Memorial Day

CrowdSource 5.26.2025

and

May 26, 2025

Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: happy Memorial Day!

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Democracy and War

We are developing a new feature on Wisdom of Crowds: Spoken Word, in which we carve out (and edit) mini-essays from memorable moments on our podcasts.

For Memorial Day, here’s the first edition of Spoken Word: novelist, National Book Award winner and veteran Phil Klay on how democracies should wage war, and what democracies owe their soldiers:

So look, in war you send out young men, usually very young men, who tend to believe very much in what they’re told, right? If you gear up a bunch of young 20-year-olds to go out and just destroy, they will and they’ll be excited to do it. If you give them a mission with a greater moral underpinning, that will motivate them as well, and provide them a framework for what they’re supposed to accomplish, and whether the suffering they endure has any meaning.
In that sense, having a clear moral purpose can be asset, as long as it’s not a loose kind of feel-good morality disconnected from brutal reality. I remember in 2009, right as Obama’s ill-fated surge in Afghanistan was going on, I was talking to some young Lance corporal and I asked him, “How are you going to be successful in Afghanistan?” And he said to me, “Through cultural effectiveness.” And he really believed it, you know? And then he went to Helmand province, which was an incredibly violent place. And there’s something tragic there, in the disconnect between what he thought the mission would consist of, and what it was — months in an incredibly hostile and deadly place that reverted to Taliban control the second U.S. troops lost.
Nevertheless, I still think the Marine going over with a sense of the moral stakes of his mission is in a better place than one whose only thought is lethality, and who afterwards, if he has any shred of humanity, will have to come to terms with what it meant to kill people, and to see his friends killed. And the moral understanding soldiers have their sense of themselves and what they’re doing, that’s something the whole society will help form, not just their political and military leaders. And if you believe in the human soul in any kind of real way, then it’s not hard to see how acts of war that become unmoored from an ethical code and a moral purpose quickly become soul-killing.

Read the whole thing.

Remembering the Fallen

Hat tip to Phil for the following two book recommendations for Memorial Day:

Inscriptions. From The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell:

The unforgettable, infinitely pathetic inscriptions are not Kipling’s but those which the families of the dead were allowed — after long debate within the Commission about “uniformity” — to place on their stones. In addition to the still hopeful ones about dawn and fleeing shadows we find some which are more “modern,” that is, more personal, particular, and hopeless: Our dear Ted. He died for us.
…
Our Dick.
…
If love could have saved him he would not have died.

Photographs. From Bedrooms of the Fallen, by Ashley Gilbertson: photographs of the empty bedrooms of fallen soldiers.

“Machine Gun”

Some Memorial Day music: “Machine Gun,” a live performance by guitarist and paratrooper in the US Army, Jimi Hendrix, who always dedicated the piece both to the soldiers in Vietnam and the anti-war protesters in the USA:

From the Crowd

Cross-Border Bohemian Trade.
Contarini
responds to
Țara Isabella Burton
’s post on transgression and art:

[…] Whether something has merit as art is, perhaps unfortunately, not strongly associated with whether it promotes, or seems to promote, whatever moral or theological program we prefer. Genius can make great art which is also corrupting or serves evil ends; mediocrity and banality are often used in the service of the wholesome and life-affirming, which is upsetting to many of us, but it is always that way. And of course good or great art can be ambiguous across other dimensions, like morality or social utility. Perhaps the biggest problem with all of this is that any functioning society has a lot of children, and a lot of unsophisticated people who cannot grasp nuances. These people have to be protected. This is felt as constricting by artists and people who have some esthetic education. But you should not bring a nine year old to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, or a young mother of modest education, but a good and kind person, to something that can be viewed in part as pornographic but which has artistic merit, because she won't get it. This is a permanent problem that can only be mitigated but never solved. Keeping the transgression in some kind of Bohemia and allowing cross-border trade with the rest of society is one approach which is probably the best way to do it.

Not Inevitable.
Michael Wear
(of the
Michael & Melissa Wear
Substack) riffs off of
Damir Marusic
’s piece on AI and the future of humanity:

I am not convinced by these confident, fatalistic assertions regarding our lack of agency to prevent particular applications/widespread embrace of certain aspects of AI — especially when paired with the imaginings about how the world AI makes will enable glorious social reforms. We can’t prevent AGI from radically disrupting human learning and education in any meaningful way, but imagine all of the leisure time we’ll have in this new world where the same people cutting the social safety net now will be freed up to support UBI!
We have established pretty remarkable, if imperfect, regulatory regimes and norms to restrain the pursuit of human cloning. We have sophisticated infrastructure and effort deployed toward arms control and the nuclear weapons. I am not quite at the point where I’m willing to concede the basic inevitability of how this will all unfold. While we’re talking about the triumphant return of the American chestnut tree, Congress is considering a ten-year ban on regulating AI. Interesting priority to have if all of this is going to happen regardless of what people actually want for their lives and our society.