by Barbara Ehrenreich
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Product Description
An ALA Notable Book
A New York Times Notable Book
In Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Blood Rites takes us on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war." Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place--not in a "killer instinct" unique to the males of our species but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that will transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.
Amazon.com Review
In this ambitious work, Barbara Ehrenreich offers a daring explanation for humans' propensity to wage war. Rather than approach the subject from a physiological perspective, pinpointing instinct or innate aggressiveness as the violent culprit, she reaches back to primitive man's fear of predators and the anxieties associated with life in the food chain. To deal with the reality of living as prey, she argues that blood rites were created to dramatize and validate the life-and-death struggle. Jumping ahead to the modern age, Ehrenreich brands nationalism a more sophisticated form of blood ritual, a phenomenon that conjures similar fears of predation, whether in the form of lost territory or the more extreme ethnic cleansing. Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War may not offer a cure for human aggression, but the author does present a convincing argument for the difficulties associated with achieving peace.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 War is hiding inside us, 2008-09-24
The passions of war are just waiting to be triggered. Are you prepared to fight your emotional programming instead of for your nation? Any deep investigation of war needs to go into what we are, where we have evolved from, and the history of war and its cultural growth. The book has a good style and length, and intelligently presented a coherent thesis from the researches of the author. The book deserves a read to discover the potentials of prey and predator in all of us. There are insights into military history and behavior, and the theme grows around our recent in evolutionary terms 'ascent' from being prey of carnivores to an organized predator who kills from a distance with fearsome armaments. The theme of this book will always be topical, because war is always a part of what we are. Knowledge of its consequences has always been in some of us, while most of us are swept along with the tides of feeling. I hope by labeling more exactly what are the emotional buttons, like our response to advertising, we can conceive of alternatives and restraint in current and future wars.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Good book., 2008-06-20
Since I read "Blood Rites" after "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning", comparisons are inevitable and I will make no attempt to avoid them.
In "War is a Force..." Hedges speaks only of contemporary war and how it excites the passions of modern man in the late 20th and early 21st century. He draws extensively on his own personal experiences covering conflicts across the globe, which gives significant credence to the arguments that he makes. One of the shortfalls, though, of that book is that he tends to speak nearly exclusively in some parts on those personal experiences. What he lacks is a more scholarly attempt at defining the "force", or as Ehrenreich calls them, "passions" of war. This is where "Blood Rites" excells.
Ehrenreich's proposal regarding the evolution of the passions of war are very compelling. Until I read her book, I was of the mind that it is a "meme" (she mentions this concept and it's creator, Richard Dawkins, in her final chapter) that has persisted for many of the same reasons as religion: In those "true believers" doing the fighting, it excites group hysteria, feelings of brotherhood and kinship found nowhere else, etc. And in those who are the puppet masters, it provides them with the ability to force their will on the masses. (That is an extremely condensed version of my views.)
Her proposal that war developed from ritual sacrifice, which was something early man adopted to transition and cope with its history of being prey to large predators, and then persisted as agricultural advancements eliminated the need for men to hunt/gather, is fascinating. As an explanation for the origin of conflict, this is an interesting theory. Other contemporary attempts at explaining war do, as she argues, fall short as they are tainted by our contemporary perspective. Our motivations for recent wars, which are fought over geopolitical and economic interests, are not valid historically in all cases throughout all cultures.
Although her arguments are compelling, I do have some questions and think her theory has some holes. Perhaps this belief stems from the fact that I had to take a break from the book for a little over a week due to a death in the family, but perhaps not. A lot has happened in the decade since this was published, and I wonder what sort of critical review her theories have received and whether or not events have validated her theories or caused her to have to rethink them. That shall be my next endeavor, I suppose, although I think her overt sympathies to Marx and socialism that are found toward the end of this book will turn off a lot of scholars and prejudice any review they make of this work.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
on the origins of war, 2006-08-30
Blood Rites is a book about the origin of war. The author's thesis is that the origins of war stem back to a time when humanity was the prey of large animals. Eventually humans organized and developed weapons to fight off predatory animals but the memories of being prey lived on in us and manifested itself in sacrifice, human and otherwise and finally, up to this day, war. In the process of explaining the above the author goes into the history of war, writing of a time when the making of war was a sacred kind of thing reserved for the elite of each society and about the democratizing effect modern weapons had on war, first making the lower soldiers such as archers more important than the knights and samurai and then with the advent of guns making the idea of a knight or samurai class completely obsolete. Finally we enter modern times with nationalism forming the identity of each group of people and hence what we fight over. Although much is made of the actions of male soldiers the author emphasizes that war is a need of humankind. She points out that facing a common enemy brings us all together and that woman are as eager to send their sons to war as men are. I enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot about the practice of war. In the end she brings up the anti-war movement and says that this movement is fighting it's own kind of war. I found this a kind of depressing point to make. I wonder if we can ever get over our need to have an enemy, that need to be preyed on that this book is ultimately about.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
War at the Heart of the Human Enterprise, 2006-05-30
In this deep and meticulously researched treatise on the origins of war Barbara Ehrenreich argues that 1.In our earliest history we were scavengers with no good defense mechanism, hardly the top of the food chain. 2.When humans developed the brain power to become an apex predator the wound inflicted by being a prey animal formed the basis of the first religious ceremonies as small bands of humans re-enacted the trauma of the predator prey relationship in sacrificial blood rites. 3.That about 12,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the agricultural revolution the large prey that consumed the attentions of the most violent segment of society had been all but hunted out. 4.Putting these men to work as warriors to replace their hunting niche was adaptative at the time. 5.War began as an organized human enterprise about 12,000 years ago as these new warriors captured people from other tribes to use in the blood rites and for slave labor.6.Finally, the fact that war was and is a social construct makes it no less real and no less dangerous as this formerly adaptative behavior has become inextricably intertwined with every aspect of our human lives over the last 12 millennia. In fact it has become the center of the human enterprise. Looking at the problem of war from the above perspective should alert those of us in the peace movement to the profound psychological transformation that must take place before we can make in headway at all. The fact that this close inspection of the earliest history is so timely today just proves Ehrenreich's central thesis as to the madness and intractability of war.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
War, the Predator Beast, 2005-11-10
I loved Nickel and Dimed but was disappointed in For Her Own Good. Barbara Ehrenreich is a prolific writer and, I guess, not everything can be a gem. Blood Rites is well researched and exciting reading. Ehrenreich attacks the nature and origins of War, a subject on which she is admittedly not an expert. She brings a fresh eye, excellent research skills and the ability to put her conclusions in clear and compelling language.
Her key conclusion is that war grew out of our early experiences as prey turned predators. I don't know if that is as revolutionary an idea as she claims, but she convinced me. War is a religious experience based on the blood sacrifices of early humans to propitiate predator gods. It evolved with human society and now serves the new religion of nationalism, known in the US as patriotism.
While it is a human creation, like Frankenstein's monster, it has taken on a life of it's own and has become the new Beast. It is so enmeshed in our consciousness and culture that we may not be able to stop it. We find ourselves throwing young men and women into its merciless maw at a rate that makes even the bloodiest ancient rites seem tame in comparison.
Ehrenreich draws us to that frightening conclusion and then, apparently in search of a happy ending, suggests that perhaps the modern anti-war movement will grow powerful enough to actually put a stop to it; the war against war serving as the new but benign secular "religion".
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