War, What is it Good For?* (Absolutely Nothing); Plus, Thoughts on Angels, Lincoln and Schadenfreude

*Edwin Starr’s iconic 1970 anti-war song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztZI2aLQ9Sw

The Angels in the Haggadah

At the Passover Seder, we tell the story of the Jews as slaves in Egypt freed by Pharaoh after Egypt suffers ten increasingly devastating plagues. But Pharaoh changes his mind and orders his army to pursue the Jews to the sea. The sea is parted, the Jews escape, the Egyptians follow, the sea closes in, and the Egyptians drown. The angels in heaven sing in jubilation until God chastises them­­: “You sing songs while my creatures are perishing?”

No schadenfreude allowed in heaven when God’s people are dying! Even if the people dying are enemy soldiers and even if the instrument of their destruction is God himself who parts the sea for the Jews and then closes the sea upon the Egyptians. One can wish for justice as retribution for evil, whether the instrument of retribution is God or fate or man. But justice need not be celebrated.

Lincoln’s Better Angels

In March of 1861, when Lincoln was inaugurated, the Civil War had not yet started. Lincoln ended his inaugural address with a plea to avoid war by calling on “the better angels of our nature.” Those six words end a speech that he was “loath to close,” as if he knew that his only way to prevent the war was to continue speaking in an endless filibuster.

Four years later, after more than a half a million war deaths (in an America with a population of thirty million,) Lincoln gave his second inaugural. Five weeks later, the war was over; one week after the war’s end, Lincoln was assassinated.

The second inaugural is a remarkable speech in its power, its brevity, and its purpose. It is Lincoln’s attempt to give some context to the astounding slaughter of the Civil War, and to give the nation a possible way forward toward peace and reconciliation.

His explanation of why the war started is a model of concise rhetoric:

“Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

But to explain the war’s long and awful slaughter, Lincoln had to reach toward God:

“Both [sides] read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces [meaning slavery]; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.” 

Lincoln also makes clear that slavery was not a sin to be borne solely by the South, but a sin to be shared by all America:

 “…[God] gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came…

Finally, in what I take to be a clear continuity with the first inaugural’s ending words of our “better angels”, Lincoln makes explicit exactly what those better angels would want the country to do. This is the speech’s iconic ending:

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan. To do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

The War in Ukraine and Schadenfreude

I quoted extensively from Lincoln not because I draw any parallels between the Civil War and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nor do I think Lincoln’s words contain any prescription for American policy toward the Ukrainian war, about which people can, will, and do disagree.

Rather, I find Lincoln’s sentiments to be morally prescriptive for Americans.

Lincoln’s words should give us a measure of humility. In fact, in reading my own comments about the war, I’ve concluded I could have used my own few dollops of humility. None of us knows what is to come, and so we cannot know what policy is best. Whatever force rules the future, whether a supreme being or the fateful tides of history, has its own inscrutable path, its own inscrutable purposes.  

Lincoln’s words, together with the Haggadah story about God chastising the angels, should also stop us from celebrating when anyone is killed, including Russian soldiers. We should avoid schadenfreude at the loss of any life.  Instead, we should hope, and pray, that the war will end as soon as possible with as much justice as possible prevailing.

It’s not an easy task to self-rebel against our instinct for schadenfreude. Spend two minutes flipping through the pages of the NY Post, and I bet, like me, the unbidden feeling of schadenfreude will come over you multiple times. But taking pleasure in the pain of others is a corrosive and unhelpful emotion. It’s the flip side of envy. And like envy, it’s a bad investment of emotional capital.

If we have ‘better angels,” then by definition we have to have worse ones as well. Maybe if we address the worse ones, the better ones will take care of themselves.