Opinion | In the Face of War: Education in Pain and Danger | Observatory

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At the dawn of the millennium, a wise man told me that, in Mexico, despite the apparent peace, we lived in a daily atmosphere of war. We all felt it; we did not want to admit it openly, for it would have meant acting accordingly. The truth is that since then, we could have undertaken a campaign of serious ethical education in the face of violence, both that of the environment and ours, our own. But to do so would have meant accepting that we were intimately involved in those conflicts (something that our conscience almost always strives to evade until the last moment), and that they were not the distant wars of others.

Today, it is increasingly difficult to deny that we are involved not only in close confrontations but also linked to those on other continents.

Will we continue to pretend that they are others’ wars? Will we persist in accumulating tension, without daring to express it and, therefore, without being able to do anything about it? It seems like the dream of an anesthetized sleep: waiting to see if bombs really fall, to admit what we feel and think, and act accordingly.

Awake, or rather, half-sleepwalking, our feeling is a non-feeling, a state of astonishment and almost bodily coldness, which an expert would diagnose as depression.

I speak of ethics education in a context like this because I want to propose it as a thawing process that, to begin with, helps us feel again. Feelings – and thoughts – flow regularly only when they find a channel, the one that astonishment would hide from them. But it is there: none other than ethics, available to all, within everyone, even if it is embryonic. Ethics is not an intellectual conviction that charts a path with purpose, nor a series of precepts imposed from the outside that we are obliged to fulfill. It is an intimate relationship between us and the world, a coupling, a kind of embrace that brings us together with the source of meaning. Ethics clarifies and advances what is confused. Our humanity expands by integrating reality within itself. Without ethics, the world tightens (and weighs on us) because it does not fit within us, and we do not fit within it.

The channel of ethics is a network of key ideas, of intuitive notions: concepts of infinite discourse – the so-called values – that move our action, understood not only as conscious behavior but also as motivating reasoning, speech, writing, art, science. Ethics articulates our feelings, thinking, and actions in the language of the world.

In ethics, there is a conjunction similar to what happens when we open a door: hand, handle, force, body, push, door, space; everything is concentrated in a single internal/external act, with the particularity that ethics articulates all the dimensions of human intention and action.

Will the same happen in war, in the reality of pain and danger? Neither I nor anyone else is sure how we would react if, at any given moment, this violence engulfed us. However, when it comes to education, we would surely not be obliged to respond with uncontrolled impulses and a lack of consideration. At times like these, our feelings and thoughts will certainly draw on experience; thus, if we resort to an ethical norm, it will be the one most rooted in us, in what we are, in what we have managed to become up to that moment. And that’s a lot! Human beings are not bound by impulse: we are capable of cultivating values, transmitting them from generation to generation, and integrating them into our experiences, with the understanding that the deeper they penetrate, the richer and more varied, agile, and flexible our responses will be.

Years ago, I had a couple of experiences that helped me trust what I say: things that confronted me, if not the fear of war, but with considerable risk. One was the sudden encounter, in the street, with a man the size of a wardrobe, in military uniform and eyes bloodshot from drugs. Coming up behind me, he pulled my hair. After an initial, clumsy, uncontrolled reaction on my part, I was finally able to neutralize him, thanks to both a genuine desire to protect my life and the previous cultivation of ideas and feelings about the best way to react in such a situation. The same can be said of the second experience, much more dangerous and prolonged (a so-called express kidnapping, which lasted four hours), from which I emerged triumphant, that is, alive.

What values can we cultivate in a situation like the world is going through that allow us to contribute to peace, that is, to recover emotion, reason, action, and speech, harmoniously? To answer, let’s recall some of the virtues emphasized in philosophies over the centuries. They will give us guidelines to find answers and, I hope, even a dialogue guide for teachers interested in sharing the topic in the classroom. (I apologize if, for reasons of space, my following comments only approximate the subject; I invite the reader to investigate, for themselves, more details.

I will start with what, for me and for many, is the supreme value: love. (As Bad Bunny’s sign at the Super Bowl said, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”) Being a transcendent value, love cannot be described; however, some human values can be attributed to it. I start with the one I consider first in line:

Communication. Values are personal/social goods; conduits that unite us to our sources of meaning and that are transmitted and consolidated in our communication. (When this transmission of values is intentional, it is called education.

Speaking of pain and danger, the philosopher Hannah Arendt said to her friend, the philosopher Karl Jaspers (married, by the way, to a Jewish woman in the midst of Nazism), “You would still place your faith in communication, even in a deluge.”

Communication is linked to another value that, unfortunately, has become a lukewarm word: courtesy. When consolidated as a virtue, it is present even in conditions of pain and danger. In reality, it is nothing more than letting others know that we are attentive to them. Jorge Luis Borges considers it so important that he goes so far as to state (seriously), “In an argument, it is discourteous to be right.”

Communication also correlates with recognition, which is the explicit valuation of the other’s effort, or implicit in dialogue. Some theoretical positions attempt to disassociate the person from his achievements, but that is not possible: when achievements are an extension of virtue, recognizing them is an act of humility and gratitude, two ways of contemplating, at once, what is human and our source of meaning. (As I write this, I understand better what I once said intuitively to an atheist friend, a great psychoanalyst: “If you don’t believe in God, how are you going to realize all the good you have done?”).

Finally, compassion is linked to communication. This virtue helps us recognize and integrate into dialogue the other’s difficulty in loving and communicating (a difficulty always present in all people).

Four other attributes of love are those described by psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving: responsibility, knowledge, respect, and care. (Fromm, another German Jew, came to Mexico fleeing war.) I will discuss only the first two, interpreting them very personally.

Responsibility is also linked to communication, assigning value to words as acts: we respond through them, we recognize that we always act and communicate under pressure, but with freedom. We are responsible for what we say and do.

Knowledge: Through knowledge, we remain alert to what is happening and what can happen, both around us and in ourselves. Some see knowledge as our starting point. But this is dangerous. Knowledge always adheres to other values so as not to be confused with either truth or opinion. Knowledge offers a coherent explanation of visible reality. It seeks the truth, but accepts it as unattainable. Regarding opinion, it fails to see the facts from a distance. It is as irrefutable as it is irrelevant. Knowledge, on the other hand, is relevant because it can be refuted. It is ethical; it allows feelings and thoughts to flow, and it helps us grow.

Knowledge is linked to responsibility in that it entails not spreading unfounded fear or false rumors. Any analysis of conflict must contribute to peace. Even when scandal overwhelms us, noise submerges us, peace must make its way through the battle, alert, stepping over the rubble, passing through the checkpoints, betting on love and understanding to reach the very center of the disillusioned heart.

Let’s turn, finally, to the classics. In his Ethics, Aristotle described the values that bring us closer to the supreme good, eudaimonia, a type of happiness present even in the face of pain and danger. He found four: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. Of those, I dare, recklessly, to give here my characterizations, appropriate to the subject.

Prudence does not seek danger or pain, nor does it deal with them in a way that increases them.

Justice does not avoid danger or pain when, in doing so, innocent people can be harmed.

Courage always escapes danger and pain, and in doing so, it is not unjust or a victim of another equal or greater danger.

Temperance allows the enjoyment of everything within its reach, even in situations of danger and pain, as long as other values are not neglected.

I would need to talk about other virtues: perseverance, trust, patience, and many more, including some regarded as spiritual, with strange names, and some already “demonized” in the academic context, by great philosophers such as Byung-Chul Han (hope) or Jacques Derrida (faith), and others still unpronounceable, although they have also been described by important teachers: piety (Zambrano), charity and mercy (Pagliai).

Anyway, the list could be extended, as I point out, but I prefer to end here.

It is up to others to speak.

Translation by Daniel Wetta