A Most Agreeable War
It is generally agreed, in the best houses and the worst newspapers, that a nation in possession of a large army must be in want of an enemy. I have never once been asked whether I agree.
The enemy, it must be said, is rarely consulted either. He is simply discovered, the way a wealthy young gentleman is discovered by a neighbourhood with daughters to marry off. One season nobody has heard of him. The next he is spoken of at every dinner, his faults are known in detail by people who could not find his country on a map, and it is settled, before he has said a word, that he is the very worst sort of person and must be dealt with at once.
On pride
Wars are begun by proud men, and proud men are a particular species. They are not usually brave. Bravery is what they require of other people's sons. What they possess instead is a horror of being seen to back down, which they mistake for principle, and an income secure enough that the consequences will reach them last, if they arrive at all.
Watch how such a man speaks when a war he championed goes badly. He does not say he was wrong. He says the cause was noble and the execution regrettable, as though the execution were done by somebody else, which, to be fair, it was. He will be invited to explain it on television for twenty years. The soldiers who carried out his noble cause will be invited to wait on hold.
On prejudice
The proud men could do very little alone. They need the rest of us to supply the prejudice, and we are generous with it. A war needs a public that has decided, quickly and without much evidence, who the good people are. It needs a public that finds questions tiresome and doubters suspicious. It needs a public that will repeat a slogan at the dinner table and feel, for a moment, part of something large.
I do not exempt myself. First impressions are delicious. It is far more pleasant to dislike a whole people at once than to learn the name of a single one of them. But a first impression formed by a government's press office is not an impression at all. It is a costume someone has handed you, and you are wearing it to their party.
On the people who pay
In the old novels, a bad marriage ruined one family. A bad war ruins families by the town. The bill arrives in forms the drawing room never sees: a young man who comes home and will not sleep, a city that is now a photograph, a mother on the other side who was never part of anybody's argument. The proud men do not pay it. The prejudiced public mostly does not pay it either. It is paid by the people furthest from the conversation, which is exactly why the conversation is so easy to have.
What I am asking
I am not asking you to love every government on earth. Some of them deserve the contempt they get, ours included. I am asking for something smaller and much rarer: that you take a second look before you take a side. That you notice who is selling the war, and what they stand to gain, and whether they will be anywhere near it. That you meet one person from the country you have been told to hate, if only in their own words, before you agree that their home should burn.
The proud man needs your prejudice to start his war. Withhold it, and he is only a man shouting in a very expensive room.
Changing your mind about a person, after you have judged them too fast, is the happiest ending in every story worth reading. It could be the ending of a few more wars, if enough of us were willing to admit we had judged too soon.
Where this comes from
Inspiration
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, free at Project Gutenberg. This essay borrows its mood, not its words: a story about judging people too fast, and the pride that keeps us from admitting it.