My chosen professional career has kept me in a community populated by veterans and active military for the last thirty years. Because I am a veteran myself, I count as “one of them” - and like any community within society, I can see our common traits and values while also seeing that we are not a monolith. Our differences are as diverse as our population, and yet the things we share in common run deep.
Way too much background
Human beings began coming into their own as a species a quarter of a million years ago. Our most distant common ancestors survived because they had a set of traits that helped them gain an advantage over other, similar groups competing for territory and resources. There is some eye-popping archaeological research going on around the world that paints a picture of what those traits were and when they evolved. New evidence of older developments in tools used for cooking or evidence that points to social changes - as we find preserved remains of ancient human habitats, we can see how the ability to imagine and predict led to higher rates of survival; how learning to process and cook certain foods led to the development of speech and language centers of our brains; and how development of speech and language drove the development of social groups that could share knowledge and growing technological discoveries.
As modern researchers learn more about our shared past, that knowledge finds its way out into the population, like water seeking the lowest point in your basement, or like smoke from a backyard firepit filling the air of a whole neighborhood. We hear anecdotal stories about how similar the social groups of modern animals might have been to those of our ancestors, and we tell ourselves stories about what that means. Think of the popular misunderstanding of the “alpha” of a wolf pack, and how people seize on that idea to paint a picture of themselves as powerful or deserving of leadership positions. Examples of humans telling stories that compare themselves to their distorted perceptions of the world around them is as ancient as the earliest pantheons of gods, or of the descriptions of animals as different tribes of people.
But what is true, and what has always been true, about humans is this: we have always struggled to resolve conflicts between those of us with new knowledge or practices and those who follow old ways. We have always felt a tension between an evolving notion of “civilization” and that of “barbarism” or “savagery.” Since the development of agriculture some 12,000 years ago, there has been antagonism between people who would work to grow and store food in one place and those who would take it from them. There has always been strife between those who would rather live by the old ways of hunting and gathering and those who would take away that freedom by putting up fences and walls to horde the bounty of the land.
And when people come into conflict over this most basic of differences, they will describe each other in ways that may sound familiar. “Those people are different from us. They don’t respect our ways. They hate us because our way is better. Those people do not share our fundamental values.”
But what values?
The role of a warrior has always had two sides: defensive and offensive. No matter what period of history you choose to study, no matter where your subjects were in the world or in time, there has always been someone whose role was to protect their tribe from attack - and that same someone with those same skills could also go out and attack someone else.
Analyzing the roles of the warrior and separating the good of defending one’s home from the evil of destroying someone else’s home is a relatively recent phenomenon. The earliest human writings we have found talk about war in terms of the glory and the excitement of battle. Our earliest stories make heroes out of those who fight. The stories of our earliest heroes elevated them into something more than merely human.
The stakes of their battles became something more than defending crops from marauders or driving colonizers from land that should be free for all to use. The wars began to stand for concepts like honor, and we began to fight for power over each other rather than for mere resources.
And the ones we fought against, necessarily, became less than human. If they were stronger than us, they were oppressors; if they were weaker than us, they became faceless hordes.
Only in the last two or three thousand years have people begun to question the morality of fighting; first we had to ask “What is morality?” This began to change the nature of fighting, as we have increasingly fought over ideology - religion, economic ideas, or how and whether people are allowed a say in government.
Millions of incremental changes in how humans think about war and fighting have led us to this point. A point where warriors from the most powerful nation in history returned from time they spent in one of the poorest, and most war-torn places in history, and comment that “that place is so ba-a-a-a-a-d - those people just have no values.”
But what values?
That’s what I want to know.
I mean, I think I do know, but I’m guessing. I’m not inside the head of the guy who said that. What values do you think he meant? What anecdotal observation do you think he made that led him to say that?
I’ll tell you - but I want to know what you think.
Until next week…