Our Forever Wars

Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War is a timely novel of remarkable depth, despite its brevity. Its premise is simple: humanity discovers interstellar travel by speeding toward collapsed stars, seemingly covering light-years in moments, though actually with extreme time dilation. War soon breaks out with the Taurans, a strange alien race from near Aldebaran that supposedly attacked human ships.  

William Mandella, a physics student, is conscripted for an elite United Nations task force to fight the Taurans. After returning from what was for him a two-year expedition, he finds that 26 years have passed on Earth. Extensive class wars have led to the abolition of most private property, most are unemployed and living on government income, hunger has been eradicated through technological developments, and many nations encourage homosexuality to control population size and prevent more class conflict. Mandella and his occasional lover Marygay grow closer, sharing a feeling of alienation in a changed world, and eventually reenlist with the promise of a safe posting on Luna. When they quickly receive updated orders to return to combat, Mandella laments that he does not know which is worse: the feeling that this was bound to happen, or that he was returning to the only place he can call home.  

After another tour, Mandella is separated from Marygay, so with time dilation they will likely never see each other again. Mandella throws himself into his military service, the only life he knows now, but he is too different from those under his command, who are all homosexual, ethnically identical, and speak a new form of English. He does not hate these soldiers; in fact, he knows that he is the real “other,” so out of time that he cannot rightfully judge them. Mandella returns from his final tour to learn that his arrival marks the end of the “Forever War.” Mankind had become a fully cloned species that could communicate with the similarly collective Taurans, whose first utterance was a somber “Why?” The Taurans had not initiated the war. Generals had blamed the accidental disappearance of human ships on the aliens to create a war, in order to spur a weak economy. Catharsis does come for Mandella, however, as he eventually reunites with Marygay, who dramatically slowed her aging by continuously jumping between collapsed stars until he returned. But many soldiers do not enjoy such a happy ending to their struggle. 

Many view The Forever War as a foil to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, rejecting its glorification of war. But ultimately, it is an expression of Haldeman’s experience fighting in the Vietnam War, which shares obvious similarities with the novel’s conflict. Both wars started with spurious ideological justifications and economic greed. Both dragged on for many years with no real goal beyond attrition. Both ended with no meaningful change other than lives lost. Both destroyed the lives of many veterans while alienating them from normal society. These forever wars are most damaging because they persist without any conception of what victory looks like. An oft-parroted and more often mocked phrase from American generals in the late 1960s was that they could see a “light at the end of the tunnel,” satisfactory exit from Vietnam. But America did not fully exit the country until 1975. 

Much of the same can be said about American involvement in Afghanistan. After our twenty years of fighting and attempting to build a stable government and capable army, Kabul fell in less than ten days amid an embarrassingly haphazard American exit. And the persistent ineptitude of the Afghan army, from general incompetence to its notorious failure to address child sexual abuse, signifies both a lack of good management and a deep cultural divide that ridiculous amounts of time and resources could never bridge. Did anything substantively change over the course of this conflict, or was it another forever war? This seems to be a story that repeats itself. I was eleven months old when America entered Afghanistan; the conflict lasted almost until my graduation from college. I knew people who were born and passed away in that same period.  

An Afghanistan veteran once joked with me that “we fought to protect poppy fields, and we came home and became addicted to prescription opioids.” War always profoundly affects the individuals involved. Haldeman’s story is most valuable as a reflection on this tragic human element. There is usually no happy ending for those veterans who return home battered and broken. Society often rejects them, or has become unrecognizable to them. America should not allow wars to drag on forever due to moneyed interests or vapid ideology. And for the veterans, who have given their all for these protracted conflicts, the least we can do is be compassionate.  

Time’s Coronation

The R.M.S. Titanic’s story is a familiar one. The flagship of England’s White Star Line, Titanic was the largest moving object in history when it set sail in 1912, only to strike an iceberg and sink on its maiden voyage, claiming the lives of more than two-thirds of those on board. The ship was as magnificent as its sinking was tragic. It was luxuriously furnished with a gymnasium, a swimming pool, a Turkish bath, a squash court, and numerous common rooms designed to evoke the Palace of Versailles. It was also a technological marvel, equipped with an electrical plant stronger than most cities employed and a remotely activated bulkhead system with watertight doors. The Titanic’s passenger list complemented its extravagance, boasting famous names like Astor and Guggenheim. 

Mark Twain satirically labeled this era “The Gilded Age,” and the French remembered it as “La Belle Époque,” “the beautiful time.” It was a time of boldness and decadence, innovation and pride, where relative peace following the Civil War in America and the Franco-Prussian War on the European continent enabled rapid industrialization and cultural development. Exponential improvement was the faith of this era, with men believing their creations could match, or even surpass, God’s and allow resolute mastery of the world. Of course, these optimistic sentiments were often real only for the upper classes. While some reaped the benefits of this economic prosperity, most toiled for a pitiful wage and many demanded change to ameliorate their miserable conditions. On the Titanic, a few enjoyed lavish staterooms, while many impoverished immigrants packed into crowded and noisy steerage cabins, although they were still leagues ahead of most other offerings.

“Titanic as Gilded Age,” emphasizing the class component of the disaster, is a tired trope, true but exhaustingly explored. Ultimately, neither rich nor poor could predict the ship’s sinking. Both wealthy and destitute passengers believed in some form of civilizational progress, the former enjoying a comfortable ocean crossing impossible a hundred years before, and the latter searching for better lives that only the New World could provide. Few believed this progress would stop; fewer predicted it would stop in such a spectacular fashion. Two pieces of fiction did imagine such a disaster, both emphasizing a lack of enough lifeboats to save passengers. One of the authors actually died on the Titanic. 

And so, the tragedy was an unfathomable event in a world that crowned man master of all, limited only by his whim and wonder. The claim that the Titanic was an “unsinkable” ship, likely offhand bravado, ultimately cemented the disaster’s legacy as a testament to mankind’s hubris in this age of limitless possibilities. It was almost as if nature had intervened to humble mankind. The Titanic’s sinking heralded an age of immense uncertainty and incredible loss, the resulting disbelief surpassed only by the First World War, which erupted little more than two years later. As Titanic survivor Jack Thayer wrote, the disaster “was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start – keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction, and happiness.”

Historians often wonder whether an event represents change or continuity. In many ways, the Titanic’s sinking signifies change. Its place in historical memory is worth considering. When the ship sank, more than 1,500 people went into the cold Atlantic, so frigid that Thayer purportedly compared it to a thousand knives stabbing you at once. Recovery teams found only about a fifth of the victims’ bodies; most were lost to the sea forever. And few tangible records of the Titanic’s fateful voyage survived. Notably, a vacationing Catholic priest, Father Francis Browne, took numerous photographs of life on the ship before he departed at its penultimate stop, his superior having ordered him back. The photos are endlessly fascinating. Father Browne took one of the last known pictures of the ship, and likely the last one of its captain, Edward J. Smith, ominously peering down from a higher deck, the photograph itself taken at such a jarringly sharp angle that it looks like Titanic is already sinking.

The wreck lay undisturbed for more than 70 years, until a 1985 expedition led by Robert Ballard finally located the watery grave, more than two miles below the ocean’s surface and remarkably preserved. Humans had gone where no man should go, piercing the void and granting the majestic ship an audience once again. Ballard’s team knew they were on the right track when they entered a debris field, first spotting a boiler on the ocean floor on their grainy video feed. The next day, the Titanic’s bow emerged from the darkness. Later expeditions extensively photographed the area. The debris field looks like a battleground, with anything the depths’ primordial creatures could not devour strewn about as if a bomb had gone off. Yet it is strangely peaceful. A bottle of champagne remains unopened, a stack of dishes unbroken, and a lifeboat davit still attached to the ship. Most poignantly, matching boots sit next to each other in the sediment, where their owner came to rest more than one hundred years ago.

But the Grand Staircase’s ornate carving, “Honour and Glory Crowning Time,” is lost forever, having either immediately splintered during the ship’s plummet or gradually disintegrated over time. Judging from its supposedly identical companion on the Titanic’s sister ship Olympic, the carving was beautiful, and its allegorical value rich. Even if its practical purpose was to hold a clock, what does it mean for time to be “crowned,” especially in an age of limitless possibility when mankind’s progress seemed inevitable? Maybe the carving meant that despite this progress, man and his creations are ultimately temporary, subject to forces greater than ourselves. For the Titanic, which will eventually fade into a pile of rust, time has ultimately prevailed, recording the exception to progress that nature had forced.

Ray Bradbury’s Enchanted Science Fiction

There are many books in my house. As a child, I spent a lot of time digging through piles of dusty boxes that seemed to go to the ceiling, hoping to find a new novel to spend an afternoon with. My favorites were the Bantam books with simple but memorable covers, so worn and aged that they often fell off halfway through my time with them. I loved the smell of the decaying paper and thought it was fascinating how yellow and oxidized the pages were.

Out of all the books in those boxes, I enjoyed Ray Bradbury’s the most. Bradbury is best known for writing Fahrenheit 451, a cautionary tale where a numbed and hedonistic populace allows all literature to be burned, preferring to consume mass media. But his prose is at its strongest in his short stories, relics of early modern science fiction rife with impossibility and brimming with imagination. Take, for example, The Martian Chronicles, a collection of short stories that traces the colonization of Mars and subsequent destruction of Martian civilization. Bradbury’s yarns are memorable, even though very few characters appear in multiple stories, because they succinctly explore the human condition in an evolving world.

In one instance, an unhappily married Martian named Ylla telepathically foresees the arrival of an expeditionary crew from Earth, fantasizing about one of the crew members, while her husband dismisses her as either childish or insane. But while Ylla cannot comprehend the possibility of extraterrestrial life, her husband is more jealous than curious, humanoid but as emotional as a human, and murders the crew when it lands. In another story after Mars has been colonized and disease has decimated the Martian population, colonists receive word of a nuclear war starting on Earth, which soon destroys the Australian continent. The colonists are helpless, countless millions of miles away, and must watch as flames engulf their true home. And the most famous story in this collection is “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which portrays an automated house on Earth struggling against encroaching nature to continue its cleaning and maintenance regimen, oblivious to the nuclear holocaust that burnt its owners’ shadows into the wall, in sharp contrast to Ylla’s peaceful home pages ago.

Bradbury’s storytelling power comes partly from a latent romanticism in his works, a fascination with the tension between existence in an increasingly mechanistic world of reason and the spirituality, emotionality, and curiosity intrinsic to all humans. Bradbury wrote stories that could resonate with anyone, perhaps in line with Leo Tolstoy’s definition of art as that which makes one feel. In a story from a different collection, an astronaut flung from his ship and about to burn up in the atmosphere contemplates his empty life and wishes that his death will mean something, as a child on Earth looks up at the sky and makes a wish on a falling star, the astronaut’s last moments a gift. In another, a couple in rural Mexico encounter a stream of American refugees of nuclear war, bewildered at their claim that the world is over because nothing has changed in their small town, possessing a morality and worldview simpler and purer than the corrupted society that created such devastation.

He certainly wrote compelling stories, but it is worth considering where Bradbury’s work stands in relation to the larger genre of science fiction. He actually considered himself a sort of fantasy writer, despite instances of scientific speculation in his stories, because he knew that his depiction of shapeshifting and clairvoyant Martians was fundamentally untrue. Instead, Bradbury believed that his stories were potent because they were untrue; their staying power was in their almost myth-like treatment of the human condition against an implausible but entertaining backdrop. Even his tamer works, to some degree, examine how mankind would operate within some future reality. The specifics of this reality are often vague, Bradbury having cleverly crafted the narrative to express his own imagination but leave room for the reader to have fun too.

Some believe this balance is missing in contemporary science fiction. It often attempts to make a world credible by conveying a myriad of dense explanations for, say, an imaginary technology’s existence--which may only delay the point where a reader must suspend their disbelief and detract from character development or thematic coherence. Contributions from physicists and futurologists on possible ways to make an unbelievable part of the story, like faster-than-light travel, valid may detract from what we are naturally better at expressing and understanding, weighing down a story’s plot. The original Star Trek was entertaining because, like many of Bradbury’s short stories, it was realistic in form, not content, and it knew that. The “dilithium crystals” that powered its space travel were a plot device, not a fantastically explained potential reality within our understanding of science, just as Bradbury never explained many of the physical challenges of living on Mars. These stories exist within their own realities, both for entertainment and to relay a message more interesting than it would be if it was forced to conform to our reality. Arguably, much of recent science fiction is disenchanted, lacking any sort of magical feeling in trying to square with our world.

But science fiction does not necessarily have to be enchanted to be entertaining – look at the subgenre of cyberpunk, which often disenchants even the mind in tales about artificial intelligence and lifelike androids, but still tells moving and relatable stories. Cyberpunk succeeds where “hard science fiction” does not because it rests on an imagination that is unwavering in its construction and unafraid to lean into the fantastic. And it often tells more compact stories, as Bradbury did, focusing on interesting characters posed against a semi-recognizable world rather than spending pages cataloguing different planets and explaining ridiculous technologies. Here and in Bradbury’s work, the author shows rather than tells, creating stories that anyone may enjoy.

The Course of Progress

Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire is a magnificent portrayal of the gradual rise, and poignant fall, of a civilization.

In the painting’s first scene, the sun is rising over a lush valley, an imposing crag dwarfs scantily clad hunters, and a cloudy horizon obscures the land beyond. Nature’s sublimity and its power over man are stirring to the viewer.

As the day progresses, the valley’s inhabitants have banded together and entered a pastoral state, the morning sky is brighter, and mankind’s mark on the land more pronounced, with sustained agriculture and a rudimentary temple. Humanity has not yet abused or altered the valley much, but great development is clearly possible in this fertile region.

Next the sun is at its zenith, as is the city. A once-humble settlement is now the seat of a self-indulgent empire, its architecture obscuring the once-commanding ridge and its people merrily celebrating military triumph and civilizational glory. Intentionally reminiscent of ancient Rome, the city’s decadence seems almost satirical, and likely unsustainable. 

Surely enough, as the afternoon light fades into a stormy evening, the city is embroiled in a bloody conflict, maybe a sacking by an external enemy, or perhaps a civil war. The delicately embellished buildings and stunning statues of war heroes cannot save it from its violent demise. 

Finally, as the sun sets and a dim moon rises, little remains of the previously glorious city. A lone pillar in the foreground draws the viewer’s eye. It once supported an empire but is now merely an overgrown home for a bird’s nest, while the rocky precipice in the background remains untouched, nature having endured mankind’s monumental hubris.

Americans remember Cole as the founder of the Hudson River School, a quasi-Romantic fraternity of painters who depicted vast, often untouched landscapes in a dramatic fashion. As the first American school of artists, these painters – especially Cole – were incredibly historically conscious, and their works were laden with social commentary. Cole painted The Course of Empire from 1833 to 1836, during a period of great change in American culture: the height of Jacksonian democracy and its emphasis on heralding progress. During this period, the concept of an evolving American frontier rose to prominence, with President Jackson’s infamous Indian Removal Act and general westward expansion. To many, especially the Jacksonian Democrats, the growth of America’s borders was part of a linear trajectory of improvement, the inevitable march of civilization. Cole disagreed, instead believing there was more cause for concern than hope. To Cole, no amount of continuous growth or seeming prosperity could triumph over the historical experience of past civilizations: man, and his anti-historical faith in the longevity of his creations, would always be self-defeating; and America, though worth cherishing, was also the next empire that would rise and eventually fall.  

Regardless, westward the course of empire took its way. And when America ran out of land to acquire, it moved on to new frontiers, especially politically and economically with the “Pax Americana” (U.S.-dominated peace) following the end of World War II. Truly the zeitgeist of the post-Enlightenment, Americans conquered abstract frontiers once they had satisfied concrete ambitions. The renowned thesis of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, that an obsession with the geographic frontier has defined American culture, has clear flaws and is a limited reading of history. Rather, the passion for ever-expanding frontiers of all kinds is symptomatic of a larger obsession with unbridled advancement – what Christopher Lasch, a more recent and comparably prominent historian, believed is the dominant ideology of the Western world, a religion of progress.

Lasch took the religion of progress to be a reaction against longstanding moral values – a secular yet almost millenarian belief that the present was the cutting edge of cultural evolution. To reference the musical film Hair, it is almost an Aquarian conceit that a new age is gradually dawning that will correct injustices and let the sunshine into a world that has been in darkness for millennia. Lasch viewed liberals as beholden to capitalism, which he believed was both culturally destructive with its atomizing individualism and falsely alluring with its presumption that general economic growth – the gradual increase in metrics such as per capita GDP – would solve society’s ills. And whoever espouses mainstream “conservatism” in America, Lasch argued, espouses an incoherent “conservatism against itself,” fighting a culture war on inherently liberal, pluralistic, and capitalistic terrain that will never allow a true victory for traditional values.

In Lasch’s view, then, most groups on the American political spectrum, and elsewhere in the Western world, have had an obsession with cultural or economic progress which leads them to assume that things would surely improve in the long run, that we will escape the once-formidable clamps of history and its limits -- as noted, for example, in Cole’s painting. It was an obsession and assumption that Lasch considered naive and deeply misguided. 

Has modern society truly insulated itself against the ebb and flow of time, transcending the cycle of rise and fall? Is the course of this empire one without finality -- will it never come to an end? Or is Cole’s stormy evening coming, the modern age having failed to live up to its expectations, with hope collapsing as increasingly fanatical groups fail to reconcile their ideologies with reality? 

Lasch saw an answer to what he viewed as dangerous progressivist illusions in what have often been denigrated as petit (small or petty) bourgeois -- lower middle class, or non-affluent middle class -- sensibilities. Marxists distrust this group for its lack of class consciousness or relative apathy and its often-conservative politics, while advocates of capitalism look down on the petit-bourgeoisie for its supposed lack of ambition. Yet Lasch respected this in-between class for maintaining happiness in its simplicity and contentment in its unimaginativeness. They can be seen as something like Cole’s pastoral stage of history – free of excessive materialism and ambition, preferring to care for the land, protect their families, and produce rather than consume. 

For Lasch, such humble self-sufficiency is a desirable model. But Lasch’s answer is unfulfilling. While one can attempt to exit from our modern world’s dominant frontier-expanding, progressivist, growth-obsessed paradigm, becoming illegible to the rest of society and placing oneself at radical odds with its power structures, this is only a personal choice that does not change society, if it is even practical at all. Cole’s decadent city remains unchanged even if a few flee it; arrogance trumps diminishing virtue. At what point do attempts to “exit” become a fatalistic, ineffectual “Benedict option” or purist monkish withdrawal -- the social commentator Rod Dreher’s appealing but flawed recommendation? 

A blind devotion to limitless progress and an unwavering belief in the modern world’s longevity are highly questionable, and we should imagine an alternative. But the proper response is unclear. Some believe that we should, if possible, accelerate the decline of the capitalistic West. Others agree that Western capitalist power is waning, but argue that carefully tailored action should be taken to preserve it and its global influence. And many others genuinely believe that there is no great problem at hand – that the modern industrial-capitalist West is uniquely positioned to escape the traditional downward course of empire. The answer is unclear. But what seems clear is that the hyper-industrialized, no-limits present is just one day in a history that spans countless years, regardless of how long the sun stays up.

The Metaphysical Confederacy

Southern sensibilities prior to the Civil War are often underlooked and misrepresented as a one-dimensional justification of slavery. James O. Farmer’s The Metaphysical Confederacy: James Henley Thornwell and the Synthesis of Southern Values sketches an intellectual history of the Old South while also exploring Thornwell’s theology and views on slavery. Characterizing him as both a product of his society and a key player in it, Farmer asserts that his subject is a perfect window into the leading debates and controversies of the antebellum South. Through Thornwell, the book also highlights the Old South’s often-understudied intellectual prowess and depth of belief. 

Farmer believes that Thornwell epitomized Calvinism, with its belief in humankind’s total moral depravity, and “can be seen as the prototype of Deep South religious thought.” He stresses that the prominent theologian’s beliefs, representative of the Southern mind, were formed in reaction to, and against, the modernizing forces that shaped the North. Northern society had become focused on economic progress and worldly success, whereas the South rejected what it viewed as the excesses of modern science, and saw a common bond among humans not in their abstract rights but the equalizing burden of universal sin. Farmer argues that this disjuncture between the North and the South developed into an irreconcilable civilizational struggle, and Thornwell’s beliefs were indicative of the predominant sense of Southern identity that preceded secession.

A key focus of Thornwell’s writings was the proper role of reason. Thornwell believed that the North’s unwavering commitment to reason, especially applying it to Scripture, was a folly because it denied man’s terribly flawed nature. “To prefer the deductions of philosophy to a Divine revelation,” he wrote, “is to relinquish the sun for the stars.” Reason, stemming from the mind of a morally fallen creature, was itself flawed. And Thornwell believed there were incomprehensible truths – divine truths – that the intelligentsia of the North wrongly believed they could prove or disprove with their minds alone. He further believed reason was in danger of going beyond its rightful place by intellectualizing all matters, infringing upon the supernatural realm by undermining the validity of divine revelations. But insistence on a firm split between the natural and the supernatural did not mean, in his case, a rejection of science and reason, as some scholars have asserted. According to Farmer, Thornwell thought “divine revelation was an ongoing process,” meaning that man would continue to learn new truths.

Thornwell believed that while many truths from Scripture should be self-evident, reason could observe things that are confirmed although not made explicit by God’s word: “The supernatural is that which alone is strictly and properly revelation; the natural is confirmed, but not made known, by divine testimony.” But reason was still an inherently flawed tool, and humans were “doomed to drudge in a humbler sphere [where] we are content to know of the external world just what our senses reveal, of the world within us [only] what reflection can bring to light, and of the world above us what the inspiration of the Almighty may vouchsafe to impart.” Here Thornwell espouses a blend of empiricism and skeptical scientism – not pure rationalism – that Farmer believes stemmed from the Scottish “Common Sense” philosophy and Baconianism that in his view were predominant in the South.

This epistemology was part of a larger body of Southern values disconnected from those of the North. By the 1850s, the divide between the regions was not only political but philosophical, with neither side able to understand the other’s ideals; people in the two societies inhabited different mental universes. Farmer maintains that Thornwell was instrumental in shaping a Southern orthodoxy, criticizing his society from within but also bringing what he believed were its principles together in a synthesis that was intended to spiritually strengthen the South. Thus he helped to create a “metaphysical Confederacy” – a Southern nation of the mind – that preceded secession and the Confederate States of America.

Farmer argues that in cultivating this Southern cosmology, Thornwell was quintessentially conservative. He applies the skepticism toward the North’s emphasis on  science and rationality to the political realm, asserting that it led Thornwell to conclude that the South needed to insulate itself from the larger world in order to protect its intellectual and cultural heritage against what he thought were radical modernizing forces. Viewing society as an organism, he espoused a unique sociology that sanctified the community over the individual (while acknowledging that individual morality was crucial to collective decency).

Thornwell is not, however, remembered mainly for his expansive epistemology or his novel sociology; instead, much of the scholarship on him stresses his regrettable defense of slavery. Farmer explains Thornwell’s ambivalence about slavery as a theologian and his position that the churches should stay out of political and social issues, which he maintained until secession became inevitable. Thornwell’s view of slavery owed much to his conservative disposition and his focus on maintaining social order. “If Adam had never sinned and brought death into the world, with all our woe,” he claimed, “the bondage of man to man would never have been instituted,” and Earth was not meant to be a paradise free of suffering. Rather, Thornwell contended that due to man’s fallen nature – the same depravity that degraded reason – slavery was destined to exist, along with sickness, suffering, and death.

Thornwell also believed that slavery should be judged, on a case-by-case basis, by how masters individually treated their slaves. He sought to ameliorate slaves’ conditions while maintaining the institution, which he considered part of the social order. Often acknowledging that in a saved or redeemed world slavery would not exist, Thornwell posited a version of the Golden Rule which commanded masters to “give unto your servants that which is just and equal.”

Thornwell’s cerebral defense of slavery was, according to Farmer, part of a larger epistemological framework that was lodged deeply in the South’s mind before the Civil War. His book expertly analyzes Thornwell’s writings, adding nuance and context to the theological and ecclesiastical debates of his time. In doing so, it adds another dimension to the antebellum South. Through Thornwell, Farmer reveals how the South conceptualized much of its opposition to the North, how it approached various philosophical questions characteristic of the modern age, and how it questioned some aspects of slavery while also unfortunately justifying it.