Laudator Temporis Acti

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962; rpt. 1963), pp. xi-xii:

Having myself lived through a couple of world wars and having read a certain amount of history, I am no longer disposed to take very seriously the professions of "war aims" that nations make. I think that it is a serious deficiency on the part of historians and political writers that they so rarely interest themselves in biological and zoological phenomena. In a recent Walt Disney film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up smaller organisms through a large orifice at one end of its body; confronted with another sea slug of an only slightly lesser size, it ingurgitates that, too. Now, the wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug. It is true that among the animals other than man it is hard to find organized aggression of the kind that has been developed by humanity. There are perhaps only the army ants which have mastered a comparable technique. But baboons travel in gangs; small birds will gang up on an owl; bees will defend a hive. The anthropoid gorilla, it seems, is now one of the least pugnacious of mammals: he lives in a family tree and does not molest the homes of others; but there is evidence that primitive man had to fight to defend his home. In any case, all animals must prey on some form of life that they can capture, and all will eat as much as they can. The difference in this respect between man and the other forms of life is that man has succeeded in cultivating enough of what he calls "morality" and "reason" to justify what he is doing in terms of what he calls "virtue" and "civilization." Hence the self-assertive sounds which he utters when he is fighting and swallowing others: the songs about glory and God, the speeches about national ideals, the demonstrations of logical ideologies. These assertions rarely have any meaning—that is, they will soon lose any meaning they have had—once a war has been got under way.