I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
French philosopher and playwright Gabriel Marcel (1889 – 1973) was sometimes labeled a Christian existentialist, but he preferred the term neo-Socrateanism as a way of describing his thought.
Marcel argued against the modern tendency to treat all of life as a problem to be solved (often with technology) instead of a mystery to experience.
He defined problems vs mysteries in this way:
A problem is something which I meet, which I find completely before me, but which I can therefore lay siege to and reduce. But a mystery is something in which I am myself involved, and it can therefore only be thought of as a sphere where the distinction between what is in me and what is before me loses its meaning and initial validity. (Being and Having, Marcel, 1949)
As a 24 year old in 1914, Marcel took a position as the director of the Red Cross information service in Paris. In this role, he tracked down information about missing soldiers and relayed it to inquirers (mothers, wives, other family members).
This responsibility illuminates Marcel’s distinction between problems and mysteries:
The service required Marcel to operate on two levels. On one level, the missing soldier was a “problem” that was solved when Marcel discovered the soldier’s status. To solve this problem, Marcel developed a “catalogue of the mind” based on field reports. The missing soldier became a variable in a formula derived from catalogue data. On another level, though, Marcel’s position entailed personal encounters. Whenever Marcel told parents their son was dead, it was painfully clear that the soldier was not a variable but a singular human being. Marcel had not solved the problem of the missing soldier for the parents. Even if his news brought an element of closure, the loss remained a “mystery” that would last for the rest of their lives. [Steven Knepper, From Problem to Mystery, emphasis mine]
The death of a loved one must always be a mystery, an experience that involves the grieving person left behind and allows for no solution, technological or otherwise. The death of a loved one when caused by decisions made by leaders who suffer no grief should be treated still as a mystery, not as a problem, even if those leaders do not naturally feel the pain of loss themselves.
Troop deaths in the current war
The current presidential administration treats troop deaths as problems, not mysteries.
Trump said, after the first three deaths were reported, “We have three, but we expect casualties, but in the end it’s going to be a great deal for the world.” As CNN noted, “Trump was immediately inserting those deaths into a cost-benefit analysis.” The deaths were regrettable but somehow okay, because a great deal for the world is on the way.
Defense Secretary Hegseth doubled down on deaths as problems not mysteries when he complained that the deaths were getting too much attention from media:
But when a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it; the press only wants to make the president look bad. But try for once to report the reality. [emphasis mine]
The Trump administration makes everything about themselves, or more accurately, their leader. Hegseth thinks that the press makes a big deal about dead soldiers because they want to make Trump look bad — look how Trump is put at the center of it all. Trump becomes the only subject in the great movie of his life and tenure as president. The soldiers who died, who lost their very lives, do not matter, their lives cut short do not matter, or if they do, almost not at all compared to the greatness we will see from Trump’s deal.
Here, Hegseth suggests that military achievements are as or more important than lives lost, if they are only a handful. Of course, in a technologically and numerically oriented society it makes some sense to take a cost-benefit analysis lens to this; that’s a problem-oriented viewpoint. But it removes the mysterious weight of one person’s death, the weight that is infinite to the people who loved them. It treats the dead soldiers as objects rather than subjects whose value cannot be measured or stacked up against military achievements, especially for a war that seems to have so little justification for its undertaking.
Note I do not call the soldiers fallen, I call them dead. Fallen is a euphemism here that obscures what really happened. They didn’t fall down. They were killed. They died. Their lives are over. They can’t get back up.