On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century by Alasdair MacIntyre

How I Discovered That, by the Standards of Contemporary Academic Philosophy, Thomist Claims Must Be Problematic

Iwas already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian. But I had first encountered Thomism thirty-eight years earlier, as an undergraduate, not in the form of moral philosophy, but in that of a critique of English culture developed by members of the Dominican order. Yet, although impressed by that critique, I hesitated, for those Dominicans made me aware of the philosophical presuppositions of their critique, of a set of Thomistic judgments about the relationships between body, mind, and soul, about passions, will, and intellect, about virtues and reason-informed human actions. And those theses I found problematic. Why so?

From 1945 to 1949 I was an undergraduate student in classics at what was then Queen Mary College in the University of London, reading Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle with my teachers, while also, from 1947 onwards, occasionally attending lectures given by A. J. Ayer or Karl Popper, or by visiting speakers to Ayer’s seminar at University College, such as John Wisdom. Early on I had read Language, Truth and Logic, and Ayer’s student James Thomson introduced me to the Tractatus and to Tarski’s work on truth. Ayer and his students were exemplary in their clarity and rigor and in the philosophical excitement that their debates generated. And I became convinced that the test of any set of philosophical theses, including those defended by Thomists, was whether it could be vindicated. In and through such debates. Yet I also had to learn—and this took a little longer—that in the debates of academic philosophy in the twentieth century no set of theses is ever decisively vindicated.

To excel as a contemporary academic philosopher is a matter of the quality of one’s analytic and argumentative skills, especially in their negative use to expose failures in the distinction-making of others or gaps in their arguments, together with an ability to summon up telling counter-examples. Conceptual inventiveness is also valued. Excellence in the exercise of these qualities is compatible with holding different and incompatible sets of beliefs about which of the various philosophical positions in contention in one’s own specialized area is to be regarded as true and rationally justified, including those positions in contention over how truth and rational justification are to be understood. Disagreement on fundamental issues is in practice taken to be the permanent condition of philosophy. The range of continuing disagreements is impressive: realists versus antirealists in respect of mathematical, moral, perceptual, and historical judgments; dualists versus materialists in the philosophy of mind; utilitarians versus Kantians versus virtue theorists in ethics; Fregeans versus direct reference theorists in the philosophy of language; and a great many more. Add to these a range of disagreements in religion and politics that, themselves non-philosophical, are closely related to philosophical disagreements: theists versus atheists, conservatives versus liberals versus libertarians versus Marxists.

It is not that there is no progress in philosophical inquiry so conceived. Arguments are further elaborated, concepts refined, and creative new ideas advanced by the genius of a Quine or a Kripke or a Lewis. But this makes it the more striking that there is never a decisive resolution of any central disputed issue. So how should we think about this and respond to it? David Lewis wrote that “whether or not it would be nice to knock disagreeing philosophers down by sheer force of argument, it cannot be done” and that “once the menu of well-worked-out theories is before us, philosophy is a matter of opinion.” Each philosopher, that is, considers the costs of accepting this body of philosophical theses and arguments or rejecting that, tries to bring her or his judgments, philosophical and nonphilosophical, into equilibrium, and in so doing take sides in one of these irresolvable disputes. My own immediate response to my recognition of the conditions of academy philosophy was more modest. It was that, however strong the case for Thomism, there was bound to be a strong case against it.
How I Discovered from Sartre and Ayer That Thomist Claims Are Problematic

Thomism had also become problematic for me for another reason. The Communist Party at Queen Mary College had introduced me to the texts of the Marxist canon, and I had become and to this day remain convinced of the truth and political relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism and of his historical insights as presented in the narrative of the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. To how much else of Marxism I was thereby committed I was unclear, although I greatly admired both the work of George Thomson, author of Aeschylus and Athens and translator of Plato into Irish, and the writings of Lucien Goldmann. Since one thing on which Marxists and Thomists seemed to agree was that Marxism and Thomism were incompatible, I found myself confronting yet another set of question marks. Nonetheless it was on the basis of Marxist insights into the nature both of morality and of moral philosophy that I began to formulate another, more constructive kind of question.

Marx and Engels had argued that every morality is the morality of some particular social and economic order and that every moral philosophy articulates and makes explicit the judgments, arguments, and presuppositions of some particular morality, either in such a way as to defend both that morality and the social and economic order of which it is the expression, or in such a way as to undermine them. And my acknowledgment of the truth of this thesis was reinforced by my encounters with social anthropology, especially first with the work of Franz Steiner and later with that of Rodney Needham. I therefore asked: What is the distinctive morality of this social and economic order that I inhabit, and how does contemporary moral philosophy stand to that morality? And in pursuing an answer to this question I was guided not only by Marx and Engels but also by John Anderson, who had urged that, if we were to understand social institutions and relationships, we should ask not what function or purpose they serve but to what conflicts they give expression. This suggested that both the morality and the moral philosophy of the present age are best understood as milieus of conflict, sites of disagreement. But those disagreements find significantly different expression in the arenas of philosophical debate on the one hand and in those of everyday moral and political practice on the other.

In philosophical debate utilitarianism and Kantianism are presented, with some rare and sophisticated exceptions, as incompatible and rival standpoints. To adhere to some version of one is to be at odds with every version of the other. But in many areas of the everyday life of modernity what we find instead is an oscillation between those two standpoints and a moral rhetoric designed to disguise that oscillation. So there are moments in which principles are laid down without qualification and moments in which exceptions to those principles are justified in the name of either the maximization of prosperity or the maintenance of public security. And it is in negotiating their way between such moments, both in private and in public life, that the characteristic skills of those who are socially and politically successful are exhibited. What we have then is a morality whose oscillations and contradictions show it to be in a state of disorder, but a kind of disorder that enables it to function well as the ideology of our present social, political, and economic order.

Yet although I had come to recognize this as a result of reflecting on the Marxist critique of morality, I had also had to acknowledge that within the communist movement there was to be found much the same oscillation between quasi-Kantian attitudes and a consequentialism that parodied utilitarianism, and this not only in the brutal and corrupting ethics of Stalinism but also in the ethics of Stalinism’s Marxist critics. Marxism as a form of practice too often suffered from the same lack of moral resources as the social order that it aspired to replace, and this unsurprisingly, since it had been generated from within that social order. It was with the rise of the New Left in Britain, after the suppression of the Hungarian Rising of 1956, that the question of whether and how this defect in Marxist theory and practice could be remedied became urgent. But what were the resources needed to remedy it? I was able to answer this question only by considering further not only the issues posed by Kantianism and utilitarianism but also those raised by the disagreements between Thomists on the one hand and Ayer and Sartre on the other, concerning the nature and status of reasons for action. And to make progress with either of these sets of issues I had to look in a different direction, and my narrative has to move backwards in time.
Two Lines of Thought About the Meaning and Use of Good

Two opposed lines of thought about the meaning of the word good and its cognates had been developed in English-speaking philosophy since the 1930s. One of these finds its first formulation in Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic in 1936. To call something good or bad is to express one’s feelings for or against it. To evaluate is to approve or disapprove. By the late 1940s Ayer was recommending C. L. Stevenson’s better-developed version of this view, according to which uses of good have both an expressive and an imperative component. To say of something that it is good is both to commend it and to urge those whom one is addressing to do so as well. Stevenson recognized that the conventions governing many uses of good are such that it also commonly has a descriptive component. But insofar as this is so, the descriptive component on the one hand and the expressive and imperative elements on the other are distinguishable and disparate. The step beyond this was to be taken by R. M. Hare, who provided both a sketch of the logic of imperatives and an account of moral judgments that was in some respects Kantian, in others utilitarian.

I had found Ayer and Stevenson more persuasive than Hare, and from them I acquired both an insight and a problem. The insight was a corollary to their successful undermining of the intuitionism of Moore, Prichard, and Ross. Viewed in the light cast by Ayer and Stevenson, intuitionist moral philosophers turn out to be under the illusion that they are asserting moral truths when they are in fact doing no more than expressing their own individual feelings and attitudes. They suffer from a lack of self-knowledge. The problem was that this mistake by some English moral philosophers seemed to have its roots in the general moral culture of their time and place. For while, so far as I could judge, Ayer, Stevenson, and other expressivists had provided a compelling account of the characteristic uses to which moral judgments were now put in a particular culture, they had taken themselves to have provided an adequate account of the meaning of moral and evaluative sentences as such, whatever the culture. Yet the meaning of those sentences was such that they at least appeared to give expression to some impersonal standard of judgment to which appeal was being made. Meaning and use had, so it seemed, come apart, something on which the current philosophy of language shed no light. How might this have happened?

In asking this question, I had of course understood the significance of Ayer’s and Stevenson’s work very differently from the way in which they themselves understood it. The question that I therefore faced was: If moral judgments here and now are used, at least in large part, as Ayer and Stevenson say that they are, what else, in other social and cultural circumstances, might moral judgments and evaluative judgments be? Might there be or have been a condition from which they had degenerated to their present state? And what would that condition be? An answer to this question was suggested by quite another and deeply incompatible line of thought about the meaning and use of good.

This second line of thought began by taking seriously J. L. Austin’s injunction to begin with lexicography, to accumulate a wide range of different types of examples of the relevant expressions. Those who do so find themselves also following Aristotle—and this is no accident. Austin’s habits of thought were in several ways Aristotelian and certainly so in recognizing the multiplicity and the heterogeneity of our uses of good, better, bad, worse, and their cognates. We speak of bad kings and good jam, of a good day at the races and a bad holiday in Casablanca, of a good time to go on a spree and a bad way to do it, of someone’s being good at tennis or good for nothing. And these are only a few examples of the variety that we need to catalogue. Austin himself took there to be an irreducible and inescapable heterogeneity here. But Aristotle had identified a unity underlying that heterogeneity, and the clue to that unity was supplied by Peter Geach. In 1956 Geach had pointed out that good and bad are noun-dependent or noun-phrase-dependent adjectives and that well and badly are correspondingly verb-dependent adverbs. What it is for an X to be good depends upon what an X is, so the criteria of goodness in a king are very different from those of goodness in jam. And what it is to X well depends upon what X-ing is, so the criteria by which someone who plays tennis is judged to have played well or badly are not the same as those by which someone who shoes horses is judged to do so well or badly. And so we take a first step toward answering the question: What makes these various uses of good more than puns?

Here we need to bear in mind the distinction between attributive and predicative uses of good, as W. D. Ross originally formulated it, together with Geach’s thesis that good is essentially attributive, that to be good is always to be a good someone or something, and that predicative uses of good can be translated into attributive uses. We speak of “good parents” but also of “good burglars,” of “the best athlete in the games” but also of “the best forger still at work.” It matters therefore that we can always ask, “Is it good for someone to be a good parent?” and “Is it good for someone to be a good burglar?” and what we learned from Geach is that to ask these questions is to ask, “Is a good parent a good human being?” and “Is a good burglar a good human being?,” questions that can be answered only by first answering the question “What is it to be a good human being?”

It is at this point that this line of thought has sometimes been thought to encounter insuperable difficulties. That there are criteria independent of our choices, feelings, and attitudes governing our applications of “good parent,” “good burglar,” or for that matter “good boxer” or “good violinist,” is difficult to deny. For in each area, drawing on Aristotle’s thesis that to be a good X is to excel in the activities characteristic of an X, we can say what it is to exhibit such excellence as parent, as burglar, as boxer, as violinist. But, many have urged, any analogy between goodness as attributed to these and goodness as attributed to human beings breaks down. There is, they argue, no set of activities characteristic of a human being, as there are activities characteristic of parents, burglars, boxers, and violinists. Hence it was to be argued by Hampshire and by Berlin, following Austin, that there is no such thing as the good life for human beings, no such thing as the human good.

To this it can be replied that there are indeed many different ways of leading a good human life, but that there are at least four sets of goods that are characteristically needed by every human individual if she or he is to flourish. First, without adequate nutrition, clothing, shelter, physical exercise, education, and opportunity to work no one is likely to be able to develop his or her powers—physical, intellectual, moral, aesthetic—adequately. Second, everyone benefits from affectionate support by, well-designed instruction from, and critical interaction with family, friends, and colleagues. Third, without an institutional framework that provides stability and security over time a variety of forms of association, exchange, and long-term planning are impossible. And fourth, if an individual is to become and sustain her- or himself as an independent rational agent, she or he needs powers of practical rationality, of self-knowledge, of communication, and of inquiry and understanding. Lives that are significantly defective in any one of these respects are judged worse, that is, less choiceworthy, than lives that are not. These goods are goods without which excellence in activity is often impossible, and so the key to our various uses of good with regard to them is a shared conception of excellence in activity, of what it is to live virtuously.

Thus on any version of this line of thought—and there are different versions of it, for example, Philippa Foot’s naturalism and Iris Murdoch’s Platonism—there are standards independent of our feelings, attitudes, and choices by which we may judge whether this or that is choiceworthy, whether this or that is good to choose, to do, to be, to have, to feel. And every version is in conflict with the view that our evaluative uses of good, unless in a linguistically degenerated culture, are no more than expressions of or determined by our feelings, attitudes, and choices.

This radical disagreement concerning how our uses of good are to be construed is of course closely related to the disagreement that I identified earlier concerning the nature of reasons for actions, one in which Thomists were at odds with Ayer and Sartre. What it means to say that, in giving a reason for doing this rather than that, we are identifying some good that will be achieved by doing this rather than that depends on whether we understand good in expressivist or in other terms. Only if our uses of good are governed by standards independent of our feelings, attitudes, and choices can something like the Thomistic account of reasons for action be justified. So how are the issues between these two incompatible and antagonistic lines of thought to be resolved?
How at the Level of Theory the Debate Between the Protagonists of These Two Lines of Thought Is Interminable and Inconclusive

Someone disposed to find credible the account of the condition of academic philosophy that I advanced earlier would, without knowing any of the facts about the subsequent debates concerning the use of good, predict that neither side would be able to provide conclusive arguments for its own view and against the other, except by its own standards. And so it turned out. For this disagreement was integrated into the longer and continuing quarrel between self-styled moral realists and self-styled moral antirealists, a disagreement in which the contending parties have enriched the statements of their rival positions by drawing on discussions of realism and antirealism in other areas. And, just as in those other areas, the debates between moral realists and moral antirealists have had no decisive outcome. Consider one theme of those debates.

On the expressivist view, when I assert that “doing such and such is bad,” the meaning of the asserted sentence is such that it gives expression to the speaker’s sentiments of disapproval. But suppose that someone says tentatively, “If doing such and such is bad, then so and so.” Then, since no sentiments of disapproval are expressed, “Doing such and such is bad” as a constituent of this conditional must have a quite different meaning from that which it has when asserted. But if this is so, then inferences of the form “If doing such and such is bad, then so and so, but doing such and such is bad, therefore so and so” must be invalid, which is absurd. So the expressivist account of the meaning of such sentences must fail. It was Peter Geach who argued this thesis powerfully, thereafter referring to it as “the Frege point.”

To this Simon Blackburn replied by giving an admirably ingenious account of the relevant class of inferences, a reply that was followed by a series of replies to the reply and replies to the replies to the reply by, among others, G. F. Schueler, Bob Hale, Mark van Roojen, Nicholas Unwin, Alan Thomas, and Mark Schroeder. At each stage in this still ongoing debate Blackburn and his allies reformulated their view in response to the most recent objections, and their success in so doing has made it clear that here we have one more example of an interminable controversy. The philosophical interest resides in the detail of the arguments. But what emerges from that often-instructive detail is the large fact that, given the shared understanding of moral thought and practice presupposed by the two contending parties, and given their philosophical methods, neither party has the resources to defeat the other.

This is true more generally. Expressivists, whether followers of Alan Gibbard or Simon Blackburn or the earlier emotivist writers, have been able without notable difficulty to accommodate somehow or other every objection advanced against them. And a variety of anti-expressivists have been able equally easily to fend off the objections advanced against them. Each remains deeply convinced of the errors of the other. Both would regard it as intolerably frivolous to suggest that one should choose one’s side by flipping a coin. But how then is one to decide?
How It Is Only at the Level of Practice That We Can Become Aristotelians

We need to begin again and to do so by returning to the social context in which we learned the use of good and its cognates. What we first had to learn was how to make the distinctions between what we desire and the choiceworthy, and between what pleases those others whom we desire to please and the choiceworthy. We characteristically and generally learn—or fail to learn—to make these distinctions, as we emerge through and from the family into the life of a variety of practices: such practices as those of housework and farmwork, of learning Latin and geometry, of building houses and making furniture, of playing soccer and playing in string quartets. What we can learn only in and through such practices is what the standards of excellence are in each type of activity and how our desires and feelings must be disciplined and transformed and our choices guided by the standards of excellence in each type of activity if we are to achieve such excellence and through it the goods internal to each type of practice.

So long as our desires have not been disciplined and transformed in the relevant ways, our uses of good and of cognate expressions will tend to be what expressivist moral philosophers have taken them to be, and our choices will give expression to our feelings and attitudes. Insofar as our desires have been disciplined and transformed in the relevant ways, our uses of good and of cognate expressions will be what Geach and others have argued them to be. So everything turns upon what we have been able to learn from the kind of practices in which we have engaged and on the nature of the particular moral culture or cultures in which we have participated. Understood in this light the philosophical quarrel between the two lines of thought that I sketched rests on a misunderstanding. It is not that we have two rival philosophical representations of one and the same subject matter but that we have two different subject matters, two different types of moral culture, an older one whose objectivist idioms and judgments are grossly misrepresented by expressivism, and one whose moral vocabulary exhibits just that blending of non-expressivist meanings and expressivist uses that had forced itself on my attention a good deal earlier, a blending characteristic of the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity.

Consider now some further aspects of a practice-based understanding of goods, virtues, and rules. The identification of a variety of types of goods poses the question: What place should we give to each type of good in our lives? And it is no accident that this question is framed in terms of “we” and “our,” rather than “I” and “mine.” For this is a question that I can only hope to ask and answer with good reason if I ask and answer it in the company of trusted but critical others, others to whom I recognize that I am bound by certain unconditional commitments—commitments not to harm the innocent, to be truthful, to keep our promises, commitments that allow us to reason together without the distortions that arise from fears of force and fraud—and this for at least two reasons. First, it is only in and through such interaction with trusted but critical others that our practical reasoning is tested, so that our evaluations become less one-sided and partial and less liable to distortion by our not always conscious hopes and fears. Second, it is only insofar as we direct ourselves toward common goods, the common goods of family, neighborhood, school, clinic, workplace, and political community, that we are able to achieve our individual goods.

We learn what place in our individual and common lives to give to each of a variety of goods, that is, only through a discipline of learning, during which we discover what we have hitherto cared for too much and what too little and, as we correct our inclinations, discover also that our judgments are informed by an at first inchoate but gradually more and more determinate conception of a final good, of an end, one in the light of which every other good finds its due place, an end indeed final but not remote, one to which here and now our actions turn out to be increasingly directed as we learn to give no more and no less than their due to other goods.

This discovery of a directedness in ourselves toward a final end is initially a discovery of what is presupposed by our practice, as it issues in a transformation of ourselves through the development of habits of feeling, thought, choice, and action that are the virtues, habits without which—even if in partial and imperfect forms—we are unable to move toward being fully rational agents. Only secondarily, as we articulate at the level of theory the concepts and arguments presupposed by and informing our practice, are we able to recognize that we have had to become some sort of Aristotelian. I am not suggesting that in order to become an Aristotelian one first has to become virtuous—even a slender acquaintance with Aristotelians would be enough to dispose of that claim. I am saying that it is only through recognition at the level of practice of our need for the virtues, and through practical experience of how the exercise of the virtues stands to the achievement of goods, that a number of Aristotle’s philosophical arguments become compelling.

To have become such an Aristotelian is to have found good reasons for rejecting both utilitarianism and Kantianism. What renders any form of consequentialism unacceptable is the discovery of the place that relationships structured by unconditional commitments must have in any life directed toward the achievement of common goods, commitments, it turns out, to the exceptionless, if sometimes complex, precepts of the natural law. What makes Kantian ethics unacceptable is not only that our regard for those precepts depends upon their enabling us to achieve our common goods but also that the Kantian conception of practical rationality is inadequate in just those respects in which it differs from Aristotelian phronēsis or Thomistic prudentia. Note, however, that these grounds for asserting that there are conclusive reasons for rejecting both utilitarian and Kantian ethics are Aristotelian grounds. Take away the Aristotelian premises from which this assertion is derived and it will cease to convince. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it lacks force precisely for those against whom it is directed, utilitarians and Kantians.

It is therefore of some importance that in arriving at a certain kind of Aristotelian standpoint I was not taking up one more theoretical position within the ongoing debates of contemporary moral philosophy. It is because I have been thought to have done just this that I have been unjustly accused of being one of the protagonists of so-called virtue ethics, something that the genuine protagonists of virtue ethics are happy to join me in denying. But what then is it to adopt this kind of Aristotelian standpoint? There are at least three aspects to such a change of view.

First, it enables one from a standpoint outside academic moral philosophy, that of an older tradition of moral practice, to understand why such moral philosophy was condemned to become what it has become, a scene of theoretical disputes between fruitlessly contending rival parties. The widespread loss of a shared practical grasp of the teleological structure of human nature and activity at the threshold of the modern world not only led to the theoretical fragmentation that I described in After Virtue but was itself the result of a prior loss of a shared mode of practical life. And there is no way to make the relevant concepts and arguments once more compelling except within some restored and contemporary version of just such a mode of practical life. Detach those concepts and arguments from the contexts of social practice from which and within which they draw their intelligibility and they too become mere debatable theoretical constructions.

Second, it is to adopt a standpoint that enables individuals, by situating themselves within such a mode of social practice, to make intelligible features of the narratives of their own lives and of the lives of others that will otherwise remain opaque, confused, disguised, or trivialized. A basic Aristotelian thesis is that only insofar as we understand our individual and common lives as potentially directed toward the achievement of goods and of the good through the exercise of the virtues are we able to identify the various types of frustration, misunderstanding, and failure by which our lives are marked.

Third, just as Aristotelian moral and political theory provides us with resources for interpreting and redirecting our practical lives, so too our practical experience provides us with reasons for criticizing and sometimes rejecting some of Aristotle’s own concepts, theses, and arguments. We learn to identify that in Aristotle which derives from the limitations and prejudices of Athenian and Macedonian elites. So we develop Aristotle beyond Aristotle and in so doing may find—as I found—that our Aristotelianism has had to become that of Aquinas.
How from the Standpoint of Aristotelian Practice Contemporary Academic Moral Philosophy Appears Defective as a Mode of Inquiry

The conception of moral philosophy at which I had thus arrived put me at odds not only with the standpoint dominant in contemporary moral philosophy but also with the established analytic understanding of how philosophical inquiry should proceed. For on the view that I have found myself compelled to take, contemporary academic moral philosophy turns out to be seriously defective as a form of rational inquiry. How so?

First, the study of moral philosophy has become divorced from the study of morality or rather of moralities and by so doing has distanced itself from practice. We do not expect serious work in the philosophy of physics from students who have never studied physics or on the philosophy of law from students who have never studied law. But there is not even a hint of a suggestion that courses in social and cultural anthropology and in certain areas of sociology and psychology should be a prerequisite for graduate work in moral philosophy. (It was my great good fortune as a student at Manchester that I was required to take a course in anthropology with Max Gluckman and was driven by my resistance to Gluckman’s views to an engagement with the work of very different anthropologists, such as Franz Steiner, and of such sociologists as Tom and Elizabeth Burns.) Yet without such courses no adequate sense of the varieties of moral possibility can be acquired. One remains imprisoned by one’s upbringing. And the particular form that that imprisonment now takes is that of an inability to recognize, first, that the contemporary morality of advanced capitalist modernity is only one morality among many and second, that it is, as a morality of everyday life, in a state of disorder, a state of fragmentation, oscillation, and contradiction. So we should not be surprised when academic moral philosophers misconstrue their own subject matter.

It would not of course be sufficient to remedy this for students of moral philosophy to take courses in anthropology and sociology. A second necessary condition is a prior and continuing engagement with a variety of practices and a reflective grasp of what is involved in such engagement. Lacking such practical engagement and such reflection, there can be no adequate knowledge of the range and application of evaluative and prescriptive concepts. So we ought to require on the CVs of those who aspire to teaching or research appointments in moral philosophy accounts of their relevant experiences on farms and construction sites, in laboratories and studios, in soccer teams and string quartets, in political struggles and military engagements. And we do not.

A third respect in which academic moral philosophy fails as a discipline of inquiry is a result of the extraordinary pressure exerted to sustain the status quo. What is the penalty that threatens academics who do not conform to the established norms? It is that their writing will go unpublished and disregarded. And this threat is the more telling because of the intensive pressure to write, a pressure initially generated by two successive apprenticeships. The first is that of producing a PhD dissertation intended to be publishable in either article or book form by those at an age at which almost no one has as yet anything genuinely of interest to say, something easily confirmed by reading large numbers of recent dissertations in moral philosophy.

A second apprenticeship is devoted to the achievement of tenure or its equivalent. Once again the pressure to publish is intense, since the future career of a philosophy teacher will be determined almost exclusively by how much, on what, and where she or he publishes. The result is unsurprisingly a large quantity of publications, as well as an even larger quantity of unpublished writing. So far as moral philosophy is concerned, it is instructive to look at the proportion of articles submitted to articles published in one especially prestigious journal, Ethics. In 2006, the number of submissions was 321, and the number of articles accepted, all of them after revision, was 16. In 2007, the corresponding numbers were 334 and 16.

A high proportion of those rejected articles will later have been submitted to other journals, which either are devoted entirely to moral philosophy or contain articles on moral philosophy appearing alongside articles on epistemology, metaphysics, and other philosophical subdisciplines. The former class includes not only Ethica, Ethical Perspectives, Ethics and Behavior, Ethics Today, Journal of Ethical Studies, Journal of Ethics, Journal of Value Enquiry, and Journal of Moral Philosophy but also over thirty journals dedicated to business ethics, medical ethics, bioethics, and the like. The latter class includes journals published in Australia, Canada, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (I am considering only the English-speaking world.) An inescapable conclusion emerges. In moral philosophy, as in other areas of philosophy, much of what is written must go unpublished and much of what is published must go unread. What function then is served by this cruel academic treadmill?

Its function is to inculcate the currently established conception of the tasks of moral philosophy and of its past history. It is to ensure that habits of mind are transmitted, so that students by and large follow their teachers in their assumptions about which few books and articles must or may be read and which may be safely ignored. It is to make certain that the young recognize whose arguments are to be taken seriously and whose disdained, when and about what to make jokes, and at whom and with whom it is permissible to sneer or condescend. It is to shape minds so that they are open to some ideas and closed to others. Academic moral philosophy is a conformist discipline, and habituation in writing what is well designed to secure the approval of those with established academic power is one principal means of producing and reinforcing that conformism.
Epilogue

Two salient thoughts emerge from this narrative. The first concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of living on the margins, intellectually as well as politically, a necessary condition for being able to see things as they are. The two standpoints without which I would have been unable to understand either modern morality or twentieth-century moral philosophy are those of Thomism and of Marxism, and I therefore owe a large and unpayable debt of gratitude to those who sustained and enriched those marginal movements of thought in the inhospitable intellectual climate of capitalist modernity, including Thomists as various as Maritain, Garrigou-Lagrange, De Koninck, and McInerny, and Marxists as various as Lukacs, Goldmann, James, and Kidron. One way to make it highly improbable that you will enjoy outstanding academic success is to enter contemporary debates in moral philosophy as either a Thomist or a Marxist.

A second thought, perhaps in tension with the first, concerns the importance for the moral philosopher of nonetheless learning as much as she or he can from those at the academic center, those who have made definitive contributions to the ongoing debates of academic moral philosophy. For interestingly it is often they who supply the resources that one needs if one is to free oneself from the limitations of their standpoint. If one is to evaluate both the achievements and the defects of twentieth-century academic moral philosophy, it needs to be understood both from within and from a standpoint that is at once external and radically critical. It is such a standpoint that I have tried to define.

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武政 諒 Ryo Takemasa

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How Did You Die? by Edmund Vance Cooke

Did you tackle that trouble that came your way
With a resolute heart and cheerful?
Or hide your face from the light of day
With a craven soul and fearful?
Oh, a trouble's a ton, or a trouble's an ounce,
Or a trouble is what you make it,
And it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts,
But only how did you take it?
You are beaten to earth? Well, well, what's that?
Come up with a smiling face.
It's nothing against you to fall down flat,
But to lie there -- that's disgrace.
The harder you're thrown, why the higher you bounce;
Be proud of your blackened eye!
It isn't the fact that you're licked that counts,
It's how did you fight -- and why?
And though you be done to the death, what then?
If you battled the best you could,
If you played your part in the world of men,
Why, the Critic will call it good.
Death comes with a crawl, or comes with a pounce,
And whether he's slow or spry,
It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts,
But only how did you die?

Losing the War

https://www.leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm


Man is a bubble, and all the world is a storm.
--Jeremy Taylor, Holy Dying (1651)

My father owned a gorgeous porcelain tiger about half the size of a house cat. He kept it on a shelf in our family den, where for years when I was a kid it roared down at us -- unappeasably furious (or so I always thought) at being trapped up there on its high perch, with no company except some painted beer mugs and a set of purple glass swizzle sticks. Then one day it got broken; I don't remember how. Probably my brother and I were having a skirmish and a shot went wild. I thought my father would be furious, but he didn't say a word. Carefully, almost reverently, he wrapped up the tiger and the shards of its shattered leg and put them away in a box in the basement.

A long time later, years after my father died, my mother and my wife found the box when they were clearing out some old family junk. My wife knows how much I like big cats and all other varieties of predators and raptors, and she painstakingly glued the tiger back together and gave it to me as a present. It's roaring at me again as I write this: it stands on a shelf in my study, surrounded by what I hope is more congenial company -- grimacing windup monsters, maddened dinosaurs, a couple of snarling dragons with their wings outspread, and a sullen rubber shark opening wide to take a bite at passersby. The tiger seems to fit right in, but I sometimes suspect it feels shanghaied. My father hadn't got it because he was fond of tigers or because he had any interest in nature. He'd bought it in Korea, where he'd been a fighter pilot during the Korean war; his squadron had been called the Flying Tigers.

My wife hadn't known that; I barely remembered it myself. My father didn't like telling war stories. He'd accumulated fistfuls of medals over there, and he kept them stashed in an anonymous little plush case at the back of his closet, where they went unseen for decades. That was all part of the past, and he had no use for the past. He used to wave off any question I asked about the world before I was born, irritatedly dismissing it as if all of that were self-evidently too shabby and quaint to interest a modern kid like me. "It was a long time ago," he'd always tell me, which was as much as to say, "It's meaningless now."

And yet every night, whenever he'd sit down in his easy chair, he'd be confronted by the tiger glaring at him. What did he think about when he saw it? Did it remind him of the distance he'd traveled from that war, or of how incongruously bland and safe his life was now, now that he'd amassed a commercial-perfect suburban family in the depths of the American heartland? I don't know, because he wouldn't say. Whatever patina of private associations the tiger had for him is gone for good.

If my wife hadn't rescued the tiger it would have been cut loose to make its own way in the world -- to languish in rummage-sale boxes and end up with new owners who'd never suspect how far it had wandered through the world to reach them. But I have the feeling my father wouldn't have minded that; he never liked other people knowing his business.

That's the common fate of mementos. They're never quite specific enough. No matter what their occasion was, they sooner or later slip free and are lost in a generic blur: a Day at the Carnival, a Triumph at the State Finals, a Summer Vacation, My First Love. It's particularly true, I think, of the mementos of soldiers, because nobody other than a soldier remembers the details of any war once it's safely over. What really happened in Korea? I don't have the slightest idea; war just isn't an experience I'm up on. I was barely young enough to miss the Vietnam draft, and I'm old enough now that the only way I could figure in a future war is as a victim. The tiger can't preserve the memory of the bombing missions my father flew. Its odd rippling surface doesn't correspond to the landscape of North Korea, terrain my father knew by heart -- which had once saved his life: on one mission his plane malfunctioned, and he'd had to find his way back to his base with no instruments, no radio, and fuel fumes filling his cockpit. Nor does that frozen roar speak to the complex of murky policies that had sent my father into battle in the first place, thousands of miles from home. To me, the tiger is just a platitude -- if it means anything, it's a symbol for all the violence in life I've been spared.

People my age and younger who've grown up in the American heartland can't help but take for granted that war is unnatural. We think of the limitless peace around us as the baseline condition of life. War, any war, is for us a contemptible death trip, a relic of lizard-brain machismo, a toxic by-product of America's capitalist military system -- one more covert and dishonorable crime we commit in the third world. All my life I've heard people say "war is insanity" in tones of dramatic insight and final wisdom, and it took me a long time to realize that what they really meant was "war is an activity I don't want to understand, done by people I fear and despise."

But there've been places and times where people have thought of war as the given and peace the perversion. The Greeks of Homer's time, for instance, saw war as the one enduring constant underlying the petty affairs of humanity, as routine and all-consuming as the cycle of the seasons: grim and squalid in many ways, but still the essential time when the motives and powers of the gods are most manifest. To the Greeks, peace was nothing but a fluke, an irrelevance, an arbitrary delay brought on when bad weather forced the spring campaign to be canceled, or a back-room deal kept the troops at home until after harvest time. Any of Homer's heroes would see the peaceful life of the average American as some bizarre aberration, like a garden mysteriously cultivated for decades on the slopes of an avalanche-haunted mountain.

In our own culture the people who know what war is like find it almost impossible to communicate with the children of peace. In the last election Bob Dole was defeated in large part because of World War II -- what he thought it meant, and what he didn't see it meant to people of a later generation. To Dole, World War II was a teacher of positive values: courage, self-sacrifice, respect for authority, dedication to a common goal -- values he thought were signally absent in the soft and cynical selfishness of Clinton's generation. But it was just that cynicism that Dole couldn't crack. Everybody knew that if those values had ever really existed in America, they were only the result of some Norman Rockwell collective delusion. We're smarter now -- smart enough to see through war, anyway. We think it's a sick joke to suggest that war could ever teach anybody anything good.

Out of idle curiosity, I've been asking friends, people my age and younger, what they know about war -- war stories they've heard from their families, facts they've learned in school, stray images that might have stuck with them from old TV documentaries. I wasn't interested in fine points of strategy, but the key events, the biggest moments, the things people at the time had thought would live on as long as there was anybody around to remember the past. To give everybody a big enough target I asked about World War II.

I figured people had to know the basics -- World War II isn't exactly easy to miss. It was the largest war ever fought, the largest single event in history. Other than the black death of the Middle Ages, it's the worst thing we know of that has ever happened to the human race. Its aftereffects surround us in countless intertwining ways: all sorts of technological commonplaces, from computers to radar to nuclear power, date back to some secret World War II military project or another; the most efficient military systems became the model for the bureaucratic structures of postwar white-collar corporations; even the current landscape of America owes its existence to the war, since the fantastic profusion of suburban development that began in the late 1940s was essentially underwritten by the federal government as one vast World War II veterans' benefit. (Before the war there were 3 suburban shopping centers in the U.S.; ten years after it ended there were 3,000.)

Then too, World War II has been a dominant force in the American popular imagination. In the mid-1960s, when my own consumption of pop culture was at its peak, the war was the only thing my friends and I thought about. We devoured World War II comic books like Sgt. Fury and Sgt. Rock; we watched World War II TV shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Rat Patrol; our rooms overflowed with World War II hobby kits, with half-assembled, glue-encrusted panzers and Spitfires and Zeroes. I think I had the world's largest collection of torn and mangled World War II decal insignia. We all had toy boxes stuffed with World War II armaments -- with toy pistols and molded plastic rifles and alarmingly realistic rubber hand grenades. We refought World War II battles daily and went out on our campaigns so overloaded with gear we looked like ferocious porcupines. Decades after it was over the war was still expanding and dissipating in our minds, like the vapor trails of an immense explosion.

So what did the people I asked know about the war? Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big totemic names -- Pearl Harbor, D day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima -- whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. Kasserine, Leyte Gulf, Corregidor, Falaise, the Ardennes didn't provoke a glimmer of recognition; they might as well have been off-ramps on some exotic interstate. I started getting the creepy feeling that the war had actually happened a thousand years ago, and so it was forgivable if people were a little vague on the difference between the Normandy invasion and the Norman Conquest and couldn't say offhand whether the boats sailed from France to England or the other way around.

What had happened, for instance, at one of the war's biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn't there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map? (Midway, released in 1976 and starring Glenn Ford, Charlton Heston, and -- inevitably -- Henry Fonda.) A couple of people were even surprised to hear that Midway Airport was named after the battle, though they'd walked past the ugly commemorative sculpture in the concourse so many times. All in all, this was a dispiriting exercise. The astonishing events of that morning, the "fatal five minutes" on which the war and the fate of the world hung, had been reduced to a plaque nobody reads, at an airport with a vaguely puzzling name, midway between Chicago and nowhere at all.

Is it that the war was 50 years ago and nobody cares anymore what happened before this week? Maybe so, but I think what my little survey really demonstrates is how vast the gap is between the experience of war and the experience of peace. One of the persistent themes in the best writing about the war -- I'm thinking particularly of Paul Fussell's brilliant polemic Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War -- is that nobody back home has ever known much about what it was like on the battlefield. From the beginning, the actual circumstances of World War II were smothered in countless lies, evasions, and distortions, like a wrecked landscape smoothed by a blizzard. People all along have preferred the movie version: the tense border crossing where the flint-eyed SS guards check the forged papers; the despondent high-level briefing where the junior staff officer pipes up with the crazy plan that just might work; the cheerful POWs running rings around the Nazi commandant; the soldier dying gently in a sunlit jungle glade, surrounded by a platoon of teary-eyed buddies. The truth behind these cliches was never forgotten -- because nobody except the soldiers ever learned it in the first place.

I think my own childhood image was typical. For me, the war was essentially a metaphysical struggle: America versus the Nazis, all over the world and throughout time. I couldn't have told you anything about its real circumstances; those didn't interest me. The historical war was just a lot of silent newsreel footage of soldiers trudging, artillery pumping, buildings collapsing, and boats bumping ashore -- fodder for dull school movies and the duller TV documentaries I was reduced to watching on weekend afternoons when our neighborhood campaigns were rained out. My war was a dreamy, gliding epic, a golden tidal wave of eternally cresting triumph: it was filled with Nazi spy satellites and commando missions behind enemy lines to blow up the gestapo's new hydroelectric dam; Hitler had a supercomputer, and SS headquarters was a ziggurat looming in my nightmares like the wicked witch's castle in The Wizard of Oz. Real battles like the Coral Sea made it into my reveries only for their poetic value: I thought they were as alluring and turbulent as the oceans of the moon. I think I was an adult before I fully grasped that Guadalcanal wasn't a battle over a canal; I'd always fondly pictured furious soldiers fighting over immense locks and reservoirs somewhere where they had canals -- Holland maybe, or Panama.

Granted, children always get the child's version of war. But the child's version is the only one readily available. It's no problem of course, if you have sufficient archaeological patience, to root out a more complicated form of historical truth; bookstores offer everything from thumpingly vast general surveys to war-gaming tactical analyses of diversionary skirmishes to maniacally detailed collector's encyclopedias about tank treads. The best academic histories -- such as Gerhard L. Weinberg's extraordinary A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II -- document and analyze in depth aspects of the war that even the most fanatical buff may not have heard of before: the campaigns along the Indian border, for instance, or the diplomatic maneuvering about Turkish neutrality. But reading almost all of them, one has the sense that some essential truth is still not being disclosed. It's as though the experience of war fits the old definition of poetry: war is the thing that gets lost in translation.

When I was taking my survey a friend told me that he was sitting with his father, a veteran of the European campaign, watching a TV special on the 50th anniversary of D day. My friend suddenly had the impulse to ask a question that had never occurred to him in his entire adult life: "What was it really like to be in a battle?"

His father opened his mouth to answer -- and then his jaw worked, his face reddened, and, without saying a word, he got up and walked out of the room. That's the truth about the war: the sense that what happened over there simply can't be told in the language of peace.

But is it really impossible to get across that barrier, even in imagination? Mementos of war surround us, and people surely wouldn't keep them around if they retained nothing of their truth. Sometimes when I've stared too long at the porcelain tiger on my bookshelf, I do get the sense that I'm looking into something deeper and more mysterious than a gaudy statuette that was once hawked to a departing soldier looking for souvenirs. I can almost hear behind its silent roar another sound, a more resonant bellow -- as though war were a storm raging through an immeasurable abyss, and this little trinket preserved an echo of its thunder.

***



One somnolent Sunday in Chicago the hush of an old brownstone apartment building was disturbed by a woman running down the hallway knocking on doors. Everybody came out to see what she wanted: back in those days people actually responded when they heard something wrong. At first they couldn't make out why she was so excited. But once they understood, they all lingered in the hallway talking to one another. More and more people emerged from their apartments to find out what the fuss was about. Soon a tense and confused clamor was spreading in the woman's wake -- more noise than the building had heard in years, more noise maybe than there'd been in all the decorous decades since its construction. It was December 1941, and the woman was asking everybody if they were listening to the radio.

My mother told me that story when I asked her what she remembered about the war. This is the sort of story everybody who was around in those days could tell; it was a defining moment in their lives, the way the Kennedy assassination would be for a later generation -- where they were when they learned that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. They remember stopping by an isolated roadside diner to find it in an uproar, or coming into their corner grocery and seeing a worried knot of customers gathered around the cash register, or hearing a rumor racing through the crowd outside a nightclub, or falling into conversation with a stranger in a snowbound train station, who asked if they'd heard what had just happened in Hawaii. The news went fanning out everywhere, in millions of unforgettable flashes of dread: it was as though the entire country was being jerked awake by the same backfiring truck.

So great was the shock of that moment that even now Americans think of Pearl Harbor as the real beginning of World War II. Maybe it's a sign of how invincibly provincial we are, how instinctual is our certainty that the war, like every other big event in the world, was something that happened mainly to us. The truth was that by December 1941 the rest of the world had had enough of the war to last the millennium.

In any orthodox history you can find the standard autopsy of the causes. Germany was falling apart after the decades of social and economic chaos that followed its defeat in World War I. Japan's growing dependence on foreigners to keep its industrializing economy going was leading to widespread and deepening feelings of humiliated anger and outraged national pride. In both countries extremely racist and xenophobic parties had come to power and begun an explosive military expansion: throughout the 1930s the Germans and Japanese built up huge new armies and navies, amassed vast stockpiles of new armaments, and made lots and lots of demands and threats.

All of this is true enough, yet there's something faintly bogus and overly rationalized about it. The approaching war didn't seem like a political or economic event; it was more like a collective anxiety attack. Throughout the 30s people around the world came to share an unshakable dread about the future, a conviction that countless grave international crises were escalating out of control, a panicked sense that everything was coming unhinged and that they could do nothing to stop it. The feeling was caught perfectly by W.H. Auden, writing in 1935:


From the narrow window of my fourth-floor room
I smoke into the night, and watch the lights
Stretch in the harbor. In the houses
The little pianos are closed, and a clock strikes.
And all sway forward on the dangerous flood
Of history, that never sleeps or dies,
And, held one moment, burns the hand.

For instance, in China -- to take one arbitrary starting point -- a war had been going on since 1931. This was a nagging turmoil at the edge of the world's consciousness, a problem that couldn't be understood, resolved, or successfully ignored. When the Japanese army invaded the city of Nanking in December 1937 they killed tens of thousands of Chinese civilians -- some say hundreds of thousands -- in the space of a couple of weeks. It was one of the worst orgies of indiscriminate violence in modern times, and as the news of it spread around the world everybody began saying that Nanking would be remembered forever, just as the Spanish civil war's Guernica (the first town to be bombed from airplanes) would be: shorthand landmarks for our century's most horrible atrocities.

But that just shows how little anybody really understood what was happening to the world. Nobody outside of China remembered Nanking a couple years later when the German Reich began its stunning expansion through Europe. The Wehrmacht stampeded whole armies before it with its terrifyingly brutal new style of tank attack (the European press called it "blitzkrieg," and the name stuck), and rumors immediately began circulating of appalling crimes committed in the occupied territories -- wholesale deportations and systematic massacres, like a vast mechanized replay of the Mongol invasions. A story solemnly made the rounds of the world's newspapers that storks migrating from Holland to South Africa had been found with messages taped to their legs that read, "Help us! The Nazis are killing us all!"

It was in September 1939, in the wake of the German invasion of Poland, that the phrase "the Second World War" began turning up in newspapers and government speeches. The name was a kind of despairing admission that nobody knew how long the war would go on or how far the fighting would spread. Over the next two years the news arrived almost daily that battles had broken out in places that only weeks before had seemed like safe havens. By the time of Pearl Harbor the war had erupted in Norway and Mongolia, on Crete and in the Dutch East Indies; the Italian Army had marched on Egypt, and the German army was pushing into the outskirts of Moscow; there had been savage fighting in Finland north of the Arctic Circle and sea battles off the coast of Argentina. The United States was one of the last secluded places left on earth.

But the depths of that seclusion were still profound. This is one of the things about America in those days that's hardest for us to imagine now: how impossibly far away people thought the problems of the world were. It's not just that there was no TV, and thus no live satellite feed from the current crisis zone. America didn't even have a decent road system back then. Any long trip across the country was a fearsomely ambitious undertaking -- and foreign travel was as fanciful as an opium dream. People grew up with the assumption that anything not immediately within reach was inconceivably far away. It wasn't unusual for them to spend every moment of their lives within walking distance of the place where they were born -- and to die thinking they hadn't missed a thing.

They weren't wholly oblivious. But the news they got of the outside world came in through newspapers and radio -- which is to say, through words, not images. This imposed even more distance on events that were already as remote as the dust storms of Mars. Their sense of heedlessness wasn't helped by the style of journalism reporters practiced in those days, which was heavy on local color and very light on analysis. The war as it appeared in the American press was a gorgeous tapestry of romance and swashbuckling adventure -- frenzied Nazi rallies, weird religious rites in Japan, hairbreadth escapes on overcrowded trains teetering along mountain ravines, nights sleeping in haystacks in the backcountry of France after the fall of Paris, journeys in remotest Yugoslavia where the reporter "spent hours watching the army, with its wagons, horses, and guns, file past the minareted village in the moonlight." (I'm quoting, here and elsewhere, from the Library of America's excellent anthology Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1938-1946.) It convinced people that there was no more glamorous job in the world than foreign correspondent, but it also convinced them that the war was just a lot of foreigners going exotically crazy -- nothing for Americans to bother their heads about.

Still, by early 1941 most Americans had come to understand that they couldn't stay unscathed forever. Even in the most remote towns of the heartland, people had some hint of the world's collective terrors: by then the local schoolteacher or minister had come back from a European trip still shaken by the sight of a Nazi book burning, or a neighbor had received a letter -- battered, heavily postmarked, and exotically stamped -- from a long-forgotten cousin, pleading for help getting out of the old country. A Gallup poll taken in the summer of 1941 showed that a large majority of respondents agreed that America was bound to be drawn into the war eventually; a slightly smaller majority even agreed that it was more important to stop the Nazis than to stay neutral. (Japan wasn't mentioned; even then nobody thought of Japan as a likely enemy.)

Yet "eventually drawn in" really meant "not now." That was what routinely stunned travelers returning to America from the war zones, even late in 1941: how unworried everybody in America seemed. Crowds still swarmed heedlessly on undamaged streets; city skylines still blazed at night, like massed homing beacons for enemy bombers. But if you'd even mentioned the possibility of an air raid out loud, you'd have been laughed at. New Yorker reporter A.J. Liebling wrote a piece that summer about coming back to Manhattan after the fall of France and discovering just how impossible it was to get his friends to take the thought of war seriously: "They said soothingly that probably you had had a lot of painful experiences, and if you just took a few grains of nembutol so you would get one good night's sleep, and then go out to the horse races twice, you would be your old sweet self again. It was like the dream in which you yell at people and they don't hear you."

It all changed of course, with a knock on the door, that weekend day in December.

There's a phrase people sometimes use about a nation's collective reaction to events like Pearl Harbor -- war fever. We don't know what a true war fever feels like today, since nothing in our recent history compares with it; even a popular war like the gulf war was preceded by months of solemn debate and a narrow vote in Congress approving military action. World War II came to America like an epidemic from overseas. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, recruitment offices all over America swarmed with long lines of enlistees; flags and patriotic posters popped up on every street and store window; wild and hysterical cheers greeted the national anthem at every rally and concert and sporting event. Overnight the war was the only subject of conversation in the country; it was the only subject of the movies you could see at the local theater (Blondie and Dagwood were absorbed into the war effort in Blondie for Victory; Sherlock Holmes came out of retirement to chase Nazi spies in Sherlock Holmes in Washington). War was the only acceptable motif in advertising: for years after Pearl Harbor every manufacturer of spark plugs and orange juice routinely proclaimed that its product was essential to an Allied victory.

In an earlier time poet Rupert Brooke had written that people hurried into war out of the moral griminess of civilian life "like swimmers into cleanness leaping." In World War II the leap was perfect, complete, and profound. To the end there were none of the signs of disaffection we've come to expect from Americans over the course of a long war: no peace rallies, no antiescalation petition drives, no moves in Congress for compromise or a negotiated settlement. Men who appeared able-bodied found themselves harassed on the street by strangers demanding to know why they weren't in uniform; baseball players who hadn't yet enlisted, godlike figures like DiMaggio and Williams, were loudly booed by the hometown crowd when they came out on the field.

Why? You'd have a hard time figuring out the answer from reading the nation's press. From the beginning the issues of the war were discussed only in the dreariest of platitudes. "America is the symbol for freedom," Life magazine patiently explained to its readers -- as though there might have been some confusion about whether the other side was the symbol for freedom. But Life firmly refused to be drawn into a debate about what "freedom" might mean: "Freedom is more than a set of rules, or a set of principles. Freedom is a free man. It is a package. But it is God's package."

End of discussion. Hard to believe anybody was moved to go to war by such tripe, but it was typical. When they're consumed by war fever, people don't need considered rationales for the use of military force; they don't even bother with the appearance of logic. As it happened, a purely cynical and cold-blooded calculation of the world crisis could have suggested to Americans that they could easily have stayed out. There were no treaties compelling the nation into the war, no overwhelming strategic or economic pressures; it was self-sufficient in food and raw materials, and it was geographically impregnable. Neither the Japanese nor the Germans would ever have been able to mount an invasion -- and, in fact, neither ever seriously considered the possibility; Hitler at his most expansive still thought any transoceanic war was a century away. But none of that mattered. The war was about the furious, implacable determination to destroy America's attackers -- and behind that, a kind of half-articulated patriotic poetry: "A green meadow stretching down from a whitewashed barn to the brook that bubbles through an American valley; an elderly man climbing up a ladder in a ripe American orchard; a stout, gray-haired woman pulling out of the oven an American apple pie; a red setter asleep on the sunny porch dreaming of American birds..."

Life magazine again, reporting an inventory it took of the soul of the typical American soldier. I've cut it down quite a bit -- the original rhapsodizes on for several more pages -- but the drift should be clear. The war wasn't about ideas, or principles, or history, or culture. The U.S. was going to war to defend some kind of untranslatable primal experience available only to citizens of the heartland.

It's one of the constants of war: a conviction that the people on the other side don't have the same soul we do. Evidently those Nips didn't give a damn about the fruit orchards of Japan, and you'd never find the pet dogs of kraut soldiers dreaming about local prey. When the Germans and Japanese looked across the ocean at America, what they saw was no more flattering: to them America was a nation of weaklings and cowards, with no honor or fighting spirit. One of the reasons behind the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor -- apart from the obvious military necessity of taking out the American fleet so that the Japanese military could conquer the western Pacific unopposed -- was the unshakable conviction that Americans would collectively fold at the first sign of trouble; one big, nasty attack would be enough to get a negotiated settlement, on whatever terms the Japanese would care to name. In the same way Hitler and his inner circle were blithely sure that America would go to any lengths to stay out of the fight. Hitler's catastrophic decision to declare war on America three days after Pearl Harbor was made almost in passing, as a diplomatic courtesy to the Japanese. To the end he professed himself baffled that America was in the war at all; he would have thought that if Americans really wanted to fight, they'd join with him against their traditional enemies, the British. But evidently they were too much under the thumb of Roosevelt -- whom Hitler was positive was a Jew named Rosenfeldt, part of the same evil cabal that controlled Stalin.

As fanciful as that was, it shows the average wartime grasp of the real motives of the enemy. It was at least on a par with the American Left's conviction that Hitler was an irrelevant puppet in the hands of the world's leading industrialists. Throughout the war all sides regarded one another with blank incomprehension: the course of the war was distinguished by a striking absence of one of the favorite sentimental cliches of the battlefield (which was afterward said to have marked World War I) -- the touching scene in the trenches where soldiers on opposed sides surreptitiously acknowledge their common humanity. For the soldiers, for the citizens at large, and for all those churning out oceans of propaganda, the enemy was a featureless mass of inscrutable, dishonorable malignity.

This wasn't a good time in America to be thought a foreigner. The great rage against Japan was what prompted the 1942 roundup of more than a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans on the west coast into internment camps -- an unconstitutional and flagrantly racist act, since nobody proposed setting up similar camps for German-Americans (though thousands of German and Italian nationals were interned). But internment may have saved some people from being lynched, given the venom about the camps displayed throughout the war by newspapers and politicians. The view was routinely offered with outraged assurance that conditions in the camps were too soft, that the internees were being coddled, that they were getting rations denied to "real" Americans. (About a quarter of the internee families were quietly released from the camps and resettled in places where anti-Japanese bigotry wasn't thought to be as strong.) One celebrated newspaper cartoon carefully explained how round, friendly Chinese faces could be distinguished from narrow, insectoid Japanese faces -- the assumption being that real Americans had an ongoing, urgent need to know, for when they got the lynching party together. Children across the country began playing a new kind of sidewalk game, a version of hopscotch with overtones of an exorcism: they would draw foreign faces in chalk on a pavement square, leering Japanese devil masks, scarred and monocled Nazi beasts, pastel gargoyles of Tojo and Hitler -- and then take turns stamping them into smudged ruins.

Meanwhile, their older brothers were enlisting or being swept up in the draft. Millions of young men poured into the military -- and most everybody not signing up was hiring on at some new war-related industry. (The American economy grew by almost half during the war; unemployment was wiped out, and skilled workers were in such short supply that wages began a steep upward spiral.) But it was the soldiers who became the natural focus of the nation's sentimental refusal to wonder about what it was doing, as though they were a kind of collective vector for war fever. In the press and the popular imagination the whole American military was merged into one archetypical meta-soldier: the singular emblem of the mass noun "our boys." This soldier was decent, soft-spoken, down-to-earth, and polite; he was shrewd, but he was honest; he was clever, but he wasn't an intellectual. When asked what the war was all about he would scratch his head and slowly drawl that he guessed the Jerries and Japs had started this fight and they had to get what was coming to them. When asked what he himself most wanted to have happen he'd look sincere and say softly that he wanted to get the job done and go home.

In one of his pieces for the New Yorker A.J. Liebling caught the soldier's style in a single word. He describes how he found a typical American soldier passing time before a battle by reading Candide -- which (Liebling carefully noted) he said was by some "fellow" named Voltaire. There it is: the soldier has never heard of Voltaire but is smart enough to read a good book if he wants to. Liebling evidently never met a soldier who'd read Voltaire before the war -- much less read him in French. (Nor, for that matter, would Liebling ever admit, to the troops or to his readers, that he himself had studied French literature at the Sorbonne: that was the sort of confession that could get you into trouble, like the spy caught out because he could quote poetry but didn't know who'd won the World Series.) Our boys weren't bothering their heads with culture or history when they were out there in foreign parts; they were going to win the war and come back as untouched by the outer world as their dogs still were, waiting loyally behind, dreaming of American birds.

As the war darkened over the years, the figure of the soldier eventually darkened as well. In magazine illustrations later in the war -- where a soldier contemplated the memory of breakfast cereal or reflected on how rubber cement saved his platoon -- he looked a little wearier and his face was harder, his jaw not always clean-shaven, his eyes more nakedly homesick. But his soft-spoken manner was unruffled -- though in feature stories and ad copy from around 1943 on he'd sometimes coyly admit to having fudged his birth date on his enlistment forms. The reason did him nothing but credit, of course. He had to make sure he got overseas and into combat "before it was all over."

You'd think nobody would have had to worry about that: after the first flush of enthusiasm everybody knew the war wasn't going to be over for a long while. (The government even asked Hollywood producers not to make movies implying there was any antiwar sentiment in the Axis, because they didn't want people to get the idea that there would be any easy resolution to the war.) But at the same time, people in America remained consistently vague about what the real status of the war was -- how soon victory would come, what our boys were going through. The ordinary sources of information were closed, and not just because the news was sanitized by the government. Draftees in those days didn't get to serve out a specified time and then go home -- at which point they could tell everybody their war stories. They were in "for the duration" -- that is, until the war ended or they were killed. They were swallowed up by the service and were gone, for months and then years, with only a fitful stream of officially censored letters fluttering back from the remoteness of the world to say that everything was still OK. New recruits in the later years of the war were going in essentially as innocent of the realities of combat as enlistees had been before Pearl Harbor.

During basic training, it's true, some of them did begin to wonder what being in a war really meant. That was when they met real soldiers for the first time -- combat veterans who'd been rotated home to serve as instructors. There was something odd about them. One marine enlistee later said they all had "an intangible air of subdued, quiet detachment... as though lost in some sort of melancholy reverie." But the recruits didn't stop to wonder what might have prompted it. They were too caught up in the glory of being soldiers, in the urgency of their imminent departure overseas, in the certainty that they were part of an unimaginably vast tide of victory.

They soon invented a ritual to be performed as soon as they were fitted with their new uniforms. They'd rush out to photographers' studios and document the occasion for their proud families. The mantels and nightstands of America were strewn with these relics -- soldiers posed with quiet dignity against a studio backdrop, half turning to face the camera with an expression both grave and proud. Some guys couldn't help clowning and left photos that baffle people to this day: foreheads furrowed, jaws clenched, eyes fixed and furious -- tinted by the studio not ordinary pink but a belligerent orange rose, like a Halloween mask. When you see these photos now, they look like antique novelty items from carnivals, or illustrations for Ripley's Believe It or Not: "The Angriest Soldier in the World." We don't remember the pride behind them, the innocence, the mysterious and happy ferocity -- the warning to all enemies of just how tough the American soldier would be when he got into the war.

***

Nobody had to be told that the German soldier was tough. From the beginning the soldiers of the Wehrmacht had acquired a reputation for implacable savagery. Around the world they were known as the sadists, the storm troopers, the Nazi beasts, the stone-faced Aryan enforcers of the Thousand Year Reich. So Nazi propaganda tended to go the other way, to show what nice, normal guys they really were -- unyieldingly fierce when it came to the fuhrer's enemies of course, but otherwise kind, decent, tenderhearted, proud, dedicated, respectful, and honest: the showpiece of Aryan virtue, the young flower incarnating the eternal nobility and valor of Nordic culture.

One such product of Nazi propaganda was a movie that came out in Germany in 1942, a war melodrama called Stukas. It's about a wholly representative German soldier, the equivalent of one of "our boys": he's handsome, thoughtful, troubled by the morality of war, and given to quoting Hšlderlin. Tragically, he's shell-shocked in battle and given no chance of recovering -- unless, or so his doctors solemnly conclude, he undergoes "a profound emotional experience." He's in luck: he receives an invitation from the fuhrer himself to attend the world-famous Richard Wagner festival, held every summer in the provincial German town of Bayreuth. In the touching final scene he sits hopelessly in the front rows of the opera house, but gradually recovers his will to live and his faith in the German cause during a rousing performance of Siegfried.

Stukas wasn't a hit. But much of what went on in it was true to life. The Wagner festival was (and is) as described. During the war convalescing soldiers were given free tickets as a special treat. A mystique really had been built up around Bayreuth in an attempt to fix it as one of the sacred events of the new Aryan culture. And, hard as it may be to believe, the big climax wasn't just a creation of Nazi kitsch; some of the real soldiers who attended the festival did experience something profound and transformative at performances there.

But then, isn't that more or less what's supposed to happen when people see great art? Recordings and photographs have survived from the wartime festivals, and they show that the productions were indeed spectacular. Bayreuth had the cream of Germany's operatic talent, it had some of the best conductors and musicians in Europe, and it had the money to make all the sets and costumes lavish and dazzling. Who wouldn't have been impressed? Everyone who went to the festivals in those years agreed that they'd never witnessed anything like them in their lives. It's even possible for us now -- from studies of Germany during the war such as Richard Grunberger's The Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany and more specialized works such as Frederic Spotts's excellent Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival -- to work out just what a singular experience it must have been.

First off the festivalgoers were greeted with a scene from a sinister fairy tale. The peaked medieval rooftops of Bayreuth, glinting romantically in the depths of the summer countryside, swarmed with thousands of Nazi flags. Bunting in Nazi colors -- red, white, and black -- was heaped in furious abundance down every narrow cobblestone street. Everywhere you looked were pictures of Hitler -- on lampposts, on walls, behind gold-leafed storefront windows: Hitler in uniform regarding the viewer with stern exasperation, Hitler addressing wildly cheering crowds, Hitler inspecting mountain ranges, and, most striking of all, Hitler (distinctly ill at ease) in a suit of armor, preparing to joust with the evil hordes threatening the Reich. Big banners hung across all the streets proclaiming Wagner's City Welcomes the Fuhrer's Guests.

But the fuhrer wasn't there to greet his guests. At one time he would have been: Wagner's operas were among his deepest enthusiasms; only Mozart moved him more. He'd been a faithful attendee at Bayreuth since the 20s, and the Wagner family, who still ran the festival, had been among his earliest and most devoted backers. It had been one of his first acts after assuming absolute power to make sure the festival received a generous state subsidy. But, to his lasting regret, he'd had to stop coming after the war began. He had no choice; he was away full-time in the east, at his military command posts in Central Europe, where he was directing the invasion of the Soviet Union. His entourage too regretted his absence; his visits to Bayreuth, Albert Speer observed in his memoirs, were the only times anybody ever saw him relax.

The other prominent leaders of the new Reich were also no-shows. But they had a different reason: they loathed Wagner. They paid lip service to him as the patron saint of Aryan culture, but the truth was that they hated all culture, Aryan or otherwise. Their aesthetic was set out by the hero of a celebrated Nazi play: "Whenever I hear the word culture, I unlatch the safety on my automatic." They particularly detested Wagner's operas for being so long, so boring, so arty, and so downbeat; party theorists thought these qualities were unpatriotic. They looked upon the Wagner festival itself with deep suspicion -- if for no other reason than that it had always attracted so many foreign tourists and, worse, foreign performers, which made it a hotbed of "internationalist" (i.e., Jewish) influence. They would gladly have shut the festival down; in fact, they wanted to burn the opera house to the ground and ban performances of Wagner's works everywhere in Germany. And they would have done it too if the fuhrer hadn't been such a fan.

Hitler professed to being appalled at the philistinism of the party faithful; he'd always hoped they'd be as transported as he was by the fire and the majesty of the Wagnerian myth. But he excused them from Bayreuth, and instead made sure that the festival was attended by people who would know what was required of them. That was why admission during the war years was by invitation only. The "fuhrer's guests" -- soldiers, nurses, workers who'd won productivity drives at war factories -- arrived by chartered train and were issued coupons entitling them to meals, a beer ration, and one opera performance. They were marched to and from the opera house in formation. The SS were present in force in the aisles to ensure that audience members were displaying the proper degree of enthusiasm.

Can there have been a worse way to see an opera? It sounds like a school field trip where the teachers are armed. But audience accounts of the performances -- even some official reports filed by the SS -- show that there was at least one production where the fuhrer's guests responded exactly the way Hitler wanted them to. They were enthralled, they wept openly at the climax, they greeted the final curtain with salvo after salvo of deafening applause. It was the July 1943 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg -- which means the audience was profoundly, heart-shudderingly moved by a four-hour light opera about a medieval singing contest.

Maybe this is a cultural divide we can't hope to cross, but the truth is that even under less freakish circumstances Die Meistersinger can have an unpredictable effect on audiences. It's a mystifying work -- odd among Wagner's operas, odd among operas generally. It's billed as a comedy, and by comparison with Wagner's normal mode of cosmic tragedy, it can fairly be called lighthearted. But it doesn't have much in the way of laughs; the funny scenes are so enormous and diffuse they're like slapstick performed by cumulus clouds. It's also sometimes called Wagner's one realistic opera, and in fact it isn't set in that strange mythological twilight realm of Der Ring des Nibelungen or Tristan or Parsifal: nothing magical or supernatural happens, and the setting is as close to documentary as Wagner ever got (there really were guilds of mastersingers in late medieval Nuremberg, and the hero, the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs, is based on a real person). But the realism keeps fading away into dreaminess. None of Wagner's other operas seems so much of a fairy tale: the plot about the winner of the contest marrying the mayor's daughter is straight out of the Brothers Grimm. And the tone isn't Wagner's normal metaphysical gloom; it's miraculously sunny and serene, as though there's no darkness in the world deeper than benign melancholy. And yet when it's done right -- as it was at Bayreuth that year -- it leaves an audience in tears.

Die Meistersinger can really only be understood in relation to Wagner's overarching masterpiece, Der Ring des Nibelungen. In fact, Wagner composed Die Meistersinger as a pleasant little interlude in the midst of his 25 years of labor on the larger work. It's deliberately airy and inconsequential where the Ring is inexorable and dark. It's a deliberate turning away from the death of gods and the fate of worlds to more humble and earthly concerns: the happiness of young lovers, the sadness of approaching age, the evanescence of a summer's day and the loveliness of its twilight. Its brightness and gentleness stand out in Wagner's universe like a line of sunny rooftops against a blackening thunderstorm.

The Nazis who hated Wagner had a point: he really was morbid. He intended the Ring to be not just his masterwork, but a summation and final accounting for Western culture -- a vision of its foundational myth and a prophecy of its coming collapse. That was always the mystery about the Ring. He composed it at the height of a civilization greater than any since the fall of Rome: the colonial empires of Europe controlled most of the land surface of the earth, and their ships carried the traffic of every ocean. Yet all Wagner could see ahead of him was its ruin and decline. He found among the ancient legends of the Teutons and the Vikings the epic story of the cursed ring of the Nibelung and the fall of the noble house of the Volsungs, and he saw it as a vast parable of the rot eating away at the foundations of the contemporary world. The ring represents avarice and the lust for power; it will give dominion over the whole earth to anyone who renounces love -- but the gods can see no danger of that, since how could there be a being, mortal or immortal, who would ever renounce the glory of love for the paltriness of mere power? Wagner looked around him and knew there would be no shortage of takers.

In his earliest plan for the Ring, the old world of the gods would be destroyed and a new human utopia free of the ring's curse would arise to replace it -- but he eventually dropped that idea. The more he worked on the Ring the less good he could see ahead, following the wreck of his civilization. So when he came to compose Die Meistersinger he offered a utopia not of the future but of the past. He retreated to a time and place where the doom hanging over Europe wouldn't yet seem inescapable, where people could pass their whole lives in a dream of contented peace, where they really could care who won a singing contest. He created the textures of this paradise with lavish concreteness. No other opera is so casually exact about its location, its sights, its atmosphere; each scene is so deeply realized, you can even tell what the temperature is. The first act is touched by the slightly clammy coolness of a stone cathedral on a sultry morning; the second is filled with a humid, lilac-scented night breeze drifting down a cobblestone alley; and the last act overflows with the hot, lush air of a sunlit meadow in the depths of the untouched German countryside.

The 1943 production brought these qualities to life with extraordinary fidelity. Surviving stills show that the backdrop of cathedral walls was painted with such care you could almost see the beads of dew on the stone. The view down the back alley was a marvelously steep twilight clutter of ancient tiled roofs and sinuously worn pavement. And the meadow was a kind of stage poem to a summer day, dominated by a majestic flowering tree, with the town glittering contentedly in the hazy distance. The Bayreuth opera house, itself so soothingly cool in the heat of those July afternoons, must have seemed to its astonished audience like a window into the mysterious peace at the heart of the fatherland.

How could they not have been moved? The orchestra played as if possessed, the soloists tore into every one of the immense arias as though this was the last time they would ever be allowed to sing music this beautiful, the chorus (filled out, by the fuhrer's special order, with the best amateur singers from a local division of the SS) roared and bellowed their way through the chorales in a kind of primordial joy of discovery. Each scene played out to lingering stillness, savoring the nuances of joy and renunciation in an ecstasy of achingly sweet nostalgia. And the final aria -- in which Hans Sachs sings of his hope that even if Germany itself is destroyed, the greatness of German art will survive -- was like a rapturous prayer of deliverance.

"German art." Of course Wagner thought the greatest art in the world was necessarily German -- that was a commonplace in those days. Germans, Japanese, Americans -- people of every nation profoundly believed in their innate cultural superiority. Wagner was wholly typical of Germans, for instance, in his loathing of the French: he was enraged during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 that the German army didn't burn Paris to the ground. Then too he was contemptuous, like most German intellectuals, of what he thought of as a Mediterranean contamination of the true, Teutonic soul of Europe -- "Mediterranean" encompassing everything from Italian opera to Christianity. And he was typical of Germans, and of Europeans generally, in his furious detestation of Jews. Back then, cultured men in Europe and America, from Degas to Kipling to Henry Adams, all took particular pleasure in cultivating lurid varieties of anti-Semitism. The curse of the ring, which Wagner himself couldn't see, included hatred and cultural paranoia.

But in the feverish atmosphere of the war years nobody could have remained blind to what was really at stake. The country was swarming with secret police, there were mass arrests and deportations of everybody thought even remotely undesirable, there were daily triumphant announcements of the latest spectacular military victory obliterating all those decades of national humiliation, and there were an awful lot of patriotic parades. The Bayreuth festival was typical of those years in its frenzied glorification of the Nazi state. Every public occasion, no matter how trivial, was turned into a riot of patriotic enthusiasm. Every week brought a new stadium-filling rally, a lurid night of bonfires, a solemn torchlight procession. The Nazis could make the groundbreaking for a new highway an excuse for another spectacular searchlight-swarming, band-thundering all-Hitler gala event. The message was everywhere: the war was about the survival of Germany itself. Either there would be a victory so great that its rule over its enemies would last a thousand years or there would be a defeat so bottomless that nothing, no hope or joy or scrap of song, would survive.

This was the message that was seeping through Wagner's dream of happiness on those summer afternoons in 1943. It was a stronger dose of the message that has always hurried nations into war. Our land is more precious than that of our enemies, our joys are sweeter than theirs, our losses are more deeply felt. The soldiers in that auditorium apparently believed -- or almost believed -- in the rightness of their cause and the urgency of victory, to the point of anguish. And the performance told them that this was what the music had always been intended to say: if only the ecstasy of song lasts we will be saved; if only we can hold on to this heartbreakingly beautiful vision of our true heritage, then everything we are doing in its name will be redeemed.

***

The levellers; or, Satan's Privy-Council. A Pasquinade, in three cantos. The author, Hugh Hudibras, Esq. 1793

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