I disagree with the way you chose to argue this point.
Consider a statement like “Choosing to denounce your country is cowardly”. Taboo cowardly and you get a statement like “Choosing to denounce your country is a decision made in order to avoid personal harm.” I like the second sentence better, despite it being obvious and not really saying anything interesting. The word “cowardly” slips in an entire value system without anyone noticing, and this value system is precisely the point that needs to be proven here.
The digression to heroism looks like an attempt to create a false dichotomy: either these people are heroes or they are cowards, there’s nothing heroic about doing something expedient, therefore they are cowards (or narcissists, or whatever).
In fact, I will play devil’s advocate and entertain the opposite recommendation. The important question seems to be what signal a captured soldier praising the enemy gives. The enemy wants it to send two signals: first, that the captive really has realized that the enemy is right and the home country is wrong, and second, that our soldiers are so weak that they will betray our expectation that they remain loyal to the home country.
Let’s say that we took your post at face value and created a strong societal norm that captives should never praise the enemy, no matter how much they are threatened. Assuming some captives still break, this is now a disaster. First, we have trouble explaining why our soldiers have betrayed us and started praising the enemy, so the enemy’s preferred explanation—that the soldiers have suddenly realized the enemy is superior—becomes more plausible. Second, we are all demoralized the our soldiers were so weak as to betray the societal normal we created. Result: our society is demoralized and unhappy. This is to say nothing of the poor captives, who probably had to be tortured pretty thoroughly before breaking the norm.
Now, let’s say we went the opposite direction, and the military instituted a regulation that all captured soldiers must immediately accept any demands the enemy makes to undergo forced conversions or praise their leadership or whatever. Let’s even say the Queen or the President or whoever make a televised speech demanding that all soldiers captured in the future do this, for the good of the country. When the captives do so, we have no trouble explaining this: it’s because they were forced. And we are not demoralized at all, because the soldiers followed orders.
(For this to work best, we’d have to make sure that people from the enemy country, for example, the Iranian people, knew about this declaration. Otherwise, it would be too easy for the Iranian media to display our soldiers’ statements to the populace.)
I think we’re already benefiting from this. I, for one, didn’t feel the least bit demoralized when I heard some journalists had converted rather than be tortured and killed, because I just expected it as a matter of course. If we were classical Sparta and they’d done the same, we’d probably be facing an existential crisis as a society by now.
I’m not sure this would work in our current society, but it’s how I’d organize things in a society of rationalists. And even in our current society, I would discourage anyone from going out of their way to create an expectation that people have to behave heroically. That’s just helping the terrorists :P
Actually, you bring up the persecution of the Jews, and this reminds me of a Jewish tradition, the Kol Nidre. It’s a ritual performed on the night before Yom Kippur. The congregation absolves themselves of all vows performed over the past year that...aren’t supposed to count...although there’s some controversy over what exactly that means.
The story I learned in synagogue was that it was developed by the Spanish Jews, who were forced to swear their allegiance to Christianity. They came up with Kol Nidre as a way of establishing a societal norm that these oaths didn’t count, so that they could swear as many of them as they wanted without losing their honor or integrity.
I have since learned that this is an oversimplification of the origin of Kol Nidre and that it probably didn’t have much to do with the Spanish Inquisition at all. However, it reminds me a bit of some of the concepts I discussed in the Applied Picoeconomics article. Swearing an oath is important because it provides a way to tie your present action to your future actions—sort of like saying “You can trust me when I take an oath, because if I betrayed you now, no one would ever trust me again when I took an oath, and this would cause me severe negative consequences, therefore it is in my own self-interest to follow this oath.” This is why the oaths I discussed in Applied Picoeconomics all had some loopholes, so that if it was necessary to break the oath because of extreme conditions, I could break the oath with my honor intact.
Kol Nidre was (at least in the probably false story about it I learned) a way for the Jews to break an oath and keep their honor intact, at least among other Jews—who were probably the relevant community to them. I could break an oath to the King of Spain on Monday, and then make an oath to my business partner Moishe on Tuesday, and Moishe could have complete confidence that I would keep my oath to him, because the only reason I broke my oath to the King of Spain was that I was permitted to do so under Kol Nidre, which would not excuse my breaking of the oath to Moishe.
This expectation that it wasn’t important to keep oaths to the Spanish Crown helped the Jewish community survive with both their integrity and their religion, which the Spanish Crown probably thought was impossible. Creating a similar norm that it’s okay to praise Iran when you get captured by them would have the same effect, at least in a fully rational community.
Ironically, this sort of thing was what got many of them in trouble with the Inquisition in the first place. The Church has no authority over non-Christians, and the Inquisition’s only real concern was heresy, so Jews were entirely out of their jurisdiction unless they claimed to be Christians (In which case they would almost certainly commit heresy when questioned).
Of course, these rules didn’t hold up that well in the Spanish Inquisition in particular.
I disagree with the way you chose to argue this point.
Consider a statement like “Choosing to denounce your country is cowardly”. Taboo cowardly and you get a statement like “Choosing to denounce your country is a decision made in order to avoid personal harm.” I like the second sentence better, despite it being obvious and not really saying anything interesting. The word “cowardly” slips in an entire value system without anyone noticing, and this value system is precisely the point that needs to be proven here.
The digression to heroism looks like an attempt to create a false dichotomy: either these people are heroes or they are cowards, there’s nothing heroic about doing something expedient, therefore they are cowards (or narcissists, or whatever).
In fact, I will play devil’s advocate and entertain the opposite recommendation. The important question seems to be what signal a captured soldier praising the enemy gives. The enemy wants it to send two signals: first, that the captive really has realized that the enemy is right and the home country is wrong, and second, that our soldiers are so weak that they will betray our expectation that they remain loyal to the home country.
Let’s say that we took your post at face value and created a strong societal norm that captives should never praise the enemy, no matter how much they are threatened. Assuming some captives still break, this is now a disaster. First, we have trouble explaining why our soldiers have betrayed us and started praising the enemy, so the enemy’s preferred explanation—that the soldiers have suddenly realized the enemy is superior—becomes more plausible. Second, we are all demoralized the our soldiers were so weak as to betray the societal normal we created. Result: our society is demoralized and unhappy. This is to say nothing of the poor captives, who probably had to be tortured pretty thoroughly before breaking the norm.
Now, let’s say we went the opposite direction, and the military instituted a regulation that all captured soldiers must immediately accept any demands the enemy makes to undergo forced conversions or praise their leadership or whatever. Let’s even say the Queen or the President or whoever make a televised speech demanding that all soldiers captured in the future do this, for the good of the country. When the captives do so, we have no trouble explaining this: it’s because they were forced. And we are not demoralized at all, because the soldiers followed orders.
(For this to work best, we’d have to make sure that people from the enemy country, for example, the Iranian people, knew about this declaration. Otherwise, it would be too easy for the Iranian media to display our soldiers’ statements to the populace.)
I think we’re already benefiting from this. I, for one, didn’t feel the least bit demoralized when I heard some journalists had converted rather than be tortured and killed, because I just expected it as a matter of course. If we were classical Sparta and they’d done the same, we’d probably be facing an existential crisis as a society by now.
I’m not sure this would work in our current society, but it’s how I’d organize things in a society of rationalists. And even in our current society, I would discourage anyone from going out of their way to create an expectation that people have to behave heroically. That’s just helping the terrorists :P
Actually, you bring up the persecution of the Jews, and this reminds me of a Jewish tradition, the Kol Nidre. It’s a ritual performed on the night before Yom Kippur. The congregation absolves themselves of all vows performed over the past year that...aren’t supposed to count...although there’s some controversy over what exactly that means.
The story I learned in synagogue was that it was developed by the Spanish Jews, who were forced to swear their allegiance to Christianity. They came up with Kol Nidre as a way of establishing a societal norm that these oaths didn’t count, so that they could swear as many of them as they wanted without losing their honor or integrity.
I have since learned that this is an oversimplification of the origin of Kol Nidre and that it probably didn’t have much to do with the Spanish Inquisition at all. However, it reminds me a bit of some of the concepts I discussed in the Applied Picoeconomics article. Swearing an oath is important because it provides a way to tie your present action to your future actions—sort of like saying “You can trust me when I take an oath, because if I betrayed you now, no one would ever trust me again when I took an oath, and this would cause me severe negative consequences, therefore it is in my own self-interest to follow this oath.” This is why the oaths I discussed in Applied Picoeconomics all had some loopholes, so that if it was necessary to break the oath because of extreme conditions, I could break the oath with my honor intact.
Kol Nidre was (at least in the probably false story about it I learned) a way for the Jews to break an oath and keep their honor intact, at least among other Jews—who were probably the relevant community to them. I could break an oath to the King of Spain on Monday, and then make an oath to my business partner Moishe on Tuesday, and Moishe could have complete confidence that I would keep my oath to him, because the only reason I broke my oath to the King of Spain was that I was permitted to do so under Kol Nidre, which would not excuse my breaking of the oath to Moishe.
This expectation that it wasn’t important to keep oaths to the Spanish Crown helped the Jewish community survive with both their integrity and their religion, which the Spanish Crown probably thought was impossible. Creating a similar norm that it’s okay to praise Iran when you get captured by them would have the same effect, at least in a fully rational community.
Ironically, this sort of thing was what got many of them in trouble with the Inquisition in the first place. The Church has no authority over non-Christians, and the Inquisition’s only real concern was heresy, so Jews were entirely out of their jurisdiction unless they claimed to be Christians (In which case they would almost certainly commit heresy when questioned).
Of course, these rules didn’t hold up that well in the Spanish Inquisition in particular.