Michael Salter’s article on masculinity and the Anzac story asks important questions of the Anzac story in the Australian consciousness. He paints a compelling story of how militarism threatens to taint both the traditions of Anzac and modern Australian masculinity.

Salter points to William James’ calls for a “moral equivalent of war”. James sought a way to inspire young people to commit to their shared sense of duty without needing to rely on militarism and a general affection for war. It’s crucial, James believed, to provide a social narrative that drives citizens beyond the selfish “pleasure economy” wherein we forget tradition, civic duty and our responsibility to the community.

In today’s Australia, the Anzac story is a crucial aspect of that narrative.

James described the military character as a “pure piece of perfection”. It’s pretty easy to see echoes of this idea in the modern image of the Digger – sacrificial, loyal, hardy, well-humoured, and courageous. Everything a good Australian should be.

The problem is when this story cannot be separated from the military context – when the virtues of the warrior lead us to believe war itself is virtuous and intrinsically worthwhile. That’s what James (and Salter) mean by ‘militarism’ – the mentality that war is good because it teaches virtue.

It’s the threat of militarism that led James to call for a moral equivalent of war. Salter points to the difficult tension for a society that rallies around military stories and figures while also facing an epidemic of (male) violence against women. Is the threat of militarism too great for the Anzac ethos to overcome?

William James described the military character as a “pure piece of perfection”.

I’m not convinced. I think it makes a good case for expanding the kinds of stories we listen to in silent contemplation on Anzac Day, but it doesn’t follow the need to do away with the story altogether.

What we might need to do is counterbalance our social interest in the virtue and nobility of the warrior character (including, dare we say, the warrior ethos that lived in Australia for 40,000 or so years before Anzac) with some honest reflections about the reality of war.

A study compiled by McCrindle Research in 2015 – which Salter also cited – suggests more than a third of Australian men would sign up to a war equivalent to WWI if it occurred today. That should be concerning – for most nations involved in the conflict the ethical justifications are hazy. Just war theorist Nicholas Fotion says, “of the major powers to enter the war in 1914, Britain is the only one that does not constitute a difficult case”.

Given this, there is good reason to believe many Australians are confusing the always tragic, sometimes necessary ethics of just war theory with the idea that participating in war is always virtuous. Do they need to stop being taught about war or do they need to be informed of its tragic reality?

Perhaps we’ve remembered the valour of soldiers from decades ago while overlooking the testimony of many of Australia’s modern Anzacs.

According to some reports, former US President Theodore Roosevelt hoped his sons might lose a limb in war as a mark of valour. This militarism though, disappears somewhat from his later letters after his sons were injured. Although he still believes his sons fought with valour, he is more circumspect than what he may have been earlier.

And this presents us with a possible solution – to broaden our war stories to include the horror and suffering it inflicts alongside our praise for the valour and sacrifice of the Anzacs.

Perhaps we’ve remembered the valour of soldiers from decades ago while overlooking the testimony of many of Australia’s modern Anzacs. Those whose character has been profoundly affected by war in ways William James never imagined – PTSD, traumatic brain injury, homelessness, substance abuse, unemployment, family breakdown – also need to be thought of and reflected upon.

If the readiness to use force when necessary is indeed a virtue, it needs to incorporate a full understanding of the personal and moral costs of violence.

This serves the intended purpose of Anzac – to bear silent witness to the sacrifices of Australian military men and women. As an added bonus, it might counteract the rampant militarism James feared – and which might be infecting us more than we know.

It is not Paris we should pray for. It is the world.

Those are the opening lines of a poem by Karuna Ezara Parikh, a poet from New Delhi, whose poem went viral after terrorism attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad.

The poem reflects a growing tradition in which people’s personal responses to tragic events is subjected to moral scrutiny. In response to online movements of solidarity such as #Prayers4Paris and #JeSuisParis emerged #PrayfortheEntireWorld and#PrayforLebanon.

These response movements censure those whose concerns about global terrorism are limited to Paris. At best they charge people with insensitivity, at worst outright racism. And not without some cause. Facebook, for instance, have not enabled a filter to show solidarity with Lebanon – nor was the Safety Check feature enabled for those in Beirut as it was for those in Paris.

It prompted New Matilda to ask (or perhaps more accurately, accuse):

How do we explain our identification with French suffering and our apparent indifference to Lebanese suffering? Or more to the point, how do we explain our indifference to the suffering of people we perceive as different, Lebanese, African, Hazara, Muslim … Brown people.

I’ve been thinking about Paris more than I have Beirut. I don’t believe that makes me racist, indifferent, or insensitive.

I have not prioritised some victims of terrorism over others. Victims of murder are always and everywhere the victims of one of humanity’s deepest horrors – their very right to life has been torn away. In this tragedy, they are all equals.

Those who ISIS murdered in Beirut are no more or less important than those in Paris. Or in Mosul, Baghdad, or anywhere else for that matter – not ethically, nor to me personally. But it doesn’t follow from this that I ought to allocate equal sorrow, grief or reflection to each incident.

It may not even be possible.

Scottish philosopher David Hume believed morality was based in sympathy – the ability to understand and share in the experiences of another person. Morally good people are, Hume argued, pleased when someone experiences something good and saddened when someone else suffers.

But all of this is grounded in our ability to know and understand how another person is feeling. We are more readily able to imagine and thereby sympathise with the familiar. We are better at knowing how our family feel than we are a total stranger.

I’ve been to Paris – I’ve walked the streets, smelled the air, and been among its people. I was there on my honeymoon. My wife and I dined in restaurants, drank in bars, and wandered the streets around Rue de Voltaire – just like those who were slaughtered last Friday.

ISIS didn’t just attack today’s Paris. They attacked the Paris of Les Misérables, A Tale of Two Cities, and Hemingway.

When my heart breaks for Paris it breaks because I know the streets that are stained with blood more intimately than I do the markets of Beirut or the mosques of Baghdad. Others whose heritage, reading or travels are different may connect more with Baghdad or Beirut. Or Japan, Mexico or any of the countless places in the world where innocent people suffer.

Of course, not everyone mourning for or expressing solidarity with Paris has visited France before. Perhaps the charge of racism still applies. Do Westerners more readily empathise with the experience of white people? Not necessarily.

Paris has always held a special place in the Western imagination. It sits alongside Rome and Athens as definitive of Europe and the West. This is precisely why ISIS chose it as a target. Terrorism speaks in symbols, and Paris is precisely that. ISIS called it the “capital of prostitution and obscenity” but Paris is more than that – it’s an icon of Western secularism, humanism and indeed, decadence.

ISIS didn’t just attack today’s Paris. They attacked the Paris of Les Miserables, A Tale of Two Cities and Hemingway. Put simply, Paris was attacked because it matters more than most other places to the West. Terrorism aims to hit our imaginations, so ISIS struck a city that captures it more than most.

The other reason Paris strikes us more deeply is because it brings the threat of terrorism closer to home. Although every Western nation has been exposed to Islamic extremism in its own way, we continue to believe attacks on our own soil to be the unlikely exception. Statistically, they are, but attacks in places such as Boston, Paris, or New York make the risks of terrorism tangible in a way similar attacks in Baghdad, Beirut, or Nigeria do not.

This is because Western nations have, since the Enlightenment, eschewed the type of ideological extremism that generates the violence that defines ISIS and other groups. We have led ourselves to believe religiously motivated violence is an artefact of history in secular societies. In other parts of the world where the norms of secularism don’t apply, we understand such violence to be possible – but not here.

Western nations have, since the Enlightenment, eschewed the type of ideological extremism that generates the violence that defines ISIS and other groups.

Thus we are not only shocked or sorrowed by attacks in Paris, we are afraid. And so we counteract our fear with movements of solidarity, resolve and a reaffirmation of our values. That’s not racism.

With all that said, it is right that people remind us of horrors elsewhere in the world. By expanding our imaginative faculties we can overcome the xenophobia and tribalism on which groups like ISIS rely.

So take a moment for Beirut, for Baghdad – mourn their dead. Think more of those places than Paris if it’s where your thoughts, prayers or heart lies. But don’t shame those who still think of Paris, and don’t feel guilty if you feel the same.