Shannon French is a professor of ethics and philosophy at the United States Naval Academy and the author of the book, The Code of the Warrior, Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present. In this episode, she talks about her time as a military ethics teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy, and the lessons she learned about ethics and warfare she brought to her students.
00:00:00.000Hey guys, it's Brett. I am sorry to be putting up another rerun episode of the podcast. We had hoped to come back from the holiday break with an entire slate of new episodes this month. Unfortunately, I got really laid up by COVID last week and I wasn't able to finish the new episode planned for today. The good news is I'm feeling better. We'll have a new episode going up on Wednesday. In the meantime, please enjoy this rebroadcast of episode number 625 Code of the Warrior. See you Wednesday.
00:00:30.000Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. War is a violent and bloody business, but it's rarely a no holds barred free for all. Instead, codes of conduct that determine what is and isn't honorable behavior on the battlefield have existed since ancient times. My guest today explored these various codes in a book she wrote during the decade she spent teaching at the United States Naval Academy. Her name is Shannon French. She's a professor of ethics and philosophy and her book is The Code of the Warrior, Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present.
00:00:58.180Shannon and I begin our conversation with the pointed questions she used to pose to the cadet she taught as to how being a warrior was different from being a killer or murderer and when killing is and isn't ethical. She then explains how the warrior codes, which developed all around the world, arose organically from the warriors themselves for their own protection and how these codes are more about identity than rules. Shannon and I then take a tour of warrior codes across time and culture, starting with the code in Homer's Iliad and then moving into the strengths and weaknesses of the Stoic philosophy, which undergirded the code of the Romans.
00:01:27.480From there, we unpacked the code of the medieval knights of Arthurian legend, what American Indians can teach soldiers about the need to make clear transitions between the home front and the war front, and how the Bushido Code of the Samurais sought to balance the influence of four different religions.
00:01:41.500We enter a conversation in the role warrior codes play today in an age when artificial intelligence and drones are having a bigger role in combat.
00:01:48.720After the show's over, check out the show notes at aom.is slash warrior code.
00:01:52.480Shannon joins you now via clearcast.io.
00:01:57.480All right, Shannon French, welcome to the show.
00:02:07.820So you are a professor of philosophy who specializes in ethics, particularly ethics and warfare. How did that happen?
00:02:16.380I get that question a lot. Well, first of all, I'd always had a fascination for military history.
00:02:22.580In fact, that goes so far back that I ran into someone I hadn't seen since I was eight years old a few years ago, and he said that he saw that I had written a book on Code of the Warrior, and he said, well, that makes sense.
00:02:37.120So apparently, even as an eight-year-old child, I had shown an interest in this area.
00:02:42.920But going forward, when I got into graduate school, my work was focused around the very difficult issues where self-interest and ethics seemed to conflict.
00:02:55.000And in looking at that area, of course, the stakes are never higher than when it's life and death.
00:03:14.160So you taught ethics at the Naval Academy, and you had one class called Code of the Warrior, which you turned into a book that we're going to talk about today.
00:03:23.000What was the response to that class to this idea of the Code of the Warrior?
00:03:25.960Well, I have to say, I have so many wonderful memories of that time in my life and that experience of teaching Code of the Warrior to the midshipmen.
00:03:35.680And essentially, this was an opportunity for them to really look at the issues that they would be facing very soon after their graduation and commissioning and to look at them from this background of not being the first people on Earth to face the kind of problems that were in their future, to feel part of something longer, a legacy that they were joining.
00:04:02.580And so there was actually quite a lot of enthusiasm around that course.
00:04:06.960And I will say, we also had a lot of fun with it.
00:04:09.560And it sounds strange, perhaps, to talk about having fun with a military ethics course.
00:04:15.140But what we were doing was trying to, as much as possible, let ourselves get into the mindset of these different warrior cultures and individual warriors.
00:04:25.580And really try to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what they faced and what we could learn from them going forward.
00:04:35.700And that, of course, is something that could not have been more relevant.
00:04:41.960And unfortunately, while I was at the Naval Academy, in the time that I was there, in the 11 years that I was there, we went from a force that was largely focused on things like humanitarian interventions to 9-11 happening.
00:04:55.620And Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom and my students were going off to war.
00:05:05.880So it went from being a course that they enjoyed to almost having an urgency to it.
00:05:14.840It became extremely relevant very fast.
00:05:18.080I mean, you talk about in your book, The Code of the Warrior, on the first day of this class, you'd often ask your students, give them a thought problem.
00:05:43.380That exercise was critical to getting to the core of the point of the course and really also the point of the book.
00:05:51.520What I wanted them to think about is that the act of killing is usually taboo.
00:05:58.300In fact, it's one of the strongest taboos that we have as humans.
00:06:02.400The idea that you would take another life is not taken lightly.
00:06:06.780So what is the difference that could be found in killing in war?
00:06:13.620And how do we identify where those lines are?
00:06:16.280So when I asked them that question, it was interesting.
00:06:19.360Sometimes the responses were almost angry.
00:06:22.180Like, you know, how dare you even think to compare what people do as war fighters to murderers or even just killer, which sounded cold and purposeless to them, for example.
00:06:40.840And looking at the different choices, though, and analyzing them, they were able to identify why it mattered so much to them.
00:06:49.580They did not want to be correctly labeled any of those other labels.
00:06:54.940They wanted to know and they wanted to believe that what they were doing was distinct in an important way and not a way that would fall apart in the stress of actually having to make these decisions in real time.
00:07:12.980And I think it also shows, even when you're engaging in warfare and you think, okay, my killing is legitimized, there's still a line there that you can cross eventually.
00:07:22.940And some of these students kind of picked up on that as well.
00:07:27.180And I think that's one of the most important things is that they recognize that you can commit murder during a war.
00:07:34.960There is still an understanding that some types of killing in war fall under the heading of still being a warfighter, being a warrior, but others do cross that line and they become personal.
00:07:49.500And they have to do with rage or vengeance or despair in some cases, and even hatred and certainly large helping of dehumanizing the people on the other side that you're fighting against.
00:08:06.600And that if you do cross that line into those kinds of understandings of what the killing is that you're doing, it's really hard to get back out of that place that you go.
00:08:17.080And that's something we talked a lot about, that if you cross the line and you kill out of one of these emotions that is not in any way linked to just doing your job, but is that deeply personal kind of killing, then it's really hard even to find your way back to the person you were before.
00:08:42.700And what I think what I saw great about this book is, you know, you explore warrior codes from throughout history and throughout cultures.
00:08:50.360And I think the big point is that this is a warrior codes are ubiquitous in humanity.
00:08:55.940We often think that, you know, 21st century Westerners or whatever, that we had sort of moral superiority over people thousands of years ago.
00:09:04.920But as you point out, like even the ancient Greeks grappled with this issue in their way.
00:09:10.120I mean, it wasn't as maybe how we do it, but they were grappling this between this line between being a murderer and being a warrior.
00:09:18.820Why do you think humanity has come up with codes of warrior throughout time and culture?
00:09:22.980Well, I think, first of all, that it's good to point out, as you just did, that this isn't a new invention.
00:09:30.920And occasionally I will get folks who think that even worrying about having limits or concepts of restraint for those who fight in wars is some kind of even like fuzzy, touchy-feely, new-agey kind of thing that came up recently.
00:09:51.740And one of the main reasons that it's not the case is that all of these different codes throughout history were not imposed from the outside.
00:10:01.760They came up organically within these warrior cultures primarily as a way to protect the warriors themselves.
00:10:10.480That is the absolutely central point that I want people to grasp in the book and that I used to teach in the course.
00:10:17.940Is that while, of course, we do need to care and all of us do care about restraining actions in war in order to protect innocence, that's how these laws of war are written in the first place.
00:10:31.100But at the end of the day, the codes that the warriors embrace are there to protect them, to protect their humanity.
00:10:38.780They're being asked to do something that puts them at great risk for moral injury.
00:10:46.880And moral injury is connected to PTSD.
00:10:51.960It's connected to a sense of losing your connection to the rest of your society, being isolated from them, being even driven out.
00:11:01.760We don't want to do that to those that we've already asked so much of, that we're asking to fight and sacrifice on our behalf.
00:11:08.580And the best protection we can give them is to give them these lines that they can rely on that help them see what they're doing has meaning, has limits, and is within that kind of structure.
00:11:24.280And that is absolutely crucial to preserving really the well-being of warriors themselves.
00:11:31.840And a lot of these codes, some of them do have very specific rules and regulations you're supposed to follow.
00:11:38.420Today, there's laws that govern warfare.
00:11:42.660But for the most part, the code, this is a little bit more amorphous.
00:11:47.760It's sort of, I mean, it's almost Aristotelian in its ethics, where it's just like, just be a good person.
00:11:53.620And it doesn't say exactly what you have to do to be a good soldier, be an ethical warrior.
00:11:58.320But people, I think, inherently understand it.
00:12:01.840Yeah, I think that's a really good insight, actually, because what you're looking at with most of these warrior codes is not so much a list of rules, but an identity that you're assuming.
00:12:15.740You're taking on an identity that actually requires you to, for example, be honorable, not act dishonorably.
00:12:23.280And that is going to be vague, and it is going to depend in part on how it's defined through action within your own group.
00:12:32.280But a lot of why it's vague is that rules by themselves are perhaps too vulnerable.
00:12:42.220Once you create just a set of rules, there's always the chance that the situation that you find yourself in doesn't match the rules.
00:12:51.360And then if you have nothing else to fall back on, you're lost with no guidance.
00:12:55.940Assuming an identity that, and you mentioned Aristotle, which is a perfect connection here, an identity that requires you to embody certain virtues, gives you something still to rely on in those complicated situations.
00:13:11.580You can still say, okay, there's nothing in the rule book about this, but if I still want to be a just person, if I want to be a honorable person, if I want to be a fair person, so on and so forth, then I need to figure out how to still embody those virtues in this situation through my actions.
00:13:33.640I need to wrestle through it myself, but with those as my guideposts.
00:13:37.580The other worry with just having a list is that people will also take that as just a minimum.
00:14:48.580Yeah, there's a wonderful story about that in Mark O'Ciel's book on Obeying Orders, which I love because it's from the Vietnam War and it's a true story.
00:14:58.300And it explains how those simple four words actually stopped someone from effectively committing a war crime.
00:15:04.600But what it brings across for us is this point that the identity there is stronger also than the rules in the sense that you've chosen to be, for example, in that case, a Marine.
00:15:27.080You've gone through all of the rites of passage and so forth to make you feel part of that community.
00:15:33.280And so, betraying that is a big deal and it's a big enough deal that psychologically it can overcome the other pressures you're going to feel.
00:15:44.700Because certainly, you can't have these conversations without talking about how incredibly hard it is to hold this kind of restraint in some of these circumstances.
00:15:54.760That you are, in fact, going to be tempted to do the wrong thing.
00:15:59.500That's something that I always tried to talk about in my class, that I didn't want them to give me pat answers.
00:16:07.500If I said something like, would you ever shoot an unarmed POW?
00:16:11.980If I just asked it like that, the students would, of course, say, why, no, ma'am.
00:16:21.320That it's just a pat response to a straightforward question.
00:16:25.460What you have to do instead is actually construct a scenario in your mind where you might really be tempted, where the person you've been dealing with has been picking off members of your platoon and you've had to see them die in your arms.
00:16:44.980You finally confront, say, the sniper who's been picking off these folks that matter to you, who are like brothers and sisters to you, and they are smug and surrender in a way that says, what are you going to do now?
00:17:01.060Wouldn't you, on some level, want to shoot them?
00:17:03.980You have to admit that you would want to before you can talk about why you shouldn't.
00:17:11.980And so getting them there is so important to have the conversation around why does that identity matter?
00:17:19.120Why would you want it to be true that even when sorely tempted, there would be lines you would never cross?
00:17:26.960So it seems like warrior codes are really about identity.
00:17:30.600It's really trying to get the soldier to think about their identity as a warrior and warriors behave in a certain way, in an ethical way.
00:17:39.600And I feel like I should mention at this point, because there is a conversation that's happening even as we speak in the U.S. military, probably in others as well, around that word warrior.
00:17:54.020They don't like that as the choice to define themselves, because, for example, they associate it with media portrayals of, or even potentially video game portrayals, of people fighting and killing who don't have restraint, who don't have limits.
00:18:14.300And so they don't like that word warrior.
00:18:16.760It sounds like a sort of Conan the Barbarian sort of thing to them.
00:18:22.000And so I don't want to get completely, even though my book is called The Code of the Warrior, I don't want to make it all about that word exactly, but instead to make it about the word you use, that identity.
00:18:32.420If your identity is as a soldier, a sailor, an airman, a marine, maybe warrior doesn't work for you, maybe your unit-specific identity works for you, but the key is it has to be something to which you have fully committed yourself.
00:18:48.420And it has to be something that is linked to these ideas of different virtues and lines that you won't cross, because it isn't a meaningful identity if you can hold on to that identity regardless of how you behave.
00:20:54.080He's not sure if anyone back home cares anymore or if anything he does there really affects them at all or matters to them.
00:21:02.240And he is doubtful of the leadership that he's under, and he's not confident that he's being led well.
00:21:11.660And all of that plays into his growing despair about his experience.
00:21:18.640And that's how we meet the great Achilles, is him really struggling with these psychological concepts that are very familiar to troops today in the forever wars.
00:21:29.300And then later we meet Prince Hector, who has a clearer sense of what he's fighting for, because the Greeks are literally attacking his home, so he knows what's at stake.
00:21:40.800But he is also close to despair, because he knows he's outmatched.
00:21:46.820He knows that he can't ultimately defeat the godlike Achilles.
00:21:50.720And he would, quite frankly, love to just run away and not have to deal with any of this, but he feels the pressure and responsibility to continue.
00:22:00.520And then when these two men clash, one against another, you also see these issues of honor and dishonor.
00:22:08.460Because for Hector, even in the midst of everything that, all the pressure he's under and everything that he's enduring, he does maintain his code and his internal sense of honor and even judged against an external sense of honor in his community.
00:22:23.960Whereas Achilles, having lost Achilles, having lost his best friend, and in some ways the last person he really deeply cared about in that situation, having lost him, he cracks in a way.
00:22:39.820He loses himself, he loses that identity.
00:22:42.540And he ends up going into this one-on-one battle with Hector, having thrown off any of the restraint, having no longer embraced his warrior's code, but instead acting almost just on pure instinct, like an animal.
00:23:02.140And he is prepared to destroy Hector, and it is very personal, and it is more like a murder than a killing in war.
00:23:11.500Yeah, I mean, even then, the ancient Greeks had a, there was a line that you did not cross, and Achilles crossed that line.
00:23:19.440He does, and he, in a sense, the point that is so poignant in the story is that while you understand his grief and his pain, because we've gotten to know Hector too,
00:23:34.820there's a sense that Hector, you know, does not deserve what Achilles does to him.
00:23:41.560And Achilles actually strips the body naked and drags it behind his chariot.
00:23:46.460This is desecration of a corpse, and this is something that most cultures, even today, of course, consider to be a gross violation.
00:23:54.020And when he does that, the horror of it strikes everyone on both sides of the conflict.
00:24:00.220And again, I mentioned they had the, the story has the Greek gods in it, and the gods are horrified.
00:24:06.180That's how far he's gone over the line.
00:24:08.600And at that point, it no longer matters that Achilles is objectively the best fighter, because he still is.
00:24:36.180It's an incredibly powerful scene in, in the epic, because what you end up seeing is an old warrior near the end of his life who knows that there's not much left for him.
00:24:47.340So, this is, you know, the king who has seen so many of his sons die, and now his, his favorite son and heir, Hector, has died, and he knows his city's going to fall.
00:24:57.740It's just, you know, there's, there's no good news on the horizon for him.
00:25:01.540And he has to swallow his pride and go beg for his son's body back from the man who killed him and the man who desecrated that body.
00:25:09.880But when they actually confront one another, Achilles looks at the older version of himself, in a sense, and he's incredibly moved.
00:25:19.480And he, the two of them weep together.
00:25:22.340And they talk about, in a sense, the horror of war, but they also talk specifically about basically the unfairness of life and how, from their perspective, the gods dole out good things and bad things, but they never give anyone just good.
00:25:41.480They only give a mix at best, and for some people, nothing but sorrow.
00:25:46.300And so, they see themselves as equal sufferers in this experience, and Achilles relents and essentially gets his soul back, gets some of his soul back from that experience.
00:25:59.900And he does return the body because he has seen that what he did was wrong and that he wants to be worthy again, and he does make that ultimate decision.
00:26:11.940Now, I will say, in the way that the Homeric cycle proceeds, it happens outside the bounds of the Iliad, but the gods still punish Achilles, and his punishment is significant, too, in that he's ultimately killed by someone who isn't worthy.
00:26:28.980So, the gods actually help Prince Paris shoot that arrow that famously hits Achilles in his heel, his one weak spot.
00:26:38.580And that is shameful under their culture to be killed by someone who is less than you are.
00:26:45.340And so, there, too, the punishment does still come to Achilles.
00:26:49.100All right. So, it sounds like from the Iliad, we can learn that the ancient Greeks did have a code of ethics in war that it could cross a line, and Achilles is a manifestation of that.
00:26:59.500And I think Hector is also just a great example of an ideal soldier that you'd want to embody.
00:27:04.860Like, he knew he was going to lose, but he still felt duty-bound to defend his home, defend his country.
00:27:11.780Absolutely. And he's another example of someone who is very relatable, even in modern times, because he is honorable, but it's not in a kind of empty reflex way.
00:27:25.920He thinks deeply about what he's facing, and he admits privately, you know, we get a glimpse inside his mind, and he admits that he wishes he could run away from it all.
00:27:37.180And there even is a moment before he has his ultimate, you almost want to call it a duel with Achilles, where he actually does run away.
00:27:45.480So, he has a moment of weakness that is so human that it kind of just makes him a little bit more lovable.
00:27:52.060He sees Achilles with armor made by the gods and recognizes that he has no chance of surviving, and for a moment, his will cracks, and he runs away from him.
00:28:02.860But then, what brings him back is also relatable.
00:28:06.040He believes that he sees one of his brothers, so imagine that in kind of a band of brothers sense.
00:28:12.620And that reminds him, again, of this identity.
00:28:16.140He's reminded of who he is and what he owes others, and it's actually that love that he feels for Troy and for his fellow Trojans that makes him stop running and turn and face his inevitable death at the hands of Achilles.
00:28:30.260And that is, again, I think a moment where people really recognize that this experience is timeless, that you can put yourself in this character's shoes from millennia ago and recognize things that we could see in any modern conflict.
00:28:50.900All right, so let's fast forward to the ancient Romans.
00:28:54.940And you say the Romans had sort of a jahnist-faced view towards military ethics.
00:29:01.720Well, on the one hand, the influences on the Romans were partly from the existing religion that was there at the time, which was a follow-on in many ways to the one that we saw in the Iliad, the Greek religion, the polytheistic with many gods.
00:29:20.200And they had philosophies that were dominant at the time that the Roman legion was at its height, and they influenced the troops certainly at the time.
00:29:33.900And probably the one that is most relevant for that is Stoicism, and that has absolutely survived until the present day and has helped many people in trying to reconcile themselves to their fates in war and other conflicts.
00:29:49.280But there was also a thread of what we would today call sort of hedonism, but the idea that if there is no afterlife, which many of the Romans believed there was not, or there wasn't a meaningful one, there wasn't one where you would be sorted based on your behavior, that all there is is this life.
00:30:11.620And so, you probably heard the old saying, you know, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.
00:30:15.480So, there's a bit of a being torn between a almost devil-may-care attitude on the one hand, and the Stoic philosophy, which is incredibly demanding.
00:30:28.220In fact, Stoicism is so demanding that it does not allow any wavering from honorable behavior, even if you are tortured, even if you are put under extreme duress.
00:30:41.740There's just no excuses in that original tradition.
00:30:46.500The idea is that you must always do the right thing, kind of, to use another expression, though the heavens fall.
00:30:52.360And so, all of which is to say that Roman legions going off into far corners of the empire had to decide which of these inspired them and which of these got them through, all in the context of fighting in disciplined units where you had to be able to rely on the man next to you.
00:31:15.640And you had to know that that man was going to keep his shield where it needed to be to protect your flank.
00:31:22.940And if they weren't there, then you were dead.
00:31:26.360So, it's an interesting, I think, tradition to study because you have to look at how all those things played together and how people found their way with all these different influences.
00:31:37.920I mean, so, on that Stoicism side, for a soldier or a military leader, you know, Marcus Aurelius is the most famous military leader who was also a Stoic philosopher.
00:31:47.760Like, what did it mean to be a virtuous warrior if you took that Stoic idea?
00:31:55.280Well, it was the ultimate no complaints, no excuses philosophy.
00:32:00.160So, for Marcus Aurelius, and you're quite right, you know, he was someone who led troops into combat and was himself right there with them in a lot of cases.
00:32:12.680So, he wasn't leading from back at the capital.
00:32:16.160He had the belief that everything was predetermined, that you had a role to play.
00:32:23.820And whether we want to play that out as fate or however you want to think of that, but the important thing was you were assigned a role.
00:32:31.400And if your role was a soldier in the Roman legions, then it was your entire purpose in life to do that role as well as you could.
00:32:41.740So, whatever task you were given, every one of those tasks had that same point of pressure on it.
00:32:51.980So, what I mean by that is that you couldn't slack off anywhere.
00:32:57.380If you were told to clear a forest, then by God, you needed to clear that forest the best way a forest has ever been cleared.
00:33:05.680You were meant to take everything as absolutely defining you.
00:33:10.300So, maybe you think of it in this term, in these terms, it would be to imagine that if you were told to guard a particular point, then imagining that that would be the entire story that could ever be told of you, whether or not you guarded that point, was the way you needed to approach that.
00:33:32.520And so, that actually carried on, and I mentioned this with the torture analogy, that you should not sacrifice those tasks and those assignments.
00:33:41.880You shouldn't fail those roles, regardless of what happens to you.
00:33:45.780So, Marcus Aurelius made the point that the one thing you have control over is your response to external events.
00:33:55.220The external events are going to do whatever they're going to do, and the people around you are going to do whatever they're going to do.
00:34:00.900But the one thing you have control over is your response, how you react.
00:34:06.940And so, it was absolutely imperative for a Stoic warrior to always react honorably with literally no regard for the consequences to themselves.
00:34:19.540So, it's a very, very high bar, and I don't think there's many that are much higher that you can find.
00:34:25.320And as you said, the Stoic ideal still lives on today.
00:34:29.140Many soldiers across the world go to Stoicism as a way to help them manage their role as a soldier.
00:34:36.800It still speaks to a lot of people, in part because their lives they know are going to be filled with things they can't control.
00:34:48.020And as I mentioned at the very outset, a lot of those things are going to be incredibly high stakes.
00:34:56.200So, when you're faced with a lot of awful things, including the losses that you're going to experience and the harms that you yourself have to cause in your job,
00:35:08.820then having this very strict philosophy to fall back on has its comforting elements.
00:35:17.160Because you can tell yourself that I have to do these things, I have to lose these people, but the only thing I can control is whether or not I do the absolute best that I can.
00:35:30.480And as long as I do that, I am fulfilling my role.
00:35:35.040And that is all that I have charge of.
00:35:39.060And so, it is something that makes you feel a bit more empowered in an otherwise helpless situation.
00:35:46.120And unfortunately, troops find themselves in those kinds of situations a lot.
00:35:50.840Right. Well, you know, James Stockdale, a famous prisoner of war in Vietnam, went on to become a professor, I think, at the War College.
00:35:57.800He famously, he used stoicism to get through his years in Vietnam as a prisoner of war.
00:36:03.100Absolutely. And he made it completely clear that he does not think he could have survived without that philosophy.
00:36:09.120Because if you talk about feeling helpless, there is no more helplessness than being in that kind of prisoner situation where everything you experience is being controlled by others with the aim of breaking you down,
00:36:23.620with the intentional aim of trying to make you give up those ideals, make you violate the trust that you've established, make you betray your friends.
00:36:33.100And the only way he found to resist that was to say that these things are happening to my body, these things are happening externally to me, but the me that I control is untouchable.
00:36:46.940And that's the part of me that responds to it.
00:36:49.600And that's what got Stockdale through, was clinging on to that idea that he wasn't powerless.
00:36:55.460As much as he appeared powerless, he wasn't, because he could control his reactions.
00:37:02.660And his writings on that are wonderful to read.
00:37:06.080And I will say his legacy lives on in many ways, including that there is a Stockdale chair in ethics that's currently held by my very good friend,
00:37:13.660Pauline Shanks-Corin up at Navy War College.
00:37:16.560And at the Naval Academy, where I used to work, there is a Stockdale Center for Ethics.
00:37:21.740So we have not forgotten Admiral Stockdale.
00:37:24.900Do you think there are any downsides to using Stoicism as an ethical framework for a soldier or a warrior?
00:37:31.900The part that I struggle with, and I think I say this with the understanding that not everyone will struggle with it.
00:37:41.420And so I don't want to discourage anyone from embracing Stoicism if it is helpful.
00:37:49.520But for myself, I think what I struggle with is that it does require you to have a certain kind of emotional detachment from suffering and loss,
00:37:59.620not only in the moment, but permanently.
00:38:03.560And that, I'm not sure, is sustainable for everyone.
00:38:06.920I think that depends a lot on individual psychology.
00:38:10.200And what I mean by that is, it's one thing to say that you can't, unfortunately, take time to mourn your losses in the middle of ongoing combat.
00:38:24.420You have to, to some extent, embrace Stoicism to get through that moment with any hope of seeing future moments.
00:38:34.480But I like better the idea that then when you are finally allowed out of that urgent moment and allowed a moment to breathe,
00:38:48.320that you can also fully mourn and remember those you've lost and feel that pain and experience it,
00:38:58.320maybe even weep the way that Achilles wept with King Prime.
00:39:02.620And I think that to suggest that there's any weakness to that is a bad idea.
00:39:10.140And I'm not sure Stoicism necessarily does accuse anyone of weakness, but it certainly does discourage taking those moments later.
00:39:18.460And for myself, I believe that it's really important to give people the time and the space to mourn and fully feel what they've gone through.
00:39:30.140And in fact, other warrior cultures that I studied have more about that and more about how that can help with the transitions.
00:39:37.180All right, well, let's fast forward to medieval era and particularly the Round Table, the Knights of the Round Table,
00:39:45.140which is probably the most famous code in the West because this is, you know, particularly in Mallory's Arthurian Tells,
00:39:52.120you actually see a code sort of explicitly laid out because the knights had to take this oath.
00:39:57.900So for those who aren't familiar, what was the oath or the general tenets of it?
00:40:02.040Well, what's wonderful about this idea and the way that Mallory wrote it?
00:40:06.240I mean, again, we have to note that this is someone writing a work of fiction and trying to create an ideal.
00:40:13.440And that ideal has inspired many people.
00:40:15.640And I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
00:40:17.260I think that sometimes, in fact, these fictional works, because they allow us inside the minds of these different people experiencing war,
00:40:26.380are more helpful than any other source in allowing us to work through what is needed for a good code.
00:40:34.040So in Mallory's work, what we're looking at is an idealized code of chivalry, and it includes things like never to do outrageosity, I love that word, or murder.
00:40:45.500It requires you to always do succor for those who are in need and particularly damsels in distress.
00:40:51.560Basically, the broad strokes of it are to require the knights to be servant leaders.
00:41:01.640And I like to talk about this, particularly now, because I think this is a concept that a lot of people who work in the space of leadership are familiar with,
00:41:10.780but that doesn't always make it into the public conversation around what leaders should be.
00:41:17.440And in Mallory's Le Morte d'Artour and in other works about King Arthur, one of the things that really does come through is the idea that knights,
00:41:28.120while they had the power, while they were the best armed, they had the equipment, they had the skills to just be bullies,
00:41:36.200to just be tyrants, they voluntarily took an oath to use that power to help those who were weaker than themselves and to not abuse that power.
00:41:48.120So, the whole outrageosity point is that you are not to use this strength that you have as a way to take advantage of others,