Pericles vs Lycurgus: Mandatory ROTC or not

The late 6th century BC saw Sparta as the preeminent hegemon in the Athenian peninsula. Sparta was the preeminent leader of the Greek forces during the second Persian invasion under Xerxes that culminated in victory at the legendary Battle of Thermopylae. This repute was well deserved: the lawmaker Lycurgus saw to it that the constitution and civilian life of Sparta was focused on the cultivation of military arts; a society molded to produce formidable warriors. The upper-class males started rigorous military training at age seven, which continued throughout life.

In the aftermath of the Thermopylae, though, due to their unwillingness to campaign too far from home which was beset by growing civil unrest (partly the revolt of the Messenian zealots), Sparta retreated into relative obscurity. Athens wrested hegemony to lead the anti-Persian struggle. Sparta reasserted its claim to hegemony, which resulted in the Peloponnesian Wars which saw Athens cede hegemony back to Sparta partly because of help by Persians under Lysander whose fleet defeated the Athenian allied fleet and forced Athens to capitulate in the Battle of Aegostami.

But after their disastrous defeat at the hands of the Thebans under Epaminondas in 371 BC at the Battle of Leuctra, Sparta descended into the nadir of prestige. The Spartiates, the army proper of Sparta and the rampart of the Spartan ruling class against the more numerous and increasingly mutinous Messenian helots (slave class) was losing manpower due to strict rules on marriage.

Athens was the anti-thesis of Sparta. It cultivated citizen participation in its politics; it valued education, the theater, sports and other public activities. Its attitude towards war was lackadaisical: “Let’s cross the bridge when we come to it.” Meanwhile, there is more to life than cutting throats. As the famed lawgiver Pericles (via Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars) put it: “There are certain advantages, I think, in our way of meeting danger voluntarily, with an easy mind instead of laborious training with natural rather with state-induced courage — and when they are actually upon us we show ourselves just as brave as these others who are always in strict training.”

Athens (Pericles) and Sparta (Lycurgus) displayed the two contrarian philosophies of civic duty to the state that modern societies still confront today. Nobody has come out with a convincing story on which one is the superior posture for the modern state. All we know is that today 67 countries have mandatory military service and many have mandatory Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at secondary and tertiary education.

The Prussians, under the Hohenzollerns, closely followed Sparta in its militarism and severe discipline. As a consequence, it emerged as a rival to top military powers in Europe in 1700s. The movement was spearheaded by the Prussian Junkers (upper-class males who followed the Bismarck-Von Clausewitz leadership) who swore to so-called Prussian virtues of loyalty, punctuality, frugality, honesty and order. Prussia as a polity, fragmented by religious (Calvinism, Pietism, Lutherans, Catholics, Jews, Slavs) and political cleavages, started to heave. It needed a centralizing principle. As war author Walter Flex put it, “He who swears by the Prussian flag no longer has anything that belongs to himself.” Duty, duty, duty. The value of the individual is nothing except as a thread forming a fabric of the carpet. According to Prussianism ideologue Oswald Spengler (1921) (The Decline of the West), Prussian instinct worshipped the whole: “…Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign…”

The Prussian militarism became a template for other countries still in the state-building phase — a separate body of men marching in uniform by a single anthem seems to be very attractive. Japan adopted the Prussian model for its military to quell the turmoil following the Meiji Restoration. The slogan “Enrich the country, strengthen the army” signaled the Restoration government’s belief in Prussian template. The social revolution was so successful that within 30 years Japan had become a recognized world power, the equal of European colonial powers.

These contrarian philosophies are once again pitted against each other in the 2024 Philippines. Before 2002 and the passage of the National Service Law (RA 9163), ROTC was mandatory in secondary and tertiary education. In 2002, and after the death of Mark Welson Chua, who denounced the corruption in UST’s military training program, ROTC became optional and could be replaced by the Literacy Training Service (LTS) or Civic Welfare Training Service (CWTS). It was not conviction but passion (the death of a critic of ROTC corruption) that determined the course of the country’s history. ROTC became the last choice of most students to escape the rigors associated with military training.

President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos, Jr. has now called on Congress to pass the bill mandating the ROTC as mandatory component for tertiary students of higher learning (Senate Bill 2034). He designated this as a priority bill. Arrayed against it is the usual noisy phalanx of well-meaning defenders of the status quo (The National Service Law) mandating as options of LTS and CWTS to ROTC making the case for Periclean “meeting danger voluntarily with an easy mind…” But the mandatory ROTC advocacy is no longer to fight a shooting war but to confront the protracted war of underdevelopment and destitution.

The perspective that deserves consideration in the debate is where the Philippines is at with respect to state building. Japan in the Meiji era or of Florence in 1500 in the times of the Machiavelli were in the state-building stage relative to countries already established and, as it were, secure in their skin. I consider the Philippines as still in a state-building stage. While we have graduated from the Hobbesian state of “warre of all against all,” we are still some distance away from proper nationhood. As National Artist F. Sionil Jose (1999) put it, “We have become a state before we became a nation.” And we have not attained a proper rule of law. To quote F. Sionil Jose futher: “This is what ails us all — we do not ostracize them, we do not punish them — no we anoint these vermin instead.” See how the bigwig perpetrators of the Napoles scandal have mostly been exonerated. We instead imprisoned a former lady senator on trumped charges related to drugs brought by a clique in the past government. Foremost in our consciousness is “What’s in it for me?” not “What’s in it for the nation?”

By “nation” we mean an “imagined community” whose members, in the words of political scientist Benedict Anderson (1983, 1991*) “will never know most of their fellow members… yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Fellowship in a nation is a mental image of belonging. This fellowship implies an obligation contained in Margaret Mead’s parable of the “healed broken femur.” When asked where civilization started, Mead’s retort was classic: “…That in the animal kingdom, if you break a leg, you die; you are meat for prowling predators… A broken femur that healed is evidence that someone has taken the time to stay with the one who fell… had carried the person to safety… Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts.” Civilization as obligation to mutual help is really a collective action personified. The grant or the sharing of one’s personal fitness with another member of the group in need, risks becoming oneself a prey to other predators — that is what started civilization. It is incompatible with the economic favorite starting postulate of homo economicus or what Nobel laureate, D. Kahneman, pejoratively calls “Econs” in Thinking Fast and Slow (2011).

From the perspective of F. Sionil Jose’s “… becoming a state before becoming a nation,” of a polity in need of a centralizing principle, I tend to favor the Spartan and the Prussian philosophy of duty to the state.

*Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (1991, London: Verso).

Raul V. Fabella is a retired professor of the UP School of Economics, a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology, and an honorary professor of the Asian Institute of Management. He gets his dopamine fix from bicycling, tending flowers with wife Teena, and assiduously, if with little success, courting the guitar.