Our Terrible Love of War

Attempting to understand the roots of human hatred toward "the other."

This morning, I made coffee and poured it into a mug I purchased in Bethlehem on one of my four trips to the Holy Land over this past decade. I sighed in a prayer filled with grief and read portions of Job, Lamentations, and the Psalms of lament.

The horror of violence and terrorism, the slaughter of non-combatants, the massacre of innocents at a music festival, and the escalation of war with its inevitable toll of death for more innocents - I cannot watch the news nor view images of the carnage. It is too much for me to take.

In all my travels in Israel, Palestine, and the West Bank over these past ten years, I encountered people who desired peace. I met with people who championed a peaceful resolution. The minority population of Palestinian Christians of the ELCJHL who hosted us worked in schools where Christians and Muslims attended classes together. They served in hospitals, universities, and churches. On one trip, we met with the parents of victims of violence, the father of a Jewish man and the mother of a Muslim son. Side by side, they were saying, "Enough." The people I know include Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and Palestinians. I never met a Palestinian who advocated violence or said Israel should not exist. They longed for everything that you and I long for opportunities to live life, contribute to society, raise children, and flourish.

But, instead of civil society, Hamas extremists used violence on October 7 to shatter whatever fragile hope there may have been. You can read elsewhere some analysis of how and why this happened. I encourage you to look beyond the overly simplistic news sources and wrestle with understanding this complicated land we call Holy.

We all need a better understanding of the Middle East, the British war against the Ottoman Empire, the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1948 Palestine War or War of Independence, which displaced 700,000 Palestinian Arabs and concluded with the founding of Israel, the Six-Day War of 1967, why the Palestinians rejected UN Resolution 242 (1967), why the Camp David Accords of 1978 failed, the collapse of the December 2000 negotiations, the First and Second Intifada, the construction of the wall, the growth of settlements, and so on, up to the present day.

Equally important is understanding the geography of a country roughly the size of Vermont with its unique borders, especially the Gaza Strip, where Saturday's events occurred. You can read a helpful history of the Gaza Strip here.

The subject is a perplexing maze. Anyone who attempts to comment inevitably fails because the views on this part of the world have fallen into either/or, left/right, pro/anti categories. Thoughtful deliberation is quickly assailed by people who disagree with you before you ask questions. No Jungian holding the tension of the opposites, no Lutheran theological thinking in paradox, and no acknowledgment that several competing ideas might all have truth within them. Either you are with me or against me. That is the devolution of public discourse, not only on this subject but also in our world. It reflects the collapse of nuance and balance within our souls. How can anyone learn? How can anyone even begin to enter the conversation?

Jerusalem: An Ancient City of Three Faiths

Why do people resort to violence? Do we have within us some innate desire to harm? Is there within our essence a core tribalism that will never be satisfied without conquest? In the Christian tradition, this has been called sin. That centrifugal force tends to push everything and everyone out toward the periphery. All of our humanity seems to fly off until nothing is left, leaving a void that appears satisfied only by taking vengeance out on the other. I first learned that lesson on the playground in elementary school, only to see it play out repeatedly in institutions, clubs, churches, corporations, and world affairs.

James Hillman's frightening 2004 treatise A Terrible Love of War describes the history, philosophy, and psychology of our attitudes toward war. The title alone gives away the thesis, namely that we humans have a love of war. After World War II, a Frenchwoman said: 'You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt before or since." Many books and movies affirm this truth about the impact of war. Horrific as war may be, it gives purpose, meaning, and the intensity of being fully alive to some. What a frightening idea. I cannot bear it.

Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, claims that war is a force that gives us meaning because it does what religion is supposed to do – raise our lives into significance or immanence. It has all the elements:

       “Ceremonies of military service, the coercion by and obedience to a supreme command, the confrontation with death in battle as a last rite on earth, war’s promise of transcendence and its sacrificial love, the test of all human virtues and the presence of all human evils, the slaughter of blood victims, impersonally, collectively, in the name of a higher cause and blessed by ministers of several faiths – all drive home the conclusion that “War is religion.” Yet that conclusion provides little for fresh thought. We need to pass beyond what we know to imagining what we may not want to know.”

Rene Girard, the French philosopher, suggested that the primary means for avoiding total escalation of violence came through what he calls the scapegoat mechanism. We resolve conflict by uniting against an arbitrary other who is excluded and blamed for all the chaos. In the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus 16:8–10), the goat is ritually burdened with the sins of the people. The scapegoat was sent into the wilderness to placate that evil spirit, while a separate goat was slain as an offering.

Carl Jung believed that war emerged from the psyche of human beings, suggesting that it is the source of all dangers.

“The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several million human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche.” (CW 17, para 302)

Simone Weil

Simone Weil wrote: “Only he who has measured the dominion of force and knows how to respect it, is capable of love and justice.” What war teaches, Weil argues, is the experience of utter misery. That is not something I relish, but if we face misery, there can be a way to heal it.

While visiting my grandchildren this past Sunday, I worshiped at Alfred Street Baptist Church in Alexandria, Virginia. In the middle of Rev. Howard-John Wesley’s sermon, which focused on the Roman Centurion witnessing the death of Christ on the Cross, he noted the significance of witnessing the violence done to Jesus. Wesley emphasized the need to see and notice people in need and the world's sufferings. We desire to turn away, but we need to look, for in seeing the suffering, the antidote to human violence, namely compassion, is resurrected within us.

Rev Howard-John Wesley

I don’t know the answer to the conflict in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, the streets of American cities, or homes where domestic violence occurs. But, there is something to this idea of facing the horrors; seeing people in need rekindles our humanness, or should I say, the better nature of our humanness. Witnessing the crucified one in the suffering of our fellow human beings is something we would rather not experience. But if we see it, really see it, hopefully, witnessing will change us from the inside out.

Ultimately evil is done not so much by evil people, 

but by good people who do not know themselves and who do not probe deeply.

― Reinhold Niebuhr

Until Next Time, when I hope I can write about something more pleasant,

James Hazelwood, author, bishop, and spiritual companion, is the author of Weird Wisdom for the Second Half of Life and Everyday Spirituality: Discover a Life of Hope, Peace, and Meaning. His website is www.jameshazelwood.net