Idle warriors

An eighteenth-century French missionary, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, wrote of the Iroquois: “The men who are so idle in their villages, regard their indolence as a sign of glory in order to make everyone understand that they are actually only born for the great things and particularly for war. For there they can put their courage to their hardest tests. War gives them many occasions to show to the greatest advantage all their exalted sentiments.”

Elias, who quotes this passage, comments:

The warriors would “even leave to the women . . . their other two occupations, hunting and fishing, if they did not provide an exercise that could prepare them for their main purpose in life, for making themselves more terrible to their enemies, more terrible, in fact, than any wild beast. But their enemies evidently had the same aim. The picture which emerges from these and other descriptions is that of a vast field of smaller and larger tribal groups all exposed to each other’s raiding parties, all trying to surpass each other in the brutality with which they slaughter their victims and the exquisite ferocity with which they torture their prisoners. In fact, they were tied to each other in the form of one of those double-bind processes which forces each of the groups involved in it continuously to escalate the means of harming others, of striking fear into their hearts as a means of paralysing their resistance, while at the same time steeling themselves against the terrible pain of the tortures that awaited them, should they fall as prisoners into the hands of an enemy.”

These are intriguing comments in many ways, but two thoughts only: First, there is a strange connection between the honor-ethic of warrior culture and idleness. Perhaps there’s a kind of law here: Male laziness is culturally reinforced in direct proportion to the value placed on martial honor, and in inverse proportion to the value placed on domesticity and commerce and craftsmanship. Shakespeare had Achilles right: Once he leaves the field, what else is there to do but laze around with Patroclus impersonating the other Greeks?

Second, one sees here some of the genius of Ruskin, who sought to imbue craftsmanship with some of the aura of glory that was once promised only to warriors. Something built into men makes them want to be warriors, and if that warrior spirit can be channeled into economic competition instead of burning limbs off of torture victims, well that’s all to the good. It tempts one to wax utopian about the virtues of capitalism.