[lit-ideas] Re: Sacrifice
- From: Robert.Paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Robert Paul)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 13 Feb 2005 19:40:10 PST
I'm really glad that I was wrong and that Eric's argument was not what I thought
it was. I still have some questions though.
Eric says that '[Richard Koenigsberg's] thesis views soldiers ONLY as
individuals, for whom such sacrifice is clearly irrational in that it runs
counter to their individual best interests.'
He goes on to say that he believes it's a mistake '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.'
*I agree with the first sentence, but I have a hard time understanding the
second. Those who die 'for their country' are individuals and their acts, even
if done with choreographed precision, are the acts of individual persons; the
_state_ acts only in the way that other abstractions do, that is to say through
those persons who are its supposed subjects or agents. There were no agents on
the battlefields of WW I except individual soldiers. Eric says that 'the same
act--viz., the act of dying for one's country in battle --may be rational for [a
state, while not for an individual].' Yet the state can perform no such act. And
surely the state does not die for itself--?
Eric: '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.'
*Yet they have (e.g., the US and North Korea; the Spartans and the Athenians).
When they do it's called an armistice or a peace treaty.
Eric: 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?
*I don't follow this. (My lot, it seems.) There is desertion, there is mutiny,
and there is just plain stopping fighting, as the Russians did in WW I, although
not on the Western Front, granted. It cannot be some kind of conceptual truth
that those who do these things must then make up their own language and live on
a narrow plot of ground.
I'm sorry to send this at such a late hour EST. Out here the Owl of Minerva
preens its feathers only when dusk is falling.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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