Inspired by Graham McAleer’s review of the new James Bond, No Time to Die, I streamed the film from Amazon Prime Video. Ever since with my young sons decades ago I watched James Bond films, I have always liked them for the action and the guns, although I now find Jason Bourne more congenial and more realistic. On Law and Liberty, our sister website, philosopher McAleer writes under the title “James Bond, Christian Knight”:
During the Enlightenment, David Hume sought to replace the ideal of the Christian knight with that of the gallant. He was sure that a military with baggage trains stocked with champagne would prevail against enemies with less refined tastes. Rustic soldiers, minds stuffed with superstitions, should be supplanted by the scientific soldier, the officer and gentleman. Ambassadors of the refinement of the arts and sciences, a new model army would deliver a revolution in military affairs to the battlefield. For the first sixty years of his film life, Hume’s fellow Scot, James Bond was the definition of the gallant. With suavity to disarm the ladies and the latest refinements in weapons and spy trickery to dispatch enemies, Bond was the lethal edge of the Enlightenment. In No Time to Die, the Christian knight makes a comeback. …
In traditional moral theology, the Bible’s greater love hath no man [than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends—John 15:13] is a call to solidarity, in a strict order of obligation: family, nation, and humankind. Bond is bent on saving his family, but he will lay down his life for his country, and humanity, too.
One might empathize with McAleer’s claim that James Bond has become a “Christian knight,” but perhaps the professor of philosophy has partly seen in the film what he wanted to see. Did the evil villain’s first name, Lyutsifer, provide an irresistible temptation? If the hero died for a former lover and the baby girl they made together (out of wedlock) as well as for mankind, it is not as clear that he sacrificed his life for his “nation.” The modern state, sovereign and omnipotent, and consequently inefficient and corrupt, appears nowhere in the Bible, even if tribes prefigure nations.
Besides Jason Bourne, who fights that sort of runaway state, another film to watch is Three Days of the Condor (1975), directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Robert Redford and the beautiful Faye Dunaway. Don’t trust the government of your “nation” too much! This being said, I admit that the new James Bond is morally more sympathetic than his previous incarnations.
The student of economics will wonder how villains such as Lyutsifer Safin can marshal the enormous resources necessary to staff and equip private armies, build secret bases on isolated islands, and manufacture biological weapons of mass destruction. Only states can do this. Safin-like villains strain credulity if not, perhaps, for the fact that they sell their services and products to nation-states, which have taxpayers to pay the bill. To add further realism to the plot of No Time to Die, the infected-nanobot technology used by Safin was stolen from a British government laboratory.
As another antidote to state idolatry, I will invoke James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock who explained in The Calculus of Consent (1962; available on Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Liberty) that the Christian ethics has to be tempered by individualism (p. 301):
Christian idealism, to be effective in leading to a more harmonious social order, must be tempered by an acceptance of the moral imperative of individualism, the rule of equal freedom. The acceptance of the right of the individual to do as he desires so long as his action does not infringe on the freedom of other individuals to do likewise must be a characteristic trait in any “good” society. The precept “Love thy neighbor, but also let him alone when he desires to be let alone” may, in one sense, be said to be the overriding ethical principle for Western liberal society.
Nothing shows that gallantry and the liberal Enlightenment on the one hand and morality on the other hand are mutually exclusive. On the contrary, classical liberalism offers the promise of both. Perhaps the My Lai massacre would not have happened if American soldiers had had champagne in their rations. There might be a bit of faith involved here, but the good life in a market society and the pleasures of life are probably a big reason why liberal societies have been able thus far to keep barbarians at bay.
READER COMMENTS
Craig
Nov 14 2021 at 7:13pm
Sage advice: if you ever capture James Bond, just kill him.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 15 2021 at 12:15am
Craig: As often, I don’t understand your humor. Anyway, he is already dead.
Craig
Nov 15 2021 at 10:02am
In most movies at some point the villain will capture Bond. But instead of just killing him they devise some scheme to kill him. But somehow instead of killing Bond, he somehow squeezes out of the jam.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 15 2021 at 11:03am
Yes. From that point of view, run-of-the-mill murderers are more effective than Spectre.
Jose Pablo
Nov 14 2021 at 10:28pm
“My Lai massacre would not have happened if American soldiers had had champagne in their rations.”
I very much doubt so. Afterall, Nazi German officials, many of them very sophisticated and with champagne in their rations, sure could attend an opera play right after killing some thousands of civilians.
And it was an American congressman (always more likely to have champagne in their rations that the soldiers) the one who said that Thompson (the helicopter pilot who saved that day a small number of villagers by flying them to safety) was the only person in the My Lai massacre that should go to jail.
[I am using here the, very interesting, Huemer’s recount of this episode in The Problem of Political Authority]
Craig
Nov 15 2021 at 10:12am
As an aside my dad in Vietnam received low ABV Budweiser beer. It was not cold. One of the pictures shows him with a beer can which he is putting into a mortar.
My Lai is the natural consequence of guerilla war. The problem when fighting guerillas dressed in a way where they cannot be distinguished from the civilian population is that you start to look at everybody as the enemy. (My lai of course they killed people who clearly could never have been combatants of course)
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 15 2021 at 11:33am
Craig: On your second paragraph, I fear there is more than that (guerilla war). For a statist, individuals belong to their state (or to their collectivity if one is a collectivist in general). From John Sack, Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story (The Viking Press, 1971, p. 125):
Craig
Nov 15 2021 at 12:52pm
Well they might belong to a state but when you speak to young soldiers they often discuss the camraderie they share with their fellow soldiers, the ‘band of brothers’, right? They belong to the US military, yes, but specifically? They belong to that platoon/company of soldiers which brave the same hazards. As a further mitigating circumstance let us also not forget that they are trained to do something unnatural to human beings. To kill, and to do that the military dehumanizes the enemy. I think in Vietnam the term ‘gooks’ embodies that dehumanization quite well. They’re young, the bullets are flying, the climate for somebody coming from most areas of the US is absolutely miserable and yeah, you have a witches brew of factors that comes together to make soldiers more likely to commit atrocities like My Lai. This is not a justification, but there are mitigating factors involved.
Yes, the government policy may exist, the one policy that comes to mind is the Allies bombing campaign in WW2 which did not have the technological ability to specifically target industries, so they went after civilian housing on the premise that those civilians would be dislocated from the industries they worked at.
War can sometimes bring out the very best in a few people. But I think we should also remember that there is something about war which also has some tendency to bring out the very worst in people. Yes, indeed I would say that SHOULD be expected.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 16 2021 at 12:37am
Craig: I did not want to imply that to “deprive the VC of their population resources,” including women and children, was the policy of “the generals.” From the little I have read, it was the policy of the officers on site (or some of them). I was just quoting Calley who claimed that this was what he was supposed to do, finding normal that individuals are resources owned by their governments or warlords.
Christopher Browning agrees with you in Ordinary Men. He argues that the “esprit de corps” is what led the Nazi’s Reserve Police Battalion 101 to kill a few tens of thousand men, women, and children in Poland in 1942. Browning documents that they were free to opt-out and ask for a reassignment. Only about 10% did.
Craig
Nov 16 2021 at 9:21am
I have heard of that book and briefly discussed it with a neighbor. Yes, I recall the concept that many stayed on because to quit would leave an unsavory task to his comrades. But let’s also not forget that books like Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, which are must reads if you want a decent insight into the inner machinations of the 3rd Reich, but it MUST be read knowing the book is Speer-apologism (he should’ve hung at Landsberg). So, yes, after the war, the guards need to say something, something mitigating in the face of such crimes, and so they do and instantly we can at least understand the motivation of not wanting to let your comrades down, again not a justification. But let’s also not forget that this duty also meant they weren’t fighting in places like Stalingrad, you know, where the other side had rifles too?
So if you’re in Vietnam and a guy shoots your buddy with an AK and shoots and scoots and you show up in a village and some guy, who could be the guy’s cousin for all you know and is busy in the rice paddies, mentally you merge the civilian population with the guerilla population. So mentally you ask, “Is this person my enemy?” And of course one cannot prove that beyond a reasonable doubt, but you’re 22, your buddy just got shot and maybe he’s your enemy, maybe he’s not, but why should you take the chance that he is and you let him go and 2 days later he’s sniping at you again, or maybe he’d still be farming. The point I think still remains that the guerilla tactic of blending into the civilian population makes the military equivocate as to who is a combatant and who isn’t and ultimately I think that is the root as to why massacres like My Lai and also Haditha happen.
Pierre Lemieux
Nov 15 2021 at 11:21am
Jose: In your quote, you forgot the first word of my sentence: “Perhaps…” Moreover, note it is an analogy, if not a metaphorical analogy, just as you can say, which I believe, that anarchy can only work if people hold their knives and forks correctly–that is, they follow etiquette and other voluntary rules of conduct, including in language. (Historical stateless societies were either violent or stifled by strict rules–much worse than etiquette and the use of the subjunctive. Note also that only the warring higher-ups drink champagne, and probably often because it is a requirement of their social class. I was talking about the common men. Craig mentioned that the ordinary soldiers received beer (only infrequently, I assume), but it is not the same as champagne. If you really wanted to deflate my allegory, you could have said that French navy ships have (or at least had) special tanks for wine and that it was for the low-rank soldiers too; but that the war in Algeria was not a piece of cake.
Roger McKinney
Nov 15 2021 at 8:14pm
Israel under the judges in the Bible was libertarian and lasted 480 years.
Roger McKinney
Nov 15 2021 at 11:34am
The Bible doesn’t include modern states, since they are relatively new in human history. But the Bible has a lot to say about inefficient, corrupt and evil empires such as Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia and Rome. It portrays them as evil, destructive monsters in every case. The book of Daniel is typical where the main empires are portrayed as lion, a bear with three ribs between its teeth, a leopard and a fourth beast with large iron teeth and ten horns. The book of Revelations describes the Roman empire as a seven headed dragon.
The only government the Bible shows approval for is the one God, through Moses, established for Israel after it left Egypt. God gave Israel no human executive or legislature and just 613 laws. The only governmental institution was the courts who adjudicated only the civil portion of the laws dealing with rights to life, liberty and property. The courts did not enforce the moral or religious laws.
I Samuel 8 shows that God was very angry with Israel for replacing his system of liberty with a monarch. Under the monarchy, Israel became a corrupt oppressive tyranny condemned by all the prophets that followed Daniel.
Theologians during the Reformation distilled the principles of classical liberalism from Moses’ government. I provide the history in my book, God is a Capitalist: Markets from Moses to Marx. Here is a review: https://mises.org/wire/god-capitalist by Doug French.
Monte
Nov 15 2021 at 4:11pm
Alternatively, you’d think that marijuana in the American soldiers rations might have induced a more pacifist attitude towards “the enemy”, whereas alcohol would more likely lower their inhibitions and aversion towards the rape, murder, and mutilation that took place during the massacre.
David Seltzer
Nov 17 2021 at 7:20pm
Pierre: I served in Southeast Asia from 1962 to 1964. 19 months inclusive. It is true, IMHO, the enemy is dehumanized in war. It’s much easier to kill him. What I observed, many of those in country lost their humanity. Some sixty years on, I still talk to some of my brothers who are still trying to retrieve their amputated humanity.
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