When None Dare Urge Restraint, pt. 2

hero: he-ro [heer-oh]

1. a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal

It's not just about ignoring death. These men and women in the armed forces are heroes... if you abandon the definition above and use a more useful definition. "A person who has qualities or performed acts which are useful to the community, who can serve as models for others, so that more people will act like them." It's a Hansonian status signal.

To allow a little anthropomorphizing, a society wants to reinforce that which makes it stronger. If you were to design a civilization from scratch which is involved in wars, the first thing you'd do is grant +200 status points to everybody who died in the service of their country, regardless of if they were effective or not effective. That will get you more recruits; that will make wars easier. It doesn't matter if the words are true or the definitions are consistent, granting those bonus status points would help you achieve your goals. It makes sense for a society to do that, and it makes sense that a society would punish people who point out it's reinforcement systems.

This is how being a cell in an organism feels from the outside.

I found an article on the Atlantic that provides additional context to Chris Hayes's remarks and it also asks a series of followup questions about whether people should be called heroes under different circumstances.

Link here.

The followup questions seemed to be worth reposting in their entirety:

1) Are all American war dead heroic because, if nothing else, they had the courage to volunteer for service knowing they might ultimately give their life for their country? That seems heroic to me. But if they're all heroes, does it follow that everyone in the military is a hero? Why is dying necessary? And if everyone who volunteers is a hero, what about the guys who would go AWOL if sent to fight, or who assault their commanding officer, or who run away in combat? What about the ones who are dishonorably discharged? Was Bradley Manning a hero? Had Lynndie England died in Iraq, would she have been a hero?

2) What about people who volunteer for foreign armed forces? Are they all heroic? Or does it depend upon their country? If an American helping to liberate Libya would've been a hero had he died in action, shouldn't the Germans from NATO engaged in the same conflict be heroes too? What about the Islamic fundamentalists fighting alongside NATO? Heroes?

3) What about the morality of the cause? Does anyone think brave Nazi soldiers during the World War II era were heroes? How about the soldiers in Stalin's army? Does the nature of the mission matter, so that a Soviet soldier who died liberating a death camp was a hero, whereas another who died while ravaging German civilians he was ordered to take revenge upon isn't? There's this reality to confront: if bestowing the title hero has nothing to do with the rightness or wrongness of the cause or mission, we'll have to grant the honorific to individuals who took part in deeply immoral acts... and yet, if the mission does matter, do we really want to deny the heroism of a GI who jumped on a grenade to save his platoon, even if we think the platoon's presence in country X was immoral? It's a confounding choice.

4) Speaking of jumping on grenades, isn't "hero" often invoked in common parlance as if it means even more than serving and dying? For example, when we hear someone described as "a World War II hero," don't we expect that he did more than fall overboard and drown en route to the D-Day invasion? Don't we assume from that adjective that he undertook some dangerous mission, or distinguished himself in combat, like the younger Bailey brother in It's a Wonderful Life? Were the average American to watch From Here to Eternity, would he or she call Robert E. Lee Prewitt a hero?

5) And say, for the sake of argument, that all American war dead are heroes, strictly defined, but that the word and its emotional resonance is being manipulated by advocates of an imprudent war. Is it better to give soldiers an honorific they deserve, consequences be damned, or to withhold an honorific they deserve to prevent future soldiers from needlessly dying?

The title of this post looks like an episode title for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

I'm reminded of how people tried to call the 9/11 victims "heroes," apparently because they had the great courage to work in buildings that were targeted in a terrorist attack.

Let's be fair: Almost no one actually said this. It's a large nation and you can generally find at least one example of just about any dumb statement, but this seems like 99% strawman.

I remember a lot of talk about how the rescue workers were heroes, and some discussion about the heroics of specific attack victims (people who e.g. tried to help others escape the building), but labeling the victims as "heroes", while certainly something one could have gotten away with, I don't recall at all.

A quick and dirty google search for "9/11 victims were heroes" without quotes returns a page full of results referring to 'victims' and 'heroes' as separate groups. If you add the quotes you mostly just get people attacking the sentiment, rather than the sentiment itself.

My biggest takeaway from "When None Dare Urge Restraint" was this quote: "It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things."

But it always bothered me that this only applied to negative things. Obviously there are some instances where saying positive things may trump saying accurate things (You look great in those jeans, and other white lies), but I think you've identified a better rule: It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world about whom saying positive things always trumps saying accurate things.

Great post. Upvoted.

As I consider this, I suspect that virtually anything which you can imagine being reported angrily on commercial cable "news" channels has purposes that are actually at odds with reporting truth. Calling terrorists cowards is just the usual insulting of the enemy, isn't it? Calling soldiers "heroes" seems to me to be a way to lower the costs associated with getting young people to go do this thing.

Is it irrational to use communication whose primary purpose is at odds with spreading objective information? Only if survival is irrational. Before we are the animal that thinks, we are the animal that survives. We gather together in groups whose members are unlikely to kill us and indeed may be likely to save us, and we gather up our dudgeon to attack the groups that are not on board with that program. The groups that are stingy using "irrational" tools to prevail against other groups do not pass either their genes or their memes into succeeding generations.

In my opinion, trying to make rational-information passing sense of a question like "should all our cannon fodder be called heros" is like an argument over whether the typical bride should wear white. The value in examining such questions comes from acquiring a better understanding of what the real purpose of such statements is, and how very orthogonal that purpose is to enhancing our perceptions of objective truths.

All good points, but hardly anything new... I guess a reminder can't hurt.

I'm told that in some countries, every schoolchild reads Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est".)

I wonder if that actually works at reducing such high zest for war heroism.

labeling a death as "heroic" can be a similar sort of rationalization.

Homer, about 2800 years ago :

It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair.

This article should be on Main.

Welcome to the positive use of Dark Arts. You can enumerate the exploited biases galore as an exercise.

Indiscriminately calling the soldiers and especially the war dead heroes is quite rational, as it facilitates the country's task of maintaining an enlisted military force, as opposed to a mercenary force. Yes, it's brainwashing, and it is irrational for the individuals believe it, but it is very much the right thing to do for the government. Imagine what would happen if the prevailing sentiment was "well, these dead soldiers weren't very nice people, anyway, so, whatevs".

Soldiers in the American military are, of course, an untouchable target

I know I'm playing with fire, but... touch. (Warning: deliberately inflammatory polemic.)

One more link on the subject. Jason Brennan has a post on Bleeding Heart Libertarians cataloging different norms for valorizing soldiers (this post is largely a follow-up to a prior post arguing that it might be appropriate to hold even individual soldiers accountable for volunteering to serve in wars they know or should know to be unjust). While it's nothing particularly innovative, I think this framework is useful for understanding both the Hayes controversy and the issue more generally.

The reaction to Chris Hayes suggests that most Americans are pretty close to norm 1, or otherwise a norm 2 where it would take something shocking and extreme -- like overt torture or rape -- to rebut the presumption of heroic status. But the reasonable debate is where we should fall between norms 2 and 3 -- that is, to what extent soldiers should be presumed heroic vs. judged neutrally according to their actual motivations and decisions, like we would judge everyone else.

For me, the hardest issue is distinguishing what makes a war unjustified enough to blame the civilian leadership and unjustified enough to blame soldiers who volunteer to fight in it. There will of course be a gulf between these positions, and the size of that gulf is probably the biggest difference I have with Brennan (I think it's bigger). As many here have pointed out, there's value in having a strong presumption of heroic status, not only as an honest recognition of what subjectively motivates most soldiers, but also to provide a social incentive to keep the military consistently strong over time. But it's still important to acknowledge the existence of this line and to question where it is, both to provide a check on unjust war itself, and to discourage soldiers from risking their lives unless it's really necessary.

I see a hero as one who volunteers to take a personal risk on behalf of his or her group/tribe/country. Whether or not the risk results in death or injury does not have a bearing on whether or not the actions taken were heroic. If one is conscripted against one's will and dies in battle one is not a hero, but more like an unlucky slave. Also, the label is bestowed by the group that stands to benefit from the hero's actions - your hero in warfare is my evil opponent.

And this is why Baysians always loose to barbarians.

Point 1 seems obvious enough. Point 2, is interesting.