An Essay on Morals by Philip Wylie

Author:Philip Wylie
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

Stop.

Here is the very instinct--the opposite of action--the consciousness. Stop. Stop following our blind impulses. Survey. Consider. Use time. Know. Then think. And act only after these.

We have had quite a little time to use, now. How did the people employ it? What have been their various reactions to the natural fact of atomic energy--the objective finding, at last, of a force which is parallel to the energies of instinct, as ultimate, as fundamental, as susceptible of good or evil, of creation or destruction--the very crystal analogue for instinct?

The people called for the Army.

The positive archetype of the soldier is courage. His function is to surround his nation with his life and to make its purchase dear. He must be ready to die. His courage is an instrument to express and to fend off the fears of his group. In so far as he identifies himself with his group, he has an idealism for which to make his self-sacrifice. But he has also an instinct to live--like any man--and a vanity, besides, which is to some extent separate from the instincts of his own kind.

So, to make him a trustworthy tool of abnormal courage, there is drill and discipline. That he will not falter like any coward in the presence of crisis, he is instructed and admonished, paraded and ordered, taught automatonism--and in such a fashion he overcomes futurities in his ego: images in time-ahead, imagination itself. Positive imagination would be useful to him in battle, but, to own it, he must own and risk its opposite: negative imagining, or fear. (The imagination of armies is confined to Headquarters, and even there, it is mostly Precedent.) The man in the field, be he West Pointer or raw draftee, must have the future-sense stamped out of him, or else he will use battle time to think, to imagine, to dread.

This soldier's courage is not to be doubted; the tribes and civilizations perceive it

and every century has known little else for its principal event: history is in large part the recollection of battle dates and the names of emperors risen and fallen on the tides of war.

But, if the law I have here hypothesized be true, the soldier must hide within himself, unconsciously, a great cowardice to counterbalance his awareness of his abnormal courage.

No whole man, but a machine of valor, ready in the minute, what does he fear?

The answer is, What he has lost--or repressed: imagination--the future-ideas of event, of circumstance, of weapon, or of social situation for which he is not mechanically ready in his own mind. He has invested his libido in bravery to meet the danger of the world as he may have to fight it. If the world should become something he does not know how to fight, his bravery may well prove futile, his competences obsolete, himself anachronistic, and his investment will be lost.

In its simplest form, see this phenomenon possess the cavalryman, who has learned the art of the horse and is prepared to die in the saddle with full glorious indifference, but who is afraid of the idea of tanks.

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