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In a one of my Newsletter Essays, I wrote as follows:
| "Waging war constitutes a vehicle for “giving away” men and resources. Waging war is a gift to the god—one’s society or nation. One throws away men and material objects—wealth—in order to prove the greatness of one’s nation, which is measured in terms of its capacity and willingness to tolerate loss." |
Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Rhodes, author of The Twilight of the Bombs (2011), responded with the following question:
| "You tell me everything but what I most want to know: Why is loss perceived as victory? How does that infernal mechanism work? Surely something more is involved than simply “bigness of soul,” whatever that is. What’s the gain?" |
Gods arise out of sacrifice: if there were no dying, how would we know that a god exists? If there was no dying, how would we know that a nation exists?
When a suicide bomber blows himself up in the name of Allah, we understand what is going on. We know that an Islamic martyr is sacrificing himself--giving his life--to Allah. In the Western world, we too have martyrs: we call them soldiers.
When a Japanese soldier or kamikaze pilot died for his Emperor, we understand this as well. He was sacrificing his life for the sake of the Emperor--his god.
What is the mechanism in each of these cases? The sacrificial act—giving one’s life—functions as a testimony to the truth or reality of the entity in whose name the individual dies.
The term "martyr" derives from the Greek word meaning "to bear witness." When the suicide bomber dies for Allah, he bears witness to the intensity and sincerity of his belief. Death constitutes “proof,” for both himself and fellow believers.
The following logic is operative: “Look, he’s giving his life for Allah. If Allah were not real, why would he kill himself.” It is difficult to imagine that someone is dying for no-thing.
Japanese who died for the Emperor similarly did so as a testimony to their belief in the reality of the Emperor as god. Although we may not be convinced of the Emperor’s divinity, the mechanism is not a mystery. We too have a sacred ideal, our nation, in the name of which we believ dying may be worthwhile.
To return to Richard Rhodes’ question: Why is the loss of life and material resources conceived as victory? Because for those who make the sacrifice—whether they are dying for Allah or Japan or Great Britain—"victory" constitute the triumph of belief.
The more people who die in the name of or for the sake of an ideal, the more we are persuaded that the ideal must be real. We sustain loss to demonstrate the validity of the ideal in whose name loss is generated.
It takes a radical act of consciousness to imagine that—when we human beings give our lives for some-thing—they have died for no-thing.
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