The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia

"War, as the realized threat of force, is able to create in the modern political community a pathos and a feeling of community and thereby releases an unconditional community of sacrifice among the combatants. Furthermore war releases the work of compassion and love for the needy which breaks through all barriers of naturally given groups, and it does this as a mass phenomenon. Religion, from its side, can only in general provide a similar ethic of brotherliness in the heroic-warrior communities. And furthermore war performs something for the combatant himself that is quite distinctive in his sensibility: the perception of the meaning and consecration of death, which belongs to him alone. The community of the standing army in the field is today aware of itself as a community until death, the greatest of its kind - just as in the times of the warrior bands. . . Death in arms, only here in this massiveness of death, can the individual believe he knows that he dies `for' something." Max Weber, Intermediate Reflection, ca 1916 Few would believe in such sentiments today. Weber himself did not look at the war the same way two years later, although his quoted comments were meant to describe the "meaning" individuals placed in war, as members of a political community of destiny, comparing it with religious sentiments. William Pfaff's The Bullet's Song is arguably his best book. Here he takes a subjective look at the great crisis or complexus of crises that arose with the First World War. With the chivalric moral values that underpinned Western Liberalism destroyed by the war, a vacuum resulted that had to be replaced with something. Unfortunately for humanity that something was a series of militant and irrational utopianisms that have led to an unprecedented series of man-made global disasters. As Pfaff implies we are not at the end of this tendency, might actually be in the grips of the last and potentially most powerful of these secular replacements for God. "The enemy is identified as a metaphysical or spiritual reality. . . This marks an advance of American political thought toward the darkness of totalitarian conceptions and discourse, translating human conflict into metaphysical combat." Page 309. Also "it is easy to conceive of the future in Hobbesian terms of totally self-interested power struggles, however disguised these may be in the rhetoric of liberalism". Page 307. And finally "It is essential to recognize the possibility that the disordered and morally catastrophic century in which the persons in my book lived might represent our future and not only our past." Page 319. Pfaff looks at these utopian ideas from the perspectives of seven main biographies of men who were caught up in the confusion and promise of their times and attempted to resolve their sense of chivalry with the confusing and massive violence around them. All came up short and some ended up turning on the very ideals they had suffered so much to fulfil.

People delude themselves into believing that they are on the right path, dreaming of a better life for their putative descendants. Pfaff has a trenchant, aphoristic style, filled with the thunder of Herman Melville, always sweeping argument off the table with his fist, and I admire the way he brings back the spirit of Mencken into his newspaper writing when he goes about his business writing op ed pieces and the like for the International Herald Trib. This book, however, is something with a little more scope, a biographical study of six influential authors who sought to improve the world with advanced political views, and who, in general, made a mishmash of things without even trying. Many Americans will read this book and see a tragic reflection of our own nation's current political nightmare, like looking into the dark hand mirror of Snow White's wicked stepmother. Many of us will know Lawrence of Arabia at least from the movie, but the lives of some of the other adventurer-authors will be fairly obscure, like Junger, or once notorious, now obscure as history turns a spade onto their graves (like Andre Malraux, whose books my father loved). Sometimes they simply collapse under Pfaff's cool scorn. And sometimes they snap back, like saplings in spring after the snow melts, and whip back in our faces with unexpected force. You might feel that Pfaff has taken his old copy of "The God That Failed" and carved up the pages and presented it as a new book, but he has actually done a fair amount of original research and the stew is tasty. I wish that Pfaff had included at least one American in his study of six men. The implication as it stands is that men of many nations have gone mad through devotion to extreme politics, but Americans are immune. (As are women I guess.) We know from Pfaff's previous books that he does not feel this way at all. He might have written in depth about the strange case of Ezra Pound, who likewise felt himself to be a progressive on every level, but who judged from the outside died insane, as he had lived.