Adam Kirsch on Morality in the Histories of WWII

A quote worth repeating from the article cited in my previous post. He expresses a perspective that I agree with.

[T]he patriotism, sacrifice and bravery we read about in a book like “Band of Brothers” cannot be nullified by knowing more about the war in which they flourished. Indeed, the best of the new World War II histories can be seen as attempts to give us, in the year 2011, a more authentic and complete sense of what the war was actually like to those fighting it.

After all, the present is always lived in ambiguity. To those who fought World War II, it was plain enough that Allied bombs were killing huge numbers of German civilians, that Churchill was fighting to preserve imperialism as well as democracy, and that the bulk of the dying in Europe was being done by the Red Army at the service of Stalin. It is only in retrospect that we begin to simplify experience into myth — because we need stories to live by, because we want to honor our ancestors and our country instead of doubting them. In this way, a necessary but terrible war is simplified into a “good war,” and we start to feel shy or guilty at any reminder of the moral compromises and outright betrayals that are inseparable from every combat.

The best history writing reverses this process, restoring complexity to our sense of the past. Indeed, its most important lesson may be that the awareness of ambiguity must not lead to detachment and paralysis — or to pacifism and isolationism, as Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan would have it. On the contrary, the more we learn about the history of World War II, the stronger the case becomes that it was the irresolution and military weakness of the democracies that allowed Nazi Germany to provoke a world war, with all the ensuing horrors and moral compromises that these recent books expose. The fact that we can still be instructed by the war, that we are still proud of our forefathers’ virtues and pained by their sufferings and sins, is the best proof that World War II is still living history — just as the Civil War is still alive, long after the last veteran was laid to rest.

Memorial Day Reflections

On Memorial Day it is good and right to remember those who served in our armed forces and sacrificed on behalf of our country. As I watch some of the non-stop war movies that parade across the television screens, I appreciate the sacrifices made, the horrors suffered, and the burdens borne. Of course, not everyone who served was “a hero”; some, over the course of our nation’s history, have committed horrible crimes in the name of our country or while in uniform.

I suggest that on Memorial Day, in addition to honoring those who served, we should turn ourselves to a wider reflection, to reflect on where we, as a nation, have been and where we might be headed. Our story is not without blemish, but if it is correct that “the truth shall set you free”, then we must face the good and the bad and the indifferent in our history. This is not always easy or pleasant. Some recent reading has brought all of this to mind. In the NYT yesterday, a review article by Adam Kirsch entitled “Is World War II Still the Good War?” The “good war”—an oxymoron if there ever was one—and yet not all wars are equal in their moral repugnance and some are justified. Kirsch rightly points out some of the moral failings of the Allied Powers, such as the fire-bombing of German (and Japanese) cities, which rightly raises the issue of war crimes. In the end, neither Kirsch nor I nor many of the authors of the books that he discusses, believe that one finds any equivalency between the evils of Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Allied Powers. Even the question of allies raises moral clouds, such as Hitler’s one-time ally and then ours, Stalin, who perhaps can rival and arguably even excel Hitler in evil, yet we danced with him in order to defeat Hitler. These are not easy questions, and Kirsch addresses them forthrightly but not naively.

I also listened to a portion of Simon Schama’s The American Future: A History. This morning I listened to the story of the treatment of the Cherokee Nation by Andrew Jackson, Schama describes Jackson’s actions as a terrible low in American political morality. Congress (including Davey Crockett) almost defeated Jackson’s theft and ethnic cleansing (for this is what it was, and often treatment of American Indians became genocide). Yet, it happened. Yes, we must remember this, too. Not to beat ourselves up with useless guilt, but to understand how we got there and to consider our own actions and how they may compare to those of our ancestors, heroic, ordinary, and shameful.

Walter Russell Mead on Clausewitz

A good, brief introduction to Clausewitz. Mead's course, like the Grand Strategy course at Yale under John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, and Charles Hill, seems like an excellent exercise. Mead makes a good point: we won't make war go away by ignoring it, and we're wise to prepare for it. We are foolish to hope war will go away even with all of the good will and new institutions we can create. We can't bet on it. Mead, and Clausewitz, make us face these unpleasant thoughts.

Tim Ferriss on Stocism, Life-Hacking, Language Learning, etc.

I like Tim Ferriss because he's an experimentor, testing ideas (Stocism), his body, his skills (here in some degree about language learning), and he brings a Pareto-based attitude to learning new skills. He seems pretty adept @ it, so I pay some attention to what he has to say. This is a good, relatively short introduction to some of his main ideas & perspectives. Of course, his two books, The Four-Hour Work Week & The Four-Hour Body are chock-full of these ideas and more.

Nicholas Phillipson: Adam Smith

Adam Smith, an odd, somewhat ungainly man from Scotland who lived and wrote in the 18th century is one of the great minds. The poor fellow seems destined to remain in the popular mind as the mand with the invisible hand. But in addition to this keep perception and his invention of modern economic thought, he is the author of another equally great work, The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. This book gives us the "impartial spectator", an ideal that a Buddhist would recognize.

This birthday gift one 1HP (thanks again!) reinforced what I already believed: Smith is a greaet mind with keen insight. Yes, he invented modern economics, but it was all a part of his project for a "science of man". He is essentially humane, careful, and worthy of all of the consideration that we can give him.

David Brooks on Democracy vs. Republic

Paul Krugman on the "Al Gore Problem"

I liked Al Gore and I thought he got a bad rap. Krugman's article explores this. I think that we, as a nation of readers, are often the victims of journalistic malpractice. There is no defense, no lawsuit that can remedy this inequity. One must simply have one's crap-detector on 24-7. Thanks to Krugman for running his at a consistent high speed.

Garry Wills: Augustine in Brief

While I reviewed Garry Wills's "biography" of Augustine's Confessions a short while ago, I understand you may not have read the book yet. This article highlights some of the key points. Enjoy.

Sitting Too Much?

As one who sits a great deal @ work in front of a computer, often reads sitting, watches television, and who writes blogs, I do more than my share of sitting. Alas, it's a bad practice in excess. However, as I write this,I'm standing up. As a temporary fix, I've simply piled some books (of which I have a few, delightfully fat and therefore appropriate for this ancillary use) to build a platform upon which to rest my computer. One project that I've begun looking into is some type of podium or platform to allow standing reading and writing at work and at home (think Bob Crachitt). Nothing yet, but I'm on the lookout. As the link suggests, the sooner the better!

John Lukacs: The Future of History

John Lukacs has written another reflection on history as a discipline and as a cultural phenomena. Regular readers of Lukacs will not find a great deal new here, as he's addressed many of these issues in the past. On the other hand, I do not tire of reading Lukacs on this topic. Indeed, given his style, it's almost as if he's sitting by the fire speaking informally to a gathering of confidants on a topic about which his mind has been quite fertile for many decades. While the topics have been addressed in the past, the fertility of his mind keeps the topic fresh and relevant. Topics like how historical consciousness has risen in modernity, how history relates to literature, how we think of what constitutes history: all of these are topics deserving of careful and repeated consideration, and Lukacs provides us with another take on these topics that makes this book worthwhile. For someone new to this master, reading this book will provide a brief introduction to the fertility of his thought on these topics. Now into his 80's, one has to consider each of these books as a real treasure.

Ursula LeGuin: The Lathe of Heaven

A recent trip to the Pacific Northwest to help 1HP celebrate her birthday included a trip to Portland. Portland gave us fun food carts, beautiful gardens, interesting restaurants, some local brews and Powell’s Bookstore. The later is famous and proved fun. In honor of the person I consider Portland’s most famous author (and one of my personal favorites), I purchased Ursula K Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven. (Darned, she was on the marquee for making an appearance shortly after our trip there.)

The Lathe of Heaven isn’t just by Portland’s most famous author, it’s also set in Portland. From this rather mundane setting (Portland isn’t all beautiful scenery), Le Guin tells her tale of the young protagonist who experiences “effective dreaming”; in other words, his dreams come true, in a very literal and often disturbing way. As one would expect in our society, he tries to stop this weird occurrence with drugs, and he ends up with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist, once aware of this unusual gift (if one can call it that), tries to harness this power to the good of humanity. From this premise, Le Guin spins yarns of alternative and dystopian futures, as rationality cannot master the world of the dream. Le Guin, however, masters a blend of the contemporary quotidian, current politics, reigning zeitgeist, and the fantastic, weaving them together so that one hardly blinks at the juxtaposition of the fantastic and the ordinary.

Le Guin’s book was a delight to read while visiting Portland (although finished in Seattle). I never leave one of her stories without a sense of having been caught up in a compelling story, well told, yet I also find myself continuing to ponder what I've just read because she offers a perspective on the world that always challenges us and the reality that we live in. In this case, she challenges us with the world of dreams; not just the dream world of Freud or Jung, with their sometimes too easy interpretations, but the world of dreams suggested by the Tao Te Ching (of which she has written a translation), Chuang Tsu, Victor Hugo, and others.

A trip to Portland for those of us in the Midwest doesn’t happen very often, but you can read The Lathe of Heaven to take a virtual trip to Portland and far beyond.

Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004, 306 p.) is an extraordinarily engaging memoir. Ms. Armstrong recounts the time from when she left a Roman Catholic convent in about 1969 to her transformation into one of the leading writers about religion. However, this is not a story all filled with grace and light. In fact, she tells a story of struggle, hurt, and misfortune, although I would say it is one of ultimate success, and I believe that in the end, she must appreciate the immense contribution that she has made to religious understanding.

Armstrong left the convent feeling a bit of a failure as a religious, never having found God has she had hoped and expected. She left Oxford without a Ph.D., thus never having qualified for the academic career that she had pursued, and she was eased out of a secondary teaching career without any apparent alternative available to her. Along the way, hide-bound and insensitive nuns, dull-witted psychiatrists, arrogant professors, and penny-pinching administrators contributed to her woes. She does not berate them, and in the end, despite obvious cruelty and arrogance, one almost secretly rejoices that these impediments led to so many misfortunes, since she might not have turned to the career that I’ve found so enriching.

Only by chance and not really by choice (intentional, anyway) did she turn to religion as a subject for her career as a writer. With her book, A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, in which she writes a parallel history (so much as history allows) of the three great monotheistic religions she turns again. (I use this phrase because she the first portion of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” serves as the epigram for the book and names the chapter titles.) She comes to the conclusion that religion is not about belief, but about practice; not about conflict, but about compassion; that self-emptying (kenosis in the Greek) comes through compassion as much as through meditation; and understanding comes from the inside, from making myth into ritual, and not from a mere recital of facts or creeds. In the end, this book is like a grail quest, altered, of course, by the age in which we live and that Eliot reflects in much of his work.

I’ve put off reviewing The Case for God (2009, 390 p.), so I’ll do that now as well briefly. First of all, although I have a hardback of this book, I listened to it on audio, with Armstrong reading it. Her reading added delight. Even though I had not yet read The Spiral Staircase, one gets a sense of her from her books, and that is enhanced by her reading, which is quite good. (One of her careers, after secondary school teaching and before full time writing, was as a television presenter.) Her firm authorial voice reveals itself fleetingly in print, but clearly in her reading.

This book takes us from the earliest cave art to the present, suggesting ways of understanding God that I mentioned above. She does not pretend to prove or disprove God’s existence; instead, she seeks to understand what all of this God-talk can be about and how it might all go astray or lead us to a better life. Modernity, which brought so many benefits into the world, also made us terribly literal-minded. Religion, as myth and ritual giving shape and substance to lives, went astray (for the most part) because of this mindset. She, like me, believes that the mystics, those who find God a paradox and elusive (not magical), have the deepest insights, but they are a minority in any religious culture.

These two books, like others of hers that I have read, give us a profound insight into what religion can and should be. I highly recommend both of these books.

Good Keynesianism

Referring back to economics once again, this is Krugman explaining how Keynesian insights have been abused. Indeed, we use "stimulus" way too much. We need to save during the good times and spend up during slack times. But, oh no, some can't bear the thought of money in the til. Foolish democracies: can we be trusted with Keynesian insights?

David Brooks on What Drives History

David Brooks reflects on the life and death of Bin Laden. I found the article very interesting, as it pointed out some aspects of the individuality of Bin Laden. We often forget that great actors in history, including some of the most despicable, are human, all too human. Brooks also uses this occasion to demonstrate how individuals, with all of our quirks and individuality, can make a huge difference in history, for good or ill. This is one of the things that makes history so fascinating. Yes, in my year of Big History, I've been looking at the big trends, like economic change, demographics, technology, and so on; yet, individuals in the midst of all of this change, still count, still make crucial differences.

Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two

This blast of a video is the sequel of their initial offering of "Fear the Boom & Bust", and it's a worthy sequel indeed. Of course, it lacks the shock of the original (two of the greatest economists as rappers), but still, when you think of what they're saying, you realize a lot of knowledge and perspective is packed into this video. Russ Roberts of EconTalk, a terrific podcast, is one of the writers and producers, and if you've listened to him as much as I have, you appreciate his ability to address complex concerns on these topics in very approachable ways. You do note that the Hayekians have a bit of a chip on their shoulder, their man's Nobel Prize notwithstanding, but I suppose that's accurate. I've only come appreciate Hayek more of late. I thought (without reading, shame on me) that The Road to Serfdom was some right-wing rant. Unfair. In fact, I like the ending of this video because both of these great economists (who, by the way, wrote in prose primarily and not math) have very important and worthwhile things to say. For me, in a crisis, go Keynesian, but for day-to-day, Hayek's perspective on the disbursement of knowledge and decentralized decision-making is crucial. Cheers to both these fine rappers!