Re: The Great War's impact
Larry, I'm so glad we read "All Quiet on the Western Front" before we tackled the Fussell. I think of Paul Baumer a lot when I read Fussell's literary criticism, which can be something of a slog at times. But a very rewarding slog, I must say. Fussell gives us the big picture of the cost of World War I in this opening chapter. If Remarque provided us with the view from the trenches, Fussell pulls back our vision to the entire theater. And the vision is absolutely hellish.
You write:
Is it conceivable to us that this could be—that all the cumulative promise of Enlightenment thinking and innovation since the time of Copernicus and the age of exploration could be overwhelmed by a single war, however big? If Fussell is right, then what was the Modern Age built on that it could be both so blind to the war it brought about and so wide of the mark in its vision of the future? This has always vexed me, and I hope we can give it a little thought since it’s the first premise of Fussell’s book. Have we lost forever the idealistic “innocence” that he says had reached its peak just before WWI?
In a way, I wish we had. Fussell makes a powerful case that the myth of Progress -- the idea that we keep getting better and better, going onward and upward -- died in World War I. (And if it didn't die there, it ought to have been finished off by Auschwitz). But in this country, it certainly hasn't. We still believe in Progress, whether it's the progressive idea of bringing liberal democracy to the benighted Iraqis at the point of a gun, or genetically engineering a Brave New World free of suffering. We believe in human potential in this country. We are optimists to the core. It's what gives America so much cultural vigor, but it's also what leads us into such tragedies.
Fussell published "The Great War" in 1975, in the trough of post-Vietnam, post-Watergate cynicism. It must have been difficult at that moment to conceive that America would believe once again in the progressivist myth, and get involved in a foolish foreign war. But Reagan reinvigorated the public, and revivified its faith in America's mission, America's values, and America's military. It makes perfect sense that we'd stumble blindly into Baghdad.
"Those who don't learn from the past are condemned to repeat it," Santayana famously said. But the American view is closer to Henry Ford's: "History is bunk."
Over on the Dallas Morning Views blog, I asked my colleagues, in a Fussellian spirit, what fundamental ideas they had prior to the Iraq War that they no longer hold, as a result of the war? For me, I've lost a certain faith in my own perceptions (I thought those who warned of disaster to come in Iraq were either boobs or cowards); I've lost faith in my relatively optimistic view of human nature; I've lost faith in the judgment and honesty of the governmental and military leadership; and I've lost faith in the power of the military to solve problems.
And I'm glad to have lost these things, because I think it makes me a more realistic person. How does one maintain a proper skepticism without yielding to debilitating cynicism? I don't know. Modern Europe, which is hedonistic and spiritually comatose, doesn't provide an answer.