War and Peace

The Search for Ecstatic Release

I am now in my eighties, and in the course of studying history for more than sixty years now, one of the many phenomena regarding human behavior that particularly interested me was what seemed to be an ecstatic desire for war, and an equally intense reaction when war was over, and peace declared. The whole thing seemed strangely irrational, and I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure it out.

I encourage readers to go online and check out photographs of the crowds in Trafalgar Square, ecstatic over England’s declaration of war against Germany on 4 August 1914. An incredibly stupid war, one that cost the lives of 15 to 22 million people, with total casualties amounting to around 40 million. To this day, historians do not agree on the causes of that war; the whole thing seems inexplicable.

In his Autobiography, Bertrand Russell relates how he wandered among the crowd there (was there even space to wander?), observing this frenzied reaction, and not being able to understand it, given that it was sure to cost the lives of so many of his fellow-citizens, including an entire generation of young men. That it would be murderous, a complete disaster, win or lose. He comments that he was so bewildered by the spectacle that he says he had to return home, sit down in his study, and revise his understanding of human nature. Indeed. Russell, of course, was a rationalist; the spectacle was, for him, beyond all reason.

I can’t remember if he ever managed to figure it out, but Goethe could have helped him: “The world is not logical,” wrote the great German writer; “it is psycho-logical.” No kidding. The eminent critic and philosopher George Steiner could have also provided Lord Russell with some insight, except that his book In Bluebeard’s Castle came out four years after Russell died. Of course, Steiner’s explanation for World War I is but one among several, but in my opinion, it’s the best, and bears directly on the theme of ecstasy that I discuss below. The period of 1789-1914 has been called the “long” nineteenth century (as opposed to the short one of the twentieth, 1918-89), an unusual period, one of relative peace. Oh yes, there were the Napoleonic Wars of 1803-15, but these were not that big a deal, being a series of skirmishes or conflicts fought by a fluctuating array of European coalitions. Steiner’s argument is that the extended peace of the long nineteenth century finally had all of Britain, and Europe, bored out of their tree. Peace, it seems, was a drag. As a result, the outbreak of war in 1914 came as a kind of relief—an ecstatic relief, in fact. At last, something is happening! was the idea; something powerful enough to generate four years of horror, carnage, and destruction. And—nota bene—when armistice arrived on 11 November 1918, the relief was just as ecstatic as the declaration of war had been. Are human beings nuts? Answer: yeah, pretty much. The plain fact is that most human behavior is unconscious and limbic, often propelling us to seek out peak experiences. War, peace, it’s all the same show, just two ways of getting high.

There is a lot of great stuff written about the end of World War II: the liberation of Paris and Rome, for example. Simone de Beauvoir details the liberation of Paris in the second volume of her memoirs, The Prime of Life. She recounts the exhilarating atmosphere in the streets of Paris in the immediate aftermath of the German occupation. A million Parisians gathered from the Arc de Triomphe to Notre-Dame, cheering the Allied troops. One reporter wrote: “All across Paris, people are coming out of their homes and shops.” In front of the Hôtel de Ville, General Charles de Gaulle declared: “Paris! Paris outraged, Paris broken, Paris martyred, but Paris liberated!”

As for the liberation of Rome: my uncle Ruby was in on it, and the ecstasy of the Romans led to his shacking up with an Italian girl (he met her at a street dance; she pressed the key to her apartment into his hand; he went for a night, stayed for a year; old story). The Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, in his memoirs, recounts the liberation as follows:

“When the first American lorries and armoured cars appeared at the gates of Rome late on June 4^th, 1944, the people were overwhelmed with hysterical delirious joy….The streets were full of jubilant people; many of them embraced each other, even strangers. The American soldiers waved and smiled to all these men, women and children, who crowded round the military vehicles, offering flowers and wine. In return the Americans gave out handfuls of sweets, chocolate and cigarettes. This enthusiasm reminded me of the announcement of the armistice at the end of the previous war…this joy shown by many people who felt they were coming back to life, was really moving….”

When the dust settles, and peace sets in, then what? Again, this is where Steiner is relevant. Many years ago someone coined the phrase “rage for chaos.” Peace, apparently, eventually generates an itch, which finally turns into a full-blown crisis. There is a fair amount of literature on this phenomenon, but my favorite depiction of it is a British film of 1985, Plenty, about a woman who was stationed behind enemy lines during the War, living in a constant state of stress and excitement. War over, she couldn’t adjust, couldn’t adapt to not living on the edge, without a constant adrenaline rush. She starts making embarrassing scenes in public, engaging in rude and disruptive behavior. In an article on msn.com (16 June 2026), “Why we crave chaos when our lives finally get quiet,” author Sara Springsteen refers to this behavior as “neurological addiction.” If our brains get used to high stress and constant dopamine and cortisol spikes, it will make the sudden declaration of peace feel like an emotional vacuum, which in turn can trigger mini-crises or restless behaviors in an effort to restore stimulation.

Imagine, she says, that you have spent weeks running around at top speed, attending to this and that item on your to-do list, and finally get all of it done. Ah! At last, a moment’s peace. But only a moment. What typically happens to most of us in this situation is that our mind quickly becomes uncomfortable with the break from the chaos of our hectic schedule. “Instead of melting into a state of pure bliss,” she writes, “an uncomfortable wave of restlessness suddenly washes over you out of nowhere. Your brain instantly starts looking for a problem to solve, an old argument to reopen, or a major life change to abruptly initiate.” Unwittingly, we have become addicted to constant stimulation, like the woman in Plenty. “When that external stimulation disappears overnight, the sudden drop in neurochemicals can feel less like a relaxing vacation and more like a bizarre emotional vacuum.” She goes on:

“Your body [has become] completely accustomed to operating at an incredibly high baseline of stress. Your nervous system adjusts to this intense pace, viewing the constant pressure as your new default state of being. Consequently, when life finally slows down, your brain interprets the sudden absence of stress hormones as a jarring malfunction that needs immediate fixing….It is a completely subconscious survival mechanism that misinterprets absolute peace as an unnatural state of boredomor stagnation…. For many people, a hectic lifestyle serves as a highly effective subconscious distraction from deeper personal questions or unresolved worriesthat they prefer to avoid.”

This last sentence, I believe, is the key to the entire conundrum. Busy-ness is probably more effective than drugs or alcohol in keeping self-transparency, and existential questions—such as Who am I?, or What the hell am I doing with my life?—at bay. This is why peace, for both the individual and society at large, is so threatening: it brings us face to face with issues that are painful, even scary, to confront. Better the carnage of war than the carnage of the psyche, is the idea; in reality, a sad state of affairs.

The rhythm, then, is ecstatic release when war is declared, and the same, when it ends. It’s all about the driven need for “rushes.” The only thing that can tame this pattern is the prefrontal cortex, and it is pretty weak compared to the energy driving the pattern. Most of the time, the nonrational tends to win out over the rational. Of course, human life would be a pretty dismal affair if everything were rational; which leads me to the following conclusion (one I have mentioned before in previous writings): as far as limbic and unconscious energy goes, we are caught between a rock and a hard place. Which is to say that we can’t live with it nor without it. As a young professor starting out at Rutgers University, I had an older (wise) colleague who said to me: “There are two types of barbarism in this world: a regime that is totally rational, and one that is totally irrational.” I had to think long and hard about that.

Ten years later I was teaching at a university in Canada, and my boss (older and not wiser) was an overweight, depressed guy with sad eyes, and had a note posted on the bookcase behind his desk: “Reason over Passion.” It wasn’t terribly difficult to discern the source of his obesity, depression, and sadness. Unlike my colleague at Rutgers, this individual was out of balance, living his life strictly according to the dictates of reason. The problem with opting exclusively for reason…well, what gets left out? Love, poetry, art, music, magic, dreams…the stuff of life, in short, and Professor X had become one of the walking dead as a result. Leaving him, and that university, was pretty much a cakewalk. (Although I did have one class that was terrific, because my students, unlike my boss, were willing to consider these types of questions.)

What can we conclude? Here it is, amigos: a life that makes sense is perforce lived as a balancing act, between a rock and a hard place. Perhaps this is no great intellectual breakthrough, but wisdom consists of knowing when to go with Scylla, and when with Charybdis, if you’ll permit me a classical allusion. If this is the burden of life, it is also its challenge, and its joy.