Katie Dreyer Fall 2015 THEO 800-01

ABSTRACT: This paper focuses on the rituals and meaning-making constructs that surround violence and death. These rituals give shape and purpose to the human experience, justify acts of destruction, and give a sense of agency over death. The first phase of the paper focuses on origins of war, while the bulk of the paper offers a case study of the rituals that dominated the Civil War. A final section briefly discusses the lack of ritual surrounding the modern use of drones and the potential consequences of this. The purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of ritual in creating meaning, while also proving the ineffectiveness of such rituals to sustain meaning. This paper is meant to contribute to ongoing discussions surrounding human desire for violence and provoke questions about our existential need for purpose in the face of chaos.

War as Ritual: Humanity’s Futile Search for Meaning in Violence

“What is it about our species that has made us see in war a kind of sacrament?” - Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites

“Perhaps our future chances would be better if man could recognize that he still is what he once was long ago, that his existence is defined by the past.” - Walter Burkert, Homo Necans

Introduction

If one wants to find a consistent aspect of the human experience throughout the centuries, one needs look no further than war. War has long had an extremely prominent role in human societies, and we continue to revere and respect our soldiers to this day.

Despite its inherent relationship to violence and death, war itself is highly structured.

Although the rules differ depending on the culture and the scale of the war, there are always rules to engagement that both sides are expected to respect. There is, for instance, a proper way and time for soldiers to engage in violence. There are strategies, tactics, and hierarchies. The differences between chief and follower, between general and major, are

1 taken extremely seriously. At the end of a conflict, mourning rituals and memorialization ceremonies give purpose to the violence that has occurred. One need only think of a unit of marching soldiers, in synchronized formation, to understand the sort of rigid structures war creates.

War itself is a ritual for violence. While the term ritual is most often associated with religion, it also heavily associated with nationalism and patriotism. Human beings are ritualistic creatures, desiring repetition, solemnity, and ceremony. This desire for meaning-making rituals intensifies during times of violence. Order ironically seems to dominate war, at least in theory.

In reality, much of war is chaos. The inherent relationship between chaos and violence is what makes ritual so essential during wartime. Violence holds a unique place in human societies, simultaneously exalted and reviled. Because of its disordered elements, rituals dominate acts of violence in order to infuse both killing and death with societal and/or spiritual meaning. Understanding the rituals that surround war and violence helps to elucidate the values that a particular society is trying to preserve, or even create, through violent actions. The inevitable disillusionment after war with meaning-making institutions, such as religion, prove that violence, even when structured and/or ritualized, has a potentially damaging effect on the human psyche.

The topic of war as ritual and the various ways people have attempted to make meaning out of and through violence is immense. In order to retain a focused argument, this paper is organized into three sections: “The Origins of War”, “The Civil War”, and

“Modern War.” The first section will provide an overview of the various ways ancient man engaged in war and the rituals that created meaning out of violence. My primary

2 source for this section is anthropologist Barbara Ehrenreich’s text, Blood Rites. I acknowledge the limits of this paper; the wartime practices of the ancient world simply cannot be covered in all its complexity in just a few pages. Nevertheless, it is useful to at least provide an overview of these rituals in order to understand the consistent need for ritual and meaning-making practices during times of violence throughout history. It is also important to understand some of the possible evolutionary reasons for our complicated relationship with violence.

“The Civil War” provides an overview of many of the rituals (as well as the disturbing lack of ritual) that accompanied the United States’ bloodiest war to date. This section is meant to illustrate humanity’s difficulty in dealing with massive loss of life in war. While rituals can provide some consolation, confronted with such colossal amounts of violence and death, rituals often seem hollow and disingenuous. My source for this section is mainly the history, This Republic of Suffering, by American historian Drew

Gilpin Faust.

In a final, short section on modern warfare, I specifically discuss drone use in the

Middle East. With the United States increasing its use of drones, and with very few soldiers engaged in what we traditionally think of as ‘hand-to-hand combat,’ the rituals of wartime are now largely focused on death and memorialization. Moreover, the lack of ritual in the use of drones has resulted in strained relations between the U.S. and the

Middle East and may actually be motivating future terrorist attacks. While drone use promises a more organized, humane method of war, in reality it may providing just the opposite – indiscriminate killing with no higher purpose.

3 The methodology for this paper is primarily historical, although Rene Girard’s theory of sacrificing, scapegoating, and doubling will be referenced throughout as a means of making sense out of history’s preoccupation with war and violence. Ultimately,

I argue that throughout history, war and its associated rituals attempt to make meaning out of the inevitability of violence. I also argue that while these rituals make war endurable, they inevitably fail to vindicate violence itself.

4 The Origins of War

Freud said, “there is some dark flaw in the human psyche, a perverse desire to destroy, countering Eros and the will to live.”1 This violent impulse has been blamed for wars throughout history. Yet, as Barbara Ehrenreich is quick to point out, proponents of the “inherently violent” thesis fail to mention the many times men have fled war and violence. One need not look back too far for examples; the Vietnam War is an excellent case study of men fleeing war and violence. Despite immense societal pressure, many men burned their draft cards or fled to Canada. War is not necessarily “natural” or instinctive.

Ehrenreich’s thesis postulates that our “peculiar and ambivalent relationship to violence”2 has its roots in our biological and evolutionary origins as animals of prey. In other words, we have, as a species, entirely repressed the fact that we were once the hunted, not the hunter. War “is not the project of a self-confident predator […] but that of a creature which has learned only ‘recently,’ in the last thousand or so generations, not to cower at every sound in the night.”3

Many ancient societies recognized the unnaturalness of war by requiring men and boys to take on new identities prior to battle, “perhaps even taking a new name.”4 This new name represented the fact that the fighting man was literally a new person that had, in many ways, forsaken his humanity in order to commit violence: “the would-be fighting

1 Quoted in Ehrenreich, Barbara. Blood rites: Origins and history of the passions of war. Granta Books, (2011): 8. 2 Ibid, 22. 3 Ibid, 22. 4 Ibid, 22.

5 man [must] leave his human-ness behind and assume a new form as an animal.” 5 The violence of battle simply could not (cannot) be reconciled with everyday society.6 It should be acknowledged that historically war has been the domain of men, “a self- portrayal and self-affirmation of male society.”7 Many ancient societies only recognized a boy as a man when he had committed an act of killing – “when a boy finally enters the world of men, he does so by confronting death.”8 The ability to confront and ultimately conquer death (either by killing or by asserting agency over one’s own death) was the ultimate transition into manhood and adult society. Despite the presence of women in modern warfare, the language surrounding war is still hyper-masculine.9 As Walter

Burkert reminds us, we, human beings, are not really so different from our ancient ancestors.10

Ceremonies marking a boy’s transition into manhood usually involved a sacrifice or a ritualistic hunt. These rituals “of blood sacrifice both celebrate and terrifyingly reenact the human transition from prey to predator, and so […] does war.”11 Sacrifice is at the heart of all violence and indeed “it was war that allowed human sacrifice to achieve a truly spectacular scale.”12 Why sacrifice only one person/animal when hundreds of

5 Ibid, 11. Also see page 18 for discussion of how Civil War soldiers feared they had lost their souls, had become no more than animals. 6 The difficulties modern soldiers have with integrating back into ‘normal’ society are well documented. Unlike ancient societies, we have no clear rituals to mark the transition from warrior to civilian. Reconciling the brutal actions of war with everyday life (and who the soldier believes him/herself to be as a moral individual) has resulted in mental disorders, various manifestations of PTSD, etc. 7 Burkert, Walter. "Homo necans, trans." P. Bing (Berkeley, 1983) (1983): 47. 8 Ibid, 18. 9 One need only visit a few recruitment websites to note the sort of masculine language being used in recruiting new soldiers. “By becoming one of us, your title will be your membership into an everlasting brotherhood of warriors – those who will stand by you in battle will never leave your side.” http://www.marines.com/being-a-marine 10 Ibid, 82. 11 Ehrenreich, 22. 12 Ibid, 66.

6 thousands of men could be sacrificed in war? Sacrifice in war becomes all the more dramatic thanks to its sheer size and immense scope. While modern readers are likely horrified by the practice of human sacrifice13, it was extremely common in ancient society. In fact, human sacrifice “played a role in the ancient religions – Greek, Hebrew, and Hindu – that were also preoccupied with animal sacrifice.”14 Evidently whether the sacrificial victim was an animal or a human mattered very little – what was important was the ritualistic letting of blood.

Many ancient societies viewed their deity or deities as some sort of bloodthirsty beast that must be appeased. Ehrenreich postulates that these gods were created as a response to the predators that constantly threatened human life. Is it any surprise that in

South American jungles ancient people worshipped a jaguar-god, or that ancient

Hawaiians worshipped shark deities?15 Before passing judgment on these “primitive” societies, one must first consider the violent and predatory nature of Jehovah, God of the

Hebrew Bible. He too demands sacrifices – the bloodletting of circumcision being the most obvious example. Ehrenreich’s anthropological method leads her to conclude that it was humanity’s fear and reverence for predators that led to their ultimate deification.

Early man hunted in groups, but also scavenged. The lion whose prey they would steal was both the provider of food and the purveyor of death. Sacrifices of humans and animals were meant to placate the animal-like, predatory god(s), at least for the time

13 Although one should be careful not to feel too morally superior – our willingness to send our own children into war as soldiers is indeed a form of sacrifice, and the language over the ‘sacrifices’ made by military families mirrors many Ancient Greek myths about human sacrifice to the gods. We may find more similarities between us and Medusa, one of the most reviled characters in myth, than we would like: “Because the object of her hatred is out of reach, Medusa substitutes her own children” (Girard, 9). 14 Ibid, 62. 15 Ibid, 74.

7 being. Implicit in these sacrifices was the knowledge that the sacrifice was only a temporary solution – the beast (god) would come back wanting more.

Perhaps the sacrifices were made less as a way of literally avoiding further death and destruction, and more as a “face-saving euphemism for death by predation.”16 If a mother lost an infant to a lion, it would no doubt be far more comforting to view the child’s death as a meaningful sacrifice that would save other members of the community.

The reality, of course, was that the child’s death was senseless (at least from the point of view of the human being; the lion no doubt viewed the incident as a very meaningful meal). This, I argue, is the reality of violence and death that we so desperately want to avoid. The rituals surrounding death and violence are aimed at infusing meaning into experiences that would otherwise seem meaningless.

As has been emphasized, our ambivalence toward violence may be rooted in the fact that we are actually far more predisposed to flee, to retreat into our primordial status of prey. We need war and its accompanying rituals to help us continually overcome this instinct and become the hunter and aggressor, a status that has allowed us to thrive and dominate. This at least is one anthropological explanation for the origins of war and violence.

Historians and theologians offer their own explanations, but almost all scholars cannot help but note the sacred quality infused into both war and violence. Ehrenreich notes how “the mass feelings inspired by war […] are eerily similar to those normally aroused by religion.”17According to French intellectual, Rene Girard, “we persist in disregarding the power of violence in human societies; that is why we are reluctant to

16 Ibid, 70. 17 Ibid, 15.

8 admit that violence and the sacred are one and the same thing.”18 Violence is inherently linked to death, or the possibility of death. One can kill and one can also be killed. This fight to kill the other while simultaneously submitting to the possibility of dying oneself makes war extremely serious, elevating the experience to a moral plane where life and death are literally at stake. Like religion, war offers structure to the unknowable; “even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”19 While war and religion both appeal to noble feelings of purpose, community, and sacrifice, the destruction of war20 always denies the devotee what was implicitly promised at the outset of war: “The violence of war is random. It does not make sense. And many of those who struggle with loss also struggle with the knowledge that the loss was futile and unnecessary.”21

Ultimately, Ehrenreich’s thesis is compelling, but incomplete. Her argument that human being’s existential angst surrounding violence has its roots in a primordial instinct does not account for human being’s desperate need to find meaning in death. It also does not account for why humans are so desperate to differentiate themselves from other animals. A soldier’s greatest fear is that his body will be left unburied, that he will be left for the crows. Why? Ehrenreich’s entire thesis rests on the presupposition that we, human beings, are animals, primarily controlled by instinct. Yet, at least from what we can tell through scientific observation, we are the only animals to worry about our own deaths long before they happen. A healthy, young person may sit at home, far from violence and war, and still have an anxiety attack thinking about their ultimate demise. No other

18 Girard, René. "Violence and the Sacred, trans." Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977) 49 (1977): 262. 19 Hedges, Chris. War is a force that gives us meaning. Anchor, 2002. 20 Unlike religion – although religion has a great potential for disillusionment as well. 21 Hedges.

9 animal does this. It makes no biological or evolutionary sense.22 While Ehrenreich’s book repeatedly describes the ways humans have tried to create meaning out of violence and war, she never addresses why we so desperately need this meaning. This paper is not a work of theology, but certainly a theological lens could provide answers that an anthropological one cannot. That, however, is not within the scope of this paper. It is my hope that this paper will provoke more questions, ultimately resulting in a deeper understanding of violence, war, and, perhaps most importantly, the human experience.

The following close analysis of the Civil War and its rituals is meant to elaborate on the issues set forth in the first portion of this paper and provide concrete examples of the many meaning-making rituals that dominate mankind’s experience of war.

The Civil War

“Oh great god! What means this carnage, Why this fratricidal strife, Brethren made in your own image Seeking for each other’s life?

Thus spade a dying Federal soldier; Amid the clash of arms he cried; With hope he fixed eyes on heaven, Then bid adieu to earth – and died.”23

The above song excerpt is from one of hundreds of songs and poems composed during the Civil War, all essentially asking the same question: Why? Over 600,000 men

22 While there have been arguments that try to make meaning out of this existential obsession, I have found them unconvincing. 23 “My God! What is all this for?,” Wolf CC116, American Song Sheets Collection, LCP.

10 were killed during the course of the Civil War. This sort of mass killing shocked and overwhelmed the nation; what both North and South had anticipated to be a short skirmish had turned into a four-year bloodbath. Shockingly, the Civil War claimed the most American lives of any war to date, with World War II coming in a distant second.24

In order to make sense of this massive loss of life, both Northerners and Southerners relied heavily on ritual. Religion dominated early Americans’ lives and infused the world with meaning and purpose. Notions of sacrifice, a “Good Death,” and the reality of the afterlife gained even more importance during the war. In general, rituals became particularly vital during wartime, when seemingly senseless carnage threatened to rob mourners and soldiers alike of their moralistic understanding of the universe. More than any other war the U.S. has fought, the Civil War was cast as a divine war of extreme moral importance. Indeed, “at the heart of the soldier’s understanding of his duty rested the notion of sacrifice.”25 Like Christ, soldiers could offer their lives for a noble cause, a

“sacrifice of the one for the many.”26 This religious symbolism and its accompanying rituals shaped everyday soldiers’ understanding of their lives’ purpose. Moreover, it heavily influenced conceptions of war and the inevitable role of violence in a “just” cause.

It is useful here to briefly explore Girard’s theories on the notion of sacrifice. For

Girard, sacrifice is a necessity; human beings need an outlet for their violent instincts.

Sacrifice offers a way for violence to be controlled: “an instrument of prevention in the

24 Claiming an estimated 405,399. “Civil War Facts.” Civil War Trust. http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/faq/ 25 Faust, Drew Gilpin. The Republic of Suffering. Vintage. 2008; 5. 26 Faust, 156.

11 struggle against violence.”27 Girard explores the myriad ways human beings have used sacrifice throughout history: as an appeasement to the Gods, as a way of honoring the dead, as a sort of good luck token before battle. Sacrifice, like all rituals, offers the elusive notion of control over the chaotic: “the ritual process aims at removing all element of chance and seeks to extract from the original violence some technique of cathartic appeasement.”28 The Civil War, like all wars, was a ritualistic attempt at controlling what is innately disordered. When soldiers viewed themselves as Christ-like sacrifices they also sought to control the chaotic and violent elements of death.

The Civil War also naturally lends itself to a Girardian analysis due to the immense similarities between North and South. Civil wars in general bring together people of similar cultural backgrounds and beliefs into a violent reality. When Civil War soldiers shot at one another, they were shooting at people who looked, acted, and believed very much as they themselves did. Girard refers to this desire to both imitate and destroy that which is similar to us as “mimetic desire:” “simply a term more comprehensive than violence for religious pollution. As the catalyst for the sacrificial crisis, it would eventually destroy the entire community if the surrogate victim were not at hand to halt the process and the ritualized mimesis were not at hand to keep the conflictual mimesis from beginning afresh.”29 For Girard, the desire for violence and the desire for God are intermixed in a confusing and contradictory psychological phenomenon. The child-like desire to imitate others, and the innate jealousy and violence we feel toward those we wish to emulate is at the very heart of man’s impetus toward

27 Girard, 17. 28 Ibid, 102. 29 Ibid, 148.

12 war. The manifestation of “doubling” in the Civil War is a prime example of humanity’s desire to destroy that which they are most alike.30

In order to understand the Civil War’s effect on early American society, one must first understand how the war disrupted previously held beliefs about how a person ought to die. Unlike today, in mid-19th century America a long, terminal illness was considered a blessing. It meant you would have time to say goodbye to loved ones and, most importantly, make sure your soul was in a fit state to meet its’ maker. The high levels of religiosity31 at the time meant that a Good Death was one in which the person was prepared and ready to die. This preparation was seen as an indication that the person was ready to meet God and would be granted eternal rest in Heaven. During the war, this idea of the Good Death was severely challenged. Whereas before the war, “fewer than 15 percent of Americans died away from home”32 now hundreds of thousands of young men were dying far away from their families on the battlefield. The intensity and suddenness of violence in war also meant it was likely you would be killed without suitable time to prepare your soul, a truly terrifying thought to many soldiers and their relatives. Soldiers were so concerned about how they would die that they would make pacts with one another where they would promise to write home to each other’s families to let them know the exact details of their demise. These condolence letters always took a familiar form, with the letter-writer repeatedly insisting on the deceased’s willingness to die and that the last words had been of love for both God and family. How true these letters were is debatable. One can hardly blame a soldier for not wanting to describe how a comrade’s

30 One need only look at the violent history between Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout history to see this doubling in action: what is the “real” faith of Abraham? Who are the real Jews? Etc. 31 Largely Protestant and Evangelical. 32 Faust, 9.

13 body had literally been blown to ash on the battlefield – a common means of dying during the war.

Burial and the fate of the physical body was also a concern. Whereas before the war, burial rituals were highly regulated and considered absolutely necessary, now many men were being buried in shallow graves on the battlefield. Some weren’t being buried at all. Others were quite literally blown to pieces, with nothing left for comrades to bury or memorialize. This challenged religious ideas about the resurrection of the body and left many wondering if humans were not really any better than animals after all. This fear, that human beings are simply animals, was one expressed by many soldiers in their letters home. Seemingly it is both language and the ability to conduct meaning-making rituals that differentiate humans from other beasts. When one is unable to tell of the

“unspeakable” horrors of war and unable to perform the most basic mourning rituals, one begins to wonder, do humans have a soul at all?

This fear of turning into animals was not unique to Civil War soldiers: “the heroes of the Illiad fear death […] because it could mean being reduced to meat.”33 Burial rituals once again give meaning to senseless death and violence. Human beings differentiate themselves from other animals (prey) by the meaning-making rituals conducted when death occurs. When robbed of those rituals, bones and bodies are left unburied and are scavenged by crows and vultures. The human body becomes no more than a hunk of flesh, devoid of both soul and meaning. Many Civil War soldiers commented on the frightening ability of human flesh to lose its distinctiveness, how upon touching a decomposing body, it felt the same as a slaughtered bull’s carcass.

33 Ehrenreich, 78.

14 Many men were disturbed by their innate desire for violence and killing. As Faust emphasizes, “men throughout history have reported loving combat.”34 Killing, it would seem, was not a sin, but rather an instinctual need. For many men, “military training seemed only to enhance an innate brutality.”35 Killing was less easy to rationalize within the context of Christianity. Dying could be sacrificial and martyr-like; killing, on the other hand, seemed synonymous with murder. Pastors had few answers when asked by soldiers how their actions were justifiable in the context of their faith. The most common source of comfort for a soldier was the conviction that God was ‘on his side,’ and that the war itself was an act of divine providence. Thus the overarching symbolism entrenched the idea that the war itself was a ritual act of sacrifice for the sake of a sanctified cause.

This would of course lead to massive disillusionment and existential terror at the end of the war: for the South, “surrender made war’s sacrifices seem purposeless; losses would remain unredeemed; southern fathers, brothers, and sons had not died that a nation might live.”36 Ultimately ritual was extremely limited in its ability to create meaning out of such massive violence and subsequent loss of life.

Yet war itself provided a ritualistic way for some soldiers to claim autonomy over their lives and, more importantly, their deaths. No discussion of the Civil War is complete without an acknowledgement of the moral crisis of slavery. By the end of the war, the Union was unabashedly fighting for liberation for slaves. The Blacks who joined the Union’s cause were free men, not coerced or forced to fight like many Blacks in the

South. This ability to claim agency over their own lives, and the way they would likely end, sent a powerful message to Black soldiers: “to kill and to be, as soldiers, permitted

34 Faust, 37. 35 Faust, 38. 36 Faust, 192.

15 to kill was ironically to claim a human right.”37 Black Americans were especially keen to see divine retribution done on the South. The War offered the opportunity to be a part of

God’s divine vengeance “as well as an opportunity to become the agent rather than the victim of violence.”38

This conviction on the part of oppressed Blacks opens up a broader discussion on the role of war in providing men (and now women) a sense of agency over their own deaths. In C.S. Lewis’s oft-debated essay, “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” he praises war’s ability to make men intensely aware of their mortality.39 Moreover, he emphasizes that the purpose of human life is not merely to stay alive. If we are truly made for another world, it is a great and glorious thing to die in a just cause. War’s ability to inspire men to great and terrible deeds can give soldiers the sense that they have more control over their deaths than they would otherwise. This is undoubtedly the attitude that many Civil War soldiers adopted when they took up arms against their countrymen. As Barbara

Ehrenreich concedes, most men (and women) fight wars not out of bloodlust, but because they experience “the ‘noblest’ feelings […]: feelings of generosity, community, and submergence in a great and worthy cause.” 40 Yet, as Ehrenreich also emphasizes, the results of war are the same, regardless of noble objectives. As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And so at the end of the war, when all the rituals glorifying war have become hollow, the result is the same: destruction, disillusionment,

37 Faust, 55. 38 Ibid. 39 Lewis, C. S., and E. M. W. Tillyard. "Why I am not a Pacifist." The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (2001): 64-90. 40 Ehrenreich, 14.

16 and death.41 Human life becomes simultaneously cheap and sanctified. Therein lies the paradox of war: “the power to kill and respect for human life illuminate each other.”42

While it is important to understand the deep need for ritual during the Civil War, it is perhaps more important to note those times when there was simply no time or means to conduct what had previously been considered necessary rituals. With so many deaths,

“human life diminished sharply in value, and the living risked becoming as dehumanized as the dead.”43 Rituals of mourning were largely done away with. Sometimes there would be upwards of 20,000 bodies left on the field after a particularly bloody battle. The practical need to do away with these bodies meant that there often simply wasn’t time to show reverence for the dead. Some soldiers reportedly dropped twenty-five Union dead down a farmer’s well. So many bodies also meant that many dead were never identified.

Indeed, “more than 40 percent of deceased Yankees and a far greater proportion of

Confederates perished without names.”44 These nameless dead could not be accounted for, not in record books, and certainly not in traditional forms of ritualistic mourning.

Relatives went to extreme lengths to try to find out what had happened to their sons and husbands, usually with little success. This not knowing was maddening and left many

Americans wondering if there could be any sort of divine purpose in so much suffering and loss.

As Faust emphasizes, “the Civil War took place in a newly and self-consciously humanitarian age.”45 This was the age of Victorian domesticity, when families and the joys of a peaceful home-life were idealized. Thus the bloody massacres of the Civil War

41 Ibid, 19. 42 Burkert, 21. 43 Faust, 59. 44 Ibid, 102. 45 Faust, 135.

17 were particularly disorienting. Americans had been living with the comfortable idea that they were moving toward a better future, one in which family ties and domestic life were valued and protected. To then not even know the fate of one’s husband or brother or son must have been maddening. Those who saw the violence of the war first-hand were appalled; there could be no possible meaning in that wreckage. Such early humanists and freethinkers as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman were heavily influenced by the violence they saw during the war. For them, and for many others, traditional ritual and religion no longer provided satisfactory explanation for such unseen levels of death and violence.

Most survivors lived in some sort of denial of death. Many relatives who never found out what happened to loved ones remained convinced they were being held captive or had gotten lost trying to come home. Others turned to spiritualism and diviners who promised to reconnect them with departed kin. With scientific discoveries challenging many of the accepted, religiously-based ideas about the world, spiritualism seemed to offer concrete “evidence” of an afterlife. But many turned back to the rituals of their religion only to find them inadequate. The traditional Christian sermon focusing on

Heaven as some sort of church, with everyone praising God eternally, no longer satisfied mourners. They wanted to retain the familial ties that the war had destroyed. Popular conceptions of Heaven changed to satisfy these desires, with many consolation letters emphasizing that they would all be together again in another world.

The rituals (and lack of rituals) of the Civil War tell us much about mankind’s desire for meaning in the face of violence. While the war itself took on divine

18 proportions, “the […] carnage required that death be given meaning.”46 While the victorious North could remain confident in the divine purpose of their mission, the surrendered South was left with hundreds of thousands of dead and nothing to show for it. Many soldiers had written that if they lost the war they would be forced to stop believing in God. How could they face the horrific deaths of their friends on the battlefield and then lose? What purpose could such suffering possibly have without a victory?

The Civil War, perhaps more than any other war in history, proves the limits of ritual in making meaning out of violence. As has been emphasized, violence is arguably47 an essential aspect of humanity. Soldiers during the Civil War were disturbed by how quickly and easily they became used to killing. Violence connects mankind across cultures, geographic divides, and time. Violence is and always has been a dominating aspect of human experience. And yet we are clearly uncomfortable with and often incredibly disturbed by violence. While Civil War soldiers felt their failure to ritually mourn their comrades made them no different from animals, they failed to recognize that the very fact that they agonized over the lack of morality in their actions differentiated them from other animals. Mankind’s conscience has demanded that war and its’ accompanying violence be justified. Whether or not this is due to our primal origins as prey, as Barbara Ehrenreich argues, we can never be certain. We can, however, objectively state that rituals provide an essential structure to violence. Rituals have the power and potential to help provide the meaning we so desperately seek out of these

46 Faust, 170. 47 I realize modern discussions of essentialism are unpopular.

19 experiences. Yet, as the Civil War makes all too clear, rituals too have their limits, ultimately failing to suitably vindicate large-scale violence and suffering.

Modern Warfare

Drew Gilpin Faust noted that during the Civil War new rifles allowed men to shoot at someone from three hundred yards away. Snipers became a reality – men no

20 longer had to look into the eyes of the person they were killing. Still “most combat [in the

Civil War] occurred at a distance of about one hundred yards.”48 In other words, although the Civil War was the first time a battle had been fought with technology that theoretically allowed for distanced killing, most men were still fighting at relatively close range (especially by today’s standards). Nevertheless, the ability to shoot from a range of a couple hundred yards facilitated a “physical distance between enemies [that had the potential to result in an] emotional distance from destructive acts.”49 It almost seems laughable now, to think that soldiers were concerned that killing from a distance of three hundred yards could potentially result in emotional damage. Today, commanders kill dozens of people with the push of a button, sitting in an office chair hundreds of thousands of miles away. Rather than become too entangled in the ethical debate regarding the use of drones, I will focus on how modern methods for killing represent an extremely new way of relating to death and destruction. The use of drones and nuclear technology has only increased mankind’s belief in its’ dominion over death. Reportedly, upon completing the first test of a nuclear bomb, creator J. Robert Oppenheimier quoted

Hindu scripture and said, “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”50 The illusion of power and control over the chaos of violence has never been more powerful.

The use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, is only going to increase with time – “more drone strikes were carried out in President Barack Obama’s first year in office than in the previous eight years combined under George W. Bush.”51 These

48 Faust, 41. 49 Ibid, 41. 50 Eby, Nelson, Robert Hermes, Norman Charnley, and John A. Smoliga. "Trinitite—the atomic rock." Geology Today 26, no. 5 (2010): 181. 51 Vogel, Ryan J. "Drone warfare and the law of armed conflict." Denver Journal of International Law and Policy 39, no. 1 (2011): 105.

21 unmanned planes allow for a lack of “boots on the ground,” a fact that President Obama has touted as a positive result – American lives are being saved. The lack of rituals surrounding drone use is astonishing. While for centuries men have agonized over killing, modern man seems relatively content to push a button and watch the world burn. This is an exaggeration, of course, and the heated debate over drone use and its ethical implications indicates a serious concern over the way our enemies are being killed. Yet it cannot be denied that the physical distance from violence is having an effect, both on our own conceptions of violence and war, as well as on how our enemies perceive us.

When Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad faced a federal court in 2010 after placing a bomb in Times Square, the judge asked him how he could be comfortable killing innocent people, “including women and children,” to which he responded, “Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody.

They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war and in war, they kill people.

They’re killing all Muslims.”52 Drone use has been cited as a motivating factor by many would-be terrorists.53 The U.S.’s apparent lack of interest in who is killed in the crossfire and lack of rituals to give meaning to these innocent deaths has had dire consequences on our relationship with the Middle East. It has also caused the international community to question the usefulness of unmanned vehicles in killing terrorists.54

While ancient man sacrificed a human or an animal with ritualistic bloodletting to substitute for massive violence and death, modern man tries to make war with no

52 Boyle, Michael J. "The costs and consequences of drone warfare." International Affairs 89, no. 1 (2013): 1. 53 Abbas, Hassan. “How Drones Create More Terrorists.” The Atlantic. August, 2013. 54 Recently, a Doctors without Borders hospital was bombed by the United States in Kunduz, Afghanistan – 12 staff and 10 patients were killed. The international president of Doctors Without Borders called the attack a “war crime.”

22 sacrifice at all. The ritual of war offers the opportunity for large-scale sacrifice, but what happens when the death is entirely one-sided? This is essentially the goal of drone- warfare: massive killing of the enemy and limited/no casualties for ‘our’ side. What happens when there is no sacrifice made, no ritualistic understanding of violence and war? The relationship between war and the sacred has already been established; “religion invariably strikes to subdue violence, to keep it from running wild.”55 The risk of drone warfare and the combined lack of ritual surrounding such killing is that the sacred element of war will be lost, that man’s intimacy with death will fade, and a god-like confidence will lead to increased violence and brutality. And indeed, what has started to happen with drone warfare is an inordinate amount of indiscriminate killing.

For centuries the rules of war have given structure and meaning to violence. War as a ritual also insists that only a portion of people be killed, namely soldiers who engage in battle knowingly and purposefully. The killing of civilians has been a reality as long as there have been wars, with non-fighting actors, mostly women and children, often being seeing as ‘the spoils of war.’ However, the ideal of war is to structure violence and ultimately limit killing. This intent is evident in President Obama’s speech on drone policy, in which he emphasizes the many troops that have been killed in previous wars, and the hope that drones will save future American troops from the same fate:

Our efforts must be measured against the history of putting American troops in distant lands among hostile populations. In Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of civilians died in a war where the boundaries of battle were blurred. In Iraq and Afghanistan, despite the extraordinary courage and discipline of our troops, thousands of civilians have been killed. So neither conventional military action nor waiting for attacks to occur offers moral safe harbor, and neither does a sole reliance on law enforcement in territories that have no functioning police or security services — and indeed, have no functioning law.56

55 Girard, 20. 56 Obama, Barack (transcript). “Obama’s Speech on Drone Policy.” The New York Times. May 2013.

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Obama’s insistence that “conventional” military action is ineffective in the war against terror is cloaked in the threat that a failure to use drones will mean more American deaths abroad. In the same speech Obama describes the many civilian casualties as a “tragedy,” while simultaneously insisting that civilian deaths are an “unfortunate” reality of every war, regardless of combat methods. Drones are presented as an alternative to traditional warfare, a chance to save American lives and systematically kill terrorists. Obama’s speech is eerily free of the religious language that dominated political speeches during the Civil War. The language is highly technical, more evocative of a scientific lecture than a sermon. It should be emphasized that we live in a much more secular age than the

Civil War and this clearly accounts for a change in political language. Nevertheless, this shift is significant in that we do not have any scientific “rituals” to give meaning to our experiences.

The age of drones may represent a new phase in human development, an era in which sacrifices are no longer presented to the beasts (gods) in the night because we, human beings, are the new gods. With our enemies thousands of miles away and death and destruction increasingly one-sided, man no longer has to face the potential meaninglessness of his own demise.

Conclusion

Human beings have a long history of engaging in violence, and an equally long history trying to justify it. Our peculiar need to find meaning in destruction may harken back to a primitive experience of being hunted and preyed upon by animals more powerful than us. Our evolution toward hunters has evidently not allowed us to forget our

24 primordial beginnings as prey, hence our need to consistently reenact our domination over other animals and one another.

The inherent relationship between the sacred and the sacrificial infuses the experience of violence with a religious-like quality. Rituals are the primary method of communicating and creating meaning out of death and violence. When those rituals stop, this signifies a significant change in the way humans relate to and understand war. The carnage of the Civil War was so immense that the rituals of war failed to justify (for many) the violence that had occurred. Today, with killings taking place far away and much of the religious language of previous wars done away with, the need for sacrifice is fading – a new emphasis is put on eradicating the enemy.57

Rituals are amoral in and of themselves. Yet, their purpose in society speaks volumes about the people who participate in and insist on them. When one reads of the elaborate measures soldiers throughout history have gone to in order to ‘properly’ bury their dead, one cannot help but ask, “why do living humans pay attention to corpses?”58

Sometimes rituals are nonsensical and strange, sometimes people will literally die59 in order to complete a ritual. They may seem unnecessary, but within the context of a particular society and culture they can indicate the function and purpose of human existence. It has been the purpose of this paper to explore how rituals surrounding violence attempt to organize what is so innately chaotic.

Humans desire structure and purpose – mortality unhinges us; death remains a mystery. I argue that the so-called death instinct shapes our actions in profound ways.

57 While every war has involved a dehumanization of the enemy, this dehumanization has become only too easy when soldiers can kill one another without ever seeing one another in person. 58 Faust, 61. 59 There are more than a few stories of soldiers being shot as they ran back out onto the field to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade.

25 Ritual is one of the manifestations of this instinct. Ritual can be very effective at creating meaning out of experiences of violence and death, but the ineffectiveness of such rituals to sustain meaning must also be acknowledged. As has already been emphasized, the noble feelings inspired by the rituals of war do little to change the inevitable outcome of war: destruction, grief, and death. Rituals may make war livable, but disillusionment is almost always inevitable.60 War always exposes itself; chaos cannot be denied.

60 Unless rituals are repeated in a way that continually enforce the meaning of the chaotic violent experience – hence the proliferation of memorialization events surrounding the deaths of soldiers. Some rituals are also aimed at erasing or redoing the past and making it meaningful – reenactments of battles, fictionalization of wars, movies, media, etc. all contribute to an on-going meaning-making process that may or may not be successful in creating order out of the innately disordered.

26 Bibliography

Abbas, Hassan. “How Drones Create More Terrorists.” The Atlantic. August, (2013).

Burkert, Walter. "Homo necans, trans." P. Bing (Berkeley, 1983) (1983).

Boyle, Michael J. "The costs and consequences of drone warfare." International Affairs 89, no. 1 (2013): 1-29.

Eby, Nelson, Robert Hermes, Norman Charnley, and John A. Smoliga. "Trinitite—the atomic rock." Geology Today 26, no. 5 (2010): 180-185.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Blood rites: Origins and history of the passions of war. Granta Books, (2011).

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This republic of suffering. Vintage, 2008.

Girard, René. "Violence and the Sacred, trans." Patrick Gregory (Baltimore, 1977) 49 (1977).

Hedges, Chris. War is a force that gives us meaning. Anchor, 2002.

Lewis, C. S., and E. M. W. Tillyard. "Why I am not a Pacifist." The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (2001): 64-90.

Obama, Barack (transcript). “Obama’s Speech on Drone Policy.” The New York Times. May 2013.

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