John Keegan, The Face of Battle. New York: Penguin, 1978.

In the Face of Battle, John Keegan explores the experience of soldiering in three significant (and very different) battlefields from British history. He begins with the mud, steel, chivalric culture of Agincourt. The pages turn, and soon the massive infantry squares appear through the gun-smoke shrouds of Waterloo. A century later, hundreds of thousands of soldiers die among the wire and trenches of the Somme.

Keegan adopts a rapidly moving third-person perspective to tell the story of each battle. The book's unusual structure helps Keegan peer deep into the mechanisms of organized violence. He examines the decision-making of generals, but frequently leaves the generals behind to focus on the what the great masses of troops actually saw and did during their respective battles. He examines the weapons and armor of the participants, but also asks about their hometowns and moral outlook. He differentiates between the officers and the enlisted soldiers, and while he does not ask about the source of class divisions, he shows enough interest in them to suggest how such divisions effect behavior on the battlefield. For each battle, he opens with a short examination of the battle's larger context--or at least the campaign of which it was a part. He then examines the particulars of the battle, with its turns, stages, and outcomes. He then assesses the practicalities of the various matchups that occurred. In Agincourt, for example, he asks how archers fared against infantry and cavalry, and what close-combat looked like to an infantryman in 1415. After examining the action, he addresses particular moral puzzles that each arise during each battle. Why did Henry V demand the execution of his French prisoners? Why did the British leave their wounded on the field at Waterloo? Why did soldiers of the First World War propel themselves out of the trenches and into harm's way? He takes what he learns from all this and applies it to a final chapter, where he considers the future of war, and the changes of technology that effect it; he ultimately supposes that war will grow increasingly horrific, regardless of the perks and amenities nations attempt to provide their armies, such as pensions and air conditioned tanks.

Keegan's book celebrates its three battles as moments of human interest, filled with deep failings and horrific exaltations. His emphasis on personal action and individual decision-making wins steep dividends. He recognizes that "ordinary soldiers do not think of themselves, in life-and-death situations, as subordinate members of whatever formal military organization it is to which authority has assigned them, but as equals within a very tiny group...." As a consequence, much of battle consists of leaders attempting to hold individuals to a collective fate, while at the same time trying to break the will of individuals in the opposing force. Thus, he pays keen attention to why Napolean's heavy cavalry units never quite crossed swords with the British infantry squares, but instead skirted their ranks, fled, and charged again. And he shows that French men-at-arms avoided confronting archers, not necessarily because of the danger archers presented, but because could find no honor or monetary reward for attacking and capturing individuals from such a low station.

Keegan, in short, unpacks the physical and psychological effects of warfare from the perspective of the individual, and then assesses the gritty details that make warfare so untenable, yet so horribly persistent throughout the years. As a work of history, Keegan grounds it in three very specific times and places, rather than attempting a generalized psychological exploration of organized violence. It is all the more convincing for his deliberate attempts to evoke specific moments in history: the mud-choked rise of infantry from the trenches, the screaming of horses before a fully-formed square. 

The Wind Rises is the final film from retiring Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. It is one of the most cynical films I have ever seen. It's cynicism runs deeper than a typical satire or tragedy, for it delves into the plausible human motivations behind inspiration, and darkly frowns at the cost of creative work.

Though rated only PG-13, the film works in the realm of dreams, and bears comparison to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Many of the same desires thrust through the subconsciousness of the characters of Lynch and Miyazaki: desire, envy, lust, jealousy, aggression, and resentment. Unlike in Mulholland Drive, Miyazaki's hero, Jiro Horikoshi walks out of his own dreams and back to his work desk, where he shakes off the thick, unsweetened syrup of subconscious imagery, and faces the cost of bringing his dreams closer to reality. 

And what, exactly, are those dreams? Jiro wants to build airplanes. He would love to fly them, as well, but his terrible nearsightedness prevents this. He finds his inspiration in the sophisticated, noble-born Italian aircraft designer, Giavonni Caproni. Caproni intrudes on Jiro's dreams, and together they explore the air and fly among the clouds, surrounded by women and friends, fame and fortune. 

Now, there is never any doubt in Jiro's mind that the planes he builds will be used for war. His friends (and Caproni) offer a variety of excuses for why this is okay. Japan must catch up with Europe. America will bully Japan if she lacks a strong military. Prestige is on the line. But most importantly to Jiro and his friends, military contracts offers the best opportunity to design aircraft. 

Even before the outbreak of war, Jiro sees that the world is full of pain and suffering. Earthquakes, roaring like a mythic beast, break the backs of Japan's ancient cities. When the ground stops shaking, fire belches across the landscape, and destroys all in its path as surely as if humans had torched the landscape. The desperate rural poor make their ways to the city, but can find no work; children are starving to death. It does not seem like it can get any worse. Jiro and his friends do not want to build weapons--no, they want to build planes. But in a world of earthquakes, firestorms, urban poverty and fear, adding another war-machine does not make much of a difference. 

Jiro begins to work on a new fighter plane. For aircraft designers, fighter planes represent the luxury standard. Fighter planes must fly higher, faster, and lighter than any other aircraft. The air-frame must handle intense stress at it soars through the clouds, and ride the extreme limits of aeronautical mechanics. 

Long hours at work compel Jiro to sacrifice the health of his young wife, a tuberculosis patient who gives herself completely to his dreams. His wife becomes a fire by which he can warm his hands, but that he knows she will soon go out. The family, for Jiro, provides no hope for the future, but instead acts a crutch for the present, allowing him to continue his work without pause. With no investment in the future, Jiro shows little interest in the ultimate outcome of his work. His plane must fly. Incidentally, he predicts that 'Japan will blow up.' And indeed, by the end of the film, it does. Not one of his planes survives the war. Many pilots die in the seats of his aircraft. But he got to build his plane. He got to dream with Caproni. 

The plot of Miyazaki's film rebels against the liberal orthodoxy of 'good taste.' It tells a tale of creativity, inspiration, and sacrifice, all of which culminates in a nihilistic fusillade. Jiro isn't just building any warplane--he's building the Japanese Zero, an aircraft at the forefront of one of the most aggressive, brutal campaigns of the twentieth century. The Zero allowed Japan to initiate the war with the United States at Pearl Harbor, but it did not allow them to win it. The industrial might of the United States eventually crushes Japan, and the last fully-imagined planes Jiro sees are American bombers, not Japanese fighters.

Advanced scientific education, rather than leading Jiro towards a world-improving wisdom, leads him into a narrow, creative fever. When he reaches the end of the film, his planes are wrecked, but his dreams remain. His wife, long dead, waves to him in the distance. Caproni, his idol, asks him if it was worth it. The ground smokes, blackened from war. The skies, however, remain blue with possibilities. 

For all that, the movie's tone never wallows in self-pity or doubt. The colors never darken for more than a few moments. By and large, people are nice to each other. The story is told exclusively through Jiro's eyes, and he seems to fight off the darkness, even as it utterly pervades his life. He never gives in to despair. 

The Wind Rises celebrates creativity and genius. But it acknowledges its costs. Miyazaki is, by critical acclaim, a creative genius. Does he believe he has found a private solution to the moral tensions he examines in his story of Japanese aircraft designers? It is impossible to say. But if he has, he does not reveal it. 

Miyazki has chosen to wave farewell with a film of psychological plausibility and deep cynicism. 

     
       In Judith Brown's Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope, revered political leader and social reformer Mahatma Gandhi wrestles with numerous Indian crises of modernity, from early battles against racism to the violent sunder of the Indian subcontinent into diverse new nations. Born in India but trained as a London barrister, Gandhi began life split between the influence of two cultures, one east and the other west. In his life in India, he entered a traditional arranged marriage while only a child, and stumbled into an early adulthood with his family's hopes upon his back. His family sent him to London to study law and secure an income suitable to his position in India's rigid caste system. He struggled to find his place in London, but achieved his family's aim and became a lawyer. Returning home, Gandhi's shyness and virtual absence of professional contacts prevented his attainment of a successful legal career in his homeland; as a consequence he traveled to South Africa for a slight commission.

The results of that journey changed his views, his life, and our world, forever.

The rank racism and writhing injustice of South African society sparked Gandhi into a career of peaceful yet rigid resistance against political and social oppression. He searched for fuel for his struggles; he found it in traditional Hindu philosophy, but also in Western ideals of equality and brotherly love; Gandhi had the audacity to insist the British empire live up to its ethos of equality, liberty, and self-government. As Gandhi fought South African injustice, he fused his influences into a wholly unique and inimitable outlook. And with that new outlook, he turned his gaze back to British India. Heeding his 'inner voice,' he reinvented Indian customs regarding family and marriage, and wholly devoted himself to the causes of a nascent Indian nation. He spurned modernization in favor of communalism, and pushed back against both capitalist and socialist economic policies. Throughout his life, Gandhi created symbolic images that riveted the imagination of the world: the furious bonfires of South African registration cards, the simple rotations of a wooden spinning-wheel, and a pilgrimage for salt on the shores of the village Dandi in defiance of British law. He ultimately perished at the end of an assassin's gun, itself an image suggesting humanity's rejection of Gandhi's pious obsession with non-violent satyagraha--truth force.

Judith Brown's biography expertly evokes the life and work of Mahatma Gandhi, the Indian nationalist leader and multi-faceted genius who introduced a new sense of social reform, political opposition, and spiritual idealism in the first half of the twentieth century. The book charts Gandhi's intellectual, political, and spiritual development throughout his life, cradle to grave. In the process she unveils not only a uniquely powerful leader, but one caught in the maelstrom of rapidly evolving and modernizing political and social environments. She thus provides a complex interpretation of her subject's mind and times. 

Brown's Gandhi chose his political actions with a cultivated political instinct; but once he made a choice, he perceived that the Truth of that choice turned the selected action into a religious imperative. And until a greater religious imperative demanded that he take an alternative course of action, the Truth mired him in the political tides that naturally envelop any policy. Most political actors seem beholden to constituencies--but Gandhi was beholden to his soul, which proved no less a master. Thus, Gandhi confounded observers (Linlithgow, Wavell, even sometimes Nehru) as either an idiosyncratic charismatic leader or else a crafty Machiavel; but Brown sketches Gandhi as someone altogether human--someone possessed of a unique and ascetic blend of religion and political philosophy who forged the ultimately uncontrollable consciousness of the Indian nation.

Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre. Freedom at Midnight. Simon and Schuster, 1975.

In Freedom at Midnight, Collins and Lapierre unveil the story of how thoughtful, intelligent, and willful men brought a negotiated end to an empire, yet unleashed the most massive migration in human history. 

Upon arriving in India in 1947, Viceroy Mountbatten sought a consensus solution for the emplacement of Indian self-rule. "I had to force the pace," he remembered, "[for] we were sitting... on a fused bomb and we didn't know when the bomb would go off." The fuse moved towards an explosive packed with sectarian resentments that might engulf over a fifth of the world's population. Mountbatten sought to leave the subcontinent with all the imperial dignity he could muster. He therefore charmed Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and other Indian political elite into finding a swift solution. As the clock struck midnight on August 15, 1947, those leaders celebrated a historic accomplishment: a bartered transfer of power after hundreds of irrevocable years of colonial experience. The Indian elite smothered the bomb of sectarian strife, but it still went off. Hundreds of thousands perished. 

The book draws to a close after Hindu extremists murder Mahatma Gandhi. Rather than celebrating Gandhi's pious nature, the murderous zealots despised Gandhi as the purveyor of "a coward's philosophy that had vitiated the force and character of the Hindu people." But in the violent season that surrounded Indian independence, it took no courage for the strong to slaughter the weak and helpless. "India was ever a land of extravagant dimensions, and the horror of the Punjab's killings, the abundance of human anguish and suffering that they would produce would not fail that ancient tradition."

Collins and Lapierre present a thoughtful and heartfelt rendering of India's tragic salvation. Their largely successful work contains two irritations. First, the authors suggest the Indian political elite might have better managed the transition to Indian independence. But they present little evidence that historic contingency allowed for any serious alteration of the outcome. Second, they show little empathy for the Eastern concepts of reverence that locked the various factions into cycles of bloodshed; they consider sectarian rivalry as a mere cultural cover for self-interested gain. While that thesis holds a truth, it fails to grapple with the complete complexity of religious psychology. Yet the sweeping power of their epic narrative renders such complaints a marginal matter for academic debate; their biases in no way impede enjoyment of the book. Collins and Lapierre tell a critically important story of power and persuasion, religious faith and political jealousy--and they tell it well.

                                                                      * * * * * *
My task, I suppose, as a writer is to reflect upon how the readings I undertake illuminate or complicate my primary interest as a social scientist--namely, the British use of special operations in the Second World War. 

A few key points emerge from my reading of Freedom at Midnight. First, while I remain an unrepentant admirer of Wavell, the penultimate Viceroy of India, he needed to make way for someone with Mountbatten's charm and energy. Given Wavell's previous use of unorthodox measures in campaigns in the Middle East and Burma, why did he not attempt to attempt unorthodox political maneuvers? His journals make clear that he suffered under a tremendous workload, with little time to think matters over. Further, the Indian civil service, at the time, lacked the ambitious strivers found throughout the British military at the time of the Second World War. If a Wavell does not flag down your car, you never hear about his ideas for Special Night Squads. 

The Second World War eviscerated the Raj's competency as an instrument of British power. It became more and more beholden to domestic Indian industry and wealth. And none of these individuals attempted to intervene with Wavell with particularly bold plans? Prospect theory suggests that I should see Wavell taking risks--but I am of course assuming a domain of losses, when in fact the Viceroyalty represented the highest point of his career from the standpoint of status. It is very difficult to determine whether an individual is in a domain of gains or losses sans highly controlled experimentation. We know how propsect theory works and that it proves useful in many contexts, but it takes a lot of hard work to establish the proper domain in a 'real world' situation. Kurt Weyland and Rose McDermott for example, have established instances in which political leaders opted for risky policy options while stumbling within a the context of a losing situation. Weyland cites examples of this during periods of hyper-inflation in 1990s Latin America [also see his 2004 article]; with the economy spiraling out of control, economists throughout the region pulled the plug on their state-centered economic policies and introduced market liberalization despite a heavy cost to their traditional interests and political networks. In McDermott's case, she established that Jimmy Carter succumbed to risk-taking when attempting to resolve the Iranian hostage crisis; despite slim odds of success, he allowed the military to undertake a risky rescue operation that ended in catastrophe and embarrassment. 

The extremity and uniqueness of these examples suggest how difficult it can be to establish with certainty that a particular cognitive heuristic (or perhaps psychological mechanism) played a role in an individual's decision making at a particular point in time. It's difficult--but not impossible. With practiced discretion, a researcher can apply qualitative methods to establish causal inference so long as the researcher pays close attention to the psychological theory upon which they draw, and rigorously tests the applicability of the theory to a particular case through the objective observation of causal process, juxtaposed against alternative hypotheses.