History Book -- CARNAGE AND CULTURE by Victor Davis Hanson

I'm a big fan of Victor Davis Hanson as many of you are aware. Well, apparently, though it was a dominant force in the world of military history for about ten years, his theories seem to have drawn a great deal of poignant criticism from some key military historians, particularly John A. Lynn, author of Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, although he has been supported by the esteemed John Keegan, author of The Face of Battle.

One of the errors that most readers and analysts seem to make is to assume that Hanson is arguing for the "universal soldier." He is, in fact, not, in my opinion. What he is doing is, from a classical perspective, analyzing trends in the way Westerners fight (particularly against non-Westerners) and draws a number of conclusions from this. His basic thesis is that there are a number of factors that have been embedded in Western culture ever since the Graeco-Roman era. These provide a solid bedrock of cultural heritage which we unconsciously draw upon when we wage war. These factors are political freedom, capitalism, individualism, democracy, scientific inquiry, rationalism, and open debate.

I would agree.

First, let me assess Hanson's primary text on this subject, Carnage and Culture. It is this book that draws the lion's share of criticism, perhaps justly so. Hanson begins with the concepts of freedom, decisive battle, and the concept of the citizen-soldier, and cites a number of sample battles, Salamis, Gaugamela, and Cannae as examples. Then he moves on to landed warriors, rationalism, and scientific inquiry and capitalism, at Poitiers, Tenochtitlan, and Lepanto, respectively. He finishes with discipline, individualism, and open debate at Rourke's Drift, Midway, and the Tet Offensive. Each battle showcases one of these traits, and is used as a vehicle to illustrate how (often) that trait intermingles with the others in order to create a cultural mindset within the fighters and the army itself.

This tactic of showcasing certain battles is very strong in some areas, and weak in others. Gaugamela is a great example of decisive battle, but it doesn't demonstrate how that is a common concern of Western commanders and cultures. An entire book could be written solely on the trait of decisive battle, and still have solid counter-attacks that the concept was born in the modern era that produced von Clausewitz. Similarly, the chapter on Poitiers is especially weak in demonstrating how landed infantry are superior, as well as how they are a constant throughout Western warfare. Actually, in my opinion, landed infantry, much like decisive battle, aren't so much constants, but ideals, and indeed, I would have chosen several battles from the Hundred Years' War (a Western vs. Western conflict) over any other engagement as a prime example of what landed yeoman infantry are capable of on the battlefield (despite the fact that they were mostly archers and not shock infantry).

This is actually Hanson's greatest weakness--he doesn't seem to realize that he's discussing ideals. He admits that Western armies don't always fight in a "Western style," and in this he is correct. What he needs to clarify is that these ideals are embedded into Western culture as part of our Graeco-Roman heritage.

This idea of a cultural heritage from Greece and Rome is very much a part of the classical historian's mindset, and would seem extremely foreign to the new researcher of cultural history or cultural studies, who, in a quite postmodern or Foucaultian manner, would prefer to see history as a series of disconnected epistemes/discursive formations bereft of continuity. To the classical historian, this is an absurd concept, because we see influences of the Bronze Age directly impacting the thought-processes of later Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic Greeks through myth, story, and heroic epic--these periods were not disconnected, and not even the break of the Dark Ages of Greece could wipe out cultural memory.

According to Chester G. Starr, former adviser to my former adviser (Steven Sidebotham), in his Origins of Greek Civilization, Western civilization is unique because of it's Greek heritage of secular thought and rationalism--ideas that evolved during the Archaic and into the Classical periods, and are not found elsewhere. This is a common thread throughout the studies of ancient Mediterranean cultures, and seeing that Hanson is a classicist, it is unsurprising that he would have adopted just this sort of concept.

The strongest chapters in the book are the first (Salamis), and the fifth through eighth (Tenochtitlan, Lepanto, Rourke's Drift, and Midway respectively), and especially the eighth (Midway). I'm familiar with some of Hanson's sources, especially the firsthand work by Fuchida Mitsuo, entitled Midway: The Battle that Doomed Japan, which, from a Japanese perspective, clearly makes Hanson's point about individual initiative for him. Initiative is also observed throughout most of the other battles cited--as I've said, Hanson wants to emphasize the continuity aspect of these cultural characteristics.

The final chapter on the Tet Offensive (open debate) compares the stasis of Athens during the early Peloponnesian War to America during the late 1960s and the Vietnam War. While the comparison is apt, and does a lot to prove his point about internal dissent, he turns it into an indictment of the American media system and journalistic sensationalism that essentially lost America the war (although Westmoreland's foolish strategies and reluctance to take the war to North Vietnam were mentioned). This chapter could have been stronger if Hanson's own political agenda (one I albeit agree with, however) could have been put aside so that the author could focus more on how political dissent strengthens Western fighting capacity. This chapter actually seems at odds with itself, describing how open dialogue can be crippling (admittedly, he cites these cases as extreme), whereas in previous chapters he likened open dialogue to individualism and described how it increased the effectiveness of fighting forces at previous battles. Rather than citing it as a trait, I'd label open debate as a consequence of individualism and freedom within Western culture.

Hanson's other weakness is in portraying Western culture as monolithic, despite his own admonitions that it is, by far, not. In my opinion, he over-plays his hand throughout the book, leading to responses like Lynn's Battle. Lynn isn't going to tackle this from a classical perspective, that much is certain from his book's preface. I agree with Hanson that there are a number of Graeco-Roman cultural traits that have been passed down through Western civilization--traits which have, at times, been suppressed or superseded by the demands of the moment or the time period. I would argue that often these traits are mere ideals, not often or always realized, or perhaps realized only in parts of the Western world from time-to-time. However, the undeniable truth (in my opinion) is that these traits continually do surface, and typify Western civilization. They are a part of us, whether we like it or not.

The reason they surface is, I think, due to something my friend, Kevin, has said:

Hanson is highlighting the way Westerners think. Reducing it, or bending it, to something larger or smaller, completely misses his point. And thus throws his implicit warnings for the land of the free, right out the window.

I would honestly have to agree with him. It is a lot about how we think, but how we think is shaped by our culture. Nevertheless, not all of us think like this, and not all of the time, either. Personally, after living in Korea for 2 1/2 years, I can certainly say that individualism, open dialogue/disagreement, rationalism, concepts of civic militarism, and egalitarian freedom are quite alien to non-Westerners. Yes, South Korea is supposedly a democracy, and there is supposed to be discontent with the current Korean president, but these ideas do not and cannot translate to the individual in everyday life--which is Hanson's key point. Many of these battles were won because of the individual decisions to buck the system or to innovate. These are certainly not unique to Westerners solely, but the ease with which we perform these actions is part-and-parcel with our culture and with our success.

이순신 (Lee Sun-shin), Korea's greatest national hero, in many ways embodies these ideas of individual initiative, rationalism, and civic militarism. And while he died a hero, he was despised, hated, and the Confucian mandarins in the Choson court constantly tried to grind him down and make him stay in his place. He was even thrown into prison. Here in the East, this sort of thinking is anomaly and anathema to the native culture. For us, it is our greatest strength.

Foucault and Psychiatry--Comments on MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION

Alright, it's been awfully long in coming. I've finished reading this book a long time ago, and I've finally gotten around to hammering out my thoughts and impressions on this piece of postmodern French thought.

But first, a little background on Michel Foucault. Perhaps the most influential thinker of the late 20th century, it is arguable that Foucault is far more well-known than a number of other recent thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas, Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm, or Jacques Derrida. (NOTE: A pretty funny video regarding Habermas' and Foucault's philosophies in contention can be found here, complete with wickedly-funny "fuck you, Habermas, fuck you" exclamation by the speaker.) The general thrust of Foucault's philosophy is a criticism of modernity. To Foucault, the modern era (post-Enlightenment to be specific) is rife with inequalities and structures of power and oppression that need to be examined critically. In this, Foucault seems to adhere to a general principle that systems of power and oppression are simply a part of the human condition, something I gleaned from his debate with Noam Chomsky.

Foucault first entered the historiographical and philosophical world with Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (titled in English as Madness and Insanity: History of Madness in the Classical Age) in 1961, which earned him his doctorate. He further cemented his influence with Naissance de la Clinique (English: Birth of the Clinic) in 1963 and Les Mots et les choses (English: The Order of Things) in 1966. But it wasn't really until 1975, with the English translation of the epoch-making Surveiller et Punir (English: Discipline and Punish) that Foucault achieved world-wide recognition as a seriously influential philosopher.

In his Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (p. 423), Ernst Breisach describes Foucault's philosophy:

Michel Foucault--less closely tied to linguistic theory--stressed the aspect of hegemony in his view of history as a sequence of periods constituted by different discourses. Dominant discourses created collective identities through the exclusion of other discourses. Historical changes (those in prevailing discourses) were not brought about by thinking and acting subjects but occurred in the manner of geological shifts. Thus, instead of delving into the world of individuals, historians needed to become archaeologists of linguistic structures of power and oppression encrusted in writings and institutions.


Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault
This volume is an abridged translation of Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, and a full translation has only been recently published by Routledge in '06 and is prohibitively expensive on Amazon. Thus, I satisfied myself with reading the standard abridged version in English, translated by Richard Howard.

Foucault's writing is extremely dense, even in translation, and is extremely influenced by his own specific jargon that he utilizes throughout the book. Though in later books he would come to edit, develop, or outright reject many of the terms and ideas he uses throughout Madness and Civilization, Foucault's discourse is nevertheless, heavily influenced by these very abstract terms that he never clearly defines. Part of this is because they are still apparently in development in this particular work, and would later come to be clarified in later works. One such term, for example, is "archaeology," which Foucault uses as "a metaphor for 'digging deep' into the underlying rules and assumptions of human sciences" (Windschuttle, 136). Another concept that is not totally formed is that of episteme (which later evolves into discourse and "discursive formation"), which is roughly a time period during which a specific paradigm of knowledge is accepted as the reality of the day. Throughout his work, Foucault behaves as if these paradigms actually do reflect the reality of that period, and are not simply the perceptions of the inhabitants of that particular time.

The book begins with a description of the fanciful "Ship of Fools," that plied the rivers of Europe with its cargo of madmen, and the exclusion of lepers from cities and their incarceration in leprosariums. The book then moves into the Renaissance, in which madness was a reflection of humanity's distance from God, and discusses how the mad were often depicted in literature as somehow possessed of wisdom and knowledge because of their insanity. Then, the Enlightenment hits, and man is defined as inherently rational, with the irrational being defined as other. Since madmen are identified with the irrational, they are defined as other and segregated apart from society.

This is the general development of the book. Foucault moves us through a variety of historical epochs, each of which possessed a different paradigm regarding reality. In each paradigm, Foucault examines the relationship of the prevailing consciousness with madness and the mad. For example, in one epoch, the relationship between madness and unreason is integral to the treatment of the mad; in another epoch, madness and unreason are not necessarily identified with one-another. In one period, madness is scandalous and must be hidden from society at large, while in another it is on display. In one period, the asylum is a place of separation, in another a place of healing and rehabilitation, and in yet another a place of discipline. The treatment of madness and the understanding of madness also go through a variety of movements throughout Foucault's book, culminating with the enthronement of the psychatric priesthood as a major force in modern society.
The major thrust of his book seems to be that madness was originally understood as a form of knowledge, and that through exclusion, confinement, and institutionalization, this form of knowledge has been repressed by the authorities that the Enlightenment have created. This theme of "repression of knowledge" by Enlightenment authorities is a major theme in much of Foucault's work.

Criticisms of Foucault's historiography seem to rest on the veracity of his examples for major epistemological movements. For example, Keith Windschuttle (p. 162) describes scholarly attempts to locate an actual Ship of Fools (Foucault depicts it as a wholly real and extant vessel). The timeline of events that Foucault describes is presented by many of his critics as wholly false, such as the absence of any state-led program to incarcerate the insane between 1700-1900 in England (Windschuttle, p. 161). Foucault's supporters, however, point out that Foucault was not only discussing the confinement of the mad, but also orphans, the poor and homeless, and vagabonds. Indeed, Foucault is quite explicit in his equation of the mad with other groups that did not conform to a particular time period's epistemological paradigm. To Foucault, these groups form sources of knowledge that were oppressed and removed from the collective consciousness of an era.
Foucault's work as an achievement of scholarship is to provide a fascinating perspective on the changes in the collective perception of madness throughout the past five centuries. I am loathe to describe these changes as evolutionary, because Foucault seems to view these different periods as completely disconnected from one another. Evolution would imply growth. Foucault describes the transitions through which physicians' understanding of the causes of madness--these transitions at first appear to be evolutionary, i.e. developments in the discourse lead to further developments and gradual change. But this is an illusion. To Foucault, there is no evolutionary relationship between those who understood madness through the imbalance of humors and those who understood it as the texture of different physical fibers in various organs--these periods are completely disconnected and independent of one-another.

And here is where I can't really agree with Foucault. Although I like that he is critical of the Enlightenment, I find the division of time periods into separate epistemes that are completely unrelated to be a complete denial of causality. Perhaps I am far too modern to be post-modern, but I have always, and likely shall always, view historical development as most certainly cause-and-effect related, and therefore each age is dependent upon the previous ages' paradigms and knowledge.

Thus, Foucault's conceptualization of epistemes is inherently politically driven. Each epoch has its dominant form of knowledge and other forms are oppressed. The dominant form of knowledge seems to literally dictate the very shape that reality actually takes for Foucault. Therefore, I have to wonder if Foucault wanted to overthrow the current episteme in order to impose a wholly new form of reality in which the previously oppressed forms of knowledge would become the dominant paradigm. Foucault, as I said, seemed to believe that every episteme possessed its own systems of subjugation and repression, institutions of power and domination, and hierarchies. To Foucault, all hierarchies are predicated upon knowledge. The monopolization of a form of knowledge, especially a dominant one that played a pivotal role in the reality-paradigm, was a key to power, and was the source of various priesthoods such as psychiatrists, doctors, and lawyers--priesthoods that exist today under modern episteme.

In the postmodern episteme that many cultural theorists such as Foucault seem to desire to bring about, the new leftist intellectual serves as a replacement for the hierarchical "right wing" intellectuals of the old, modern, Enlightenment-era paradigm. Therefore, my favorite critique of Foucault's politics is by Keith Windschuttle (p. 142), regarding Foucault's philosophy of challenging the Enlightenment and the modern Western epistemological paradigm:

"There is one area, however, where Foucault demonstrably fails to break with the Western revolutionary tradition. Every grand scheme to transform society that has ever been dreamed up by an intellectual or academic has always given a major role to intellectuals and academics themselves. Foucalt rejects the idea of the 'universal intellectual' who claims to represent or speak on behalf of the oppressed masses in order to institute a new world order. Instead, he substitutes the idea of the 'specific intellectual' who advises the locals to help them with their immediate struggle. However, the essential role for the intellectual is different in nominal terms only. In Marxist theory, the proletarian masses need the universal intellectual to inform them of their historic mission and to help them realise it; in Foucault's version of politics, more specific groups, such as prisoners, identify their own immediate issues but still cannot define their historic significance nor conduct an effective resistance without the intervention of the intellectual. Despite his support for a less centralised politics, Foucault's postmodern intellectual still wants to be the centre of attention, just like all the radical intellectuals who have gone before him."

(Emphasis added by me.) What makes people think that under the new paradigm the oppressed groups will actually find liberation? Perhaps they will be more enfranchised, but in reality, everyone's just traded one priesthood for another, and again, the monopoly of power-knowledge structures continues.

To return specifically to the work under question, however, it is indisputable that Foucault has achieved something important with his work. He's thrown down a very heavy gauntlet and challenged a number of historiographical preconceptions. This is, to me, a positive thing. His scholarship and perspective are incredibly unique, and I very much agree with his tendency to critique the prevailing power-knowledge hierarchies that dominate a time-period. His methods are both fascinating and challenging. I only wish that these techniques would be applied to non-Western societies as well. Confucianism, for example, is screaming to be analyzed just as critically and rigorously, but since it is essentially a non-Western power-knowledge structure and predicated upon a radically different reality-paradigm, it is beyond the interests of the politically motivated post-modern, post-structuralist cultural theorists.

References:
Breisach, Ernst. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Windschuttle, Keith. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists are Murdering Our Past. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 1996.