Moral equivalence redux

 In CoPhi today we press on with reports while reading chapter two of Sick Souls Healthy Minds and considering "The Moral Equivalent of War," the latter having prompted this beginning in an old post from last year:

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?

I was still ready to ride with Elon less than a year ago. How things have changed. 

The next paragraph observed Carl Sagan's birthday, which this year came yesterday. We miss his perspective, profoundly. 

And then,

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")

But it may well be that sports mania of the sort we see in stadia and on the streets of championship teams actually intensifies and exacerbates the aggressive side of human nature rather than diverting and deconstructing it...

Interesting that I was already thinking then about our Lyceum speaker of just this past September, Tadd Ruetenik, and his thesis that in the U.S. the "symbiotic relationship between sports culture and war culture" is especially salient.

In conclusion,

As for the imagined pacifistic future of the race? Not holding my breath. But I do still invite my friends in the Peace Corps to come make their pitch.

And as friend Ed says, "effective public service benefits from the martial virtues. As James said, 'we must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings.' Onward civic soldiers, marching on as if to war."

Let's drop James's dated "manliness" rhetoric, though. Humane-ness will suffice. Or so we may freely suppose.

The essence of humanism, recall, is that the totality of our human experience leans on nothing but itself. We have to lean on each other, we humans. As Carl said, there's still no hint that help will come to save us from ourselves. 

Or, therefore, as we'll consider in Environmental Ethics today, to save future generations from being "discounted" by ours.