The End of War. Paul K. Chappell
would be far more powerful than our “flight response,” but in fact the opposite is true. Getting soldiers to run away and retreat during a battle is easy. Getting them to stand their ground, fight, and kill other human beings is the challenge.
The Greeks realized, however, that one simple thing could give soldiers endless courage when their lives were threatened and convince them to not only stay and fight, but to sacrifice their lives. At first glance the Greeks’ solution might seem like a contradiction, because the most powerful motivator that convinces people to stay and fight is not a natural propensity for violence or killing, but their capacity for love and compassion. Halfway around the world, Lao-tzu, a Chinese philosopher who lived during the sixth century BC, also acknowledged this fundamental truth about human nature when he said, “By being loving, we are capable of being brave.”5 Because the ancient Greeks discovered this fact about human nature, they were able to protect their homeland from Persian conquest during the fifth century BC.
In 490 BC, during the Battle of Marathon, the Persians landed on the Greek shore in an attempt to conquer Greece. By some estimates the Athenian soldiers were outnumbered ten to one. Despite the numerical superiority of the Persian military, the Athenians repelled the invading force and saved their country from destruction. Ten years later in 480 BC, the Persians again tried to conquer Greece. During the Battle of Salamis, the Athenian navy was greatly outnumbered by the Persian fleet, but the Athenians again refused to retreat and were victorious once more.
To inspire the courage that made this victory possible, the Athenian warriors shouted the battle cry “Advance, ye sons of Greece. From oppression save your country, save your wives, save your children…This day, the common cause of all demands your valor.”6 Although they were greatly outnumbered, the Athenians refused to retreat because they were fighting to protect the lives of their loved ones.
I find it odd that people refer to compassion and love as naïve moral ideals that make one weak, while the U.S. Army uses compassion and love to motivate its soldiers to cooperate and survive in the harshest circumstances. In the army I was taught to treat my military unit like my family and to fight in order to “protect the person to my left and to my right.” At West Point I learned a famous passage from Shakespeare’s Henry V that reads: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother…” This ideal of love and brotherhood is responsible for most acts of heroism, along with many of the Medal of Honor recipients who sacrificed themselves to save the lives of their friends. We can see the power of compassion in people such as Private First Class Frederick C. Murphy, who served as a medic during World War II. His citation for the Medal of Honor reads:
An aid man, he was wounded in the right shoulder soon after his comrades had jumped off in a dawn attack 18 March 1945, against the Siegfried Line at Saarlautern, Germany. He refused to withdraw for treatment and continued forward, administering first aid under heavy machine gun, mortar, and artillery fire. When the company ran into a thickly sown antipersonnel minefield and began to suffer more and more casualties, he continued to disregard his own wound and unhesitatingly braved the danger of exploding mines, moving about through heavy fire and helping the injured until he stepped on a mine which severed one of his feet. In spite of his grievous wounds, he struggled on with his work, refusing to be evacuated and crawling from man to man administering to them while in great pain and bleeding profusely. He was killed by the blast of another mine which he had dragged himself across in an effort to reach still another casualty. With indomitable courage, and unquenchable spirit of self-sacrifice and supreme devotion to duty which made it possible for him to continue performing his tasks while barely able to move, Pfc. Murphy saved many of his fellow soldiers at the cost of his own life.7
The Medal of Honor is the highest award a soldier can receive, but when I studied the Medal of Honor recipients while I was at West Point, I realized something surprising. If human beings are naturally violent, as some suggest, then the highest military award should be given for the act of killing, and the person who kills the most people should receive the highest award. However, many of the Medal of Honor recipients I studied never killed a single person. Why then do so many people assume that we are naturally violent, I wondered, if the highest military award is given to those who display incredible selflessness and compassion on the battlefield? And how can compassion not be a defining characteristic of human nature, I thought, if the most admired trait in soldiers is not their ability to kill, but their willingness to sacrifice for their friends?
THE KEY TO HUMAN SURVIVAL
Before I could answer these questions and discover whether human beings are naturally peaceful or violent, I had to ask and answer a more fundamental question: why does compassion encourage these acts of heroism? As I explored the reality of human nature, I realized that compassion’s influence on the battlefield is not a contradiction, but one of the reasons why our ancestors were able to survive in the harshest conditions. And why we, their descendents, are capable of ending war.
Our earliest human ancestors lived on the plains of Africa, but when I was a teenager, I often wondered how they could have possibly survived. After all, human beings are not very fast. We are much slower than lions, leopards, and other predators, and we lack natural weapons such as fangs, claws, tusks, and horns. We are physically weaker than chimpanzees and gorillas, and we lack the climbing agility that allows them to quickly escape to the safety of trees. With such significant drawbacks, how did human beings survive and prosper in the harsh conditions of Africa?
We survived because of our large brains and our endless capacity to cooperate. In fact, our large brains make us even more dependent upon cooperation, because our intelligence cannot develop unless a community protects us and gives us the gifts of language and knowledge while we are young. Because our large brains take many years to fully mature, a human child remains helpless for a longer period of time than the offspring of any organism and requires a community to further its growth and development.
All mammals cooperate to some degree, while many mammals rely on cooperation for their survival. Lions live in prides, for example, while elephants live in herds, wolves in packs, dolphins in pods, and chimpanzees in troops. But due to our physical limitations, along with the conditions our large brains require to fully develop, we rely on cooperation far more than any other mammal.
Many people do not understand that cooperation is the key to our survival, because they incorrectly assume that the purpose of every organism is merely to survive, reproduce, or provide for its self-interest, but this is not true. In a hive of honeybees, only the queen bee is capable of reproduction. The female worker bee labors for the well-being of her community, and in an act of ultimate self-sacrifice, every worker bee must give her life when she defends her hive, by leaving behind her vital organs when she delivers her defensive sting.
Where mammals are concerned, a gorilla will die to protect its family members and a wolf will die to defend its pack. Gorillas, wolves, and other mammals serve their community because the purpose of every organism is not merely to survive, reproduce, or provide for its self-interest, but to continue the survival of its species. Because bees, ants, gorillas, and wolves rely upon their communities for survival, they are instinctually willing to protect their communities at the risk of losing their lives.
THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BOND
Since human beings, more than all other mammals, require cooperation to survive, our reliance upon our community is even more important for us. To survive, we have a bond powerful enough to hold a community together and to encourage selfless service, sacrifice, and cooperation among its members. If you and I were stranded in the wilderness, my genuine concern for your well-being would be the only bond strong enough to prevent me from leaving you when times were hard, killing you when food was scarce, or breaking the cooperation that allowed us both to survive. This is why our genuine concern for the well-being of others, also known as unconditional love, is not a naïve moral virtue but a crucial survival instinct that makes cooperation possible.
My experiences in the military allowed me to understand this fact about unconditional love. If a soldier’s friend or loved one is in danger, the soldier will often risk his