LISTEN. "The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party," begins James's "Moral Equivalent of War." This is no idle metaphysical dispute about squirrels and trees, it's ultimately about our collective decision as to what sort of species we intend to become. It's predicated on the very possibility of deciding anything, of choosing and enacting one identity and way of being in the world over another. Can we be more pacifistic and mutually supportive, less belligerent and violent? Can we pull together and work cooperatively in some grand common cause that dwarfs our differences? Go to Mars and beyond with Elon, maybe?
It's Carl Sagan's birthday today, he'd remind us that while Mars is a nice place to visit we wouldn't probably want to live there. Here, on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," is where we must make our stand. Here, on the PBD. The only home we've ever known.
In light of our long human history of mutual- and self-destruction, the substitution for war of constructive and non-rapacious energies directed to the public good ought to be an easier sell. Those who love the Peace Corps and its cousin public service organizations are legion, and I'm always happy to welcome their representatives to my classroom. Did that just last year.
But the idea of sacrificing personal financial gain for the opportunity of a lifetime to immerse in another culture and lend tangible life-support for our fellow human beings is not immediately enticing to most of those who've been raised to value personal acquisition over almost all else. Have we lost our appetite for peace? Have we become inured to war? Do we just want to score an early Black Friday deal?
James didn't think so. Or wouldn't have, re: Black Friday, though he did already cringe (in that '06 letter to H.G. Wells, who he cites in Moral Equivalence) at the commercial Bitch-goddess "values" of our cash-besotted society. He "devoutly believes" in a pacifistic future for humanity, or maybe really just believed in believing in it. That's a start.
A non-military conscription of our "gilded youth" would be good for them and for us all, so many of the great non-gilded majority already effectively "conscripted" by circumstance to enlist not in a noble cause but for a crummy paycheck. You don't really get to be all you can be, in today's Army. But tomorrow's could be mustered to fight not "against Nature" but (for once) for it, and for our continued place in it. We could choose to battle the consumer lifestyle that has fueled anthropogenic climate change.
Yuval Noah Harari seems to me to be on James's wavelength when he says "the story in which you believe shapes the society that you create." If we believe we can successfully battle our own worst "Onceler" impulses, that "fiction" stands a fighting chance of becoming fact. If we don't, it doesn't. Apocalyptic fatalism is not constructive.
James's old student Morris Raphael Cohen once attempted to persuade James that baseball could be the sort of moral equivalent he was looking for, a way of channeling our martial impulses into benign forms of expression on playing fields, in harmless competition. James wasn't having it. "All great men have their limitations," Cohen sighed. ("Baseball as a National Religion")
The quote from Yuval Noah Harari seems very accurate to me. I would go as far as to add the extension: "The events that you experience help construct the story in which you believe, which in turn shapes the society that you create." Earlier today, I saw brutal images recently captured by satellites from space that showed villages in Sudan. In the images, you could make out piles of dead bodies lying in pools of blood. It was extremely disturbing and surreal to observe. While I remember previously reading headlines about violence in Sudan, seeing those photos completely altered my perception of the gravity of the situation.
ReplyDeleteI think the main reason as to why it so surreal to observe that level of brutality is simply because I've never had to witness anything close to that in my own experience. I think one of the biggest flaws of humanity that I have observed is that we often behave out of indifference. And I think for many people, it is not a conscious ignorance of others' pain that causes their indifference, but rather a mechanical inability to truly internalize the experience of others, especially people who are located across the globe. I sincerely believe that any rational person who directly observes the effects of war and genocide, will become motivated to advocate peace as much as humanly possible.
My theory is that if every single human on earth was forced to spend one hour every day, strapped to a chair staring at a screen displaying all the new violent footage from places like Palaestine, Sudan, and the Congo, every war on Earth would cease in the span of two weeks. If people were forced to experience the ongoing atrocities for themselves, massive change would be inevitable.