Mike Mulvihill
speaker
452 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 27 Jun
Mike Mulvihill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 2.
Appearances
by the U.S., and it's just turned into this great celebration, not just of America, but of America's place in the world and the idea that America is still a place that welcomes the entire world.
I think that's an idea that has a lot of resonance right now.
I'm going to get very lofty and high-minded about this, but I think you, of all people, will appreciate this.
Something that I've been thinking about a lot leading up to the World Cup and these first two weeks of the tournament is
is an essay that was written over 100 years ago by William James, an American philosopher.
And William James would talk about the moral equivalent of war, looking for the moral equivalent of war.
What does he mean by that?
Well, I think what he was saying in that essay was,
was that war, for as horrific as it obviously is, it does bring people together in a unique way.
It brings people together in a spirit of a common purpose, national pride, unity, a common goal.
And it has these qualities that paradoxically are really edifying.
And in James's essay, he writes about looking for something that
gives us an equivalent experience, but without the violence and the chaos and the immorality of war,
And I think 100 years later, what we're seeing, I would suggest, and I'm not the first person to say this, is that sports has become the moral equivalent of war.
The World Cup is the moral equivalent of war.
It's a way for us to engage in those feelings of nationalism, as I say, common goal, shared experience, enthusiasm, passion.
But rather than have it in the context of something that is violent and insane and immoral, it gets expressed in something that is joyful and exuberant and really profound and can actually be kind of beautiful.
And I think we're seeing that in the World Cup.
You're seeing the World Cup as a way for all those things that are sometimes associated with conflict, and they're being expressed in something that is...
incredible and joyful and once in a lifetime.
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