The tragedy of the death of the Chaledean archbishop called to mind some remarks of Michael Ignatieff ten years ago, in a review of Lacey Baldwin Smith, Fools, Martyrs, Traitors: The Story of Martyrdom in the Western World (The New Republic, September 22, 1997, pp. 42-45). Notice that the date is pre-9/11. Among the initial remarks after 9/11 was that it meant "the end of irony." It obviously hasn't meant that, and I wonder whether Ignatieffwasn't on to something about the larger culture. I put this as a separate thread so as not to deflect Bob Imbelli's.

>> In the Western tradition, martyrdom has always served to connect the idea of truth with the idea of death. It was Socrates who first bequeathed the idea that the ultimate test of a propositions truth is our willingness to die for it. While his example still inspires, his idea--that truth and death are linked--now seems perplexing. Truth has become too contestable to die for, and the certainty and faith which martyrdom demands have become positively exotic.This exoticism makes martyrs interesting, but it makes it difficult for us to enter into their mental world. The fact is that while we admire our martyrs, most of them died for a version of the truth radically different from our own. We can only imagine the idea of laying down our lives so that others may be free to construe the truth as they wish. But most of the martyrs in our tradition died not for the tolerance of many truths, but for a truth that they believed could not be other than it was.Thinking about martyrs also confronts us with what Flaubert called the incorrigibly bourgeois character of modern moral evaluations. We have turned family values into a synonym for values tout court. So to us the martyrs willingness to sacrifice hearth and home to the demands of truth looks like pathological selfishness. There is an inhuman chill to Jesuss injunction in Luke 14:26: If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters...he cannot be my disciple. Yet this was the inversion of values by which the Christian martyrs believed they must live. As they mount their funeral pyres and brave the flames, we can call them sado-masochists or monsters of self-righteousness if we wish, but in the end we are only seeking to deflect the force of their example. For they do compel us to ask why we place family values ahead of principle, why self-sacrifice has become the most distrusted of moral gestures.Martyrs also make us think again about modern styles of self-deprecation. We take it for granted that it does not pay to take yourselves too seriously. The modern moral style is ironic, and irony is valued because it keeps us from going to extremes. Martyrs make a virtue of going to extremes, taking yourself so seriously that you are prepared to lose your life for the sake of a principle. Our ideas of identity are connected to reflexivity: to having thoughts, mostly skeptical, about our thoughts. For a martyr, identity is not reflexive. Finding yourself means throwing yourself so utterly into a cause that the self is suffused with what it believes. The martyrs in our past make us uncomfortable because they put our ironic standpoint into question. They make us wonder whether irony will be the death of principle. They make us ask why we never dare to take ourselves more seriously. <<