Let me talk about an important book bearing on the American scene.
Sebastian Junger’s War (New York, 2010) is a specifically non-religious book, but with great relevance to assessments of the effects and experience of war in Afghanistan for American troops. Junger ‘embedded’ himself with the ultimate front line troops in a far flung outpost of Afghanistan to experience daily life in combat.
This book is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those who cannot ‘blank’ or ‘beep’ in their minds over the fairly frequent expletives. What makes it interesting, and important, is that it describes life as it appears to really be for those who are on the front line of fighting in Afghanistan from the perspective of an eyewitness, and a sympathetic ‘embedded’ eyewitness at that. Junger is, it seems, non-religious himself, or at least attempts to explain the phenomenon of war and the comradeship that it produces from a strictly atheistic evolutionist point of view. He wants to know why it is that young men will die for each other, or risk probable death. His answer is that the experience of a small group of soldiers on the front line imitates the evolutionary predisposition of the tribe, where individuals are genetically advantaged to sacrifice for each other for the sake of the continued blood line of the tribal group. Of course, soldiers are not themselves genetically related to each other, but they begin to act like it, he thinks. They are not just friends and comrades; they are brothers. And that is why they will die for each other. He is pretty sure it has nothing, or very little, to do with the high-minded principles or politics that may (or may not) be behind this or any other war. People sacrifice for each other in combat out of the evolutionary version of what Christians might call love.
