on missionary tracting, hostility, killing

[_Sethbag]

I just finished a fantastic audiobook entitled "On Killing", by a retired Lieutenant Colonel Grossman. The book discusses the act of killing a human being, and the role this act has played in societies for a long time, and most specifically how it affects the military, and the willingness of troops to fire at enemy soldiers.

One of the premises of the book is that in most people there is an innate unwillingness to kill, or attempt to kill, another human being. He discusses statistics researched by historians for older wars, and studied by people on veterans during and right after WWII and later conflicts, that show that up until and including WWII, the vast majority of soldiers in a war wouldn't even fire their weapons.

In WWII an average infantry unit might have 15% of its members even fire their weapons in the direction of the enemy, and of that, some percentage were just "posturing", and not actually intending to kill their foes. The rest of the soldiers would try to help out in ways that didn't require them shooting their own weapons, such as passing out ammo, food, caring for wounded, and so forth.

He discussed historical evidence that in battles between musket-armed forces, and in battles during the US Civil War, whole regiments of infantry consisting of many hundreds of soldiers would fire volleys at each other from distances of 30-50 yards or more and yet inflict deaths at the rate of 1 or 2 per minute. In testing, an infantry regiment firing their weapons at a target 6 feet high by 200 feet wide, from a much longer range of 225 feet (simulating an enemy infantry formation) scored hits at the rate of something like 25-30% per volley. This shows that they were capable of hitting their enemies at enormous rates, they simply lacked the will to do so in actual combat, when their targets were fellow beings instead of a non-descript paper or cloth rectangle.

After WWII, upon the suggestion of a general who had done the pioneering work in discussing the human factors behind these sorts of findings, the US armed forces changed their training methods to condition soldiers to be more willing to fire upon their enemies, resulting in firing rates over 50% in Korea, and up to 95% in Vietnam. How many of these firers were merely posturing, rather than seriously trying to kill their enemies, isn't known precisely, however the rate of over 25,000 rounds fired per enemy killed in Vietnam suggests that a lot of firers were posturing.

The book suggests that in any military force ever studied in regard to these questions, only around 2% of the combatants really engaged enthusiastically in the attempts at killing their enemies, and that these 2% seemed to be somewhat psychopathic in their aggression.

Anyhow, this book is fantastic, and IMHO a must-read for any military officer or NCO. The insights into the human psyche are plentiful and eye-opening.

I started comparing what I was hearing in this audiobook with my mission experiences, and I started to wonder if there were some connection. In particular, I started to consider whether missionary tracting is analogous, in some way, to hostile acts during war. I pondered the fact that I was willing to engage in tracting until it dawned on me that the Swiss people whom I was tracting this way really didn't want to hear it, and regarded our intrusions into their privacy as a rather annoying, or even hostile act.

Upon realizing this, I became much more reluctant to engage in it, and came up with elaborate ways of talking myself into it. I started ranging far out into the extreme limits of my area in an attempt to do my tracting in areas very likely untracted by previous missionaries in that area for many years. Since most of my areas were bike-only areas, this meant ranging out on my bike to the little dorfs (villages and towns) the furthest away, since most missionaries aren't willing to ride that far. I became Senior Companion in my 5th month in the field, and stayed that way for the rest of my mission, and I ended up stearing much more of our work effort into street contacting, which I perceived as still annoying to the Swiss and Germans, but not as much so as showing up uninvited at their front doors. My tracting efforts, for a large stretch of my mission, were fairly limited engagements in remote parts of my areas.

I've pondered this situation many times in the past, but it has made a lot more sense in the past few days as I listened to "On Killing", and came to understand how deeply-rooted the human antipathy is toward attempts to kill our fellow human beings.

Is there a strong antipathy towards tracting on the part of large numbers of missionaries once they perceive that their tracting is regarded as a hostile act by the local population? Am I projecting here?

Is there some connection between the 2% of soldiers who are not only willing but even eager to engage in war violence upon the enemy and the minority of missionaries who go all gung-ho in doing missionary work, who end up getting "promoted" to ZL and AP? You know, the kind who will go out and do 70 hour weeks of non-stop, grinding, soul-crushing tracting, and cheerfully proclaim these numbers to their higher-ups, and then, upon their promotion, mercilessly demand this kind of "production" from their underlings?

And what about the desensitization and conditioning that modern militaries have worked into their training regimens in an attempt to increase rates of firing and willingness to kill the enemy among their recruits? Is their any analogy between this conditioning and the kinds of things missionaries are taught, and practice, and rehearse, in order to increase their willingness to go out and commit the acts of tracting out and contacting people who obviously have no desire to be engaged by the Mormons?

Have any of you read or listened to this book, or have any comments to add? I had a lot more specific thoughts in this vein while listening to the audiobook, but I didn't write them down, so this thread has started with just a representative sample.

[_Sethbag]

To add some more comments, it has occurred to me that I stood in conflict with myself on my mission, in that I perceived our tracting and street-contact efforts were taken almost as hostile acts by the Swiss and Germans, but I felt by duty bound to engage in them anyway. I now wonder to what extent I fell back on the age-old expedient of posturing, in combination with actual serious contact techniques, as a way of lessening the extent to which I was acting aggressively towards the local people, while honoring my committments and duty as a missionary.

In war, of the 15% of soldiers who actually fired their weapons at their enemies, many of them were just "posturing", showing aggression and a willingness to fight, while actually aiming deliberately over their enemies' heads or into the ground or whatever. In the animal kingdom there is a lot of posturing, for example by males competing for females, where the males demonstrate aggression to their foes sometimes without serious attempts to harm them, until one male backs down.

By ranging out far and wide on my bike to tract in villages and towns at the furthest ends of my mission areas, was this akin to posturing? The time spent on my bike would be greater than the average missionary, leaving a shorter amount of time for actual proselyting. Thus, I was reducing the net volume of hostile acts (houses tracted out, people approached on the street, etc.), but my conscience was clear, because I wasn't just wasting my time out riding - I was in fact proselyting when I got to these remote areas, and thus the entire time spent was, in my mind, spent in carrying out my duty.

I know my mission behavior was not like the 2% of psychopathic warriors who really dig war and do it enthusiastically. Nor was I like the 85% of WWII and previous soldiers who found reasons not to fire their weapons at their enemies when the opportunity presented itself. Was my willingness to proselyte like the 15% of soldiers willing to fire their weapons at the enemy, but my attempts to range out far and wide on my bike, thus lessening the net amount of proselyting, a combination of doing my duty with some posturing? Of doing "missionary work" while lessening the net volume of the hostile acts inherent in missionary work amongst an unenthusiastic populace?

I know that, in general, I was more willing than most of my companions to proselyte. I know I was also less willing than some to engage in some of the sheer lunacy of endless hours of tracting and racking up numbers, and I was never a serious candidate for anything above district leader.

Anyhow, this whole topic has been a good one for my own self-reflection. I can see from the number of views with no responses yet that it hasn't struck a chord with you all the way it has with me. Maybe I'm just totally up in the night, or maybe one just had to read this book to see what I'm getting at.

[_Dr. Shades]

Hmm. I originally wanted to respond that I must've been in that 2%, but at the same time I can't really consider myself to be "psychopathic" because I didn't care at all about numbers. Getting hours, numbers of Books of Mormon given out, etc. didn't mean much to me; all I cared about was finding individual people who would hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, if you know what I mean.

At the same time, although I was FULLY aware that most people would consider what I was doing as "bothering" them, I can't really consider it a hostile act because, unlike during war, I was 100% convinced that I was doing them a favor. Think of it this way: If, instead of being loaded with lethal lead bullets, your weapon shot painless rounds full of the cure for cancer, the cure for the common cold, vouchers for free farm equipment for the village, etc. Wouldn't you be much more willing to "hit" the other guy in that case? Well, that was how I felt.

So, my outlook differs from yours, I guess.

[_Sethbag]

What if your rounds weren't painless at all, and the people you were intent on helping with them were completely uninterested, and highly annoyed by your attempts?

I too believed that the gospel message was true, and that I was doing my duty, but I also knew that almost nobody over there gave a crap about it, and intensely disliked our attempts at converting them. Also, not literally 100% of the people I tracted out acted like this, some were friendly to us, but enough were really bugged that the "hostile act" comparison is IMHO an apt one.

[_Dr. Shades]

What if your rounds weren't painless at all, and the people you were intent on helping with them were completely uninterested, and highly annoyed by your attempts?

Well, I thought of it along the lines of, "In order to find your prince, you have to kiss a few frogs." Or perhaps, "In order to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs."

[_The Dude]

Well Seth, I don't know if that's the soldier analogy I would use to describe my mission experience. I would probably go with something like Catch 22 to describe why I was reluctant to tract or do annoying things for numbers. I thought the whole thing was a futile bore and secretly I couldn't wait to get home. Sometimes it was even a secret from myself.

I would indeed sometimes prefer to walk instead of taking the bus or riding bicycles. Walking ate up a lot more time that I didn't have to spend bugging people. It was good exercise. Gave me time to think. God will probably give me skin cancer because of it.