Funeral orations and pro-war rhetoric

In The Rhetoric, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E) divided public speaking into three genres: epideictic (ceremonial oratory, such as funeral orations), deliberative (policy determination, such as what takes place in the Assembly), and judicial (court cases). He said that each of these kinds of speeches has a different emphasis—judicial emphasizes guilt or innocence, deliberative speeches emphasize expediency (costs and benefits), and epideictic speeches are about honor or dishonor.

In other words, if we’re arguing about policy, that’s deliberative, and we should argue about the costs or benefits (advantages or disadvantages) of our policy options. We might bring up issues of honor, but those should be secondary. I’ve come to think that Aristotle is right, that one of the characteristics of cultures whose political discourse is a train wreck is that they don’t argue about policies qua policies—they argue about honor, blame, guilt, loyalty. They argue that the out-group is to blame for the current problems (as well as those members of the in-group whose support isn’t passionate enough), that for anyone to disagree with the in-group plan (there is only one) is disloyal, that to provide any evidence that the in-group plan isn’t working or can’t work dishonors the in-group.

This way of thinking about political deliberation makes it extremely unlikely that communities will rectify bad decisions. They can only double down (since, if politics is really a question of loyalty, and criticism dishonors the in-group, then the only available response to a policy failing is to recommit with more will). It also means that communities will commit to a policy without really thinking it through. Because dissent and disagreement are necessary (but not sufficient) for good decisions, communities who rely on epideictic for policy deliberation will make a lot of bad decisions.

In a class on the history of public argument, we were reading Schenck v. US, and two students argued that the decision was right—criticism of a war (or how it was being conducted) should be silenced the second boots are on the ground.

I pointed out that this means that, if the war is a mistake, or it’s being handled badly, then it could mean that more people (especially in the military) in service of a war we shouldn’t have, or shouldn’t be conducting as we are. Their argument was to repeat, “Once boots are on the ground, there’s no more debate.”

That visceral reaction surprised me, especially considering the stances these students had taken on other issues (they were generally skeptical of the government, and very much in favor of transparency and citizen scrutiny).

A few years after that class discussion, I picked up a book about the Battle of Kasserine Pass, where my uncle was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. He died a few weeks later, bombing a Nazi supply train. Family lore about his death had two versions. One was that they didn’t know the train had ammunition, and so he was flying too low to the train to get out of the blast when it went. The second was that he had been mildly injured in the Battle of Kasserine Pass (his shoulder), and he didn’t have quite enough strength to pull the plane up fast enough (apparently it was a model for which that was notoriously difficult).

The book I picked up argued that the Battle of Kasserine Pass was a clusterfuck. It said that the person in charge, Lt. General Lloyd Fredenall, was a coward who had spent most of his time and unit’s energy building him a bunker far from where the combat was likely to take place. Even though he was far away from the action, he micromanaged his subordinates—although he had never had any experience leading troops in battle. He was so obsessed with the possibility of his orders being heard by the enemy (he was using a radio) that they were often incoherent. So, according to this book, he was giving orders that he insisted be followed, that were grounded in poor understanding of the actual combat situation, that were hard to understand, and that he couldn’t modify quickly. Bad orders, badly communicated. The book specifically said that Fredenall’s orders regarding the air corps were especially bad—his incompetence endangered them.

I was overwhelmed with rage.

At the author of the book.

I felt, very strongly, that the author should not have written any of that. My uncle had died in that campaign, and he was a hero. That his heroism might have been necessitated by the incompetence of his superior, that his death might have been caused by that incompetence, that he wasn’t part of a glorious campaign, but an avoidable clusterfuck, that it was a clusterfuck with 10k Allied casualties (there were only 30k in the battle, and 6k of those casualties were US), that, in short, the Kasserine Pass was an example of what happens far too much in war, the way that, even if the war as a whole is admirable and just, many of the casualties are not caused by the enemy’s competence, but our incompetence—all of that was unthinkable for me. Actually unthinkable.

Intellectually, I knew that not every death in war is glorious, that even the good guys screw up. I’d read Goodbye to All That, All Quiet on the Western Front, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, The Great War and Modern Memory, Catch-22, J.D. Salinger and Peter Gay on their war experiences, and various books on Vietnam. I knew all the things the author was saying about Operation Torch were true of wars and even war, but I could not let myself think that they were true of the operation that had killed my uncle.

And that is when I understood what my students had been saying.

If you give a family member over to a war effort, you have to believe that, if they die, it will be in a meaningful and important way, that it will not be the consequence of incompetence, indifference, or internal unit rivalry. You have to believe that the war for which they’re fighting was not only necessary, but just, and actively virtuous. And if they die, you have to believe that they died on the side of the good guys. And good guys aren’t incompetent.

To say that American military died in a war we shouldn’t have started, that we are bungling how it’s being conducted, that the people making decisions are incompetent—that is violating the norms of decorum regarding the cultural (and personal) need to honor the war dead.

But those norms of decorum mean that we can’t deliberate effectively about war. And, what’s worse is that those dead can become warrants for further commitment to a war that might be wrong-headed, incompetently managed, or managed purely in terms of factional goals (we should do this because it will help our party).

If you even dip into The Pentagon Papers, and anything about any other 20th century war (it’s probably true of earlier wars, but we don’t have the records), then you can see that political figures often force the military to make what are bad decisions from a military perspective, but politically useful for the current President. Personally, I find most disturbing the argument that the Bush Administration went for invading Iraq with inadequate troops because the Afghanistan action wasn’t going well (although LBJ’s partisan-motivated decisions about Vietnam, or the various military decisions that Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton made that were purely factional aren’t far below—and I’m open to the argument that LBJ’s factional treatment of Vietnam is just as bad if not worse).

I mentioned Aristotle at the beginning, and here’s how he’s relevant. A funeral oration has certain standards of decorum. You do not speak ill of the dead.

My mother-in-law died within a year of my father-in-law. It was a rough year for my husband. We had no idea how to handle a funeral, what arrangements needed to be made, or how to make them, and a friend of my husband’s mother stepped in and helped us so much. We later found out her mother had died only a week or so before.

She died suddenly a couple of years later, and we went to her funeral. She lived in a small town, and the funeral had to be moved to a larger town because so many people wanted to come. She had been a teacher for years—she had been that teacher, the one who makes marginal students feel valued, the one who inspires students to think beyond their dreams, the one who is just magically always there. She was that friend in need, the effective and non-judgmental person at your side. On my best days, I don’t even have moments when I’m as good as this woman was. And the packed church was proof of it.

A friend of hers, a pastor, gave the funeral oration. And her speech began with acknowledging that this woman was good, and their long friendship and how this woman had helped in so many ways, and then she said, “But I failed her because I never spoke to her about whether she had a personal relationship with Jesus, and so she might be in Hell.”

That whole point about how she might be in Hell went on for a while, and it turned into what Aristotle would have categorized as a deliberative argument—about what the people in the audience should do (be saved, by the fairly specific terms of the speaker). I don’t know how long she went on, but I know it was long enough for me to consider, very seriously, that I wasn’t known in that area, and so I could tackle her, and then just race out the back door, but I was holding our baby, and I’d have to hand him to our husband, and he was known. I seriously considered the options of tackling a speaker at a funeral.

That pastor did not understand the genre of funeral oration. It is not a deliberative argument, in which you are advocating a policy of action, but one in which you unqualifiedly honor the dead.

When my mother died, a woman who hadn’t attended church in 25 years because she had so completely broken with Catholicism, the priest who spoke at her funeral said, “She had an Irish maiden name, and we know God loves the Irish, so we know she’s in heaven.”

He understood the genre of the funeral oration.

But, and this is our problem, if the funeral oration is all about making the people who are grieving feel that the loved one who has died is in heaven and has died for a worthy cause (or after a long battle), then the funeral oration should be apolitical, and yet it isn’t. If the family needs to hear that the dead have to have died for good reason, then funeral orations have to say it’s a war to which we should continue to be committed, which we should have fought, and which is being conducted in an honorable and competent way.

In other words, funeral orations for the military dead have to be pro-war. So, funeral orations can drift into what Aristotle would call deliberative (or we would call “political”) rhetoric, but only if the rhetoric is pro-war.

Effective deliberative rhetoric depends on a world in which all sorts of policy options can be interrogated. Ineffective deliberative rhetoric sets some policies off as sacred, ones that cannot be disputed. And that is exactly what the funeral oration does.

My uncle died long before I was born, and the military action in which he engaged—in which he was lucky enough not to have died, but which might have incurred the injury that contributed to his death—really was a clusterfuck. The author was right. But the genre of funeral orations means that, even sixty years later (or more), I wasn’t open to rational deliberation about a military action in which an uncle I’d never met had been engaged.

Once the smoke cleared, I realized that the dishonor done to my uncle—and there was dishonor and disloyalty—was not that someone said that he probably died because he was under a Lt. General who was incompetent and cowardly. It was that he was under such a person.