Why do the fighters fight? 1 Corinthians 13

Spirit Force

Content provided by Michael Basham. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by Michael Basham or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://staging.podcastplayer.com/legal.

1M ago 1:06:20

MP3•Episode home

Why do the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible
and wonderful thing called a war?
In nothing is this new history needed so much as in the psychology of
war. Our history is stiff with official documents, public or private,
which tell us nothing of the thing itself. At the worst we only have the
official posters, which could not have been spontaneous precisely
because they were official. At the best we have only the secret
diplomacy, which could not have been popular precisely because it was
secret. Upon one or other of these is based the historical judgment
about the real reasons that sustained the struggle. Governments fight
for colonies or commercial rights; governments fight about harbours or
high tariffs; governments fight for a gold mine or a pearl fishery. It
seems sufficient to answer that governments do not fight at all. Why do
the fighters fight? What is the psychology that sustains the terrible
and wonderful thing called a war? Nobody who knows anything of soldiers
believes the silly notion of the dons, that millions of men can be ruled
by force. If they were all to slack, it would be impossible to punish
all the slackers. And the least little touch of slacking would lose a
whole campaign in half a day. What did men really feel about the
policy? If it be said that they accepted the policy from the politician,
what did they feel about the politician? If the vassals warred blindly
for their prince, what did those blind men see in their prince?
There is something we all know which can only be rendered, in an
appropriate language, as _realpolitik_. As a matter of fact, it is an
almost insanely unreal politik. It is always stubbornly and stupidly
repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a
moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who
fight. In any case, no man will die for practical politics, just as no
man will die for pay. Nero could not hire a hundred Christians to be
eaten by lions at a shilling an hour; for men will not be martyred for
money. But the vision called up by real politik, or realistic politics,
is beyond example crazy and incredible. Does anybody in the world
believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall
go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of
my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland.’ Can
anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I
shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that
should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that
career is now open to me and my countrymen.’ Materialist history is the
most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances.
Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the
soul; that is something akin to religion. It is what men feel about life
and about death. A man near to death is dealing directly with an
absolute; it is nonsense to say he is concerned only with relative and
remote complications that death in any case will end. If he is sustained
by certain loyalties, they must be loyalties as simple as death. They
are generally two ideas, which are only two sides of one idea. The first
is the love of something said to be threatened, if it be only vaguely
known as home; the second is dislike and defiance of some strange thing
that threatens it. The first is far more philosophical than it sounds,
though we need not discuss it here. A man does not want his national
home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the
good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt
down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss.
Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is
really a house. But the negative side of it is quite as noble as well as
quite as strong. Men fight hardest when they feel that the foe is at
once an old enemy and an eternal stranger, that his atmosphere is alien
and antagonistic; as the French feel about the Prussian or the Eastern
Christians about the Turk. If we say it is a difference of religion,
people will drift into dreary bickerings about sects and dogmas. We will
pity them and say it is a difference about death and daylight; a
difference that does really come like a dark shadow between our eyes and
the day. Men can think of this difference even at the point of death;
for it is a difference about the meaning of life.
Men are moved in these things by something far higher and holier than
policy: by hatred. When men hung on in the darkest days of the Great
War, suffering either in their bodies or in their souls for those they
loved, they were long past caring about details of diplomatic objects as
motives for their refusal to surrender. Of myself and those I knew best
I can answer for the vision that made surrender impossible. It was the
vision of the German Emperor’s face as he rode into Paris. This is not
the sentiment which some of my idealistic friends describe as Love. I am
quite content to call it hatred; the hatred of hell and all its works,
and to agree that as they do not believe in hell they need not believe
in hatred. But in the face of this prevalent prejudice, this long
introduction has been unfortunately necessary, to ensure an
understanding of what is meant by a religious war. There is a religious
war when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet;
or in more modern language, when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the
one man’s breath is the other man’s poison; and it is vain to talk of
giving a pestilence a place in the sun. And this is what we must
understand, even at the expense of digression, if we would see what
really happened in the Mediterranean; when right athwart the rising of
the Republic on the Tiber, a thing overtopping and disdaining it, dark
with all the riddles of Asia and trailing all the tribes and
dependencies of imperialism, came Carthage riding on the sea.
The ancient religion of Italy was on the whole that mixture which we
have considered under the head of mythology; save that where the Greeks
had a natural turn for the mythology, the Latins seem to have had a real
turn for religion. Both multiplied gods, yet they sometimes seem to have
multiplied them for almost opposite reasons. It would seem sometimes as
if the Greek polytheism branched and blossomed upwards like the boughs
of a tree, while the Italian polytheism ramified downward like the
roots. Perhaps it would be truer to say that the former branches lifted
themselves lightly, bearing flowers; while the latter hung down, being
heavy with fruit. I mean that the Latins seem to multiply gods to bring
them nearer to men, while the Greek gods rose and radiated outwards into
the morning sky. What strikes us in the Italian cults is their local and
especially their domestic character. We gain the impression of
divinities swarming about the house like flies; of deities clustering
and clinging like bats about the pillars or building like birds under
the eaves. We have a vision of a god of roofs and a god of gateposts, of
a god of doors and even a god of drains. It has been suggested that all
mythology was a sort of fairy-tale; but this was a particular sort of
fairy-tale which may truly be called a fireside tale, or a nursery-tale;
because it was a tale of the interior of the home; like those which make
chairs and tables talk like elves. The old household gods of the Italian
peasants seem to have been great, clumsy, wooden images, more
featureless than the figure-head which Quilp battered with the poker.
This religion of the home was very homely. Of course there were other
less human elements in the tangle of Italian mythology. There were Greek
deities superimposed on the Roman; there were here and there uglier
things underneath, experiments in the cruel kind of paganism, like the
Arician rite of the priest slaying the slayer. But these things were
always potential in paganism; they are certainly not the peculiar
character of Latin paganism. The peculiarity of that may be roughly
covered by saying that if mythology personified the forces of nature,
this mythology personified nature as transformed by the forces of man.
It was the god of the corn and not of the grass, of the cattle and not
the wild things of the forest; in short, the cult was literally a
culture; as when we speak of it as agriculture.
With this there was a paradox which is still for many the puzzle or
riddle of the Latins. With religion running through every domestic
detail like a climbing plant, there went what seems to many the very
opposite spirit: the spirit of revolt. Imperialists and reactionaries
often invoke Rome as the very model of order and obedience; but Rome was
the very reverse. The real history of ancient Rome is much more like the
history of modern Paris. It might be called in modern language a city
built out of barricades. It is said that the gate of Janus was never
closed because there was an eternal war without; it is almost as true
that there was an eternal revolution within. From the first Plebeian
riots to the last Servile Wars, the state that imposed peace on the
world was never really at peace. The rulers were themselves rebels.
There is a real relation between this religion in private and this
revolution in public life. Stories none the less heroic for being
hackneyed remind us that the Republic was founded on a tyrannicide that
avenged an insult to a wife; that the Tribunes of the people were
re-established after another which avenged an insult to a daughter. The
truth is that only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a
standard or a status by which to criticise the state. They alone can
appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city; the gods of the
hearth. That is why men are mystified in seeing that the same nations
that are thought rigid in domesticity are also thought restless in
politics; for in

1001 episodes

#Government #Michael Basham