On Love and War: Reflections on the Abuse of Technical Rationality

Abstract

On Love and War:Reflections on the Abuse of Technical Rationality Michael S. Sherwin O.P. "Militat omnis amans." —Ovid, Amores 1.9 "El amor y la guerra son una misma cosa." —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha 2.3.21 "Militat omnis amans: Every lover battles, and Cupid holds his fort; Atticus, believe me, every lover battles. The age that's good for war, is also right for love."1 Ovid expresses an ancient insight when he describes the affinities between love and war (artistically represented in song already by Homer and later in the many classical and Renaissance images of the attraction between Ares and Aphrodite, between Mars, the god of war, and Venus, the goddess of love).2 Cervantes expresses [End Page 259] this even more succinctly when he has Quixote exclaim, in defense of a young lover's behavior in winning the hand of his beloved: "love and war are one and the same thing."3 In both quotations, the poets are affirming that the ways of love are like the ways of war. If this is the case, might the study of one help us better understand the other, especially in the American context? The ways of love and the ways of war: a striking feature of the last fifty years is that Americans are becoming less and less successful at both. During these past fifty years, our wars have rarely attained the stated goals for which they were undertaken and have wreaked cultural, economic, environmental, and human havoc on friend and foe alike.4 The American way of love has fared no better. The marriage rate in the United States is now at an all-time low, while the divorce rate, although down from its record levels, is still troublingly high (around 45% of all US marriages now end in divorce).5 Cohabitation [End Page 260] has not proved to be a panacea, either: only about thirteen percent of those couples stay together.6 Perhaps the most disturbing statistics concern the growth of American solitude: over the last half century the number of Americans living alone has doubled, with almost a third of our country living alone.7 And when it comes to raising children, if in 1960 less than 10 percent of our children were raised in single parent homes, that number has now reached a staggering 34 percent: one third of our children.8 Clearly, Americans are having difficulty pursuing the ways of love and family life. Thus, in the pages that follow, I will offer some reflections on the American way of war and suggest how they might help us better understand the current limitations in the American way of love. I wish to do so by focusing on one war in particular, the Vietnam war, and to suggest that the way we fought that war also has important things to teach us about the way we make love. Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate the point I wish to make is by focusing on the example of one particularly influential actor in that war, because of how well he illustrates the issue I wish to address: the abuse of technical rationality to solve human problems. The person in question is Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.9 [End Page 261] Although it would be tempting to give a detailed biography of Secretary McNamara, these facts will suffice: when President-elect Kennedy tapped him to serve in his cabinet in the autumn of 1960, Robert McNamara was already a distinguished public figure, He began his professional career as the youngest and highest paid assistant professor at Harvard Business School. Then, during the Second World War, he played a key role in the Army Air Corps' Office of Statistical Control, applying systems analysis technics developed at Harvard to help the Air Corps efficiently bomb its targets in both Europe and Japan. Upon returning from the war, he was part of an elite group of Statistical Control veterans hired by Ford Motor Company to help turn the ailing company around. They were known as the Whiz Kids. Within fourteen years, McNamara was president...