If Russian history teaches anything, it is that such “moral clarity” has no limits. If all right is on one side, then anything—literally anything—one says or does is justified. Indeed, to stop short of the most extreme measures is to indulge evil, which means risking the charge of complicity. When Stalin sent local officials quotas of people to be arrested, they responded by demanding still higher quotas. It was the safest thing to do to prove one’s loyalty. No one ever secured his position by calling for less severity to enemies. When everything is black and white, sooner or later everyone is at risk.
“If only it were so simple!” reflected Alexander Solzhenitsyn about such thinking. If only it were a matter of good people always doing good things confronting evil people and those directly or indirectly aiding them. Such thinking is not only profoundly dangerous, it also fundamentally misunderstands the very nature of moral judgment. The more serious the question, the more, not less, care should be taken in addressing it. And we must never forget, as Solzhenitsyn frequently observed, that “the line dividing good from evil” runs not between one people or one class and another. Rather, it “cuts through every human heart.”
claritatem belli
Money clarifies; so does war. As I write these words, news reports say that China may be willing to give military as well economic support to Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. If that happens, certain dominos will or will not fall. Will the United States impose economic sanctions against China? If the possibility is mooted, what will Apple Inc. (for example) say about that? And what will its customers say? We support Ukraine, we say so all the time; we’re willing to send money and offer military support, but can we do without iPhones? Or, if Apple is willing and able to move its manufacturing elsewhere, would we be willing to pay double what we currently pay?
The full implications of our involvement in a truly global economic order have long been invisible to us, because such invisibility has been in the interests of those who most profit from that order. Over the next few months and years, on multiple fronts, what was invisible will become all too visible, and we will be faced with choices that so far we have been able to avoid. Like my former student, we’ll have to confront the chasm between our self-conception and our actual behavior. How will we bridge that chasm? And how happy will we be with ourselves when our choices are made? Money clarifies; so does war.
(nearly) doomed to excuses
We have tasted the worst of ourselves; we have had to look at the vilest we are capable of – mass murder by technological skill. And we will probably then either put enormous energy into denying this (and blaming others) or adopt a negative and cynical approach to our shared humanity, in which everything comes down to competitions for power.
It’s hard to quarrel with the implication that the advent of the nuclear age has introduced higher levels of both denial and cynicism into our public life and our expectations of humanity; we don’t have far to look for examples. But Knox steers us towards the key point here. We are capable of horrors – Belsen, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Rwanda and Srebrenica. But we see these as horrors precisely because we know that not one of them was forced on us, not one of them was inevitable. We chose. And to say we made a dreadful choice is also to know that there were other choices that were possible. We are not doomed to evil. The problem is that we are seduced by it, reassured by it, fascinated by it, and all too ready to gloss over it and justify it when it suits us. It’s not that we need to be liberated from an iron necessity. It’s tougher than that: we need to be liberated from an addiction that we always seem to be eager either to deny or to rationalize. We can’t see straight or think straight.
Williams, in a previous chapter of the same book:
St Paul tells us to be ‘transformed by the renewing of our minds’ (Romans 12.2). And in the discussion that follows in his letter to the Romans, he makes clear that this is essentially about learning the habits that will create trust, minimize resentment and rivalry, and dissolve our greedy longing to occupy the high ground at our neighbour’s expense. Transformation is the process of growing into a state in which this is second nature to us – a state in which we are so deeply attentive to the practical and psychological needs of those around us, so unfussed about our own status, so liberated from the longing to save and solve everything by our own wisdom and heroism, that we instinctively speak and act in ways that give life to the neighbour. This, for Paul, is what it is to live in Christ and to let Christ live in us – the Christ who is uniquely, freely and eternally attentive to the world’s needs at every level.
Growing into this is a long and frankly painful business.
What’s the rate?
Buried in a human neck, a bullet looks like an eye, sewn in,
an eye looking back at one’s fate.
Who shot him there? Who gave the order, which man?
Who will bury him, and what’s the rate?
When it comes to humanity, war is the beginning and end.
Whoever attacks you, don’t turn your back.
Says the Lord: For my people are foolish, they have not known me,
they are silly children and they have no understanding.
But the children feel as strong as their machinery,
mass-produced, with plenty of seamstresses for repairing:
some ladies patch holes, others fix neck bones,
still more sew on buttons that were torn away from hands.
And the Lord says: They are wise in doing evil — but,
says the Lord — they do not know how to do good.
But the children, if they survive, say it was luck,
and if they die, they think that was yesterday,
today is another day,
and the seamstresses stand with a shroud, telling them, “Put this on.”
How long must we put up with the flags, the trumpets calling us into the fray?
What beast has awakened? Where did our special forces land?
Who shot that man in the back? Who gave the command?
Who will bury him, and what’s the rate?
toward an incarnational realism
Above all, we need to start by acknowledging that for the vast majority of analysts, this war has delivered a shock that does not confirm, but puts in question our sense of reality.
It drives home the point that adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does it consist in affecting a hard-boiled attitude so as to inoculate oneself forever against liberal enthusiasm. Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change, but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly.
blind skyscrapers
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong
[…]
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
“empathy”
My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast-guard light,And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.
I’m glad that we didn’t wake
Our kids in the thin hours, to take
Not a thing, not a favorite toy,And we didn’t hand over our cash
To one of the smuggling rackets,
That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets
No better than bright orange trashAnd less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark
Above us, is not deeply twinned
Beneath us, and moiled with wind,
And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,Any mark, that demarcates a shore
As the dinghy starts taking on water.
I’m glad that our six-year old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floorIn the bottom bunk, and our son
With his broken arm’s high and dry,
That the ceiling is not seeping sky,
With our journey but hardly begun.Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish. It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.
“the happiness of living with our backs turned”
We Lived Happily During the War
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but notenough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
Kaminsky, in a recent interview:
That poem specifically has been shared widely on social media in the wake of Russia’s attack. How do you feel seeing your work resonate, particularly that poem, at this time?
“We Lived Happily During the War” is not a piece of journalism or philosophy, where one might go into facts or questions of ethics. In a poem, one hopes to create an experience in the reader: in this case, the hope of the poem is to help the reader see their own complicity.
The poem doesn’t want to be a pronouncement. The poem is a warning. This is what happens when half-measures take place. “We lived happily during the war,” the poem begins, and it ends with the same words. But by the time it gets to its final line, one hopes the reader might find the horrific irony in that fact of repetition. How many wars can we live through, happily?
One hopes the reader sees the critique of this “we” and what it has done. By the time you get to the repetition of “our country of money” and then to “our great country of money” — one questions the word “great.” That is what art hopes to do: it doesn’t shout at the reader “You must change!” Instead, the reader is changed via the act of reading.
What are you hearing from friends and family right now?
A writer from [Kyiv] tells me he sees people making Molotov cocktails together with their kids. An 80-year-old journalist from Odessa writes: “The air raid just quieted down. It’s a sunny morning.” My cousin tells me potatoes are marked up 50%. A James Joyce translator writes about spending the night sleeping next to a dog in the bomb shelter.
A friend from [Kyiv] emails with a photo of a bullet casing: “There’s a military outpost next to my house, just 1-minute walk. I found this on my balcony. A photo for you — a result of the war in my hand.”
Finally, this conversation I’ll never forget with an older friend from Odessa. After I asked him for any way I could help him, he responded: “Putins come and go. If you want to help, send us some poems and essays. We are starting a new literary magazine.” In the first days of war. Imagine.
hoarding happiness
How could I be living this simple, peaceful existence of making art, prop-styling my apartment for mini photoshoots, listening to my podcasts, eating fresh produce from my garden? How could I justify waking up and creating in my comfort, when so much around me was dying?
Something was off. I was hoarding happiness and it didn’t feel . . . happy. I felt bloated, that kind of “Thanksgiving full” where you overeat and it’s just not fun anymore. There was a dissonance growing, and it was becoming bolder and bigger.
the pre-Borg Complex
L.M. Sacasas (responding to an article about David Chalmers news book on the future of VR technology):
. . . I want to read Chalmers against the grain, which is to say as the unwitting emissary of a fantastical cautionary tale, which invites us not to fear some uncertain future but to reflect more critically on existing trends and patterns.
For example, I wonder for how many of us the experience of the world is already so attenuated or impoverished that we might be tempted to believe that a virtual simulation could prove richer and more enticing? And how many of us already live as if this were in fact the case? How much of my time do I already devote to digitally mediated images and experiences? How often am I lured away from the world before my eyes by the one present through the screen?
The claim that, even now, virtual realities can outstrip my experience of the world is increasingly plausible when I have lost the capacity to wonder at and delight in the gratuity and beauty of the world. And there may be many reasons why such capacities may have diminished, ranging from the ever-more complete enclosure of our experience within a frame of human artifice to the loss of the arts of perception and the power of social structures that eliminate the gift of leisure in principle and in practice for so many. In other words, I mean for us to consider how we might have already begun to sever our relation to our common world long before the virtual worlds Chalmers envisioned are, if ever, realized.