[lit-ideas] Re: Sacrifice
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 20:55:16 -0500
*The argument would seem to be this.
(1) Everyone belongs to some group.
(2) So, everything so-called individual sacrifice is done for the sake
of some
group.
*This is clearly such a non-sequitor that it cannot have been Eric's
argument; therefore, I must not have understood what he wants to say.
_____
Not my argument at all. I was responding specifically to RK's
"irrational sacrifice" of soldiers in warfare.
My point was that RK's thesis views soldiers ONLY as individuals, for
whom such sacrifice is clearly irrational in that it runs counter to
their individual best interests.
It was a mistake, in my view, to examine soldiers in wartime SOLELY as a
bunch of individuals. Dying in defense of one's country may be an
irrational act for the individual, but the same act may be quite
rational for the state that is defending itself in war.
When troops refuse self-sacrifice--and nations have never "awakened from
the nightmare of history" simultaneously--the nations in question are
defeated, conquered, partitioned, or destroyed.
Hence [with rewrites] imagine:"Trench warfare at Somme. Everyone walks
away. They gave a war and nobody stayed for it. So what do these
individuals do? Do they return to "their countries"? And what is that?
What is "their country"? These are pure individuals now; they have no
national identification. What do they do? Make up their own individual
language and customs and claim a twenty-foot square parcel of earth as
their own individual country?
"That's the fallacy we are projecting here--that of isolated rational
individuals who somehow can exist without a nation. It's as if people's
hands only had palms but no back of the hand. Doesn't exist. People are
individuals-in-a-nation, not pure individuals."
Eric
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