Consider this/ Einfach zum Nachdenken

A cause worth living for is worth dying for- I am sure we have all heard this saying before. Is it true? Should the things we hold dearly compell us, if need be, to give our lives for them? Or does such a motto nothing more than foment radical behavior, such as we have come all too well since 9/11?

One useful distinction might be between causes worth killing for, and those for whom we would be ready to give our own lives. The former can never be right, and Western democracies are justified in upholding what they consider an important achievement of our societies, namely that we no longer kill those who differ in their views from us.

But is anything really worth dying for? Not “anybody” because we will certainly find people who are ready to defend their loved ones at the price of their lives, but “anything”? Could any cause be so important, so pressing, that we ought to be ready to risk all else, including our welfare, in order to advance it? Can you think of one?

Just over ten years ago a Dublin journalist was looking for a story. She stumbled upon the drug trade in her city and the havoc it wreaked in the lives of thousands of young people. Yet police and politicians alike seemed unable or unwilling to adress the problem. So she began writing, and received warnings that she was infringing on dangerous territory; she was beat up, shot in the leg, and her son was threatened with kidnapping. But she kept researching, writing, agitating, and on 26^th June1996 Veronica Guerin was shot and killed while sitting in her car at an intersection. She left behind a husband and a handicapped son. Was she foolish, irresponsible even, not to heed the warnings? Had she just miscalculated, never expecting that drug lords would actually come after her in earnest?

About eighteen years ago I met Freiherr Philipp von Boeselager, the last survivor of the famous 20^th July when a number of officers of the Wehrmacht sought to assassinate Hitler. Boeselager described how he, then a young man of no more than twenty, had come to the conviction, together with others, that Hitler was insane, and that he had to be stopped, even if this meant the most unthinkable of all acts for a German officer, the murder of the commander-in-chief. The attempt failed, most of the perpetrators were hanged, including Boeslager’s brother. Yet almost fifty years later, he said without hesitating: “I would do the same again if I had to!” A fool? A fanatic? A poor soul?

Over the last number of years tolerance has become the value which trumps all others: other races, religions, sexual orientations, opinions have to be respected. So much so that voicing any view which is strong enough to allow disagreement will often be vehemently punished, ironically in the name of tolerance. So churches that uphold the view that adultery is a sin risk losing their legal protection as churches, since they “condemn people on account of personal lifestyle issues”; adoption agencies which refuse to facilitate adoptions of children by same sex couples for reasons of religious conviction will be shut down by the state. How could anybody in such a climate hold opinions strongly enough to risk imprisonment, pain and death? Aren’t all views ultimately negotiable?

Studies of decaying civilizations confirm that economic and military decline are not what causes nations to disappear; it is rather the waning will to sacrifice and to fight what one believes to be right. Declining birth rates in Europe can be primarily explained by a lack of conviction that children are worth making sacrifices for and by a lack of hope that anything matters. At the same time many young people in Europe (as the recent Shell Youth Study shows) struggle to find anything worthwhile to live for; they are desperate to find a “star to hitch their wagon to”. Conversely those who are ready to suffer, to risk, to give their lives quite often succeed. Boeselager did not, but Veronica Guerin’s death mobilized the country and triggered a avalanche which changed the landscape in Dublin. I have friends who have been running an orphanage in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, for over fiteen years. Last December a fire broke out, destroying the building and killing one of the Swiss workers, but none of the children. This one death has galvanized the country into action and has put the issue of orphans finally on the map.

So is it folly? Are Taliban the only ones who believe in a cause? Or should we not all live for something beyond tonight’s TV serial and the next holiday?

Maybe the saying should go like this: “If you don’t have anything to live for, you are already dead”?