Reflections On the Conquering Heroes
A good warrior is a person who is willing to obey orders or carry out an assigned duty for his society, even to the point of death if necessary. A good man, by contrast, is a person who is willing to disobey orders or defy an assigned duty of his society, even to the point of death if necessary. From this it follows that a good warrior need not be a good man, strictly speaking, and indeed perhaps cannot be. That is to say, at least, that he cannot be the best kind of man. Indeed, as history repeatedly demonstrates, good warriors are as often as not unjust men in the extreme, though always in someone else’s name, thereby preserving their sense of honour at the price of their sense of moral agency. Perhaps then it is time to let go of the pleasing fiction of the warrior as the model of manly virtue. I know this has been an agreeable notion for societies to teach their children and their military men for millennia, in the name of attracting fighters, maintaining loyalty, and reintegrating trained killers into civil society. But the difference between the noble lie and the pragmatically convenient lie in this case, as is all too often apparent, lies in the distance between just and unjust rulers.
We all know that there has never been a perfectly just society, and furthermore that even among the imperfect but relatively just ones there is sometimes only a thin line — perhaps a matter of having good digestion today, or of fortuitously exchanging a warm smile with an acquaintance in the morning — separating the imperfectly just ruler’s goals and motives from those of the punk or the pirate. This line of separation, however, determines what any duty-bound, honour-driven military man — the good warrior — will define as the content of duty and honour in his heart. Plato’s depiction of the best guardian as a “noble dog” captures the essence of the thing. He will do what he is told with loyalty, regardless of who is speaking or what the speaker is saying, as long as this speaker is perceived as his master. Such men, it must be conceded, may in fact be indispensable to the survival of every state and regime, including even the best states realizable in practice. But that is precisely the point. All real political establishments — good, bad, or indifferent — depend on the maintenance and reinforcement of certain “virtues” among their guardians: blind allegiance and a willingness to kill or die, not for the good, but for the familiar, although this latter is invariably labelled “the good” for rhetorical purposes.
Note on exceptions or special cases.– Occasionally, a good warrior might function as a very good man in practice, when his governing sense of duty and obedience happens to have been previously trained in the service of a relatively just ruling idea. Eisenhower, for a famous example. Churchill, on the other hand, exhibited the opposite dynamic: a good man who more or less achieved with character, learning, and rhetorical flair the effect of a good warrior in practice, rather than necessarily being one. Even in the realm of rank and file soldiery, where historically clear examples are much harder to come by, we nevertheless have one striking case, namely that of Socrates: certainly a good man, almost definitively so, but one who, on the accounts that have come down to us, also functioned in practice as a relatively good soldier, which is to say that he was unquestionably courageous though without being particularly concerned for the cause, and unshirking in the midst of battlefield confusion and danger though being spiritually free of any hint of blind loyalty or naïve patriotism.
Standing among the ruins, the horror-struck conqueror exclaimed:
‘Why do they have to attempt to refuse me my destiny? Why?’
— W. H. Auden1Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957, London: Faber and Faber, 1966, 191.
The blindness of the conqueror (diminished in our contemporary smallness of soul to “the winner”) is his inability to perceive that those ruins are his destiny, and will most likely be his entire legacy; that his destiny is not the only or ultimate one at stake in every circumstance in which he happens to take an interest; and that every man driven by earthly acquisitiveness who ever identified himself as a destiny was destined to be quickly and comprehensively surpassed, soon thereafter hated, and eventually reduced to little more than a test answer for junior high school students.
