We Love War, Don’t We?

“The fact is clear: Western wars are backed by the Christian God, and we cannot dodge his draft because we are all Christians, regardless of the faith you profess, the church you attend, or whether you declare yourself utterly atheistic. You may be Jew or Muslim, pay tribute to your god in Santeria fashion, join with other Wiccas, but wherever you are in the Western world you are psychologically Christian, indelibly marked with the sign of the cross in your mind and in the corpuscles of your habits…Once you feel your own personal soul to be distinct from the world out there, and that consciousness and conscience are lodged in that soul (and not in the world out there) and that even the impersonal selfish gene is individualized in your person, you are, psychologically, Christian.” — James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War

I played cowboys and indians when I was a kid, with real horses. My older brother loved guns. He collected and restored them. I didn’t love war movies, but I was fascinated by Westerns as a child. I imitated the way my movie heros mounted and rode their horses.

We were Texans. That was our mythology.

Hillman is saying in the quotation above that there is a larger mythology the whole western world subscribes to whether it wants to or not. It’s invisible but ever present. We have wars on everything from poverty and drugs to the ubiquitous…