Richard Weaver on Total War

Along with the thinkers like Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet, Richard Weaver (1910-1963) was one of the leading intellectual lights of the conservative movement that emerged after the Second World War. Weaver might best be classified as a “Christian humanist” or maybe “Christian Platonist”; he believed that there was an intelligible order to reality, and that human flourishing required cognizance of that order.

For Weaver, one of the hallmarks of civilization is the making of distinctions. There are many different qualities that we value, possessed by different people in varying degrees. Rather than reducing everything to a single measure of value (e.g. utility, economic productivity, etc.), a healthy culture allows that there are many different measures of value (aesthetic, ethical, religious). Eliding such distinctions is the social analogue to denying that things have distinct, intelligible natures and adopting some kind of monist ontology (e.g. materialism) that reduces all things to a common substratum.

It’s in this context that we can understand Weaver’s critique of total war. His essay “A Dialectic on Total War” appears in his book Visions of Order. In it he argues that the advent of total war marks the collapsing of distinctions that were painstakingly built up over centuries of development in the West. With respect to war, the most important distinction is that between combatant and non-combatant. When this distinction is recognized as having a foundation in reality we get limitations on the conduct of war as expressed in codes of chivalry, just war theory, and laws of war. When such distinctions are denied, we get total war:

These obliteration bombings carried on by both sides in the Second World War put an end to all discrimination. Neither status nor location offered any immunity from destruction, and that often of a horrible kind. Mass killing did in fact rob the cradle and the grave. Our nation was treated to the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust which is said to have taken tens of thousands of lives, pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These are items of the evidence that the war of unlimited objectives has swallowed up all discrimination, comparison, humanity, and, we would have to add, enlightened self-interest. Such things are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built that they cast into doubt the very possibility of recovery. It is more than disturbing to think that the restraints which had been formed through religion and humanitarian liberalism proved too weak to stay the tide anywhere. We are compelled to recall Winston Churchill, a descendant of the Duke of Marlborough and in many ways a fit spokesman for Britain’s nobility, saying that no extreme of violence would be considered too great for victory. Then there is the equally dismaying spectacle of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the reputedly great liberal and humanitarian, smiling blandly and waving the cigarette holder while his agents showered unimaginable destruction upon European and Japanese civilians. (Weaver, Visions of Order, pp. 98-99)

Weaver’s line that “[s]uch things are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built” hints at his response to those who would argue that once you’ve engaged in war it’s foolish to obsever limits and that you should just get it over with as quickly as possible. For Weaver, on the contrary, means and ends aren’t so easily separated:

The expediential argument for total war is ususally expressed very simply: “It saves lives.” I have seen Sherman’s campaign in Georgia and the Carolinas defended on the ground that it brought the war to an end sooner consequently saving lives; the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been excused in the same way. This argument, however, has a fatal internal contradiction. Under the rationale of war, the main object of a nation going to war cannot be the saving of lives. If the saving of lives were the primary consideration, there need never be any war in the first place. A nation threatened by war could surrender to the enemy at once, preventing the loss of even a single life. The enemy would in all probability allow the people of that nation to go on living, even if it demanded “unconditional surrender” and proposed to make the people of that nation slaves. The truth is that any nation going to war tells itself that there are things dearer than life and that it proposes to defend these even at the expense of lives. The people are reminded of this in numberless ways, and every young man is instilled with the thought that he must be willing, if called upon, to make the supreme sacrifice. In war the saving of lives is a consideration secondary to the aims of war.

This is not to say that there is no economy of means in war. It does, however, say that in war the economizing of lives is not the first aim, since in embarking upon war that nation declares that the war aims are the supreme goal for which lives will be spent if necessary. The self-contradiction of total war is that it destroys the very things for which one is supposed to be sacrificing. The “total” belligerent finds at the end that he has the formal triumph, but that he has lost not only the lives necessary to win it but also the objectives for which it was waged. In other words he has lost the thing that the lives were being expended to preserve. (p. 103)

The “thing,” the end in question, is the preservation those forms of civilization that make distinctions by reflecting the true order of being. To sacrifice those distinctions for the sake of victoy leaves the “victor” “on an immensely lower plane than that on which it began.” (p. 104).