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  • Writer: Michael Martin
    Michael Martin
  • Mar 8, 2022
  • 5 min read

Maybe it was last year. I was in the middle of a class discussion about—well, I forget exactly what, maybe it was Ivan Illich, maybe it was Václav Havel—and the conversation turned to the topic of war. Most college students, in my recent experience, don’t think much about war—or about current events to be honest—but I have been reminding them for over twenty years that the horrors of the past, of genocide, the Holocaust, chemical and biological warfare, could happen at anytime. If Germany, home of the most sophisticated and educated European culture of the early twentieth century could cave to something like Nazism, it could happen to anybody. Seeing recent disconcerting events unfolding over the Western Democracies™, I guess I was right.


I have thought long and hard about the problem of war, though I have never served in the military. Perhaps this stems from my earliest memories of waiting for cartoons to start on television in the morning and having to wait through the news reports of the dead and missing in Vietnam. I’m sure those experiences, administered in homeopathic doses over the course of my early childhood, served as something of an anti-war vaccine.


The thing is, as I was discussing with my students, I can’t believe war is still a thing. You’d think the human race would have figured this out by now, right? Watching recent geopolitical developments—not only in Ukraine, but also in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, France, Italy, and elsewhere—I find myself somewhat astonished that people go along with this theme and variation on totalitarianism and “soft totalitarianism” (“it’s for your safety”). And I don’t just mean the general populations, but also those enlisted in the military and police forces. Why do the men and women in uniform go along with the ruse? Why do they victimize the proletariat at the command of their masters? And I have also watched—and I’m sure you have, too—as people of relatively comfortable means in a kind of mimesis of the elite classes cheer on the prospect of war—even nuclear war. This is insane.


Over the course of my life struggling to understand the phenomena of war and human cruelty, I have turned to two sources of, if not comfort, then at least of consolation: the Iliad and the writings of my tutelary spirit, Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus called “the only great spirit of our time.”


The Iliad tells the story of the absurdity of war. The Greeks have been fighting in Troy for a decade—just to get Helen back from Paris and restored to Menelaos. Hardly a prize worth all the lives lost. But this is how the powerful roll. To add irony to the tale, Homer opens The Iliad with Achilles sulking in his tent because Agamemnon took away his war trophy, the slave girl Briseis, for his own. The story’s absurdity is extended further in Achilles’s slaying of Hector, the most noble figure in the epic, and dragging his body behind his chariot in shame for weeks afterward. Integrity doesn’t matter in a world characterized by absurdity. As Weil writes in her essay, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,”


The wantonness of the conqueror that knows no respect for any creature or thing that is at its mercy or is imagined to be so, the despair of the soldier that drives him on to destruction, the obliteration of the slave or the conquered man, the wholesale slaughter—all these elements combine in the Iliad to make a picture of uniform horror, of which force is the sole hero.” [1]


I think this an apt description of our own moment—and of much of the chatter on social media (from people who will never pick up a weapon) for that matter. Force is the sole hero.

Weil expands on this notion in “Human Personality,” concerning the usually unspoken utterance, “Why am I being hurt?”:


Those people who inflict the blows which provide this cry are prompted by different motives according to temperament or occasion. There are some people who get a positive pleasure from the cry, and many others simply do not hear it. For it is a silent cry, which sounds only in the silent heart.


These two states of mind are closer than they appear to be. The second is only a weaker mode of the first; its deafness is complacently cultivated because it is agreeable and it offers a positive satisfaction on its own. There are no other restraints upon our will than material necessity and the existence of other human beings around us. Any imaginary extension of these limits is seductive, so there is a seduction in whatever helps us to forget the reality of the obstacles. That is why upheavals like war and civil war are so intoxicating; they empty human lives of their reality and seem to turn people into puppets. That is also why slavery is so pleasant to the masters.” [2]


The question is: how intoxicated are we at this point?


Weil’s contemporary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin served in World War I and saw the horrors of armed conflict up close. He recalls his state of mind in the face of this in his essay “The Promised Land”:


“—And was peace, then, no more than this?

“—The peace that all through these long years was the brilliant mirage always before our eyes.

The peace that gave us courage to hold fast and to go into the attack because we thought we were fighting for a new world.

The peace that we hardly dared to hope might be ours, so lovely it seemed…

And this is all that peace had in store for us!” [3]


Thus “The War to End All Wars.” Thus geopolitics. Thus “The Great Reset.”


In a kind of scatological free-association, this all reminded me of a song I wrote with my friend Graham when we were in our early twenties. We’d been writing songs together since we were fifteen and we were just getting good at it. We were exploring a variety of genres and styles, incorporating mandolin, harmonica, fiddle and other instruments into our arsenal of available textures. It was really an exciting time. The world opened up. Everything seemed possible.


One Sunday night we were driving around in my jalopy drinking whiskey and Coke (don’t judge me) listening to a documentary or something about Bob Dylan. I remember something about Dylan hitchhiking around Minnesota, something about the Bible, something about trying to find himself as a young man—something Graham and I were doing ourselves.

The next day or so I came up with a very folky and clever chord progression and showed it to Graham. He immediately got to work and the Dylan story transfigured through his imagination. I can’t recall all of the verses, but snatches come back:


Looking out into the blazing sun

With my Bible and my thumb

No inclination as to where we’d go

No inclination at all


But I remember the chorus:


Thanks be to Jesus and to everyone

I thank the Lord I am alive

Thanks be to you, my trusted friend

All together: We’re alive.


Now Graham wasn’t then a religious person, nor is he now that I know (haven’t seen him for a few years). But something beautiful spoke through him then. We called the song “The Promised Land.” What I loved about his lyric was that it didn’t offer any answers. Rather, it rested in the knowledge that the Promised Land is a reality we can enter at any time, that it is always present. Even in times of war.


One of the great anti-war poems.


Michael’s latest book is Sophia in Exile. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine. There are also a few spots open in the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening as Christian Path course being offered at the end of April. See more here.


1. Simone Weil, An Anthology (Grove Press, 1986), 186.

2. Ibid., 52.

3. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War, trans. René Hague (Harper & Row, 1965), 278.

  • Writer: Michael Martin
    Michael Martin
  • Aug 19, 2021
  • 4 min read

World Party

You know it, and I know it: things are bizarre. Hopefully, we will not be slipping into a Hobbesian “war of all against all,” but I am not taking any bets. The closer we get to a culture of “show me your papers,” the closer we get to societal chaos.


In that spirit, I have put together a little playlist to help navigate the season of this our angst. You will notice that most of these songs are from my youth. I remember reading an interview with John Lennon just before he died (I think it was in Rolling Stone) and the interviewer asked what he was listening to. He answered, “Old rock ‘n’ roll. Chuck Berry, Fats Domino. I’m like our parents, you know: That was my era.” Even though I left the music business for the most part in 1987, while still a babe, I haven’t really tried to keep up with what the cool kids are listening to since then. But if you have suggestion of songs to add, mention them in the comments.

1. Beatles, “Revolution.” Speaking of Chuck Berry, John Lennon’s evocation of the guitar god at the opening of this tune is one of the most ferocious sounds ever to be recorded. I also love his equivocation about destruction. “It’s gonna be alright.”


2. The Call, “The Walls Came Down.” Michael Been, lead singer, songwriter, and leader of the band The Call employed biblical allusion to the walls of Jericho in his castigation of American “nation building” (meddling to you and me). It seems particularly poignant right now in light of the disaster that is Afghanistan. Interesting trivia, No. 1: In 1985 I opened for The Call in Detroit and talked to the band quite a bit in the dressing room. Been was ALL ABOUT THE POLITICS, a very earnest and sincere man. Interesting trivia, No. 2: A few years later, when I watched Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, I was surprised and pleased to see Been in the role of John the apostle. Unfortunately, Been died prematurely of a heart attack in 2010.


3. The Hooters, “All You Zombies.” Speaking of biblical allusions, this song by The Hooters is just crummy with them. The Hooters were outstanding musicians, very inventive and accomplished, but they were also cursed with good looks, so the record company marketed them as heartthrobs. To their credit, they didn’t play along.


4. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, “Ohio.” This is one of the great monuments in the catalog of protest songs. Written by Neil Young about the massacre of students at Kent State in 1970, it captures that moment like nothing else could. I show this video just every semester to my college students, telling them that they shouldn’t ever think it couldn’t happen again. It can. I don’t know if you’ve seen the video circulating of Autralian police pepper-spraying a 12-year-old for not wearing a mask, but I’d say Western democracies are moving dangerously close to turning on the unarmed citizenry. Don’t think what happened at Kent State can’t happen again.


5. “Get Up, Stand Up.” Bob Marley and the Wailers. This one, Peter Tosh’s masterpiece of resistance, really needs no explanation. I was very pleased to see it used at the conclusion of the recent protest against vaccine passports in New York City.


6. World Party, “Ship of Fools.” Karl Wallinger is a great and underrated songwriter. This scathing indictment of the political order has been my theme song for a good long while, even more so over the last eighteen months.


7. X, “The Have Nots.” One of the most disappointing developments of the last year and a half has been the vilification of the working and poor classes as part the propaganda apparatus of BigPharma and friends. The caricatures of doltish Trump supporters as the symbol of “vaccine hesitancy” is one thing, but New York mayor De Blassio’s vaccine passport actually impacts 60% or more of his city’s African-American residents. More propaganda. My sympathies are with the working classes and the poor, not with corporate, political, and media elites. Whose side do you think Jesus would be on? X’s song is a validation of the working poor—and it mentions Detroit’s Aorta Bar where I hung out once upon a time. This song is Charles Bukowski set to music.


8. The Parachute Club, “Rise Up!” Nothing says “80s” quite like parachute pants. Canadian band The Parachute Club offers an optimistic song here. I used to hang out in Toronto quite a bit as a young man (it’s only four hours from Detroit, where I grew up) and this song perfectly captures the mid-80s Toronto vibe. So rise up already.



9. Steppenwolf, “The Pusher.” This one goes out to BigPharma.


10. Elvis Costello and the Attractions, “(What’s so Funny about) Peace, Love, and Understanding.” Something to remember! Costello’s turn on Nick Lowe’s song (Lowe did it more as a ballad or lament) is as earnest as it is aggressive. And what a great description of our own moment:

As I walk through This wicked world Searchin’ for light in the darkness of insanity. I ask myself Is all hope lost? Is there only pain and hatred, and misery? And each time I feel like this inside, There's one thing I wanna know: What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

This version, from when Costello hosted The David Letterman Show, is gold.


11. Queen and David Bowie, “Under Pressure.” I don’t think any song has captured existential angst better then this one from 1981, an earlier time of existential angst (trust me, I was there). It also describes our own time. Bowie and Queen must have been reading their Heidegger, as the antidote to this angst is found in care, Heidegger’s point. We should try to remember that. This video beautifully complements the music.


Michael’s latest books are an edition of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and Transfiguration: Notes toward a Radical Catholic Reimagination of Everything. He can be reached at director@thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com See also The Center for Sophiological Studies' available courses. Also check out the latest volume of Jesus the Imagination: The Divine Feminine.

The Center for Sophiological Studies

8780 Moeckel Road  Grass Lake, MI 49240 USA

email: Director

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