Living by war.(Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging)

• Published in: American Conservative Vol. 15; no. 5; p. 53
• Main Author: Beauchamp, Scott
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Arlington The American Conservative LLC 01.09.2016; American Conservative LLC
• Subjects: Community; Culture; Junger, Sebastian; Nonfiction; Veterans; War
• ISSN: 1540-966X

Why veterans can't access these human essentials outside of a combat zone is the key question [Sebastian Junger] fails to fully explore. His assertions that modern society is "so unappealing," "a desperate cycle of work, financial obligation, and more work," and a cheap, fractured, and alienated culture that has "perfected the art of making people feel not necessary" demand some serious analysis. But Junger pulls his punches. He doesn't explain why our society is fractured and lonely in the first place. He gestures at a large and complex critique of contemporary Western culture without ever actually sinking his teeth in. He gives us constellations of dots but leaves us to connect them ourselves. And since the questions he asks could be used to interrogate the rationale of our market-driven, community-destroying individualist culture, one is left wondering if Junger balked on the followthrough out of fealty to the very consensus his work implicitly condemns. For years now, on public radio, in Vanity Fair, and in TED Talks, Junger has been telling the stories of veterans who return home from the horrors of war only to find that home doesn't quite live up to their expectations. In a counterintuitive twist, Junger tells us that it's returning to the civilian world that unmoors veterans, not combat. Junger writes, "Given the profound alienation of modern society, when combat vets say that they miss the war, they might be having an entirely healthy response to life back home." Either the world is crazy or veterans are, and Junger puts his money on the world. In combat, veterans had community, a sense of worth and purpose, the joy of sacrifice, and a kind of egalitarianism- in race and class, if not rank-that simply doesn't exist in the civilian world. Or is extraordinarily rare, at least. Drawing from self-determination theory, Junger cites three basic things that human beings need in order to be content: to feel competent at what they do, to feel authentic, and to experience connection. "These values are considered ?intrinsic' to human happiness," Junger writes, "and far outweigh extrinsic' values such as beauty, money, and status." As he makes clear, these values don't exist solely in combat. Junger points to cops, firefighters, and even Amish society as tight-knit groups that experience some of them. But instead of staking his claim on these moral values and taking them as final ends to move our society toward, Junger stuffs the book with pathologized facts and filler anecdotes.