Sacred Violence/Sacrificial Soldiers

We are happy to present two terrific papers published for the first time on the Ideologies of War, Genocide and Terror website.

Paul Kahn observes in his paper “Evil and European Humanism” that the West has been torn between two views of the source of the violent disruptions that have occurred throughout history. One view is that evil arises from the failure of culture, as if “civilizing forces have not been quite strong enough to overcome the brutish forces of nature.” The opposite view is that nature is innocent and that evil is “the product of culture itself.”

Kahn in his paper (and in his great book Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror and Sovereignty) demonstrates that collective forms of violence are inseparable from our attachment to symbolic forms. But evil (the result of our attachment to symbolic forms) cannot be separated from love: for the sovereign—and one’s nation. What liberalism does not comprehend, according to Kahn, is that in modern societies the domain of politics contains—indeed embodies—the sacred. People seek self-transcendence through their relationship to nation-states and make profound sacrifices in the name of sacred ideals.

The problem is that each society has a different sacred ideal or idol—and human beings are willing to sacrifice only for one God (their own). The rage that powers war, Kahn hypothesizes, grows out of the fact that the enemy “denies the self-transcending truth of the nation:” if their god exists, then ours is a mere idol. One “proves the truth of one’s faith by the murder of the other.”

Political forms of violence thus are variations on the theme of radical Islam: death to the infidels; death to the non-believers. The “enemy” symbolizes negation of those “self-evident truths” that define one’s nation. We kill out of faith: to maintain belief in that sacred ideal that contains our society’s fantasy of immortality.

In “Just War? Moral Soldiers?” Laurie Calhoun confronts a fundamental paradox in our understanding of soldiers—those to whom we delegate the task of entering battle, defeating enemies and thus defending our sacred ideal.

On the one hand, soldiers’ violence often is viewed from the perspective of “male aggression.” According to this conception (the “testosterone hypothesis”), soldiers and military men are “exaggeratedly masculine” and a “naturally bellicose lot.”

The reality, Calhoun shows, is quite the opposite. Soldiers who act as weapons against enemy soldiers are the “tools of the leaders of society.” The soldier is required “not to criticize but to submit, not to reflect but to obey,” in other words to be ready and willing to do whatever he is told to do.

Calhoun’s understanding is consistent with current research that views obedience to authority as a central dynamic underlying societal forms of violence. I have found that the horrors of Nazism were generated by the ideological imperative to become “obedient unto death.”

But if the essence of the role of the soldier is obedience, submission and abandonment of one’s own will in the name of executing the will of an other—as clearly is the case—from whence comes the view that young men become soldiers because they are violent, and that the role of soldier embodies the essence of masculinity? Perhaps we create this image as a lure—and in order to alleviate our guilt about selecting young men as sacrificial victims.