The non-cynical explanation is that what makes soldiers unique is morale. We can encourage farmers and sewage engineers via steady monetary compensation, and we don’t have to worry that hazardous manure will make them break and run, and if 5% of them were to suddenly quit then we’d be okay eating 95% as much food and paying some overtime to maintain the pipes. With soldiers, shit really does turn lethal, a 5% retreat can quickly cascade into a rout, and less mercenary compensation (using status and esteem instead of just money) seems to make such a rout less likely.
Although I think Hayes’ points were apt and his treatment despicable, he may be missing a similar point: thinking of soldiers as “heros” rather than just regular employees may also reduce peoples’ desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.
I agree that certain roles, like warfare, are much less tolerant than others of individuals unexpectedly refusing to perform the functions of the role. I agree that certain roles (again, like warfare) are much more likely than others to involve intermittent periods of extremely high risk, which makes steady-state reward very easy to game. I agree that both of those factors seem to explain a lot more of what we call heroic than the “useful to the community, who can serve as models for others” metric proposed earlier.
It is not clear to me that we’re less willing to tolerate astronaut’s deaths or soldier’s deaths than we are construction workers’ deaths… we seem pretty willing to tolerate all of them, though we make a much bigger fuss about the former group. I suspect our lack of support for the space program has other causes.
You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.
It may be significant that their deaths are associated with projects which are not only highly visible but orders of magnitude more expensive.
I suspect that if we decided to build a proper Tower of Babel, and people died in the construction, their deaths would get plenty of publicity.
The non-cynical explanation is that what makes soldiers unique is morale. We can encourage farmers and sewage engineers via steady monetary compensation, and we don’t have to worry that hazardous manure will make them break and run, and if 5% of them were to suddenly quit then we’d be okay eating 95% as much food and paying some overtime to maintain the pipes. With soldiers, shit really does turn lethal, a 5% retreat can quickly cascade into a rout, and less mercenary compensation (using status and esteem instead of just money) seems to make such a rout less likely.
Although I think Hayes’ points were apt and his treatment despicable, he may be missing a similar point: thinking of soldiers as “heros” rather than just regular employees may also reduce peoples’ desire to risk their lives unnecessarily. You can see an overreach of the same effect in public attitudes toward the space program: death counts that would go unremarked in heavy construction projects are considered intolerable because the dying astronauts are heroes to us.
I agree that certain roles, like warfare, are much less tolerant than others of individuals unexpectedly refusing to perform the functions of the role.
I agree that certain roles (again, like warfare) are much more likely than others to involve intermittent periods of extremely high risk, which makes steady-state reward very easy to game.
I agree that both of those factors seem to explain a lot more of what we call heroic than the “useful to the community, who can serve as models for others” metric proposed earlier.
It is not clear to me that we’re less willing to tolerate astronaut’s deaths or soldier’s deaths than we are construction workers’ deaths… we seem pretty willing to tolerate all of them, though we make a much bigger fuss about the former group. I suspect our lack of support for the space program has other causes.
It may be significant that their deaths are associated with projects which are not only highly visible but orders of magnitude more expensive.
I suspect that if we decided to build a proper Tower of Babel, and people died in the construction, their deaths would get plenty of publicity.