Joel Dietz

The Tamil Tigers had human shields by the tens of thousands, not just by the dozens and hundreds like Al Qaeda. They put people between themselves and the government and say “you have to kill all the people to get to us.” So the government obliged them. The government killed thousands of civilians.

MJT: Tamil civilians?

Kaplan: Yes. They killed thousands of civilians in the course of winning this war. It acted in a way so brutal that there are no lessons for the West.

MJT: Would you say it was as brutal as Russia’s counterinsurgency in Chechnya?

Kaplan: Yeah. It was. The U.N. is investigating whether as many as 20,000 civilians have been killed during the last few months.

MJT: I didn’t know it was that brutal. I’ve read accusations that there were human rights violations, but we’re so used to hearing that no matter what happens.

Kaplan: The West thinks of Sri Lanka as unimportant, whereas for the Chinese and the Indians it’s very important. And I consider Sri Lanka part of the new geography. It’s part of the new maritime geography, and that makes it very important.

Michael Totten interviews Robert Kaplan

Games Continued

E continues:

Chicken-egg problem. Do cubicle workers play minesweeper because it is a continuation of their regular pattern of life — or is it a product of intelligent design — children play minesweeper in order to facilitate their transition to contented cubicle workers? Moreover, can an unconscious ‘stream of being’ be articulated which sets the orientation of the young and ultimately leads to their distribution in vocations of ‘choice’ ?

Possibly all these are facets of the true situation. These are complicated questions which don’t have either/or answers, it seems to me.

Another question: do those playing America’s Army naturally transition to soldierly occupations? Assuming yes, under what circumstances do they make good soldiers? Again, how moral is the person who takes their moral lessons from Chess?

Surely many more factors are involved than just the game. I did find this interesting piece by Benjamin Franklin on the morality of chess:

http://www.wisconsinscholasticchess.org/moralsofchess.php

He lays emphasis on the players’ intention and good will as important elements in the use of chess to cultivate morality.

Tangential to this there’s the “Soldier’s Deck of Cards” : http://thegentleshepherd.net/SoldiersDeckOfCards.html

And chapter XVII of the Gesta Romanorum, summarized thus:

Antonius governed the city of Rome with great wisdom. He was exceedingly fond of the game of chess ; and observing, on one occasion, that when the men were replaced in the bag as usual, the king  was confounded with the inferior pieces, it led him to reflections upon the vanity of human greatness. He thereupon determines to make a triple division of his kingdom, and hasten to the Holy Land. He did so, and died in peace. 

All interesting. Some people might consider quitting life on the same note as Antonius, having no faster means towards reaching the ‘Holy Land.’ “Soldier’s Deck” raises the issue of pious lies.

Ecstasy

In the wake of the Thomas-Hill catastrophe in Washington, the New York Times Sunday Magazine contained a skin lotion advertisement that displayed a photograph of the naked torso of a woman. From a feminist point of iew, this headless and footless body represents the male chauvinist’s sexual ideal: a woman who cannot think and cannot escape. From a point of view somewhat more comprehensive—the point of view of community—it represents also the commercial ideal of the industrial economy: the completely seducible consumer, unable either to judge or to resist.

The headlessness of this lotionable lady suggests also another tleling indication of the devaluation of sexual love in modern times—that is, the gravitation of attention from the countenance, especially the eys, to teh specifically sexual anatomy. The difference, of course, is that the countenance is both physical and spiritual. There is much testimony to this in the poetic tradition and elsewhere. Looking to one another’s eyes, lovers recognize their encounter as a meeting not merely of two bodies but of two living souls. In one another’s eyes, moreover, they see themselves reflected not narcissisticly but as singular beings, separate and small, far inferior to the creature that they together make.

In this meeting of eyes, there is an acknowledgment that love is more than sex:

‘This Ecstasy done unperplex,’
We said, “and tell us what we love;
We see by this it was not sex;
We see we saw not what did move.

These lines are from John Donne’s poem “The Ecstasy,” in which the lovers have been joined by the “double string” of their mutual gaze. This is not a disembodied love. Far from it. For love is finally seen in the poem as “that subtle knot, which makes us man” by joining body and soul together, just as it joins the two lovers. Sexual love is thus understood as both fact and mystery, physical motion and spiritual motive. That this complex love should be reduced simply to sex has always seemed a fearful thing to the poets.

Wendell Berry

In denying the holiness of the body and of the so-called physical reality of the world—and in denying support to the good economy, the good work, by which alone the Creation can receive due honor—modern Christianity generally has cut itself off from both nature and culture. It has no serious or competent interest in biology or ecology. And it is equally uninterested in the arts by which humankind connects itself to nature. It manifests no awareness of the specifically Christian cultural lineages that connect us to our past. There is, for example, a splendid heritage of Christian poetry in English that most church members live and die without reading or hearing or hearing about. Most sermons are preached without any awareness at all that the making of sermons is an art that has at times been magnificent. Most modern churches look like they were built by robots without reference to the heritage of church architecture or respect for the place; they embody no awareness that work can be worship. Most religious music now attests to the general assumption that religion is no more than a vaguely pious (and vaguely romantic) emotion.

Wendell Berry