Last night I finished reading Paul Ham’s The Soul, his 856-page history of the human mind. Ham is an esteemed Australian military historian whose moving chronicle of Passchendaele secured his reputation. But with The Soul he has ventured into broader territory, and I was curious.

After nearly a year of Israel’s relentless genocide in Gaza, I was swirling into depression, and was tempted to follow him through time. I felt I had to step back from the soaring body counts, the harrowing accumulation of IDF barbarisms, Israel’s repeated lies and the Biden administration’s specious calls for a ceasefire while continuing to provide Israel with ever more money and weaponry to conduct its apocalyptic retribution. I hoped that the sweep of Ham’s narrative might lead me to better understand what had made us humans so terribly inhumane to one another, and was more than willing to follow him through time. And like all good books, his has been a springboard for my own thoughts on the subject.

It’s as clear today as it is from the past that there’s little if anything rational about waging war. It........

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