Samuel Moyn begins and ends his new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), with a discussion of Leo Tolstoy. The great novelist, Moyn tells us, was a peace activist who nevertheless held a surprising view of military conflict: If wars must be fought, they should be brutal.
While this view seems paradoxical, the author of War and Peace believed that if wars remained unruly and agonizing, nations would be less inclined to fight them. He also feared the reverse was true: If wars were fought humanely, they would be easier to start and more apt to drag on.
The effort to end suffering and increase the humanity of war is certainly a moral and legitimate one, and Moyn says as much. But the goal of Humane is to force us to look at where it’s actually gotten us, and where it’s taking us.
A professor of law and history at Yale who’s written widely on human rights, Moyn adopts Tolstoy's view as his book’s central premise. He argues that the long struggle to make warmaking humane—to reduce civilian casualties, ban torture, and treat prisoners of war with civility—has not only diverted from the ultimate goal of ending war altogether, but gone a long way toward legitimizing it.
In the United States, the result has been a lukewarm public acceptance of the vast military-industrial complex that increasingly pushes us into "forever wars" like Afghanistan and Iraq, which, even when they officially “end,” are left unresolved.
As thought-provoking and timely as Moyn’s chief argument is, he’s getting at some things that are even deeper: threats to freedom and dominion over peoples. Moyn envisions a dystopia in which global policing by one or two superpowers replaces war entirely. While that may not sound so terrible compared with, say, the horrors of trench warfare or the firebombing of Dresden, Moyn depicts a future in which the world’s poor and weak are constantly surveilled by the wealthy and powerful; where autonomous weapons systems do all the fighting; and where robots use algorithms to determine each person’s societal worth. The book is ultimately a warning that humane war is taking us in this direction, and the United States is leading the way.
“Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane,” Moyn writes, referring to our increasing use of drones and special forces. “It has also been Americans who are revealing that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance, with mortality and even violence increasingly edited out.”
Many of the earliest voices for pacifism, in fact, were Americans—particularly American Christians—and Moyn points to sects such as Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Quakers, which had a long history of refusing to take up arms. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, founded near Pittsburgh later in the century, refused even to work in armaments factories. Tolstoy himself, “drew substantially on the Christian vision Americans had developed for opposing slavery and war alike earlier in the 19th century.”
Slavery, in fact, is central to Moyn’s argument. He argues that focusing on the humanity of war instead of banning it is like focusing on improved treatment of slaves while continuing to deny them freedom. While this analogy initially resonated with me, I thought of an account by a slave I read recently, which described being locked up for days, often for no apparent reason, in a “sweatbox”—a barely ventilated wooden box that was too small to stand up or lay down in. One would be inclined to think he would exhort us: “Yes, ban slavery, but in the meantime, do what you can to stop this torture!”
This is the question that nagged at me throughout Moyn’s book: Why can’t we simultaneously work toward banning war while also making it more humane? Or why can’t we make humanity part of a continuous process toward abolition?
Moyn himself points out that the British moved incrementally from better treatment of slaves to abolition in a relatively short period of time. So why can’t we move incrementally from humane war to no war?
While that question is not explicitly explored by Moyn, he argues that humane war has become a “spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down.”
The book is erudite and well-researched, but Moyn approaches his subject from such a legalistic standpoint—parsing the legality and illegality of American warmaking—that it can occasionally be a bit dense for the layman. Indeed, most of Moyn’s main characters are lawyers, such as Telford Taylor, counsel for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials; John Yoo, most famous for his “torture memos” under President George W. Bush; and Michael Ratner and Jack Goldsmith, who wrestled with how to make the Iraq War abide by current law and who, Moyn asserts, “led the country down a road to an endless war that neither lawyer might have envisioned or planned.”
In light of what the U.S. war machine has become, it’s barely believable that an influential pacifist community once existed here. Moyn’s book reminds us just how warlike our nation has been throughout its history. You will find yourself shaking your head at the frequency and brutality of our wars, as Moyn describes them in unnerving detail.
The effort to end suffering and increase the humanity of war is certainly a moral and legitimate one, and Moyn says as much. But the goal of Humane is to force us to look at where it’s actually gotten us, and where it’s taking us.
This theme of good intentions gone wrong is exemplified by his discussion of Barack Obama, perhaps the book’s main culprit—not because he had any secret sinister motives, but because he has done more than any other President to make war more acceptable, through his eloquent rhetoric on humane war, his successful efforts to make war more “legal-ish,” and his escalation of drone use.
As U.S. troops have finally withdrawn from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to take power, it’s clear that virtually nothing good was accomplished by our twenty years there. Warmonger politicians like Lindsey Graham already predict our return. “We will be going back into Afghanistan," opined Graham on September 7, the day Moyn’s book was published. “We’ll have to, because the threat will be so large.”
If that happens, it’s not hard to foresee an early incarnation of Moyn’s end game: more drones constantly buzzing overhead, their rockets increasingly precise; better security cameras and surveillance devices spying on everyone; special forces deployed permanently to patrol the streets; curfews; and a population cowering in fear, their freedom all but extinguished.
This review was updated after publication to include a reference to pacifism on the part of Jehovah's Witnesses.