In our supposedly enlightened era, many people would like to imagine that most wars are fought for essentially rational purposes: punishing terrorists, seizing resources, profiteering off of arms sales, and so on. In centuries past, of course, kings and princes would fight wars to avenge personal insult or for self-aggrandizement. But surely we don’t do that sort of thing today? Surely entire countries don’t burn with humiliated resentment and seek revenge?

If only. Countries are collections of people, after all. And emotions still play a significant role in decisions to go to war. In some cases, they may play the decisive role. And fantasy or sci-fi authors would do well to keep this point in mind. As I have noted before, we are apt to forget that people have many reasons to go to war.

I am nearly finished reading Bloody Revenge: Emotions, Nationalism, and War, by sociologist Thomas J. Scheff. (Despite the piffle that infests the field, there are occasionally good works of scholarship by sociologists to be found!) He argues convincingly that in recent decades, much of American academia has been improperly deemphasizing the role of emotion in war, and in society generally. (This is, he claims, part of the move by advancing “civilization” to suppress and delegitimize emotions as justifications for behavior. I wonder what Dr. Scheff would say about the late effervescence of “safetyism.”)

Somewhat less convincingly, Scheff argues that many if not most wars are motivated by suppressed shame, acted out in a dysfunctional international system that mimics a dysfunctional family system in many respects. He argues from the assumption that if national interest were the only issue in a conflict between countries, people are creative enough to work out compromises that are, at any rate, not as bad as the wholesale destructiveness of total war.

Why fight wars then? Scheff argues that the emotion of shame (and probably fear as well, though it is not his focus) leads to alienation between the conflicting sides when it is suppressed and unacknowledged—and also within a country, so that citizens subordinate their own selves to the false solidarity of nationalism, to the extent that they are willing to fight and die in the military (which Scheff calls engulfment). It is this alienation, and the rage erupting out of unacknowledged shame, that leads countries to desire vengeance and fight wars with each other, rather than working out their conflicts less destructively.

Scheff argues that France’s shame at losing Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 was one of the key preconditions of World War I, and motivated French policies that played a key role in triggering the conflict—in particular, its alliance with Russia against Germany, which encouraged Russia to foment trouble in the Balkans. Germany’s own belligerence was, therefore, (partly) motivated by a rational fear of France’s intrigues. He also draws parallels between the secret intrigues of France, Russia, and Britain—each of which kept preparations for war secret from their own peoples, and in some cases even from much of their own governments—to the “triangling” and intrigues to be found in dysfunctional families. Finally, Scheff endorses the standard position that World War II was in large part motivated by Germany’s humiliation in Versailles and consequent desire for revenge, though he adds several lurid details of the psychology of Adolf Hitler in particular.

Scheff nearly falls into the trap of reducing everything to a single variable. He does periodically note that clashes of interests, rational fears, and the like still play a role in decisions to make war; but his foundational assumption that people would naturally come up with solutions to conflict, if not for their emotional commitments, impels him to the conclusion that if only countries would acknowledge their shame and work through their issues, wars would all but disappear.

This conclusion, however, is based on Scheff’s unstated assumption that both parties always assume that war is not something desirable, in the absence of humiliation and rage, or some other “problem” or “conflict” to be resolved. But in some cases, war is simply something that a society does. For example, while the Mongol campaigns against China and the neighboring Muslim sultanates seem motivated partly by the desire to eliminate ongoing threats, the invasion of Kievan Rus was completely unprovoked. The Rus write that the Mongols were unknown to them before their sudden invasion.

In general, Scheff neglects a country’s strategic culture, the way it understands the world and the role of war in such a world. If one “civilized” country goes through a soul-searching process of airing grievances and working through its emotions, and another “warlike” country simply perceives the first country as weaklings who are ripe for conquest, acknowledging shame is more likely to encourage war than to prevent it.

Still, Scheff’s book is an important reminder that emotions in their rawest form, cloaked as they may be in the language of national interest or international justice, often play a role in war. Worldbuilders should keep this in mind, as shame and fear can be powerful tools in the worldbuilding toolbox.