Moral equivalents of war
Manhood, hardship, Orwell, and Barbie: plus, a time without cell phones
Hi everyone — it’s been hot here in Barcelona. Of course, it’s been hot everywhere.
I now joke on Zoom calls for work that small talk about the weather has gotten much more interesting.
The heat has been unrelenting and it’s hampered my writing. The past two weeks are littered with discarded prose. I saw a study recently that productivity plummets in hot weather. The surprising finding though was that “white collar” productivity also plummets. Something about heat outside just makes us all want to slow way down.
I’ve been taking city bikes back and forth to the climbing gym after Spanish classes, taking the rides as an opportunity for a warm-up and warm-down to book-end the climbing. It’s about 15-18 minutes each way, depending on how motivated I am to blow through red lights. I love the bike lanes in Barcelona, and the city is generally pretty flat, so it all feels very friendly even on busy main streets.
The past two trips though I’ve relented: there are e-bikes available for a markup of a mere €0.34 per half hour, and rather than risk heat stroke I’ve opted for that sweet, sweet motor to get me home. But I do wonder about the escape to convenience (as you’ll see below I’m sensitive to). At least I haven’t bought a moped yet.
Tomorrow, my son arrives from the States, and next week he’ll start school. The routine will change, Summer will end, and so too, I hope, will the heat.
I. Moral equivalents of war
After my interview with Chris Blahoot, he recommended I read Pete Davis’ Dedicated: The Case for Commitment in an Age of Infinite Browsing.
It’s a book after my own heart about committing to places, investing in people, and in general laying out a value structure that is an alternative to what he calls the “Age of Infinite Browsing.”
Davis references a lot of writers and ideas I’ve encountered before, but it was some of his observations on struggle, hardship, and challenge that were really helpful for me to re-encounter.
One of those ideas is what William James called “Moral Equivalents of War,” or “collective projects that share the positive qualities of martial valor—projects that necessitate struggle, vigor, fidelity, and courage—while avoiding the negative ones, like division, dehumanization, and bloodshed.”
I’ve often thought of climbing mountains as fitting that bill. Any proper alpine climb in a remote area certainly requires struggle, vigor, fidelity, and courage. In the lead-up to World War II, many European countries were even sponsoring mountaineering expeditions almost as a proxy for war.
The kind of climbing I do doesn’t come close to the kind of struggle and courage required to push new boundaries in mountaineering—but it does contain some of the same challenges in miniature. Struggle, vigor, courage, and fidelity are all part of the deal when climbing outdoors.
Society needs more things like that, where instead of comfort, convenience, and sloth, we are required to struggle and be brave. As a parent, I can certainly see my son searching out these kinds of experiences to try and test his own bravery. Even if I don’t provide them, he’ll contrive them on his own with whatever is available.
The more you look around, the more you see it—wealthy Western society writ large is in desperate need of struggle in service of shared purpose. And that lack has consequences that reverberate, especially over our politics.