Shirt of fire
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 14: The Trouble with Paradise
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Paul Brennan
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I am a human being and hope to be neither saint nor scoundrel. As one who has spent his life in wistful longing and searching, I die resigning in the hope that my life will serve as a human document.
– Ensign Heiichi Okabe, kamikaze pilot, 1944
Our species is paradoxical. It supports many self-interested egoists, yet many others are willing to sacrifice themselves for this or that "higher cause" or "higher power", dying in the hope that others might survive and flourish. Socio-biologists call such sacrifice "altruistic suicide". When a gazelle runs off at a tangent from the herd and feeds itself to a predatory lion, it makes a gift of its life and enables the herd to escape. Altruistic suicide is also identifiable in organic life when healthy cells induce their own death to enhance the survival of their genes (apoptosis). The tadpole's tail cells are induced to commit altruistic suicide (cellular biologists actually use the phrase), so that the newly morphed frog may flourish. Biologists note, however, that "self-promoting or ultra-selfish genes" can sometimes exploit nearby suicidally altruistic cells to create new abnormal growths. At times they may work in coalition with local "killer" cells.
Creating an analogue of the concept, as socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson did in 1975, and using it to interpret human ideological or theological behaviour, invites many objections. The first set focuses on the moral bias of sociobiology itself: that it is a value-laden science; that it is used to justify deterministic Darwinism; and that it has at times even been embedded with Nazi-like prescriptions. These objections fail to distinguish between the objectivity of the language of the discipline and the subjectivity of its social context. The objectivity of John D. Rockefeller's observation that "the growth of a large business is merely the survival of the fittest" rests in the descriptive and tautological interpretation of his language, whilst the subjective gloss of his statement arises from its context – who made it, for what purpose and based on which moral assumptions. Altruistic suicide, like survival of the fittest, is both a practice and an idea, a blend of facts and values – a fact being a realised value and a value being a potential or idealised fact. For example, love can be the promise of an objective wedding ring and the promise of a wedding ring can be objective love. So it is with survival of the fittest or altruistic suicide: they are both facts-within-values as well as values-within-facts.
The second lot of objections argues that altruistic suicide, originally defined by sociologist Emile Durkheim in 1897, should not be appropriated by non-human biologists, thus committing the methodological sin of anthropomorphism. It can also be argued that altruistic suicide should not be extended into the discourses of human ideology and human theology, simply because the animal analogues are not a snug fit. But can we afford to shy away from using such vulgar analogues, given the insights delivered by socio-biology and its allied discipline, evolutionary psychology, over the last thirty years? These insights include the claim that depression in older human males may be due to a loss of status within their group, as observed in other higher primates, rather than to some personal bio-chemical imbalance, as Baron Cohen stated in 1997. The phrase "biological fundamentalists" is used to denigrate socio-biologists. Yet it has been shown that not only is it common practice for a male lion, upon taking a new female mate, to set about killing her accompanying cubs by a previous union, but that – according to Daly and Wilson in 1996 – "in the USA a child less than two years of age is at 100 times greater risk of being killed by step-parents than genetic parents".
This context frames the focal question of this article: can it be deduced, from the cases which follow, that the behaviour of human "suicide-missionaries" who sacrifice themselves to a higher cause (explosives being a technological add-on) has a similar biological basis to the behaviour of those sacrificial gazelles which, when outflanked by lions, give themselves over to their predators in the interest of their group? Can such human suicide-missionaries be seen as both an expression of theology/ideology-in-practice and as a display of adaptive human biology? (I use the phrase "suicide-missionary" to refer to the actor prior to death. The word "martyr" refers to an assessment of that person after their death.)
JAPANESE KAMIKAZE PILOTS REGARDED their suicide mission as protecting the divinity of Emperor Hirohito and his imperial ambitions. Over 6,000 Japanese pilots flew suicide missions against Allied ships during World War II, the largest martyrdom in modern history. According to Hatsuho Naito, writing in 1989, kamikazes always flew against military targets without killing innocents. The name of their planes, Ohka ("exploding cherry blossoms"), alluded to beauty in death. Sixteen thousand pilots volunteered to sacrifice themselves as "the thunder gods". Collectively, they saw themselves as a divine wind (kamikaze) that would turn the war in Japan's favour. Images from nature abound. The kamikazes' Suicide Manual (1944) says: "Two or three metres before impact you will see clearly the muzzle of the enemy's guns. You feel you are floating in the air. At that moment you see your mother's face. She is not smiling or crying. It is her usual face. Happy memories will return like a dream. You are relaxed and a smile creases your face. The sweet atmosphere of your boyhood days returns. You may nod then, or wonder what happened. You may even hear a final sound like the breaking of a crystal." As souls, kamikaze pilots believed they entered Shinto Paradise, where their ancestral fathers waited to introduce their souls to God.
Clearly kamikaze pilots are not a genetic subset of homo sapiens genetically programmed to commit altruistic suicide for their higher cause, like gazelles. Much sophisticated human behaviour is transmitted through time by memes, the cultural equivalent of genes. A meme is a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea – like a song – that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Kamikaze pilots were steeped in the memes of altruistic suicide: non-negotiable loyalty, selfless bravery, sacrificial love of homeland – all largely preserved and perpetuated today by pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine.
At first glance, most suicide-missionaries seem to be a triumph of man's soul over the culture of secular values. Yet this forced separation of secular values from theological faith collapses on examination. For example, the personality profiles of the Tamil Tigers' elite corps of suicide bombers in Sri Lanka raise vexing paradoxes. Politically, they are atheistic Marxists. But commentators regularly point out that they are driven by a variety of inspirations, including the charisma of their leader. Most are born Hindus and believe in reincarnation. Tigers believe their assassinations deliver karma rather than, say, justice. The tiger, the symbol of the wrathful Tamil god Murugan, is also an emblem of the mythical mother who sacrificed her children in war. Furthermore, the tiger is both the symbol of Tamil emperors and an image embedded in Tamil poetry going back to 500BC. Like the kamikazes, the Tigers link themselves to an imperial tradition with a homeland at its hub.
Although communists are ostensibly materialist and atheistic, they are devoted to Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, as the prophets of revolution who signposted mankind's long march through history to the higher cause of socialism. From the Paris Commune to Stalingrad, the red revolutionaries have generated their own martyrs. Some chose to die for "the revolution"; many more were chosen.
The People's flag is deepest red,
It watches o'er our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs lie soft and cold,
Their dying blood's in every fold.
The people dominated the twentieth century. The people were dedicated to the higher causes of liberty, equality and fraternity (in the case of France) and justice, tranquillity, liberty, welfare and prosperity (for the United States). Communists interpreted fraternity as mandatory solidarity, thus totalitarianism was born. The people sanctified themselves as producers and were then pressed into the service of the "Great Leader" by way of the vanguard party. The collectivisation of humanity as the people reached transcendental heights. Secular capitalists translated liberty into mandatory free markets, thus corporatism was born. The people sanctified themselves as consumers, elevating infinite desires above finite needs in the service of profit and possession. Soon the people became a largely unchallenged higher cause unto itself for which many people sacrificed themselves in the course of two world wars.