Bathing in reeking wounds: The liberal arts,beauty,and war

Here is a true story about the liberal arts today.

In June 2010, I was observing a seminar at Peking University in Beijing about new methods in historiography. The chief speakers were Americans, but most of the participants were Chinese. They were members of the first generation that had been allowed to leave Communist China to study abroad after the government’s decision in the late 1970s to reconstruct Chinese higher education. They told of reveling in the unexpected sense of freedom that permission to study in the United States had brought. Growing up they had feared that they would never travel.

Then a younger man from a generation with fewer such fears, a graduate student at Peking University, stood up. He had been listening intently, but clearly he had wanted to speak and had been restraining himself. Now passionate words burst out. ‘But what about beauty?’ he asked. ‘You can use any method you want, but what about the beauty of history? I want to live with the beauty of history.’

I have always regretted that the student left before I could get his name. Whoever he is, wherever he is, this is how I longed to respond to his outburst.

The beauty of history? I said to myself immediately. Where is the beauty in such awful events as war? And then I corrected myself. There is beauty in history. It lies in our ability to do history, often censored though it is. To be able to think about history, to wonder about it, to discover its truths, to write it – that is beauty in action. Even more significantly, the study of history is the incessant display of a hallmark of our species: the dialectic of the beautiful and the bestial. The terrible destroys the beautiful, but in a bloody miracle, the beautiful also emerges from the womb of the bestial, that ‘terrible beauty’ of which the poet W. B. Yeats wrote.

What is true of history extends to the liberal arts. To think about them, to wonder about them, to discover and establish their truths, to write about them – that is beauty in action. The liberal arts largely reveal the dialectic between the beautiful and the bestial. The liberal arts rub our hearts in the destruction of beauty, but their practitioners, liberal artisans, exhibit an intellectual beauty in action and show the wresting of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic beauty out of the ugliest of human experiences – among them the violent monstrosities of war. They bring us to tears and a fragile hope.

I wish I had told that Chinese student a story about the great classicist Bernard Knox. In 1945, towards the end of World War II, he was a captain in the United States Army, co-operating with partisans in the grueling Italian campaign. Their task was to hold sections of a mountain line at the notorious Passo dell'Abettone. As he struggled, he thought about the Roman legions of Octavian and Mark Antony who had earlier, in 43 BCE, marched through this landscape. At one point, Knox and his men stopped to smoke a cigarette in a bombed villa. Amidst the wreckage he spotted a book on the floor, a text of Virgil, the classical Roman poet, published by the Roman Academy but ‘By Order of Benito Mussolini’. Knox closed his eyes, opens the dictatorially produced volume at random, and puts his finger on the page he finds. It is a prophecy for Italy, from lines at the end of the first Georgic. In translation:

… a world in ruins …

For right and wrong change places; everywhere

So many wars, so many shapes of crime

Confront us; no due honor attends the plow.

The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt …

Impious War is raging.

Knox continues:

‘A world in ruins.’ It was an exact description of the Italy we were fighting in - its railroads and its ancient buildings shattered by Allied aircraft, its elegant bridges blown into the water by the retreating Germans, and its fields sown not with seed by the farmers but with mines by the German engineers.

The fighting stopped; it was time to move on. I tried to get the Virgil into my pack, but it was too big, and I threw it back to the cluttered floor. But I remember thinking, ‘If I get out of this alive, I'll go back to the classics, and Virgil especially.’ And I did. (Knox, 2006: 39–41)

Today, we speak compulsively about the liberal arts and globalization, about the liberal arts and digitalization, about the liberal arts and the crisis in the humanities. An even graver imperative is to answer that Chinese student’s question: where is the beauty of history? Where is the beauty of the liberal arts that must compel us and that liberal artisans must fight to defend? It exists here, there, and elsewhere, but I am seeking it – perhaps perversely – in the ducts that connect the liberal arts and war, those armed struggles that are everywhere in the human experience. I will range widely as I mine and sweep these vast seas, but I have an anchor: Shakespeare’s play Macbeth.

First, in the midst of the wretched hurly-burly of my subject, some definitions.

The liberal arts are significant ways of organizing our thinking about created and natural life. Codified as the 7 Liberal Arts by Martianus Capella in the Graeco-Roman tradition, they became the basis for the famous Medieval curriculum of the trivium (grammar; rhetoric; dialectic, which might include logic and philosophy) and the quadrivium (geometry, with some geography; arithmetic; astronomy; music). Over time, these seven rubrics have shifted shape. After great cultural upheavals, they evolved in the late 19th century into three academic divisions, each with its disciplines and their home departments: the humanities with their moral, cultural, and aesthetic concerns; the social sciences; and the sciences. This triad is now the staging area for the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work that shuttles among them, including fusions with the professions. Despite such changes, the liberal arts are foundational, if contested, ways of thinking that the liberal arts curriculum embeds.

As for war, its entry in the 5^th edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is two columns long, but I will borrow from the formidable critic Elaine Scarry. War is a contest that seeks to injure and that sanctions killing (Scarry, 1985). These contests differ in scale. Our wars are cosmic and earth-bound, or religious and secular, or total and guerilla. We can modulate and/or sublimate our organized violence into contests that are less fatal than warfare. Think of courtrooms, sports, or debates. We also mobilize our financial and human capital against a reified enemy that lacks a human face: the highly-publicized United States wars against cancer, poverty, drugs. The participants in these clashes of arms and armies vary. For example, much of my own work has been on gender wars, the risibly named ‘Battle of the Sexes’. Psychologically, the self can be divided, at war with itself, that ancient psychomachic duel. But, no matter what the scale, no matter who the participants, war is an injurious contest in which one side seeks to win – no matter what the cost.

Macbeth is a savagely beautiful, globally famous text about these injuring contests. It dramatizes wars between states, wars within states, wars among the genders, wars within the self. Since its original production around 1605–1606, it has become an enduring cultural force. I have even read of a free form modern dance production of Macbeth in Belgrade when the 1990s war in the Balkans was formally over but keeping its grip on Serbian politics. The production was a parable of Serbia, Macbeth representing Slobodan Milosevic, Lady Macbeth Mira Milosevic (Weschler, 2004: 75–76). ¹

The tragedy is about a well-born, energetic, childless couple in Scotland, erotically attracted to each other. The Macbeths struggle over the pace of the pursuit of their political ambitions, he initially more self-divided than she. Yet ambition couples them. Their ruler, Good King Duncan, is fighting both a civil rebellion and the incursions of the King of Norway. He, his son Malcolm, and his staff receive a battle report from a sergeant who praises the valor and military skill of Macbeth, the king’s cousin, and Banquo, his companion in arms. The two warriors are doubling and redoubling their ‘strokes upon the foe’ that they must wound and kill. The sergeant continues, before he collapses, that they meant either to ‘bathe in reeking wounds’ or ‘memorize another Golgotha’ (I.ii.39–40).

Despite the patronage of King Duncan, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth assassinate him, get the throne, and then murder and murder in their ultimately futile efforts to secure it. They create more reeking wounds. ‘Bleed, bleed poor country!’ laments Macduff, another warrior/noble. They leave a world in ruins. Lady Macbeth will die mad, attempting to bathe away the blood on her hands. Macbeth will die on the battlefield at the hands of Macduff, whose wife and children he has killed. Malcolm will become king.

All this is familiar stuff to the arts and liberal arts, but familiarity fails to blunt the ferocity of the tragedy’s dialectic between the experience of war and of the beautiful. For war, which seeks to destroy human bonds, seems inseparable from love, which seeks to maintain them – love among those at war, love for those at the home front, love for those at the front. ² Macbeth and Lady Macbeth initially dramatize this conjunction. The pun in English on ‘arms’ reflects this. Arms are both weapons and the limbs of an embrace, the sign of both Mars and Venus. In civil wars, we share blood lines with the enemy.

Still another dialectical whiplash occurs in the sergeant’s phrase ‘bathing in reeking wounds’. War horribly wounds individual bodies, families, societies, and the land itself. We bathe, not in water, but in stench and blood. War leaves us wound up in shrouds. However, many believe that blood, like water, can also cleanse, purge, and redeem us. The beauty of such regeneration is a message of the Apocalypse, of other holy wars, and of Golgotha, the place where Christ was crucified.

A recent production of Macbeth dramatized still a third possible oscillation. ³ At the end of the play, Macduff gives Malcolm the severed head of Macbeth. Shaped like a globe, its colors are red and gold. Malcolm lifts up the head, and in the stage light, I could not tell, nor could many in the audience, if the object resembles the golden crown of another good king or the blood-red crown of another homicidal maniac. Is Malcolm the biological son and heir of the fruitful Duncan, or the spiritual son and heir of the barren Macbeth? Were all the wars a terrible prelude to peace, or were they a series of repetitions in the repetitious compulsion of violence? Does Duncan, who represents the beauty of royal sweetness, embody the ‘reality’ of our species, or does Macbeth? The audience swerves between hope because of Duncan and fear because of Macbeth.

Where, my Chinese student might ask, is the emergence of a beauty that has any stability? All you have talked about, he might say, is destruction and a play that keeps its audience in agonizing doubt about the relations between the conduct of war and the formation of beauty. But, I would say without much originality, the play is aesthetically beautiful. The play’s the thing, which may catch the conscience of a commoner and king. For war has been the soil, the womb, the matrix in which the arts have grown. So have the liberal arts, fertilized by resilience, courage, anguish, or desperate necessity. Yes, the reeking wounds, so often sacrificial, are also generative.

It takes realism for the liberal arts to acknowledge this and perhaps a certain bravado, even blithe superficiality, for me to glimpse hope in such generativity. But the laws of war arise in order to tame the lawlessness of war. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) writes Concerning the Law of War and Peace in 1625, about two decades after the first production of Macbeth. Slavery and apartheid in the United States, a civil war against African-Americans, create the blues. World War I is the hot spur for the Core Curriculum of Columbia College. World War II speeds up the development of the computers we all now routinely use. I again oscillate, this time between bitter sorrow at the setting of such creations and gratitude for them. I once heard a provocative literary critic say that she didn’t mind the death of grandmothers in the bombing of Guernica because it produced Picasso’s Guernica. This proud mouth was rueless, morally clueless, and ruthless, but she bluntly confronted the death of the human body in war as the birth of a painter’s beauty. None of my wimpy dialectical oscillations for her.

And, I would tell my Chinese student, the quest for understanding has its own beauty as well as frets and tedium. Every liberal arts discipline contributes to the critical understanding of wars. Literary and cultural studies explore the literature and language of war, including our epics from Homer to Harry Potter novels and movies. ⁴ Musicology analyzes the music and noise of war; Economics the shifts in the distribution of goods and services during wartime; Anthropology or History the cross-cultural dimensions of the warrior ethic and rituals of battle. The biological and health sciences take up the breaking and healing of bodies; psychology and psychiatry the breaking and healing of minds; psychology and neural science the brain’s wiring of aggression and fear. Together, politics, philosophy, law, and religion teach us about the control of wars through treaties, negotiations, conventions, laws, and theories of the just war. Since the 1970s, undergraduate and graduate peace and conflict studies programs have grown. Together, literature, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, law, and medicine give us Trauma Studies.

Even more than a set of questions and knowledge, the liberal arts are advocates for modes of thought that have their own elegance and artful powers. In the audience at that performance of Macbeth was a group of West Point cadets, both women and men. Upright, disciplined, they wore the famous grey West Point uniforms with black stripes down their trousers. I asked them why they were there. We are studying Shakespeare, they said forthrightly and politely. Once again, war and the liberal arts were allies. From its founding in 1818, the United States Military Academy has offered the liberal arts, at first ethics, history, and geography. The tradition of training the warrior in the liberal arts, the ideal of the soldier/scholar, far predates West Point, but judged by a recent website, the Academy has the clearest possible modern expression of the nature and value of liberal arts mind.

To be sure, one part of this West Point treaty with the liberal arts is instrumental. The History Department assures students that history majors are ‘more competitive for promotion than the average!’ ⁵ However, instrumentality soon gives way to the persuasive description of the compelling moral and cognitive competencies of the liberal arts. They enable us to think historically, and without history, a student will be no better than ‘an individual with amnesia’ (a quote from the historian David McCullough). As the liberal arts student brings the past into the present, he or she develops ‘a passion for understanding the human condition’; ‘an intellectual curiosity that seeks growth in learning how to think critically, not what to think’; a capacity for ‘higher order thinking’ and ‘interdisciplinarity’; and a desire to find the ‘lasting satisfaction that comes from working hard, learning much in the process, and in the end producing quality work’. The sum of the competencies is the power to ‘make sense of the inherent complexity of the human condition’ – for example, the complexity of connections among war, beauty, and the liberal arts.

The ability of the liberal arts to understand war is more urgent than it ever has been – simply because the human species, since World War II, has become more and more capable of destroying itself. How can I be killed? Let me count the ways. We are in a very risky period of history, a period of even greater unevenness and scarcity in the distribution of regional and global resources, of acute competition for global leadership, of the proliferation of nuclear and biological and conventional weapons, and of collision among militant faiths. The temptation to use force for a variety of motives leers out at us.

Fortunately, the practitioners of the liberal arts are more prepared than they ever have been to organize our understanding. Our competencies are sharper and more agile. Globalization has increased the sheer quantity of accessible information about wars – their varying nature, their causes, their processes, their consequences. New tools of communication such as blogs quickly spread news and messages – sometimes openly, sometimes secretly and in code; sometimes from combatants, sometimes from observers. Recipients can widely distribute this information, including sonic resonances and visual images. Of course, the sheer ubiquity of images has contradictory consequences. It can threaten to turn war into a guilty aesthetic pleasure, or a spectator sport, or a video game that spares its players that nasty physical interactivity of actual combat, that disturbing gush of real blood. Yet the images can also document the sordid, the repellant, and the injurious, and force public revulsion against a war.

Moreover, the liberal arts are now far more diverse in their participants and their areas of inquiry. Both people and scholarship were harshly tested during the post-Vietnam ‘culture wars’, a kulturkampf that roared on in the United States and elsewhere. The expansion of the liberal arts was accused, hotly and not always wrongly, of being divisive, intellectually shoddy, politically motivated and politically correct, unpatriotic, virulently at odds with the achievements of America and of the West, and unthinkingly, unconscionably anti-war. ⁶ Such attacks have diminished, but continue to rumble and flare. A waggish friend who once worked for Fox News sent me a salvo, A Field Guide to Left-Wing Wackos. It featured eighteen different species of wackos, among them self-hating vets and Peace Moms, ‘a well-organized, well-caffeinated member of the suburban leisure class who has an overwhelming need to “make a difference”' (Alfia and Lipton, 2007: 127).

When all is said and screamed, because of such fields as African-American Studies, Gender Studies, the new social history, gay and lesbian and queer studies, and post-colonial studies, we know far more about who fought where and for whom and how and why; far more about soldiers and their animals and machines; far more about the war experiences of the ordinary, marginal, and unlettered. We also know far more about the lives of civilians at war. The liberal arts are gaining a deeper appreciation of the histories, testimonies, diaries, and autobiographies of non-combatants in past and present. We read Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen (1945), not as the minor work of an avant-garde modern writer, but for what it is, a brilliant ethnography of civilians in 20th-century war, told as an account of Stein and her partner Alice B Toklas, two aging Jewish American lesbians who manage to survive in Occupied France long enough to greet the American liberators.

Among the most revealing documents from the Occupation and wars in Iraq is Baghdad Burning, the now-published blog of ‘Riverbend,’ the pseudonym of an educated Iraqi woman of 24. Bringing together new technologies and the voice of a non-combatant, it also shows again a literary beauty being born in war. The introductory materials framing the book are polemical, but she is not. Indeed, she is often wickedly satirical and witty, the humor that harsh circumstances can provoke, that defuses self-pity, and that asserts one’s own will and subjectivity. She appreciates having readers, and likes questions and ‘differing opinions,’ but she is in the midst of a hellishly hot city with little or no electricity, shattered glass and buildings, abductions, and so much death that the process of mourning has become ‘automatic’ (Riverbend, 2005: 286). She is fearful of both the Occupation Forces and the Islamic fundamentalists.

As the year of blogging (2003–2004) passes, we watch her feelings about the American military presence shift. An initial pity and grief for Americans because of 9/11 evaporates. So does an initial sympathy for the American troops – in their uniforms, with their equipment – in the Baghdad heat. Burning her tenderness away are the photographs of Abu Ghraib, globally circulated digitally from a local prison. At last, repossessing the grievances of contemporary war, she writes with anger and weariness, ‘We have 9/11’s on a monthly basis’ (Riverbend, 2005: 286).

‘Riverbend’ is the material of history. As the history website at West Point states, we live in history. The liberal arts must struggle and have struggled – even at the risk of unpopularity and of seeming ugly – to write history as reliably as possible. Understanding means attacking misunderstanding. Such a tough struggle famously entails analyzing how historical narratives about war project the needs and desires of a specific culture. These narratives then become fiercely defended castles of truth and beauty for that culture. Perhaps community mourning is the earliest of such buildings. To live in New York City during and after 9/11, as I do, is to witness them being built. As James Tatum writes in his eloquent study of the process of turning war into memorials, ‘The Iliad speaks to the way we think about war, because the one impulse that has proved as enduring as human beings’ urge to make wars is their need to make sense of them. The first step in making sense of any such loss is to mourn the dead’ (Tatum, 2003: xvi). No matter how much I respect the sincerity of such mourning, such sense-making can also lead to the grotesquerie of chauvinism, sentimentality, self-dealing, and manic self-delusion. Off we go into the wild blue yonder of myth.

My own experiences of war have been relatively benign, but I have soared into those wild blue yonders. On my wings, I have enacted that familiar Hegelian master/slave dialectic and its two-fold discovery: first, how much we have constructed our identity through the construction of the Other, here as Mortal Enemy, and next, how much the Other as Mortal Enemy has done the same to us. ⁷ I was a very young child in the Pacific Northwest during World War II. Every male member of my family of the appropriate age, including my father, was in the military. An aunt was with the Red Cross in the Pacific theater. Little Catharine was an ardent patriot. She worked in her mother’s Victory Garden, had her own war bonds, collected tin, memorized military ranks, followed battles, and could sing the anthems of every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. On rainy and sunny days alike, she sat in a foxhole she had dug on a cliff overlooking Bellingham Bay, her wooden rifle on the lip of the hole, guarding against the Japanese who might swarm ashore and decapitate noble Americans.

Years later, professorial Catharine, now an ardent advocate of pluralism and multi-culturalism, was team-teaching Law and Literature with a section about the law of war. On our syllabus was One Man’s Justice (in Japanese, Toi Hi No Senso) by Akira Yoshimura, a novel first published in 1978. I was shocked, and shocked to find myself shocked, by the narrative of a young Japanese air defense officer who, angry and traumatized by saturation bombing, participates in the beheading of a downed American pilot. After the Emperor’s surrender, which appalls him, he flees but is arrested. He is then imprisoned, tried, and sentenced. What I would have called a war crimes trial is to him the implacable machinery of the victor’s justice. What was to me a vicious brutality by a young Japanese officer was to him an honorable act of revenge. I was forced into a difficult dialogue with myself about ‘my’ World War II.

In a fierce essay (2008), Tony Judt, one of the towering historians of his generation, lacerates a far more general and pervasive American myth-making about war. He is an exemplary guide to understanding through the exposure of misunderstandings. We are turning the past, he writes, into a museum, ‘a moral memory palace’. The mourning of war’s victims does not bring a sense of reality to the present. On the contrary, it is the dues we pay in order to join a club of amnesiacs. Judt reminds us that no 20th-century war was fought on U.S. soil. Consequently, Americans have, for a century and more, been free from the worst of war. Rather than being grateful, they have forgotten its hard-bitten, bitter meanings. Empty of wisdom, they glorify the military; they refuse to understand the complexities of terrorist groups; they are complacent about torture; and they are ignorant of the knowledge that any clear-eyed study of the 20th century proves, ‘war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike’ (Judt, 2008: 20). Reading these words, the image of a frantic Macbeth and a distraught Lady Macbeth – after they have won the throne, increasingly alienated from each other – rose up unbidden before me.

My question for historians is why, why do people go to war and wars. What are the causes? Posing this question, I fear I am simple and naïve, a grown-up child wanting to know why the woods are dark at night and when the light will break. Why do wars seem to drive us, and we drive them? Is this the invisible hand of evolution, the invisible hand of the markets, the visible or invisible hands of the gods? Or are the hands our own, reaching for power and resources, thrones and new revenues, grasping a gun or machete, or tapping on the keyboard of a computer that will send a predator drone soaring?

Or, can war represent a resilient, indefatigable lust for excitement and certainties? Chris Hedges, the war correspondent and student of the classics, writes in a profound study, ‘The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with the destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living’ (Hedges, 2002: 3). Even some of the most powerful of anti-war voices accept the compelling allure of war. This is not true of the grievous cries of the defeated, enslaved Trojan women. This is not true of women and children raped during war. It is not true of some feminist anti-war statements. The more Utopian of them, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), ache to imagine a benign, non-contestable domain.

It is true of the great William James’ ‘The Moral Equivalent of War’, finished 7 months before his death in 1910. It begins rousingly, ‘The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party’ (James, 1987: 1281). The essay, although brilliant and ambitious, is self-divided. Writing in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, suspicious of the rough riding of his contemporary Theodore Roosevelt, James hates war and knows the horrors of the violent pursuit of ‘loot and glory.’ Echoing Macbeth, he writes that ‘History is a bath of blood’ (1987: 1281). He also gets the strategy of standing a state on a permanent war footing under the rhetorical guise of maintaining the peace. However, he understands and even responds to the attractions and virtues of war. For this ‘gory nurse’ trains societies to cohesiveness and men to hardiness, daring, courage, risk-taking, and the obedience that is a check against unbridled individualism. War is romantic. Straining to reconcile his pacifism and his admiration of the ‘higher aspects of the militaristic sentiment’ (1987: 1284), James offers up sketches of morally and socially acceptable outlets for masculine energies and needs to live in extremis – a stable system of civic honors, an army ‘enlisted against Nature’ (1987: 1291), a rigorous period of mining, fishing, and building roads.

Over a half-century later, in 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. in ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail,’ resisting the civil war against African-Americans, displays a far more tempered muscularity than James. Although King knows that freedom must be ‘demanded’ by the oppressed, his tone is deliberately reasonable, judicious, loving. He wants to occupy a third way between ‘complacency’ and a ‘bitterness and hatred’ that ‘comes perilously close to advocating violence.’ Yet he is preparing for a ‘nonviolent campaign,’ the goal of which is freedom. Like all good campaigns, it must be undertaken systematically and strategically. Facts must be collected to see if indeed ‘injustices are alive.’ If they are, negotiations must be entered into. Then ‘self-purification,’ a traditional preparation for warriors and questers, must be accomplished before ‘direct action’ can be launched (King, 1990: 325–329). ‘Letter’ displays a warrior seeking to retain the warrior’s strengths but daringly stripping the warrior of the weapons of violence.

The most plausible opponents of war, as Judt tells us, are the people – like King – who have experienced war. For them, war is neither fantasy nor entertainment but a grim existential reality. Macbeth, in his psychomachia, alternates between his violence and his suspicion of it. Caught between wanting to murder his cousin/king, and resisting his own desires, he speaks of Duncan’s virtues. If Macbeth kills Duncan, ‘Pity, like a naked new-born babe/Striding the blast or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’d/Upon the sightless couriers of the air/Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye/That tears shall drown the wind’ (I.vi.21–25). Macbeth knows that pity for the victim, here Duncan, can eventually overcome the terror that the victimizer, here Macbeth, engineers. Then tears become the rushing waters of defiance. ⁸

As they seek to embody the beauty of thought through the study of war, and as they listen to those who have smelled its reeking wounds, can the liberal arts prevent war? Control it? Heal it? Can they lead us to the beauty of a lively, kinetic tranquility? For this, the liberal arts are not sufficient. They may educate the powerful and the powerless, but the liberal arts have a sorry record of being unable to dictate actions. However, I am a skeptical Utopian, and if skeptical, I retain the hope of Utopians. The insufficient is not synonymous with the unnecessary. Traditionally, the liberal arts offer consolation against the ravages of war. They also offer alternatives to a brutal present. Students in Belgrade in 1997, protesting their corrupt and violent regime, set up demonstrations that included a Police University. On the street they taught Plato, the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, Serbian history and literature, the poetry of Walt Whitman. One of their professors found it a ‘miracle’ that they could have escaped the saturation propaganda campaigns of Milosevic, but the liberal arts that they learned in academic classrooms were the raw materials of the miracle (Weschler, 2004: 49).

If the liberal arts at their weakest can serve as an inoculation against propaganda, they might at their most potent inoculate some of us against war itself. A virologist colleague told me that inoculation uses an attenuated or crippled virus vaccine to protect a body against a virulent disease. The vaccine induces a protective immune response in the host and thus prevents a future infection. ⁹ Let us say that the virulent disease is war. The attenuated virus vaccine is our complex understanding of wars. Our inoculations may produce cognitive revulsion, the response that war is stupid and stupidly dangerous to the headstrong warrior. They may produce moral revulsion, the response that war is wrong and shameful. Or, our inoculations may stimulate a process of identification that inculcates an active empathy with and compassion for the victims of war. If the liberal arts can so treat us, they will have done an invaluable service. They may even be smart and wise enough to suggest other ways of nurturing the creativity that wars engender.

When should we in liberal arts be trusted to inoculate the individual and collective bodies? Surely when we serve as witnesses to the powers and beauty of the liberal arts that do exist, teach with care and passion, and believe that life and death may be at some point be at stake in what we do. Surely, too, we can be trusted when the practitioners of the liberal arts exhibit certain habits of mind. This is not a matter of our methods, which vary. Some are called qualitative, some quantitative. Some are text-bound, some lab-bound. A philosopher thinks through a problem in logic; a musicologist analyzes a Bach fugue or a Beethoven symphony or a jazz improvisation; an economist or political scientist extends game theory.

However, we can share three habits of mind. One is the extent and depth of our awareness of the materials relevant to our inquiries. In the humanities, these would be archives, texts, historical developments, languages, works of art and architecture, cultural institutions, and conflicts. I am far more apt to trust a scholar of wars in Egypt if he or she knows Arabic, English, and French, or, at the very least, Arabic. A second is excellence of sensibility, the ability to be subtle and original, and to create a spacious argument or narrative and yet do finely-textured analyses. A third habit of mind is the capacity for interpretations, for seeing many meanings of an event or object.

I would assure the Chinese student, whose memory haunts me, that we in the liberal arts can exercise these habits of mind as we connect the liberal arts to war, to the human capacity for bathing in the reeking wounds that have torn apart skin and bones and the very fabric of existence and yet, in such anguish, have also been generative of moral, mindful, and aesthetic beauty. As the liberal arts do so, may we be aggressively and lovingly capable of pity, of tears. In our sorrow, we must also remember that the root of ‘liberal’ is liber, the Latin for free. We are not always free to choose what happens in our days and nights. Lady Macduff did not choose to be murdered with her children by Macbeth’s thuggish agents. But when we are free, we can choose to repudiate the way of Macbeth. That would be creating beauty in history and for history.