ABSTRACT
What is it that lures young people to places of physical and cultural danger? Specifically, what lures soldiers to horrific fields of battle? British mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead questioned this willingness to confront death during World War I. “As this war goes on,” he writes, “and so many young men die before they have had time to live, I keep asking myself what it is that can inspire such heroism and devotion” (qtd. in LeShan 2002, 42). Is it eagerness, such as war theorist Clausewitz suggested in the nineteenth century, which is based on ignorance? Is it that state of delusion by which “before we have learnt what danger really is, we form an idea of it which is . . . attractive [rather] than repulsive” (Clausewitz 1982, 158)?
