The Greatest Generation.

I was in an upper-division English class the other day, talking about Heidegger and Derrida, signifiers and signifieds, and thinking to myself, This Is Hogwash.  I sometimes lose patience with so many abstractions.  I tend to sympathize with Alma, when he’s talking about the palpable benefits of applying Christ’s teachings:  “O then, is not this real?  I say unto you, Yea, because it is light; and whatsoever is light, is good, because it is discernible” (Alma 32:35).  Essentially, he’s saying, I can tell this gospel makes my life better.  That’s my analysis.

Now, don’t get me wrong:  it’s probably important that someone examine what qualifies as reality.  But it’s an activity (I guess we could call it philosophy) for people and societies that are prosperous and secure enough to have the leisure time to dissect and criticize the world they live in and wonder how it could be better.   However, when a society is under duress, it focuses on survival, and reverts back to its instinctive, traditional, core values– the ones that produced all that prosperity and security in the first place.

This is the story of the war chapters in Alma.  Nephite civilization has been healthy and rich long enough for people to get bored.  They try and come up with new ways to look at the world– through the eyes of Rameumptomism, for example, or monarch imposition.  Many decide to try out the Lamanite lifestyle, like Amalickiah.  When these experiments threaten the stability of the nation as a whole, the old values gain new currency as the remedy  to society’s ills.  God, religion, freedom, peace, family (Alma 46:12).  Of course some will call this fascism.  And there certainly can be excesses to “subjecting [people] to peace and democracy,” without question.  But there is a definite benefit to this reinforcement of national identity, it’s like there’s a magic to it.  It’s apple pie and Clint Eastwood.  Mormon records that “there never was a happier time among the people of Nephi, since the days of Nephi, than in the days of Moroni, yea, even at this time, in the twenty and first year of the reign of the judges.”  They were at war!  And yet they were happy.

Reading this, I can’t help but think of the World War II generation of Americans.  I wasn’t around to see World War II, but it certainly has an aura of magic about it: the whole country united against a clear external threat, bound together by their great common American legacy.  Now, I’m certain that both the popular perception of WWII and Mormon’s description of Captain Moroni’s War have been given some heavy romanticizing soft-lens treatment.  Moroni even mentions that although the afflictions humbled some people, “many had become hardened, because of the exceedingly great length of the war” (Alma 62:41).  There’s no doubt that, in the immortal words of Sherman, War is Hell.  But perhaps precisely because of that, it seems to expose to a society its heart and demand that they decide what their life is really all about.  And so I can’t help but wonder, whenever I hear about interpretive indeterminacy or epistemological crises, Are We Missing Out On What’s Really Important Here?