Noah Millman:

I doubt anyone in the military believes that, if they disobeyed a flagrantly illegal order, that choice would be anything other than career-ending. So by giving such orders, you drum out people unwilling to obey, and make the remainder dependent on your personal authority for their continued freedom (since the pardon power is the only thing that assures they will be exempt from subsequent prosecution for having committed war crimes).

The political purpose of such an order, meanwhile, is essentially trolling: anyone who raises an objective will be mocked as weak and a loser simply for saying that there are such things as laws and ethical guidelines for behavior. I’ve written before about the gutter Nietzscheanism underlying this phenomenon, and specifically espoused by Hegseth: the belief that reestablishing manliness requires breaking both the law and ethical rules because in our purportedly feminized era one can presume that anyone who cares about such things only does so because he is pussy-whipped. That’s basically the message of Hegseth’s children’s book stunt in a nutshell. If you’re not one of the people who believes this, it should be obvious why it is horrible—and why it’s incredibly ominous if it proves politically effective. Even if you are a person who believes this, though, it should be obvious that, at least in the short term, you’re tossing ethics overboard—which is to say: doing things that you yourself think are wrong—in the service of a larger effort to reshape society.

Oliver Burkeman:

Ironically, “interest” and “interesting” are vaguely boring words compared to words like “passion” or “excitement”. (“Interesting” can even be negative: it’s the euphemism you might deploy about your friend’s terrible choices, or inedible cooking, if you didn’t want to hurt their feelings too much.) But in his book Creating a Life, the Jungian therapist James Hollis makes a powerful case that an interesting life – interesting to you, that is, not necessarily to other people – might in fact be the highest and best goal to which any of us could aspire. His own specialism of psychotherapy, he writes, 

…will not heal you, make your problems go away or make your life work out. It will, quite simply, make your life more interesting. You will come to more and more complex riddles wrapped within yourself and your relationships. This claim seems small potatoes to the anxious consumer world, but it is an immense gift, a stupendous contribution. Think of it: your own life might become more interesting to you! Consciousness is the gift, and that is the best it gets.

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

Not surprising here, Emily Dickinson said it first:

To be alive—is Power—
Existence—in itself—
Without a further function—
Omnipotence—Enough—

To be alive—and Will!
‘Tis able as a God—
The Maker—of Ourselves—be what—
Such being Finitude!

W.H. Auden:

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it looks from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savior-faire,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weep;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

“Come One, Come All”

This Thomas Nast cartoon, published in the November 20, 1869 issue of Harper’s Weekly, celebrates the ethnic diversity and envisions the political equality of citizens of the American republic. Joining the Thanksgiving Day feast of hosts Uncle Sam (carving the turkey on the far-right) and Columbia (seated on the far-left) are Americans from all over the world:  German, Native American, French, Arab, British, African, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, and Irish.  Behind Uncle Sam is a large picture of Castle Garden, the main immigrant depot in the United States, with the inviting label reading “Welcome.”   (Located at the foot of Battery Park in southernmost Manhattan, Castle Garden was the primary station for processing immigrants until replaced by Ellis Island in 1890.)

Emily Dickinson 🙂

William Deresiewicz:

Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of “relevance,” the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

(Via Conor McDonough)

John Henry Newman:

We are not our own, any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves; we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We cannot be our own masters. We are God’s property by creation, by redemption, by regeneration. He has a triple claim upon us. Is it not our happiness thus to view the matter? Is it any happiness, or any comfort, to consider that we are our own? It may be thought so by the young and prosperous. These may think it a great thing to have everything, as they suppose, their own way,—-to depend on no one,—to have to think of nothing out of sight,—to be without the irksomeness of continual acknowledgment, continual prayer, continual reference of what they do to the will of another. But as time goes on, they, as all men, will find that independence was not made for man—-that it is an unnatural state—may do for a while, but will not carry us on safely to the end. No, we are creatures; and, as being such, we have two duties, to be resigned and to be thankful.

Nadya Williams, discussing Leah Libresco Sargeant’s book The Dignity of Dependence:

To take the principles Sargeant presents and apply them to war means, ultimately, to confront the continued existence of genocide in our seemingly civilized modern world. The problem is that any one of us, if we were to find ourselves in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time, could be the object of a brutal missile attack or a nuclear bomb or a terrorist group invading a peaceful kibbutz on a holiday morning. It is not only that our own society does not recognize the dignity of the weak. It’s that the weak are considered worthless even today in war zones the world over, deemed good for nothing other than violence and outright destruction. The very attacks on the weak that the Geneva Conventions outlaw are repeatedly violated with no visible consequences for those committing these war crimes—just ask Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian mother and poet, who sent her son away from Ukraine and became a war crimes investigator in 2022, until she was killed during a bombing of a pizzeria in summer 2023. In wartime, such simple acts as meeting friends for dinner can be deadly.

Virginia Woolf, via Mandy Brown:

Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Of what use then is a university education in influencing people to prevent war? […]

It seems as if there were no progress in the human race, but only repetition. We can almost hear them, if we listen, singing the same old song, ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree’ and if we add, ‘of property, of property, of property,’ we shall fill in the rhyme without doing violence to the facts.

But we are not here to sing old songs or to fill in missing rhymes. We are here to consider facts. And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? In another century or so if we practise the professions in the same way, shall we not be just as possessive, just as jealous, just as pugnacious, just as positive as to the verdict of God, Nature, Law and Property as these gentlemen are now?