Had to be a moment, many moments for decades and centuries, where the Athenians looked at each other after the long walls were down and when Romans were treating them as a tourist stop where they looked at each other and knew they just fucked it up, and there was nobody to blame but themselves.
We voted for Syracuse, now it’s just letting it play out.
This is an interesting piece, but its optimistic portrayal of Civil War service as a universal 'civic duty' omits a critical analysis of conscription's role on both sides.
This omission is significant, as the draft complicates any simple narrative of voluntary consensus. It suggests a parallel to a pre-republican tradition where subaltern classes are compelled—whether through social engineering or outright force—to fight for the articulated interests of a hegemonic elite, who retain the power to define the very telos of the conflict. The historical record is, of course, replete with corollaries; Napoleon's use of the levée en masse and its long-term, corrosive effects on France's social fabric is a foremost example.
Furthermore, this dynamic is not merely an external or pre-modern phenomenon. James Fallows's 1975 critique of the Vietnam-era draft captures this perfectly when he asked:
'...why, when so many of the bright young college men opposed the war, so few were willing to resist the draft, rather than simply evade it... why all the well-educated presumably humane young men... so willingly took advantage of this most brutal form of class discrimination—what it signifies that we let the boys from Chelsea be sent off to die.'
This leads to a more critical counter-argument: that a 'shared sense of higher purpose' is rarely, if ever, an organic, bottom-up consensus. Rather, it is an articulated consensus dictated by the state's power-brokers. This suggests the structural inequities and problems you so aptly capture in your own writing are not a bug within the system, but are, in fact, a feature produced by this very dynamic.
The urge to war is not level across all potential participants. But to play the game of Citizenship one should be prepared to acknowledge that if one has benefited from the society one finds oneself part of, then one should accept the rules of that society, more or less. So when asked if one is unwilling to fight, would one agree to serve as a field medic, one might say "Of course. My hope is to see more people kept alive and fewer people unnecessarily dead."
None of that sort of citizen action is a product of "articulated consensus dictated by the state's power-brokers". Consensus-dictators can no more force someone to fight than they can force them to play chess. Individuals choose. Prison in protest against wars or defiance of the draft is a choice. But our society, flawed as it is, set out a community-based process for determining how to accommodate dissenters. A 'shared sense of higher purpose' can encompass plenty of contributions of many different sorts.
Skipping 'cross the border felt to me like cheating. But meeting with the draft board to make my case as a conscientious objector seemed like bottom-up attending to the rules as writ.
You read Pericles’ funeral oration almost perfectly backwards. Classicists understand the speech as a binding reaffirmation of the polis, a reminder that individual "freedom" is sustained only through obedience to law, mutual duty, and sacrifice for the common good. Pericles was articulating a social contract of reciprocal obligation between citizen and city. That's just about the opposite of preaching abstract idealism or voluntarist “belief in democracy”. Pericles was not, as you suggest, articulating citizenship as "nothing more than seeking to fulfill the highest civic ideals" but was instead making a brutally practical argument: Athenian citizens must die for empire because empire funds their democracy, provides their grain dole, pays for their festivals, and maintains their superiority over both slaves at home and subjects abroad.
You turn a speech about the responsibilities of citizenship into a call for moral striving within a society that offers no shared structure of belonging, which is ... pretty well the opposite of what Pericles, and Thucydides, intended.
Love your footnote practice, reminds me of Pratchett.
Footnotes are meant for making jokes. I stand behind my practice
You’re god damn right.
This is good james, reading this on veterans day and honored to fight with you for something cringe and something greater
Powerful, but depressing.
Had to be a moment, many moments for decades and centuries, where the Athenians looked at each other after the long walls were down and when Romans were treating them as a tourist stop where they looked at each other and knew they just fucked it up, and there was nobody to blame but themselves.
We voted for Syracuse, now it’s just letting it play out.
Thank you! I resonated with this !
This is an interesting piece, but its optimistic portrayal of Civil War service as a universal 'civic duty' omits a critical analysis of conscription's role on both sides.
This omission is significant, as the draft complicates any simple narrative of voluntary consensus. It suggests a parallel to a pre-republican tradition where subaltern classes are compelled—whether through social engineering or outright force—to fight for the articulated interests of a hegemonic elite, who retain the power to define the very telos of the conflict. The historical record is, of course, replete with corollaries; Napoleon's use of the levée en masse and its long-term, corrosive effects on France's social fabric is a foremost example.
Furthermore, this dynamic is not merely an external or pre-modern phenomenon. James Fallows's 1975 critique of the Vietnam-era draft captures this perfectly when he asked:
'...why, when so many of the bright young college men opposed the war, so few were willing to resist the draft, rather than simply evade it... why all the well-educated presumably humane young men... so willingly took advantage of this most brutal form of class discrimination—what it signifies that we let the boys from Chelsea be sent off to die.'
This leads to a more critical counter-argument: that a 'shared sense of higher purpose' is rarely, if ever, an organic, bottom-up consensus. Rather, it is an articulated consensus dictated by the state's power-brokers. This suggests the structural inequities and problems you so aptly capture in your own writing are not a bug within the system, but are, in fact, a feature produced by this very dynamic.
The urge to war is not level across all potential participants. But to play the game of Citizenship one should be prepared to acknowledge that if one has benefited from the society one finds oneself part of, then one should accept the rules of that society, more or less. So when asked if one is unwilling to fight, would one agree to serve as a field medic, one might say "Of course. My hope is to see more people kept alive and fewer people unnecessarily dead."
None of that sort of citizen action is a product of "articulated consensus dictated by the state's power-brokers". Consensus-dictators can no more force someone to fight than they can force them to play chess. Individuals choose. Prison in protest against wars or defiance of the draft is a choice. But our society, flawed as it is, set out a community-based process for determining how to accommodate dissenters. A 'shared sense of higher purpose' can encompass plenty of contributions of many different sorts.
Skipping 'cross the border felt to me like cheating. But meeting with the draft board to make my case as a conscientious objector seemed like bottom-up attending to the rules as writ.
You read Pericles’ funeral oration almost perfectly backwards. Classicists understand the speech as a binding reaffirmation of the polis, a reminder that individual "freedom" is sustained only through obedience to law, mutual duty, and sacrifice for the common good. Pericles was articulating a social contract of reciprocal obligation between citizen and city. That's just about the opposite of preaching abstract idealism or voluntarist “belief in democracy”. Pericles was not, as you suggest, articulating citizenship as "nothing more than seeking to fulfill the highest civic ideals" but was instead making a brutally practical argument: Athenian citizens must die for empire because empire funds their democracy, provides their grain dole, pays for their festivals, and maintains their superiority over both slaves at home and subjects abroad.
You turn a speech about the responsibilities of citizenship into a call for moral striving within a society that offers no shared structure of belonging, which is ... pretty well the opposite of what Pericles, and Thucydides, intended.
Just wow . I resonated Big Time ! Thank you!