The Cause was lost. The Imperial Guard was surrounded, outnumbered, and outgunned. The victorious British magnanimously offered to accept the surrender of the surviving remains of the elite French troops when General Cambronne famously retorted, “Merde”! La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas!” Only then did the British cannons deliver the coup de grâce.
What made the French sacrifice so many young lives so gratuitously? What makes many men and women persist in a course of action long after its foolishness has amply been demonstrated?
Countless other examples could be cited; for the sake of brevity, I will restrict myself to two.
Winston Churchill made a sagacious observation in his WWI memoirs entitled "The World’s Crisis" when he marveled at the short-sightedness of the German leaders in the aftermath of their victory in the East. Russia was knocked out of the war and lay prostrate as Germany, early in 1918, forced its politicians to cede vast territories in Eastern Europe, eclipsing any potential gain on the Western Front. Wouldn’t the best course for Germany be to negotiate a peace settlement with the Western Allies, even at the cost of some territorial concessions to Belgium and France? Would the Allies, bled white in four long and murderous years of ruthless warfare, have rejected such an offer? We all know what happened next. Ludendorff opted instead for a last throw of the dice and launched his ultimate attack in the West in the spring of 1918. It ended in disaster and Germany’s unconditional surrender.
More mundane, though not any less relevant, is a dilemma created by modern medical technology, which has made it possible to fight terminal illnesses ever more tenaciously, though at a tremendous financial, physical, and psychological cost. Time and again you see or hear about a hopelessly ill patient fighting the complications of metastatic cancer for months in a row, shuttling back and forth between a regular hospital ward and the intensive care unit when everyone knows that he or she is dying. The stated goal is, of course, to prolong life. Towards achieving that objective, the medical team tries to keep the patient’s oxygen level within range, his heart pumping, his lungs ventilating (or ventilated), his kidneys (or a dialysis machine) operating, etc. The patient becomes a “heart,” “lung,” kidney,” magnesium,” “potassium”… The larger picture, the patient himself, is lost to sight. Doctors brief the family about “winning battles” against bacterial infections and internal hemorrhage when everyone knows, deep down, that the war is irremediably lost. Rather than prolonging life, the process becomes, in reality, prolonging death. It’s almost as if some people actually believe in the possibility of deflecting Death forever. An anecdote attributed to Ǧuḥā comes to mind. He borrowed a pot from his neighbor and returned it the next day with a smaller one, adding, to his neighbor’s delight, that it “gave birth.” The next time he told the same person that the pot “died,” the neighbor was beside himself with rage, as if, all of a sudden, it dawned on him that Ǧuḥā was lying.
That brings me back to the theme of this post. What makes individuals, peoples, states, and empires persist in a demonstrably bankrupt course time and again? How could Homo sapiens be so conceited, blind, and downright stupid? Wouldn’t it make much more sense to invest the resources spent on weapons and conflicts in the welfare of our planet? What about devoting a fraction of the sums spent on prolonging death to promote education and child welfare? I think the answer is best sought in the principle of inertia. Inertia in physics — Newton's First Law of Motion — is defined, according to Dictionary.com, as
“the property of matter by which it retains its state of rest or its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force.”
To return to the two examples quoted above, the Imperial Guard—an extreme example, to be sure, but nonetheless a valid model for many fanatics—knows how to fight but not much else. It obeys orders even if those no longer make sense. It abdicated logic to mob frenzy and paid the ultimate price. The panic-stricken bulk of the French troops were perhaps less valiant but more human when they clamored, "La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!" Cowardly perhaps, but much more sensible.
As for the WWI vignette, it certainly was possible, hypothetically at least, for Germany to return Alsace and Lorraine, along with the other conquered territory, to France in return for an honorable peace and a free hand in the East—an offer almost impossible for the Allies to resist, again at least in theory, especially since we know, with the wisdom of hindsight, that, in the end, Germany gave up all this territory and much more after hundreds of thousands more of young men on both sides were needlessly immolated to Ares.
But was it psychologically possible for the German leadership to even privately consider returning lands to France and Belgium, let alone dare submit such a suggestion to their public, for years subsisting on a diet of militaristic patriotism, especially in light of their recent brilliant victories in the East? Here the Principle of Inertia could be seen at full force: absent a force majeure, that is, “an external force,” the Kaiser and his generals were fated to continue “along a straight line” towards their doom. The Allies provided this “external force." What was unthinkable for Germany became inevitable.
As far as our hypothetical patient is concerned, at what point do we give up? Where should the line be drawn? Isn’t death just as predictable as birth? Does anyone really presume the ability to interrupt the life cycle? In general terms, the “external force” here is more than just cancer, heart attack, respiratory failure, or infection. Thanatos has been lurking behind a corner near the end of the human journey from time immemorial.
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