• Benjamin Ginsberg, The Worth of War, Prometheus Books, 2014, 256 pages, $24.00.
When the cover of The Worth of War recently filled the screen on C-SPAN, viewers who didn’t switch to “Antiques Roadshow” may have expected a bemedaled general or General Dynamics executive to come on next. Instead they saw bald, soft-spoken political science professor Benjamin Ginsberg, director of the Center for Advanced Government Studies at Johns Hopkins University. No worries — professor Ginsberg is not a warmonger and believes America is “excessively willing to go to war.”
“War is brutal and terrible, and we should not grow fond of it,” he writes. “The fact that war is terrible, however, does not mean that nothing is to be learned from it.” Ginsberg has a few items in mind, such as rational thinking and the ability to plan, all parts of the “audit of war.” He sees war as the most severe form of competition, and as such a driver of innovation, better ways of doing things.
Even in wartime, some societies resist such change and indulge what he calls “magical thinking,” such as the Lakota belief that a “ghost shirt” would stop bullets. Other examples include Nazi racial theories and “Aryan physics.” Magical thinking is “not amenable to reconsideration based on new facts and information,” and the professor speculates that this explains why many societies “no longer exist.” The author notes that the Moriori of the Chatham Island stuck to their pacifist principles, with the result that “most of the Moriori were enslaved or killed, even eaten, by the Maori invaders.”
Ginsberg understands that war is expensive and thus requires societies to learn the rudiments of fiscal policy. The military fosters discipline, applicable to the world of work and commerce. War involves mass production, the “bedrock of civilian industrial economics.” An “engineer” was originally a person who designed and built military equipment.
The microwave oven is “a spinoff of military radar.” (Indeed, the first consumer models were marketed under the name “radarange.”) The jet engines in the Messerschmitt 262 fighter were the basis for today’s passenger airliners. So, as Ginsberg sees it, “copying the sword produced an important plowshare.” The Internet was an outgrowth of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, a military enterprise. So in most realms, Ginsberg says, “war and technological progress seem to go hand in hand.” But there’s more.
In war, even a regime as loathsome as Stalin’s backed off on domestic repression. In the United States, Great Britain, and Canada, women’s suffrage got a huge boost during World War I. By allowing women to vote, the reasoning went, they would be better supporters of the war effort. And war production placed women in the work force, where many remained. In some respects, Ginsberg says, African-Americans were treated more as citizens when added to the military roster during the Korean War.
So war has worth, but the author does not neglect the downside. War builds an administrative state which then “redeploys to regulate the civilian economy.” On this theme Ginsberg references the classic Crisis and Leviathan by Robert Higgs. A similar dynamic is at work on the intelligence side.
In war, states expanded their techniques of surveillance and secrecy, and these do not diminish when the conflict ends. Ginsberg noted that President Truman expanded the agencies authorized to classify information. On this front, President Obama has made only one change, a move to declassify old documents. The President’s Surveillance Program dates to 2001, when George W. Bush was president. Ginsberg is not upbeat about what all this means for the nation.
“Today, indeed, the state keeps more and more of its activities secret while the citizenry has less and less privacy.” America has “turned its wars inward, eroding political freedom.” Further, “Privacy for political activities is, like the secret ballot, an important element of political freedom.”
The belief that no president would be willing to use surveillance against opponents, the professor writes, is comparable to believing in Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. He mentions Nixon’s plumber’s squad and the IRS offensives against the Tea Party. The belief that the current administration (“not a smidgeon of corruption”) is not involved in that is comparable to belief in the tooth fairy.
The Worth of War is an important and timely book, but Barack Obama does not get the attention he deserves. Ginsberg does note, however, that “the modern equivalent of the ghost shirt is the idea that war can somehow be organized or legislated out of existence.” Readers will see echoes of that in the president’s consistent soft-pedaling of the threats facing the United States. Genocidal anti-American groups are really the junior varsity, on the run, and so forth. But on the domestic front, the president sheds the rhetorical ghost shirt and escalates the conflict.
The massive surveillance of Americans, well charted here, is supposed to protect us from terrorists. Domestic snoops had Maj. Nidal Hasan’s emails to terrorist bosses but did nothing to stop him from murdering 13 at Fort Hood in 2009. So Americans easily can surmise that massive surveillance in fact is intended for other purposes. Ginsberg does not get into Hasan’s “workplace violence,” but readers will appreciate his sense of where we are now as a nation.
“Absent war abroad,” he concludes, “the state seeks enemies at home against whom to protect its people. In so doing, it transforms citizens into victims who will pay fearfully for protection from one another.” Agree or not, The Worth of War is well worth reading.
Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to Carolina Journal.