front only as very distant thunder, bumblebees droning by quite drown it. Around us stretches the flowery meadow (Remarque 9).
Freud, on the other hand, focuses on the destructive passions which underlie and propel the objectives and strategies of nations which initiate war. Freud assumes that the morality of individuals is negated when nations succumb to war:
It is just as though when it becomes a question of a number of people, not to say millions, all individual moral requirements were obliterated, and only the most primitive, the oldest, the crudest mental attitudes were left (Freud 121).
In accordance with his evolutionary, materialistic, deterministic philosophy of life, Freud pessimistically concludes that the current state of human behavior cannot now be improved and "only future stages in development will be able in any way to alter this regrettable state of affairs" (Freud 121). Freud does not say that the human being has no higher impulses, such as reason and moral principle, but rather that when the individual's "interests" are threatened, that individual's passions are energized and reason and morality are quickly rendered meaningless:
Students of human nature and philosophers have long taught us that we are mistaking in regarding our intelligence as an independent force and in overlooking its dependence upon the emotional life. Our intelligence . . . behaves merely as an instrument of the will. . . . Logical arguments are impotent against affective interests (Freud 120).
The state of war is one in which nations and individuals are most vulnerable to their irrational emotions, and swiftly ignore higher impulses of reason or morality or compassion. Freud believes, in fact, that war is a desirable phenomenon in that it gives people the opportunity to be as aggressive as they want to be---under the
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