The Marines, Religion, and the Burden of Responsibility
For many years I said something that puzzled people.
I would tell them that the United States Marine Corps is a religion.
As you might imagine, Marines usually understood exactly what I meant. Everyone else thought I was being provocative.
I wasn’t.
I was trying to describe something I could see but not yet fully articulate.
Recently, I believe I finally put my finger on it.
The Marine Corps is not a religion because it believes in God.
It is a religion because it creates a people.
It takes ordinary men and women who arrive with the same instincts as everyone else and systematically forms them into a community bound by obligations that transcend self-interest.
The famous phrase is simple:
Leave no one behind.
We admire those words.
We put them in movies.
We quote them in speeches.
But admiration is cheap.
The Marines do something far more difficult.
They train people to live by them.
That is the difference.
The Marine standing next to you is not merely another individual. He becomes your responsibility. You will carry him if necessary. You will risk yourself for him if necessary. You will not abandon him.
That commitment does not emerge naturally.
It has to be formed.
It has to become identity.
And that realization has led me to an uncomfortable conclusion about humanity.
The Great Abdication
For thousands of years human beings have searched for meaning in the heavens.
We have searched for laws written into the cosmos.
We have searched for divine commands.
We have searched for eternal purposes.
The assumption has always been the same:
If we can discover the ultimate source of meaning, then we will know how to live.
I no longer think that is true.
In fact, I think we are looking in the wrong direction.
The universe does not appear to contain an inherent moral law.
There is no cosmic instruction manual.
There is no universal decree telling us what is good.
Goodness appears to be something that human beings create.
At first glance this sounds liberating.
But it carries a price.
If no external authority is providing the rules, then responsibility falls entirely upon us.
And that is precisely what many people find difficult to accept.
It is one thing to say:
God commands us to do this.
It is another thing to say:
We have decided together that this is the way human beings ought to live, and we accept responsibility for the consequences.
The first position creates obedience.
The second creates authorship.
The first seeks authority.
The second demands maturity.
Why Religion Endures
This has made me rethink the persistence of religion itself.
Many people today no longer literally believe the things their religious traditions once taught.
They may doubt miracles.
They may doubt divine intervention.
They may doubt heaven and hell.
Some may even doubt the existence of God.
Yet they continue to identify with the faith.
Why?
Partly because religion provides community, tradition, ritual, and identity.
But I suspect another reason is often overlooked.
Without an external source of authority, the burden of moral responsibility becomes frighteningly direct.
If God is not responsible for history, then WE are.
If God is not responsible for justice, then WE are.
If God is not responsible for caring for the vulnerable, then WE are.
The absence of God does not free humanity from responsibility.
It places responsibility where it has always belonged: in human hands.
Perhaps religion has endured in part because people prefer obedience to authorship.
Obedience is easier.
Authorship is terrifying.
The Real Problem
This brings me to what I now believe is humanity’s central problem.
Our problem is not the absence of meaning.
Our problem is the refusal to accept responsibility for creating and sustaining it.
We know cooperation is necessary.
We know communities survive by mutual support.
We know no society can endure if everyone pursues only self-interest.
Yet we continue to organize ourselves around systems that reward greed, power, and control.
The result is predictable.
The strong prosper.
The vulnerable become dependent upon the goodwill of the powerful.
A child with Down syndrome, an elderly person, a disabled person, a refugee, a poor family, all become dependent upon benevolence rather than protected by obligation.
And benevolence is optional.
It can be withdrawn.
A society built upon obligation is different.
In such a society, people do not help because they happen to feel generous.
They help because the community has collectively decided:
No one gets left behind.
The Marine Lesson
This is where the Marine Corps returns to the center of the discussion.
The Marines understand something philosophers often overlook.
People do not live by ideas alone.
They live by practices.
They live by disciplines.
They live by stories, rituals, expectations, and identities.
The Corps does not merely teach a moral ideal.
It forms human beings capable of embodying that ideal.
In this sense, the Marines are a secular monastery.
They possess symbols.
Rituals.
Initiation.
Sacred obligations.
A shared narrative.
A vision of a life devoted to something larger than the self.
That is why the Corps works.
Not because Marines are better than other people.
But because they have undergone a formation process designed to make collective responsibility stronger than individual convenience.
From Concept to Praxis
This realization has important implications for Opthē.
For years I have been exploring the idea that meaning is humanly created.
That is an important insight.
But it is not enough.
The deeper question is:
What follows from that insight?
If meaning is humanly created, then responsibility is humanly unavoidable.
If meaning is humanly created, then the vulnerable become our responsibility.
If meaning is humanly created, then the survival of humanity depends upon our willingness to create and sustain a common good.
The question is no longer:
What is meaning?
The question is:
What kind of people must WE become to sustain it?
That is where Opthē moves from concept to praxis.
Not merely a philosophy of meaning.
Not merely a theology without gods.
But an attempt to cultivate mature human beings willing to accept the burden of collective responsibility.
The absence of God is not humanity’s crisis.
Humanity’s crisis is what happens when WE discover that the responsibility was ours all along.
In the end, the issue may be very simple.
The universe has not given us a moral law.
The task has always been ours.
The challenge is whether WE are mature enough to accept it.