I'm watching, not for the first time, Ken Burns' epic documentary of the Civil War. As much as I admire its artistry and craft, it's depressing to see such dramatic and irrefutable evidence of the human incapacity for moral progress. Our progress is of another kind, not of changing our behavior but of better disguising its essence from ourselves.
We learned no more from the human carnage of the Civil War, where it could take a wagon train 17 miles long to haul away the corpses after a battle, than we learned from Homer's bloody descriptions of battles in the Iliad. Our progress is not moral but to learn how to kill the enemy in less visceral and experiential ways, at Dresden and Hiroshima, with "shock and awe" and unmanned drones. We learned how to make the killing abstract, so we get the result without the stench.
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We can excuse this, or disguise the truth from ourselves with more layers, by pointing out extraordinary acts of kindness and empathy that occur in war environments; we can play with metaphors and talk about heroes and valor and sacrifice; we can give speeches and medals, play rousing music, even recite poetry; but these, too, are distractions from the hard truth of what we've become, butchers and pawns in a game not in our interests -- and in this we ignore and fail to honor the truly courageous, the truly heroic, among us, who declare themselves, one at a time, a majority of one, refusing participation in this con game of war, refusing to cooperate in adding to all this human carnage.
We can learn that our greatest power is in saying one syllable: No.
We learned no more from the human carnage of the Civil War, where it could take a wagon train 17 miles long to haul away the corpses after a battle, than we learned from Homer's bloody descriptions of battles in the Iliad. Our progress is not moral but to learn how to kill the enemy in less visceral and experiential ways, at Dresden and Hiroshima, with "shock and awe" and unmanned drones. We learned how to make the killing abstract, so we get the result without the stench.
We can excuse this, or disguise the truth from ourselves with more layers, by pointing out extraordinary acts of kindness and empathy that occur in war environments; we can play with metaphors and talk about heroes and valor and sacrifice; we can give speeches and medals, play rousing music, even recite poetry; but these, too, are distractions from the hard truth of what we've become, butchers and pawns in a game not in our interests -- and in this we ignore and fail to honor the truly courageous, the truly heroic, among us, who declare themselves, one at a time, a majority of one, refusing participation in this con game of war, refusing to cooperate in adding to all this human carnage.
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| By Heinrich Kley |
We can learn that our greatest power is in saying one syllable: No.
