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Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Review

Victor Davis Hanson offers a magnificent thesis explaining the success of Western Civilization in "Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power". This work presents several major battles between Western and Non-Western armies against the backdrop of Western values and culture. Values like individualism, capitalism, freedom of speech and religion, self-criticism, and democracy played central roles in creating Western culture. It is these values, Hanson explains, that have allowed Western armies to be the most lethal on Earth.

A few years ago a friend gave me Jared Diamond's Pulitzer prize winning book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies." While I found Diamond's ideas intriguing, I found his central thesis somewhat broad and unconvincing. The arguments made in Hanson's "Carnage and Culture" completely put Diamond in his proper place and offer a much more convincing thesis for Western success. Indeed, in many ways "Carnage and Culture" is a direct rebuttal to Diamond. As Hanson notes, Diamond attempts to explain away Western success as little more than geography, biology, and chance. Diamond is a scientist, not a historian. Hanson states that while Diamond is correct in that race had nothing to do with it, (no one race having a monopoly on intelligence, generalship, etc...), he notes that Diamond completely dismisses culture as reason for Western success.

The case studies offered reflect those values that have allowed Western culture to flourish and spread around the globe. The role of freedom is explored at the battle of Salamis, as is capitalism at Lepanto, Individualism at Midway, and dissent at Tet, to name but a few. Throughout Hanson offers an engaging intellectual minefield that blows apart previously held conceptions of culture, warfare, and values. Each study illustrates Hanson's command of the subject, and utterly convinces the reader. I highly recommend this work to those who thought "Guns, Germs, and Steel" was the last word on the subject, as well as for those who simply want to know why Western culture, with all of its pitfalls, and perils, has emerged as the world's driving force in technology, human rights, the arts, and progress in general. This is simply a brilliant work by a master historian.

Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Overview

Through vivid depictions of historic battles, Victor Davis Hanson reveals the connection between the West’s superiority on the battlefield and its rise to world dominance.

Why have Western values triumphed? Why are Western ideas and practices spreading unopposed throughout the globe? In this sweeping and ambitious work of military and cultural history, Victor Davis Hanson convincingly argues that it all comes down to the Western knack for killing.

Hanson is a superb writer with a particular gift for dropping the reader into the midst of clashing armies. With his trademark zest for bringing the gritty realities of battle to life, he vividly re-creates nine important confrontations between Western and non-Western armies, from the stunning Greek victory at Salamis in 480 B.C. to Cortés’s conquest of Mexico City in 1521 to the grueling urban warfare of Vietnam’s Tet Offensive. But Hanson goes beyond the conventions of the “guns and trumpets” genre to reveal the cultural underpinnings that determined the course and consequences of each engagement and in the process advances a bold and provocative thesis about the reasons for Western global dominance. Replying to those who stress environmental and other nonhuman factors in the rise of Western hegemony, Hanson shows that the rise of the West was not a fluke of geography or “germs” but a logical result of Western cultural dynamism as manifested in its ways of making war.

Each battle illustrates a crucial element in the distinctive and powerful matrix of Western identity. Hanson delineates the characteristics of successful armies–including individual initiative, superior organization and discipline, access to matchless weapons, and tactical adaptation and flexibility. Then he shows how these characteristics develop and flourish as a result of such traditional Western institutions and ideals as consensual government, free inquiry and innovative enterprise, rationalism, and the value placed on freedom and individualism. These are the cultural values that have enabled Western armies, often vastly outnumbered and far from home, to slaughter their opponents and impose their social, economic, and political ideals on other civilizations.

Through his detailed reconstructions of these battles, some of which were actually lost by Western armies, Hanson tells the story of the rise of Western global dominance. He thereby joins the great debate about the character and future of the West, sparked by recent controversial works by authors such as Samuel Huntington, Paul Johnson, and Francis Fukuyama.

Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Specifications

Many theories have been offered regarding why Western culture has spread so successfully across the world, with arguments ranging from genetics to superior technology to the creation of enlightened economic, moral, and political systems. In Carnage and Culture, military historian Victor Hanson takes all of these factors into account in making a bold, and sure to be controversial, argument: Westerners are more effective killers. Focusing specifically on military power rather than the nature of Western civilization in general, Hanson views war as the ultimate reflection of a society's character: "There is…a cultural crystallization in battle, in which the insidious and more subtle institutions that heretofore are murky and undefined became stark and unforgiving in the finality of organized killing."

Though technological advances and superior weapons have certainly played a role in Western military dominance, Hanson posits that cultural distinctions are the most significant factors. By bringing personal freedom, discipline, and organization to the battlefield, powerful "marching democracies" were more apt to defeat non-Western nations hampered by unstable governments, limited funding, and intolerance of open discussion. These crucial differences often ensured victory even against long odds. Greek armies, for instance, who elected their own generals and freely debated strategy were able to win wars even when far outnumbered and deep within enemy territory. Hanson further argues that granting warriors control of their own destinies results in the kind of glorification of horrific hand-to-hand combat necessary for true domination.

The nine battles Hanson examines include the Greek naval victory against the Persians at Salamis in 480 B.C., Cortes's march on Mexico City in 1521, the battle of Midway in 1942, and the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam. In the book's fascinating final chapter, he then looks forward and ponders the consequences of a complete cultural victory, challenging the widespread belief that democratic nations do not wage war against one another: "We may well be all Westerners in the millennium to come, and that could be a very dangerous thing indeed," he writes. It seems the West will always seek an enemy, even if it must come from within. --Shawn Carkonen

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Customer Reviews

An education - T. Lowdon - Hillsborough, CA United States
Carnage and Culture provides a perspective on Western civilization that you probably didn't encounter in college. I learned so much from this book and wished I'd had it as a text in school.

A Decent Read - J. Romeo - knoxville, tn USA
There is no doubt that Hanson can write. Hason never really provides us with scholarly insight, but he does write some exciting prose. You can actually feel yourself inside some of the battles that he describes. That is all fine and good if this were a fiction book. However, it's not fiction. What Hanson does provide us is a theory on why the West came to dominate over the rest of the world. His theory borders on EuroAmericanexceptionalsim. He argues that it was our culture that lead us down the path to victory. He says in one part of the book its always the West invading somewhere else and not another country invading the West and that non-Western countries lose. However, he conveniently forgets that the Crusades were not won by the European armies and that the Vietnamese beat back both the French and American armies. Hanson argues that the West weapons are better than non-Western countries. However, the weapons and designs that were discovered while fighting the Crusades (along with other things such as more sophisticated math and better medical ideas than what the West were using at the time) were brought back to the West. Also, most military historians and tacticians will agree that the AK-47, designed and built in a non-Western county (Hanson does not include Russia in the West), is perhaps one of the best built automatic weapons ever created.
Hason claims at the start of the book that it is he is not judging on skin color, but he does talk about genes. One can not help to think that Hanson feels the opposite after reading Carnage and Culture. I would not discourage anyone from reading this book, but only remind them to take what Hanson says with a grain of salt.

brilliant analysis and a fresh point of view - John Desmond - Orlando, FL
Carnage and Culture provides a fascinating counterpoint to Jared Diamond's Guns Germs and Steel. Where Diamond's study fell short was in that it explained why Eurasia might dominate the world, but he failed to carry on and explain why Europe would dominate all. Hanson fills that gap. The only shortcomings of the book were a certain amount of redundancy and also some minor factual errors (such as referring to troops of the US 7th Division as "marines."

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Tuesday, November 2, 2010