Gotham Diary:
Nothing New
6 June 2014
Aristotle says somewhere that the true aim of war is peace. He does not say that the true aim of war is victory.
In the light of this precept alone, World War I is the most egregious conflict since Roman times — since the militarization of powerful classes in the wake of the ancient empire’s collapse. In 1914, Europe was at peace, aside from the rash of Balkan affrays that characterized the subsidence of the Ottoman Empire. There was no genuine casus belli. The assassination of the heir to the crown of Austria-Hungary simply does not qualify as a threat to peace that would warrant war. No, World War I was ignited by a restless anxiety that afflicted Europe’s military leaders. The most restless and anxious of them all was Kaiser Wilhelm II, and his counterpart in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II — both men were the supreme military authorities in their respective empires — while not particularly restless, was anxious lest he be seen as timid and irresolute. Most of the generals and chiefs of staff were ageing men, who in another time might have contented themselves with trophy blondes. (Although Conrad von Hötzendorf’s love-life appears to have made him even more aggressive.) The three powers of central and eastern Europe — the three empires that collapsed during or at the end of the war — were armed by men who, for lack of anything better to do, cultivated hallucinations of vulnerability to sudden attack.
The kindling was provided by diplomats, who created a network of buzzing fretfulness throughout the capitals. Diplomats are supposed to avert war, but in this case their fussing over how to respond to the assassination at Sarajevo only amplified its illusory importance. (Austria never considered punishing Switzerland for “harboring” the assassin who stabbed its Empress to death in 1898.) In their minuet of communiqués and not-so-secret meetings, the ambassadors and attachés seemed to be imitating the great character actor Franklin Pangborn — exasperated beyond endurance but having the time of their lives.
The folly of the arms race that preceded the war is simply stupefying. How could presumably intelligent German policy-makers not understand that the pursuit of colonial ambitions required an unfettered access to the high seas that Germany could never have without Britain’s permission? No matter how large its navy, it might never be able to deploy its ships beyond confines of the North Sea. Having wasted millions on deadnoughts and cruisers, Germany would find lethal effectiveness in tiny submarines.
In short, I have learned nothing from John Keegan’s The First World War — nothing but a horde of details. Everything is as it was before; I might as well have spared myself the gruesome close-ups of the pointless slaughter of millions of men. And yet I feel that I have at least in a small way honored their sacrifice, simply by paying attention to the battles that, until now, were rather meaningless names.
At the end of his book, Keegan asks a number of questions, the most pointed of which is, Why did the war continue? Once it was clear that the war would not be a brisk affair along the lines of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, why didn’t everyone simply withdraw, if only to prepare to fight another day? And the best answer he can find is the camaraderie that grew among the troops as they fought together. “That is the ultimate mystery of the First World War. If we could understand its loves, as well as its hates, we would be nearer to understanding the mystery of human life.” What bottomless pathos in that! The ability of men to find meaning in absurdity is itself an absurdity, for even as it protects men from the horrors of senselessness, it validates senseless conduct.
An idle question that I find pressing me with an insistence that is not idle: why didn’t the Germans think to push on recklessly for Paris, surround the city with heavy artillery, and hold the Allies hostage to an unconditional armistice? In other words: to wage war for peace. In the end, we read about the Great War the better to understand the inevitability of the Worse that followed.
***
Tante Hannah
Reading The Life of the Mind, I’m having my first serious problem with the thought of Hannah Arendt. Her rigid insistence that thinking can occur only during a temporary withdrawal from the world, a complete putting-down of all worldly engagements that would seem Buddhist if it were not so purposeful — is she daft? Did she never have a useful insight during the course of a lively conversation with her brainier friends? Did she not attend thoughtfully to what others said in lectures and seminars? Arendt was a very sociable woman, warm to old friends and always eager to dispute a point. It is hard — impossible — to believe that this part of her life was intellectually fallow.
I suspect that it’s a question of cherchez la femme. When Arendt wrote — this may have been true of her speaking as well — she was clearly determined to make it difficult to find the woman in the author. Her elision of conversation — from the standpoint of serious German philosophers, a womanly weakness for chatter, or, worse, a decadent French pastime — reminds me of her elision of housework. Housework comes up for Arendt, in The Human Condition, only as the concern of household slaves in the ancient Greek polis — almost as if it came to end with slavery itself. Accustomed to servants throughout her childhood, the mature Arendt took no notice, in her ongoing appraisal of human activity, of what they did. With typical generosity, she contributed to the tuition of her “part-time” housemaid’s daughter. The ban on discussing womanly matters is so intense that Arendt’s biographer, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, mentions the maid only to note Arendt’s largesse; there is no other mention of household matters. (Although we are told that Hannah’s mother “kept house” for Arendt and her husband during the early years in New York.)
I don’t really fault Arendt for this evasion; it’s too clearly part and parcel of her déformation professionelle as a philosophy student in what was still the highly traditional world — to which women themselves only recently had been admitted — of the German university. Arendt was also living in a world all too inclined to dismiss women as intellectual inferiors; she must therefore be as little womanly as possible. (Happily, she managed this without unsexing herself personally.) All I hope is that future students of Arendt will tease out, not what she might have said about conversation and housework had she felt more free to do so (I’m fairly certain that she was unaware of the inner constraint), but what might be said in the comprehensive terms of her world view.
When I withdraw from the world, the best I can do is watch the clouds float by. I cannot really think unless I am at the keyboard; for me, thought is not a dialogue between me and myself, but a tussle between me and the sentence that I just wrote. I am certain that Hannah Arendt would dismiss me as a stupid slob.
Daily Blague news update: Getting Inflation Wrong.