These days of myths and what-ifs

Feb. 6, 2003

Dear Julie,

Our favorite hardware store is closing. So is the branch office where we bank, where we consider the tellers friends. Business is having problems. The economy has suffered since 9/11. We don't know what is to be done about Iraq. These unsettled days, the world seems to be holding its breath. We could use some oxygen.

Some preachers have been predicting the end of the world for much longer than I've been alive. They whip Biblical passages into mental pictures of Armageddon. We love sermons and horror films that scare the beeswax out of us. We pay money for the experience.

My guess is that their business is good right now.

All governments are astutely aware of the power fear has over their own citizens. Saddam Hussein uses fear to maintain murderous control. For our convenience, our own government has color-coded the levels of how scared we're supposed to be on any given day.

Terror is the goal of one of the U.S. scenarios for an attack on Iraq, to pulverize the country with a barrage of missiles -- one every four minutes -- that will send the populace into a state of shock, leaving them unable to fight back. Our government has not ruled out the use of nuclear weapons, in fact, it is considering a plan in which nuclear bombs called "bunker busters" are used to knock down Saddam Hussein's hideouts.

A research psychologist named Lawrence LeShan says three ideas appear when a country is moving toward war:

That a specific country has become the embodiment of evil, and that life will be wonderful once that country is defeated.

That taking on this enemy is an exalted and glorious action.

That those who disagree with this view are traitors.

In his book "The Psychology of War," LeShan differentiates between the way we think in peacetime and how our minds work in wartime. He calls the latter the "mythic" mode of perception.

In peacetime, we see the gray between good and evil. In wartime, good and evil become Us versus Them.

In peacetime, we try to solve problems by understanding their causes. In wartime, the outcome is all that matters.

In peacetime, the present seems to extend into a familiar future. In wartime, the war is expected to change the world forever. You remember the war to end all wars.

In peacetime, people everywhere are thought to be basically the same. In wartime, the enemy seems very different from us. Whatever we do is good, whatever actions they take are evil. It's right for us to have weapons of mass destruction. It's wrong for them.

Mythic thinking is seductive.

Here is my horror film: We bludgeon Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of Muslims and sending Saddam Hussein into a bunker so deep even he can't find the bottom. We watch as the Arab rulers who played along lose control of their own countries. Their governmental systems implode just as Communist countries' did two decades ago. Quickly the United States is fighting a holy war with most of the Muslims on Earth.

The preachers turn out to have been right.

This is a momentous time in history. LeShan argues that the time for all war to end is now. His analogy is the abolition of slavery, a socially accepted institution only 150 years ago. The irony that it took a war to stop slavery then is not lost on me.

The world has changed. Half a century after discovering the secret that can bring on our own extinction, what if we decided to turn our backs on violence to find out what else we are capable of understanding?

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.