Stockdale on Suffering and Life’s Meaning; Gray’s Elegy; Nietzsche
In a sermon once Pastor Whitaker mentioned a story about Admiral Stockdale in Vietnam from the
book
Good to Great,
by Jim Collins. I’ve boldfaced the key idea: that suffering as a prisoner of war was
perhaps the best thing in his life, a source of utility and not disutility.
Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to
1973, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set
release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to
see his family again. He shouldered the burden of command, doing
everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number
of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war
against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for
propaganda. At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself
with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so that he could not be
put on videotape as an example of a “well-treated prisoner.” He
exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their
letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps
death. He instituted rules that would help people to deal with torture
(no one can resist torture indefinitely, so he created a step-wise
system–after x minutes, you can say certain things–that gave the men
milestones to survive toward). He instituted an elaborate internal
communications system to reduce the sense of isolation that their
captors tried to create, which used a five-by-five matrix of tap codes
for alpha characters. (Tap-tap equals the letter a, tap-pause-tap-tap
equals the letter b, tap-tap-pause-tap equals the letter f, and so
forth, for 25 letters, c doubling for k.) At one point, during an
imposed silence, the prisoners mopped and swept the central yard using
the code, swish-swashing out “We love you” to Stockdale, on the third
anniversary of his being shot down.
…
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him.
“I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would
prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my
life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
If one wishes to accomplish something memorable and great, one must sacrifice some
other, lesser, things. Thus, men go to war, write books, and climb mountains.
For most men, serving in battle is the biggest thing in their lives. It is often “the
defining event”, but that is a bit different. Most people have no defining event, and
most people are not well-defined. War gives them a chance. Recall the “mute inglorious
Miltons” of
"http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1091.html"> Gray’s Elegy:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton, here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country’s blood.
Th’ applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o’er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation’s eyes,
Their lot forbade: nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind;
This is a common notion of non-bourgeois humans. Here is what Nietzsche, bourgeois but
trying to escape it, said in
Thus Spoke
Zarathustra:
Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars–and the short peace more than
the long.
…
Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it
is the good war which halloweth every cause.
War and courage have done more great things than charity. Not your
sympathy, but your bravery hath hitherto saved the victims.
“What is good?” ye ask. To be brave is good. Let the little girls say:
“To be good is what is pretty, and at the same time touching.”
…
Ye shall only have enemies to be hated, but not enemies to be despised. Ye
must be proud of your enemies; then, the successes of your enemies are also
your successes.
…
So live your life of obedience and of war! What matter about long life!
What warrior wisheth to be spared!
It is a hard and fundamental question as to whether a man should strive for pleasant
satisfaction or struggle arduously for achievement. The answer would not be the same for
every person.