Some 40 new students walked into our fall geopolitical studies class last week. I love to see them come in — some quietly nervous, others boisterous and chatty, but all curious. We started with a trailer for a movie called “Eye in the Sky,” as the basis for discussing decisions that involve taking lives to save lives. This is one of my favorite, but brutal, exercises: measuring the benefits of ends against the character and content of means. It presents a scenario where two terrorists are donning explosive vests, while a missile is ready and waiting to be fired by military leaders to kill them, saving perhaps 80 to 100 people. The fix looks easy, but a young girl is hula-hooping in the yard next door. The politicians wrestle with the slippery notion of ends and means and whether an indeterminate number of innocent victims in an unknown place outweighs the cost of one known innocent life, hula-hooping on the screen. Despite all the mathematical attempts to place her outside the circumference of collateral damage, the math can’t clean the moral slate. The missile is fired; the terrorists and the girl are now dead, and potential victims are alive and well.
The following week, PC, a U.S. Marine officer, came to class to run a simulated war game mimicking these same issues. In the game, the students represented four countries that realistically portrayed our world. The scenario featured a strait critical to energy access, as well as countries caught up in alliances and agreements that complicate any honest exchange. Time was short, reliable information was scarce, and a skillful — much less humanitarian — response was hard to find.
The PC then started to connect the simulation to real situations. He implied the U.S. ideally operates within the notion of a “just war” theory, a moral framework to evaluate when and how armed conflict can be justified. He became more somber and started asking students about their knowledge of the mortality rates of U.S. casualties and the number of civilians and soldiers killed in countries that we have recently intervened in or attacked. And the numbers were staggering: U.S. losses vs. the losses of foreign innocents and soldiers. The class went silent. I waited, then asked the class if they had noticed the dramatic change in the room’s tenor. Hands shot up; no tentative concerns about right answers, just raw and human desire to not be part of this casual and fatal chain of taking lives. Their desire to be innocent was so tender. I wrote them a note the next day:
I am still reeling from the profound nature of our class last night. PC was stellar, and your thoughtful engagement and heartfelt grasp of the conceptual implications of these complex situations were impressive. I was awed by the compassionate silence in the room, with some 40 people stunned by the statistics of casualties resulting from our interactions in foreign lands. I so appreciate how huge your hearts are — seeing your silent reverence for what PC was saying. Your thoughts and articulate responses to our questions were right on. In short, you are my heroes.
I’m often teased for touting the power of innocence — my “Don Quixote”-like quest for a conscious, deliberate rejection of the cynical, money-driven, corrupt and materialistic world we live in (currently, our country makes 17th-century Spain look benign). Miguel de Cervantes mocked a romantic glorification of war, exposing the illusions of chivalry and the true cost of combat. Cervantes was a soldier brutalized by war, and knew that defending justice and the innocent through battle is delusional, leaving us like “madmen” tilting at windmills — forever bruised, battered and trapped in endless cycles of violence.
My students are not tilting at windmills; they seek real change. Like “Don Quixote,” they have big, beautiful dreams, and they have the hunger and courage to question the nature of our being. What does it mean to be human today? What does it mean to live honorably? To pursue purpose takes deep self-awareness, to pause and ask,“Is this life meaningful to me?”—and even greater bravery to actually change direction when the answer is no.
My desire to ensure my students seek and find navigable routes to being moral selves rests on ideas of authors like Cervantes, Martin Luther King Jr. and his notion of self-purity, and Hannah Arendt’s assurances that true power is found in consent freely given, and that the power of innocence, dignity, choice and decency will outlive warmongering, voracious greed and self-aggrandizement of political leaders (characteristics so brazenly displayed by our current administration). As Lincoln said, “The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
The sheer physics of these “mystic chords of memory” call upon teachers and students to relentlessly put “the better angels of our nature” into the arena, where we all learn to “dare greatly”: dare to think, to speak, to expose our humanity, to find the courage to live together, authentically. And to be a part of this process with students and colleagues can only be described as miraculous.
Our Marine leader was honorably discharged the next day. I am grateful for his generous and honest contributions to our class that helped students feel the power — intellectually and spiritually — of seeking truth in a world of paradoxes. Barry Lopez wrote, “One must live in the middle of contradiction. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
Because of who my students are, I know how to do that.