14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Song of a Bullet, June 1, 2005
This review is from: The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia (Hardcover)
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.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Disenchantment of Chivalry, August 31, 2005
This review is from: The Bullet's Song: Romantic Violence and Utopia (Hardcover)
"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. In the end all the main characters arrived at a certain clarity of what their actions had achieved or failed to achieve or had unintentionally achieved. They had got beyond their own ideals/ideology and realized their distinctly human limitations, or perhaps the (un)avoidable tragedy, farce and chance of human experience?
This is no minor issue today in a time of schizophrenic public debate/information available, which relies on endless and ambiguous assumption . You are suppose to "just know" which way to go, whom to follow. But it never really works out that way.
Instead, we always struggle with a compromise of irreconcilable values - which is the curse of modern times. Somebody always gets screwed over - either your parents, or your kids, or your spouse, or yourself. Endless value conflicts in a war of opposing "gods" who fight on in dis-enchanted form as obscure interests. Whereas before there was only the absolute ethic, there is in modernity a variety of warring value "spheres" - Weber defined modernity in terms of the conflict in values interacting with modern social processes. What Pfaff really seems to lament is the loss of this absolute ethic, what Medieval Christianity for example promised and for generations many believed . . . His appeal seems to me that of a modern follower of Thomas Aquinus, someone looking for a synthesis of reason and faith, which is unfortunately not possible in the modern West. Or is he more in the line of the stoics and Marcus Aurelius, actually appealing to a pre-Christian ethic?
In any case, as Nietzsche indicated, it was not the end of chivalry as a value set, but the end of the absolute ethic that Christianity once supplied that was the crisis facing the West. The lack of that absolute ethic, transcending all other values - what after all could compete with serving the Lord and safeguarding one's own everlasting soul? - has been replaced by a return to "polytheism" as Weber described. This of course pre-dated 1914, so what was the effect of the war? The war acted as a catalyst, quickening the pace of change, challenging the old values and notions which did not survive this "hammer". Nietzsche said that new values were necessary and that we as individuals would have to choose them. Few are up to such a challenge, even today, so the tendency is to find a replacement for the lost absolute ethic in political ideology or retreat and attempt a "re-enchantment" of religion or other traditional dogma.
This is where Pfaff's ideal falls short imo, since it requires a rather extensive "surrender of the intellect", in effect repeating the same sort of commitment (this time a return to traditional Christianity or Christian-like stoicism) without questioning what might be the unintended results of those commitments. Even a Marcus Aurelius was afterall the father of a Commodus. In this way, Max Weber's ideal of the politician balancing the ethic of responsibility with that of conviction, yet being conscious of the historical processes and tragic outcomes that befall human endeavour, is more intellectually appealing than Pfaff's call for a re-enchantment of the lost Christianity of our great-grandparents. Pfaff's idea of virtue is based on ascetic self-denial and sacrifice "to achieve perfection in the performance of something of no inherent utility" (page 311), but it was Nietzsche again in his influential 3rd Essay in The Genealogy of Morals that showed this ascetic ideal as the mother of science which leads us back to the confusion or debasement of all values, since as in his example of Ernst Jünger's focused and scientific study of beetles, even science can have no "inherent utility".
Still the journey that William Pfaff takes you on to reach his conclusions is an impressively insightful view of the 20th Century and the sanguinary ideologies that caused it to destroy much of the tottering moral universe that had existed at its beginning. He knows his history, especially of the struggle against Communism and his description of Willi Münzenberg and the Comintern provides much that makes some of the current methods of mass persuasion comprehensible. Contrary to those who think that recent actions of groups to undermine the legitimacy of the state is something new (referred to often as 4th Generation Warfare), Pfaff shows that it was in reality Soviet policy from the 1920's on. It all comes down to how one defines the state.
This brings up another important question that Pfaff never asks. If the attitude as expressed in the Weber quote no longer expresses Western attitudes towards war, how come it does in fact express the attitudes of many in the world today, those political communities fighting for what they consider their very existence? I suspect that a fighter in the current Iraqi resistance, or among the Palestinians of the West Bank, would find Weber's view of 1916 obviously correct.
Here, I mention America since it is only in America, only here in the West, where anything approaching the old chivalric ethic still survives. Who in America joins the military with the idea that they would welcome a hero's death? That their death would have special meaning for the entire community that they represent? That's not really it, is it? Does not in fact every volunteer join with the idea that he or she will undoubtedly survive and experience old age, with grandchildren on their knee, telling of their service for the great cause? It is more the trappings of the old ethic that attracts us, discounting the materialist incentives, the shards of the old ethos, not the moral ideal - the real essence - that attracts us. When the reality intrudes we react bitterly - "how could such a thing happen?"
Should we lament this fact? It is in fact only in the West, and in Japan, India, South Africa, much of South America. . . where we have nothing left to fight and die for. Our societies are either prosperous and powerful, or we are not willing to take a violent alternative due to historical experience. Beyond attack in most senses, even the "threats" more the nature of "blowback" of our own failed Western policies, better dealt with as a police matter. Obviously a war for oil would never command the same sort of devotion or commitment, which is why our current war(s) have to be packaged with compelling masks. . .
This is all within Pfaff's argument, which makes it a powerful one. One which would
allow humanity to focus on the real dangers at hand. We need not fear each other, but rather need to address questions concerning our environmental survival, not a moral question at all since it does not involve a choice.
One last comment: Pfaff seems to misread Leo Strauss (page 307) since Strauss rejects Natural Law - divine or otherwise - and...
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