My wife asked me to recommend a speaker for the Military Moms. “We all have kids in the military,” she said, “and the world is really heating up.” We are reminded that peace is a blessing, not the natural state of things. As a friend and neighbor, with a son in the Marines and two on the way, I said to myself, “I certainly know the audience.” And because I know you, I don’t underestimate you. This was an invitation to address serious things in our unserious times and perhaps blow the dust off some old wisdom. So, I recommended myself.
The word “tradition” is from Latin roots meaning “to hand down” and “across.” Humans believed for two millennia in passing down something valuable, even priceless, from those that came before. A man named Burke said society was a compact between the dead, the living and the not yet born. The intellectual history of the West is a study of this integrated inheritance. Nothing less than the wisdom of our most sage forbears on being human.
The Greeks founded our Western tradition. Embedded in all things, they believed, including humans, was an innate and enduring purpose, or telos. This purpose was recognizable to humanity using its greatest gift—thought and self-awareness. But with recognition came responsibility. Aristotle defined our purpose as human flourishing, striving with our full capacities as self-reflective, self-judging beings. Satisfaction came not in ease and freedom from obligation but in the embrace and achievement of great possibilities. The Greeks had high expectations for themselves.
Today, a different ethos prevails. The handing across time has stopped. We acknowledge little wisdom from the past, mostly superstition, outdated customs, and error. Progress requires that the past be forsaken. The truth about man is no longer an objective discovery to be illuminated but a subjective, unceasing, restless self-creation.
Apologies for the armchair philosophy, but the importance of this change cannot be overstated—and begs the question: are we, then, moving towards the truth about ourselves or away from it?
I believe Homer’s Iliad, the first book ever written, is also the best. This tips my hand on this question! The Greek’s legacy is the best defense of the wisdom they celebrated. They found beauty in the truth of human life. And that truth was struggle and suffering. Homer, some said, had “ruthless poignancy.” Striving through pain and human existence were the same thing. This did not make life bad that’s just what it is.
From the Greek playwright Aeschylus:
God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
The Greeks did not lie to themselves or take the easy way out; they looked reality in the face and smiled.
How different we are now! Struggle, setback, suffering, and even discomfort are evils to be eliminated. Trigger warnings, snowflakes, snowplow parents—everyone gets a trophy. The suffering that was man’s inseparable companion for the Greeks we medicate, therapize, or obscure under a pile of distraction. Do 1000 channels on demand and an iPhone with the computing power of Houston Control in 1969 really make us happier? Perhaps they would if we were exploring the moon instead of watching Bravo and cat videos. The Greeks were said to be very serious, embracing the possibility and privilege of existence. Surveying what we spend our time doing, how we conduct ourselves, and most strikingly, the poverty of our aspirations, we seem a very unserious people.
Burke might observe that we no longer have a compact of any kind, much less a regard for the past or the future. David Brooks noted that the contemporary West “chose the wrong philosophers.” Hobbes over Durkheim; but we are not atomized individuals, we are social beings; Descartes over Augustine; while rational, we are ultimately driven by the spirit; and Bentham over Frankl; we search not for the most stuff but for meaning. In The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis describes men of the stomach (material desires), the head (rationality) and the chest (the heart or spirit). The modern problem, he remarked, was that we were producing men without chests. Unmoored from the most deeply human element of our nature, we are only partially realized. In seeking to avoid, mitigate, or ignore unavoidable suffering, we make it worse. How could a society so rich, so technologically advanced, and so enlightened be anything but the happiest ever? But we are not. The less we understand ourselves, the more certain we become in error. In our hubris, we engage in a “joyless quest for joy.”
Nowhere is the break between past and the present more manifest than in the military. For 3,000 years, the place of honor around the campfire or counsel table was the warrior’s. For most of human history, male military service was widespread, if not universal. In most Native American languages, the words for man and warrior are identical. The honor drew all of society. At Harvard University, where I attended, President Lowell nearly shut the school down during WWI so it could train soldiers. 11,319 Harvard grads or students served from 60 different classes. 373 were killed, 43 of whom were students who enlisted before they graduated. Then, elite society perceived a duty, but also an attraction, to the calling of honorable service.
A change in this foundational element of human experience has gradually occurred. A tiny ROTC presence was only recently permitted back at Harvard. In a 2023 poll (FN: Echelon Insights), 72% of Americans replied that in the event of a major conflict involving the US, they would not be willing to join the military. (I checked the following numbers twice.) Almost half of 18-29-year-olds polled said they would not be willing to risk their lives in the event of a military invasion of America, and 30% said they would rather surrender than risk death (FN: JL Partners poll for Daily Mail UK). Willingness is only part of the problem. A 2022 Pentagon study shows 77% of target military-age male recruits were unqualified to serve based on fitness, drug use, etc. In a currently airing commercial, a young, otherwise healthy-looking young man says that he is too portly to enjoy recreational activities or play with his kids. Alas, he is encouraged by the new weight loss shot he injects into the flesh hanging over his sweatpants, saying with a smile, “a military mindset in a shot.”
Half of one percent of Americans serve in the military and only a small fraction of those in combat roles. On the coasts, among our so-called elites, the extraordinary fact exists that many don’t know anyone in the military, not among their family, extended family or friends. We sense from many to whom we mention our own children’s service silent incredulity. They express admiration but don’t want their children serving. Recall the comment of an Afghanistan veteran: “We were fighting a war, and everyone else was going to the mall.” Brief, superficial displays, the pre-game color guard and fly-over, “thank you for your service,” belie a vague discomfort. Our society no longer understands how to think about those who would offer their lives for their country and whose profession it is to take the lives of others.
Language is a mirror of society. Words that used to be commonplace even 70 years ago are gone. Unapologetic patriotism is the province of the unlettered or the rube. Idealistic words like excellence and honor are quaint anachronisms. You hear “courage” and “hero” all the time, but their meaning has been deformed by misuse. Properly understood, these positive virtues demand something from you. They have been replaced by tolerance, inclusion, and empathy—negative virtues that, more than anything, demand you do nothing, judge nothing.
Have we progressed beyond the need of these old virtues or do we suffer their loss?
CS Lewis wrote:
We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
The eloquence of two soldier intellectuals stands out on this conflict between modernity and the warrior calling. What is extraordinary about Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ernst Junger is their similarity despite their differences. Holmes was a Union officer in the US Civil War, and Junger a German in the trenches of WWI. Both saw extensive combat in conflicts of legendary brutality. No armchair jingoes; both were severely wounded multiple times and fought with exceptional courage. Like Lewis and Brooks, both warned of rational, technocratic, materialist individualism. The eclipse of tradition. They were prescient men. In his 1895 Soldier’s Faith Speech at Harvard, Holmes addressed growing “individualist negations.”
…we have learned the doctrine that evil means pain, and the revolt against pain in all its forms has grown more and more marked…we express in numberless ways the notion that suffering is a wrong which can be and ought to be prevented…how hard it is to be wounded in the battle of life, how terrible, how unjust it is that any one should fail. There are many, poor and rich, who think that love of country is an old wife’s tale, to be replaced …. by a rootless self-seeking search for a place where the most enjoyment may be had at the least cost.
And Junger, in his WWI memoir Storm of Steel:
When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country – and the time will come….then… the idea of the Fatherland is dead …For all these great and solemn ideas bloom from a feeling that dwells in the blood and cannot be forced. In the cold light of reason everything alike is a matter of expedience and sinks to the paltry and mean.
Back to Holmes:
But who of us could endure a world, although cut up into five-acre lots, and having no man upon it who was not well fed and well housed, without the divine folly of honor.
100 years ago, they saw a cresting wave that is now breaking.
The most honest commentary about war must always account for its central paradox. It is the venue for man’s greatest depravity. But war is also man’s most grand endeavor, inspiring incomparable energy, excitement, and awe—the stage for his most soaring acts. All the Christmas Eves of my life blend together but one: kneeling in the sand, holding a candle, and singing at midnight with my fellow Marines in the Saudi Desert in 1990.
Holmes again:
We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top.
Junger again:
It was our luck to live in the invisible rays of a feeling that filled the heart, and of this inestimable treasure we can never be deprived.
Why did our sons and daughters choose the military?
Sophocles, another Greek dramatist, wrote:
Only the base will long for length of life
That never turns another way from evil.
What joy is there in day that follows day,
Now swift, now slow, and death the only goal.
I count as nothing him who feels within
The glow of empty hopes.
In the Iliad, Thetis, the goddess mother of Achilles, can see the future. She laments his choice to reenter the battle as one of death and immortal glory over life.
Did our children sense the void of empty hopes? Did the call the Greeks heard beckon them, now muted but immutable? We certainly know our children are not mythical heroes! But most young people I have met who elected to serve seem moved by more than free tuition. In various degrees, perhaps unconsciously, the same genus of spirit that drove Achilles is here. They have chosen a profession that provides the chance to be a hero.
In preparing my remarks, I thought about years of my own responses to the question, “Why did you join the Marines?” I realized my answer has been self-consciously incomplete. Yes, I was patriotic and sought a challenge, but also perhaps honor and even a chance at glory.
The choices our children make carry us along. We would be justly proud if they worked at Goldman Sachs because of the prestige and compensation. But, even today, we sense—most people sense—a higher claim when you say your son is on a destroyer in the Red Sea or an infantry officer in the Marines.
Our children are part of an ancient tradition, but the tradition of the military mom is precisely as old. The first warrior created the first worrying mother. These days, one of the lies we tell ourselves is that men and women are the same, but for prejudiced purposes. Biology is even ignored. But men and women are far from the same; they are natural, wonderful complements of each other.
Each of you has accomplished the greatest worldly achievement: to nurture another human being within yourself. Fathers, men, will never know this transcendent satisfaction. You create and protect life, so war is your sworn enemy. There are countless stories of martyred heroes, but of their mothers, we know little. Heroism is trumpeted, but the grief inextricable from it is borne in anonymity. Perhaps this is the most unfair thing about war.
This special bond is also the military moms burden. In the Iliad, Hector’s mother, Queen Hecuba, reacts to his decision to fight Achilles, the greatest of all warriors. No longer able to protect the son she raised, she uses her fundamental claim on him in a final appeal.
The young man’s mother wailed from the tower across, above the portal, streaming tears, and loosened her robe with one hand, held her breast out in the other, saying: Hector, my child, be loved by this, and pity me, if ever I unbound a quieting breast for you. Think of these things, dear child, defend yourself against the killer…
Clytemnestra called the loss of her daughter “the pain which never sleeps”. The Greeks again being honest with themselves.
Thucydides account of Pericles funeral oration in the Peloponnesian War tells us as much about the present as the past. The commemoration of the fallen was an elaborate ritual involving most of Athens. The bones of the dead were buried in the best location in the city, and their children raised to adulthood at the public’s expense. As Pericles speaks to his citizens of the first democracy, we hear none of the shallow lying to which we are habituated. To the parents of the dead, he says, there is no pretending that his words will eliminate their grief. Perhaps the young can have new children to replace those lost, the suffering of the old will be shorter. To these grieving parents “past their prime,” he adds: “For it is only the love of honor that never grows old, and honor it is, not gain as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.” Not empty words where honor has value. “Comfort, therefore, not condolence”, he says, “is what I have to offer to the parents of the dead…” He delivers not sympathy and pity but, while acknowledging their grief, affirmation of “a death so glorious as that which has caused your mourning.” An odd amalgamation for us today: suffering and triumph hand in hand.
Human beings hate to be alone. Take solace in the knowledge that you are far from alone. Though America may not fully understand your position, you join the company of the greatest drama in human history—the warrior’s mother. Your companions are millions of ghosts at peace, the mothers of Pericles’ Hoplites, medieval bowmen, and privates at Gettysburg.
I think about the two Navy SEALS lost recently in the Red Sea, or more precisely, their parents. I was surprised at how little coverage they received and how fleeting it was. I disdain the manifest fecklessness of the policy they died executing. The parents of the fallen often animate their grief by lashing out at the cause of the loss. The equipment should not have failed, the plan was foolish, the aim unrealistic, …. my son died for nothing. But war could be defined as a colossal endeavor in mismanagement, waste, and overreach. An American mother’s son will never be worth a ball-bearing plant in Schweinfurt or the borders of Ukraine. The soldier has never chosen his equipment, his leaders, or his war aims; only his duty.
What did those SEALS die for? For us, this seems an important question. Holmes and Junger offer an answer. Both speak of a Soldier’s Faith.
Holmes:
I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe. But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt, that no man who lives in the same world with most of us can doubt, and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.
if, in short ….you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of. You know your own weakness and are modest; but you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him capable of miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, able to face annihilation for a blind belief.
Junger:
We stood our feet in mud and blood, yet our faces were turned to things of exalted worth. And not one of that countless number who fell in our attacks fell for nothing. Each one fulfilled his own resolve To-day we cannot understand the martyrs who threw themselves into the arena in a transport that lifted them even before their deaths beyond humanity, beyond every phase of pain and fear.
And so, strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four years schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare that life has no depth of meaning except when it is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no weight.
I believe those SEALS died for this. What greater achievement than to keep this faith? A final cause, an end in itself. Men with chests stand in sharp relief in a society sliding towards virtual reality, Xanax, and blissful lassitude. Like Holmes, I don’t desire to live in a world without this Faith.
Tragedy, the art form we know today, is another gift of the Greeks. Edith Hamilton wrote a book called The Greek Way. The Greeks’ grasp of human nature made their invention of tragedy possible, even probable. Tragedy seeks to transform human suffering. After his brother’s assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy gave a copy of Hamilton’s book to RFK Sr.
I quote Hamilton:
It is by the power to suffer, above all, that we are of more value than the sparrows….deep down, when we search out the reason for our conviction of the transcendent worth of each human being, we know that it is because of the possibility that each can suffer terribly…..And to her realm alone are admitted those who belong to the only true aristocracy, that of all passionate souls. Tragedy’s one essential is a soul that can feel greatly. The great soul in pain and in death transforms pain and death.
Perhaps it is another paradox that only potential for loss, or loss itself, allows us to fully appreciate what we lost.
We here are not powerless bystanders. Our mission is to understand the ambition of our sons and daughters service, and if we must, their sacrifice, in order to sanctify it. It is hard to do with the tools of our times. We must appeal to our traditions.
Jesus said to his disciples:
The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected
by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes,
and be killed and on the third day be raised.”Then he said to all,
“If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?
Well, we said we would speak of serious things and we sure have! Living fully as a human being is serious business and it is advisable to plant seeds before storms.
Through the choices of our sons and daughters, we are invited into the realm of life as passion to its top. We wish and pray for our children’s protection. But if fate’s design is not our own, their sacrifice will always be for something. If there is a Soldiers Faith, then there is surely a Mother’s Faith as well, with different perspectives on the same shining star.
Edith Hamilton wrote:
The Greeks knew to the full how bitter life is as well as how sweet. Joy and sorrow, exultation and tragedy, stand hand in hand …. but there is no contradiction involved thereby…. Never, not in their darkest moments, do they lose their taste for life.