War and Peace in 2020

"The Face of War" by Daniel Ursino, acrylic on canvas

Are we so recently from our turd fights in the trees that we cannot forsake war for just one year in 2020? This question prompted the four previous posts in this series; 2020 A Year Without War.  These views are my own about this project, and they do not necessarily reflect the views of anyone else associated with the global project 2020 A Year Without War. Nevertheless, over 118,000-page reads for all four in the series indicate these views have some traction. Thank you for reading and commenting.

The last post on ‘War and Acceptance in 2020’ should have been the most difficult to write as most of us have a problem with enduring the unendurable to the point of accepting the unacceptable. Once it rattled around in my brain for a week, the post wrote itself. So too with this one i.e. War and Peace in 2020. What is clearly seen is clearly expressed. Writing this series has made it abundantly clear how we will successfully arrive at 2020 A Year Without War. Here, I examine two synergistic ways we will get there.

One way believes millennial-driven social media will get us there with just 800 million ‘engaged’ tech-savvy, benign activists ‘tipping history’, and so, suspending war for only one year in 2020. They may be right. I'd like to believe they are right, but I have my doubts. Clicking ‘like’ or ‘share’ on social media, wearing wrist -bands or T-shirts, accumulating signatures on petitions and civic proclamations of support, pleading videos from adorable children, academic lectures and debates for large audiences, pronouncements from Popes, Kings, Presidents and sundry potentates, celebrities, and notables, even valid and sound moral arguments...none of these individually or even collectively will succeed in bringing about 2020 A Year Without War. They certainly will help, and they certainly are worth the material effort. Some of them may be necessary conditions, but none of them, even collectively are sufficient conditions in my view. They will help the choir to believe more fervently, but I'm not preaching to the choir.

Another way believes that these material efforts need the spiritual virtues to succeed. Gandhi did not bring the British Empire to its knees by writing letters to the editor, circulating petitions, making pretty speeches, wearing T-shirts and wristbands, or lining up backing of political potentates and celebrities. He did it with salt, cotton, sweat, dirt, and blood. Like his moral grandchildren, Martin Luther King, Michael Collins, and Nelson Mandela, he used ‘non-corporation' and civil disobedience, with marches, strikes, fasting, and prayer enduring unendurable oppression grounded in the daily practice of mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance. Three of them were assassinated for schooling the world in the power of daily practice in human virtues; mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance.

[T]he good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are more kinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and most perfect kind.

--- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 7

The habitual practice of virtue is the only necessary and sufficient condition for peace in the year 2020. Aristotle lays it out in his iconic Nicomachean Ethics. In a most ironic series of philosophical arguments, he argues against philosophical arguments as the means to virtue and what he calls ‘the good of man’. Ethics cannot be taught in the classroom, he claims, for ethics is not merely a mental understanding of right and wrong, it is the habitual practice of virtue through experience. Professors who teach ethics are not necessarily ethical because the teach ethics. Nor are any of  their students. For this reason, Aristotle is highly skeptical of ethical ‘youths’ for they have not the daily experience in practicing virtue but only rely on their emotions to guide their moral choices. This barrier to ethical agency is not confined to the young, says Aristotle. Adults and the elderly, who have not lived a life of habitual moral practice, are still prisoners of their feelings like the wretches in Plato’s cave guided by echoes and shadows instead of reality.

A ‘practice’, according to moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is the incubator of character virtues. Gifted physicians perfect their art in a ‘practice’.  Legal giants are not born they are nurtured through years of their legal practice. A community drawn together for a common good is a ‘practice’. This can be a family legacy, a school’s knowledge, or even a political party’s manifesto. It’s a common exhortation from pulpits to ‘practice’ ones spiritual commitments. The unique context of ‘practice’ is the pursuit of a common good unattainable without hat particular practice.

 A child learns more about moral right and wrong from watching the behavior of parents than by listening to the moral inducements of the clergy, police, teachers, or politicians. Family is the practice of moral virtue or its lack.  Lawyers learn more about the morality of the law by their ‘practice’ of it. Life and death decisions made by physicians are groomed by the conditions of their patients rather than by textbooks of medical ethics. We know right from wrong at a very early age. Family is merely the practice of what we already know. Where does a child first learn mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance? For many modern children is it anywhere but the family. Self-centered dysfunctional choices increasingly destroy the family unit and with it the incubator for character virtues. When matrimony is defined by every human urge save procreation and nurture of children we need not look for any advance in human consciousness through the daily, familial practice of mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance. It’s an “everyone for themselves” brave new world with no moral compass.

Public schools, inspired by the myth of ‘cultural relativism’, try to fill the moral void with disastrous results. Bending and then breaking under the weight of counter-cultural practices there are no virtues. We never hear the words ‘good’ or ‘evil’ anymore. We only hear ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ 'offenders' and 'offended' as though ethics is some book of social etiquette with annual updates. Instead of incubators for resolving cultural conflicts, public education is a snake pit that exacerbates them all in the name of ‘cultural relativism’.

And what is that? It’s the false assumption that all cultural and moral ideas are equal, and that we must be ‘tolerant’ interlocutors in the tower of Babel called ‘diversity’ even with this diversity expresses views that are self-evidently invidious, insidious and evil.  The logic of cultural relativism collapses when it becomes necessary to accept, respect and celebrate the diversity of madmen who bayonet children while their comrades rape and behead the mothers. If cultural relativism is the answer then we must embrace and cherish, in the spirit of diversity, war criminals, and genocidal maniacs. Why? There is no right or wrong, just opinions about what is thought to be right or wrong. That’s what the teaching of ethics has become today, opinions about ethics.

Cultural relativism won’t get us to 2020 A Year Without War. The only thing that will get humans to forsake war, even for one year in 2020, is a common agreement on a four pointed moral compass practicing mercy, forgiveness, reconciliation and acceptance. Future blogs here will begin charting this common moral compass. We must try. We cannot fail to try. 

This five-part series 2020 A Year Without War is written for the skeptic, not the believer. The believer does not need sound reasons, the skeptic does. Though I remain skeptical, my belief is that it is better to try. What's the alternative? If we don't try to suspend war for at least one year in 2020, then do we advance or do we, as a species, stay where we are? Do we wallow in our base nature, or do the triumph over it? Do we get serious about practicing the necessary virtues to get there, or do we buy a longer 'selfie' stick. You decide.

Otherwise, we are too recently from the trees.

 _____________________________________

Postscript: Four student volunteers, and the founder of 2020 A Year Without War, Professor Joe White, are invited to make a presentation at the United Nations International Day of Peace this coming September 21st. You can help them get there @ https://rally.org/ayearwithoutwar/start?source=about

Thanks for all your comments and emails on this series. They are a trumpet call to write from the heart informed by the mind.--MM 

____________________________________