- Go to the movies or visit the bookstore and you'll see that war stories are everywhere, whether the protagonists are gods, superheroes, or human beings.

But today's guest warns that the appeal of the good war story obscures the complexity of conflict and shapes the way we view current international tensions.

She's Elizabeth D. Samet this week on "Story in the Public Square".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square", where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Elizabeth D. Samet, whose scholarship includes the book "Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness".

Elizabeth is Professor of English at the US Military Academy at West Point, and we need to note that the views she expresses today are hers alone and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the US government.

With that, Elizabeth, I hope I got that right.

- You did.

Great to be with you, Jim.

- Well, we're thrilled to have you here.

And I mentioned this to you, that you have this article in Foreign Affairs last fall, "The Military-Narrational Complex: What Stories Do in an Age of Conflict".

And your insights were so wonderfully aligned with the whole idea behind this show that I had to reach out.

I'm thrilled that you're able to join us today.

- Well, I'm very glad you did.

- So, central to that piece in Foreign Affairs is this insight, "Political violence and conflict call," and I'm quoting here, "For a perspective beyond the realm of political science."

In particular, you're talking about literature.

And to borrow a line, "You had me at hello," what is it that literature provides that political science or other more traditional national security related disciplines don't?

- Well, part of what I think as someone who studies literature is that the human element, we might call, in warfare, which political science of course does touch on, but maybe not to the same extent and in the same depth as literature does.

So, things like the personal desire for glory, a thirst for vengeance, other irrational passions that, of course, political scientists know as part of war, is a major preoccupation of literature.

And I think the exploration and literature offers us a way, a complement to political science and other disciplines in understanding what is, of course, a hugely complex multidisciplinary endeavor, and perhaps never has war been as complex as it is today.

- So, with that kind of insight, though, about the value of literature, does that influence the way you teach literature at a place like West Point?

- So, much of what we do in a literature classroom at West Point would resemble what happens at a civilian university in the sense that we often teach texts you would find elsewhere.

But what we do and what is different is that we are always very, very clear on the circumstances.

There is a very particular context, of course.

All of my students will become second lieutenants in the Army on their graduation.

Some will stay for a period of years, some will stay for a whole career in the Army.

And so much of the literature that we read, and this is the case with other disciplines as well, has a very specific context.

They want to understand how it will affect them, not only as college undergraduates, but as aspiring officers.

And of course, when we study the literature of war, which we do quite a lot, perhaps more than is done elsewhere, that is where they are emerging professional identity, and our own study of literature really intersect.

- You know, we had on the show a few years ago Azar Nafisi, who I think she's done a lot of thinking, a lot of writing about the power of literature.

And one of her central insights is that literature is challenging, because the texts prove that the villain has as much of a perspective as the hero.

And so is that your experience with the teaching of literature as well?

- Absolutely.

I think one of the things when you teach literature in a training environment, I think sometimes it's an easy mistake for novice readers to suggest that whatever you offer by way of literature is a kind of training manual.

And that's not the case, as Azar Nafisi observes, of course, you are thrown into contact with all sorts of people, characters, whose values you do not share and perhaps you would not want to aspire to.

And yet you are forced in literature to reckon with those, to seek out commonality, but also to understand difference, sometimes unbridgeable difference.

But how is it that you will understand other perspectives, other points of view?

- So, how did someone who, you've got these incredible academic credentials, Harvard, St.

Andrews, Yale, how do you come to find yourself teaching at a place like West Point?

- Well, the answer I usually give is my father and Ulysses S. Grant.

They're the two men who are responsible for this.

My father, because he served in World War II, and I grew up thinking about war and the Army through that lens, rather than, I think, through the lens of some of my contemporaries' parents who were of a younger generation, perhaps a Vietnam generation.

So I think I had perhaps a more nuanced or more complicated understanding of the military and military service.

And then when I was in graduate school, I came upon the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

And I didn't know it at the time, I knew it was an extraordinary book at the time, but I didn't know at the time how unusual it was in terms of its accounting of warfare in the 19th century.

And I didn't know that in many ways, it would sort of redirect my life, or at least change the trajectory somewhat of my life.

It's a book I later came to edit, and it's one that, in a sense, introduced me to West Point, because in the early chapters of that book, Grant spent some time talking about West Point and about his love-hate relationship with his time there and the things that he did.

One of the things that he did, and this I like to share very much with my students, was that he spent a lot of time reading novels, but he assures us that they were not of the trashy sort.

(Jim laughs) - Well, so that exposure to literature, that exposure to the challenges and of thinking about complex issues, that seems more relevant now than maybe ever, because as the world gets more complex, our ability to process that complexity in the safe space of a novel seems more relevant than ever.

- I think so.

Now we are bombarded by information from so many different sources, and often information in a very abbreviated form.

So many social media platforms are now giving us bite-sized elements.

And so it's sometimes very hard in all of that to discern stories, to interpret them, and to be able to find nuance in those stories.

- Well, so let's turn to this piece that you wrote in Foreign Affairs, "The Military-Narrational Complex".

And in it you quote literary theorist Peter Brooks, who wrote, and I'm quoting here, "Narrative seems to have become accepted as the only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs."

Would you unpack that for us?

- Sure.

So, Brooks is a long time theorist of narrative and wrote about the preeminence of story.

But he found in his most recent, in this recent book, from 2022, that narrative had begun to eclipse other forms of purveying information.

And as a result, rational argument and other sorts of means of delivering information had become sort of less important.

And when the battle is between story, narrative, and rational argument, his instinct was that stories won.

- Do you agree with that analysis?

- I do.

I think everybody, and he points this out in his book, but everybody has a story, the power of narrative.

What's your story?

Corporations have stories, individuals have stories.

We tend in many cultures to, military culture's no exception, sometimes to argue by anecdote rather than appealing to other things, appealing to different kinds of evidence, and I think we are, the ease with which we are seduced by story is today, and this is, I think, the real insight and the real difficulty, today, in an era where we actually, in many senses, devalue the study of stories.

So, the question that every English major gets is, what are you going to do with that?

How is it relevant?

How is it practical?

So my response would be, I'm gonna unpack and interpret all those stories that end up seducing you, because you are less able to read these accurately than I might be.

And so I think that while we... These are the gifts of the humanities that I think are often now devalued.

- You know, so I think you encapsulated really sort of the essence of why we do the show, the power of story.

But I wonder if you could reflect a little bit more on why are stories so seductive in the first place?

- Well, I think they interact not only, of course, with our reason, but with our emotion and our passion, with our desire to see patterns, to see when we are confused how our own life might turn out, what kind of story we aspire to live.

And I think they're elemental.

The ancients realized this.

They are sort of the first things that we start to learn, music and stories.

And this ability of the story to capture an arc, to capture a trajectory that is often heroic and that we would all like to imitate ourselves.

So this desire of human beings to imitate, to emulate, is what stories answer, that need.

- You know, so it's interesting, you mentioned this in the article, and you've already mentioned it here today, that at this moment when narrative and storytelling is so predominant as a means of political communication, the inclination that people have to try to unpack and understand and go through some of the critical thinking necessary to really unpack those stories seems to be less valued.

Why do you think that is?

And is there an antidote?

- I'm not sure I have a good answer on why it is the case, but I do think that one of the antidotes is to do the hard work of reading.

There have been many studies recently that suggest that high school students are doing a lot less reading, that high school seniors are far less literate than they used to be.

And that these studies suggest and link this to a lack of literary reading, that there's a lot of informational literate... There's a lot of informational texts, a lot of digests, but fewer novels themselves, fewer long form works.

Those take time.

We are impatient.

I think we're culturally impatient.

I think technology, and this is a big part of it, makes us even more impatient.

But reading and rereading, a kind of slow, deep attention, is something that is exceedingly hard to cultivate, but I think the need for it has never been greater.

- I worry profoundly about what AI is gonna do for us on that as well, you know?

- Well, the ease with which I think we seem willing to outsource things that, to me, and I suspect to you, are elemental, reading and writing especially, writing our own stories, if you will, that we're gonna seed this to artificial intelligence with, really, a great, I think, carelessness, is something that I think will further degrade our capacity for understanding, interpreting, and crafting narratives.

- So, yeah, you know, the very first article that I read in Foreign Affairs, I can actually remember, it was about 1988, and it was an article by a scholar by the name of Michael Vallejos.

And it was about the idea of the good war, and basically tracing America's conflicts from the Civil War up through the end of the Second World War, and how the idea of fighting a war of liberation was a central theme in American foreign policy.

But that idea of the good war is you are central to this military-narrational complex that you write about in your article.

Can you unpack what we mean by the idea of a good war?

- Sure.

So, I do touch on this in the article, and in my book, "Looking for the Good War," it was the central focus, this idea that we have really fought every conflict since in the long shadow of World War II, and that our understanding of that war has seemingly gotten progressively less nuanced.

So we characterize it now as a war of liberation.

It had the consequence of liberating millions, but that was not why it was initially thought.

So we sort of back date our investment in the idea of liberation.

The war on the Pacific, of course, fought then as a war of vengeance for Pearl Harbor, but even that narrative, the Roosevelt administration found by, really, February of 1942, so only a few months after Pearl Harbor, they found that people had sort of become complacent and had stopped really believing in the urgency of the war effort, and so they had to find ways to reanimate that desire.

And then of course, the story of the war in Europe, which is the one we tend to focus on more often, is absolutely one of liberation, but we didn't enter the war for that purpose, we entered it in response to being attacked.

And so what ends up being, I think, diminished is the story of a really intense period in the '30s of American isolationism, and the idea that most people did not want to get involved in what they thought were European conflicts that had no bearing on them.

But of course, subsequently, because the country was comparatively unified and because the enemies were quite clear in ways that I think they have not been so clear in succeeding conflicts, that people have looked back to that war as a good war, as a war in which victory was clear, there was a clear punctuation mark at the end of it, and that we could consider ourselves having served a righteous cause.

But in the wake of that, I think we have fallen under the spell of thinking that every war might lead to a similar ending.

And it's committed us, I think, to prosecution of wars that don't turn out the way we expect them to, and that are not, in fact, they don't end up, in fact, as wars of liberation.

- In the article, you characterize this not in the term grand strategy, but you call it grand tragedy, where narrative supplants critical thinking, mistrust grows, and a cycle that leads to what seems to be an inevitable conflict arises.

Historically, the example you point to is the Anglo-German competition prior to World War I. More contemporarily, I think that the analog is probably the United States and China.

Can you talk a little bit about how those narrative frames get set and what the risk is with them?

- Yes, so I think we start well, before conflicts themselves begin, we start to tell a story about our potential enemies.

It's much easier to define oneself against a perceived adversary, I think, than it is to look within and become self-critical.

As a result of that, I think particular motives are attributed to adversaries.

We read intent and malice where there may just be inattention and accident.

The historian Odd Arne Westad has made this argument in Foreign Affairs and in a recent book about World War I, which you mentioned, and the fact that the powers believed certain stories about their adversaries and had certain attitudes that they couldn't really break down.

And I think today, the China-US relationship that you mentioned is an ideal example of the same sort of phenomenon.

And so there are stories that I think confuse preparation sometimes with a sense of inevitability.

And it's very easy, of course, the harder you prepare for some potential conflict, for that preparation to seem like something inevitable.

- So, how do strategic leaders then avoid getting sucked into that narrative trap?

- I think they have to recognize the power of the stories that they not only tell themselves, but that others tell to them, and that they have to realize it's always more complicated.

There are always more stories in play than it seems.

And all stories, of course, are shaped and constructed.

Certain inconvenient details are omitted, certain anomalies, certain contradictions.

And so looking for those contradictions, looking for those ambiguities, looking for ways in which stories are refuted as well as confirmed I think is essential for any strategic leader.

- Yeah, you know, so, you know, I think about the appeal of story, particularly war stories, and, you know, I could, you know, be engrossed in "Band of Brothers" on HBO or, you know, sob in the viewing of "Saving Private Ryan".

I've read a lot of history as a historian about peacemaking, the Congress of Vienna or the Versailles Peace Conference, that's never moved me to tears.

What's so compelling about a war story in the first place?

- I think war stories compel us because they place human beings at the margins of human experience.

They test people to the utmost.

There is a sense of urgency that shows human behavior in extremis.

And I think that that taps into something everybody wonders about.

Would they have what it takes in a crisis?

And so I think that there is a certain romance that attaches to that and a certain energy and momentum that such narratives have that narratives of peace don't, because they are inconclusive.

They're about restraint.

They're also about things that don't happen, which are much harder to imagine than the things that do.

And so I think that they lack that kind of excitement that those war narratives so often possess.

- Well, so one of the... I learned a lot in your article, but there was a piece in particular about what we think we know about the Trojan War and what Herodotus actually told us about the Trojan War.

Do you wanna just walk us through that in terms of... What do we think we know because of the Iliad, and what does the history actually tell us?

- So the story of the Iliad, which, as you know, is really one of the founding narratives of Western literature, and for some is the sort of first iteration of an East-West conflict in the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans, it starts, and this is the story that Homer and other poems that haven't survived to us tell, is that the Trojan Prince Paris goes to Menelaus' court in Sparta, there's a lot of backstory that I won't get into, but effectively, he steals Helen, Menelaus' wife, and a lot of treasure from Menelaus' court, and brings it back to Troy.

Menelaus, of course, does not like this.

He and his brother, Agamemnon, recruit Greeks from many different places to retrieve Helen.

And the war lasts for 10 bloody brutal years, the Iliad dealing with the final year of that war.

But the Greek historian Herodotus says, actually, there's a different story that he has learned.

And in that story, Paris and Helen never even make it to Troy, but they're blown off course, and Helen ends up in Egypt, where the Egyptian king says to Paris, "Look, this is not okay.

I'm gonna hold Helen here in trust for Menelaus, and you can make your way back to Troy."

And Herodotus says Homer knows this story, but chooses not to tell it, 'cause it's really not as good a story, not as good a war story.

And Herodotus says that it's only a phantom, Helen's only a phantom, and that the Greeks are fighting for no reason whatsoever.

And so he exposes the possibility that this war had no cause, righteous or otherwise, but was fought just for a phantom.

And so that, in its way, calls into question this whole notion of why we fight and what do battlefield heroics mean in the absence of a cause?

- And can we draw any conclusions about that?

I mean, that's an epic question.

- It really is.

And I read it as a sort of archetypal question that we might apply to other wars as well.

But I think what it points out to us, and this is where the insight of a Greek playwright who writes about Menelaus, once he learns that Helen is just a phantom and he's fought for no reason, he actually has no second thoughts about it, he has no regrets, and he still thinks his own actions were heroic.

And I think that we often, when we are confused about causes, and this is another reason that the war story is so seductive, we focus on the battlefield alone, and we abstract battlefield heroics from the causes that they're ostensibly meant to serve.

- So, you teach cadets who are gonna be commissioned as second lieutenants in the United States Army and other services.

You teach, but you're also teaching future strategic leaders.

If we leave those folks aside, for the citizens, for the rest of us, what do we take from your research and your scholarship about the power of narrative and the way we view what's going on in the world around us?

- Well, I think in particular for American citizens at this time, when we have an all-volunteer military and a much smaller percentage of people who serve than, let's say, they did in World War II, I think that it's extremely important for citizens to recognize that our national war stories do not belong exclusively to soldiers, but they are in fact a national story, and that we bear a responsibility not only for telling those stories in an accurate way, but also for understanding that we have a sense of responsibility in general about the stories that are told about why we go to war and why wars are fought in our name.

- Yeah, we've got about a minute left here.

I'm wondering, there's... I grew up in the '80s.

I read a lot of Tom Clancy.

I know people who refer to some of his stuff as useful fiction, because it helps educate, helps planners think about different scenarios.

Is there such a thing as useful fiction in that context?

- Well, I think insofar as fiction exercises the imagination and trains the imagination, it can be construed as useful in that way, but I would be the last person to argue for a sort of narrow, utilitarian view.

I think that there is a more expansive view, that the skills that literature offers can help us in that way, but that they also put us in touch with something that is really a sort of elemental core of our humanity, which is our connection not only to the present and to the future, but also to the past.

- Elizabeth D. Samet, this is remarkable scholarship.

Thank you for spending some time with us today.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square", you can find us on social media or visit salve.edu/pellcenter, where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And thank you for spending some time with us this week.

I hope you'll join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square".

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music)