Heroism is now a superstition

Heroism is a culture that Turkey, despite the whole adventure of modernization, has still not been able to give up. We say "despite the adventure of modernization" because modern life, like many values and titles, has overhauled the value of heroism and left it in the depths of history.

In the past, in periods when war technologies were not much developed, the personal abilities, courage and self-sacrificing contribution of the fighting soldier gave the human element a very special place in war. War was won or lost largely thanks to the presence or absence, the strength or weakness, of these personal qualities. In a sense, in the past heroes won wars. Even when one displayed epic examples of heroism it was possible to lose the war, but a story of heroism that is surely to be respected remained behind.

Yet today wars are carried out under the influence of high technologies. High war technologies have reduced killing people or defeating the enemy to merely a race of technically achieved superiority. Today it is impossible to produce a story of heroism from any war. By calculating the technical features of the weapons in the enemy's hands and developing a more advanced technology that can put them out of action, the war is ended before it begins.

Perhaps a skill capable of using the technologies at hand still makes the human element necessary, but here too no situation arises that requires coming face to face with the enemy as a human being, and thus produces a scene of heroism. This problem also comes down to technical training.

The tragic disappearance of heroism in the face of war technologies is expressed pithily in the story of the famous Turkish hero Köroğlu, who waged the last heroic struggle against the Bey of Bolu, in the words "the perforated iron was invented, manliness was spoiled."

The manliness spoiled by the perforated iron is the very possibility of heroism itself. Although there is now no place in our wars for heroes or for heroism, this situation produces yet another thing that is not very manly. Whoever holds the not-at-all manly war technologies does not refrain from unjustly inheriting and appropriating all the literature of glorification that remains of the culture of heroism.

That is why modern nation-states, although they possess war technologies in which the possibility of heroism has vanished, use the discourse of heroism far more than in the past.

The sanctity attributed to weapons or to those who fight through the discourse of heroism is in fact a sanctity that badly contradicts modern values as well. In the ideal definition of the modern state, soldiering, or defense activity in general, is a task in the social division of labor that has been outsourced to some people purely technically and has no sanctity whatsoever.

Yet in Turkey, an extra superiority can still be attributed to the army and to the natural task it undertakes within the social division of labor through the discourse of "heroism." A privilege over all other institutions can openly be claimed on account of the heroism that the military duty is accepted to require.

That is why, with the sanctity attributed to an institution charged with protecting the rest of society, it suddenly turns into an "apple of the eye" that must be protected by everyone.

For the institution that sees itself as having the right to declare anyone it wishes an enemy and wear them down, the only thing it cares about is that it not be "worn down."

It is seen that a significant part of such a "this much" of a privilege is managed through the discourse of heroism that has somehow stuck to the military profession. Yet, both given the technical features of the profession, soldiering does not today bear heroism, and the army of a secular state can have no sanctity on account of heroism or any other feature. In the social division of labor everyone is doing their duty, and as long as it is done properly, no one's duty is more or less sacred than another's.

The wall of sanctity that an institution whose sensitivity on secularism is above everything has woven around concepts such as heroism, martyrdom and veteranhood is beginning to crumble. Because modernity perhaps removes other superstitions, but it no longer carries these superstitions.