Citation

Mace R. Evol. Hum. Sci. 2023; 5: e1.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Cambridge University Press)

DOI

10.1017/ehs.2022.60

PMID

37587947

PMCID

PMC10426001

Abstract

One of the most interesting emails I received this year was from Masanori Kakaota, a philosophy researcher at Hiroshima University, asking if I was the granddaughter of the moral philosopher turned psychologist C. A. Mace (1894-1971), to which the answer was yes. Rather implausibly, it seems that a somewhat forgotten collection of what appears to be the contents of my grandfather's study was purchased by the state of Japan (a country he never visited to my knowledge). I am delighted to learn that a collection of his published and unpublished work is in a university library, although the reason it went to Hiroshima University is not known to any extant members of my family nor indeed to Hiroshima University. However, one point of interest Masanori has in my grandfather is his pacifism. He found in the Hiroshima collection his first academic writing - an unpublished speech on conscience given when he was a student at Queen's College Cambridge in 1916, shortly before his arrest for disobeying orders to fight (his appeal on grounds of conscientious objection was rejected and he was sentenced to prison with hard labour). This email correspondence alerted me to the college magazine my grandfather was editing at the time. Apart from the occasional comment that there were no longer enough rowers to fill the college eight, the rest of the magazine had become basically a list of obituaries of all his fellow students and teachers who had been killed in the war. Most were so young there was little to be said about their short lives other than that they had fought bravely. I am reminded that none of his three sisters ever married, as, after World War I, the shortage of men in their age group was so extreme. In this foray into my family history, I could not help but draw parallels between what happened to his generation and what is happening now in Ukraine, where tens of thousands are dying in not dissimilar circumstances. Of all the disasters occurring this year, a war on the edge of Europe is the most unexpected.

Our woes are trivial compared with those freezing, imprisoned or dying in war. Nonetheless, here in the UK there is a growing feeling that things are falling apart a bit...

Language: en