Making Sense of the Warrior: The Reith Lectures by Margaret MacMillan
We tend to think of war as a temporary breakdown, an interruption in our normally peaceful existence. But what if it isn't? What if it's an innate and inescapable aspect of humanity? In her BBC Reith Lectures, historian – and past Massey Lecturer – Margaret MacMillan ponders whether we're destined to fight, and explores our very complicated feelings about war.
In Lecture Two from her series, The Mark of Cain, she asks why both men and women go to war. How are warriors produced? What differences do gender play in war? This lecture is called Fear and Loving: Making Sense of the Warrior.
**This episode originally aired October 5, 2018.
In the novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote: "If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."
But what if war is not the opposite of civilization? What if it's a permanent and inextricable part of it? And if war is an inextricable part of civilization, then so are the warriors. They live among us, part of society, sharing daily life and dreams. Yet they are apart, somehow different and permanently altered by their experiences. They are a lesson, an example, a caution, or even an ideal of duty to the larger society.
Margaret MacMillan wonders whether those who've never fought can ever comprehend what warriors have gone through. She asks:
"Can we really understand what it's like to be a soldier, what it's like to be in battle? We read the memoirs, we read what we can, we try to understand it. It's very difficult. And of course history will impose order on what was not orderly. History will talk about battles, they'll talk about battle plans, it'll talk about strategy. Generals will say this — I always meant it to turn out that way. But when you read accounts of battles — and I think these are probably closer to the truth — it's muddle and confusion and nobody quite knows what's going to happen. One of the best descriptions I think is Pierre wandering round the battlefield of Borodino in 'War and Peace'. He doesn't know what's happening, nobody knows what's happening, but somehow at the end it looks like the Russians have won and the French have lost."
But If the warriors can't quite grasp what has happened, then how can we?
Margaret MacMillan is emeritus professor of international history at Oxford University and professor of history at the University of Toronto. Her acclaimed books include Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (Random House, 2003), The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Penguin Canada, 2014), and her Massey Lectures History's People (House of Anansi, 2015).
For copyright reasons, we cannot provide this episode as a podcast. But the BBC Reith Lectures website offers additional ways of listening to Margaret MacMillan's series. There are also complete transcripts of all five lectures, as well as details on previous Reith series.