Welcome back to the new Thinkery. I'm David Barr and with me as always is my good friend Alex Preo. How are you doing, Alex? Doing well, David.
How are you? Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you too. And Greg McBrayer.
Happy New Year, Greg. Happy New Year, although it's like several weeks past New Year's at this point, but yes, happy New Year's. No, no, no, it's January 4th. Oh, for us, yes.
Yeah. For listeners, it'll be like the April 15th or something. Yeah. One of us could die, which would be kind of.
Why are you? I feel like you know, you know, most likely. Yeah. Anyway, today we're going to talk about something extremely boring.
Totally agree. Um, Alex selected this. Alex usually has such good selections. I can't think of a single misfire so far in this podcast from Alex Preo.
Yeah. Yeah. Everyone has one. I'm not all right.
So we're talking about William James. He's the least favorite of the James clan. I like Henry James. I pound for pound.
He's probably the finest American author in him. LeBron. Uh, yeah, LeBron James. Obviously.
The soccer player. No. And, uh, and so William James comes from this family of Boston intellectuals. Uh, and he is in terms.
Yes. He's the, I think the godfathers of this philosophic concept of pragmatism. He and a guy named Charles Pearson. So if, if America has produced, uh, you know, what Tocqueville says with standing, a philosophic school of thought, it is pragmatism.
And I've never studied the pragmatists. So that's the extent of what I can say. But William James, uh, has books with title pragmatism is most interesting book to me, just based off the title is, uh, the varieties of religious experience, which in prepping for this episode caught my eye, I, I known about it before, but I purchased it on Amazon. Uh, he was born.
When was he born? I don't know. It doesn't matter. 1842 and he died in 1910.
Um, and that's how that's really all I have to say about it. Alex selected this essay. Is it fair to say if there is a, if there is a school of thought or if there is a distinctly American philosophy that it's fragmented, right? And he's, he's a part of that.
You mentioned pregnancy. Like, is there another group of American philosophy or folks that call themselves philosophers? Oh, the Straussians. Thank you, Greg.
I totally forgot about that. I mean, like, there's the transcendentalists, uh, and then these guys write the pragmatists is that it? I mean, they're kind of like psychology. I guess I did.
Go ahead. Sorry. No, no, I, I don't, I'm out of my element. You just mentioned tokalen.
He says there's not a lot of, there will not be and it's not a lot of philosophy in America. And this is one of the, Alex should be, you know, this right? It doesn't have a PhD philosophy. Like the two major American philosophy schools.
Yeah. It says, I mean, it's, it's a pretty trifling question. It's not one of them. I'm mad at, you know, at least one of us as a brain of it.
It could be that a fat joke directed at David. No, no, I'll take it off to you. Uh, it could be. I don't know if this is the brain in the top.
But, um, it's a brain, uh, a pig in a blanket. And William James, I bet is he is probably more widely recognized outside of the field of philosophy. Yeah, I agree with like, as a psychologist, where I'm, yeah, and pure system, some sort of, I don't know if he's taught in methods class. I don't know.
Have you read the variety of religious experience? No, no, that's the book that I'd like. Oh, you're just, you know, either of you actually, I think Greg didn't listen to you. I mean, he just asked for a date.
I think Alex. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm just for listeners at home. They need to hear it again. So jokes aside, Alex, you selected today to discuss, uh, James's essay, the moral equivalent of war is a well known essay. Uh, and it's a institutional and functional thing too.
Yeah. So give us a very, very quick overview. Well, you know, I gotta say we usually open up every single episode being like, this is a really special episode. It's not very special.
Turns out, cause they're all special, right? Um, you know, but we usually start having this is special. I'm so excited, right? We got so and so here we're reading this, that and the other.
This is great. And today is just already just, just, uh, taking James to the rigor. I mean, the reason I thought this might be good for an episode is not because it is in itself something that, that, you know, lays out an argument that's particularly persuasive, but it does seem to me to, uh, um, touch on issues and try something that it's fruitful to think through. Uh, even if you're thinking about James fairly easily, like he is doing something that's interesting.
So maybe I just to kind of set it up, uh, I thought that this tied into a couple of things. Uh, we've already done already. First off, Aristotle and courage, obviously, right? Uh, thinking about, um, the place of courageous action in human life, specifically Aristotle, when we talked about that was concerned with the various sort of false guises that things that look like courage, um, and also the range of apparently courageous action starting from war.
And then as we explored it up to, you know, as a kind of courage that's present in, in philosophy, um, I think James is also concerned with the range of courageous actions. So I think that's a sort of interesting philosophic aspect of this text. Um, one question I have as well as what he proposes within aerosols range, would Aristotle call this outlet for courageous action or kind of spirited action? Would he call it courage?
Another episode I thought it was related to was the one we did on Churchill on modern life. I think both of them are responding to the effects of a highly organized, uh, political community. Uh, James is all in on that, uh, Churchill sort of like, well, this is just what we have, right? Um, but James is all in on that.
He's, um, openly, uh, for a more socialist state. Um, and he is nevertheless attuned to some of the problems with that. He does want to create distinctions between different kinds of social states. And he's specifically interested in, and on the one hand, a pain and fear economy, which creates occasion for heroic action on the one hand and, uh, an ease economy, which seems to negate a heroic action, right?
Um, and he has some very disparaging things to say about that sort of society. Um, both him and Churchill, James and Churchill, I think they see the loss of a space for this manliness for heroic action. Again, with Churchill, it doesn't seem like he has a solution. It's a kind of despairing and kind of depressing, I say, to read.
Um, it seems more diagnostic, Churchill, that is, than anything else. But James, I think, uh, does try a solution. Uh, of course, I think this is what you guys have already alluded to. We really want to ask, I think this is the principle question one has to ask is, well, it seems like James has this thing on the pulse of a real problem, but does this solution actually work or was, you know, to put it in the context of our pastimes, it was Churchill right to despair.
Um, uh, that the loss was of this sort of space for heroic action is somehow permanent. So that's the kind of in the context of things we've done before. Uh, feel free to jump in here. I also think there's some, uh, stuff, uh, to relate to, uh, more philosophic texts.
I mean, this is the work of a floss or let's be real. Uh, it reminded me a lot while I was reading of Plato's Statesman. Um, in there, this, the stranger, uh, from a lei lays out. That is high.
That is high phrase for what it's worth. Well, no, no, no, no. Yeah. I should be clear that this is Alex trying to pump up his penny.
William James. Yeah. Did you do? Very good.
No, no, no, look on William James. And we're just, this is, I see this is all grift. Anyway, no, no, I'm about to assume the William James chair of philosophy. Being a big kid about James.
No, what is this essay about? What is it about? You've done a good job in the context. One guy.
I interrupt you. I apologize. You were about to draw a moral equivalence between a million James and Plato. So go on.
No, no, no, I was what I want to say is that I think there's, uh, one way to think about what James is doing to understand what's at stake is to think about Plato's state by no means. So anyways, in the Statesman, the Statesman is proposed as a kind of weed verb by which, uh, Plato means that he sets the laws, the statesman sets the laws and the ways of the people. So that both the spirit and the meek become courageous and moderate and somehow come together into one. Uh, he talks at length about how spirited types and meek types are naturally at odds.
And it's the, and, you know, a political community needs both. And somehow it's the duty of a law giver or a statesman to keep them moving together to weave them together. Uh, for Plato, that's always going to be defective. Um, and so, but I think James is trying to somehow reconcile, uh, the tendency of socialism to innovate, mainly virtue, mainly virtue that's necessary.
Um, he's trying to fight against that by creating an outlet for it. And therefore, I think bring a kind of harmony so that there isn't this sort of tension within it between the pacifists and the militarists, right? Between the, uh, again, the painted fear economy and the ease economy. Um, again, another platonic lens through the Republic.
Uh, there you have the sort of moderate or moderated types that are found in the artisan class, the technical class, while the courageous are found among the warrior class. And the goal there too is to reconcile these two groups. And this happens through the noble lie, right? The courageous have to be taught to defend those for whom they might have contempt, right?
The mirror artisan class concern with just the desires of the body. So again, I asked from this angle, well, is James a solution also a kind of lie. Um, it is much as it is, uh, trying to encourage courageous action in a way that's conducive, uh, to a non militaristic end, right? Um, hold on.
Alex, can I interrupt you? Can you in the most basic way? So the most basic, what's going on in this, I say, I thought for me, it's, you know, going, so in the most basic way, you know, every, every society is going to have spirited and more meek types, right? That's just, if you want to divide a community into two groups, that seems going to be in Machiavelli.
And he uses the word for a lot, right? And we have, it's replete. Yeah. And this is reflected in peace, loving and war loving, right?
Right. Tights. Right. Machiavelli, right.
It's the people who just don't want to be oppressed and the great who want to do a press, right? And it seems like this is a common theme in political philosophy. You want to reconcile them. Now, I think James is in a way concerned with that question.
He's on the pass of the side on the social side. He's, he's very clear about that, but he doesn't see that project as being able to be completed unless it gives an outlet to this other type that may not be attracted to that. That really loves war, you know, deeply loves war and even romanticizes it as he puts it. Right.
So I think, I think that's kind of the philosophic question that's at stake in James. Is that's like, he doesn't raise it to the level of, of a general philosophic problem. He treats it as a pragmatist might, right? As a kind of particular political problem that he's trying to propose an institutional solution for.
And in fact, it does. I think people take this essay. I mean, this essay is a jumping off point for organizations like AmeriCorps. And because he's proposing a kind of sublimation of this war, like, that sublimation is wrong.
It's like he wants to re-channel this war, like impulse, the thematic impulse in what he would consider a healthier way while still helping society. So it's like we all get to be boy scouts and we're really psyched about it. It's the sort of thing that like people to judge propose or Ben Sastra's proposed, the kind of service that's meant to have an indubling effect. And it doesn't have to be high for noon.
I mean, he's pretty clear. It can take dishwashing, right? It means that even in an economy of ease, I think he's thinking very big picture, even an economy of ease where you have, you know, a lot of luxury, you don't have to work much. It is important to keep this virtue up.
So maybe force people to do drudgery, I guess, unnecessary. Can I say just a few things here, by the way, so what he's the title of the moral equivalent of war, the title is a little confusing to me because on the one hand, the implication is that his alternative that he's proposing is equivalent to whatever this war like thing is, but it's obviously thinks that it's better. It's superior. So it's not a moral equivalent.
It's somehow a replacement for a re-channeling an outlet. But I just want to say like this sounds like I'm, I'm not sure if in the end, in the final analysis, I would agree, but I'm at least sympathetic to the notion that national service is a good idea, right? Israel has it, Germany has it. I think it's a fantastic, you know, not necessarily military, but civilian.
I think it would do young people a lot of good. I can't speak for all three of the members. I think David Barr was born with a sore, smooth his mouth and as we know, pre-use a descendant from the Shah on one side of the eye, I told the other, I actually had to work for a living at some point, I have Persian. Well, for the same side, I see the French, French, French, French, or not a banking family got it.
Got it. Got it. So I guess what I'm saying is while I see the value in this, I see why it's appealing. In my own case, I think that some of the manual labor I did before and during college to put myself through college, I think helped sort of help me grow up.
Oh, really? So when you work, but when we're at Emory, that's $70,000 a year. So I didn't know that you were digging ditches. I literally done ditches in summertime, dude.
That's a pretty good example. Well, I think Greg is a great example of this because, you know, here he is, he's an academic, right? Yeah. What did he do?
He works out with a bunch of, you know, Christians, he built his shed. He grows a beard. He shoots guns. He's just started shooting guns.
So that is always what guns? You always just what guns? Guns shot him. Okay.
Sorry. But what I was going to say is I'm not done insulting you. And he's also, you know, shooting guns and, you know, doing all the sort of outdoorsy stuff to try to prove to his in-laws that he's no, you know, academic as you said, pencil, neck, sissy, weenie, right? I prefer weenie.
This only proves my point. I guess what I'm going to say is as useful as I see this as beneficial as I see this, as good as I mean, I'm around young people all the time. I think many of them who some of whom I really liked that you could use these sort of this toughness, this toughening up. But I don't see how in, I don't see how this would actually satisfy the part of the soul, the fumatic, the spirited part, the part that gets angry, the martial part, the part of the principal young men that wants to destroy stuff.
I don't see how this kind of work will satisfy that longing. And to be fair, I thought that James was going to try and say, wish this part of the soul away, but he seems to recognize that it's there, that there is this part. So he just thinks that it can be redirected in these ways. I'm less sure.
I will say, by the way, athletics, your jokes about working out in these things, that does seem to be a possible outlet for these things. I mean, it seems to me that as I watch the NFL that these guys look like, you know, gladiators or sort or the popularity with the UFC, these things. No, no, UFC MMA, all that. So that's a real risk, right?
In a way that few like, not like dishwashing, right? So I watch dishes too, by the way, in college. I think you mean, I hadn't thought about I hadn't thought about this, but the title is in a way, it sounds like it's a solution, but it's a restatement of the problem, right? War is a moral.
So how can you have a moral equivalent, right? I think that's, and so I think I think you're right. I mean, I find myself very much critical of this essay as well. But as a matter of just sort of practical politics, it does seem like it's a decent way for a large nation state like our own to instill a kind of civic virtue.
Right. Yeah. Yeah. And we can't for some reason.
It's so funny. We talk about the draft. We have these horrible wars like Vietnam. And we wonder if if we had a standing army or something almost hell, man.
You guys, what is real, what Israel has if we would have continued to blunder into these kinds of things. So he says at one point, I like this language. Meanwhile, men at large still live as they always have lived under pain and fear economy. For those of us who live in an East economy or but an island in the stormy ocean and the whole atmosphere present day, you took in literature, taste mokish and dishwatery to people who still keep a sense for life, some more bitter flavors.
It suggests in truth, ubiquitous and feary ority. And so I think he's trying as we get more and more insulated from sort of natural disaster or from, you know, out and out war fear of being destroyed by for a nation. He talks about how we're all kind of aware that it's better to have an economic solution. It's kind of ridiculous because this is on the eve of two world wars.
But but I think he does have a point, especially nowadays, it seems like that out and out full scale war seems less and less plausible. But it's important to know that we are still just a very comfortable island in the stormy ocean, that there are these these realities that we need to at least prepare people to encounter, if not least remind them of in a small way. I don't think what's funny is funny. He talks about dishwatery when later he proposes we wash dishes.
So that sounds just as dishwatery to me of a solution. What did you guys think of some of his historical examples throughout throughout this essay? Yeah. I mean, like he brings up everyone from when he brings up, I think he starts with Thucydides, uh, in Meelos, right?
Well, what he goes on to Brutus and Alexander. He's like Alexander. We romanticize. It was horrible.
And then he just goes, well, he says that Homer, I mean, Alex should speak to the Homer bit. He speaks about Homer and then Thucydides and he says the Greeks, they loved war and they just exalted it and they loved it. The Greek mind fed upon the stories of the, the Trojan war and the Peloponnesian war between the Athenians and Spartans. And I think in both cases, he's wrong.
I'll let Alex speak about Homer. Maybe I realize this is probably not a conventional understanding, but I'm not sure that Homer is actually glorifying war. I think he's deeply critical of war. And I'll speak specifically about Thucydides, the example he uses is the Million dialogue where some Athenians, James uses the Million dialogue to show that the Greeks just loved war, right?
This was great. So I'll just briefly tell you what happened. And then I'll tell you why I think his reading of this is wrong. Learn us.
Learn you. I'm going to learn you good. So Athens at the height of its empire goes and to a very small island, actually a very small city called Milos and says, look, you need a picture like you need to give up and or will obliterate you. And the Million's don't, they say we're in a fight.
We believe that the Spartans and or the gods will come to our aid. The Athenians say, you're silly, that's stupid. You should surrender. If you don't surrender, we'll murder all the men and slave all the women and children.
Million say, no, no, gods will help us. The gods don't. Alas, the Spartans don't either. Anyone who knows, Sparta would have known that.
And the Athenians, in fact, kill all the adult males and slave all the women, children. And I guess, you know, James infers from that, that Thucydides and the Greeks, therefore thought that this was perfectly fine and a good idea. It's not clear to me that that's case. He even says Thucydides quietly reports the end.
So he seems to recognize tacitly that Thucydides is actually quite critical of this. And I will just say, even the Athenians, so the Athenians, imagine this. Imagine if I came to you, David, let's actually more accurately, Alex comes up to me in the schoolyard and says, McBrayer, give me your lunch money because he seemed like a bully and I was most definitely get a guy picked on, grown up. And if I said no, and then if Prius says to little McBrayer, listen, kid, I don't want to have to beat you up, give it to me.
It'll be better for you. And if I did that, and I think what I'm trying to say is in that case, if you could imagine a bully sort of trying to reason with the little pimp, pimp, not pimp, wimp, wimp and say, give me the money. So I don't have to beat you up. It actually in a strange way, shows a concern for the kid.
Like he doesn't want to beat up a little kid. And I think similarly here, the Athenians are trying to say, I realize it's weird, but I think the Athenians are actually, excuse me, the Athenians are actually quite moral and they don't want to have to hurt the millions. They want to see. It's exactly the argument Alex gave to his headmaster, Philip Sandoper.
I was trying to do my favor. Yeah. First of all, your example is as specious as any of James's. I don't know what reality you're in where we're children at the same time.
You're 40 on my birth. Let me talk about the alien example, because it's pretty bad. He only uses soldiers from one side, right? Yeah.
Well, he goes history is a bath of blood. Which is like, I don't like that. He says the alien is one longer sightled. How do you imagine?
He's an age X, started on an actor killed. No detail of the way the aid has spared us, which is true. There's this my favorite. I used to, I just taught the alien in every class.
I'd be like, Hey, what was your favorite death? And my favorite death in the whole book was this guy gets hit in the face right on the bridge of the nose with a spear and his eyes pop out and hit the ground before his knees do. I thought that was a particularly gruesome one. But anyways, he's not going to.
He says, it's just he says those words were purely piratical, right? That was the whole thing, which is the wrong deep misunderstanding because, well, first of all, Achilles wants to defend. Well, he's there. He wants to be the savior of the Greeks.
He wants to be absolutely necessary. It's not for radical at all. They're very much concerned with the noble or glory or something. And even more so, I think the concerned was just law.
I mean, Paris has violated the law of guess friendship and it seems like there's a concern. I thought Helen was hiding in the cloud. What? That's just an account I read.
Now, he at one point talks, he goes, those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends of war are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession. So he seems to understand that these wars and surviving these wars and attaining victory is somehow sacred and has some connection to the sacred. And yet he doesn't, I think, a two to that. And I think that's, this is why I enjoy thinking alongside this piece, even though I think there's obvious flaws in it, is that it does push you toward to sort of respond on a higher level, right?
And I think that's one problem is that if war is about the sacred because it involves death, I don't think you can get a moral equivalent. You need that risk, that supreme risk, that supreme sort of risk involves the utter collapse or destruction of your people, right? Can I just, I'm going to try and defend it. I probably agree with you in the last analysis.
So you've chosen the weakest of these examples of dishwashing. But I do think, for example, whaling, which he mentions mining, which he mentions, laying the rail. First Greg McBrier thinks it's moral to go whaling, to kill whales. Well, what I was going to say was I think that whaling captures that element of the sacred and captures that element of risk of death, right?
And I think if you, Moby Dick is an ex, one of my favorite novels is an excellent account of this. And by the way, I'll just say modern day Japan, their methods of whaling is not a good account. No, I don't think so. But I read, I wish I could think of this quickly, but I read recently a really good, I was in like the Atlantic or something like this, but people who do this offshore drilling, the author of this little article, I read, said if Moby Dick were set in contemporary times, it'd be set in there.
So there is, there's maybe not the sacred, although with the whale, there is this kind of the majesty of the creature, but there is at least the risk of death with a lot of those major jobs in industry that they used to be like in the 19th century, for example. So which are examples that would have been fresher in James's mind, I think, right? I mean, think about, I mean, I lived in Kentucky for five years, right? I mean, you'd always hear about somebody having died in a coal mine or something.
He has this one line that I think really underscores and I says, one cannot meet them effectively. These unwillingness to sort of give up on this one cannot meet these unwillingness is effectively by mere counter-insistency on wars, expensiveness and horror. The horror makes the thrill, right? Horror is the point of war.
And when the question is of getting the extremists and supremeists out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious, right? I think he's 100% right that there's this higher thing. But when he really, and he's trying to give due credit to war lovers, right? That there's something maybe not of moral value.
And I think he seems to be saying something like that. Yeah, it's, it's got something, you know, really great, you know, at stake in it. He wants, he wants to give them credit. But I think the more credit you give it, the more you try to get at what it is that really makes it so compelling, the less it seems like there's any kind of equivalent, let alone a moral equivalent.
Yeah. So that's a good point. I had the same feeling that he was chopping himself off at the knees throughout the paper, but he's, he's sent it. He's making it impossible to find the equivalent.
Did you think that he's aware that he's doing this? Yeah, I think he understands he needs to make a couple of moves. There's a couple of lines here where he construes this kind of militarism. He says, all the qualities of a man acquired dignity when he knows that the service of the collectivity that owns him needs him.
I see that that's kind of like Achilles, right? He wants to be proved that he's essential to victory, right? And that therefore he's deserving of honor and that Agamemnon should not have slighted him, right? He is absolutely necessary, but it's too abstract, right?
I mean, a CEO is might be necessary to the collectivity that, that is hired him but it doesn't mean that they're somehow equal in virtue or in satisfaction to the kind of militaristic virtue, no? Yeah, though he doesn't have that curious line where he says, where is this? This is the penultimate paragraph. The martial type of character can be bred without war.
Stranny was honored, disinterested in this abound. Everward, did you just read this? I'm like losing my mind. Oh, that's what I had my notes.
But then this is, this is the line. This is priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it. We should all feel some degree of its imperative. If we are, we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state, priests, I mean, it's a really incredible assertion he's making that doesn't can I wholly am persuasive?
Yeah. So I have a question there. So you just read that. So the martial type of character can be bred without war.
So we're talking about developing a martial character strenuous honor and disinterestedness, disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priest and medical men are in a fashion educated to it. So are they educated to this martial capacity or are they educated to strenuous honor and disinterestedness? And or is he saying that that that's what the martial character is?
It's this honor, loving and being disinterested. I think he is. So in other words, I think he might this is very helpful. You read this day was like he might be collapsing the martial type of character with the type of character that likes strenuous honor and disinterestedness.
Yeah. Not not recognizing or maybe I don't want to sound too. Maybe James is pretty this time we haven't, but the potentially priest and a warrior are not the same type. I would say, even though they may share some.
That's a very, very controversial claim. Well, I'm sorry. Maybe not controversial, but if that's what James is saying, then there is something. So on the heels of that a little earlier, I think he supplies his argument, which I found very kind of unpersuasive because it was just there's something to it.
He says the war party is assuredly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although originally gained by the race through war are absolute and permanent human goods. Patriotic pride and ambition in their military form are after all that after all, it's doing a lot of work here, only specifications of a more general competitive passion. I understand that competitors like to dress themselves up in militaristic garb. I mean, you always see football players talking about battle, right?
You guys want to say they are its first form, but that is no reason for supposing them to be its last form as though it can mature. That's in a way what Aristotle talks about the first form of courage, right? Or the most obvious form of courage is kind of courage and battle. Um, but it doesn't seem like you can ever get rid of that or completely simply make that right.
I mean, it seems almost Hegelian and what he's envisioning for the future. Maybe this is why nobody reads him in philosophy department. Can I say what there's one word that I kept anticipating and we didn't encounter at least I didn't encounter in a way that I was looking for history? Because that's, that's what I thought.
I mean, I thought that's, I thought this, uh, this is progressive. This is history as a purpose. There's this, there is this part of the human psychology, but that it can be retooled over history and developed into more, um, uh, civically, solitary ways or something like this. Magmag, Google, Greg, Mac, Google, wrong, you are how wrong you are.
The very last sentence read the very last special. Thanks to Don Weiss and the Santa Cruz service board for the text of the speech. Read above that. Oh, oh, oh, history.
There you go. Yeah. History has seen the letter interval bridged over the former one can be bridged over much more easily. No, I think it's great.
It's, it's, uh, I mean, this is exactly right. It is this kind of sense that, oh, the sciences are progressed. We have advanced and we have to leave certain things behind, right? You know, we're not hunting with bows and arrows.
So, you know, should we even be fighting? Um, yeah, and you see this a lot where, where, you know, people, evolution or biologists offer similar arguments. Well, we have these old passions that worked when we were cave men and stuff, but now they're useless and we have to sort of discipline ourselves out of them and they're kind of. So for sure.
Outlets. Yeah. You for sure see echoes of this everywhere. Great.
You had a really interesting insight about the connection between this and Nietzsche, right? Well, if you, I mean, it seems, yeah, it seems to me that James here, it's, so it seems like Nietzsche looked at the modern world as you, you guys are last man. You're like, Cal and actually I forgot the line. Maybe bark and find it from just like he found history doesn't even mention this cattle like existence, James.
And so like there seems to be this recognition that Nietzsche is by and large right about this. And so that that modern men have become kind of like cattle in some way. But what he says is a poor woman, five on such a cattle yard of a planet. This whole paragraph is really some of the best stuff in it.
Why don't you want to read it? If you want to, let me just say the point and move on. I think he seems to be a last man who's like, yes, we should want to become last men, but we should, we should figure out a way to recapture some of what Nietzsche is talking about, but put it in the service of last manness, if that makes sense. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay. All right. That's kind of the impression like that.
So he writes reflective apologists for war at the present day all take it religiously. It is a sort of sacrament. It's prophets are to be vanquished as well as to the victor. And quite apart from any question of profit, it is an absolute good, we are told, for it is human nature at its highest dynamic.
It's quote unquote horrors are a cheap price to pay for rescue from the only alternative suppose of a world of clerks and teachers. Or we would say professionals and middle managers of coeducation and zoophily of consumers, leagues and associated charities of industrialism, unlimited and feminism unabashed. No scorn, no hardness, no valor anymore. By upon such a cattle yard of a planet.
Yeah, he seems based secretly based. So that's what I saw. So that's what I saw. I saw this sort of loathing of the last man, but trying to figure out a way to transcend it, but still remain very much within the same horizon as the last man.
Like, yes, but we shouldn't simply be feminists or co educated people or clerks and teachers. We should be really like tough clerks and teachers and feminists. Right. Isn't that kind of what he's saying?
Hey, I'm not just a clerk. I wash dishes. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
That's what it's that's what makes it. And so this is what I like about the platonic background is right. He's trying to reconcile these two things and make them fit together. And then you look at it and just falls apart, right?
You realize it's defective. Like so many attempts to reconcile these two tendencies. So can I say that? Can I say that?
So I take Hobbes to be a pacifist, like Williams is, but I think Hobbes is a much more realistic pacifist. In other words, he doesn't try to, he doesn't try to take this part of the soul, this pneumatic martial world, I'm part of the soul and put it into the service of other things. He tries to subordinate it to the competitive part of the soul or something like this. We'll put it in the service of the competitive part of the soul, which seems like a psychological understanding that would have more traction.
I could see that working in the case of more people. If does that make sense? Is I'm trying to work through it here? Like his psychological analysis doesn't seem like it fits or works.
You're actually right. He's trying to reconcile what's the psychological motivation for me to be a sort of serve my country for something like this. It's not clear to me. Yeah, it certainly isn't a kind of safe, like getting your hands dirty.
I mean, it's just out of a desire to maintain some, you know, thinsemble of our ancient valor. What's weird is I think for James's plan to succeed on a practical way, it presupposes that the populace is already in some way noble and inclined to take even menial to recast even menial tasks in a like patriotic or like themonic kind of light. But if you have a degraded populace, like right now, the three of us can't even think of this getting off the ground in our present America without like nervous laughter. It's just impossible because we're all messed up.
That's my story. I think that's right. I mean, you know, how much traction would Buttigieg get with his national service platform? Oh, it's dismissed as his draft, right?
People thought he was talking about the draft and he was just laughed out for that. Yeah. But would we agree? So would we agree with?
Do we even agree with a problem as James has presented them? I mean, I'm fairly persuaded that it is a problem. If I weren't persuaded the problem and the solution would be a pretty worthless essay, right? I do think he's right that modern society encourages a kind of professional class and a loss of militaristic virtues, right?
And valor. So if he's a pacifist, why wouldn't he like cheerleader that from the like, this is great. I mean, why isn't it better that we have? He thinks you can't get rid of the militaristic types of things to give him a place.
I mean, he has a line in here where he's trying to distinguish between different kinds of social estates and he's pretty harsh. So this is a little bit later and he says, why should men not someday feel that it is worth a blood tax to belong to a collectively superior, a collectivity superior in any sort? Why should they not blush with a dignity and shame of the community that owns them is violent in any way whatsoever? He's saying, look, I'm on board with you, but there is a kind of defect in what you're proposing, right?
I'm fine with the social regime, but there's still something ugly about certain kinds. We can aim for a certain mix that's not holy. And I think he thinks this is the only way to give them a place. He talks a lot early on.
We didn't really talk about this, but the failure of the present arguments to move those who are inclined towards war, those who love war, if they don't have an outlet, they're just going to say, no, we're not going along with this, right? We want to preserve our way of life and we'll go into war, rational or not, even if it is against our interests. And so I think he's saying that if you really do want to achieve it, this might be the only path. Do you guys do you guys buy the, I came across the statistic today that now like South Korea's in South Korea, their death rate is outpacing their birth rate or something like this.
They're having major problems with like the demographics that are coming down the bike. They're just not having kids fast enough. I think the USS is from other countries that this from. And it made me think about like sex drives and all this other stuff.
And I was lost in a wonderful memory. But I wonder if we, if James thinks that we can't take this martial inclination out of let's assume he's just talking about America for the present, do we really think that's the case or could we see a, or could we imagine a time where we become so hollow chested that our inclination toward anything marshals has been totally sapped from us. I suspect that some martial types can be drawn into other kinds of careers that can satisfy to a great degree, that same longing, this bearded, glory loving part of the soul. So being a captain of industry or something like this, building great things, being you know, Elon musked into a small degree, right?
I'm going to be the guy that gets these are some bars, these kinds of things. So I think there is an outlet in the, in the sort of private civilian sector for this kind of thing. But I mean, the example of T. Gave us a Frederick the Great and Caesar and I think Napoleon, would there be, could there be a non-martial outlet for those types?
I'm, I'm less sure I, in fact, I guess I'll just say no. I mean Abraham Lincoln, my favorite speech by Lincoln, the perpetuation of our political institutions, the Lyceum Address, he says, you know, could, could some of you know, can America satisfy the people who are members of the tribe of the lion or the family of the eagle? I may have gotten the backwards, but right? There are certain human types that cannot be satisfied by being the CEO or by having made a railroad that crosses the continent or going to Marv so these kinds of things.
So that's simply, and if we think that there are these types that will pop up from time to time, it's a political question of what to do with them. I think that is a legitimate problem. Yeah. And I think that can, I think the real difference there is not being necessary just as some sort of, you know, like a CEO, some kind of financial sort of thing or some exploratory, you know, going to Marv's thing, but being necessary to the very survival of your people, your tradition, your history, you know, towards the fatherland, right?
That commitment and preserving it over time, the way that Lincoln did, right? Really, you know, he's not fighting on the battle, right? Being on the edge and fighting a war, right? Leading a war so that we can somehow come out and have this new birth of freedom, right?
That being essential to history like that is amazing. He actually tries to play this down at one point early on, right? This might be another moment that's related to the history question. He says that, look, nobody's that essential to history.
We is just silly to think that way, right? No individual is actually going to change that. So move on, right? And it's kind of not, I think, taking seriously how deeply this passion to be essential to the community actually goes and why it has to actualize in war.
And I think one, sorry, just to build off this, but I think one of the reasons we have such ugly domestic politics is, well, there's not really much room for valor in our military anymore, right? There's we don't fight as many wars, we don't send as many troops, we use a lot of drones. And so how do you fight for the goodness of your fatherland? Well, you fight the bad people within, right?
As opposed to the bad people without. And you see a lot of, I think, uprooted and disenfranchised, you know, spirited action as a result of domestic politics. I was just going to add that, you know, I have friends who have served abroad in civilian sort of national service capacities as civilian and also military. My friends who did it in the civilian capacity simply, I just can't imagine civilian national service satisfying this martial loving part of the soul and people.
I could see it bringing a great deal of honor to most, I would have, for me, for example, an ordinary person who's not particularly martial loving. I could imagine having a great deal of pride in having served my country in a civilian capacity, but I'm not, that's not, I'm not this sort of honor loving type, this martial type. Those people, I can't imagine like working in the post office for a year and a half out of college would be like, oh, yeah, I really stood up for my country or something greater than myself. And I do wonder on a to take this in a slightly different direction.
He keeps coming back to this idea as the service, the nation service of the state, to what in connecting this to Alex's earlier comments about how actually the Greeks connected divine law to why they were fighting. Is there a kind of sublimation of the state or the nation in the speech by James, right? That why should I have service to the community? What's the greater good there?
Is the community somehow divine or taking or replacing divine or playing the role that the divine played in ancient times, right? And even then can people have formed this attachment to the state, maybe if it's a nation state where there's people have a similar culture or religion race, but in a multicultural society, it seems less obvious to me how that's possible. It's very abstract. Yeah, I'd become very attached to abstract.
Yeah, that's very point. We're going to talk about a lot of these themes when we talk about Shakespeare's coriolanus. Right. I do think there's a lot of no, no, a lot of what to do with men of this type that simply can't be contained.
What happens to their soul? So I didn't ask, I think we've I think plunked us enough. But I didn't ask for any questions from the listeners, mostly because I was embarrassed to admit afraid of the tidal wave of questions that would come in. How would we?
I was mostly embarrassed to admit we were recording on this. I think it won question from Christopher Hoffman at Dr. Safman. Yeah, Dr.
You know, no, oh, yes, you go and Dr. Safman. No, I did not. I'm trying to change.
Unlike you guys, I don't disrespect Hoffman because he's very strong. He's very smart. Dude, we all agree with that. He reads uniform.
I know. And he always sends me helpful things. Congolese. Yeah, like obscure atlases from the 18th century.
I said, you know what? I he saw on Twitter when I was still on Twitter. I was asking people for a recommendation of atlases the ancient world. And then he found one for me.
Amazing. He said, make sure I'm on his motorcycle with his chaps on. I was like, cowboy, but he asked. He asked a question.
Yeah. I don't believe you. Why? He wanted to know.
Well, he asked me. You were texting. He said, why are you texting? He said, no, dehoming on Twitter.
Come on. OK. Yes. Why were recording?
You just killed my joke with interrupting. Oh, we're doing it. Do not like you. And that happened to you.
You did that to me several weeks ago. Come on. Tell us what he's doing on this. Twitter.
Come on. What did the Hoffman DM you on the Twitter? No, no, no, let's play this. Come on.
I'm done. Tell me what he's doing. Come on. Come on.
Be sure to like us. Subscribe. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Special thanks to our friend Jack Jake for the convention.
Yeah. And so thanks to our mama James for having two sons, at least two sons. No, this was the nephew Henry James was the nephew. I think we're willing James.