Much has been said about the civil-military divide, but there is a sharper breach: the academic-military divide. With the World War II generation’s disappearance from classrooms, no noticeable portion of the civilian professoriate has any military experience. Uncertain as to what kind of individuals they are trying to foster, many universities are home to a pervasive “anti-belief,” a conviction that belief itself is arbitrary or merely a cloak for power and that no one can know truth.
Yet the field that addresses this most directly—the humanities—is now driven by the politics of victimization. The source of fundamental and universal questions that have occupied mankind throughout history, the humanities have become secondary, in the minds of many, to science and technology. The Great Books, repositories of the heritage on which our Western culture is based, are ignored.
The military also has scorned the humanities, partly out of a perception that history and literature are studied today in ways that place more emphasis on students’ emotional reactions than actual knowledge, and partly because of the military’s own eager adoption of management studies and the social sciences’ quantitative methods. This was not the inevitable outcome of technological progress; the humanities are simply not practical in the narrow sense now given that word.
And so one is more likely today to have a serious discussion about the meaning of honor not in a military setting, but in a Shakespearean-literature course whose students never have, and probably never will, fight for their country. Works by Thucydides or Plutarch, revered for centuries by the profession of arms, are more likely to be found in the backpack of a college student than an officer’s slide-packed briefcase.
This academic-military divide is unhealthy for a free society. In ancient Greece the philosopher Socrates, playwrights Sophocles and Aeschylus, poets Tyrtaeus and Alcaeus, and historians Xenophon and Polybius were also soldiers, most of them wartime commanders. They were not the exception but the rule, part of a culture that believed history, literature, and philosophy were the proper and highest study for leaders and that fighting for one’s country was the ultimate act of citizenship.
The founders of our nation agreed. Despite the deprivations of Valley Forge, General George Washington had his officers perform a play for his army: Joseph Addison’s Cato. It evidently resonated with many. Years later, when Washington’s officers threatened to mutiny, it was in Cato’s words that the general spoke to them and restored their loyalty. Classical figures were once part of the everyday discourse of citizen-soldiers. Their words and deeds were an inspiration, their failings a moral lesson.
To be sure, this tradition does not provide pat answers to questions such as, “What’s the bottom line?” Those at Valley Forge would have been troubled by this standard, and by an academy that has too often turned away from the big questions and the great ideas by dismissing them as irrelevant or unworthy of significant attention.
We cannot let the university’s abandonment of Western traditions of thought result in our own intellectual poverty. Without the Archimedean point that the historical perspective once provided, today’s warriors can no longer hope to move the world. Rather, it is they who are moved, and ultimately devoured by an increasingly technocratic present without roots and without philosophical concerns of any kind.
This problem cannot be solved by consulting professional historians the way one might a mechanical engineer. The leaders of the Revolutionary War had a vision of history not as the private reserve of the classroom, but as a stock of wisdom open to all, if we apply ourselves as people of action as well as developed minds. Nor can we wait for the much-needed reform of higher education, which may be a long time coming.
What we can do is begin to reclaim the classical tradition that so inspired our forebears. Currently we overwhelm our troops with doctrinal pamphlets, awareness seminars, and PowerPoint briefings of doubtful utility.
Why not put something more useful into their hands? To conscientiously read Homer or Plutarch while in war is more illuminating than reading a thousand scholarly articles on either author, and infinitely more relevant than a treatise on management written by a corporate executive. Yet this cannot be just another professional reading list. We must create the institutional climate for a cultural renewal, a sorely needed reconnection with the wellsprings of our profession.