111. THE FOG OF WAR - Student Questions Arising From The Situation In Ukraine
Being a philosophy teacher I am often asked big questions by my students. Things like “what do you think the meaning of life is?”, “do you think there’s a God?”, or “what’s the actual point of doing philosophy, sir?” You become a sort of go-to sounding board for any issues of significance going on in your students’ lives. “Do you think the new ban on mobile phones is ethical?”, “why can’t we wear coats indoors?”, “how come I’m not allowed to steal but you’re allowed to confiscate my stuff?”
This week, understandably, I have been asked a lot of questions about the ongoing situation in Ukraine.
Questions have ranged from the linguistic - “is it a war, or an invasion, sir? And what’s the difference?” - to the fiercely practical: “if a student here is Ukrainian, should they drop everything and go back to Ukraine to defend it from Russia?” There have been questions of strategy - “why aren’t we bombing Russia?”, “are the sanctions working?” - to more nuanced questions about ethics - “if the bad guy is Putin, won’t the sanctions just hurt normal Russian people and not Putin? Is it right to punish innocent people for the crimes of their leaders?” And there have been questions of rights and responsibilities: “why did we let Putin get to this point? Shouldn’t we have intervened sooner, even if it meant striking first or limiting a sovereign state’s power?” “If I accidentally share propaganda and misinformation on social media, am I a bad person? How much responsibility do I have to check out the truth of what I am sharing?”
Less philosophical and more practical have been the questions about whether this marks the start of World War 3, and the more common question: “what can we do?”
The sense of helplessness is palpable. Sure, we can raise money and send aid, but we all know this is not stopping the war, only treating the symptoms of war. As much as we might raise, we will not bring a single innocent person killed in this conflict back from the dead. We will not stabilise the world order shown so clearly to be far more fragile than many of our students had realised. This week alone we had a near miss at a nuclear power plant alongside Putin’s readying Russian’s own nuclear deterrent. Having lived through the pathetic protections schools offered recently for the COVID 19 pandemic, I am reminded of the even worse guidance schools once taught on surviving a nuclear attack and wonder how long before “duck and cover” becomes part of our curriculum?
The more critical questions are coming to me too. Some students are just as aware as other media critics have been of the potentially racist framing of the current conflict. White people in trouble. “People like us” dying and fleeing the terror given a sympathy and compassion that darker skinned victims of other conflicts have not previously been offered. Will Ukrainian refugees be treated the same way we treated Syrians fleeing their own war zones, or will they be welcomed? When Israel was attacking Palestinian land last year students were banned in some schools from showing support or solidarity with Palestinian victims. Fundraising was deemed too political to allow. In this conflict, however, it is the teachers asking just as much as the students that we must do something. Assemblies and PSHE lessons are addressing the invasion, with clear lines drawn between the good guys and the bad guys, and Red Cross and DEC campaigns are shared, whereas similar attempts at educating on Israel/Palestine were declared too controversial for schools. Indeed, it was only a few weeks ago that the Department for Education released new guidance for schools on “political impartiality”, suggesting that recent historical events “which are particularly contentious and disputed” like those “related to empire and imperialism” need to be taught “in a balanced manner”. It is hard to imagine that the compassionate safeguarding discussions that have arisen around students of Ukrainian descent considering returning home to fight would have quite the same sympathetic tone were it May of last year and the students Palestinian instead. Or if the students were Russian instead of from Ukraine?
I suppose all these questions boil down to the more abstract question asked at this week’s Philosophy Club: “is it possible to be a good person?” What all of these inquiries amount to is the same thing - a struggle to do, say, think the right thing about a situation so self-evidently awful and yet also self-evidently so complicated. While it might be simple to condemn Russia in the abstract, when we try to transform that condemnation into something tangible that might actually save Ukrainian lives we are left having to strike a balance between restoring peace and escalating the conflict, as well as being consistent with all our previous moral stances on similar invasions. No one wants to accidentally advocate the move that lights the touch-paper on another world war. No one wants to do nothing, but no one also wants to do the wrong thing. We are all participants in Philippa Foot’s infamous “trolley problem”, seeing a train hurtling towards all those innocent people but not knowing for sure whether or not we should grab the lever and pull. We want to know as much about the lever as we can before doing anything. Who the people on each train track are. The likelihood of any more trains coming along afterwards or there being more people further down the tracks. We all want to be the “good” person, but we struggle both to define what we mean by “good” and, once defined, what actually constitutes achieving such “goodness”.
Being a philosophy teacher I am often asked big questions by my students. But this week more than others, I am finding it difficult to find the answers.
Author: DaN McKee
My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE and from all good booksellers. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com