Ehrenreich, a public intellectual beloved for her sharp-eyed, witty analyses of social and feminist issues, takes a major leap in a new direction with ““Blood Rites.’’ Reading widely in history, anthropology, religion and military theory, she comes up with a fascinating perspective on our staunch - indeed, religious - devotion to mass, mutual slaughter. Rather than tracing war back to its supposed roots in man-the-hunter, she finds a more likely ancestor in man-the-hunted. ““We were not given dominion over the earth,’’ she writes. ““Our forebears earned it in their long, nightmarish struggle against creatures far stronger, swifter, and better armed than themselves.’’ That original capacity for terror was so adaptive that long after conquering our predators we still whip up our fears at scary movies, imprint similar sentiments in our children (““Who’s afraid of the big, bad wolf?’’) and, most important, enact rituals designed to appease wild beasts and angry gods. Today those rituals include troops marching, bands playing, flags waving and chaplains bestowing blessings, but that’s fairly recent. For much longer, and in nearly all cultures, humans have carried out religious mini-dramas of predation. These ceremonies of animal or human sacrifice constitute the origins of war, Ehrenreich believes: they’re rituals of violence intended to make everyone (except the victim) feel safe.
Ehrenreich spent 11 years researching and writing ““Blood Rites,’’ much of the time in a state of dismay over what she was finding. ““With every other book I’ve written, I knew what I wanted to say,’’ she says. ““This one was full of surprises, some of which I tried to suppress, but they kept coming back.’’ Her initial assumption was that war could be explained in terms of warriors. ““There were European officers in World War I who could trace their lineage of officerdom back hundreds of years,’’ she says. ““I was fascinated by the notion of a warrior elite. I thought, this is it, these are the bad guys, it all comes back to them.’’ But war, she found, operates independently of bad guys. As weaponry changes, warriors change; knights in armor become kids with looted machine guns. What keeps war alive isn’t armies, she learned, but a process akin to contagion. A tribe may love peace, but if its neighbors are warlike, it will fight or be wiped out. Simply, war begets war.
““Blood Rites’’ is particularly invigorating on the question of gender and violence. There’s no question that sanctified killing has functioned for millenniums as a symbol of masculine power: Ehrenreich’s description of the Fang men of Africa - who came home from a killing shouting, ““We are real men, we are real men, we have been to town and shot a man, we are men, real men’’ - pretty much sums up the subject. But in the midst of her research, the gulf war broke out. ““It was the first feminist war,’’ she says. With women clearly willing to fight on equal terms with men, it became a lot harder to respect the ancient dichotomy casting men as bloodthirsty and women as gentle and nurturing. ““There’s a canonical feminist assumption now that war is an extension of male violence against women,’’ she says. ““But if we ever have a matriarchy in this country, and Canada invades, we’ll have a military apparatus.''
Free of piety: Lively and clear-headed on subjects ranging from human sacrifice to Hitler, ““Blood Rites’’ is that rare animal, a nonfiction page-turner. And it’s wonderfully free of piety. ““Pacifists and feminists say there’s something wrong inside us that we have to excise, and then we’ll all be nice and have no more war,’’ she says. ““But maybe our fighting spirit isn’t bad - after all, it’s helped us to survive. Maybe we can call on that fighting spirit to fight war itself.’’ Maybe we have no choice. As Ehrenreich puts it, ““War is not a god you want to worship anymore. This god is mocking you.''
