Why do Soldier's Die?

Davidson Loehr

November 11, 2000

Whenever war breaks out, the media treats it as an unexpected tragedy. When we look for the causes of a war, we tend to look at superficial things — as though each new war is a unique problem rather than an enduring and predictable part of who we are. As a veteran of our most unpopular war (so far anyway), it’s always been important to me to help us recognize the causes of war as lying in a place much closer to home.

(PLOT: Set a scene, maybe on a playground. The kids have played a game during a field trip. They visited a zoo, and two groups were taken into an elephant’s cage, blindfolded. The first group was taken to feel the elephant’s ear. The second group was taken to feel the elephant’s tail. That’s all that either group got to touch of the elephant: the first group touched the ear, and the second group touched the tail. And they weren’t told what kind of animal it was. When they returned to school, the two groups got into an argument about what this thing was that they had all felt. The first group said, “It was broad and flat, like a giant leaf.” The second group said “No it wasn’t! It was long and thin, like a rope. It was nothing like a leaf at all!” Then the kids in the first group started saying that the kids in the second group must all be stupid if they thought a broad flat leaf felt like a long thin rope, and the kids in the second group said the first kids must be stupid, if they thought a long thin rope felt like a big leaf. Before they knew what was happening, a fight broke out. Meanwhile, the adult playground supervisors are standing by watching, but do nothing to stop it. They weren’t at the zoo, and have no idea what on earth the two groups of kids are talking about. But they say that the kids obviously feel strongly, and kids who feel strongly about something should be able to act on it. So the two groups are beating each other silly. Now the Smart Patrol — the kids in church — have arrived, and it is up to them to figure out what caused this fight, and how it should be stopped.)

RESPONSIVE READING: #518

Grandfather, Look at our brokenness.

We know that in all creation

Only the human family

Has strayed from the sacred Way.

We know that we are the ones

Who are divided.

And we are the ones

Who must come back together

To walk in the Sacred Way.

Grandfather, Sacred One,

Teach us love, compassion, and honor.

That we may heal the earth

And heal each other.

— from the Ojibway Indians

SERMON: Why Do Soldiers Die?

This is an awkward Sunday to be preaching. I began with a sermon on Veterans’ Day. It’s an important day to me, and I wanted to ask what there is in us that keeps leading to social, political and military fighting. I wanted to explore why our soldiers die.

Then the presidential election began to unfold last Tuesday, and five days later it is still not unfolded. Here too we are dividing into warring camps, often very self-righteous about our candidate and that other idiot.

People are confused and restless. We are such a deeply hierarchical species that the lack of a clear leader drives us to the borders of our rationality. But this dividing into social and political camps looks a lot like enlisting soldiers for a battle.

So I will try the unlikely, by combining thoughts on Veterans’ Day, why we fight, our current post-election confusion, who we are, and what we are called to do in the coming years.

It’s so ambitious; I count on your forgiveness when I fail. I’ll start and end with stories.

There was a poignant story about a WWII veteran on the front page of yesterday’s “Life & Arts” section of the Austin American-Statesman. It was about a Texas man, now 80, who had to leave the one true love of his life in France in 1941, never to see her again. It was many years before he learned that she had died a few months later. He served in the war, came home, had some marriages but no lasting loves, and still dwells in memories of 59 years ago. He’s written a script about it which he’s trying to get turned into a movie, and it would probably make a good one. We love stories of thwarted love set in wartime — it’s the plot of “Casablanca,” maybe the greatest of all romantic war films.

The combination of war and love is the most powerful in our history. In Greek mythology Ares, the god of war, was the favorite consort of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and their liaisons produced three children, named Fear, Terror and Harmony. Neither of these gods was ever considered wise by the Greeks, though they were powerful. But Aphrodite’s loves were too local, too limited, and Ares was all rage, no reason.

They were like the “ear” and “tail” people in this morning’s children’s story. Like the other gods, Love and War represented partial passions, too incomplete to be enough. The Greeks had such good insight here. For when incomplete but passionate visions clash, they might produce Harmony. But it is far more likely they will yield Terror and Fear.

War is a kind of mirror held up to let us see some turbulent parts of ourselves. Or it is those turbulences, projected outward from our psyches onto the stage of the world. But every clash of partial visions and half-truths seems to be an example of the same rule, a rule so deeply a part of us we have probably never been without it. The rule is simple:

We must enlarge either the size of our visions or the size of our armies.

Like the playground fight in this morning’s Children’s Moment, wars mostly occur between ear-people and tail-people. Wars happen because we are trying to defend what is right and good against those who stand up for what is wrong and bad. And on the other side, wars exist because those others are trying to defend what is right and good against we people who stand for what is wrong and bad.

There are those few precious times when we are convinced a war was really about right vs. wrong. WWII was probably the only such war in the last century, though. Since then, our wars haven’t been such proud affairs.

When I say “war” I don’t mean only the fights between armies with guns. I mean all of the fierce confrontations between people who see different little pieces of reality, and fight in their name.

There’s an old story about this. One day the Devil’s messengers — who must be very busy — reported to him that some people on earth had discovered pieces of Truth. They wondered if the Devil didn’t see this as a threat. “No,” he laughed, “they’re only tiny pieces of the truth, too small for wisdom. They’ll turn those little pieces into orthodoxies, dogmas, and ideologies. Then they’ll form armies to fight for their little pieces of truth. That’s how I will take over the world!”

Why do we fight? If this is a scientific question, it’s an easy one. Like a million other species, we are territorial animals. We identify with our territory and defend it against all outside threats. We wave our flags and parade our armies like other animals bare their fangs and arch their backs. Remember that a dog barks at you from behind its fence for the same reason that its owner built the fence.

We have expanded our notion of territory to include conceptual territory. We defend our ideas with the same kinds of attack and defense strategies that we and other animals use to defend physical territory. A lion may kill another lion for infringing on his hunting territory or putting the moves on his mate, but he won’t kill another lion for holding the wrong religious or political beliefs. That extension of territory to include intellectual territory seems to be ours alone. That’s what I mean by calling most of our fights a game of ear-people against tail-people. But there’s a catch. When we are willing to fight and kill for our notions of right and truth, then unless we really know what’s right and true, we become foolish and dangerous. And history shows us that we always seem to identify the Truth with what we happen to believe. It would be amazingly lucky for us if we were right. So, since we can’t enlarge our understanding, our vision, we have to enlarge our armies.

It seems the world has always been run by the outcomes of wars between one set of special interests against another set of special interests, won b y the side with the largest army. Then the strong demand what they will and the weak grant what they must, and time rolls on to the next act, which is much like the last act.

One reason that the religious teachings of thousands of years ago still survive while almost all the scientific teachings from ancient times have been forgotten is that we have solved most of the scientific problems. But the problems addressed by the great religions — these problems are as much with us today as they ever were.

And the religious answers have a striking similarity. They often speak of seeking a “God’s-eye view” of the world, kind of like that photograph of the earth taken from the surface of the moon, where all the boundaries vanish and the world is whole again:

Live in harmony with the Tao, said Lao-Tzu twenty-five centuries ago. The Way is a balance of light and dark, aggressive and receptive, sunlight and shadow, everything is part of the whole, live in a way that honors the whole rather than the isolated parts.

Seek first the Kingdom of God, Jesus taught two thousand years ago. And that Kingdom of God, he was clear, was not something magical or supernatural, no matter what the religion that followed him has taught. Jesus’ Kingdom of God was simply a world in which we treated each other as brothers and sisters, children of God, and refused to accept any smaller or more local identity.

“We are all limbs of the body of humanity,” said the Roman Seneca. And the task of trying to grow into our fullest humanity is the task of trying to identify with the whole body, rather than just our parts of it.

Perhaps the oldest of these teachings is still the ancient Hindu story of the blind people and the elephant, from which I adapted this morning’s children’s story. The “elephant” is life, and none of us can ever see the whole of it. We just see the parts we can touch or experience: an ear, a tail, a leg or a trunk, and we think it must be the whole thing.

But religious teachings often get a kind of glassy-eyed unreality about them. We listen to them as part of the Sunday ritual, but there’s a disconnect from the real world. So rather than milking these religious teachings further, I want to share an example of this same kind of thinking that solves problems by transcending and including their different aspects, taken from the real world.

This isn’t just abstract or irrelevant. If our current election is resolved as it seems it will be, with Governor Bush becoming our next president, we will almost certainly have several very important and very emotionally loaded social issues to examine or re-examine, from abortion, affirmative action and individual rights to restructuring of our environmental and tax laws. We could use a model that has actually worked somewhere.

To find this model, I’ll move from the contentious subject of war to the equally complex issue of abortion. About fourteen years ago, a Harvard law professor named Mary Ann Glendon did a comparative study of around twenty industrialized cultures, including ours and about nineteen European cultures, comparing their policies on, among other things, abortion. Our country came out worst. We had done the least to resolve these issues, for reasons she found easy to show.

Her argument is a simple one. Thirty five years ago, all over the world, industrialized cultures began discussing some of the variables involved in this issue of unwanted pregnancies. The discussions came about because, all over the world, birth control pills and condoms became more widely available, and abortions became more openly discussed as options. These discussions were going on across societies, in many social circles, at many levels. Religious beliefs, beliefs in individual rights, in a woman’s responsibility to the unborn life she carried, in a society’s responsibility to care for unwanted children, in the things that a child needs in order to have a shot at the kind of life we want to give our newborns. All of these issues and more were being discussed in the countries of Europe, as they were just beginning to be discussed here in the early 1960s.

Yet in Europe, abortion issues have never reached the intensity and hatred that they have here, because Europeans continued the public discussion until they reached a consensus. In this country, our Supreme Court short-circuited the process of public discussion with its Roe v. Wade decision. It created a law before the society had finished debating the issues, and so the law never settled the deep differences and angers that still torment women at abortion clinics or help murder physicians who provide abortions. Because we wrote our law before we had found common ground, our society has often been divided into the rigid ideological clans of “pro-life” or “pro-choice” platforms. This is the structure of ear-people against tail-people that leads to wars. And this has been the American path.

In European countries, on the other hand, people continued the open discussions until much more substantial compromises were reached. Now, most European societies have laws stating that the most important single consideration must always be the sanctity of life. But that concern for the sanctity of life, they say, must be placed in a realistic understanding of the conditions of life: the social, economic and psychological situation of the pregnant woman, the probabilities of that unborn child’s finding the quality of life that we in society want for the future of our species, and so on.

The result has been that women in many European countries have access to abortion at least as liberal as ours. In Catholic Spain, for example, the government pays for legal abortions. Yet we don’t hear of “right-to-life” people declaring war, barring the doors of abortion clinics, or murdering Spanish doctors who are providing abortions, because they got what they wanted: the admission that life really is sacred, and that the sensitivity to the sacrality of life comes first, before a woman’s right to choose. It hasn’t restricted the choices much, it’s mostly dissolved them within a larger moral and ethical picture.

It has avoided wars and murders in many European countries, has resulted in lower rates of unwanted pregnancies, fewer abortions, higher adoption rates, and greater roles for societies in caring for unwanted children. So you think they must be doing something right!

I’ll take only one case to make the point, though there are many. The case happened in Catholic Spain. It involved a single women who wanted an abortion during her eighth month of pregnancy. Under Spanish law, as also under American law, this woman had to get the court’s permission for such an abortion. Initially, she had wanted to keep the baby. Though she was a single woman, was not planning to marry the baby’s father or receive any support from him, and though she only worked at about minimum wage, she felt that she had no right to deny life to this baby just because it was inconvenient for her.

However, late in her pregnancy she had amniocentesis performed, and discovered that the baby she was carrying was severely deformed, both physically and mentally. It would cost a lot of money and take a lot of energy to care for such a baby, and she told the court that she wasn’t capable of caring for such a child. Therefore, she wanted the court’s permission to have the abortion.

The court agreed. She obtained the abortion, and the government of Spain paid for it, as they pay for all legal abortions in Spain. But the court’s reasoning showed a deeper and broader vision of life, pregnancy, and responsibility than we hardly ever hear in this country. The court noted that even though Spanish law insisted on the sanctity of life, Spanish society had not put its money where its mouth was. Spanish society did not have the ability to provide care for such a baby. They lacked the social services, the financial support, and the educational and nursing services to provide any decent quality of life for such a child. And if the government was unable or unwilling to commit the money and the resources to caring for such a child, they said, then it would be brutally unfair for them expect a single woman to do so. Therefore, they granted the abortion. They hoped, however, that some day Spain would be able to provide services for such children so that they could grow to live useful and happy lives.

What I want to suggest to you is that Spain, like most European countries, has avoided the wars we fight over abortions here in our country, because they were able to develop a more mature and responsible understanding of the many issues involved in unwanted pregnancies.

Instead of building armies, they increased the size of their vision. And this borrowing from Spain points to the kind of solution that could also help avoid social incivility in many areas here at home.

I don’t think that liberals have enough wisdom to guide our society adequately today. Nor do conservatives. The view of an ear plus the view of a tail still don’t do much justice to an elephant.

If we react ideologically during the coming social changes, liberal and conservative camps will just circle their wagons and try to keep short-circuiting the process by getting our kinds of laws passed.

Our instincts will push us to react like territorial animals, to defend our position harder and help create the conditions of social hatred and violence. But we have a chance, during the coming social changes, to try a different path. It is a path I want to recommend, especially to liberals, and most especially to religious liberals.

Soldiers die for our failures of vision. They die mostly because we are like the ear- and tail-people, who make big armies because we don’t know how to make bigger visions. We don’t want to see that those on the other side of almost all complex and powerful issues are our moral equals, our intellectual equals, our brothers and sisters. We think we’re right, they’re wrong, and that the important problems of life can somehow really be as simple as that kind of cartoon. And as long as our visions remain too small, we will have to create bigger armies. And then it starts all over, the next act looking much like all the last acts. And in every generation, people will find all the old religious teachings about peace rather than war, and wonder why they are still so apt. I went through a few of those visions earlier, in their Taoist, Hindu, Christian and Stoic versions. You may know of more.

But whether it is the Kingdom of God, the Way, the whole elephant or the body of humanity, the same message comes to us through all the ages of humanity, and it is a message we need now as much as at any time in memory.

We are still coming through a frustrating presidential election. By almost all accounts, these two men were not exciting candidates; half of our citizens didn’t even bother to vote. We were frustrated with the choices, and no matter how it turns out, at least half the country will be frustrated with the results. If governor Bush is finally elected, there may be some significant changes in our society, and in many areas.

We will be sorely tempted to circle the wagons around our own ideology as we feel it assaulted by its opposite. We are primed to play, once again, the parts of ear-people and tail-people, gearing up for warfare against those others who, we feel, must be wrong if they disagree so strongly with us.

I hope you and I will resist the downward pull of stunted visions, and seek instead to expand the horizons of discussion and debate:

On the subject of abortion rights versus rights to life, I hope we can work to frame the issue, instead, under the larger umbrella of how we can treat all these questions as moral issues whose roots go into the sanctity of life, as several European countries already have.
On the important issue of individual rights versus individual responsibilities, I hope we can insist that the two concerns be linked together, for neither one alone is sufficient.
On economic issues, I hope we can also find and articulate the bigger umbrella. There will always be inequalities in income and opportunity because there will always be inequalities between people. Greater gifts deserve, and will anyway get, greater rewards. But our laws and economic structures must be used to encourage and reward gifts and character wherever they are found, not merely wealth and privilege.
On issues of religion and education, I hope we can see past the separation of church and state far enough to realize that we must find a place in public education for the deeper questions of ethics, morality, and responsible living which have always been held as primary by the best religions.

And in all the other divisive issues which beg us to become small soldiers for limited visions, I hope we will resist. We come to, and from, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. We are the bearers of a proud, bright, deep religious tradition that has inspired the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, including you.

We are meant to be among the intellectual and moral leaders of our community and our world. It is our gift and our calling. I believe it is our duty. In all these areas and more, rather than enlarging our armies let us enlarge our visions. We can serve our exclusive territories or our inclusive humanity. We can define ourselves by our divisive differences, or by our inclusive commonalities. Let it be the latter.

There is an old Buddhist story that is on point here. A fierce soldier approached the Buddha, brandishing his long sharp sword. “I am a mighty warrior and I am going to kill you!” he shouted. “Well then,” replied the Buddha, “with that much power, you ought to grant me two final wishes.” “Very well,” bellowed the warrior, “but make it quick!” The Buddha pointed to a sapling tree nearby and said “Cut off a small branch from that tree.” With one stroke of his sword, the deed was done, and the warrior handed the severed branch to the Buddha. “And now?” he roared. The Buddha handed the little branch to the warrior and pointed to the tree: “Now make it whole again.”

It is reported that the warrior experienced enlightenment at that moment, and spent the remainder of his days working to heal rather than destroy, to make whole rather than cutting apart.

My friends, let us aspire to the same.