Philosophical Fight Log: Day 31-Fighting and The Moral Equivalent of War
“How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t ask for sacrifice? How do you become a man in a world that doesn’t require courage?”
-Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
In his famous essay, ‘The Moral Equivalent of War,’ philosopher William James talks about the extreme importance of the cultivation of what he refers to as the martial virtues. In addition to the classic Christian-Aristotelian virtues of chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, kindness, patience, and humility, the martial virtues, James argues, are those virtues and attributes of character which reject the softness and ease of the world and which foster within persons, a kind of robustness, anti-fragility, and inner resourcefulness, enabling in such persons the will and character to respond to life’s unexpected dangers, hardships, and uncertainties with strength, efficacy, and resolve. He writes,
But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy. In the more or less socialistic future toward which mankind seems drifting we must still subject ourselves collectively to those severities which answer to our real position upon this only partly hospitable globe. We must make new energies and hardihoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully clings…
He continues,
Martial virtues must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock upon which states are built — unless, indeed, we which for dangerous reactions against commonwealths, fit only for contempt, and liable to invite attack whenever a centre of crystallization for military-minded enterprise gets formed anywhere in their neighborhood…
The militarily-patriotic and the romantic-minded everywhere, and especially the professional military class, refuse to admit for a moment that war may be a transitory phenomenon in social evolution. The notion of a sheep’s paradise like that revolts, they say, our higher imagination. Where then would be the steeps of life? If war had ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it, on this view, to redeem life from flat degeneration.
A pacifist, James suggests ‘trials against nature’ as a surrogate and ‘moral equivalent of war,’ in order to foster and keep alive these important inner virtues of the human person minus the large-scale, coordinated bloodshed endemic to modern warfare. Accordingly, activities such as going out on the open seas as members of the Coast Guard, fighting forest fires, or taming the wilderness in some other capacity, on the Jamesian view, would all constitute sufficient and adequate proxies for the fostering of the martial virtues short of actual large-scale warfare.
Mixed Martial Arts, I believe, could function as another such proxy that could function as a moral equivalent of war.
Indeed, almost all of the martial virtues that James mentions above are realized and cultivated within the training, preparation, and execution of the MMA match. MMA likewise holds the potential to serve as a kind of male initiation ritual now so painfully and woefully absent in modern, domesticated society. What’s more, and paradoxically even, actual modern warfare, with its increasingly distanced and impersonal nature, due to a ever-growing reliance upon automated technology, now seems to function to actually dampen rather than to promote the cultivation of the classic martial virtues. General George S. Patton, of course, saw all of this coming when he once remarked to one reporter inquiring his thoughts on so-called Nazi ‘push-button, wonder weapons’, stating the following,
“Wonder weapons? My God, I don’t see the wonder in them. Killing without heroics? Nothing is glorified? Nothing is reaffirmed? No heroes? No cowards? No troops? No generals? Only those who are left alive and those who are left dead. I’m glad I won’t live to see it.”
With no skin in the game, no heroes, no cowards, no martial values to be realized, ‘nothing to be re-affirmed’ at all, the ethic of the emerging 21st century battle-space now looks to be one far less of ‘Once more unto the breach dear friends!’ and one more and more of ‘set it an forget it.’ One has to seriously wonder the moral and metaphysical trade-off between these things, and whether or not we as individuals and as a collective society are actually getting better. I have my suspicions.
That said, I wonder sometimes if maybe we’d actually be safer if we had less safety, stronger if we had less ease, and have less wars if we had more fights.
I wonder…