kathleen barry’s
UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN
reviewed by
GARY OLSON
____________________
Gary
Olson
chairs the Political Science Department at Moravian College
in Bethlehem, PA.
MASCULINITY,
MILITARISM AND EMPATHY
Knowing
something of feminist-human rights activist and sociologist
Kathleen Barry’s ground-breaking work on female sexual
slavery and related topics, I hoped to unconditionally recommend
her latest book Unmaking War, Remaking Men (Santa Clara,
CA: Rising Phoenix, 2010). And because I’ve recently been
studying the politics of empathy, I was also favorably predisposed
by the book’s intriguing subtitle, “How Empathy
Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves.”
I do
intend to make this book required reading in two of my courses,
including a seminar on the politics of identity which has a
gender component. However, as will become clear below, my only
hesitation for not totally embracing Barry’s thesis derives
from questions I have about the political lessons she draws
from her research. But more on that later.
In
recent years the gendered dimension of U.S. imperialism has
received increasing attention and this book is a welcome addition.
Certainly the dominant organizations supporting the empire are
gendered and it behooves us to incorporate an understanding
of the masculinization of these institutional subcultures into
our analysis. Indeed, as Robert Jensen has noted, there is a
close overlap between how men are socialized and the mission
of the U.S. military’s killing machine: “Dominance
and conquest through aggression and violence, in the service
of deepening and extending elite control over the resources
and markets of the world.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author
of Blood Politics, depicts this perverse construction
of masculinity, coupled with warfare, as “mutually reinforcing
enterprises.”
In
a small but telling example of this phenomenon, political scientist
Cynthia Enloe wonders about the male soldiers who remained silent
about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “Did any
of the American men involved in the interrogations keep silent
because they were afraid of being labeled ‘soft’
or ‘weak,’ thereby jeopardizing their status as
‘manly men’?” And Francis Shor, a preeminent
historian of U.S. imperialism, reminds us that “For hypermasculine
warriors, compassion and caring become signs of feminine weakness,
marking someone as a wimp or wuss.”
This
foreshadows how Barry answers the vexing question that prompted
her to write this book, namely, “Why do wars persist in
the face of our human urge to save and protect human life?”
Her response is that “War will not be unmade without remaking
masculinity.” In fact, the author’s answer to virtually
all questions surrounding war is the same: masculinity of the
violent, aggressive and militaristic form. The term she coins
for this phenomenon is core masculinity. Here she’s careful
to specify that this means core socialization and not violence
as an essential biological trait in men. Barry argues that early
on men are set up to be the protectors of women, children, tribe
and state. Violence and aggression follow from this role. Her
argument is more nuanced than I can do justice to here, but
she asserts that only by undoing core masculinity, eliminating
blinding macho and violent standards of manhood can we begin
“remaking men from the ground up, from the personal to
the political.”
For
me the most compelling parts of the book are those in which
she explains how masculinity requires that men’s lives
be expendable; how the military’s intensive brainwashing
reinforces and exploits earlier socialization of boys and men;
and the dynamics of the process she labels “From Soldier
to Psychopath.” The result is a soldier who kills without
remorse, acts without conscience or regret -- and then is praised
for it. The personal trauma and “loss of one’s soul”
that often follows in the wake of this behaviour receive careful
and sensitive treatment. This heart-rendering recital is driven
home by anecdotes collected from firsthand accounts and interviews
with soldiers. If empathy is putting oneself in another’s
shoes, the indissoluble combination of core masculinity with
brainwashing, degradation and stripping away any sense of self
aims to foreclose this response.
Further,
there is general agreement in the literature that sociopathy
is defined as the lack of empathy. Barry contends that by replacing
empathy with desensitized callousness, the military is creating
sociopathic characteristics, that the military itself is a sociopathogenic
institution. That is, the task of the military is to “normalize
amorality for soldiers . . . the same amorality found in sociopaths.”
Here I was reminded of an interview with former combat marine
Chris White (not included in this book) who recalled his recruiter
explaining the purpose of the initial twelve-week indoctrination
as removing any “undesirable traits, such as anti-individuality
for the sake of a team work ethic, and, most importantly, the
ability and even desire to kill other human beings.”
WHY
SOLDIERS FIGHT
The
debauched spirit reflecting an absence of remorse appears in
this refrain from grunts on the ground in Vietnam:
She
quotes one Marine who recalls that shooting to kill “becomes
muscle memory, you don’t think about it. You just do it.”
Soldiers have “the remorse driven out of them” and
the military counts on insensitivity to fill the void, allowing
more killing without a second thought. Another Marine tells
Barry that “shooting someone was like watching a moving
target, hitting it, and watching it fall. It wasn’t real.”
To
reshape human groups into effective killing machines the military
uses male bonding and attendant fears of being ostracized. It
would be unmanly, cowardly behavior not to proceed, even toward
one’s own likely death. Even in retrospect, after feeling
a modicum of remorse at “taking someone out” the
soldier’s mantra remains “I was only there to defend
the person next to me,” even as they return to the killing
fields.
Barry understands that one of the consequences is that “support
for your buddy and unit is as far as sympathy for others is
allowed to go” (emphasis added). Anyone who threatens
a buddy’s safety is “the enemy,” a potential
enemy, and someone without a life at all. In putting forward
this “fighting for each other” argument, Barry’s
position is compatible with research suggesting that soldiers
fight because those in their unit are depending on them.
Historian
S.L.A. Marshall’s study Men Against Fire in 1942
concluded: “I hold it to be of the simplest truths of
war that the one thing which enables an infantry soldier to
keep going with his weapon is the near presence or the presumed
presence of a comrade . . . He is sustained by his fellows primarily
and by his weapons secondarily.” This conclusion apparently
holds true for recent wars.
A military
study of American soldiers from Iraq concluded that the primary
motive was “fighting for my buddies.” One soldier’s
answer was typical as he responded, “That person means
more to you than anybody. You will die if he dies. That is why
I think that we protect each other in any situation.”
And this view wasn’t limited to the “grunts.”
Just prior to the start of the Gulf War in January, 1991, one
Marine Corps lieutenant colonel remarked, “Just remember
that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag,
for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are
fighting just for each other, just for each other.” Journalist
Sebastian Unger, after five months of observing U.S. troops
in eastern Afghanistan, concluded that “The guys were
not fighting for flag and country. They maybe joined for those
sorts of reasons, but once they were there, they were fighting
for each other.”
Patriotism,
fear of jail if drafted, lack of economic opportunities, job
training, naiveté, or boredom might explain a recruit’s
enlistment and undoubtedly there are individual exceptions,
but topping the list for actually engaging in combat is the
social connection of not wanting to let down one’s comrades.
This unit cohesion bleeds into self-preservation because remaining
alive means keeping fellow soldiers alive. Of course, while
the soldier is fighting on behalf of joint survival, the larger
context of the mission means he or she is a resource expended
on behalf of state-sanctioned killing.
In
Vietnam, Prof. James McPherson found that Army psychologists
became intensely concerned because the largely draftees not
only didn’t want to be there but “didn’t understand
in many cases, why they were there.” But the pressing
problem for the military was that because fresh replacements
arrived individually, the indispensable bonding with other members
of the unit was the issue.
In
terms of how to unmake war and remake men, Barry wisely advises
that we adopt an attitude of ‘critical empathy.’
This will allow us to see through the lies and disinformation
suffusing these matters. That is, we need to employ the potent
combination of emotion and intelligence. In that spirit and
because I felt Barry was selective in applying the cognitive
dimension of critical empathy, I’ll raise a few questions
about her analysis.
First,
the Pentagon might well prefer to rely on robotic warfare, a
variation on empathy-devoid androids. “Closing with the
enemy” already occurs with some frequency as “cubicle
warriors” in suburban Las Vegas dispense death from 7,500
miles away. This wholesale substitution for “boots on
the ground” is projected to occur sometime between 2020
and 2035. This doesn’t mean these changes won’t
be masculinized or that recruiting posters will soon read “we’re
looking for a few good androids.” But it has been suggested
that because the combat warrior ethic has been inseparable from
the military’s historic emphasis on face-to-face killing,
change in military doctrine might strongly influence future
generations of military masculine culture.
Second,
military indoctrination is complementary, albeit in more intense
form to the subtle and arguably more comprehensive indoctrination
of the civilian population under neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism’s
pathological numbing of our empathic disposition is what Shor
terms “the hectored heart,” and those “imperial
mental enclosures often work to deter most U.S. citizens from
expressing empathy toward those brutalized by U.S. imperial
policies.”
As
products of this empathy-deficient cultural programming, a certain
preconditioning may soften up and facilitate some aspects of
military training. However, as a tool of the state, the military
is less concerned with what a soldier thinks or believes about
“the system” because the objective is absolute compliance
in service to a specific mission. Empire requires a “trained
to kill” culture or the system would break down. Recall
that the definition of Marine Corps discipline is “instant
willingness and obedience to follow others” -- all orders
-- and to follow them absolutely.
For
instance, the respected Zogby polling organization found in
2006 that 72% of American troops in Iraq believed the U.S. should
exit the country within one year. No matter, as long as they
follow orders in the field of combat, this is a non-issue.
Finally,
it’s unarguable that the American empire currently requires
this particular version of gender construction. In that sense,
Barry’s book sheds needed light on the intersection between
masculinity and empire. But as Shor argues in his comprehensive
and accessible account of recent approaches to understanding
U.S. imperialism, this endemic masculinism is only one constituent
element deployed on behalf of creating, expanding, and defending
political-military control of the globe. Therefore, in trying
to understand war, it’s not helpful to claim, as Barry
does, that U.S. presidents have repeatedly led the country into
“unnecessary wars” to test and prove their machismo,
their virility. In her treatment of psychopathic leadership,
Barry specifically identifies machismo as the primary shared
pathology of “leaders,” from George W. Bush and
Ariel Sharon to Bin Laden and Dick Cheney. But not brutal war-mongers
like Golda Meier, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher? And what
of our rogues’ gallery of militarism enablers including
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice and
Hillary Clinton? If it’s socialized and not essential,
it’s not confined to men.
Perhaps
it’s the lack of opportunity for women rather than core
masculinity? Women now make up 20 percent of new recruits for
the U.S. military, 14 percent of the active-duty force, 17 percent
of the reserves and some 16 percent of senior officers. Women
in the military have bitterly complained about the heretofore
“military exclusion” rule because the lack of combat
experience slows down their promotion through the ranks. Valorizing
these behaviours for women will facilitate career advancement
and based on reports requested by Congress that rule is now
being reconsidered. Here I’m reminded of political scientist
Michael Parenti’s observation (I’m paraphrasing)
that it’s not what’s between one’s loins but
what’s between one’s ears that matters. U.S. imperialist
wars require empathy anesthetizing socializing agents that we
generally associate with traditional masculinity -- whether
the soldiers are male or female. I wish Barry had done more
to address these questions and I expect she’ll do so in
the future.
At
still other points she cites masculine revenge and irrational
masculine thinking as the key factors behind U.S. interventions
around the globe. I would argue that making core masculinity
the stand-alone, virtually monocausal explanation for U.S. (and
all) war making tends to weaken an otherwise sterling contribution.
And to argue that all this violence is the result of a culture
of socialized masculinity is more of a tautology than an answer.
Don’t we need to understand whose interests are being
advanced by this culture? Exactly who is reinforcing it? Yes,
in some important aspects the military is an end in itself but
I felt that Barry failed to address its primary role as servant
to the ruling interests and their capitalist state. In fact,
unless I missed them, Barry never mentions capitalism or imperialism,
the critical political-economic context. Here I reference Parenti’s
definition of imperialism: “The process whereby the dominant
investor interests in one country bring to bear military and
financial power upon another country in order to expropriate
the land, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets
of that country.” Unquestionably “core masculinity”
complements the overriding motive of protecting and advancing
the interests of transnational capital. However, I didn’t
detect any appreciation of the very real geopolitical and economic
motives behind U.S. global behavior. There’s not a single
reference to pillaging of natural resources like oil and gas,
military Keynesianism, exploitation of workers, the reasons
for 750+ U.S. military bases around the world and related factors.
I offer these few objections only to suggest that while socialized
masculinity facilitates war-making, in and of itself it can’t
explain the basis for U.S. imperialism.
Also
by Gary Olson:
Rifkin
and Singer
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