Delphic Maxim 132: Die for your country
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
132. Die for your country
Following from yesterday’s discussion about the Anzacs, this is a pretty interesting maxim. Part of the remembrance and reification that happens in the Anzac myth revolves around the idea that these soldiers ‘died for our country’ (or, as we have become less thinking and more Americanised, that they ‘died for our freedom’). But did the Anzacs actually do this? In reality, they may have died for an idea, for a dying empire, but not so much for Australia — at least not in World War One when the Gallipoli campaign took place. In that campaign, Australian soldiers were deployed in a war between European powers, in defence of Britain’s interests, but not necessarily Britain itself. (It’s important to remember that back then many Australians still thought of themselves as ‘British subjects’, so may well have felt they were dying for their country).
World War Two is a different story in the Pacific: the Japanese advance through the archipelago of the South-East Asia directly threatened Australia — though there are historical records to suggest that the Japanese imperial command had no intentions of actually invading Australia, but simply isolating it as a base for its allies. In that war, it was quite reasonable to suggest that an Australian was dying for his country, and the second world war was unambiguously a case of good versus evil — the Axis powers, Nazi Germany and its allies, were cruel and expansionary. Interestingly though, we don’t associate the idea of ‘Anzac’ with this war as strongly as we do the first, foundational war in the mythology.
So there’s a bit of Australian context for this maxim, but I still don’t know that nationalism — which is what it really takes to die for your country — is enough to give your life. Maybe there’s a disconnect in the scale for me, as though a ‘country’, a ‘nation’, is something too large and artificial, to old-fashioned, to waste human life on it. Or at least, the ‘idea’ of the nation is — what a person is really giving their life for is less patriotism, and more the protection of a people, which is much nobler I would argue.
Consider that the ‘country’ in the age of the Oracle was likely much smaller: a city-state. The Greeks might have aligned with each other to fight against the Trojans, or to repel the Persian invasion, but ultimately people identified more as Athenian, Spartan, Boeotian or from whichever smaller place they hailed. Aristotle approved of this idea: a nation shouldn’t grow so large that everybody couldn’t know everybody else. That might give you a social bond worth dying for, simply because of the closeness and proximal relationships everybody would have with everybody in the country. And of course, cultures that emphasise the idea of honour gave people a spiritual means to justify self-sacrifice (this is still the case today).
There’s a quote — I can’t remember who from — that I enjoy using when people ask about the limits of my beliefs: “I would never die for an idea because what if I was wrong?” Taken a step further, the question becomes: why would a person die for something as detached and constructed as a nation? Nations as we understand it today are vast, impersonal constructs. They structure our identities in interesting ways. When I am overseas, I identify first as Australian. But how fundamental are they to our identity? Why is it that this idea of nation is so powerful that people are prepared to die for it? To become fundamentalist for it? To rage at each other in the name of ‘patriotism’, but really who are using the flag as a shield for bigotry and hatred?
Maybe it makes me a wishy washy cosmopolitan, but I would prefer a world where nobody had to die for their country.
