Paganism is about honoring the fundamental aspects of authentic human experience. It’s about looking at the parts of existence that are terrifying and overwhelming and trying to figure out what they mean: things like birth, death, sex, war, love, art, and even the powerful, capricious, and unpredictable forces of the natural world. The gods give rise to these essential facets of human experience (and/or are themselves born from them), and to deny one or more of the gods because there is no place in your life or your worldview or your schema for the things they represent is to deny a fundamental part of who you are.
War is a part of being human. It may be ugly, brutal, and horrifying, but it is omnipresent. To be truly human is to know war. To reject Ares because you reject war is to reject a part of what it means to be you. And to reject Ares because you reject war means also rejecting warlike aspects of many of the other gods as well: Athena, Aphrodite, Zeus, Dionyus just off the top of my head.
Who would Ares be without war? A god of mental conflict? A god of physical exertion? We already have those gods. Ares is a god of a lot of things, and there are a lot of lenses through which to view Ares, but he is primarily a god of war. Trying to edit the war out of Ares is like trying to edit the sex out of Aphrodite. I don’t know what you’re left with, but it isn’t the real deal. That kind of selective approach to the gods is apparently pretty popular among neopagans, but I honestly don’t think it’s a road that is going to take you anywhere worth being.
Think about it: the soldier knows both war and peace, but the pacifist tries to know only peace. The pacifist is rejecting an entire part of human existence because it does not suit him or her. Whether that’s a thing worth doing, or a thing we should be doing, is not actually the issue. But I would maintain that trying to edit human existence to remove the bits we don’t like is just not what any kind of real paganism is about. Christianity does that, with its vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Not paganism.
I also don’t think, with regards to Ares, that it’s a question of whether violence is necessary or justified, but merely whether it is an essential facet of human existence. Violence IS. War IS. We can play at quasi-Christianity if we want and imagine a utopia where violence no longer exists, but even in Christianity that requires massive divine intervention. The overwhelming, unanimous weight of human history tells us in no uncertain terms and with no exceptions that war and violence are fundamentally a part of the human condition.
Whether or not this reality is morally acceptable is a question that is, in my opinion, not even on paganism’s radar. Violence is a part of human reality, and paganism is about how we honor and respond to human reality. The ethics of paganism ask not whether a violent society is morally acceptable, but instead ask “given that violence and war exist as a part of the human condition, how do you respond virtuously?”
Look to the epics, the philosophers, and the myths. Look to the maxims. Tell me what the answer is. The world is violent–we honor that when we honor Ares. The question is how you respond with virtue when presented with that violence, whether you’re a kid in the hall at school getting beaten up by bullies, a young man who just got his draft notice, or a parent whose family is threatened.
Sailing to Byzantium 
Does this leave room for improving human nature?
You seem to enshrine human nature as an eternal platonic form. While I don’t subscribe to the cult of eternal progress, we know that human nature has evolved over time from our ancestral origins billions of years ago to the origin of modern humans in Africa. So as much as violence is part of our nature, so too is change.
Is there no virtue then in the pacifist’s response to violence, in trying to realize a change in human nature making violence less necessary?
I don’t know that I’m actually talking about “human nature” here. I am talking about the human experience, and I think there are fundamentals to human experience that actually don’t change much.
That’s the crux: I’m not even addressing the issue of whether war is morally acceptable. That’s an entirely unuseful question, because war is. It’s like asking if death and sex are morally acceptable: in and of themselves, they have no moral quality at all.
I think the question of how we deal with war, sex and death is one that admits moral consideration and moral progress. If war is eradicated by human virtue and that turns out to be a positive thing then great, dandy. But I’m not so sure that pursuing a particular end is ever virtuous. Does that make sense? Make virtuous decisions now. Be guided by virtue now. You can’t predict the future anyway; you can’t predict the effects your actions will have on fate as it unfolds, so why not focus on making the virtuous decision where you are at instead of making yourself sick over what decision will yield what result?
I’m much more interested in working toward a world where people behave virtuously than I am in working toward a world with no war or no death or no sickness or whatever, first because I think the former is possible while the latter is not, and second because I think that the former will do more indirectly to bring about the latter in a healthy and organic human way than working toward the latter directly ever would.
Call it the human condition, then. What I said doesn’t change substantially.
I’m curious how you define something as virtuous if it isn’t intended to bring about the best results possible. What makes a virtue virtuous?
How would you say that these views about war inform the ways you want to raise your children?
Well, I think the general ideas apply more than the specific. In other words, I want to raise my kids to be happy and healthy and to live a life in which they acknowledge and honor all of what makes up that life, even the scary and difficult bits. They don’t need it all at once–they need space to be kids after all–but as it comes up and as it is appropriate, I want us to be honest with them and to work at helping them put all the pieces together so they understand that it is all part of the whole tapestry. Even the war parts.
Sorry to keep coming back to this, but something bothers me about what you’ve said here. I don’t think it’s the conclusions because I agree with them, more or less. It’s probably the arguments for them. If there were a god of rape, it seems that all of what you’ve said would apply equally well.
It should also be noted, if Wikipedia is to be believed, that the ancient Greeks were also ambivalent about Ares.
[…] a blog about how Ares encapsulates something that is fundamental to human existence. And it is true. Before passing moralistic judgments on things in our religion and the nature of our […]
Were they really? I grant that he is not painted very flatteringly in the Iliad, but the Iliad is not the Qu’ran of ancient Greek religion.
It actually looks to me like, despite his presentation in the myths, he was in fact given quite a bit of worship, devotion and regard by many of the ancient Greeks.
Virtue ethics was around long before consequentialist ethics waltzed onto the scene.
Virtue ethics suffers from the lack of a foundation. It just asserts that virtues are virtuous without giving a reason why. Consequentialist ethics suffers from a similar problem (i.e. why are some outcomes preferred over others?) but in my opinion is less damaged by it.
If the ancient Greeks had valued rape as a manly pursuit, prescribed how to rape virtuously (e.g. only the women of your enemies at time of war), and worshiped a god of rape (because rape is a constant part of the human condition just like war), then how could we refute that from within the framework of virtue ethics? Or how is this different from the argument here that war is a part of the human condition and we should do our best to participate virtuously?
In consequentialist ethics, we could at least say that rape doesn’t result in the outcomes that we want and dismiss what the ancient Greeks said about rape being virtuous. Or perhaps that’s just moral relativism. Is there a relativistic approach to virtue ethics that I haven’t heard of that allows us to pick the virtues we agree with?
Which god of rape are you talking about?
The hypothetical one.
Exactly.
So it comes down to which gods the Greeks bequeathed to us? Arbitrary.
If we’re being arbitrary, then I can think of better ways to make up our ethics and better arguments for why warfare is here to stay.
I don’t think there’s much that’s arbitrary about it at all.
Anyway, you have it backwards. I’m not arguing that war is here to stay. I’m saying, given that war is here to stay, by which I mean, given that war appears to be a materially fundamental part of the human experience, and given that Ares is the god of war, that therefore failing to honor Ares means failing to honor a materially fundamental part of the human experience.
And since I think that all religion, not just paganism but particularly paganism, is ultimately about making sense out of the human experience, selectively editing Ares out because his bailywick does not suit you results in a religion that is materially less well-suited to making sense out of the human experience.
PS, you’re fooling yourself if you don’t think that every approach to ethics does not have the exact same foundational problem.
I think that the unique failure of consequentialist ethics is that it judges actions based on their consequences, i.e., an action’s moral character is based on something that happens until after the action, which means an action’s moral character is not fully determinable at the time you take the action.
In any situation involving complex variables or interrelated systems (including anything that has any kind of large scale social or cultural impact), you have almost no chance of accurately predicting the full ramifications of any action. Which means consequentialist ethics are useless as a prospective guide to behavior or policy.
(I think the Bhagavad-Gita addresses this problem pointedly when Krishna exhorts Arjuna to free himself of attachment to the results of his work)
I suppose then it’s too bad there isn’t a god of starvation or disease so we could honor him, too. I’m not fond of defeatist ideologies – whether that’s the brand of Hellenismos you’re espousing here or some Buddhist doctrines of non-attachment – that rationalize giving up on trying to make things better because we will never have a complete victory. That’s a given. It’s also very human to wear ourselves out in hopeless causes.
I think another reason that folks are uncomfortable with Ares is because he’s not just about protecting hearth and home. He’s also about going to war for the sake of personal glory à la Alexander the Great. Our collective experience with modern warfare has made hope for personal glory on the battlefield seem naïve.
I conceded that every version of ethics suffers from that problem, but I think virtue ethics more than most.
The converse of the problem that you pointed out for consequentialist ethics is that it is therefore easier to actually measure the morality of an action. With virtue ethics, a person might do something because it’s what they believe to be virtuous and end up causing everything to go to hell (good intentions are after all what pave the road there). What good did it do to be virtuous, then?
In that case, a virtue ethicist may say that the person lacked phronesis, but that’s just a dodge that basically turns virtue ethics into consequentialism. If virtue doesn’t lead to a better world, what good is it?
Only in retrospect, and even then not really.
In fact, consequentialist ethics doesn’t tell you how to measure a moral act at all, only when. Even if you are able to apprehend the full consequences of anything, which as a practical matter you can’t, the issue of what rubric to use to evaluate those consequences is just as big of a problem.
This is the exact problem with consequentialist ethics: a person might do something intending to produce results but which in fact produces bad results. And this is worse for the consequential ethicist because the results are the only way his actions are judged.
And the consequentialist has to deal with the same problem in reverse when he does a reprehensible act that he believes will achieve a good result. But it is compounded by the shift in the evaluative timeframe: he can’t even be certain when he commits the repugnant act whether or not it will be to a good end because he can’t anticipate the end. At least the virtue ethicist can know prospectively he is acting out of virtue.
Here’s another way of putting it:
Both the virtue ethicist (who acts out of virtue) and the consequential ethicist (who acts with intent to bring about a particular result) have to deal equally with the problem of unintended bad consequences. But unintended consequences are worse for the consequential ethicist, because they’re all he’s got to judge his actions by. His own moral system says that the intent or character of his actions is irrelevant, except to the extent that it brings about some kind of net positive consequences. And since he acted with the intent to bring about a particular result, he choise his actions not for their intrinsic value, but for their utilitarian value, so if their utilitarian value turns out to be zero, he can’t fall back on their intrinsic value. And he can’t possibly predict the future or (probably) account for all the variables, and he likely can’t apprehend the full results of his actions after the fact, either.
The moral value of his actions is judged based on their post hoc interplay with countless other seen and unseen variables. In other words, unless he is omniscient, he doesn’t really have control over the moral value of his actions. Which means we are talking about a moral system which evaluates the acts of moral agent based on things over which he has no control. That’s not a moral system at all.
I suggest a reading of Nichomachean Ethics, by Aristotle. Virtues are neither without foundation or arbitrary. A whole book of the NE is dedicated to defining what virtue is.
War is fundamental to the development of humanity. Like any animal competing for limited resources, nature requires physical conflict for this resolution; nature cannot provide for a peaceful human race, because we breed to fast and live too long. The more we “progress”, the sillier the reasons for war become. The more “noble” the conflict and the more war is restricted by “rules”, the bloodier and more drawn out the conflicts become.
When I say virtue ethics, such as those argued by Aristotle, are arbitrary, I’m saying that such beliefs are not justifiable outside a person’s or culture’s preferences. In other words, if Aristotle said “courage is virtuous”, then what he’s really saying is “I like courage” or “I have been taught that courage is good”.
Actually, I think all ethics are arbitrary. I just think virtue ethics are more arbitrary than most because what we think is virtuous generally comes from tradition instead of rational thought. If someone tried to justify their list of virtues, they would probably end up making consequentialist or deontological arguments.
I think you are confusing virtue with values. Virtue, by its very nature, transcends cultural values. A virtue is a virtue no matter what, because a virtue exists outside our ability to limit it, much like we can not alter in any significant way the nature of gravity or light.
How do you discover the nature of these transcendent virtues? How do you recognize that they’re virtues rather than cultural or human values?
[…] is conducting a survey on contemporary Ares worship. From Ophiokhos: To Ares I. From Kullervo: Ares, and what Paganism is all about. From Kullervo: Why Ares is Unpopular. From Ophiokhos: Re: Why Ares is Unpopular. From Wednesday: […]