Church Times

Then as He went out of the temple, one of His disciples said to Him, “Teacher, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here!” And Jesus answered and said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone shall be left upon another, that shall not be thrown down.” Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked Him privately, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign when all these things will be fulfilled?” And Jesus, answering them, began to say: “Take heed that no one deceives you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am He,’ and will deceive many. But when you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be troubled; for such things must happen, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be earthquakes in various places, and there will be famines and troubles. These are the beginnings of sorrows.
Mark 13:1-8

“Then the devil, taking Him up on a high mountain, showed Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said to Him, “All this authority I will give You, and their glory; for this has been delivered to me, and I give it to whomever I wish. Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours.” And Jesus answered and said to him, “Get behind Me, Satan! For it is written, ‘You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.’”
Luke 4:5-8

“What king, going to make war against another king, does not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks conditions of peace.
Luke 14:31-32

One of my first articles in the Church Times,

Church Times Day 693

had to do with the morality of war. That article was published on Day 693, Today is 1475 (December 4, 2011). So that article would have gone out about October 12, 2009. The WWIII invasion of America had just subsided. With the Hungarians out of Canada, President Frost had no where to fight, so we were doing a training war. In Malaysia. Two plus years and two more invasions later, it does seem like a kind of dream, an artifact of a long-forgotten past.

But in fact, it was at precisely that time that the eUSA started going off the rails. Far from tending to our business, far from building our strength so that the nation could recover and defend itself, the eUSA government launched a long-term offensive in Asia that only ended with the onset of V2. At the time, the thought was that America's defenses could only be assured by cheap iron. The eUSA joined the TERRA alliance and committed itself, not to an endless succession of training wars, but a seemingly endless cycle of invasion and counter-invasion. It has never been the same since. Here is what I wrote, back then:

“We cannot, therefore, help but point out that this excludes the chauvinistic, militarist tone we sometimes find here in the eUSA. A warrior culture is growing up in our midst, a culture that is not merely unChristian; it is at times barbaric.”



Many of today's eUSA elite were either very young, or not even born yet. But this became the culture in which they were raised, selected from the many, encouraged or discouraged. As the real Plato wrote in the Republic:

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“And may we not say, Adeimantus, that the most gifted minds, when they are ill-educated, become pre-eminently bad? Do not great crimes and the spirit of pure evil spring out of a fulness of nature ruined by education rather than from any inferiority, whereas weak natures are scarcely capable of any very great good or very great evil?
There I think that you are right.

And our philosopher follows the same analogy — he is like a plant which, having proper nurture, must necessarily grow and mature into all virtue, but, if sown and planted in an alien soil, becomes the most noxious of all weeds, unless he be preserved by some divine power. Do you really think, as people so often say, that our youth are corrupted by Sophists, or that private teachers of the art corrupt them in any degree worth speaking of? Are not the public who say these things the greatest of all Sophists? And do they not educate to perfection young and old, men and women alike, and fashion them after their own hearts?

And thus it was that this “greatest generation”, those who gained an unexpected victory in WWIII, who stole triumph from the jaws of defeat, educated the young in the very path that had nearly brought them to ruin, in the path of vengeance and idolatry and pride and corruption.

In the Republic, Socrates speaks of how democracy emerges from oligarchy when the excess of wealth and inequality triggers a social revolution. But it is tyranny that emerges from democracy due to an excess of freedom. In order to avoid anarchy, the people put their trust in a Protector. At first, this Fuehrer type does well and is popular, but then...

“The tale is that he who has tasted the entrails of a single human victim minced up with the entrails of other victims is destined to become a wolf. Did you never hear it?”

“Oh, yes.”

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“And the protector of the people is like him; having a mob entirely at his disposal, he is not restrained from shedding the blood of kinsmen; by the favourite method of false accusation he brings them into court and murders them, making the life of man to disappear, and with unholy tongue and lips tasting the blood of his fellow citizen; some he kills and others he banishes, at the same time hinting at the abolition of debts and partition of lands: and after this, what will be his destiny? Must he not either perish at the hands of his enemies, or from being a man become a wolf — that is, a tyrant?”

and how does this leader behave abroad ? Well, Socrates continues:

“But when he has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. “
“Has he not also another object, which is that they may be impoverished by payment of taxes, and thus compelled to devote themselves to their daily wants and therefore less likely to conspire against him? “

“Clearly.”

“And if any of them are suspected by him of having notions of freedom, and of resistance to his authority, he will have a good pretext for destroying them by placing them at the mercy of the enemy; and for all these reasons the tyrant must be always getting up a war.”

“He must. “

“Now he begins to grow unpopular. “

“A necessary result. “



This then, is the dilemma we face. While oligarchy is no bed of roses, in the eUSA we hover between oligarchy and tyranny, not able to choose between one or the other, never quite secure enough to be free, to take the chances required to be a real democracy, a state that it capable of living in peace and stability. And our leaders take advantage of this insecurity, like little rotating tyrants, by placing us in the midst of New World conflict. Training wars ? An historical anomaly. National self-determination ? Not even a consideration.

Now, Plato's writings assume that the nature of man is the nature of the state, so that unjust men and women cannot form a just city, much less create a just world order. I have to say that I'm disappointed and indeed offended that the players of this game, and specifically eAmericans, do not have any better sense of themselves than to devolve to the tyranny and wolfishness that represents the worst in man. When I wrote that article two years ago, I was beginning to stake out my ground, intellectually and politically. Now I see that not only was this true, but it was necessary.

I'll end on a personal note. In other browser games, specifically in CyberNations, and Tribal Wars, I've brought in personae from my family history. In CN, I'm my great grandfather, back in a small German principality, risen from a family of blacksmiths to become prime minister, both a man of the people and a creature of his culture. My Tribal Wars persona was even more fetching – one of my French Huguenot ancestors, driven out of France by Louis XIV, a true refugee, noble, penniless, seeking a new home. In this game, as Sam Seabury, I've found the greatest of all challenges. Many people assume that personification (what you all call “roleplaying”) is just window dressing, and what matters is the culture of the game itself. I contend that without playing one's role with integrity, the game itself becomes the tyrant, imposing its values through the emergent “game culture” - a culture that is sadly marred by the barbarism of first-person-shooter clans and Mafia Wars and other such grotesque constructions. But it doesn't have to be that way, always or everywhere. It is not that one need dream of the universal application of Kant's Categorical Imperative (I've never taken that position) or the human perfectability implied by More's Utopia (what, one might wonder, would be the game mechanic for that ??). The lesson Jesus teaches his disciples in Mark 13 and Luke 14 is simply this – the game is only “worth it” if you are all in. War, famine, hard time and distress, all those things are part of real life, and any game that mimics real life will have these as part of its story. These things come and go, but they don't have to damage your spirit, they don't have to make you into less of a human being, into a wolfman that preys on others.

Here endeth the lesson.