Being in the military is associated to a degree with a personality type. An 0-6 pen pal of mine writes about “alpha hotels”—SEALs, Marine ground, Ranger, and so on. The alpha “type,” of course, is aggressive, testosterony, hard-charging. Even if not everybody in the military is in one of these “alpha hotels” (many guys and gals spend their days looking at a computer screen), I think they still have pride of place in terms of the way the military conceives of itself. Certainly my students here at the US Naval Academy seem to think they've taken a demotion when they service-select SWO, Surface Warfare — i.e. driving ships (oddly enough: remember this is the Naval Academy). And the vocabulary of USNA as well as the fleet is larded with references to warriors; I've written before about whether those in the military shouldn't be calling themselves “peacekeepers” instead. Still, I understand why they'd rather be “warriors.”

This pride of place of the alpha type is basically a good thing. We need people who won't even think of giving up, and the battle benefits of hard-chargers are so evident that I don't even need to list them. However, a side-effect of this personality poses problems. In our current tense worldwide situation the problems posed are very strong indeed. I mean the sense of all these alpha types -- and their wannabe buddies -- that you get intrinsic points for a high degree of certainty about what you believe. The more strongly you know you're right, the more certain it is you are right.

This is screwed-up reasoning. Being sure you're right and being right are two different things. And confusing these two is bad, in the long run, for the military. The problem with pushing out your jaw and giving any ideological opponents the same old fire-in-the-eye business you give the enemy, is that you dig your own rut deeper. And the deeper you are, the more unlikely it is you'll ever get out. Besides, it means you have no option of settling disputes other than opening fire. Sounds like fun, right? How about the fact that the other side, victim of the same confusion you have, is going to be opening fire too? Not so much fun, right?

Take this business of religion I've written on. I'm willing to take on faith (if I may use this phrase) that the people who want to share -- as it invariably is in this US of A -- Jesus Christ with the rest of the world have the best of motives. It seems so clear to them that what they believe is not only what they believe, but precisely because they believe it so intensely, the truth , that they want to share. But what do they do when they meet someone else who's equally convinced that his or her belief in X means that X is the truth, and has to be shared with everybody? They don't like it, not one little bit -- because they have no comeback. What they say about the other equally applies to them. So, frustrated, they start shouting and name-calling, which makes little sense past the kindergarten sandbox.

The form this face-off takes most often nowadays is between fundamentalist Christians (“us”) and fundamentalist Muslims (“them”). The Christians are shocked that Muslims could deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. You mean they're not even Christian ? Nope. Believing that neither Jesus not anyone else who ever walked the Earth is divine is at the center of Islam. God is one, so He has no son. Those who believe this are Muslims.

The Christian right usually tries to avoid this sort of relativistic view by claiming that there's another reason to believe Christianity rather than Islam. Namely, that Islam is intrinsically violent in a way that no other world religion is. Usually it does this by selectively quoting from the Holy Koran. Look! It says right here, “Smite the infidels!”

But all religions cherry-pick from their sacred scriptures; so too do Christianity and Judaism. Few Christians or Jews follow all those laws in Exodus about whom you can sell into slavery, or how your hair is to be cut (Orthodox Jews still like this one), or the Commandment clearly forbidding graven images. (The fight over that was big in the 7 th century Roman Empire; those against images gave us the word “iconoclasts” -- breakers of images.) Christians and most American Jews eat pork, and so on. So the mere fact that “it's in the Koran” doesn't tell us squat about whether people calling themselves Muslims will actually practice it, and under what circumstances. There are plenty of things “in the Bible” that Christians and Jews ignore, without feeling themselves less Christian or Jewish.

Believing something more intensely means nothing but that you believe more intensely. It doesn't mean others will share that belief, and the thing you believe isn't likely to be amenable to proof. Confusing intensity of belief, which is actually harmful to the military, with the capability for intense, sustained action (the mainstay of the military) is the source of a lot of trouble. A too-great collusion between civilian politicians and the military blinds us to non-military options. The military plays an honorable, real, role in society, but it is not the only arrow in society's quiver.

Intensity of belief isn't the same thing as intensity of action. In fact, intensity of belief doesn't end up implying anything but itself: If you believe X strongly all it means is that you believe X strongly, not that X is true, or that others will believe it strongly too. The error of thinking that intensity of belief means anything at all outside of itself isn't something we should be encouraging. This error causes military personnel, officers, and civilian politicians in charge of them to have trigger fingers that are way too itchy.

Those drunk on their own convictions may think that there's no such thing as a too-itchy trigger finger: they're right, after all. But the world is full of people who think the same thing, and whose trigger fingers are just as itchy, if not more so. That's a fact that the military needs to be aware of. Maybe two testosterone-mad eighteen-year-old boys are doomed to beat each other up over the slightest provocation. But that doesn't mean the rest of us are too.

PS: What do we do if we know this and they don't? Answer: We keep our guns cocked while we talk to them. No, we don't just roll over. Thinking this is the only alternative is another mistake those who think that intense belief is something the military should be encouraging usually make. But neither do we kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out, as the Marine Corps T-shirt amusingly suggests we do. Jokes are funny precisely because you're supposed to realize they're not a real option. Unfortunately, many people seem to think this one is.