When we declare war on crime, drugs or terror, we limit our means for understanding and dealing with them.
Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been fighting a “war on terror.” Real soldiers have been deployed to distant lands; real cluster bombs and white phosphorus have been used; real cruise missiles have been launched; the first MOAB, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal, has been dropped; and real cities have been reduced to rubble. In revenge for the deaths of 2,977 civilians that day, real people ― in the millions ― have died and millions more have become refugees. But is the war on terror actually a war at all ― or is it only a metaphor?
In a real war, nations or organized non-state actors square off against each other. A metaphorical war is like a real war ― after all, that’s what a metaphor is, a way of saying that one thing is like something else ― but the enemy isn’t a country or even a single group of Islamic jihadists. It’s some other kind of threat: a disease, a social problem, or in the case of the war on terror, an emotion.
In truth, it may not matter if the war on terror is a real one, since metaphorical wars have a striking way of killing real people in real numbers, too. Take the U.S war on drugs, for example. In Mexico, that war, fueled by U.S. weapons, using U.S. drones, and conducted with the assistance of the Pentagon and the CIA, has already led to the deaths of many thousands of people. A 2015 U.S. Congressional Research Service report estimates that organized crime caused 80,000 deaths in Mexico between 2007 and 2015. Most of the guns used in what has essentially been a mass murder spree came from this country, which is also the main market for the marijuana, cocaine, and heroin that are the identified enemy in this war of ours. As with our more literal wars of recent years, the war on drugs shows no sign of ending (nor does the U.S. hunger for drugs show any sign of abating). If anyone is winning this particular war, it’s the drugs ― and, of course, the criminal cartels that move them across the continent.
What is the problem in using the metaphor of war to represent an effort to battle and overcome some social evil?
American metaphorical wars fought in my own lifetime began with President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty,” first announced in 1964 when I was 12 years old. Indeed, my mother “served” in that war. We lived in Washington, D.C., at the time and she worked for the United Planning Organization, a community-based group funded under Johnson’s Model Cities program. It fought poverty in the slums of my hometown, just a few blocks from the White House. As with other similar groups around the country, its personnel tested new “weapons” in the war on poverty ― job training programs, citizen advice bureaus, and community-organizing efforts of various sorts. I was proud that my mother was a “soldier” in that war, which for a few brief years it even looked like we might be winning.
And there were victories. After all, the legacy of Johnson’s Great Society and the war that went with it included Medicare for older people ― I’ll be starting on it next month myself ― and Medicaid for people of any age living in poverty. The struggles, sacrifices, and deaths of civil rights activists together with Johnson’s political mastery gave us the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. (Of course the Trump Justice Department is doing its best to roll back both of these victories.) Then, as now, poverty touched the lives of many white people, but it flourished most abundantly in black and brown communities and so these new rights for people of color, some of us believed, signaled a light at the end of the tunnel when it came to the genuine abatement of poverty.
There’s a problem with declaring 'wars' on threats to human well-being: a tendency to conflate the threat and the victim of the threat.
The war on poverty was hardly this country’s first metaphorical war. In the 1930s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched a “war on crime,” anticipating by some 40 years Richard Nixon’s war on drugs, which itself has lasted another 40 years with no end in sight. Nixon also gave us the “war on cancer” ― still ongoing ― even as he continued to pursue the actual war in Vietnam, a rare American conflict in the second half of the twentieth century, metaphorical or otherwise, that came to a definitive end (even if in defeat).
Yes and no. A metaphor is, of course, an implied comparison in which two things share enough qualities in common that calling one by the other’s name will be illuminating. If, for instance, you said, “Donald Trump is a giant Cheeto,” you wouldn’t be suggesting that the president is actually a large, puffy piece of junk food. You would be highlighting the way he shares with that particular delicacy a certain orange coloration, as well as an airy structure that crumbles when you try to get your teeth into it ― as so many of Trump’s statements crumble in the jaws of truth.
Metaphors only work when the similarity between two things is striking enough that you learn something about one by comparing it to the other. Those two things must also, however, be different in crucial ways, or what you have isn’t a metaphor but an equation. For instance, Trump as Cheeto works exactly because you and I are unlikely to transfer to Donald J. Trump the feelings and attitudes we have toward Cheetos. We know enough about the nature of both never to want to eat the president, however much we may love the salty crunch of that snack food. When, however, you know less about at least one of the terms of comparison ― or less than you think you do ― then a powerful metaphor can be a deceiver, making us think we understand a phenomenon that actually goes over our heads (another metaphor). A bad metaphor can affect how we act individually and as a society and in some grim cases even whether we, or others, live or die.
And the use of war as a metaphor ― the treating of every human ill as if it were an enemy that could be defeated by a battle plan ― works just that way. When we declare war on phenomena like crime, drugs, or terror, instantly militarizing such problems, we severely limit our means for understanding and dealing with them.
Another problem with war as a metaphor for social ills is that warring and caring call upon very different moral qualities.
One consequence of militarizing the problem of drugs ― a lesson from the war on terror, too ― is that our survival comes to seem dependent on ensuring that captured enemies be detained until the end of hostilities. And since such hostilities never seem to end, that means essentially forever. In other words, as soon as you make war on drugs (and so on those who use them), the urge to end the real human suffering that drug addiction causes quickly devolves into, in Trumpian terms, “winning.” That, in turn, means ensuring vastly more suffering through actual violence and the endless incarceration of millions of people, a startling number of them for drug offenses, or what might be thought of as the Guantanamo-ization of America.
Another problem with war as a metaphor for social ills is that warring and caring call upon very different moral qualities. While both share characteristics like courage, persistence, and often the need to endure real hardship, the prosecution of war also requires other qualities: obedience, indifference to the suffering of oneself and others, and the necessity of viewing the world in black and white. War requires that we recognize in ourselves only virtue and, in our foe, only inhuman evil. We should not be surprised when President Trump informs us that, in his wars on crime and drugs, the human enemies ― gang members, and by extension immigrants in general ― are not people, but “animals.” And to be good soldiers, the rest of us are expected to practice dehumanizing the enemy, too.
War metaphors distort legitimate efforts to resolve real social problems, while at the same time cheapening our understanding of actual war.