Tocqueville on 'the military spirit'

Last month’s repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell law has met with widespread and justified approval. Some voices, however, have issued reminders that military culture continues to be 'gendered' (see, for instance, here). Whether or not you agree with this, and whether or not you are troubled by it, it's perhaps worth reflecting on the degree to which attitudes on this bundle of issues have changed over time. Alexis de Tocqueville – not usually considered a militaristic thinker – wrote in this respect a revealing note to Volume Two of Democracy in America (which I quote below).

As Alan Ryan recently observed (“Tocqueville’s Lesson,” New York Review of Books, Dec. 9, 2010), Tocqueville in Volume Two of Democracy was concerned with "the dangers of ‘soft despotism,’ a condition in which the population were reduced to a sheep-like dependency on a state that made them comfortable, saved them the necessity of thought, and destroyed their will by enervation rather than oppression."

In the note to Volume Two to which I’ve referred, Tocqueville ruminated on what the taste for comfort might do to "the military spirit":

If the love of physical pleasures and the taste for well-being which are naturally prompted by equality [i.e., some social mobility and absence of a quasi-feudal class structure--LFC] should get such a hold on a democratic people that they should come to absorb it altogether, national mores would become so antipathetic to the military spirit that even the army, in spite of the professional interest leading soldiers to desire war, would come to love peace. Living in such a soft society, soldiers would come to think that slow but convenient and effortless promotion in peacetime was better than a more rapid rise in rank paid for by all the toils and privations of the battlefield. In such a mood, the army would take up arms without eagerness and use them without energy.... The remedy against such dangers does not lie in the army, but in the country. A democratic people which has kept its manly mores will always find courageous soldiers when it needs them.[1]

Today, this explicit equation of courage with 'manliness' would sound jarring to many people (though admittedly not to everyone). Which is an indication of, for lack of a better word, progress.

P.S. An interesting question is: when would this have started to sound jarring? Possibly not until quite late in the twentieth century. Note for instance that William James, writing almost a hundred years after Tocqueville, shared his general view of 'manliness' and concern about 'softness': "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy.... Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built -- unless, indeed, we wish for dangerous reactions against commonwealths fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a center of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood." [2]

Afterthought (added Jan.2): "A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy": sounds like something that might have been said by a revolutionary who's just come to power and is trying to prepare the people for an extended period of hardship and adversity. Did Fidel ever read "The Moral Equivalent of War"?

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1. A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. G. Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (Anchor Books, 1969 [and subsequent editions]), p. 734.

2. "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1910), in William James: The Essential Writings, ed. B. W. Wilshire (State Univ. of N.Y. Press, 1984), pp. 357-58.

Sexual abuse and terrorist activity: is there a connection?

Jessica Stern, lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School and author of The Ultimate Terrorists, gave a talk recently at the University of Maryland that I attended. Part of the talk covered the same ground as her article "Mind Over Martyr: How to Deradicalize Islamist Extremists" (Foreign Affairs, Jan/Feb 2010; link here [full text requires subscription]).

Rather than summarize the whole talk or article, I'll focus on one point. Stern writes:

"One element worth examining...is the potential impact of sexual abuse on radicalization. Much has been written about the role of radical madrasahs in creating terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere.... Outside of the Pakistani press, however, little note is made of the routine rape of boys at such schools. Also troubling is the rape of boys by warlords, the Afghan National Army, or the police in Afghanistan. Such abuses are commonplace on Thursdays...because Friday prayers are considered to absolve sinners of all wrongdoing. David Whetham, a specialist in military ethics at King's College London, reports that security checkpoints set up by the Afghan police and military have been used by some personnel to troll for attractive young men and boys on Thursday nights. The local population has been forced to accept these episodes as par for the course: they cannot imagine defying the all-powerful Afghan commanders. Could such sexual traumas be a form of humiliation that contributes to contemporary Islamist terrorism?"

The answer is not known, but in her talk Stern mentioned that several jihadists she has interviewed have hinted at this. The Western press has reported in recent years on the rape of women and girls in war zones, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. Scholars who study the intersection of gender and conflict also have written about the sexual exploitation of women and girls. But the fact that males can be and are victims of sexual exploitation has not been as widely discussed (except in the context of the clergy abuse scandal), and the possible connections to terrorist recruitment and behavior have not been investigated.
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Note: See also the Frontline (PBS) program "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan"; link here.

More on Newbolt and the sports-war 'equation'

The interesting comments on my post "The poetry of empire" (June 17) prompt these further remarks.

The large issue of the relation between poetry and colonialism, raised in the comments, is, unfortunately, beyond my competence to tackle here. On the narrower issue of the relation between Newbolt and Kipling, also raised in the comments, I think I was wrong to make a specific link between Newbolt's 'Vitai Lampada' and Kipling's 'White Man's Burden,' since the two poems' particular themes and their audiences (Kipling was addressing Americans in the wake of U.S. annexation of the Philippines, Newbolt was addressing his compatriots) are different. However, Kipling and Newbolt did share the same basic attitudes, a point that has been made before: see, for example, James G. Nelson's review of Vanessa F. Jackson's The Poetry of Henry Newbolt, in the journal English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 v.37 n.4 (1994), pp.538-41.

Newbolt is mentioned in A.N. Wilson's The Victorians (2003), where is weirdly misdescribed as a "man of the left" (p.292). Newbolt also appears in the opening chapter of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). Referring to the "commitment to the sporting spirit" as emblematic of the "innocence" with which the British entered the war, Fussell quotes 'Vitai Lampada' and notes that it had established "the classic equation between war and sport" (p.25).

Fussell proceeds to tell the story of Captain W.P. Nevill of the 8th East Surreys regiment, who fell on the first day of the Somme. During his last home leave before the battle, Nevill "bought four footballs [i.e., soccer balls], one for each platoon" and "offered a prize to the platoon which, at the jump-off, first kicked its football up to the German front line" (p.27). A private in another regiment who was there that day, quoted in Martin Middlebrook's First Day on the Somme and re-quoted by Fussell, reported seeing "'an infantryman climb onto the parapet into No Man's Land, beckoning others to follow. As he did so he kicked off a football. A good kick. The ball rose and traveled well towards the German line. That seemed to be the signal to advance.'"

Fussell, after noting that Nevill "was killed instantly" and that two of the soccer balls "are preserved today in English museums," continues: "That Captain Nevill's sporting feat was felt to derive from the literary inspiration of Newbolt's poem...seems apparent from the poem by one 'Touchstone' written to celebrate it. This appears on the border of an undated field concert program preserved in the Imperial War Museum:

THE GAME
A Company of the East Surrey Regiment is reported to have dribbled four footballs--the gift of their Captain, who fell in the fight--for a mile and a quarter into the enemy trenches.
On through the hail of slaughter,
Where gallant comrades fall,
Where blood is poured like water,
They drive the trickling ball.
The fear of death before them
Is but an empty name.
True to the land that bore them--
The SURREYS play the game.

"And so on [Fussell writes] for two more stanzas. If anyone at the time thought Captain Nevill's act preposterous, no one said so" (p.28).

For those whose history of World War One may be a bit rusty, it should be noted that the British suffered 60,000 killed and wounded (about 20,000 killed, 40,000 wounded) on the first day of the Somme. They were mowed down by German machine-gunners who had been left largely unscathed by a lengthy but ineffective pre-attack artillery bombardment. It is safe to assume that the First World War is the last time it would have seemed un-preposterous to kick a ball toward the enemy while attacking. This is one way of saying that the First World War changed the way both soldiers and civilians thought about war. The manifestos of the Italian Futurists, the first of which was published in Paris in 1909, advanced the view that war is "the only cure for the world" [guerra -- sola igiene del mondo] (J. Joll, Europe since 1870, p.127; cf. R. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p.6). It is hard to imagine any minimally sane person saying something like this after World War One. Although Fussell has been criticized for drawing too sharp a division between World War One and what came before it (see Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age, ch. 13), there is plenty of evidence to support the position that the First World War marked a watershed in attitudes about war. One of the casualties of the First World War was the particular view of war and "the sporting spirit" articulated in Newbolt's 'Vitai Lampada'. I will end by quoting the first sentence of James Nelson's review of Vanessa Jackson's book, cited above: "Henry Newbolt was one of several poets -- William Watson and Stephen Phillips also come to mind -- who awoke to sudden and unexpected fame in the Nineties [the 1890s], a fame which did not last, Newbolt's poetry, one might say, having been written as if it were consciously designed not to survive World War I."

The poetry of empire

In 1897, barrister and writer Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) published a poem called Vitai Lampada, which said, in essence, that fighting for the British empire against African "natives" demanded the same qualities of teamwork, loyalty, and sacrifice required of a schoolboy cricketer. In the poem, a soldier, far from home and facing almost certain death in a hopeless situation, imagines himself back on the school cricket close, feels his team captain's encouraging hand on his shoulder, and manfully proceeds to do his duty for monarch, country, and empire.

'Vitai Lampada' (rough translation: [they pass] the torch of life) arguably belongs to the same genre as Kipling's better-known "The White Man's Burden" (1899); today one can still find references, almost always deprecatory or satirical, to the refrain of Newbolt's poem: "Play up, play up, and play the game." If one ignores its imperialistic, militaristic, jingoistic message (a big "if"), 'Vitai Lampada' is undeniably stirring, though its strictly literary merits are slight to nonexistent. It was very popular in some circles in Britain in the years leading to the First World War and less popular, for understandable reasons, thereafter.

With this as background, you will perhaps appreciate my surprise at finding 'Vitai Lampada' reproduced in a kind of handbook called The Mammoth Book of Boys' Own Stuff, which I recently saw prominently displayed in a bookstore. This book is full of chapters on how to do various (if I may be permitted a sexist phrase) boy things (e.g., build a model rocket, camp in the wild, etc., etc.), but it also has a section with a few poems, of which 'Vitai Lampada', identified simply as a "patriotic" poem, is one. Reproducing an ode to Empire in a sort of bloated scout manual aimed at 12 and 13-year-olds, and published in 2008, is somewhat bizarre.

For those who may be curious, here is the poem.

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night,

Ten to make and the match to win

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

An hour to play, and the last man in.

And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat

Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,

But his captain's hand on his shoulder smote

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

The sand of the desert is sodden red -

Red with the wreck of the square that broke.

The gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,

And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

The river of death has brimmed its banks,

And England's far, and Honour a name,

But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks -

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

This is the word that year by year,

While in her place the school is set,

Every one of her sons must hear,

And none that hears it dare forget.

This they all with a joyful mind

Bear through life like a torch in flame,

And falling fling to the host behind -

"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

P.s. See also the post More on Newbolt and the sports/war equation.

Congo and MONUC

A UN Security Council team recently met with Congo's president Joseph Kabila, who said he hoped UN peacekeepers could leave by the next presidential election in 2011, according to the BBC. The UN peacekeeping mission in Congo (MONUC by its French acronym) is the largest one in the world, and its record is mixed. On the one hand, violence in the eastern Congo between government and various militia forces, including some Hutu militias from neighboring Rwanda, probably would have been worse without the UN's presence. On the other hand, during its mission MONUC has not been able to prevent mass population displacements or what the New York Times in October 2007 called an "epidemic" of rape and sexual violence (see Jeffrey Gettleman, "Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War," NYT, 10/7/07, link). (One hopes this problem is less acute now than it was in 2006-07.) Maybe conditions will allow MONUC to leave by 2011, but if you're a betting person, don't lay odds on it.