The Art of War

[alice wellintown]

Young people, like not so young people, act voluntarily,
involuntarily, and non-voluntarily. Young men may volunteer an answer
to a question, or blurt something out without thinking, or may be
called on to, think first and then respond, and do so. A young woman
may join the army, she may be inducted or conscripted, and she may
even “join” the army. This last covers the involuntary or the Freudian
theory proposed by a P-Lister who speculated about the free will of
some soldier volunteers who may be involuntarily or automatically or
unconsciously Oedipal suicides.   All three causes of action are never
as simple as cause and effect, though it helps to think of them as
caused effects. Human actions are not like those of other bodies that
we may study with physical laws. Even Benny Profane, a human yo-yo,
knows this much. But we’ve been using the idea, causes that is, to
make sense, first of the world, and then of human action, for so long
now we find it difficult to make sense of things without it. Can Benny
learn a god-damned thing without it? Does Stencil get too much
Education with it? Of course, we are not characters in books. Nature
is not an abstract work of art. When Charles Sheeler (at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art now), in his very famous painting, “The
Artist Looks at Nature”, paints himself painting a photograph, he is,
as are Adams and Pynchon, distinguishing what Aristotle calls the
essential causes, from what he calls accidental causes.  Surely,
Stencil’s decision to involve Benny in a crime is a moral decision. He
uses his nature and his intelligence to deliberate and then he
volunteers Benny. Nature and Intelligence are essential causes of
moral decisions. We wouldn’t want a child to decide if Stencil is
guilty. The child has neither the Intelligence nor the Nature to do
so. We wouldn’t want to try Stencil or Zoyd in a court of Chance or on
a wheel of fortune. Accidental causes are not essential causes, and
are not, therefore any part of deliberation, but are only causes of
body movements. So, as Thoreau’s abstraction of the body, head, and
conscience describes, the body or mass of men, moved by the mob, or by
the heads of men who exploit them, do not exercise the conscience. So,
they move by accidental cause. Accidental cause has no moral criteria.
While, as IV makes clear, and as Benjamin’s Slot Machine makes even
clearer, reward, blame, punishment, praise, red badges of courage and
the like, are the products of risk and reward market fortunes, these
are not moral for the causes of these outcomes are not essential but
accidental. Young people today are swamped by fortune and, like
players in “The Lottery,” polishing stones with their fingers crossed.
But even Pigs and Cops have a code. Perhaps if they knew something
about freedom and the conscience, but that stuff is so old. Sometimes
I feel like a motherless child in a shoe of standing room only.