In time of war or other intense conflict, partisanship can foster a pathology all its own. When this happens, partisanship goes beyond the emphasis on loyalty and cohesion needed for the well-being of any community and leads people to become obsessive and heedless of their group's long-range self-interest, even of its survival. Communities, like living organisms, can succumb to stress, internal weakness, or contagion. These factors heighten the risks that the pathology of self-destructive partisanship will take over. Only with the help of strong leadership and institutional safeguards can communities prevent or withstand such deterioration.

      When such protections are inadequate or absent altogether, partisanship can usher in a state of mind that grants neither respect nor mercy to even the most innocent victim; this almost invariably elicits similar partisanship among the adversaries thus injured. The narrowest of group perspectives comes to prevail on each side; each views the other with distrust and acts in ways bound to increase mutual distrust. Participants may have taken up the battle hoping to defend their people or out of anguish over the injustices threatened--perhaps already done--to their families, their fellow citizens, or their coreligionists; or they may have been driven by a desire to convert others to their beliefs or form of government. But as time goes on, those drawn into such wars often find it increasingly difficult to sustain full concern for the dignity and suffering of those on their own side without growing callous, even inhumane, toward outsiders. Whatever brutality or treachery they then exhibit gives their opponents further reasons for responding in kind and for even greater distrust. And as the climate of mutual threat and mutual distrust deteriorates, the chances for negotiating a halt to the hostilities dwindle.

      Thucydides has told the story of the pathological and ultimately self-destructive effects of such narrow partisanship during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C. It is a story we know well, having seen it reenacted time and again over the centuries. The two city-states were great powers when they declared war, but as the conflict wore on, each grew impoverished and demoralized. The toll in lives, and in farms burned and lands devastated, turned out to be far greater than anyone had foretold. After the citizens of Athens had crowded together for protection inside the city walls, an especially virulent outbreak of the plague brought grief and near-panic. Death was everywhere; people took to committing crimes they would previously have shunned, thinking that they might not live long enough to be brought to trial for them. In time, even those Athenians most devoted to democracy and to human respect grew capable of carrying out atrocities they would once have found unthinkable. Polarization grew, both internally and in external affairs; opposing parties carried out brutal revolutions in many Greek cities; and revenge came to be more important than self-preservation:

Society had become divided into two antagonistic camps, and each side viewed the other with distrust. As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves?

When I saw photographs of children, murdered by fascists, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words.

      Gradually, Spender writes, he acquired a certain horror of the way his mind seemed to be working: "It was clear to me that unless I cared about every murdered child impartially, I did not care about children being murdered at all." His perception had been distorted by the intensity of his concern for the threatened lives of those on his own side of the conflict and by his horror and distrust of the fascists' tactics. He had lost all concern for the children on the fascist side and had come to see any reference to their suffering as mere propaganda.

      The French writer and philosopher Simone Well took part briefly in the Spanish civil war in 1936. Like Spender, she tells how easy it is to become caught in a partisan perspective under the strain of daily combat. In 1940, preparing to flee Paris as the Nazis advanced, Weil reflected on the capacity of violence to heighten and debilitate partisanship in a remarkable essay, The Iliad or the Poem of Force. Turning to Homer's account of the Trojan War in order to shed light on what violence does to the human spirit, she offers a penetrating analysis of how the partisan perspective can be transformed by violence.

      Weil was willing to grant that force could be necessary as a last resort in self-defense; she fully supported the struggle against Nazi Germany. But in her own life she strove to practice nonviolence to the greatest extent possible and to become someone who could make it work. (1) She understood the contagious quality of violence, its ability to spread out of control and overpower victim and agent alike. She had seen at close hand how quickly combatants "get carried away by a sort of intoxication" and how easily they take to killing once they know that they need fear neither blame nor legal punishment for such acts. And she knew how the power of violence could numb both feelings and reason, so that those in its sway no longer make room for what she called "that halt, that interval of hesitation, wherein lies all our consideration for our brothers in humanity."

      It is this interval of hesitation, of reflection, that permits us to think of the moral dimensions of what we as human beings do to and for each other; of what we owe to ourselves, to members of our own groups and communities, and to others, even our adversaries. In the heat of battle there may sometimes be no time for such reflection; at other times issues are so clear-cut that it is not needed; but as conflicts intensify without any end in sight, partisanship transformed by the experience of exceptional violence may numb the capacity for careful judgment, even when it is most needed and when there is time enough to stop to reflect. It is then that people become, as did the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, capable of massacres that they would once have rejected out of hand.

      The transforming power of violence has rarely been so vividly rendered as by Weil in writing of the Trojan War. But this power is stressed not only by those who, like Weil, explicitly warn against its danger. The great epics sing of it; eulogizers of war can come to regard it as divine. Thus Joseph de Maistre, the nineteenth-century French diplomat who saw war as a divine law ruling the world, insisted that it takes but little time before the "kindest characters" become accustomed to passionate engagement in violence. A friendly young man, he argues, brought up to recoil from violence and from blood, can be led with the greatest of ease to seek out and destroy those whom he is told to regard as enemies: "The blood that flows all around him only incites him to spill his own and that of others. By degrees he grows inflamed and will come to experience the enthusiasm of carnage."

      For Well, the enthusiasm of carnage is anything but divine. It is, rather, a contagious and addictive form of intoxication that injures all who come under its sway. She writes of how the embittered Greeks and Trojans, worn down by years of fighting, came to believe that liberation would be possible only through further carnage, further destruction:

Any other solution, more moderate, more reasonable in character, would expose the mind to suffering so naked, so violent, that it could not be borne, even as memory. Terror, grief, exhaustion, slaughter, the annihilation of comrades--is it credible that these things should not continually tear at the soul, if the intoxication of force had not intervened to drown them?