In a recent Library of Social Science Newsletter/blog post, Richard Koenigsberg wrote that:
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? What’s the secondary gain?
Gods arise out of sacrifice: if there were no dying, how would we know that a god existed? How would we know that a nation existed?
When a suicide bomber blows himself up in the name of Allah, we kind of understand what is going on, don’t we? We can imagine that someone might sacrifice himself for his god. The Christian world has its own martyrs as well. But if don’t believe in Allah, we feel that the suicide bomber has died for nothing.
When the Japanese soldier or kamikaze pilot died for the Emperor, we can understand this as well. We can imagine that a human being is capable of giving his life for the sake of an Emperor or a King, or maybe even a President, even if we don’t believe that the Emperor is god.
What is the mechanism involved? 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 is bearing witness to the intensity of his belief. Death constitutes “proof,” for both himself and his fellow believers.
His fellow jihadists might think to themselves, “Look, he’s giving his life for Allah. Allah must be real, otherwise it’s not possible that he would kill himself.” It’s difficult to imagine that someone is dying for no-thing.
Of course, we are still not convinced. Just because the suicide bomber blows himself up, we are not therefore persuaded in the reality of Allah.
Japanese who died for the Emperor similarly did so as a testimony to their belief in the Emperor’s reality. We may not be convinced of the reality of the Emperor’s divinity simply because so many soldiers died for him. On the other hand, the mechanism is no great mystery because we too have some sacred ideal—an absolute—in the name of which we believe dying is worthwhile.
To return to Richard Rhodes’ question: Why is the loss of life and material resources perceived or conceived as victory? Because for those who make the sacrifice—whether they are dying for Allah or Japan or Great Britain—victory is the triumph of belief. The more people who die in the name of the ideal, the more are we persuaded that the ideal must be real. We are willing to sustain loss in order to demonstrate the absolute 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—we are dying in the name of no-thing.