In The Warrior Ethos, Christopher Coker discusses the concept of warriors and war, covering warrior culture from ancient Greece to the Iraq War, considering philosophy, psychology, political thought, culture, and the media. There is no end to our fascination with military history in the Anglo-American world. Since it was announced, warriors have taken center stage in the war on terror.
But I still wonder whether they can survive long into the twenty-first century, especially in light of the three challenges I identify in this book.
1 The unhappy warrior
My attempt to capture this in the study is inevitably colored by my own idea of the warrior. The first will be the warrior myth itself, embodied in the person of the greatest Western warrior of all, Achilles. Who is he - that every man in arms should wish to be?' writes Wordsworth in his poem 'The Character of the Happy Warrior'.
It is this merging of the inner and outer worlds that gives the warrior ethos its appeal.
2 Achilles and the warrior soul
Others may not have been heroes in the classic sense of the term, but they performed heroically when asked. One of the most common fighting words in the Iliad, charme, comes from the same root as chairo – 'to rejoice'. For him, the poetry of war was to be found in the sound of exploding bombs and the chaos of the battlefield.
Many warriors must contend with a diminished sense of self in the face of the technological dynamics of war.
3 Escaping the state of nature
In The Leviathan he created a vision of the world born of fear and nourished by desperation. He was rendering an accurate bird's-eye view of the Europe of his own day. In the particular climate of the time, he felt that he would fall with the parliamentary insults.
He called them 'worms in the bowels of the state', which gradually sapped its life and reduced its power. In the end, Homer's world, for all its splendor and glory, is a cruel one because of the absence of Law, that is, it is only with the invention of the state that Law mediates conflicts through courts of law.
It is a terrible blunder, though one of many, because it is the presence of the gods in the Iliad that makes Achilles less of the monster he is or that. The great fault of Troyas a film is that Achilles is such a hollow figure in the absence of the divine. Discipline is what the state provides by subordinating the passions of the warrior to reason.
It is the act that impresses regardless of its practical consequences; the power lies in 'doing' not the effects or consequences of the deed. It is in the context of the argument – they want them to be silenced – their silence will satisfy them.'67.
4 Emerson and self-trust
In the heat of battle, soldiers behave unpredictably according to the demands of the moment and the demands they place on themselves. Faced with death, Pierre finds himself engaged in a battle for his soul - the battle of life. It is the soldier's camaraderie with his comrades that makes war such an intensely human (and even humane) experience.
Let's take the battle of Thermopylae, one of the defining battles in the Western imagination. This is the message conveyed by the picture of the battle that Herodotus describes for us. It's not one of the shows that seems to resonate most with the military.
Another Greek hero who is mocked is Ajax, the warrior whom Homer called “the bravest of the Achaeans” after Achilles. As a decorated Marine soldier, he had no doubts about the importance of the warrior ethos. What makes Webb's novel unusual in Vietnam War literature is that it is unapologetically pro-war.
For the warrior the dramas of the occasion are remembered and commemorated in the history of the Corps. One of the first later described the scene to a BBC reporter: “It was like a Hollywood movie.
5 Brave New World, Brave New Warriors
The Bushido ('way of the samurai') ethos continued to underpin notions of right and. Hagakure (1716) – the gospel of the bushido code – produced an idea of courage that required the warrior to accept that his life was already lost. Contrary to the caricature still cultivated in the West, these mostly student pilots were not volunteers in the classical sense of the word.
In the heroic code such a public injury to the hero's dignity must be avenged and can only be undone by deliberate violence. If physics promised to change the world or, in the case of the atomic bomb, to destroy it, biology promised to change humanity. But these thoughts must be entertained because in the warrior's case they go to the core of what defines his humanity.
Peter Berger cites the example of the soldier who is persuaded to cheat the biological impulse to run away from death through training. Some see in the prospect of the biotech soldier a form of technological embodiment that bodes ill for individual self-realization. In short, the weakness of the body is not something to be 'overcome', but something to be respected.
The warriors of the future can be programmed and managed in advance, and even their courage can be artificially increased. It has been the major scientific breakthrough in how we understand human consciousness of the last fifty years.
6 Warrior ethos
It goes to the heart of the ideal: what General MacArthur famously called “a sacred trust.” Once we consider the warrior ethos in terms of trust, we will see that every military unit is an inherently ethical community. Social norms shared by the members of the group allow them to cooperate with each other based on trust.
To be alienated (worse, to celebrate that alienation) is to betray what MacArthur called the "sacred trust" that lies at the very heart of the warrior ethos. He followed orders and acted in the spirit of the times, but he did not fulfill his obligations. Durkheim's concept of duty—the more we study it—seems to me to go to the very heart of the warrior ethos.
The driver of the vehicle was killed, just as about 20 Marines had been involved in a separate incident in the city three months earlier. The moment we think about it, we must realize that we are not confronted with different realities, but with different meanings of the same term: the warrior ethos. At the US Naval Academy, the values of different cultures are explored in a course called 'The Code of the Warrior'.
Violence is addictive because it is endless; it can only end in the unconditional elimination of the other. Let me close with the question I asked at the beginning of the third chapter of this book.
Notes
15 Shannon Finch, 'The Warrior's Code', in Russell Parkin (ed.), Combat Warfare and Ethics, Rowell Profession of Arms (Canberra: Land Warfare Studies Centre, 2005), p. 17 Andrew Exum, This Man's Army: A Soldier's Story from the Front Line of the War on Terrorism (New York: Gotham, 2005), p. 25 William Wordsworth, "The Character of the Happy Warrior," quoted in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p.
29 Giambattista Vico, The New Science: Principles of the New Science of the Common Nature of Nations (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 44 Quoted in Shannon French, The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present (Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. Gould, 'Is Complex Technological Information Alienating Us from Our Own Humanity?', in Philip Windsor (ed.), The End of the Century: The Future in the Past (Tokyo: Kodasha International, 1995), p.
18 Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 20 Victor Davis Hanson, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks and Their Invention of Western Military Culture (London: Cassell, 1999), p. There speaks the voice of the 1970s, with the US still stuck in Vietnam and heroism at a discount.
35 Citeret i Ignacio Ramonet, Wars of the Twenty First Century: New Threats, New Fears (New York: Ocean Press, 2004), s. 6 Stephen Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (London: Aurum Presse, 2000), s.
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