How to Act Amidst War: Cultivating Humanity Through Civility at Home
Learn about the virtue of a great soul and watch, read, or listen to the latest coverage of my book!
Gracious reader,
In times of atrocity and senseless loss of life that we witness from afar or experience firsthand, we feel viscerally the pain and suffering of others. It’s easy to feel helpless and to wonder how we can and should respond or how we can help those suffering far far away.
My book, The Soul of Civility, as a humanistic manifesto, offers an answer.
Guard and cultivate our humanity.
We can do so by reviving an appreciation of the gift of being human, both in ourselves and in others.
There’s really not much to be done for atrocities far away.
But we can let it help us revive an appreciation of the gift of human life in all its forms. Then act in ways that appreciate the gift every day.
We can look people in the eye, smile, and offer a word of kindness to a stranger. We can let the suffering of others remind us to do our part to not cause unnecessary suffering at home.
This is one argument Steven Pinker made in his work, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He credits the rise of the novels as a humanizing force that cultivated the reader's empathy muscles in new ways. It helped them see the world through the eyes of others, even those with whom they differed. This cultivated their own humanity and made them desire to be gentler to their fellow human beings.
We can, too.
We see this idea of caring for humanity by caring for the human beings in front of us across historical and ethical traditions.
As Kierkegaard wrote, "I must love all of humanity as particular neighbors, and I must love them all equally."
As the thirteenth-century Persian-Islamic poet Rumi wrote,
A generous friend
gives life for a friend.
Let’s rise above
animalistic behavior
and be kind to one another.
The Huainanzi, the ancient Chinese text dated from before 130 BC that expresses the ideals of ancient Daoism, is also expressly humanistic. It states, “To be thoroughly loving toward all sorts of [living] things yet not love humankind—this cannot be called humaneness.”
Or as Louis de Jaucourt, eighteenth-century French scholar and author of the entry on hospitality in the Encyclopédie wrote, "[Kindness to others] is the virtue of a great soul that cares for the whole universe through the ties of humanity."
We can care for the world by caring for those in front of us, right where we are.
Wishing you a lovely weekend!
Warmest regards,
Lexi
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Great note, Alexandra (yet again!). Also loved your piece in the Globe and Mail today! Some decent discussion in the comments section, but still shows there's much more to go towards being civil to each other is concerned.
What we can do is make sure that everyone knows that war is a racket. Poor people make rich people richer with their blood and the rich still consider them a lower class. This is the truth of war. All guts, no glory, all hat, no cattle. The profiteer deserves the soldier’s pay. And the world has entered the Anthropocene era. Conventional war and is obsolete. Now there are no winners, only losers. Baghdad was bought for oil and that’s all that was wanted. The museums were looted. No one goes there for vacation. And it doesn’t even fly the victor’s flag.