Tuesday, March 29, 2022

The absurdity and necessity of rules during war

 


During the invasion of Ukraine, we have heard frequently terms like ‘war crime’ and ‘just war’. In a fight to the death, when your aim is the taking of the life of another human being, the idea of there even being such a thing as a ‘crime’ or ‘justice’ in that context is seemingly absurd. Furthermore, institutions like NATO are endlessly discussing the ‘rules of conflict’, while in the UN Security Council Russia absurdly has a veto ruling out action against its own aggression. Seeming absurdity on top of seeming absurdity. But the rules of war are necessary. Defining terms like ‘war crime’ and ‘just war’ do have a clear and important role to play, even in the face of the chaos, the heartache and the bloody killing of war.

Ukraine’s heroic struggle against Russia’s wanton aggression has elicited a lot of talk about the possibility of a ‘morally just’ war. At first, the very idea of such a war might seem absurd. After all, wars are horrific. They represent humanity at its worst, in which all our ingenuity, our energies, our capacities, are aimed at killing one another. “War is cruelty,” William Tecumseh Sherman famously said, “and you cannot refine it”. Any attempt to unearth moral principles for war seems not just foredoomed to failure but also morally perverse. On this view, there can no more be rules for war than there can be rules for murder or rape. Worse still, it might seem that ethicists and legal theorists, in discussing the very possibility of a just or legal war, or wars fought justly, serve only to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the politicians and plutocrats who, in their vaulting ambition, drive the machine of war at the expense of countless innocents ground up underneath. 

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Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Why Do We Argue?

 


From Eve’s exchange with the serpent, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s soaring ultimatums, and the throes of Twitter, the desire to prevail with words has been not just a moral, but an existential compulsion. In Why Argument Matters, Professor Lee Siegel, who teaches in the writing program at the School of the Arts, says that the art of argument is the supreme expression of humanity’s longing for a better life, full of empathy and care for the world and those who inhabit it. 

Siegel plumbs the emotional and psychological sources of clashing words, weaving through his exploration the story of the role argument has played in societies throughout history. Each life, he believes, is an argument for that particular way of living. Argument is at the core of human existence, and language, at its most expressive, bends toward argument.

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