The Suicide Weapon

The Weapon The suicide weapon must be as old as the human race or older. It may be part of a system of animal survival. One dies, knowing that one is bound to be killed, in defense or attack, in order that kin or clan shall survive. Perhaps only people can be said to know that they are bound to be killed. If so, then the suicide weapon, like suicide itself, is uniquely human. Those who like the fancies of evolutionary psychology can imagine that Homo sapiens made it through the titanic struggle with the Neanderthal species precisely because our lot had the wit and the courage to deploy the suicide weapon. Human groups who ran away in their entirety were wiped out by longer legs and stronger arms, so the genes of groups able to use the suicide weapon prospered, if a few individuals did not. I do not believe that fantasy for a moment. We are, however, so confused both about suicide and about its use in battle that we should try out innumerable unexpected angles of approach. We need shaking up because suicide is encumbered with so many conceptual taboos that we do not know how to think it. The meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide. A universalist view more modest than my fake evolutionary story can be tied to words of Goethe’s: “Suicide is an event that is part of human nature, which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed anew.”1 Let us take this route and say that there is one such thing as suicide, peculiar to human beings. We will not battle about definitions. We will be plain and positivist in the style of Emile Durkheim. He counted as a suicide