Note from Richard Koenigsberg: Readers of the Library of Social Science Newsletter have been receiving my publications on the sacrificial theory of warfare and culture for many years. Agnieszka Monnet's paper (see below) is one of the finest and clearest expositions of this theory.

Monnet observes that although nationalistic rhetoric tends to rely heavily on the notion of sacrifice, the "idea that nations might actually 'need' members to be willing to die for them can appear prima facie as a revolting claim." Nothing could seem more wrong (even 'sacrilegious'), Monnet says, than to propose that "the nation might need members to die for it on a regular basis in order to sustain its sense of unity."

It's evident by now that the sacrificial theory of war and culture is more disturbing than Darwin's theory that human beings are evolved from lower forms of animal life, and Freud's theory that sexuality is a prime motivator of human behavior. The theory is depressing and unsettling. It is so painful that scholars barely have begun to argue with it.

Those who receive the Library of Social Science Newsletter are on the cutting edge of human thought: willing to receive and consider this painful truth. 

Dr. Monnet is the author of The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic.   For information on purchasing this book through Amazon, click here.

The social theorist whose work  is pertinent to this issue is Emile Durkheim, especially in his late work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1915). Durkheim’s most influential idea is that social belonging is the root of religion, since religious feelings (i.e. awe, submission to a greater power, and a sense of the sacred and profane) originate in the admiration and fear that the individual feels before the power of the collectivity.

The collectivity has the power to protect or to harm the individual, and so the individual’s basic attitude towards the group is an ambivalent one of attraction/attachment and awe/terror. 

That which is set aside as “sacred” is invested with the meaning and the power which is basically that of the group, i.e. it is a sign for the collectivity. In the aboriginal tribes that Durkheim used as the basis of his theory, the sacred takes the form of a totem. Durkheim further argues that the religious practices of aboriginal tribes are able to reveal the universal traits of all religions and all societies.

This is the point missed by Robert Bellah and other scholars: civil religion does not function like other existing religions because it transcends them in relation to the collectivity as a whole. While many people have abandoned religious beliefs and practice, it is almost impossible to have no nationality.

Even people who have lost their citizenship one way or another usually consider themselves as “belonging” to some nation in at least a spiritual and cultural sense. The main point here is that nationality is generally the first and most important way that social life on this planet is organized. It commands the most primary emotions and its leaders, representatives, institutions, and flags require the highest degree of respect.

While the claim that the American flag is a kind of totem may still be accepted by most historians, Marvin and Ingle’s argument that the nation is regenerated most effectively by blood sacrifice is more problematic.

This is where Réné Girard’s work on the sacrifice comes in. In Violence and the Sacred (1972/2005), Girard argued that societies are naturally rife with tensions and conflicts— and that they can avoid internal violence only by directing this aggression towards a common object. This sacrificial scapegoat allows the group to maintain internal peace by being purged or destroyed.

Similarly, Anthony Marx argues (2003) in a recent study of national origins that nation-states did not merely replace the Church, as is commonly accepted, but that they harnessed the exclusionary tactics and deep passions of religious identity into nationalist politics. Linking Christian martyrology to modern nation-formation, Marvin and Ingle argue that national cohesion is always constituted on the basis of a collective “victimage” or collective sacrifice. 

In other words, as nations tend to view their history in terms of foundational moments of collective sacrifice, such as wars of liberation or other moments of great loss of life, the intensity of their sense of national unity and loyalty is based on a sense of ongoing identification with these foundational sacrifices. Here we return to Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg and his hope that the casualties buried in that new war cemetery would inspire the living to “dedicate” themselves to the cause of American nationhood.

Although nationalistic rhetoric tends to rely heavily on the notion of sacrifice, and we are all familiar with such phrases in political speeches, the idea that nations might actually “need” members to be willing to die for them can appear prima facie as a revolting claim. For many modern subjects, the idea of the nation serves as a powerful ideal of community and social justice.

Civic nationalism promises to transcend and reconcile ethnic, religious, and all other differences by congealing a disparate population into a kind of imagined family linked by citizenship and mutual solidarity, and it is in this utopian guise that the idea of the nation inspires powerful emotions in people across the political spectrum. Modern political theory defines the role of the nation-state primarily as one of protection: of nationals from non-nationals, and of citizens from each other.

Therefore, nothing could seem more wrong (even “sacrilegious”) than to propose that the nation might need members to die for it on a regular basis in order to sustain its sense of unity. Following Girard’s contention that some rituals require participants to be unaware of their true meaning and function, Marvin and Ingle argue that the true nature of war as national sacrificial ritual is the object of a powerful taboo.

Although willing sacrifices create powerful group feeling, and political speeches such as Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address tacitly acknowledge this, the group or nation cannot know that it needs members to die or that it finds ways to send them to die. This fact cannot be explicitly articulated or understood or the ritual will not work.

The class of willing sacrifices that every viable nation possesses is its military, which is why soldiers are something like a priestly order: subject to strict selection, training, rules, and privileges. In the US, the mandatory Soldier’s Oath binds the pledger to protect the Constitution and obey orders given by the President and his representatives.

The mixture of national and religious rhetoric (“true faith”, “So help me God,” “appointed” officers) is striking for a nation which has made the separation of church and state a cornerstone of its national creed, but this is to miss the point that the state is itself a kind of church for all practical purposes.

The other important omission in the Soldier’s Oath is any reference to killing or dying, which finally are the two basic tasks that the soldier is authorized to do and which sets him/her apart from ordinary citizens. These all-important implications are couched in the neutral pledge to obey the President and one’s hierarchical superiors in the Army who represent his sovereign authority.

The direct and explicit relationship of each soldier to the highest sovereign power in the group articulated in the Soldier’s Oath, binding each oath-taker directly to the President, reveals something about why military service occupies such a charged and often coveted place in national experience.

Military service confers on soldiers a privileged relationship to totemic power, the power linked to sovereignty and to the most sacred sites, objects and moments in national life. This heightened relationship to national belonging is the reason why military service continues to be prized by young men seeking a rite of passage and a link to something greater than their individual lives.

It is also the reason why women have fought to be accepted into the military and why African Americans and other ethnic groups have eagerly served in every major war. Military service bears a special relationship to citizenship and offers the promise of unassailable national credentials.

And yet, soldiers are often objects of intense popular ambivalence. The negative stereotypes of soldiers as unthinking automatons or lawless brutes are rooted in a common perception that soldiers are qualitatively different from civilians: they are linked to death, either by killing or agreeing to be killed.

The unquestioning willingness to die, though appreciable in certain specific circumstances, nevertheless creates suspicion that servicemen are uncritical: naive fools in the best of cases, brainwashed robots in the worst. These negative perceptions are even greater in the case of combat veterans who have killed as well as risked their lives.

The fear and contempt aroused by Vietnam veterans in the 1970s (before their rehabilitation by official ceremonies and shifts in media depictions in the mid-1980s) revealed a discomfort that is latent in the civilian attitude towards veterans of any war.

The official and public respect accorded to military personnel, all the more ubiquitous and ostentatious since the beginning of the Iraq War, conceals the fact that there is necessarily a tension between civilians, focused on their pleasure and profit, and the class of people designated for exposure to death and injury supposedly to protect them (though, in actual fact, few American wars have been truly defensive, most advancing economic and imperial interests of limited relevance to the majority of the population).

Thus, the suspicion and distrust is often mutual (with veterans voicing resentment about having been sent into danger by a population that doesn’t seem to appreciate what soldiers have risked and lost). This mutual incomprehension came to a head during the Vietnam War but is always present to some degree.