Civil War? |
Recent events in Minnesota regarding ICE have provided the latest occasion for commentators to renew their predictions of an impending civil war.
Whether a civil war is genuinely on the horizon, and whether it would be a good or bad thing, are topics that we can put to one side for the moment. There is a more fundamental question that all Americans from across the political spectrum need to ask themselves: If war comes, do I have the ability and the resolve to successfully master the lethal violence that all war entails?
Your average citizen, if honest, would have to reply to this question with a resounding no. This is especially so with respect to the chatterers and scribblers in the media who tirelessly talk about a new civil war, a war in the streets of the United States. There are reasons for this.
Long ago, Aristotle distinguished “hexis” from “techne.” The latter refers to techniques or skills necessary for the production of the goods of a craft (like, say, carpentry). Technical knowledge can be expressed propositionally and, in theory, discerned intellectually by anyone.
Hexis, however, is something else entirely. It is a capacity, a settled disposition, a habit that a person must cultivate over time through practice. Hexis transforms the agent by way of constituting, or reconstituting, his character. It is second nature: Unlike techne, hexis pertains to a person’s identity, not to his actions, to who he is, not to what he does.
Crucially, hexis is embodied intelligence. A person with a formed capacity knows, subconsciously, not just what to do but how to do whatever it........