Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War Alvin H. Bernstein Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War. By Barbara Ehrenreich. NewYork: Metropolitan Books, 1997. 280 pp. $25.00 Cloth. Readers may be a bit daunted to learn from the dust-jacket of Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War that its author, Barbara Ehrenreich, intends to take them “on an original journey from the grasslands of prehistoric Africa to the trenches of Verdun, from the elaborate sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth century ‘Total War’.” Will this slim volume be excruciatingly superficial or a remarkable feat of literary concision? Some years ago Ehrenreich, who holds a Ph.D. degree in Biology from Rockefeller University, felt the need for a theory of war. Alas, she discovered that “there are no theories of war or— depending on what you are willing to accept as a theory—far too many of them.” Professional students of the subject would have referred Ehrenreich to Clausewitz’s majestical On War. The Prussian strategist gets short shrift from Ehrenreich, however, because she thinks, quite erroneously, that Clausewitz viewed war as “an entirely rational undertaking, unsullied by human emotion.” We quickly discover why Ehrenreich has little patience with rationality. She seeks to understand neither the nature and dynamics of warfare nor the logic of political violence. Rather, she is pursuing an explanation for “the peculiar psychological grip that war has on the human species” which has allowed us, as she puts it, to “sacralize” war. Her not-so-hidden agenda is radically feminist, genetically deterministic, wistfully socialist, and unabashedly anti-American. The author instinctively wanted to place gender, and masculine naturally, at the heart of her theory, to make war, as Dave Barry might have said, “a guy-thing.” She has not, in fact, entirely rejected these first thoughts. She refines her hunch not so much because it was wrong as because it is incomplete and not quite in sync with current orthodoxy. Maleness, she concludes, cannot on its own explain war’s persistent attractiveness: not all men are warrior-like and some women see war as a sacrificial [End Page 189] activity. Current politically correct thinking requires, however, that war be condemned and female warriors extolled. Therefore, she must ask what is it about the entire human species that compels it “to see war as a kind of ‘sacrament’” and do her best to blame evil war on men without diminishing women. Ehrenreich’s analysis of human origins on “Africa’s ancient grasslands” is as tendentious as it is derivative, but it is necessary to the position she will eventually take because it allows her to reject the theory that connects those origins with the hunter-gatherer paradigm. “Man-as-Hunter, Woman-as-Gatherer” was popular in and appropriate to the ethos of the 1950s. But times have changed and in the last fifteen years or so the cognoscenti have come to reject the old paradigm in favor of one that locates the origins of human behavior in the millennia before the species evolved the cranial capacity to arm itself and become the arch-predator. The deepest-seated springboards of human behavior stem from a prolonged period of gut-wrenching fear when our far-distant ancestors confronted, without arms, a world in which not being eaten took emotional precedence over feeding themselves. Group living was invented precisely for the collective defense of the unarmed community, in which both sexes participated. From this earliest stage, the females of the species, no less than the males, had courage, cunning, and violence hard-wired into their neural circuitry. Ehrenreich’s theory also requires a biologically determined way of having blood spectacle program us, so she interprets “the elaborate sacrifices of the ancient world” as reflecting the community’s need to dampen its aggressive and self-destructive energies. Sacrificial blood rites, Ehrenreich insists, symbolically re-enacted the crisis of a predator’s attack and served “as a face-saving euphemism” for death by a predator. Even if our ancestors never literally threw members of their community to the wolves to divert or satiate them...