Monk

Steven Pinker, the mind/brain and language guy, has a thoughtful piece that counters some of the gloom & doom attitudes that seem commonplace, perhaps including in this blog. Although we tend to see a world where violence and war continue to rule, as though there can be no true moral progress in the world, since the caveman days up through the present, Mr. Pinker argues that, in fact, we have seen a fantastic reduction in violence, and that is true even when you count the last century and its world wars as part of the modern toll of violent death.

He does offer a rather profound caveat:

Whatever its causes, the decline of violence has profound implications. It is not a license for complacency: We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

I know, as I was reading his little essay, I was looking for such a disclaimer, because time isn't up yet. Still, he argues that there has been true progress, and that it is worth the effort to work to achieve more. Our destiny is still to be made and there is reason for hope.

( Pinker )

The most horrible weapon in any arsenal is the madness of men. We see this time and time again, and sometimes the only way to stop them is by war. "War is an ugly thing," John Stuart Mill wrote, "but not the ugliest of things." Far uglier, he wrote, is the feeling that nothing in life is worth fighting for. World War II was fought for several reasons but above all -- and proudly -- because the only way to stop the killing was to stop the killers.

-- Richard Cohen for The Washington Post

Cohen is reacting to the new book by Nicholas Baker, "Human Smoke", in which Baker argues for the virtues of a pure and total pacifism, such that even World War II should not have been fought.

♠
Once we knew who and what to honor on Memorial Day: those who had given all their tomorrows, as was said of the men who stormed the beaches of Normandy, for our todays. But in a world saturated with selfhood, where every death is by definition a death in vain, the notion of sacrifice today provokes puzzlement more often than admiration. We support the troops, of course, but we also believe that war, being hell, can easily touch them with an evil no cause for engagement can wash away. And in any case we are more comfortable supporting them as victims than as warriors.

... We impoverish ourselves by shunting these heroes and their experiences to the back pages of our national consciousness. Their stories are not just boys' adventure tales writ large. They are a kind of moral instruction. They remind of something we've heard many times before but is worth repeating on a wartime Memorial Day when we're uncertain about what we celebrate. We're the land of the free for one reason only: We're also the home of the brave.

-- Peter Collier for The Wall Street Journal

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