On June 22, 2010, Michael Hastings published in Rolling Stone magazine an essay entitled “The Runaway General,” a profile of General Stanley McChrystal and his leadership of American troops in Afghanistan. The next day President Obama held a press conference announcing he had “accepted” General McChrystal’s resignation, claiming that “the conduct represented in the recently published article does not meet the standard that should be set by a commanding general.” Having read the article, I can’t say I found much to object to in McChrystal’s conduct per se; I was far more troubled by his overall approach to the war than by the fact that he criticized some thin-skinned politicians or that his aides had a beer or two too many at a Paris pub. Nonetheless, Obama claimed that McChrystal’s behavior “undermine[d] the civilian control of the military that is at the core of our democratic system. And it erode[d] the trust that’s necessary for our team to work together to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan.” Although McChrystal retired at full rank, his conduct was deemed dishonorable.
McChrystal’s resignation serves as a reminder of honor’s strong claim on our attention. I’m not convinced that a mistimed middle finger or a witless joke at Vice President Biden’s expense justifies the removal of an effective field commander. I’m not sure General McChrystal believes so either, at least not on the basis of reading between the lines of his recent book On Character: Choices the Define a Life. Who could blame McChrystal for not wanting that one choice to define his life? The article wasn’t flattering, but neither was it scandalous. McChrystal says little about that meeting with Obama, but the event led to a great deal of introspection. “In my attempts to understand who I was and the character of the person I sought to be,” he writes, “it caused me to think deeply, and often differently, to understand what I thought and what I believed—my convictions—about things that matter.”
In so doing, Stanley McChrystal discovered philosophy. His rather odd epigraph—Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”—hints at a level of philosophical reflection the book never fully achieves. Concerning two preeminent philosophical issues, the reality of death and the nature of the transcendent, McChrystal is doggedly agnostic and only on occasion does he connect those two questions to the issue of character. Nor does he seem particularly interested in forming what we might call a coherent and consistent worldview, the kind of rigor a philosopher would demand. The book’s 60 chapters read more as diary entries than sustained reflection. But like many thinkers before him, the crucible of suffering and the loss of status inspired new levels of introspection.
To the degree McChrystal engages the philosophical tradition, Marcus Aurelius serves as his guide, and one can certainly do worse. The warrior-thinker would naturally gravitate to the emperor-philosopher. McChrystal’s efforts to engage Hobbes or Kant come off as undergraduate, but his connection to Marcus Aurelius sounds authentic.
I wouldn’t recommend the book for its depth of reflection, but I would recommend it nonetheless, especially for a general audience, an undergraduate class, or a leadership training seminar. When Aristotle identified three modes of being-in-the-world—the contemplative, the active, and the mixture of the two—he also identified human types. Aristotle realized that a well-ordered society had to combine the different types, and that in some sense each of us as individuals needed to as well, given that we were mixtures of action and repose, of thought and deed. A philosopher who can’t change a tire is less useful to society than a mechanic who doesn’t grasp the hypostatic union, and I’d probably be more interested in spending time with the mechanic than the philosopher.
Philosophers have long fascinated themselves with the “warrior” as part of the social order. Socrates was, after all, a war hero. So when a warrior offers us some reflections on the relationship between character and operating in stressful circumstances, we should pay attention. I’ve never been shot at, but I imagine it would concentrate my faculties. A warrior will experience things most of us blessedly avoid, and those experiences also bring a depth of insight.
I’ve been fortunate to teach in the University of Louisville McConnell Center’s “Strategic Broadening Seminar,” wherein Army officers participate in a liberal arts boot camp. It’s a terrific program in part because seminars get real in a way they don’t with traditional undergraduates. I begin by confessing to the officers that I have never been in the military nor seen combat duty, so I can’t speak with any authority to their experiences. Our conversations, stripped of bellicose bravado and “thank you for your service” platitudes, demonstrate remarkable sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and candor. We’ve typically discussed Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, an interesting and important book to read alongside McChrystal’s. The officers bring to the class’s conversation a level of experience that teases out many of Shay’s meanings that would have otherwise remained hidden to me, while his book helps them make sense of their own combat experiences. Loss and violence remain at war’s core, but those are conditions for and not barriers to soldiers performing acts of valor. The drapery of civilization torn down, their war experiences allow the bright light of truth to illuminate their condition.
Those of us not on the front lines ought to remember that our nods to service shouldn’t clear our consciences or blind us to the enduring horrors of war. We get to feel good about ourselves without having to deal with war’s trauma and continued undoing of personality. Neither do we appreciate fully the sense of duty and obligation, as well as acts of love and courage, that men and women in battle can express, or allow such expression to shape our own lives. Ares’s marriage to Aphrodite suggests something about war’s twofold nature and thus also its appeal.
I appreciated McChrystal’s stripping away a lot of bourgeois values in assessing character. He rightly recognizes character’s stable nature in the face of constantly changing circumstances, and his appreciation for human frailty and weakness, maybe especially among men in battle, is offered as a tonic against hero worship. He understands heroism as “the result of measured actions over time that cumulatively constitute a level of behavior that sets a person apart from, and above, what we usually expect,” the particularity of which I find a useful corrective to assumptions we make about people just because they wear uniforms.
McChrystal defines character as the combination of conviction and discipline, allowing for conviction’s ambiguity. After all, many of the al-Qaeda operatives he killed, captured, and (perhaps) tortured were not lacking in conviction. McChrystal’s lack of philosophical sophistication, however, gets him in trouble: In the midst of the personal crisis wherein the titles and tasks that defined him were effaced, he had to go in search of an answer to the question “Who am I?” but he often short-circuited the search before any meaningful conclusion. This abandonment of the full range of possibilities reveals itself most clearly when he meditates on conviction as a relationship between persons and their circumstances.
Undoubtedly McChrystal, like many soldiers, found himself at some point doing inhuman things he never thought himself capable of. Taking a human life, even under a cloak of legitimacy, changes a man. The legitimacy arises from two sources: institutional command and the sense of an important cause. One’s commitment to a cause, McChrystal repeatedly claims, arises always and only from one’s circumstances. “We are all just[!] products of our own environments,” he repeats throughout the book. On the one hand there is something refreshing about reading a man admit, concerning slavery and the Civil War, that “with the same life journey most [people] would have done the same.” He also feels “the same about the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Regardless of my views, I believe that with the same life journey and sources of information, I might well share their perspectives.”
McChrystal also makes it clear, however, that he regards slavery an evil and the protesters of January 6 profoundly in the wrong. Were we nothing more than the product of our circumstances, our moral judgments would carry no weight; we, in fact, would not be capable of moral judgments. McChrystal may lament that we now live in a time in America “when each side is passionate about the righteousness of its cause” and that these causes cannot coexist with one another peacefully. Which is why this is the moment we need philosophy.
Instead of clear moral conviction, McChrystal offers a series of shoulder shrugs. Although he raises the question of whether there is a standard of right accessible to human beings and capable of being communicated, he abandons the question as soon as he asks it. McChrystal handles the question of a higher “cause” by relativizing all causes. I found his chapter on patriotism surprising. Any time McChrystal touches upon the question of right, he resorts to bromides, as he does in this instance. “Our patriotism,” he writes, “like our faith or the people we love, is a uniquely personal choice that we each must make, respecting the choices others make, as well.” McChrystal confesses that he doesn’t wear his patriotism, such as it is, on his sleeve and that “my way is neither right nor wrong.” He claims character is about conviction plus discipline, but I’m not clear on his fundamental convictions. In the chapter “When There’s No Right Answer,” and it seems there rarely is, he suggests keeping silent when possible and “speaking from the heart” when not. I don’t find this helpful.
If the legitimate taking of life cannot arise from the nature of the cause, then its legitimacy, as I said previously, must result from structures of institutional command. Seeing the bloodshed caused by fighting and dying for a cause may have inspired McChrystal to relativize all causes, but as a soldier and commander he is dedicated to structures of command and the sense of duty they inspire. McChrystal is less interested in whether soldiers achieved some sort of objective than whether they did their duty, for duty is sacrosanct while objectives seem to assume some sort of “god’s-eye” view of things inaccessible to mere mortals. Perhaps the big picture can provide some “clarity of the sacrifice” required by soldiers—that was certainly Lincoln’s view—but soldiers don’t operate from a big picture. They operate from a unit with a specific code of conduct, and from that point of view “the worth of a hill captured or a terrorist killed is less clear than when lofty objectives are never attained or simply abandoned.” In the middle of the bloody struggle, a soldier might ask, “Does all this matter? Does any of it?” But again, having raised the question, McChrystal cuts off the inquiry.
At least McChrystal asks some of the right questions, and I think part of the value of the book is that when you live in a world where the misty hazes of subjectivism occlude questions concerning the good, the true, and the beautiful, we can at least make some moral progress with institutionalized codes of conduct that can shape persons of character. McChrystal never veers into speculations about “identity,” that strange contemporary obsession, and this no doubt results in part from the fact that the military exists as the last honor-based institution in society. Honor-based institutions stress not authenticity or the positing of one’s own values; instead, meaning and purpose derive from playing assigned roles, and judgment attends to how well one plays those roles. Those roles, in turn, institutionalize virtues intrinsically related to everyday practices. To perform the role well means to live a virtuous life.
I think we can learn a lot from that, and in many ways McChrystal’s book operates as a pre-theoretical meditation of what Alasdair MacIntyre lifts to the level of reflection in his virtue ethics. I suspect many of our culture wars might vanish were we to stop worrying about identity and authenticity and give honor its due. Washington loved Joseph Addison’s play Cato, and in a key passage Juba reminds us of a truth worth remembering:
Honour’s a sacred tie, the law of kings,
The noble mind’s distinguishing perfection,
That aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her,
And imitates her actions, where she is not:
It ought not to be sported with.
