The August-September issue of Position Papers leads with the rather dark theme of war. Two tragic wars in Ukraine and Gaza are grinding on with no end in sight, and in both cases with the real possibility that one or other will escalate into a full-scale regional war in the case of the Gaza conflict, and a world war in the case of Ukraine.
In both cases a chilling warning from the renowned military historian Victor Davis Hanson in his recent work The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation needs to be heeded: “The effort to destroy rather than merely defeat a trapped enemy ensures unprecedented savagery. And the zeal necessary to resist overwhelming odds eventually ensures a level of counter-violence that seals the fate of the defeated.” In his review of the book James Bradshaw observes that the war in Ukraine “… has become a bloody quagmire where neither the Russian aggressor nor the Ukrainian defender appears capable of substantially redrawing the map. Rather than the status quo pointing to a negotiated outcome, there is a risk of something much worse lying in store.”
In the second book on the war theme, historian Richard Overy’s Why War? – also reviewed by James Bradshaw – the argument is made that, as Bradshaw puts it: “With virtually all wars having multiple causal factors, there has been a tendency in this secular age to refuse to seriously examine the role of religious belief in explaining conflicts.” While Overy observes that “historians and social scientists have begun to argue that belief must be injected back into any analysis of warfare where religious or ideological motives can be seen to be paramount” the same cannot be said of many other commentators. I don’t think it could be said of the media at large, maybe particularly in Ireland, that they attend to the deeper cultural-religious tectonics at work in these conflicts. For instance, there seems to be a fear of acknowledging the dire role played in the Gaza conflict by the death cult that is radical Islam, but also to the rise of Jewish fundamentalism within Israel. (In some ways the animus of more radically fundamentalist Jews and Moslems towards one another is surprising since fundamentalist Islam and Judaism share much in common: both are fideistic, theocratic and espouse a narrow monotheism very hostile to Trinitarian Christianity.)
If observers fail to identify the deeper issues underlying the bloody conflicts in Ukraine and in Gaza then the wrong remedies will invariably be applied. As Bradshaw observes: “The conflicts which exist between countries and within countries cannot be solved unless they are understood, and that will often require a more serious religious dialogue than has been heard in recent times.”
But of course there is something deeply irrational and tragically inevitable about war. Bradshaw’s quote from the diabolical Judge Holden character in Cormac MacCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, perhaps gets at the essence of war better than any sociological or historical survey can: “War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.”
Our third book on the theme of violence is a memoir by Armagh born journalist Eamonn Mallie who covered much of the thirty years of conflict in Northern Ireland: Eyewitness to War and Peace: My Life in News, reviewed by Gerard Scullion.
This bloody conflict which claimed the lives of over 3,000 people was thankfully concluded with the signing of The Good Friday Agreement on 10th April 1998, in most part because of commitment to dialogue on the part of key politicians. There may be a lesson here for the other conflicts (which likewise may continue for decades rather than the initially presumed weeks or months). As Gerard Scullion puts it:
Yet, in the midst of the seemingly unending death and destruction, Mallie is deliberate in noting the efforts of courageous and bold individuals to bring about peace. In the end, it took a unique version of war-weariness, coupled with the outside intervention of intelligent politicians such as Bertie Ahern, Tony Blair and George Mitchell, to bring about a cessation of violence.
•••
While human nature is probably at its darkest when drawn into war, we see too the heights to which that same nature can ascend when drawn into creativity, whether artistic or technological. A wonderful example of artistic creativity is the work of the Soviet film director and screenwriter Andrei Tarkovsky – widely considered one of the best directors in cinema history. In the first of a two part In Passing series Michael Kirke looks at his life and work, and reveals (to me at least) an artist with a profound appreciation of what art is meant to achieve. As Tarkovsky was being subject to draconian censorship by the Soviet authorities, he made the following observation:
Am I really going to be sitting around again for years on end, waiting for somebody graciously to let my film through? What an extraordinary country this is? Don’t they want an international artistic triumph, don’t they want us to have good new films and books? They are frightened by real art. Quite understandably. Art can only be bad for them because it is humane, whereas their purpose is to crush everything that is alive, every shoot of humanity, any aspiration to freedom, any manifestation of art on our dreary horizon. They won’t be content until they have eliminated every symptom of independence and reduced people to the level of cattle.
It would make one ask where are the artists now, in the Western world? Where are the artists who can counter the efforts of our own anti-humanists, who want to reduce life in community to tribal-like conflict or even to an animal-like subjugation to our most primitive passions?
As regards the heights of technological creativity, Pat Hanratty reviews the story (and back-story) of USA’s incredible achievement of putting men on the moon in July 1969: One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon by Charles Fishman. This story is, as Pat observes, “a testament to what great minds working together can achieve in a positive sense, as distinct from the growth in the arms industry which promises only death and destruction.” It wasn’t just great brains that were needed to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, it required lots of brains; at its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and required the support of over 20,000 industrial firms and universities (and the average age of the Apollo workforce was 27).
This raises the issue of what happens to a society that no longer wants young people? Where will that creativity – artistic and technological – come from? Tim O’Sullivan reviews British demographer Paul Morland’s No One Left. Why the World Needs More Children which presents truly shocking statistics about the the spectre of depopulation haunting the world at large, and Europe in particular. For instance, in Italy in 1950, there were about seventeen persons under ten for every one person over eighty. Today, the two groups are matched roughly one-to-one. As Tim O’Sullivan suggests, at root the problem is not merely a demographic one, but a spiritual one. The population crisis cannot be understood through a purely materialistic analysis of the data. In the words of Pope Benedict in Caritas in Veritate (2009), “The development of individuals and peoples … requires new eyes and a new heart, capable of rising above a materialistic vision of human events.”
Finally David Gibney reviews The Bible and Poetry in which the author, English literary critic Michael Edwards, uses his professional expertise to explore the role of the poetic in Sacred Scripture. While, as David Gibney says, “The idea of the literary as a channel for the transcendent is not new, … for Edwards it was his path to the faith, and he wants to share some of these glimpses with his readers.” And certainly there appears to be a certain resonance here with the observation that anti-humanists want to reduce man to cattle by destroying true art, it appears that God uses the “strangeness” of poetry to assist in “the task of allowing a glimpse of what transcends us.”