KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 7 November
Ye are my friends
This week brings us to Remembrance Day, always a remarkable part of the educational programme of the School. The largest team that any of you will ever be on is the Cadet Corps. It is the School as a corps, a body, a living body, and not a corpse, a dead body, I hasten to add! Though, to be honest, that partly depends on all of you stepping up and keeping in step with one another; in short, honouring and respecting one another as part of something bigger than yourselves, a community defined by certain principles and ideals. In a way, the corps is the School on parade.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the armistice that finally ended the Great War. It is so significant that November 11th marks our remembrance of the Second World War as well, itself a continuation in many ways of the first. There is something powerful and arresting about the First World War that remains with us and rightly disturbs us as imparting the legacy of something profoundly disquieting about ourselves. We are only beginning to begin to come to terms with the horror and the evil of our humanity. There was something cataclysmic about the First World War which I fear we still struggle to comprehend and have yet to understand fully let alone from which to begin to learn.
Remembrance Day is not about the glorification of war. The Great War, after all, unleashed a wealth of literature, poem after poem, novel after novel, that is profoundly anti-war, opposed in a deep and fundamental sense to the glorification of war. That we should have to be reminded of this points to a deep forgetting and a profound literary ignorance if not insouciance in our contemporary culture, as if we were above and beyond such things, superior and better than those who have gone before us. I fear the arrogance of a progressivism that is so convinced of its own self-righteousness and so oblivious of its own hypocrisy especially in the face of the atrocities of our own times.
Remembrance Day is a sober remembrance of the senselessness and the madness that our humanity in its disarray and evil is capable of unleashing against one another and against our world. It forces us to look within, to look at the evil of our own hearts and to realize with a fall of own hearts that we are not very different from those who have gone before us. Even more, it should provide some critical self-reflection about our technocratic exuberance that instead of providing the solution are simply part of the problem. It is that possibility of a deeper thoughtfulness that is the most necessary and significant feature of our Remembrance Day observances.
