Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos
by Robert D. Kaplan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert D. KaplanEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-01-07
ISBN: 0375726276
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos
Book Review: "WWJD?" ("What would Jupiter Do?")
Summary: 5 Stars
In the ancient world, the Romans, launching their civilization into war, carried out a simple but meaningful ritual: the temple priests opened wide the portals of the Temple of Mars, the War God---left them opened wide to signify the spirit of War unleashed on Rome's foe, a God of Battle red in tooth and claw.
Simple. Brutal. Symbolically powerful. Effective. The Ancients were onto something.
Times change. After having lived through one of the most ferocious and deadly centuries in our planet's history, humanity remains furiously optimistic and convinced of a new golden age of peace and globalism.
After the end of the Cold War, so we're told, man's nature has changed, or can be changed with education and international relief aid, sparing humanity from fruitless war and suffering. Even the economic and financial theories sweeping the nineties and thriving during the Tech Bubble confirmed this astounding new liberation from the shackles of genetics: we had now emancipated ourselves from the Business Cycle, all Hail the New Economy!
Indeed, the breathtaking speed of technological advances only served to heighten this sense of a world in flux. True, humanity is on the threshold of a marvellous age in technolocal innovation and revolution, and we may very well be the first generation in human history to control not only the definition of longevity, but its quality as well---to say nothing of the growing power to define, and to alter, the very notion of what it means to be human.
Not so, according to Robert Kaplan, whose gem of a book "Warrior Politics" suggests that Ecclesiastes may have had a better bead on the future than Francis Fukuyama and Bill Clinton: there is nothing new under the sun.
Kaplan's marvellous little tome "Warrior Politics" comes as a blast of icy water on our assumption of our modernism, and the book's first chapter is appropriately entitled "There is no Modern World".
Kaplan cautions that this distinction between the 'ancient' and 'modern' world is an artificial and potentially dangerous one; to Kaplan, the age in which we live, though more technologically proficient than ages past, is no different from any other time in human history, and can be perceived and dealt with by distilling and using the wisdom of ancient (and not so ancient) political and military philosophers from Greece, China, and Rome.
To that end, Kaplan has divided "Warrior Politics" into chapters that distill the wisdom of political and military theorists like Sun-Tzu, Thucydides, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Livy, and Churchill, and succinctly and deftly apply their experiences and philosophies to modern conflict. The analysis spent on each philosopher is brief, but in the brevity the casual reader gains precious insight into the unchanging nature of human events, and the experienced reader may view a Machiavelli or Churchill in an entirely new fashion.
According to Kaplan, human nature has not changed. Man is still ambitious, avaricious, and greedy, and tyrants and belligerents eager to enslave their fellow man or seize precious resources will be checked only with force, prudently and intelligently applied. Diplomacy, harsh words in international bodies and in Alpine peace conferences, and appeals to human dignity are all well and good, but only if those velvet words are undergirded by steel and force of arms.
Kaplan buttresses his use of the military philosophers with some social theorists as well, including Hobbes, Malthus, and Immanuel Kant, and emphasizing that a Kantian utopia where all men are viewed as "ends in themselves" may be desirable, but highly impractical. "Utopia", after all means "no place."
Finally, Kaplan ends this delicious and imminently readable little book on an eccentric note: he suggests the Roman emperor Tiberius as a model for governmental stability. For all his later cruelty, Tiberius maintained the borders of Empire, eschewed costly conflicts, and left the coffers of Rome richer than when he first succeeded Augustus.
The synthesis of Kaplan's book can be viewed through the gimlet eye of his final chapter: global governance requires global stability, and order is best fostered through a cold-eyed, realistic, and pragmatic view of human affairs.
Why a pagan ethos? Because the pagan philosophers saw human affairs as they were (those Pagan gods were hardly idealizations, but earthy creatures with desires and furies as human as their adherents), whereas Christians saw humans as they should be.
But in the real world, we can ill afford to have our policy guided by good intentions. And "Warrior Politics" ends with a coda: the wars we fight in the future may be with warriors, not soldiers. The excellent chapter on Achilles and Troy is instructive, in that it warns of a new class of economically disenfranchised young men (particularly in the Arab world) who give themselves over to the "glory of bloodlust", finding meaning and importance through martyrdom, terror, and chaos.
Santayana warned that those who are ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it; in the wake of 9/11, that warning takes on considerably more ominous significance.
Kaplan's excellent book is a thoughtful and well-paced anodyne to our own short-sighted modernity, and a roaringly good read.
JSG
Leadership Books
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