Larissa MacFarquhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…So you’re returning to moral luck in a sense. We live in a time where most Americans don’t experience war, so they don’t have this chance to be great, and that’s luck, relative to their individual lives. That’s right. But, look, I would never advocate, I would never consider it to be lucky to be caught up in a war in any capacity. Wars are awful. But there is something about certain circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives than do the kind of easy circumstances that some people find themselves in here — not everyone by any means. The great, great William James wrote an essay about a hundred and some years ago called “The Moral Equivalent of War. ” He advocated a kind of — it sounds odd because of the name — but a kind of peacetime peace corps because, he said, there’s no need to depend on moral luck, in effect — this is not his language — but we can engineer circumstances in which people are pushed to the same kind of self-sacrifice and heroism that they might be pushed to in war, but we can artificially engender it, and we can do it in a way that does not result in the horrible bloodshed and loss and waste of war, that results in something positive. So he had the notion of “Let’s send people to do work that is valuable but is really miserable and uncomfortable and pushes them.” They could be working in coal mines, or they could be working in soup kitchens. I can’t remember his examples; I read the essay a while ago. It was interesting because the reason he thought this was necessary is that he said people who are pacifists always talk about how terrible war is because it’s so bloody and violent and wasteful. What they’re not getting is that people who like war — or don’t dislike war — admit all that; they know that. It’s very obvious, but for them, it’s worth it because of the stimulation, as they see it, to human greatness. And so, he said, we pacifists, we people who think war is dreadful have to come up with some other means, some other circumstance to push humans to greatness so that war, to people who value greatness, does not seem necessary. If we do a one-on-one podcast, there’s no selective editing. Everything you say is presented to the listeners as you say it. Is that a more realistic look at a person than a profile, which is all about selective editing?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.