post-war"—high water-marks in the collective psyche—and never "pre-peace" or "post-peace."    

    What I have said in long-winded academic prose, native Americans have said more succinctly and forcefully. The Cherokees and the Iroquois seemed constantly at war with one another, which they fought with ferocity. When the British urged them to make peace, the Indians said something like this. "OK. We'll stop fighting the Cherokees (or the Iroquois), but we must be at war with some tribe, or else we won't know what to do with ourselves." (Oliver La Farge, A Pictorial History of the American Indian)

    Peace can be dull. But does it have to be so? Consider Athens in the fifth century BCE. It was a time of unprecedented cultural efflorescence. Sophocles and Euripides wrote their tragedies, Aristophanes his comedies; the Parthenon was being built and the great frieze was being cut in marble; philosophers and worked out the atomic theory of the constitution of matter; the Sophists revolutionized political, moral, and social theory; and Pericles delivered his immortal Funeral Oration. And yet the great historian, Thucydides, ignored these timeless accomplishments, with a single exception—if it can be called such—of a tangential reference to the Funeral Oration. So what did Thucydides consider more worthy of notice? You got it: war! And war for two somewhat contradictory reasons. One: it was a perfectly normal aspect of human life. The Greeks of Thucydides's time were constantly fighting, city against city, city alliances against city alliances, and Greeks against Persians. Two: war—as I noted earlier—raised the human capacity for good and evil far above the normal level, making humans and their actions more vivid, more worthy of note in drama and history. (Bernard Knox, Essays, Ancient and Modern)

    Maybe George W. has read Thucydides? After all, he was a graduate of Yale. America is doing great things scientifically, but what is stem cell research in scope and melodrama compared to war in Iraq? And if that war is beginning to pale, what about starting another one in Iran?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu