Drew Gilpin Faust, President of Harvard University and eminent Civil War historian, has written a profound essay reflecting on our continuing fascination with the Civil War. She begins with the centennial commemoration, juxtaposing a reenactment of the First Battle of the Bull Run with MLK’s March on Washington, then she briefly outlines the intervening 50 years of historical reinterpretation of the war. But her real interest is with humanity’s fascination with war in general:

How is it that the human has become so entangled with the inhumane, and humanity’s highest creative aspirations of literature and imagination have been all but inseparable from its most terrible invention—the scourge of war? Most other creatures engage in violence, and some insects and animals with elaborate social structures reflect those systems in their modes of association and aggression. But humans are unique in their creation of an institution of war that is designed to organize violence, define its purposes, declare its onset, ratify its conclusion, and establish its rules. War, like literature, is a distinctively human product.

Among her conjectures:

The seductiveness of war derives in part from its location on this boundary of the human, the inhuman, and the superhuman. It requires us to confront the relationship among the noble, the horrible, and the infinite; the animal, the spiritual, and the divine. Its fascination lies in its ability at once to allure and to repel, in the paradox that thrives at its heart.

She discusses the “impossibility and necessity” of communicating war’s truths, for foot soldiers writing letters home, as well as for historians or novelists. Most importantly, she links war and narrative: “To rename violence as war is to give it teleology,” using the example of the invasion of Iraq to prove her point. The “war on terror” implies that “terrorism could be defeated, eliminated, that it need not be a permanent condition of modern life. We expect wars to come with endings.”

It’s well worth reading and pondering.