Out of Weakness Healing the Wounds That Drive Us to War [Paperback]

USPrologue: Out of Weakness


1. THE WARRIOR SPIRIT, War and the Search for Security

War is both the parent and child of fears. For the people of the world today, the expansion of our powers of destruction has increased the scope of our fears. As before, each nation worries about impingement or conquest by rival powers. But a new element has been added. We are haunted by the possibility that in a fit of bellicose passion we human beings may self-destruct. This danger casts a shadow over everything we love.

To avoid this new and cataclysmic danger, we must master an ancient problem. To end the plague of war, we must understand both the adaptive and the maladaptive dimensions of our fears and our efforts to protect ourselves.

For human beings to live in fear is nothing new. Insecurity has been the common lot of civilized peoples: as far back as the written record reaches, societies have preyed upon one another. This has been part of the cost of civilization. Among civilized societies, the struggle for power has continued from the dawn of civilization without relent.

The ceaseless struggle for power has structured the living energies of civilization into the form of fear. Two images of civilization illustrate the structure that fear has imposed: the image of the warrior, whose vital energies of flesh and blood are encased in armor; and that of the fortress city, whose social life is surrounded by thick defensive walls. Fear drives what is alive into a hard, dead shell; it mandates that love is turned inward, while distrust and enmity guard the approaches from the world outside.

This structure governed by fear is adaptive in a world plagued with insecurities. To survive, human societies have made themselves ready to fight, amassing armed forces and adopting a martial spirit in defense of fatherland and national honor. It is the great warriors who have traditionally been sung as heroes, for they have been the most visibllc4