The meaning of sacrifice, and how we can be heroes in a modern war

Do we really understand sacrifice nowadays? We can talk the talk, but do we have the courage to fight the wars upon us today?

At this time of year we all remember the soldiers who died. This year has special poignance because the war ended 100 years ago today. As we remember, we are asked to consider the sacrifices made for us. Some have broadened remembrance to include the non-soldiers; the women and animals who worked, or were sacrificed, to win the war.

I heard one such speech today. We must remember those who fought and died, or gave their prospects and youth, if not their full lives, for the freedom and prosperity of the future. Different wars have different meanings, and different soldiers fight for different cocktails of ideals. But as we are asked to, we remember them for their deeds. How else can they be remembered? It is our actions that reverberate into the future, safeguarding the next generations from the evils that beset us.

Nowadays we have wars on many things. We have wars on drugs, on terror, a half-hearted war on cancer that we gave up on. The word is used to invoke the solidarity of a struggle and the determination of combat, but it demeans it a bit to use it of such dull things.

War is a terrible thing. It corrupts the lives of all it touches, ruining their memories, taking limbs, friends, loved ones and, of course, money. We pour our wealth and efforts into war because war is a struggle for survival. Without the sacrifice of a nation’s wealth and effort, there is no war, merely a redirection of purpose.

We shouldn’t talk of wars on drugs, and even though we launched genuine wars in foreign countries as part of the war on terror, it didn’t cost us more of our taxes than we were already paying for ‘defence’. It cost us some soldiers’ lives, but no-one was conscripted, and we didn’t have to recruit heavily for it. The families of the dead soldiers will never forget, but as a nation even the war on terror hasn’t touched us (except perhaps culturally).

So when we remember those who died in the great wars, we should remember what sacrifice truly is. And we should remember that sometimes it is worthwhile. We remember people for their actions. Chamberlain and Mosley might have been nice men, but we remember the appeasers and sympathisers as fly specks compared to the towering majesty of Churchill, who for all his faults took a stand against evil. That’s why Churchill, a bigot who made many mistakes in his life, is on our currency. We judge him by the actions that mattered most.

And in all this remembering, a thoughtful person might wonder how we will be judged. What actions will we be known for? What challenges do we face? Are we tackling them, or hiding from them?

We do indeed face an implacable foe, ready to destroy the world as we know it. And so we come to climate change. We face existential threats of our own: antibiotic resistance, climate change, ageing…. These are enemies that will kill us.

Are we appeasers, playing along in the hope that everything will be alright? Hoping that we can carry on with our prosperous lives, not sacrificing anything and ignoring the threat? Or will we be heroes? We won’t be sacrificing our lives for climate change; not directly anyway. Some of us will die early deaths from heat; some of us will die from the shifting diseases; some of us will die from antibiotic resistance; all of the remainder will eventually age, wither and die.

These enemies can’t be defeated by a prayer and feigned ignorance. Wishful thinking won’t make them go away. Wars can only be won with sacrifice, and we are privileged not to be called to sacrifice our lives. All we need to do is work against them. We must redirect our efforts, pay our taxes and our national wealth to fighting the enemies of today.

Remembering the heroes of yesterday doesn’t make us heroes. We will be remembered for the actions we take, not the actions of our forebears. And so far we have taken precious few actions. We should be fighting wars still, about what really matters. A war on climate change might sound odd, but the threat is even greater than in any war humanity has fought before. We should be redirecting the whole economy to deal with the problems we can see today, just as we do with war. Market forces didn’t defeat the Nazis, and they won’t today. It was the might of a nation, every thought bent on victory, that won the war. If we learn anything from remembrance, let it be the meaning of sacrifice. Some things are more important than a bit more GDP or higher stock indices. We must face them, even when defeat seems certain, because it is the right thing to do. That is the courage our predecessors had. We can sing praises to them, but when we finally go to whatever heaven there may be, we must answer only for what we have done

‘For none may reach by hired speech of neighbour, priest, and kin

Through borrowed deed to God's good meed that lies so fair within.’

The way to know true humanity

There seem to be two contrasting attitudes to humanity as a group: a positive one that says people are good and should be trusted to do the right thing, and a negative one that says they’re selfish and thoughtless and need external forces to make them behave.

These beliefs inform very important political opinions. There are people who think that if we remove regulation everything will work better because people will do nice things for each other anyway; who think that if we give people the freedom to do good and bad things, good things will result on top of any argument about whether that freedom is good in itself. On the other side, there are people who believe in regulation, law and enforcement of rules, knowing that humanity’s is at its most creative when rule-breaking, both deliberately and through ignorance or lack of attention.

In between the two extremes are people who believe in good and bad. This is the darkest path: believing that more distant humanity is more evil than others who share an arbitrary classification with you, or that generalizing is so bad we should not even consider whether to regulate or not, and let ourselves be blown around by happenstance without a plan.

When I’m forming an opinion about people in general, I don’t have much information on the subject. I know a few friends, but they’re a highly-selected group and not representative of the population. And even if they were, their behaviour with me probably isn’t typical of how strangers interact.

                I know a few more people at work. I deal with about 10 regularly, and there are about another 30 on the floor who are roughly strangers. But being at work with colleagues still doesn’t mean they behave normally, and it’s still a small sample of the millions in the country.

                I could judge people by what’s on the news, but of course something isn’t news unless it’s odd or unusual. Judging millions of people by the occasional stabbing, or by the misbehaviour of politicians, would also be silly.

                I interact with the most people when I’m out and about: when commuting, or when I’m travelling for other reasons, and when I’m in the pub. This is where I must draw my most accurate conclusions about humanity.

                I know some hopeless optimists who believe that people are fundamentally good. I don’t think these people get out much. Or maybe they do, but always in a way that makes them less vulnerable to interference. When you’re wielding a tonne or two of metal either people get out of your way, or there really is no way for you to move. Other forms of transport show up humanity better. You must judge people by how they treat the vulnerable, not the powerful.

                I get around mostly by myself, occasionally getting trains. I cycle and walk. On my 15-minute cycle ride to work (shorter than most commutes because I pay so much to live centrally) I interact, if only briefly, with hundreds of people. There are the cars who pass me and whom I pass; the other cyclists, the pedestrians crossing the road. In 15 minutes I slide from one frustration to another. Pedestrians leap out in front of me, then stand in the dry or smooth part of the road, leaving me a wet pothole; or cars honk furiously at me because they almost ran me down when changing lane without indicating or looking. Other cyclists sidle past me at the lights when I’m at the stop line, going beyond it and then holding me up when the lights turn green; or they weave from side to side in the cycle lane, making sure that I can’t overtake. There is never a dull moment when I can trust that people will behave themselves. There might be twenty pedestrians waiting for their crossing to hold me up, but someone will jump out. My experience is one of constant misbehaviour, even if I know that not everyone is doing it.

                When walking I experience the same thing. People weave from side to side, walk down the middle of narrow tunnels or pavements wide enough for two, stop at the narrowest and/or busiest points, and never look ahead or get out of anyone’s way. I have stopped dead in front of someone walking in a group of people I saw coming tens or hundreds of metres away and seen the look of surprise that I didn’t magically disappear; that I didn’t jump in front of a car or prostrate myself to be walked over. The surprise that he must do something about my existence rather than ignore me and have me work/walk around him.

                These seem like small things when I talk about them. Waiting a moment to walk around someone, or being held up by an idiot on the road only last a few seconds at most. I know that it seems silly to care too much about a second or two of my life. And yet small things add up. When someone costs me a few seconds on my bike, that often means that I miss the green light at the next set of lights, putting me a minute behind. And minutes add up even more, to a general impression of humanity.

                People are thoughtless. They are selfish. They never think of others unless forced to. A tonne of mobile metal and a deafening horn often forces them to; anything less probably won’t. People don’t care about rules and don’t think about the consequences. The only rules that matter are those with consequences. You don’t jump out into the road because a car might run you over, but in the absence of cars cyclists don’t matter. They aren’t a threat, and the consequences for them aren’t a factor in decision-making.

                People respond only to power, and get angry with anyone who exposes, deliberately or merely through existing, their own bad behaviour. People will blame anyone else before admitting their own faults. Extenuating circumstances exist often enough for people to make my commute a constant hassle and the rules almost pointless. Rules are guidelines that people will break if they have an emergency, a minor problem, a bad mood or if they see someone else breaking them.

                This is humanity in its rawest form. They’re not acting out just for a psychological study, or being nice for their friends. They are being themselves unfettered by biases or pressures. The ebb and flows of people on the streets, passing others with whom they have no connection except their fellow humanity, is where we must look to understand humanity.

                Optimists say to themselves 'my friends are nice to me, and everyone has friends, so everyone must be nice', but they forget to add '...to their friends'. To understand humans we need to look further afield.

And then we see yet more reason to think that optimism is wrong; and caution sensible.