Self Sacrifice

Competition, Loss Of Selfishness Mark Shift To Supersociety

2009-11-01T05:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070611094002.htm

Competition, Loss Of Selfishness Mark Shift To Supersociety

ScienceDaily (June 13, 2007) — How social or altruistic behavior evolved has been a central and hotly debated question, particularly by those researchers engaged in the study of social insect societies – ants, bees and wasps. In these groups, this question of what drives altruism also becomes critical to further understanding of how ancestral or primitive social organizations (with hierarchies and dominance fights, and poorly developed division of labor) evolve to become the more highly sophisticated networks found in some eusocial insect collectives termed “superorganisms.”

In a paper published online May 21 before print by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a pair of researchers from Cornell University and Arizona State University propose a model, based on tug-of-war theory, that may explain the selection pressures that mark the evolutionary transition from primitive society to superorganism and which may bring some order to the conflicted thinking about the roles of individual, kin, and group selection that underlie the formation of such advanced eusocial groups.

A superorganism ultimately emerges as a result of intergroup competition according to findings by theoretician H. Kern Reeve of Cornell University’s Department of Neurobiology and Behavior and professor Bert Hölldobler of Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences and Center for Social Dynamics and Complexity.

Reeve and Hölldobler’s model is unique in that it is comprised of two interlocked nested tug-of-war theories. The first piece describes the tug of war over resource shares within a group or colony (intragroup competition), and the second piece incorporates the effects of a tug-of-war between competing colonies (intergroup competition).

According to Hölldobler, the path to colonial supergiant is first paved by the maximization of the inclusive fitness of each individual of the society. How this might arise, he believes, is that competition that might exist between individuals in the same society diminishes as the incipient colonial society becomes larger, better organized and contains better division of labor and ultimately, cohesiveness.

“Such societies in turn produce more reproductive offspring each year than neighboring societies that are less organized. Thus, genes or alleles that code for such behaviors will be propagated faster,” Hölldobler says.

The second piece of the model takes into account that “as the colonial organization of one group rises, there is a coincident rise in discrimination against members of other societies of the same species.” Hölldobler notes that the competition between societies soon becomes a major force reinforcing the evolutionary process: “In this way the society or insect colony becomes the extended phenotype of the collective genome of the society.”

Hölldobler believes that this model developed with Reeve goes further than others in explaining the evolutionary transition from hierarchical organizations to superorganism, “as it also demonstrates how the target of selection shifts from the individual and kin to group selection.”

Such a nested tug-of-war model, he says, might also be applied “equally well to the analysis of the evolution of other animal societies” and give insight into the evolution of cooperation in non-human and human primates, in addition to such things as collectives of cells and the formation of bacterial films.

Hölldobler is the Pulitzer Prize winning author (1991, non-fiction) of “The Ants,” co-authored with Edward O. Wilson, Harvard Professor Emeritus.

Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows

2009-11-01T05:35:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080111102934.htm

Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows

ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2008) — People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.

Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects. Behavioral studies have shown that these cultural differences can influence memory and even perception. But are they reflected in brain activity patterns?

To find out, a team led by John Gabrieli, a professor at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, asked 10 East Asians recently arrived in the United States and 10 Americans to make quick perceptual judgments while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner--a technology that maps blood flow changes in the brain that correspond to mental operations.

Subjects were shown a sequence of stimuli consisting of lines within squares and were asked to compare each stimulus with the previous one. In some trials, they judged whether the lines were the same length regardless of the surrounding squares (an absolute judgment of individual objects independent of context). In other trials, they decided whether the lines were in the same proportion to the squares, regardless of absolute size (a relative judgment of interdependent objects).

In previous behavioral studies of similar tasks, Americans were more accurate on absolute judgments, and East Asians on relative judgments. In the current study, the tasks were easy enough that there were no differences in performance between the two groups.

However, the two groups showed different patterns of brain activation when performing these tasks. Americans, when making relative judgments that are typically harder for them, activated brain regions involved in attention-demanding mental tasks. They showed much less activation of these regions when making the more culturally familiar absolute judgments. East Asians showed the opposite tendency, engaging the brain's attention system more for absolute judgments than for relative judgments.

The results are reported in the January issue of Psychological Science. Gabrieli's colleagues on the work were Trey Hedden, lead author of the paper and a research scientist at McGovern; Sarah Ketay and Arthur Aron of State University of New York at Stony Brook; and Hazel Rose Markus of Stanford University.

"We were surprised at the magnitude of the difference between the two cultural groups, and also at how widespread the engagement of the brain's attention system became when making judgments outside the cultural comfort zone," says Hedden.

The researchers went on to show that the effect was greater in those individuals who identified more closely with their culture. They used questionnaires of preferences and values in social relations, such as whether an individual is responsible for the failure of a family member, to gauge cultural identification. Within both groups, stronger identification with their respective cultures was associated with a stronger culture-specific pattern of brain-activation.

How do these differences come about? "Everyone uses the same attention machinery for more difficult cognitive tasks, but they are trained to use it in different ways, and it's the culture that does the training," Gabrieli says. "It's fascinating that the way in which the brain responds to these simple drawings reflects, in a predictable way, how the individual thinks about independent or interdependent social relationships."

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health and supported by the McGovern Institute.

Culture Is More Important Than Genes To Altruistic Behavior In Large-scale Societies

2009-11-01T05:34:00.000-08:00

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091012230456.htm

Culture Is More Important Than Genes To Altruistic Behavior In Large-scale Societies

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2009) — Socially learned behavior and belief are much better candidates than genetics to explain the self-sacrificing behavior we see among strangers in societies, from soldiers to blood donors to those who contribute to food banks.

This is the conclusion of a study by Adrian V. Bell and colleagues from the University of California Davis in the Oct. 12 edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Altruism has long been a subject of interest to evolutionary social scientists. Altruism presents them with a difficult line to argue: behaviors that help unrelated people while being costly to the individual and creating a risk for genetic descendants could not likely be favored by evolution: at least by common evolutionary arguments.

The researchers used a mathematical equation, called the Price equation, that describes the conditions for altruism to evolve. This equation motivated the researchers to compare the genetic and the cultural differentiation between neighboring social groups. Using previously calculated estimates of genetic differences, they used the World Values Survey (whose questions are likely to be heavily influenced by culture in a large number of countries) as a source of data to compute the cultural differentiation between the same neighboring groups. When compared they found that the role of culture had a much greater scope for explaining our pro-social behavior than genetics.

In applying their results to ancestral populations, the World Values Survey was less useful. But ancient cultural practices, such as exclusion from the marriage market, denial of the fruits of cooperative activities, banishment and execution happen now as they did then. These activities would have exerted strong selection against genes tending toward antisocial behavior, and presumably in favor of genes that predisposed individuals toward being pro-social rather than anti-social. This would result in the gene-culture coevolution of human prosocial propensities.

Bell is currently continuing his research in Tonga, where he is planning through ethnography to estimate statistically what social learning behaviors people have in general that may explain the distribution of cultural beliefs across the Tongan Islands. He is developing a survey instrument that will help capture people's cultural beliefs and measure the effect of migration on the similarities and differences between populations.

Journal reference:

Adrian V. Bell, Peter J. Richerson, and Richard McElreath. Culture rather than genes provides greater scope for the evolution of large-scale human prosociality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2009; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.09032

The Ethics of Self-Sacrifice

2009-07-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/004-the-ethics-of-self-sacrifice-20

By John Milbank

If I were to say that the highest imaginable exemplification of the good consists in dying sacrificially on behalf of an other or others, I imagine that many people, religious or otherwise, would concur. And in some recent ethical thinking, this understanding of the highest good has been given a philosophically systematic and rigorous expression. For such thinkers as Jan Patocka, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and, to a certain extent, Jean-Luc Marion, the highest ethical gesture is a sacrificial self-offering which expects no benefit in return. The good is, paradigmatically, a purified sacrifice, the purest sacrifice imaginable.

Anyone who thinks of this pure self-sacrifice more closely must answer four questions: How is giving to be understood? What is the reality of death? What is the appropriate concept of the self? What are the background ontological circumstances against which the sacrificial gesture would be situated?

Recent ethical thinkers have certain characteristic answers to these questions. The only real gift, they claim, is one that expects no counter-gift in return. Unless a gift is in this fashion sacrificial-the giving up of something-it is argued, a gift reduces to a hidden contractual agreement, governed by a principle of self-interest; and actions out of self-interest, as Kant pointed out, are not pure gifts.

Secondly, they hold that death, far from being complicit with evil as religious traditions have often taken it to be, is the very circumstance that makes it possible to act ethically at all. This claim further breaks down into two complementary parts: 1) We are radically and ultimately vulnerable only because we might die-an immortal would be in the most crucial aspects invulnerable. Hence it is the fact of death alone that lends serious gravity to the ethical demand which vulnerability imposes upon us. 2) At the limit, the ethical agent might die for the vulnerable other person. This readiness to die alone guarantees the ultimate disinterest of his ethical gesture, since it would seem that a good one is prepared to die for cannot be the secret vehicle of one's own power or (presently enjoyed) glory. In this sense, readiness to die precludes the will to power.

Thirdly, in the trend of ethical thinking we are investigating, it is characteristically assumed that what makes us aware of the self in the first place is just this double intrusion of death: the cry of the vulnerable other eliciting our preparedness to negate our own life. Combine this understanding of self with a common epistemological belief, and we bring God into the picture. The epistemological belief is that when something appears to us, when it is present to our consciousness, we can see only what we understand and are able to grasp; we reduce the “other” to the sphere of our awareness. If this is the case, then for the vulnerability of another to place an ethical demand on us greater than ourselves, the other must be greater than ourselves. Thus, the demand of the other with a small “o” passes mistily over into the claim of the other with a big “O,” the demand of transcendence, of deity.

Finally, in the fourth place there is the question of ontology, of just what kind of world it is in which gift without return and the death of the other linked to my own death gives rise to subjectivity and ensures that as subjective beings we are first and foremost ethical creatures-even before we are erotic creatures or curious creatures. Recent thought has it that ours is a world in which death, the passing away of life beyond being into nothingness, is an ultimate horizon. It is suggested that only within this horizon does ethics acquire an ultimate seriousness. For if we are all terminally fragile, then our temporary lives assume an ultimate value, since we can offer our own lives for the sake of others. A death without return ensures that the choice of the good exceeds any self-interest, and that the good lies, as Levinas says, “beyond being [including our own].” With God reduced to a shadow of the human other, and no longer seen as the source of compensating heavenly rewards, the ultimate religious and ethical imperative of pure sacrifice is therefore fulfilled within a secular and symbolically drained sphere, harboring no illusions. Common to all these thinkers (with the exception of Marion) is an attempt to make nothingness or the continuous disappearance of life into the void the precondition for morality, rather than an obstacle in its path. Death in its unmitigated reality permits the ethical, while the notion of resurrection contaminates it with self-interest.

So is it true that death undergirds ethics? I want to argue against this, instead proposing the opposite position that only with faith in the resurrection is an ethical life possible. However, I believe that recent thinkers are rigorously consistent when they argue that self-sacrifice is supremely good only if death is final and unrewarded. So in exalting resurrection, I will have also to deny that self-sacrifice is most paradigmatic of the good. And this is what I shall now proceed to do, arguing that this idea is incoherent, actually unethical, and not at all a translation of the essence of monotheistic tradition as some tend to claim. To make this argument, I will examine in turn the four components of this ostensibly pure sacrifice: 1) gift without return or “unilateral” gift; 2) death as grounding the ethical; 3) a subjectivity as constituted through sacrifice and the demand of a God beyond being; and 4) ontology without resurrection or eschatological overcoming of death.

The notion that a sacrificial offering without hope of return is the only true gift suggests that to be ethical is to be prepared to lose oneself for the other. This is purported to be an improvement over the ancient Greek idea that to be ethical is to value as the only source of secure happiness that which cannot be taken away from one, such as, for example, a simple, ordered, tranquil life, passed mainly in contemplation and the enjoyment of secure friendship-a life relatively immune to disaster. I want to argue, on the contrary, that both ideas are equally solipsistic. The one thing about ourselves we know with certainty is that we are to die. When we accept this death, or prepare ourselves, if necessary, actively to appropriate it, we fulfill most rigorously the Greek demand to value only that which cannot be taken away from us. We do so, it is true, in a somewhat paradoxical manner; that which most securely defines us-death-is that which puts an end to us, while the moral gesture which supposedly establishes our subjectivity, and so is inalienable, involves our being drawn beyond our own boundaries. Nevertheless, one might suggest that pure self-sacrifice strangely turns out to be the securest self-possession, and so one might wonder whether, after all, there is something stoically solipsistic about this ethic despite its being founded upon a disinterested regard for the other.

Let us reflect further upon these claims about self-sacrifice. It is thought that one can never observe another's subjectivity, but can only glimpse a “trace” of it in his or her pain. It would follow from this notion that one acknowledges the other as other only when one sacrificially responds to that pain. This means that we only acknowledge the reality of the other person, and then negatively, when we can no longer be in communication with him. But a person whom we cannot see or talk with is an unknown and indefinable other, and therefore only a generalized other. And here is where the problem sets in.

For a generalized other is a totalized other, an other reduced to ourselves, since we can only imagine it by projecting our own subjectivity upon it. To die for any old invisible other is the very reverse of valuing otherness, because otherness must involve not just diversity and difference but specific diversity and concrete difference. All these things have to be visibly or audibly or in some way sensorially registered.

I am also doubtful about the claim that to gaze upon something is to reduce it to the terms of our understanding or of publicly available linguistic categories. Those who hold this view are the victims of a transcendentalist dimension in phenomenology which, in the tradition of Kant, reduces what appears to that which our understanding can master. It strikes me rather that the very specificity of an object, its very ability to arrest our attention, is constituted by a depth it withholds. We can never see every aspect of a thing, nor know how it would respond in every conceivable circumstance; yet without knowing those responses, we do not know all the different truths they would disclose. If this is true of objects, then it is all the more true of other human subjects. We cannot look at anything, especially not at human beings, without ourselves being regarded in turn from an unknown depth. This depth is not necessarily contrasted with the surface of the thing, since even surfaces tend to exceed our categories: we never feel our words exactly capture a rainbow, for example. So I disagree that what is apparent, what makes itself present, is thereby reduced to what we understand it to be.

We have seen that, in much recent ethical thought, a self-sacrifice is supposed to acknowledge the other through a response to his or her pain, without reducing that other to our understanding of him or her. And yet the effect is actually the opposite-self-sacrifice is that which is most inalienable and so remains within the circle of our self-identity, as does also the generalized other which can only be a projection of our self. On the other hand, we have seen that a person with whom we can interact and whose concrete presence we enjoy is able to be genuinely other, and in a positive way, rather than just as a victim or as suffering. In fact, it is only in this positive sense that someone cannot be reduced to our self.

So, if attention to the other is central for a sense of the ethical, it would appear that convivial enjoyment of another is more important than suffering on his behalf. Moreover, if a person can only be known as other via communication, then I cannot remove myself as a participant in this situation. The German Roman Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann has expressed this point very well: giving food to those in need, he observes, can occur as a one-way gift from those who have to those who have not, or it can occur in a feast, where all eat together. In the feast egotism is mitigated, since here one eats only if one eats along with others; and yet at the same time one does eat, and so selfhood is not eradicated. This image of the feast suggests for Spaemann that what is supremely good is the ecstatic-not in the sense of departing from life, but in the sense of living life as departing from oneself while in this very departing receiving oneself back again. In other words, beyond the ancient Greek quest for happiness in security, he proposes living convivially through generosity to the other and through receiving back again from the other.

Now all this is of course not to deny that to preserve conviviality, to preserve the spirit of feasting, one may very often have to make one-way gestures, without apparent return. Indeed, one can go further to say that in a corrupt, fallen world, the only way to the recovery of mutual interaction will pass through sacrifice unto death. But the point is that this sacrifice is not in itself the good, but rather that which sustains a road to the good in adverse circumstances. If one values every single individual as unique and irreplaceable, and if one's image of the good is of the widest possible conviviality, then in order fully to aim for the good, even the sacrificial offering of oneself must sustain the hope of one's own ultimate redemption. I myself am unique and irreplaceable; without oneself, as without anyone, the universe would have lost something good.

What I am suggesting here, therefore, is that if the fullness of being, or of convivial interaction, defines our vision of the perfect good, then giving can be conceived as quintessentially reciprocal; expecting a gift in return need not necessarily diminish the gratuity of a gift. But in that case, one might very well protest, what precisely distinguishes a gift from a contract? Does it not make giving into a sort of informal and somewhat self-deceptive contractual arrangement, rather like an exchange of business lunches? Not exactly-giving is more unpredictable. If we sign a contract we know what we will get back and probably when-we also take it that what we receive in return is, according to some public measure, equivalent. But if, for example, at Christmas, we exchange gifts with a friend, although there is reciprocity involved, there is also asymmetry: what we receive in return may often surprise us, and whether it is equivalent will be a matter of fine judgment. Indeed, very many different modes of equivalence might prove acceptable here. Furthermore, a return gift may be for a long time delayed, and we will require no exact guarantee of when it is to be returned-as for example with an invitation to dinner. When such a gift is returned, it will certainly in many ways repeat the initial gift-the same hour of the evening perhaps, the same sitting at a table, the same number of courses. But it will also be repeated non-identically-the menu will be different, at least in our culture. Indeed, if one were invited back to dinner immediately, the very next night, and presented with the same menu, one would be offered not a gift but an insult.

This suggests that the content of a gift may as much deem “giftness” as its circumstances (i.e., how free, how unconstrained it is, with what expectations it is given). Modern thinkers, however, tend to concentrate wholly on the formal circumstances of the gift, not on what is given. But suppose a wealthy dying man whom you knew would not live to enjoy a reciprocal invitation invited you to a meal but presented you with only a piece of stale bread and butter. Although the formal circumstances are correct, would you suppose that to be a gift?

My claim here is that asymmetrical reciprocity and non-identical repetition allow sufficiently for an element of freedom in gift exchange to distinguish it from contract. Within limits, at least, the recipient of the initial gift may choose what to give back and when. Certainly, it remains the case that the initial giver and society in general exert pressure on the recipient to give back, in the name of justice. Nevertheless the coercion is mitigated in that if he fails to give back, any punishment he would receive would also fall outside the fixed contractuality of law. For a long time he may be punished with more pressure, more gifts. But eventually the giver will judge that his generosity should be diverted to other, more promising causes, and then the defaulter will finally receive the logical consequence of his refusal: isolation.

At the same time, however, it would be true to say (and I am indebted here to discussion with Jean-Luc Marion) that the very components of non-identity and delay in gift exchange involve a certain surplus of unilateral giving over reciprocity. I do give without the guarantee of return, and if my gift differs from the return gift, then it would seem that something unique has passed from me which does not return. Hence Aquinas insists that gift involves a notion of the unreturnable, even though he also asserts that the ultimate blessedness of charity involves reception as well as giving. However, in the first case of the unreturned gift, one could say that there always remains a hope for a reciprocal gesture, as there is in an eschatological reserve: there will always be self-sacrificing in this life, but in hope of the eternal banquet.

In the second case, of giving something which I do receive back but not in the same form, there is an element of unilaterality, but this is connected to the fact that for a gift to remain a gift, it must change throughout its passage. For as soon as something passes into someone else's hands, it is marked by their character, by their usage; it has become something different in a sense, insofar as the gift-giving succeeds in establishing understanding between giver and recipient. It follows that a return gift (which may only be that of gratitude) would further unfold a mutual understanding, so although the thing which one receives back is in the most obvious sense different from that which was first given, in a deeper sense the reciprocal gift returns the same gift of mutuality that one had first offered. A gift to remain a gift must continuously alter, and this altering is essential to exchange; but at the same time, without the exchange of gratitude a gift is unrecognized and therefore obliterated in its effective actuality.

So far I have argued that exchanging gifts more enshrines the ethical than does a one-way giving that is indifferent to return. In addition, however, I want to claim that the sheerly unilateral gift is a barely coherent notion. In some sense, at least, the free, one-way gift, although it supposedly defines the good in modern ethical thought, is impossible and cannot occur. For as many have noted, even to have the consciousness of being a giver is to reward oneself for giving and to cancel the gratuity of the gift. We may be genuinely disinterested, but we cannot escape the fact that if this disinterest is for us a value, we shall experience our disinterestedness with satisfaction. Since one would seem to fall prey to the same trap were one even to aspire to giving, it seems hard to understand how aspiring to self-sacrifice is any better. Such aspiration is equivalent to an endless deferral of the gift, except, we are told, at the point where we pass beyond ourselves in death and cannot receive our own death back again. However, the formal circumstances of the sacrificial death are not enough to make a purely one-way gift possible. For the gift to be truly disinterested, the giver of his own life must not be able even to imagine the future pleasure of its recipients.

Therefore the true gift would have to be to an absolutely anonymous other-paradigmatically the enemy, suggests Jean-Luc Marion, echoing the Gospels. In addition-and again to prevent anticipation of the other's satisfaction-the thing given should possess no content outside the gesture of giving itself; otherwise we could be pleased that the recipient will at least possess the content we passed along (e.g., “at least he'll always have his health”). We have already seen, however, that removing the question of the appropriate content of the gift leads to absurd results. Nevertheless, the offering of death would seem to approach most closely to the contentless gift. For example, one might ask: In dying, just what did Jesus Christ offer all those infinite numbers of people unknown to him? However, even if one is prepared to offer death for unknown others, this still does not establish a one-way gift. Before dying, the living subject will imagine that somebody benefits from his death, and will be reimbursed by the knowledge that his death is significant in some fashion or other. As a result, the giving ethical subject only becomes purely giving, and therefore ethical, once he is dead and has ceased to be a subject at all.

It has been seen then that the first and most crucial component of the notion of pure sacrifice-namely, one-way giving-not only fails to define the ethical, but is also scarcely coherent. And we have already seen how the second component, death as condition for the possibility of morality, fails to grasp the priority of intercommunion in defining the good. But one should note here, in addition, that if the ethical only arises in response to that fragility which in extremis is the death of the other, then the ethical is, ontologically speaking, something merely secondary and reactive. Far from it appearing to be the case, as some would wish, that the good lies beyond being, the good would on this construal rather seem to be distinctly less than being. In other words, only when being begins to suffer does it instigate the good.

But here one might suggest that a vision of morality as a reaction to the threat of death is less a transcription of monotheism than a reversion to the heroic morality of Homeric times. Against this morality, Socrates, in Plato's Phaedo, insists that warriors who die for the city out of fear for their own death or the death of others in the city, or fear of loss of honor, are sacrificially trading a lesser fear of dying in battle for a greater fear of shame, loss of nobility, and the loss of the city itself. By contrast, says Socrates, the philosopher is a person who begins with absolute confidence, with a vision of eternal truth, goodness, and beauty, and with his own psychic kinship to these abiding forms. For this reason, the philosopher can act positively, truly without fear even unto death (avoiding the merely apparent fearlessness that is in thrall to an even greater fear). He is good, not primarily as acting, but as knowing, or as receiving and recognizing the realm of the forms as that which is most real. No sacrifice is involved here, since the body and lower passions given up are less intense degrees of being, truth, and goodness; the absolute degree of these things includes the reality of the lower, and so nothing is truly lost.

Thus if the good is primary-if as for Platonism and the monotheistic faiths what is, is good-the good is not first occasioned by death.

The third component of the notion of pure sacrifice is the idea that subjectivity itself is constituted through the “persecution” of my consciousness by the demands of the vulnerable other. Here again, I have already enunciated my main response: this tends to render the personal impersonal. For if my ethical response to the sorrows of another precedes my exercise of judgment, I respond in the same way to all ostensible sorrows, whether authentic or not, self-indulgent or not, self-caused or not. I would have no means of knowing whether this persecution was in fact simply a confidence trick on the part of others, universally pretending sorrow in order to win power over me. If, by contrast, one is to respond to real historical persons, then one must first distinguish the legitimacy of their claims, the specificity of their needs. This being said, it goes without saying that to regard God as a big Other shadowing the small human other is simply to make an idol out of generalized and drained subjectivity. Since God is not just another person, but the fullness of personhood and being in whom we participate, He is as much not-other-non aliud as Nicholas of Cusa put it-as other.

This leads naturally to the fourth and final component of the idea of pure sacrifice: the ontological vision which sees Being without immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body. Only this vision, according to our modern thinkers (though not, of course, the Catholic Marion), ensures that the Jewish and Christian imperative to self-sacrifice can enjoy a purified fulfillment.

What the modern presentation of this ontology tends to overlook, however, is its profound link both to the antique pagan polis and to the modern secular state. We need to comprehend the first link if we are to understand something of the process by which sacrifice was displaced from an actual bloody ritual practice to a metaphor for moral action, such that we can now say “he was very self-sacrificial” and not mean “he offered his body to Aztec priests.” What, in part, assisted the transition to metaphor was the way in which the death of the hero for the city came to be construed by the Greeks and the Romans as equivalent to ritual sacrifice, and indeed as rendering the hero himself a fit recipient of sacrifices in turn.

There is a notion here that the hero's life is subsumed in a greater social whole, losing himself without return except for posthumous praise or the celebration of his bravery. The Greeks did not believe the hero continued to live, save in the rather shadowy intimations of an afterlife in Hades. But modern secularity gets rid of even such intimations, and so perfects this pagan logic of sacrificial obliteration of oneself for some ideal, or for the State, or for both. Such a logic elevates as supreme the abstract notion of the perpetually abiding nation-state, outlasting its citizens and being more valued than the lives of individual humans. Sometimes this last aspect is disguised in the form of a “sacrifice for future generations,” but since every generation should logically be subject to the same imperative to sacrifice for future generations, in no generation will the people benefit from the sacrifices of those before. Consummation of the sacrifice, then, is forever postponed.

To espouse these values is essentially to perpetuate the positivist exaltation of “altruism,” of surrender of self for the future, for science, for the state. If the ethical imperative is that we should offer our lives to an other who is present to us only as a trace (as a sufferer, as we said above) and not in visibility, then, as I have shown, this other is an anonymous and therefore generalized other. Thus we live under the ethical sway of a law of abstract otherness, mirroring in the ethical realm the legal assumptions of the modern liberal state, which enjoins a merely abstract respect for the rights of the individual in general with indifference to that individual's gender, character, or cultural specificity.

Given the assumptions of such a state two things follow: our responsibilities tend to become unlimited because we owe our lives infinitely to every other person; and the ethical good never arrives-we can never fulfil this impossible responsibility, and no one could ever legitimately relax and enjoy the benefits of the sacrifices of others. Thus the only thing that is achieved is the continued carrying out of self-obliteration. Liberals pretend that continuous self-obliteration is the demand of the moral law, but in reality it is only the demand of the liberal state, which cannot put a brake upon sacrifice because it is unable to promote any positive goals or values that would define true humanity. It follows that the exaltation of pure self-sacrifice for the other is secretly the sacrifice of all individuals to the impersonality of the formal procedural law of state and marketplace. Like the antique polis, this alone abides, this alone is eternal.

Within the ethical thinking regarding pure sacrifice that I am opposing, one's decision to be responsible for this person rather than that appears to be entirely arbitrary. As Derrida puts it, Why look after this cat rather than all the other stray cats? However, he is surely overlooking here the limitations of liberal politics: if to be good was not, as for liberalism, to exercise a generalized responsibility, but rather, as for antiquity and the Middle Ages, to perform excellently a particular social role which helps to achieve, in coordination with other performed roles, a specific concrete social telos or end, then I can look after the cat assigned to me in the secure knowledge that other people are looking after theirs. Moreover, if this telos is taken as reflecting a transcendent reality, then the individual carrying out his role provides insight into this transcendent that others can learn from.

We can see from this that while, on the one hand, the logic of pure sacrifice upholds the law of an impersonal collectivity, on the other hand it is too individualistic and has no account of the good as achievable through coordination. For modern ethical thinkers, indeed, the tension is resolved only through death, when at last that which I alone can responsibly take on-my own death-is also recognizable as fulfilling the law of public responsibility. But this is only because, as we have seen, in fully possessing myself in death, I pass beyond myself into public, impersonal indifference. By contrast, if we allow for a good achievable through coordination, it is possible to exalt not just self-offering, but even a joyful attention to the infinite presence of a living, visible other above the social whole.

We may be confident that a society based on such coordination would be made up of an infinite series of joyful relations to each other. But that is to say that to carry out the ethical project requires a community collectively aspiring to enact charity. One needs to realize here that before early modernity, when it was reduced from a moral imperative to a private task of one-way giving, charity in the Middle Ages was a reciprocal state of being that persons had to enter into with familiar others, with adopted kin under God, and with friends with whom they were conjoined in a common purpose. Charity was not something for me, privately, to perform, but an entire network of complex reciprocity.

Of course, even a community aspiring to this would be utterly riven by fractures and failures. Much of the time one would be conscious that others were failing to perform their role, and failing to exert any sort of charitable preference. And often, indeed, failures of some would require sacrifices from others, even unto death. But it is at this point that faith in resurrection doubly sustains the project of a charitable society, founded on the widest extension of reciprocity. First of all, because of this faith, one can have hope for the victims of the failures of others; and secondly, in the case of necessary self-sacrifice, one need not surrender oneself to the consuming totality. In either case, one need not embrace the logic of ultimately necessary self-sacrifice without return, either of others or of oneself. If this is true, then only the vision of the eschatological banquet could be an image of the good, whereas the image of dying for the other-though it is the advent of the good in fallen time-cannot itself be the final good, without once more subordinating the person to an impersonal totality, in this case an abstract moral principle.

If, as in this modern ethical vision, there is no resurrected return, then we have to accept that there will be, eventually, nothing more to be said to anyone. But that means that towards all those we have harmed and wounded and then lost without reconciliation, we can only rehearse an empty gesture of private, nominal apology. They can never appear to forgive us, just as those who have injured us and vanished can never appear to be forgiven.

Without resurrection, there can never be any final reconciliation. But in the absence of reconciliation, or of hope for that, neither can there be any morality. For where I cannot be reconciled with the lost one I have injured, I owe him an infinite debt of mourning and regret. So great a debt do I in fact owe, that my energies cannot legitimately be freed up to perform my duties towards the living. But those demands of the living also are infinite and infinitely legitimate, and so, here indeed, without resurrection arises an irresolvable problem: I should not cease mourning and apologizing, and yet I should. Only the hope for an infinite community of all who have ever lived frees us from this dilemma, again to do good.

And so we must finally conclude that resurrection, not death, is the ground of the ethical. They are wrong who claim that in Luke's Gospel a promise of eternal reward contaminates an injunction to unilateral giving. A wider reading of the New Testament, especially John and Paul, suggests that such injunctions are only a moment of eschatological delay within a wider promotion of gift-exchange beyond the fetishized limits upon such exchange imposed by most ancient societies. The name of the Holy Spirit himself as “gift” is after all bestowed not only to denote a pure one-way gratuity, but also because the Spirit expresses the infinitely realized exchange between Father and Son. And if to be resurrected is to be bodily incorporated into the life of the Trinity, resurrection is not an extrinsically added reward for successfully giving without return. Rather, for the Christian, to give is itself to enter into reciprocity and the hope for infinite reciprocity. And to offer oneself, if necessary, unto sacrificial death is already to receive back one's body from beyond the grave. To give, to be good, is already to be resurrected.

John Milbank is Francis Gall Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Virginia. His most recent books include The Word Made Strange, The Mercurial Wood, and Radical Orthodoxy (coeditor).

Dying a Martyr’s Death

2009-07-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

Most people who die for a religion are just another human sacrifice and thus waste their precious life...

http://hirr.hartsem.edu/sociology/rahimi.html

Dying a Martyr’s Death:
The Political Culture of Self-Sacrifice in Contemporary Islamists

A paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, San Francisco, California, August 14, 2004.

Babak Rahimi

Department of Political and Social Sciences
European University Institute
Via dei Roccettini 9, 1-50016 San Domenico di Fiesole
Florence, Italy
brahimi77@hotmail.com

Few things have been a greater taboo in Islam than suicide. As noble it is to die in battle—that is, to die at the enemy’s hands in a just cause—so has it been considered shameful to willfully take one’s own life. Although there is no clear ban on suicide in the Qur’an, much of the controversy in Islamic discourses stems from the meaning of martyrdom and its ethical and theological implications.

This dilemma is mostly apparent in the recent rise of suicide bombing and the so-called “human detonators”, in which have further complicated the notion of martyrdom in the Islamic tradition. Whether considering the young war volunteers in Iran of the mid-1980s, who willingly threw themselves into Iraqi machine-gun fire and minefields, or a young Palestinian blowing himself in front of a Sbarro Pizzeria in Jerusalem, the recent developments signal a major transformation in the Islamic notion of martyrdom, with an added combination of modern warfare technology and radical militancy.

For the most part, the wave of Islamist ideologies that has engulfed the Middle East since the late 70s has dramatically shifted the classical Islamic conception of martyrdom or shahadat for a new description. In the classical view, martyrdom identified the exemplary ethical model of moral action in a show of struggle (jihad) for the sacred, manifested in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. The (male) martyr or shahid encountered the sacred by fighting against the enemies of the true religion; and in the process giving up his life in exchange for a higher, celestial existence. In this regard, it was not merely the event of death that identified martyrdom, but the very fulfillment of the duty of obedience to the will of God that brought one to the level of sacred.

But the modern treatment of martyrdom emphasizes less the ethical and more the ideological, that is, the mobilizing, motivating and boundary marking potential of self-sacrifice. The central shift in the contemporary Islamist notion of martyrdom lies in the ideological value of self-sacrifice, defined in the medium of symbolic violence, in which martyrdom is ritually enacted by the actors to confirm identity through the death of the other as a symbolic affirmation of group solidarity.

The main thrust of my argument in this paper is that the new discourse of martyrdom in contemporary Islamist movements is an attempt to essentialize sacrifice in an ideologically totalistic ways. In an attempt to appropriate different themes and sociopolitical patterns in modernity, the new Islamist discourses have engaged in the reinterpretation and reformulation of the classical ethical notion of martyrdom; and, as a result, they have produced diverse discursive conceptions of martyrdom within the contemporary Islamist movements. For the purpose of this presentation, I would like to identify three distinct yet (partly) overlapping discourses of martyrdom, that is: honorific, revivalist, and mystical-millenarianism.

Let us begin by making clear how I shall be using these terms.

1.Revivalism. The advocates of revivalist Islamic ideology conceptualize martyrdom as a sacred act for the renewal (or tajdid) of the faith through the act of self-sacrifice. In the revivalist tradition, best represented by thinkers like Mawdudi and Hasan al-Bana, martyrdom is conceptualized within a circular historical process that diametrically opposes the Western notion of progress. According to these thinkers (like Mawdudi), for instance, the necessity to regenerate Islam throughout history is due to the reappearance of pre-Islamic age of ignorance or jaheliat. The need to have the periodic renewal for the attainment of the ideal society, which the Prophet and the righteous four Caliphs established in the seventeenth century, requires the ultimate act of self-sacrifice. To become a martyr in an attempt to fight against the reappearance of the age of ignorance is indeed the affirmation of the Prophet’s holy message.

In this view, waging jihad and dying in the process is central to the cause of Islam. To use Al-Bana’s famous words here, “God gives the umma (or the Muslim community) that is skilled in the practice of death and that knows how to die a noble death an exalted life in this world and eternal felicity in the next.” To become a martyr, then, is the affirmation of the elect and the chosen, those that sacrifice themselves for God and those that will profit in this world and attain blessing in the next. Central to this view is the notion that martyrdom involves the ability to revive Islam and bring back the “Golden Age” in the highest, most sacred possible ways.

2.Honorific. There is a sense in which the revivalist notion of martyrdom could also entail an honorific conception of self-sacrifice. This is so since, along with the affirmation of the Prophet’s message, martyrdom can also signify the honorable defense of the faith. The code of honor, which reflects a defensive derive to protect the pietistic themes of virtue and purity, plays an important role in the revivalist discourse.

In the second treatment of martyrdom, honorific conception of martyrdom becomes most apparent in a more radically puritanical form of Islamist movements, best represented by the Al-Qaida organization. For groups like Al-Qaida, to die a martyr’s death is to protect and honor the faith and the integrity of Islam, which has been threatened or polluted by the impure unbelievers. The so-called “martyrs” of the 9/11 Twin-Towers and Washington in a sense were elected by God, since they honorably defended Islam from the unbelievers by attacking the enemies at their home, and in the process surrendering their lives as an honorific act of submission to the all-mighty.

A statement from the Qiadat al-jihad reports, “The brothers who offered themselves for the destruction of the strongholds of the enemy did not offer themselves in order to gain earthly possessions…Rather, they offered their souls as a sacrifice for the religion of Allah, defending Muslims whom American hands had mistreated by various types of torture of domination and subjugation in every place.”

Let us recall here that the main objective of Al-Qaida and its role in the events of 9/11 was not merely to revive Islam (which is a recent development in the ideology of the movement), and make Muslims aware of an imagined confrontation between the “West and Islam”; but mainly to take vengeance for the honor that was lost to Muslims while the US military was stationed in the Arabian peninsula, coupled with the starvation of the Iraqi children during the oil-for-food embargo of the 90s. The attempt to restore the honor of Muslims and the purity of Islam played the central role in this second type of martyrdom.

[Here, btw, I would also classify the ideologies of Hammas and al-Jihad Islami movements (along with the Palestinian secular political movements) as the honorific type of martyrdom, since they also stress the loss of honor as a result of the Israeli presence in the occupied territories, and the impurity caused by the death of Muslim members of the community by the enemy forces. We should bear in mind here that Hamas’ suicide-bombing campaign began really after the Goldstein massacre of Ibrahim Mosque in Hebran in early 1994, which resulted in the death of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers. The massacre triggered new demands for an honorific type of martyrdom as an expression of vengeance for the impurity caused by the death of Muslims at a holy site. ]

3.Mystical-millenarian. The third type, that is millenarian-mysticism, implies a type of martyrdom in terms of an extraordinary experience of the divine through the act of self-sacrifice. In its eschatological expectation of the end of the world, the act of martyrdom involves an altered state of consciousness (trance, vision or suppression of cognitive contact with the ordinary world), which ultimately involves the loss of self as a result. In this regard, the central theme in Millenarian-mystical discourse is not to revive the past, but to break from it, to discontinue from the past, the ordinary, the common, and unleash a new unimaginable reality with the return of the Mahdi. The centrality of the messianic persona-figure in this discourse is the role of mysticism, and the self-denunciatory demand that is equally congenial to the ideological promotion of a revolutionary disposition.

Consider Ali Shariati, the late Shi’i intellectual and chief ideologue of the 1979 Iranian revolution. According to Shariati, martyrdom is the expression of the value, the ideal in which the martyr sacrifices himself for something greater and more lasting, leaving behind a permanent and valuable legacy.

In his usually idiosyncratic way, Shariati describes two kinds of idealized notion of martyrdom. The first kind, namely a mujahid or a fighter’s martyrdom, signifies a “hero who goes into battle to achieve victory and defeat the enemy. Instead he is defeated, is killed, and thus becomes a shahid. His name is registered at the top of the list of those who died for the cause of their belief. The second kind, namely the Husayni martyrdom (named after the death of the Prophet’s beloved grandson at the battle of Karbala in 680 C.E.), represents the sort of shahadit that involves a form of martyr’s death in such the actor knows his fate and consciously seeks (or chooses) to attain it, despite victory or defeat on the battlefield. A shahid of the Husayini type, Shariati explains, is a “person who, from the beginning of his decision, chooses his own shahadat, even though, between his decision-making and his death, months or even years may pass.”

In other words, in the second case, “The shahid chooses his own shahadat,” and he accepts his fate as a way to realize and arise “for his own death.” The act of self-sacrifice in this second type is an act of self-realization, the actualization of destiny. And, moreover, the performance of shahat, in its Husayini manifestation, is more like an act of self-cultivation; a way to open oneself up to a primary “essential” self that chooses his own loss for a higher state of being, which reflects the inner vision of the Holy in the creative act of self-sacrifice. A Shahid attains a new soul and, as Shariati puts it, becomes “knowledge himself”.

In short, what is common about all these three different, though at times overlapping, discourses of martyrdom is the emphasis on the ideological value of self-sacrifice. They all aim to interpret martyrdom in terms of its substantial importance to affirm the ideals of Islam through the act of self-sacrifice.

However, they also share a basic ideological objective, that is, the way in which through the act of sacred suicide the experience of reproduction of a more lasting life, an immortal life becomes the basis for an essential subjective transformation, which creates an idiom and a legitimation for aggression. Whether considering the flying martyr missions of 9/11 or the 1984 Hizbollah’s truck-bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, the symbolism in dying a martyr’s death maintains the essential vitality of legitimation of outwardly directed militant aggression towards a real or an imagined enemy.

On the level of practice, all these three discourses of martyrdom entail a ritualistic attempt to dramatically bring about a new form of totalistic identity, which would confirm group and communal solidarity through the death of the other. Martyrdom, in other words, centrally involves the killing of an enemy, which enables the community of believers (regardless of sex), those that accept and glorify the fate of the male martyr warrior, to regain a total vitality and life by maintaining strict boundaries between “us” and “them”.

Martyrdom as a symbol of group identity, allows the male martyr and his community to participate in the immortality of a transcendent entity, an entity, which can essentially be achieved through the loss of self, the sacrifice of one’s life, and the conquest of an external enemy. And it is in the very act of sacrifice that the ordinary sense of existence is defied in a demand for a transient state of existence beyond this world, beyond oneself in the world.

Self-Sacrifice from the book The Nature of Goodness

2009-07-04T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Nature of Goodness
by George Herbert Palmer

CHAPTER VI. Self-Sacrifice

The view of human goodness presented in the preceding chapter is one which is at present finding remarkably wide acceptance. Philosophers are often reproached with an indisposition to agree, and naturally where inquiry is active diversity will obtain. But to-day there appears a strange unanimity as regards the ultimate formula of ethics. The empirical schools state this as the highest form of the struggle for existence; the idealistic, as self-realization. The two are the same so far as they both regard morality as having to do with the development of life in persons. These curious beings, both also acknowledge, can never rest till they attain a completeness now incalculable.

Of course there is abundant diversity in the application of such formulae. In interpreting them we come upon problems no less urgent and tangled than those which vexed our fathers. Who and what is a person? How far is he detachable from nature?

How far from his fellow men? Is his individuality an illusion, and each of us only an imperfect phase of a single universal being, so that in strictness we must own that there is none good but one, that is God? These and kindred questions naturally oppress the thought of our time. Yet all are but so many attempts to push the formula of self-realization into entire clearness. The considerable agreement in ethical formulae everywhere noticeable shows that at least so much advance has been made: morality has ceased to be primarily repressive, and is now regarded as the amplest exhibit of human nature, free from every external precept, however sacred.

Man is the measure of the moral universe, and the development of himself his single duty.

But when we thus accept self-realization as our supreme aim, we bring ourselves into seeming conflict with one of our profoundest moral instincts. It is self-sacrifice that calls forth from all mankind, as nothing else does, the distinctively moral response of reverence. Intelligence, skill, beauty, learning–we admire them all; but when we see an act of self-sacrifice, however small, an awe falls on us; we bow our heads, fearful that we might not have been capable of anything so glorious. We thus acknowledge self-sacrifice to be the very culmination of the moral life. He who understand it has comprehended all righteousness, human and divine. But how does self-sacrifice accord with self-development? Will he who is busy cultivating himself sacrifice himself? Is there not a kind of conflict between the two? Yet can we abandon either? And if not, must not the formula of self- realization accept modification?

This, then, is the problem to which I must now turn: the possible adjustment of these two imperative claims,–the claim to realize one’s self and the claim to sacrifice one’s self. And I shall most easily set my theme before my readers if I state at once the four historic objections to the reality of self-sacrifice. I call them historic, for they have appeared and reappeared in the history of ethics, and have been worked out there on a great scale. While not altogether consistent with one another, no one of them is unimportant. Together they compactly present those conflicting considerations which must be borne in mind when we attempt to comprehend the subtleties of self- sacrifice. I will endeavor to state them briefly and sympathetically.

First, self-sacrifice is psychologically impossible. No man ever performs a strictly disinterested act, as has been shown in my chapter on self-direction. Before desire will start, his own interest must be engaged. In action we seek to accomplish something, and between that something and ourselves some sort of valued connection must be felt. Every wish indicates that the wisher experiences a need which he thinks might be supplied by the object wished for. It is true that wishes and wills are often directed upon external objects, but only because we believe that our own well-being is involved in their union with us. I devote myself to my friend as my friend, counting his happiness and my own inseparable. Were he so entirely a foreigner that I had no interest in him, my sacrifices for him–even if conceivable–would be meaningless. They acquire meaning only through my sense of a tie between him and me. My service of him may be regarded as my escape from petty selfishness into broad selfishness, from immediate gain to remote gain. But the prospect of gain in some form, proximate or ultimate, gain often of an impalpable and spiritual sort, always attends my wish and will. The aim at self-realization, however hidden, is everywhere the root of action. No belittlement of ourselves can appear desirable except as a step toward ultimate enlargement. Self-sacrifice in any true and thorough-going sense never occurs.

So cogent is this objection, and so frequently does it appear, not only in ethical discussion but in the minds of the struggling multitude, that he who has not faced it, and taken its truth well to heart, can have little comprehension of self-sacrifice. But it is a blessed fact that thousands who comprehend self-sacrifice little practise it largely.

A second objection strips off the glory of self-sacrifice and regards it as a sad necessity. While there is nothing in it to attract or be approved, the lamentable fact is that we are so crowded together and disposed to trample on one another that, partially to escape, we must each agree to abate something of our own in behalf of a neighbor’s gain. We cannot each be all we would. It is a sign of our mean estate that again and again we need to cut off sections of what we count valuable in order to save any portion. Only by such compromises are we able to get along with one another. He who refuses them finds himself exposed to still greater loss. The hard conditions under which we live appear in the fact that such restraint is inevitable.

I call self- sacrifice, therefore, a sad necessity.

This theory of sacrifice is urged by Hobbes and by the later moralists who follow his daring lead. It should be counted among the objections because, while it admits the fact of self-sacrifice, it denies its dignity.

A third objection declares sacrifice to be needless. Its very appearance rests on a misconception. We mistakenly suppose that in abating our own for the sake of our neighbor’s good, we lose. In reality this is our true mode of enlargement. The interests of the individual and society are not hostile or alien, but supplemental. Society is nothing but the larger individual; so that he alone realizes himself who enters most fully into social relations, making the well-being of society his own.

This is plain enough when we study the working of a small and comprehensible portion of society. The child does not lose through identification with family life. That is his great means of realizing himself. To assume contrast and antagonism between family interest and the interest of the child is palpably unwarranted and untrue. Equally unwarranted is a similar assumption in the broader ranges of society. When we talk of sacrifice, we refer merely to the first stage and outer aspect of the act. Underneath, self-interest is guarded, the individual giving up his individuality only through obtaining a larger individuality still.

Such identity of interest between society and the individual the moralists of the eighteenth century are never tired of pointing out. If they are right, and the identity is complete, then sacrifice is abolished or is only a generous illusion. But these men never quite succeeded in persuading the English people of their doctrine, at least they never carried their thought fully over into the common mind.

That common mind has always thought of sacrifice in a widely different way, but in one which renders it still more incomprehensible. Self- sacrifice it regards as a glorious madness. Though the only act which ever forces us to bow in reverent awe, it is insolubly mysterious, irrational, crazy perhaps, but superb. For in it we do not deliberate. We hear a call, we shut our ears to prudence, and with courageous blindness as regards damage of our own, we hasten headlong to meet the needs of others. To reckon heroism, to count, up opposing gains and losses, balancing them one against another in order clear-sightedly to act, is to render heroism impossible. Into it there enters an element of insanity. The sacrificer must feel that he cares nothing for what is rational, but only for what is holy, for his duty.

The rational and the holy,–in the mind of him who has not been disturbed by theoretic controversy these two stand in harsh antithesis, and the antithesis has been approved by important ethical writers of our time. The rational man is, of course, needed in the humdrum work of life. His assertive and sagacious spirit clears many a tangled pathway. But he gets no reverence, the characteristic response of self-sacrifice. This is reserved for him who says, “No prudence for me! I will he admirably crazy. Let me fling myself away, so only there come salvation to others.”

Such, then, are the four massive objections: self-sacrifice is unreal psychologically, aesthetically, morally, or rationally: But negative considerations are not enough. No amount of demonstration of what a thing is not will ever reveal what it is. Objections are merely of value for clearing a field and marking the spots on which a structure cannot be reared. The serious task of erecting that structure somewhere still remains. To it I now address myself.

What we need to consider first is the reality and wide range of self- sacrifice. The moment the term is mentioned there spring up before our minds certain typical examples of it. We see the soldier advancing toward the battlefield, to stake his life for a country in whose prosperity he may never share. We see the infant falling into the water, and the full-grown man flinging in after it his own assured and valued life in hopes of rescuing that incipient and uncertain thing, a little child.

Yes, I myself came on a case of heroism hardly less striking. I was riding my bicycle along the public street when there dashed past me a runaway horse with a carriage at his heels, both moving so madly that I thought all the city was in danger. I pursued as rapidly as I could, and as I neared my home, saw horse and carriage standing by the sidewalk. By the horse’s head stood a negro. I went up to him and said, “Did you catch that horse?” “Yes, sir,” he answered. “But,” I said, “he was going at a furious pace.” “Yes, sir.” “And he might have run you down.” “Yes, sir, but I know horses, and I was afraid he would hurt some of these children.” There he stood, the big brown hero, unexalted, soothing the still restive horse and unaware of having done anything out of the ordinary. I entered my house ashamed. Had I possessed such skill, would I have ventured my life in such a fashion?

Such are some of the shining examples of self-sacrifice which occur to us at the first mention of the word. But we shall mislead ourselves if we confine our thoughts to cases so climactic, triumphant, and spectacular. Deeds like these dazzle and do not invite to full analysis of their nature. Let us turn to affairs more usual.

I have happened to know intimately members of three professions– ministers, nurses, teachers-and I find self-sacrifice a matter of daily practice with them all. To it the minister is dedicated. He must not look for gain. He has a salary, of course; but it is much in the nature of a fee, a means of insuring him a certain kind of living. And while it is common enough to find a minister studying how he may make money in his parish, it is commoner far to find one bent on seeing how he can make righteousness prevail there, though it overwhelm him. The other professions do not so manifestly aim at self-sacrifice. They are distinctly money-making. They exact a given sum for a given service. Still, in them too how constantly do we see that that which is given far outruns that which is paid for. I have watched pretty closely the work of a dozen or more trained nurses, and I believe it Would be hard to find any class in the community showing a higher average of estimable character. How quiet they are under the most irritating circumstances! How fully they pour themselves into the lives of their patients! How prompt is the deft hand! How considerate the swift intelligence! Their hearts are aglow over what can be given, not over what can be got. A similar temper is widely observable among teachers, especially among those of the lower grades. Paid though they are for a certain task, how indisposed they are to limit themselves to that task or to confine their care of their children to the schoolroom! The hard-worked creatures acquire an intimate interest in the little lives and, heedless of themselves, are continually ready to spend and be spent for those who cannot know what they receive. Among such teachers I find self-sacrifice as broad, as deep, as genuine, if not so striking, as that of the soldier in the field.

Evidently, then, self-sacrifice may be wide-spread and may permeate the institutions of ordinary life; being found even in occupations primarily ordered by principles of give and take, where it expresses itself in a kind of surplusage of giving above what is prescribed in the contract. In this form it enters into trade. The high-minded merchant is not concerned merely with getting his money back from an article sold. He interests himself in the thoroughly excellent quality of that article, in the accommodation of his customers, the soundness of his business methods, and the honorable standing of his firm. And when we turn to our public officials, how frequent it is–how frequent in spite of what the newspapers say–to find men eager for the public good, men ready to take labor on themselves if only the state may be saved from cost and damage!

But I still underestimate the prevalence of the principle. Our instances must be homelier yet. Each day come petty citations to self- sacrifice which are accepted as a matter of course. As I walk to my lecture-room somebody stops me and says, “What is the way to Berkeley Street?” Do I reprovingly answer, “You must have made a mistake. I have no interest in Berkeley Street. I think it is you who are going there, and why are you putting me to inconvenience merely that you may the more easily find your way?” Should I answer so, he would think and possibly say, “There are strange people in Cambridge, remoter from human kind than any known elsewhere.” Every one would feel astonishment at the man who declined to bear his little portion of a neighbor’s burden. Our commonest acceptance of society involves self- sacrifice, and in all our trivial intercourse we expect to put ourselves to unrewarded inconvenience for the sake of others.

What I have set myself to make plain in this series of graded examples is simply this: self-sacrifice is not something exceptional, something occurring at crises of our lives, something for which we need perpetually to be preparing ourselves, so that when the great occasion comes we may be ready to lay ourselves upon its altar.

Such romanticism distorts and obscures. Self-sacrifice is an everyday affair. By it we live. It is the very air of our moral lungs. Without it society could not go on for an hour. And that is precisely why we reverence it so–not for its rarity, but for its importance. Nothing else, I suppose, so instantly calls on the beholder for a bowing of the head. Even a slight exhibit of it sends through the sensitive observer a thrill of reverent abasement. Other acts we may admire; others we may envy; this we adore.

Perhaps we are now prepared to sum up our descriptive account and throw what we have observed into a sort of definition. I mean by self- sacrifice any diminution of my own possessions, pleasures, or powers, in order to increase those of others.

Naturally what we first think of is the parting with possessions. That is what the word charity most readily suggests, the giving up of some physical object owned by us which, even at the moment of giving, we ourselves desire. But the gift may be other than a physical object. When I would gladly sit, I may stand in the car for the sake of giving another ease. But the greatest conceivable self-sacrifice is when I give myself: when, that is, I in some way allow my own powers to be narrowed in order that those of some one else may be enlarged. Parents are familiar with such exquisite charity, parents who put themselves to daily hardship because they want education for their boys. But they have no monopoly in this kind. I who stand in the guardianship of youth have frequent occasion to miss a favorite pupil, boy or girl, who throws up a college training and goes home–often, in my judgment, mistakenly–to support, or merely to cheer, the family there. Of course such gifts are incomparable. No parting with one’s goods, no abandonment of one’s pleasures, can be measured against them. Yet this is what is going on all over the country where devoted mother, gallant son, loyal husband, are limiting their own range of existence for the sake of broadening that of certain whom they hold dear.

But when we have thus assembled our omnipresent facts and set them in order for cool assessment, the enigma of self-sacrifice only appears the more clearly. Why should a man sacrifice himself? Why voluntarily accept loss? Each of us has but a single life. Each feels the pressure of his own needs and desires. These point the way to enlargement. How, then, can I disinterestedly prefer another’s gain? Each of us is penned within the range of his solitary consciousness, which may be broadened or narrowed but cannot be passed. It is incumbent on us, therefore, to study our own enrichment. Anticipating whatever might confirm or crumble our being, we should strenuously seize the one and reject the other. Deliberately to turn toward loss would seem to be crazy. What should a man accept in exchange for his life?

Here is the difficulty, a difficulty of the profoundest and most instructive sort. If we could see our way clearly through it, little in ethics would remain obscure.

The common mode of meeting it is to leave it thus paradoxical. Self-sacrifice banishes rationality and is a glorious madness. But such a conclusion is a repellent one. How can it be? Reason is man’s distinctive characteristic. While brutes act blindly, while the punctual physical universe minutely obeys laws of which it knows nothing, usually it is open to man to judge the path he will pursue. Shall we then say that, though reason is a convenience in all the lower stretches of life, when we reach self-sacrifice, our single awesome height, it ceases? I cannot think so. On the contrary, I hold that in self-sacrifice we have a case not of glorious madness, but of somewhat extreme rationality. How, then, is rational contrasted with irrational guidance? As we here approach the central and most difficult part of our discussion, clearness will oblige me to enter into some detail.

When a child looks at a watch, he sees a single object. It is something there, a something altogether detached from his consciousness, from the table, from other objects around. It is a brute fact, one single thing, complete in itself. Such is the child’s perception. But a man of understanding looks at it differently. Its detached singleness is not to him the most important truth in regard to it. Its meaning must rather be found in the relations in which it stands, relations which, seeming at first to lie outside it, really enter into it and make it what it is. The rational man would accordingly see it all alive with the qualities of gold, brass, steel, the metals of which it is composed. He would find it incomprehensible apart from the mind of its maker, and would not regard that mind and watch as two things, but as matters essentially related. Indeed, these relations would run wider still, and reason would not rest satisfied until the watch was united to time itself, to the very framework of the universe. Apart from this it would be meaningless. In short, if a man comprehends the watch in a rational way he must comprehend it in what may he called a conjunct way. The child might picture it as abstract and single, but it could really be known only in connection with all that exists. Of course we pause far short of such full knowledge. Our reason cannot stretch to the infinity of things. But just so far as relations can be traced between this object and all other objects, so much the more rational does the knowledge of the watch become. Rationality is the comprehending of anything in its relations. The perceptive, isolated view is irrational.

But if this is true of so simple a matter as a watch, it is doubly true of a complex human being. The child imagines he can comprehend a person too in isolation, but rational proverb-makers long ago told us, “One person, no person.” Each person must be conceived as tied in with all his fellows. We have seen how in the case of the watch we were almost obliged to abandon the thought of a single object and to speak of it as a kind of centre of constitutive relations. A plexus of ties runs in every direction, and where these cross there is the watch. So it is among human beings. If we try for a moment to conceive a person as single and detached, we shall find he would have no powers to exercise. No emotions would be his, whether of love or hate, for they imply objects to arouse them, no occupations of civilized life, for these involve mutual dependency. From speech he would be cut off, if there were nobody to speak to; nor would any such instrument as language be ready for his use, if ancestors had not cooperated in its construction. His very thoughts would become a meaningless series of impressions if they indicated no reality beside themselves. So empty would be that fiction, the single and isolated individual. The real creature, rational and conjunct man, is he who stands in living relationship with his fellows, they being a veritable part of him and he of them. Man is essentially a social being, not a being who happens to be living in society. Society enters into his inmost fibre, and apart from society he is not. Yet this does not mean that society, any more than the individual, has an independent existence, prior, complete, and authoritative. What would society be, parted from the individuals who compose it? No more than an individual who does not embody social relationships. The two are mutual conceptions, different aspects of the same thing. We may view a person abstractly, fixing attention on his single centre of consciousness; or we may view him conjunctly, attending to his multifarious ties.

Now what is distinctive of self-sacrifice is that it insists in a somewhat extreme way on this second and rational mode of regard. It is a frank confession of interlocking lives. It says, “I have nothing to do with the abstract, isolated, and finite self. That is a matter of no consequence. What I care about is the conjunct, social, and infinite self–that self which is inseparable from others. Where that calls, I serve.” The self-sacrificing person knows no interest of his own separate from those of his father and mother, his wife and children. He cannot ask what is good for himself and set it in contrast with what is good for them. For his own broader existence is presented in these dear members of his family. And such a man, so far from being mad, is wise as few of us are. Glorious indeed is the self- sacrificer, because he is so sane, because in him all pettiness and detachment are swept away. He appears mad only to those who stand at the opposite point of view, but in his eyes it is they who are ridiculous. In fact, each must be counted crazy or wise according to the view we take of what constitutes the real person.

I remember a story current in our newspapers during the Civil War. Just before a battle, an officer of our army, knowing of what consequence it was that his regiment should hold its ground, hastened to the rear to see that none of his men were straggling. He met a cowardly fellow trying to regain the camp. Turning upon him in a passion of disgust, he said, “What! Do you count your miserable little life worth more than that of this great army?” “Worth more to me, sir,” the man replied. How sensible! How entirely just from his own point of view, that of the isolated self! Taking only this into account, he was but a moral child, incapable of comprehending anything so difficult as a conjunct self. He imagined that could he but save this eating, breathing, feeling self, no matter if the country were lost, he would be a gainer. What folly! What would existence be worth outside the total inter-relationship of human beings called his land? But this fact he could not perceive.

To risk his separate self in such a cause seemed absurd. Turn for a moment and see how absurd the separate self appears from the point of view of the conjunct. When our Lord hung upon the cross, the jeering soldiers shouted, “He saved others, himself he cannot save.” No, he could not; and his inability seemed to them ridiculous, while it was in reality his glory. His true self he was saving–himself and all mankind–the only self he valued.

Now it is this strange complexity of our being, compelling us to view ourselves in both a separate and a conjunct way, which creates all the difficulty in the problem of self-sacrifice. But I dare say that when I have thus shown the reality and worth of the conjunct self, it will be felt that self-sacrifice is altogether illusory; for while it seems to produce loss, it is in fact the avoidance of what entails littleness. So says Emerson:–

“Let love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply:
’T is man’s perdition to be safe
When for the truth he ought to die.”

Have we not, then, by explaining the rationality of self-sacrifice, explained away the whole matter and practically identified it with self-culture? There is plausibility in this view–and it has often been maintained–but not complete truth.

For evidently the emotions excited by culture and sacrifice are directly antagonistic. Toward a man pursuing the aim of culture we experience a feeling of approval, not unmixed with suspicion, but we give him none of that reverent adoration which is the proper response to sacrifice. And if the feelings of the beholder are contrasted, so also are the psychological processes of the performer.

The man of culture starts with a sense of defect which he seeks to supplement; the sacrificer, with a sense of fullness which he seeks to empty. He who turns to self-culture says, “I have progressed thus far. I have gained thus much of what I would acquire. But still I am poor. I need more. Let me gather as abundantly as possible on every side.” But the thought of him who turns to self- sacrifice is, “I have been gaining, but I only gained to give. Here is my opportunity. Let me pour out as largely as I may.” He contemplates final impoverishment. Accordingly I was obliged to say in my definition that the self-sacrificer seeks to heighten another’s possessions, pleasures, or powers at the cost of his own. Undoubtedly at the end of the process he often finds himself richer than at the beginning. Perhaps this is the normal result; but it is not contemplated. Psychologically the sacrificer is facing in a different direction.

Yet, though the motive agencies of the two are thus contrasted, I think we must acknowledge that sacrifice no less than culture is a powerful form of self-assertion. To miss this is to miss its essential character, and at the same time to miss the safeguards which should protect it against waste. For to say, “I will sacrifice myself” is to leave the important part of the business unexpressed. The weighty matter is in the covert preposition for.–"I will sacrifice myself for,” An approved object is aimed at. We are not primarily interested in negating ourselves.

Only our estimate of the importance of the object justifies our intended loss. This object should accordingly be scrutinized. Self-sacrifice is noble if its end is noble, but become reprehensible when its object is petty or undeserving. Omit or overlook that word for, and self-sacrifice loses its exalted character. It sinks into asceticism, one often most degrading of moral aberrations. In asceticism we prize self-sacrifice for its own sake. We hunt out what we value most; we judge what would most completely fulfill our needs; and then we abolish it. Abolish it for what? For nothing but the mere sake of abolishing. This is to turn morality upside down; and in place of the Christian ideal of abounding life, to set up the pessimistic aim of impoverishment. There is nothing of this kind in self-sacrifice.

Here we assert ourselves, our conjunct selves. We estimate what will be best for the community of man and seek to further this at whatever cost to our isolated individuality. By this dedication to a deserving object sacrifice is purified, ennobled, and made strong. We speak of the glorious deed of him who plunges into the water to save a child. But it is a foolish and immoral thing to risk one’s life for a stone, a coin, or nothing at all. “Is the object deserving?” we must ask, “or shall I reserve myself for greater need?”

Too easily does our sympathetic and sentimental age, recklessly eulogistic of altruism, hurry into self-sacrifice. Altruism in itself is worthless. That an act is unselfish can never justify its performance. He who would be a great giver must first be a great person. Our men, and still more our women, need as urgently the gospel of self-development as that of self-sacrifice; though the two are naturally supplemental. Our only means of estimating the propriety and dignity of sacrifice is to inquire how closely connected with ourselves is its object. Until we can justify this connection, we have no right to incur it, for genuine sacrifice is always an act of self- assertion. In saving his regiment and contributing his share toward saving his country, the soldier asserts his own interests. He is a good soldier in proportion as he feels these interests to be his; while the deserter is condemned, not for refusing to give his life to an alien country and regiment, but because he was small enough to imagine that these great constituents of himself were alien. I tell the man on the street the way home because I cannot part his bewilderment from my own. The problem always is, What may I suitably regard as mine? And in solving it, we should study as carefully that for which we propose to sacrifice ourselves as anything which we might seek to obtain. Triviality or lack of permanent consequence is as objectionable in the one case as in the other. The only safe rule is that self-sacrifice is self-assertion, is a judgment as regards what we would welcome to be a portion of our conjunct self.

Perhaps an extreme case will show this most clearly. Jesus prayed, “Not my will, but thine, be done.” He did not then lose his will. He asserted and obtained it. For his will was that the divine will should be fulfilled, and fulfilled it was. He set aside one form of his will, his private and isolated will, knowing it to be delusive. But his true or conjunct will–and he knew it to be his true one–he abundantly obtained. It is no wonder, then, that in explaining these things to his disciples he says, “My meat it is to do the will of my Father." That is always the language of genuine self-sacrifice. The act is not complete until the sense of loss has disappeared.

Yet while I hold that self-sacrifice is thus the very extreme of rationality, grounding as it does all worth in the relational or conjunct selfhood, I cannot disguise from myself that it contains an element of tragedy too. This my readers will already have felt and will have begun to rebel against my insistence that self-sacrifice is the fulfillment of our being. For though it is true that when opposition arises between the conjunct and separate selves our largest safety is with the former, the very fact that such opposition is possible involves tragedy.

One part of the nature becomes arrayed against another. We must die to live. Our lower goods are found incompatible with our higher. Pleasure, comfort, property, friends, possibly life itself, have become hostile to our more inclusive aims and must be cast aside. It is true that when the tragic antithesis is presented and we can reach our higher goods only by loss of the lower, hesitation is ruin. It is true too that on account of that element of self-assertion to which I have drawn, attention, the genuine sacrificer is ordinarily unaware of any such tragedy. But none the less tragedy is there. To suppose it absent would strip sacrifice of what we regard as most characteristic.

Nor can we pause here. Those who would call self-sacrifice a glorious madness have still further justification. A leap into the dark we must at least admit it to be, For trace it rationally as far as we may, there always remains uncertainty at the close. There is, for example, uncertainty about ultimate results. The mother toiling for her child, and neglecting for its sake most of what would render her own life rich, can never know that this child will grow up to power. The day may come when she will wish it had died in childhood. The glory of her action is bound up with this darkness. Were the soldier, marching to the field, sure that his side would be victorious, he would be only half a hero. The consequences of self-sacrifice can never be certain, foreseen, calculable. There must be risk. Omit it, and the sacrifice disappears. Indeed nothing in life which calls forth high admiration is free from this touch of faith and courage, this movement into the unknown. It is at the very heart of self-sacrifice.

But besides the unknown character of the result there is usually uncertainty as regards the cost. The sacrificer does not give according to measure. I do not say I will attend to this sick person up to such and such a point, but when that point is reached I shall have done enough. This would hardly be self-sacrifice. I rather say, “Here I am. Take me, use me to the full, spend of me whatever you need. How much that will be, I do not know.” So there is an element of darkness in ourselves.

And possibly I ought to mention a third variety of these incalculabilities of sacrifice. We do not plan the case. A while ago, meeting a literary man whose product is of much consequence to the community and himself, I asked him how his book was coming on. “Badly,” he answered. “Just now an aged relative has fallen ill.

There is no other place where she can be properly disposed, and so she has been brought to my house. I must care for her, my home will be much broken up, and my work must be set aside.” I said, “Is that your duty? Have you not a more important obligation to your book?” But he answered, “One cannot choose a duty.” I did not fully agree. I think we should carefully weigh duties, even if we do not choose them. Morality would otherwise become the sport of accident. But I perceive that in the last analysis no duty is made by ourselves. It is given us by something more authoritative than we, something which we cannot alter, fully estimate, or without damage evade. Necessity is laid upon us, sometimes an invading necessity. We are walking our well-ordered path, pursuing some dear aims, when harsh before us stands a waiting duty, bidding us lay aside that in which we are engaged and take it. I have said I believe a degree of scrutiny is needful here. We should ask, what for?

We should correlate the new duty with those already pledged. And probably an interrupting duty is less often the one it is well to follow than one which has had something of our time and care. Few fresh calls can have the weighty claim of loyalty to obligation already incurred. But, after all, that on which we finally decide has not sprung from our own wishes. It subjects those wishes to itself.

Standing over against us, it summons us to do its bidding, and allows us no more to be our own self-directed masters.

Summing up, then, the jarring characteristics of self-sacrifice,–its frequency, rationality, assertiveness, nearness to self–culture; yes, and its darker traits of risk, immeasurability, and authoritativeness, –does it not begin to appear that I have been calling it by a wrong name? Self-sacrifice is a negative term. It lays stress on the thought that I set myself aside, become in some way less than I was before. And no doubt through all this intricate discussion certain belittlements have been acknowledged, though these have also been shown to lie along the path of largeness. There are, therefore, in self-sacrifice both negative and positive elements. But why select its name from the subordinate part? Why turn to the front its incidental negations? This is topsy-turvy nomenclature. Better blot the word self-sacrifice from our dictionaries. Devotion, service, love, dedication to a cause, –these words mark its real nature and are the only descriptions of it which its practicers will recognize. That damage to the abstract self which chiefly impresses the outsider is something of which the sacrificer is hardly aware. How exquisitely astonished are the men in the parable when called to receive reward for their generous gifts! “Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee, or thirsty and gave thee drink? When saw we thee sick or in prison and came unto thee?" They thought they had only been following their own desires.

Perhaps the most admirable case of self-sacrifice is that in which no single person appears who is profited by our loss. The scholar, the artist, the scientific man dedicate themselves to the interests of undifferentiated humanity. They serve their undecipherable race, not knowing who will obtain gains through their toils. In their sublime benefactions they study the wants of no individual person, not even of themselves. Yet, turn to a man of this type and try to call his attention to the privations he endures, and what will be his answer? “I have no coat? I have no dinner? I have little money? People do not honor me as they honor others? Yes, I believe I lack these trifles. But think what I possess! This great subject; or rather, it possesses me. And it shall have of me whatever it requires.”

In such service of the absolute is found the highest expression of self-sacrifice, of social service, of self-realization. The doctrine that though union with a reason and righteousness not exclusively our own each of us may hourly be renewed is the very heart of ethics.

I have attempted to cut out a clear path through an ethical jungle overgrown with the exuberance of human life. I have not succeeded, and it is probably impossible to succeed. In the subject itself there is paradox. Conflicting elements enter into the very constitution of a person. To trace them even imperfectly one must be patient of refinements, accessible to qualifications, and ever ready to admit the opposite of what has been laboriously established. We all desire through study to win a swift simplicity. But nature abhors simplicity: she complicates; she forces those who would know to take pains, to proceed cautiously, and to feel their way along from point to point. This I have tried to do; and I believe that the inquiry, though intricate, primarily scientific, and only partially successful, need not altogether lack practical consequence. Our age is bewildered between heroism and greed. To each it is drawn more powerfully than any age preceding. Neither of the two does it quite comprehend. If we can render the nobler somewhat more intelligible, we may increase the confidence of those who now, half-ashamed, follow its glorious but blindly compulsive call.

REFERENCES ON SELF-SACRIFICE
Spencer’s Principles of Ethics, pt. i. ch. xi., xii.
Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, p. 414-429.
Paulsen’s Ethics, bk. ii. ch. 6.
Wundt’s Facts of the Moral Life, ch. iii., Section 4 (g).
Sidgwick’s Methods, concluding chapter.
Kidd’s Social Evolution, ch. 5.
S. Bryant in Journal of Ethics, Apr. 1893.
Bradley in Journal of Ethics, Oct. 1894.
Mackenzie, in Journal of Ethics, Apr. 1895