The Warrior Ethos
Wars Change, Warriors Don’t
By Steven Pressfield | Published: February 9, 2011
Today we launch a new series on the site. It’s called The Warrior Ethos. Here’s a short intro, in case you missed it. The series is intended for our young men and women in uniform, but I hope that other warriors in other walks of life will give it a chance too. Posts will appear every Monday. After this week, Writing Wednesdays will resume.
Let’s plunge right in. Here’s the introduction to The Warrior Ethos and the first two chapters. (The photo above is from Khalidiyah, Iraq, 2008—the men of Company F, 2nd Battalion, 24th Marines. Thanks to Lance Corporal Albert F. Hunt.)
THE WARRIOR ETHOS
Part One: Academies of War
“The Spartans do not ask how many are the enemy, but where are they.”
Plutarch, Sayings of the Spartans
INTRODUCTION
Writing About War
I am a writer. I write about war—external wars and internal wars, wars ancient and modern, real wars out of history and imagined wars that exist only in speculation. Why? I don’t even know myself.
My newest book is called The Profession. It’s set a generation into the future. The Profession posits a world in which combatants, serving for hire, have been cut loose from the traditional rules of war and are no longer bound by the standards of honor that have governed Western armies since Troy and before. This was new territory for me. Questions of right and wrong arose that I had never considered. The subject forced me to do some hard thinking.
Does a fighting man require a flag or a cause to claim a code of honor? Or does a warrior ethos arise spontaneously, called forth by necessity and the needs of the human heart? Is honor encoded into our genes? What does honor consist of—in an age when the concept seems almost abandoned by society at large, at least in the West?
What is the Warrior Ethos? Where did it come from? What form does it take today?
This volume is my attempt to address these questions. The book makes no claim to provide an ultimate, definitive answer. It’s just one man’s thoughts and observations on the subject.
The Warrior Ethos was written for our men and women in uniform, but its utility, I hope, will not be limited to the sphere of literal armed conflict. We all fight wars—in our work, within our families, and abroad in the wider world. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
We are all warriors. Do we fight by a code? If so, what is it? What is the Warrior Ethos? How do we (and how can we) use it and be true to it in our internal and external lives?
CHAPTER 1: TOUGH MOTHERS
Three stories from ancient Sparta:
A messenger returned to Sparta from a battle. The women clustered around. To one, the messenger said, “Mother, I bring sad news: your son was killed facing the enemy.” The mother said, “He is my son.” “Your other son is alive and unhurt,” said the messenger. “He fled from the enemy.” The mother said, “He is not my son.”
A different messenger returned from a battle and was hailed by a Spartan mother: “How fares our country, herald?” The messenger burst into tears. “Mother, I pity you,” he said. “All five of your sons have been killed facing the enemy.” “You fool!” said the woman. “I did not ask of my sons. I asked whether Sparta was victorious!” “Indeed, Mother, our warriors have prevailed.” “Then I am happy,” said the mother, and she turned and walked home.
Two warriors, brothers, were fleeing from the enemy back toward the city. Their mother happened to be on the road and saw them running toward her. She lifted her skirts above her waist. “Where do you two think you’re running? Back here from whence you came?”
The most famous Spartan mother story is also the shortest:
A Spartan mother handed her son his shield as he prepared to march off to battle. She said, “Come back with this or on it.”
That’s a warrior culture. That’s the Warrior Ethos.
A Spartan colonel, a man in his fifties, was accused of accepting bribes in an overseas command. When his mother back home learned of this, she wrote him the following letter: “Either quit your thieving or quit breathing.”
The Warrior Ethos embodies certain virtues—courage, honor, loyalty, integrity, selflessness and others—that most warrior societies believe must be inculcated from birth. In Sparta, every newborn boy was brought before the magistrates to be examined for physical hardiness. If a child was judged unfit, he was taken to a wild gorge on Mount Taygetos, the mountain overlooking the city, and left for the wolves.
We have no reports of a mother weeping or protesting.
CHAPTER 2: WOMEN FIRST
One scene in my book Gates of Fire has elicited more passionate feedback than any other. It’s the one where the Spartan king Leonidas explains what criteria he employed to select the specific 300 warriors that he chose to march off with him and die defending the pass at Thermopylae. The scene is fiction. There’s no evidence that anything like it happened in real life. But something about the moment seems to ring so true that it has produced a torrent of letters and e-mails.
Leonidas picked the men he did, he explains, not for their warrior prowess as individuals or collectively. He could as easily have selected 300 others, or twenty groups of 300 others, and they all would have fought bravely and to the death. That was what Spartans were raised to do. Such an act was the apex, to them, of warrior honor.
But the king didn’t pick his 300 champions for that quality. He picked them instead, he says, for the courage of their women. He chose these specific warriors for the strength of their wives and mothers to bear up under their loss.
Leonidas knew that to defend Thermopylae was certain death. No force could stand against the overwhelming numbers of the Persian invaders. Leonidas also knew that ultimate victory would be brought about (if indeed it could be brought about) in subsequent battles, fought not by this initial band of defenders but by the united armies of the Greek city-states in the coming months and years.
What would inspire these latter warriors? What would steel their will to resist—and prevent them from offering the tokens of surrender that the Persian king Xerxes demanded of them?
Leonidas knew that the 300 Spartans would die. The bigger question was, How would Sparta herself react to their deaths? If Sparta fell apart, all of Greece would collapse with her. But who would the Spartans themselves look to in the decisive hour? They would look to the women—to the wives and mothers of the fallen.
If these women gave way, if they fell to weeping and despair, then all the women of Sparta would give way too. Sparta herself would buckle and, with her, all of Greece.
But the Spartan women didn’t break, and they didn’t give way. The year after Thermopylae, the Greek fleet and army threw back the Persian multitudes at Salamis and Plataea. The West survived then, in no small measure because of her women.
The lioness hunts. The alpha female defends the wolf pack. The Warrior Ethos is not, at bottom, a manifestation only of male aggression or of the masculine will to dominance. Its foundation is society-wide. It rests on the will and resolve of mothers and wives and daughters—and, in no few instances, of female warriors as well—to defend their children, their home soil and the values of their culture.
[To be continued next Monday.]
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The warrior ethos is a recipe for severe mental illness.
This project seems to me an empty attempt to valorize and mythologize violence in ways that are largely irrelevant to the experience of modern soldiers.
Applying tropes of narrative and fantasy to all areas of life takes us away from reality and prolongs the destructive addiction to murder and destruction that is central in North American culture (as well as many others).
The focus on sending the warrior “within” to obsess over his own state and code of ethics allows a dissociation from external reality where murder etc of becomes to rationalise, freeing the warrior-hero from concerns about who/what they are fighting for and why.
“The warrior ethos is a recipe for severe mental illness.
This project seems to me an empty attempt to valorize and mythologize violence in ways that are largely irrelevant to the experience of modern soldiers.”
Spoken like someone who has basement Manichean view of the world.
You do a great disservice to the concept of the warrior-ethos by only physically defining the concept. There are many in the world who intrinsically embody the notion and employ it daily withoutever having served in a combat roll or ever seeing war.
Defending the weak does not always have to be done with the business end of a gun. Social workers, first responders, teachers, and anyone else who, by choice, stands up to defend the bereft agains percieved injustices emulate this mode of thinking.
I suggest you revisit the world around you with more of an open mind. You might find that people who surround you possess this wonderful trait and they aren’t in the military.
I don’t see how a war metaphor is useful outside of war. How specifically is a warrior ethos specifically helpful to ’social workers, first responders, teachers’?
Look at how well “The War on Drugs” / “The War on Terror” went.
Surely any competent warrior must have a clear view of who is “us” and who is “them” in order to be able identify and kill enemies. Is that not what a warrior does? Or I am not meant to take SP’s words at face value? And If warrior values can be utilised without violence, why bother including the warrior metaphor at all?
I am a huge fan of the 3 SP novels I have read, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence he has had to set his war books in the past or future — a present-day setting would expose how nutty and destructive warrior-codes tend to be.
For example, this sounds kinda cool:
But imagine a mother saying something similar now to her son as he headed off to Afghanistan as a marine. She’d be locked up and he’d go on Oprah and be in therapy for years.
Why ignore the negative aspects of this inculcation ? Why are so many Vets from the US, Russian and Israeli armies so dysfunctional and traumatised upon discharge? Having lived in Belfast, my view is that warrior-cultures create a self-destructive spiral that is v. difficult to get off of.
The direction of global society shows that, given a choice, fewer and fewer of us want anything to do with warrior cultures.
“Why are so many Vets from the US, Russian and Israeli armies so dysfunctional and traumatised upon discharge?”
Perhaps it’s because they’ve exposed themselves to the hell of war before adequately addressing the ethos of why they were there. If this column spurs ONE of those warriors to properly answer that question for themselves, then they will spare themselves that dysfunction.
Recall the pentagon studied DTSD during World WAr II and concluded that soldiers should bnot be in combat for more than 90 days or they would suffer psycologically. Still the tour of duty remain at one year.
mentally preparing oneself for the horrors of war is part of being a warrior in the military. i have the greatest respect for those who choose to defend our country and those who can not defend themselves. i hold them in highest reguard. here is a quote for you to think about “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” Edmund Burke. take the second world war for example. If none of the nations did anything to stop hitler he would have succeed in his quest to dominate the world. the men of the second world war, some to most of them i think had singed up voluntarily. in my books every single individual who fought and died in this war and the ones who lived had immense courage amoungst other great qualitites that allowed them to endure what they need to to defeat hitler. The German army was better equiped, battle hardened and yet the warriors of the second world war (From U.S., Canada and Britain that i know of) managed to defeat them, i can only dream of having that much courage!the Warrior code is more than just physical toughness but also of mental toughness. i have not had to endure the horrors of war. to see your friends die beside you, to have to see the bodies all over the battlefield, the emotional suffering because of that, but i do know one thing they have my undying respect and gratitude for what they do. the warrior creed is one of certain values that are upheld.
As I write this, there are 16 Comments to today’s post. I’m delighted and gratified that the subject has elicited such passionate, lengthy and thoughtful responses. But I want to get back to you specifically, JT’s Mum, because your point is really serious and well-taken.
If I hear what you’re saying correctly, you fear that a “warrior within” mentality will and does lead to actual warriors becoming capable of acting out destructively to any and all perceived enemies–and gives them an internal moral justification for violence, thus perpetuating war. I’m probably not being articulate enough, but I think that’s the gist of it. And there’s something to what you say, no doubt.
There’s a “Warrior Ethos” chapter coming up in a few weeks called “Purity of the Weapon.” Here are a couple of paragraphs from it:
I think you may be underestimating the real-world warrior’s capacity for self-restraint. This is a huge part of the warrior ethos. By any chance, have you read Nate Fick’s terrific memoir, One Bullet Away
(or Generation Kill
or the HBO series of that title? All three followed a battalion of Recon Marines in the initial assault into Iraq. What struck me most reading and watching these was the incredible care taken by these Marines NOT to inflict casualties and always to be sensitive to the fact that their mission was to affect “regime change,” not conquer a sovereign country. Their commanding general, James N. Mattis, had given the 1st Marine Division an identity to guide their actions: “No better friend, no worse enemy.” A case could be made that these Marines were too sensitive and bent over too far backward.
Have you read Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor
or Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero
? Both tell stories of elite units inserted behind enemy lines, whose missions became compromised when they were discovered by innocent civilians–shepherds and goat herders who stumbled upon their hideouts. Both units found themselves in excruciating ethical dilemmas. Should they silence these innocents, meaning capture or kill them–or let them go, at the risk of jeopardizing their own men? In both cases, the commandos let the shepherds go. The shepherds promptly alerted nearby military units to the proximity of allied forces. Men died because of this restraint. Others were captured and tortured. This sort of thing happens all the time.
The point I’m getting at (above and beyond the metaphor of “warrior” as opposed to the literal interpretation of “warrior”) is that today’s Western soldiers and special operations men are excruciatingly aware of the moral and ethical limits on their actions and take these with deadly seriousness. Self-restraint and “purity of the weapon” is not an empty catchphrase, but really is at the heart of the warrior ethos.
Thanks for your post. Please keep reading. We’re only up to chapter two.
Thanks!
SP
The problem here seems to be the same I find in forums that talk about religion. The atheists point out the horrible abuses of religion, the religious point to the great good done by same. Both sides are correct. For every instance of professional restraint you can point to, we can point to the opposite. Embrace the paradox, and make your best judgment on a case by case basis. Violence is not always the answer, but it is sometimes. As a subject of literature it gives the writer a heightened sense of risk, conflict and meaning which are good things.
There is a phrase I came across relating to the religious beliefs of the Japanese. Ambiguity tolerance is what allows them to believe in two, or more, sometimes mutually exclusive things at once. That’s what we need here, some ambiguity tolerance.
Dear Mr. Pressfield,
I have read many of your books and find them to answer many questions I have in my own mind when dealing with the different questions on combat and killing. I am currently in the Kunar province in afghanistan at the mouth of the Korengol valley. The fighting here is intense and unlike anything I experienced in both tours I served in Iraq. MY main comment or question, however you would view it, is that I still have a feeling of emptiness in regards to feeling as a true warrior should. I mean this in no braggart form, but throughout this tour we have endured the hardest fighting known throughout the world. I had always wondered if I were able to lead my squad through these hard times and have succesfully by the grace of God. But as I have said before I still feel that something is not right with me. As if there is still something I have not done to solidify my status to myself as a true warrior. The warrior ethos defined by the military, to me, is very transperant and does not apply to the “True” warriors on the front line. It feels as if it were dictated to us from higher by those whoe have never endured the rigors of combat. When I read gates of fire on my previous tour it motivated me simply by how you accuratly put into perspective with words the feelings deep down we feel and do not speak. I hope you may shed some light on my question. My question is two part. 1. What is it that im seeking out here to make me “feel” as a true warrior should? 2. Does the attitude of a soldier who views fighting as something fun or something to test him self against his enemies selfish of him if he has a family depending on him back home? I pray you can help me with these questions that plague me constantly.
Respectfully yours
SSG Soldier in Afghanistan
Perhaps you feel empty because you haven’t a true cause to fight for. I did 13 years in the navy when it dawned on me that I was nothing more than a “Pinkerton”. I got out soon after that little epiphany. Before that point I was red, white, and blue. Perhaps you need to find meaning outside the corps.
Sadly, I disagree, in some small part. What you’re describing isn’t the warrior ethos. It isn’t even the soldier’s ethos. It’s an artificial and self-destructive construct of western liberal _sentiment_, fed by unwillingness to see the world as it is, neatly tied up in colorful ribbons of decrepit, self-centered, usually hypocritical, and frankly unintelligent intellectualism. (No, that doesn’t mean I’m calling you unintelligent.)
The warrior’s ethos can be summed up in the single word: “Win.” If restraint helps you win, fine. If it causes you to lose, or to pay a higher price than neccesary to win, that is nothing of the warrior, and everything of the pacifist and/or humanitarian intellectual, to whom the warrior is nothing. (Which sentiment is, of course, cordially returned.) Honor matters because it helps you win. Courage is indispensible…to win. Loyalty, selflessness, all of that helps you win. Following the law of war, among western foes who generally adhere to it, reduces the price of winning. Following its niceties with those to whom it is meaningless, however, is simply stupid or, rather, criminally stupid, as it is criminally stupid for our society not to have realized this and reprised . written our ROE accordingly.
You are absolutely right about something; it depends on the women. It’s their collective decision; they can either raise their sons to be warriors or they can become the slaves of women who do.
Steven,
Interesting point of view.
My view is about the warrior ethos has to do more with honor and bravery for the men you fight beside. That is what warrior ethos is about.
As to your example about the Israeli military. The primary, and only real ethos is to win. If the Israeli military committed a holocaust they would lose our support and they would lose their war.
If we supported the Palestinians instead of the Israelis, it would be the Palestinians showing restraint and it would be the Israelis using car bombs (as it was before with the Brits).
Because the goal is to win.
You go to war if the cost of winning is less than the cost of not fighting.
We are magnanimous in our fighting now. And we take much care to not harm civilians. If we were in danger of losing, of losing our freedoms, of losing what is ours, we wouldn’t care so much about civilian casualties, as we didn’t care in WW2.
The warrior ethos is a recipe for severe mental illness.
This project seems to me an empty attempt to valorize and mythologize violence in ways that are largely irrelevant to the experience of modern soldiers.
Applying tropes of narrative and fantasy to all areas of life takes us away from reality and prolongs the destructive addiction to murder and destruction that is central in North American culture (as well as many others).
The focus on sending the warrior “within” to obsess over his own state and code of ethics allows a dissociation from external reality where murder etc of becomes to rationalise, freeing the warrior-hero from concerns about who/what they are fighting for and why.
Words could not express my profound pity and disgust at the, arrogance, ignorance and condescension of the person who wrote the above missive. The ivory tower you live in is so far in the clouds!!
I don’t think chapter 2 follows from chapter 1, although it might be nice to think so in our modern, equality-focused, ‘caring’ societies.
If “we have no reports of a mother weeping or protesting” and by all accounts Spartan mothers preferred dead warrior sons to live cowards, it wouldn’t have mattered which Spartan warriors were chosen: all of the mothers would have reacted in the same way.
If you’d have said in chapter 1 that 50% of Spartan women were steely-eyed warrior mums and the other 50% were delicate, teary-eyed maidens who took fright at the sight of a worm, then I might believe he chose the 300 borne of warrior women.
Mr. Pressfield, nice to see you coming back to these themes. I’ve been keeping track since the “Tribes” series wound up, just haven’t had anything to say.
I think John Terry’s Mum brings up some good points, but it’s only one half of a very complicated discussion, which is only one small part of a much larger concern in America today. PTSD, American society’s relationship with its military, morality in war and the individual warrior’s burden are all issues we’ve struggled with throughout the last decade, and though progress has been made we’re not really any closer to definitive answers.
With that said, I’ll try to restrict my remarks only to what you’ve written on here, specifically the importance of the relationship between society and the warrior. To begin with, I think it’s interesting just how controversial the term “warrior” itself can be. Tom Ricks has featured guest writings from several people on his blog “The Best Defense” which attack and defend the concept with equal fervor. Some military members see it as a profound overarching ideal that unifies the different branches under the concept of a universal code. Detractors see it as a hackneyed catch phrase that arose as a consequence of the “Wounded Warrior” units meant to help injured combat vets rejoin society. They claim that if there is such a grand unifying honor code for these warriors, no one has specifically enumerated its points the way the American army has the Soldier’s Creed or the the Samurai of Japan wrote in the Bushido Shohinshu.
I believe you’ll find that the presentation of these arguments in the Spartan paradigm will exacerbate the challenges in real discourse on these topics. The Spartan model is popular within the modern American ranks, but it is often highly romanticized and poorly understood. What was a very matter-of-fact and methodically indoctrinated stoicism is today thought of as the melodramatic (and, it should be noted, sometimes misogynistic) bravado of Hollywood’s “300.” Neither the typical soldier nor the citizen differ in this view– it’s just that one hails it as an ideal while the other scorns it as vice.
I don’t think that should particularly surprise anyone when you consider that each one occupies an entirely different environment. One lives in a world of deprivation, violence and death. The other dwells in a place full of drive-through windows and cable-on-demand. This is the foundation of the argument that a “warrior culture,” and thus its ethos, exists. Some military members simply state that it’s a de facto consequence of an Army spent so long away from America at war. Others go so far as to argue that, beyond the constant training and deployments, society has gradually placed the military at arm’s length. The military went to go slay dragons, and returned home as dragon slayers. Society has learned that it fears the slayer almost as much as the dragon.
However, if there is one salient point we should take away from the anecdotes of Spartan mothers, it is this– there was no distinction between the warrior and the citizen in Spartan society. Indeed, had the enemy come to the city’s gates, the women would have willingly taken up arms, and most likely acquitted themselves admirably. But no one in Sparta would have dared thought of themselves as less obligated to defending their society than a soldier, and no soldier would have thought of themselves as the better of a citizen by virtue of their profession. I don’t believe, even in Gates of Fire, that your Spartans ever refer to themselves as “warriors.” For the most part, they consider themselves Spartans. It is enough to be a Spartan.
Antiquity isn’t so antiquated on this matter, either. Whether in the strict social codes of feudal Japan, the sieges of Medieval Europe, or the civilian targets of modern terrorism, women and civilians at large remain accountable for the conduct and defense of their civilization, and are held to account by their enemies. I believe women’s involvement in the war effort in WWII, especially in Great Britain, demonstrates that victory necessiates that “all give some.” This is an element that’s missing in our modern society at war– less than one percent of the population is conducting the combat operations, while the vast majority of the country is afforded the luxury of going about their daily lives without any requirement of acknowledging or hearing about the war. In this regard, there is an existential disconnect between society and the military that the Spartans didn’t have. Whatever arguments you develop for and against these ideas, I look forward to seeing the reactions of others and a thoughtful debate on the very proposition of a “warrior culture and ethos.”
Steve – Of course anyone who’s actually read all of your work understands exactly where you’re coming from. Interesting so far. I look forward to reading on.
This is a response to Jim Gourley’s comment above.
Jim, the reason that there is such a huge disconnect between the larger part of American society and its military in the current ‘war on terror’ is pretty clear. Most Americans did not/do not want this war. It’s as simple as that. How can people support something they do not want in the first place? The small percentage of people who support the war are misrepresented in the US media as being a larger element of American society than they actually are… All you need to do is look back at World War II to see the difference in the overall support for the war cause by the American populace.
In ancient societies, war was serious business and everyone understood that the very existence of their nation/tribe/city was at stake in any given conflict, so the stakes were higher and everyone knew it. Thus, even when wars were not desired by a given populace, there was still a strong sense of solidarity in the face of the enemy. Today, the USA is not facing an existential threat from “terrorists” or the Taliban, and everyone (or most people) know it, so the support for this war effort is largely an optional matter. Not surprising then that most people opt out…
Sotiris,
After reading your comments to Jim’s post, I feel sorry for you and other like you who think that there is no “existential threat” to their comfortable lives. I wish for a moment that you could spend a day in my boots and “interact” with some of the “existential threats” that are present in our world today.
Fortunately for you and I, the fighting IS occuring away from our homes and families, communities, country clubs, and McDonald’s drive-thru windows. Unfortunately for me and others like me, we spend many long days and nights, weeks, months, and years ensuring that you never have to seriously worry about whether the car sitting next to yours in rush hour traffic is full of high explosives ready to detonate.
There are people around the world who live with that reality ever single day, and the reason it is them and not us who worry is because warriors from around the free world have have come to their country to fight to the extremists, the suicide bombers, the radical clerics, and the people whose intolerance of what you and I consider to be inalienable rights and freedoms drives them to commit some of the most horrible and deranged things that you can imagine.
If only I could show you and everyone else (or most people who “know” that there is no threat) my reality. Not the evil Taliban, but the real threat, you might have a little more appreciation for the decisions (whether flawed or not) to send warriors into harm’s way. Someday, when everything you doubt comes to light I hope that you will find a new appreciation for one of my favorite quotes by George Orwell.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” (Although, I have been told that the actual quote is this: “Those who “abjure” violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.”)
Either way, you are welcome…
- One who appreciates your support
One of those soldiers,
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Chris
If you can prove to me that any “terrorist” in the world wouldnt give their own life, (as many did on 9-11) to strike America another significant blow, at any single point in time I will agree with your jabber. So, while you conjure that up, I will stay vigilant and forward looking. That is not to say I cement my doors and bunker down, that is to say I take the fight to the enemy which I am given information about by honest people who have the same goal, the protection of red white and blue soil. We have a pampered and protected society. (Afghanistan is home to a real live warrior society) those people work for food every day, work for heat every day, and know what it means to fight to survive. This concept is so distant to our people because we are so well protected and able to go on with our business as per-expected. I have not gone native, I just understand and respect the day to day lives of the natives of that country. God forbid we let our guard down and show vulnerability and allow an enemy on our soil again to do worse damage. Would your family survive without power and running water and a grocery store?
There’s another story about the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys, one of the boys lay dying after being shot, and his mother scornfully tells him to quit crying and die like a man, like his brother. Is this as commendable?
This warrior ethos is complex and grey, too often it takes a saint to pull off the tightrope walk it requires. How many revolutions have risen against tyranny to become just as tyrannical as the people they replaced?
The warrior virtues can be useful, but can also be misused as easily. I prefer to think of it as survivor ethos. A survivor endures, even thrives, in circumstances that would kill others. Yet there is no innate violence in the word survivor as there is in the word and historical reality of the warrior.
See Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival.
I would also say that the primitive hunter gatherers were not warriors, they were egalitarian hunters, and the ethos is very different from that found in a hierarchical society in which the individual is used by the state to further ends not necessarily his or her own. Which is why propaganda exists,to convince people, through lies, that they are the same.
Sotiris,
A lot of this has already been discussed on several other forums. I’ll go over the items in brief and leave readers to find their own sources. To begin with, and only worth the slight mention, is that your perception of American solidarity in the wake of December 7th, 1941 is a bit romanticized. Political opinion on the war was quite divided throughout.
To say that “most Americans” don’t support the war today is to forget the context of the decade. Support for the Afghan invasion was nearly unanimous. Things only turned when we invaded Iraq. Politics aside, the truly necessary question to ask is “how can a country get into a war to which its populace objects, and what is it that causes a population to turn ‘against’ any war it initially wills?”
The argument that several observers make is that these incidents occur when the citizens don’t have any “skin in the game.” This is our current situation. To a large extent, the war in Afghanistan was an immaterial issue to Americans even in the beginning. There no threat that the draft would be reinstituted. Our “all volunteer force” of “professional warriors” would take care of it, or, in less appetizing terms, bear all the consequences. So while many in our country moan about how the war goes on despite the change in public opinion, many a soldier scratches his or her head and wonders how the country could be so fickle as to change its mind like this.
I think your final remark that “most people opt out” is a great characterization of American public opinion– “I don’t have to go fight if I don’t want to, and I perceive the personal risk of not taking part either in the military action or the national political dialogue as minimal, so I will opt out.” While the Spartan saw no difference between the soldier and the citizen in terms of fulfilling vital obligations to the community, the American sees no difference in terms of how little personal gain there is in either. I generalize here, but the two societies were of undoubtedly distinct mindsets.
Again, this discussion takes place fully outside the political spectrum. Our volunteer-force model and the Spartan “every citizen a soldier” model are each bred of cultural paradigms. The Spartan was willing to die in battle or sacrifice her son to the state. The modern American feels less connection to their local community, state or country, and consequently doesn’t feel the same obligation to give service to them of any kind. George Washington himself told his troops to remember that “when we assumed the soldier, we did not give up the citizen.” Perhaps what should have been more clearly defined, and what Mr. Pressfield touches on here, is the meaning and importance of that citizenship.
I like how you brought in the concept of being a citizen. I am a National Guard Soldier, a Citizen Soldier, tracing my heritage back to the Colonial Militia, also citizen-soldiers. I have seen how we have now brought this “Warrior” term into our rhetoric, and have started to abandon the “Soldier” in our literature. A Soldier is speical. A Soldier is trained and disciplined, living and dieing for the ideals of the country, the corps, the team. And while a Soldier is a warrior, a warrior is not necessarily a Soldier. Any being willing to withstand the hardship of confrontation can be considered to be a warrior.
Steven’s overall premise is simple and completely applicable (and greatly appreciated). If you’re reading his posts literally and as a fundamentalist, you’re really going to miss the point. There isn’t a person alive who can’t identify with the larger concept of war (whether they be personal battles or literal warfare). Taking the truths of past warriors and the real or imagined creeds and applying them in a modern context is a worthwhile pursuit for all walks of like.
Looking forward to next Monday’s post!
But if you don’t take into account the warts, you risk going down the same paths. I take your larger point though, that in our secular, material society it is hard to approach anything, religion, art, literature as metaphor, as poetry, and not take it at it’s surface meaning. Given that difficulty that people have, you don’t want to send people off to emulate the Spartans leaving their ‘imperfect’ infants out to die. As a metaphor for an interior state, useful. As an actual historical practice, not so much. (that’s irony, what it is, is evil, right?)
Yeah, I hear that Ken.
One of the very books I’ve ever read was Gates of Fire. I hoped it would never end. Great work. That said, I can tell that not too many people posting comments have ever served nor have been to war. I’ve done both. The US Military has been all volunteer since 1973. Milton Friedman believed a person would be better soldier if they chose to be so. I believe he was correct in his thinking. The low number combat death over the war on terror and even the 1st Gulf war backs up this statement. Another thing people maybe missing is the military does choose who to defend or when to be part of a war. That is done by civilians, the elected ones that You choose. the military executes Their (Yours) policy. If people are disconnected from that, then they disconnected from many other things as well. Sparta was special because everyone was trained to think and believe the same way. Every one was a warrior because that was needed to survive. Remember that if America becomes like Egypt.