By Sara Veltkamp—
We cannot fight a war against COVID-19. It’s a virus and the unfortunate people—or maybe we should call them Trojan Horses?—who have the virus are not our enemies. Similarly, we cannot go to battle with drugs, crime, cancer, or Christmas.
None of these social challenges (excluding Christmas) have a cohesive strategy for domination, leadership, or even sentience. In other words, we have no enemies to attack. So why, when we’re attempting to change behaviors, do we feel the need to revert to wartime language in our communications?
The easy answer is that it can be useful. When Americans think of war, they often call to mind self-sacrifice, unity, collective action, and honor. These associations make it easier to convince people to behave differently, give up liberties they would otherwise hold tightly, and feel good about doing both.
Leaders go to war to unite their countryman around their vision and against rivals. Many even attempt to prolong a warlike stance to keep this rivalry and internal cohesiveness going. For example, Syria’s previous leader, Hafez al-Assad entered, along with Egypt, into the losing 1973 “October War” with Israel at least partly for this purpose. To commemorate the war, al-Assad built a museum—with the help of his friend Kim il-Sung in North Korea—dedicated to this war. The museum includes a massive panorama that tells the story of the war from the Syrian perspective, twisted to show how Syria had triumphed—when all accounts show that they demonstrably lost.
War and addressing social issues do have some things in common. We should create strategic plans, some sacrifice may be involved, and we’ll probably need to invest substantial resources to solve the problem. But the same could be said of road construction. And we don’t often declare a war on potholes though this may be a politically expedient campaign platform for candidates in states where potholes have been known to swallow smaller vehicles whole—Rhode Island and my home state Michigan come to mind.
Despite being an easy way to move people, adopting warlike language is problematic for a variety of reasons. First, war is not an apt metaphor. Ask people who’ve been in a war. At the beginning of the pandemic, leaders described social distancing measures not just as a means to slow the rise of cases, but also as an opportunity for heroism. As if, for most Americans, staying home with family and watching Netflix requires the same courage as heading out in a Humvee to Fallujah during the height of the Iraq war or fleeing from Syria as a refugee.
Second, war is not effective. Only when painting the rosiest of one-sided pictures, can we envision a historical or current war as anything other than devastating and incredibly expensive. We may win, but at what cost? We continue to pay for the wars we’ve engaged in as a country in myriad ways—from deaths of our young people to destroyed economies and fragile states around the world to mental health challenges related to trauma. Why would we want to model a program to reduce crime or a COVID-19 response after these disasters?
What I find most troubling, however, is that using a war metaphor to describe anything that isn’t a war bolsters the belief that adversarial relationships, division, and creating common enemies is the only way to bring people together to make progress toward a common cause.
How we speak impacts how we think about the world. The war metaphor underscores a zero-sum worldview that stresses the importance of dominance and maintaining power. This view has thrived in our world for too long. We are so deep in this view that we struggle—even when creating metaphors—to break from alignment.
Fortunately, another narrative is “battling” for our attention during the pandemic. It’s a rallying cry that points out an obvious truth: We are in this together. The challenges we’re facing—the health of the planet, poverty, disease, or speaking with civility in an election year—are too multifaceted for anyone to solve alone, and too important to tackle as ineffectively as a war.
We humans have no choice but to figure things out together, so let’s blow the war metaphor to smithereens and start using new language to motivate the changes we need to see in the world.
