Already Dead

A good long while ago, my husband and I were watching the Band of Brothers series, a dramatization of the wartime actions of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne Division, during WWII. I had never seen it, but I love history, particularly WWII history, so I was enjoying it immensely.

During the first few episodes we discussed the various characters—who are all drawn, however dramatically, from real men who really lived and really had these experiences—and how and why such and such a man would act such and such a way, etc. My husband told me that his favorite character wasn’t actually the calm, serious, eminently moral Lieutenant Winters—the ostensible series protagonist—but the almost silent, hard-bitten, rumored-to-be-ruthless Lieutenant Speirs.

Throughout a portion of the series, most of the soldiers hold this Lieutenant as a mystery, and tell semi-mythic stories about his brutal wartime actions. He is not the classic protagonist, but he is tough and enigmatic, and it is one of his lines that struck me as the most powerful.

In one scene, there is a soldier who is paralyzed by fear. He is hiding in a foxhole when he should be taking action. He is ashamed of himself, but he can’t seem to break out of the fear strait-jacket.

Lieutenant Speirs walks up to him, crouches at the foxhole and tells him the ultimate paradox: “The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already dead. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a soldier is supposed to function.” The reason that soldier had become useless is because he was unwilling to give up his life…to give himself wholly over to the task at hand.

Lieutenant Speirs, on the other hand, figured he was as good as dead already, and for this he was able to be courageous, decisive, and capable in the midst of a horrible and life-threatening situation.

This is the classic Christian paradox shown true in an entirely secular context: the harder you try to cling to your life, the more useless that life is to you. It becomes a waste. You become paralyzed—“dead” in effect, as far as anything meaningful or purposeful is concerned. Try to save your life, you lose it. Give your life up and you might survive, and save many other lives along the way.

True in battle, true in life.

More recently, I watched some films and TV shows in which characters—who were not the heroes—sacrificed themselves for the sake of the greater goal. They got no glory. In some cases they scarcely had names or faces. In others, they were the convenient scapegoat which enabled the Hero or Heroine to live. This culminated in my watching Mockingjay Part 1; I was struck by two scenes in which nameless characters took coordinated action against the oppressive government and, in so doing, ensured their own deaths. It was very moving to me, but I found myself resistant to this idea. Perhaps a few survived, but most of the people in those uprisings had to know that they were going to die. They were cannon fodder for the sake of the higher goal of defeating the Capitol. If they didn’t believe in their cause with all their heart, soul, and body, one might say they had just been used and discarded in a heartless and utilitarian manner. But they had to want to fight, badly, to do that. It had to mean something to them.

It bothered me. It had me wondering if I would ever, for the right reasons, have the courage to be like that: to run into the cannon’s mouth without having any hope of survival, or any hint of fame or glory, just so that someone else can get past the cannon to do something greater. To die quietly so someone else can live loudly. Would I ever be willing to be the nameless not-hero who enables the victory without anyone ever noticing or caring?

I realized that I always want to be ‘the main character.’ Because not only is the main character the hero, but they usually survive, albeit with a few cuts and bruises. It’s those unnamed characters in the gray background that die in spades so that the protagonist can scrape through at the last second and see what all that fighting and dying earned. Because if you die without seeing the end, how do you know that it was really worth it? How do you know you weren’t being duped?

I find this mentality—mine—a problem. Not only are we “already dead,” as Lieutenant Speirs put it, but if we’re obsessed with being the hero—the name of renown—we aren’t going to get anything done either. Our role may be small. It may not be flashy. There may be a hundred other people doing the exact same small thing. But if it serves the higher goal, does it matter if no one ever sees us or knows our name?

Besides, if you’re not willing to sacrifice something—or yourself—because you can’t prove right now that it will have been worth it, you would never sacrifice yourself for anything. It takes faith—in a cause or in person. In God.

It reminds me of Brother Lawrence, a monk whose duties were very low and mundane; he worked in the kitchen, and it was tedious. No glory. No grandness. No heroism. Just simple work that has to be redone every day (like the dishes, which are the most depressing and endless of chores). But he took “do everything as unto the Lord” to heart. He did scrubbing as unto the Lord. How was he able to do this? How could he be so humble and patient in his heart with such dull work?

Because he had already died to himself. He yielded his goals and dreams and preferences to the Lord. The result? His words and advices, written hundreds of years ago, are still read today and influence many. His small work was a seed and it grew great. I don’t know that he ever lived to see it do so either. He couldn’t guess that, in the 2000’s, a young man would read his words and decide to volunteer in a kitchen at a summer camp in order to learn how to honor God in that simple work. He couldn’t know that I would remind myself of Brother Lawrence at times when I am tempted to be angry that my work or my life seem mundane, or lack the glory and adventure that I crave. When I try to cling to my idea of my life, instead of embracing the actual circumstances, I lose. I am paralyzed.

How can we be effective—in war, or in life, or especially in the Kingdom of God? By remembering that we’re dead already, and glad of it despite the way it sounds. Dead to things that chain us down, tether us to our selfish selves, and our foolish plans. We’re free to risk everything, free to be fearless, free to do things small or great with all our hearts, free from the need to be validated by others, free from the need to prove ourselves or measure ourselves against the achievements of others. Because we’re not clutching to our life (or our reputation, or our popularity, or our fame, or our accolades) like a security blanket. And, unlike Speirs, we haven’t given up our lives to become hard or nihilistic. We’ve given them into good hands. God’s. And, if we trust him, we will not regret letting go.

“The best way to live above all fear of death is to die every morning before you leave your bedroom.”

-Charles Spurgeon

Our Dystopia

There appears to be a fear and curiosity surrounding the idea of things we (mankind) make getting out of hand. There are numerous ways in which this curiosity manifests itself in film and literature and, it being a hearty and prevalent topic, I’ve begun to wonder why it resonates.

It starts with Pygmalion and progresses to Frankenstein; exploring the idea of falling into obsession with the work of our own hands until we lose touch with reality, or finding what we have made to be a danger to others or even to ourselves. Did we tamper with forces we cannot control? Is everything we make doomed to go awry? There is a simultaneous fascination and dread with something created by our very own selves becoming independent of us and our intent.

The trickiness of the situation isn’t revolutionary; many have commented on it. Technologies of advancement and convenience develop right alongside technologies of destruction and manipulation and we don’t always have control of how what we make will be used or developed. It’s good, it’s bad or it’s ugly, and everyone has something different to say about it:

I have an almost religious zeal…not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up.

-Dan Millman (self-help guru)

If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger.

-Frank Lloyd Wright (Architect)

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

-John F. Kennedy (President)

Men have become the tools of their tools.

-Henry David Thoreau (Poet)

A small sampling, and it is Thoreau’s take which so often fascinates us in literature and film: what happens when the brain-child of man—be it a piece of technology, or a form of government—turns on its maker?

There are two main versions of this: The A.I. tale (Robots and machines on the rise!) and the Dystopian tale (We thought it was for the best! But the perfect government turned out to be even worse than what we had before!)

I could make a very long list of examples, but instead I will make short ones which highlight the central themes which seem to so strike us. The main ones for A.I. start with the Terminator, in which man-made machines battle humans for control of the world. That which we made to do our bidding now seeks to destroy us and take our place.

In i, robot, a similar thing happens, but with a twist; the robots are not out to destroy humans…they are trying to protect us by efficiently eradicating our flaws. We have wars and violence, and in order to fully protect us (as their protocols dictate) they must choose how to cultivate us “for our own good” which may include killing some of us and removing from us our freedom.

Finally the most obvious one, which surpasses all the prior stages: the machines we have made no longer battle mankind. They have long since won, and now control humans, mind and body. They make use of us as we once made use of them. The story has become a  modern classic: The Matrix.

The list goes on, well into children’s films: the too-clever robot in “The Incredibles” and the atrophied bodies (due to over-reliance on technology) of the humans in the brilliant robot-centered cartoon “WALL-E.”

Dystopian tales are a slightly different beast, but they ask the same questions: what happens when our best plans eat us alive?

In the Hunger Games books (a young adult series), the government demands children from each district as tribute to take part in a battle to the death for the simultaneous sake of entertainment and retention of control. It’s Battle Royale, Gladiators and Reality TV all rolled into one. As the story progresses, the theme arises that the cure (revolution!) for the ill (oppressive government) quickly becomes a disease in and of itself (i.e. the French Revolution).

(the hunger games heroine in the film version)

Dystopians are popular now, so the young adult literary list in particular could go for miles. In the film Equilibrium, art and affection are considered inciters of violence and instability, so they are suppressed.

In Fahrenheit 451, literature is deemed the chief danger to society, and books are to be burned.

In the book Divergent, society is formed—and deeply divided—around each individual’s belief regarding how to prevent war. Five factions separate five belief systems regarding what society most needs—courage, peacefulness, selflessness, knowledge and honesty—and from the divisions grow mutations of every virtue. Courage becomes violent recklessness. Peacefulness becomes withdrawal/inaction. Selflessness becomes suppressive stoicism. Knowledge becomes pride and power-hunger. Honesty becomes cruelty and moral ambivalence.

In V for Vendetta, a crisis ushered in an extreme government (blatantly reminding the viewer of Hitler’s rise in Germany due to financial crisis) and the government controls the arts, objectives and morals of the people. Moreover it is the extreme example of one classic definition of ‘the state’: monopoly on violence.

(the vigilante and his protege)

On and on the list goes: governments that control the arts, conventions, technology, marriage or religion. The point here—which seems peripheral to these stories but ought not to be—is that these governments were not formed by one all-mighty Lex Luther-style bad guy. Most of the governments in these stories were formed by either the will or at least the consent of the people. The people in these books and films demanded safety, security or stability in some fashion, and the government responded accordingly. But then, like all these other man-made aspirations towards man-made ideas of perfection, they went badly, badly awry. Why we all assume the ‘awry’ part to be inevitable is another discussion entirely. Why we are so interested in the concept of our own creations turning on us is the crux of the thing.

Why?

Because we are the made things that have run off and tried to make ourselves like unto our maker. We are the created servants hell-bent on usurping the creator’s place. We’re the ones set in a position to rule, who rule so ruthlessly, and so very far outside of the original intent.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that is us. Except, unlike robots or governments, we are actually lit up with the divine spark (should we choose to live in the light of that fire) and that means the comparison to bureaucracies and machinery stops pretty well short of the full effect. We do not love tyrannical governments or violent robots. We do not vie for their salvation. We want them dead and destroyed…by machine guns and grenades if at all possible. We want them toppled, dissembled and unable to recover.

God seeks our recovery from misguided usurpation and self-dictatorship. He wants to fling us the rope, pull us up and mend us. He gives us the very strength we use to either fight him or seek him. So this is the crucial difference between our approach regarding when the things we make go awry (pull the plug?) and when we go awry:

“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”

-Dietrich Bonhoeffer

This is a fact which, quite honestly, I can scarcely begin to grasp, and from which springs restoration. Since I'm pretty troublesome and often awry of God's best and have trouble balancing judgement and mercy this is befuddling to me. But it's so. We are not glitchy products but rather, He tells us, a labor of love.