Steven Spielberg’s Moral Equivalent of War
Spielberg’s Disclosure Day believes our humanity can transcend our dark-hearted national security states. Is it right?
I’ve mostly avoided spoilers in what follows. Mostly.
In 1987, Ronald Reagan famously stood before the United Nations and basically wished for an alien invasion:
Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.
International-relations scholars have sometimes used Reagan’s quote—along with the film Independence Day1—as an example of how nations need external threats to come together. One-world government or world peace, the thinking goes, requires humanity to face a common existential threat. The Realist can only imagine international cooperation as a function of self-preservation whereas the Liberal can imagine international cooperation as enlightened self-interest. Both, however, give reason to expect that an existential threat would bring the human race together.
But this has always struck me as quasi-intuitive rubbish.
A “foreign” threat is neither inherently necessary nor sufficient to unite a people—that was my instinct long before writing The Rivalry Peril, a book that proves it. At a philosophical level, imagining an alien invasion for the purposes of a political thought experiment simplistically erases how the world works. It’s the functional equivalent of explaining war or peace with reference to “the state of nature”—an abstraction—rather than the world’s lived history.
This is why I feel conflicted about Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. It subverts the foreign-threat trope—love to see it!—but in sappy ways. An edge-of-your-seat adult thriller burdened by child-like politics. Doing the necessary work of holding up a moral mirror to ourselves in a way that a child might, yet, in so doing, it comes across as far too innocent of the violent domination saturating our world. A child’s idealism is something we should never trample on. It’s to Spielberg’s credit that he’s done quite the opposite both here and throughout his career. But we must also balance what the child doesn’t know with what we do.
The film follows two protagonists. One is a cybersecurity expert who has defected from a dystopian defense-tech firm called Wardex, which spends the movie hunting him down. In the style of Edward Snowden, he’s part of a team that stole government secrets about the existence of extraterrestrial life and plans to release them to the public—“The world deserves to know the truth,” our cyber protagonist says more than once.
The other protagonist, played by Emily Blunt, is a Kansas City TV weather personality with big dreams who turns out to be a crucial bridge between the aliens and our world. The lives of Blunt’s character and the cybersecurity guy are mysteriously entwined in ways that unravel as they approach “disclosure day”—ie, the day the world will learn the truth.
In small ways, you could say Disclosure Day is a mashup of E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and War of the Worlds (the 2005 version)—Spielberg’s other bites at the extraterrestrial apple.
But Disclosure Day feels like Spielberg’s most ambitious film: It wants to morally condemn contemporary militarism and reveal a universal truth about humanity in the process.
To say that this film is Spielberg’s most ambitious, though, is not to say that it will land with audiences. The movie adheres to the adage “Show, don’t tell” to a fault—there’s almost no exposition, you start the movie in medias res, and most scenes are light enough on dialogue that anyone watching with a second screen on will quickly lose the plot. In that sense, Disclosure Day feels (admirably) like a film from the 20th century. A pristine action-thriller-drama that could be studied in film school but that doesn’t quite belong in the era of clipping, ADHD, and Netflix dumb-watching.
Spielberg shows us the antimilitarism of it all by depicting the national security state as villainous—a welcome mainstream shift after decades of copaganda, war porn, and procedurals about the “heroic” exploits of the profoundly anti-democratic FBI. Disclosure Day shows national security contractors to be more influential than the state itself—a collection of power-hoarding zealots hiding the truth from us, for profit. They surveil us without consent. They selectively repress us without accountability. They even grind the gears of humanity toward World War III in the background of the film, as in real life.
Above all, the national security profiteer, armed with the license and funding of the state, imposes a violent us-versus-them frame on the aliens who visit our planet. Grainy found-footage scenes of torture interrogations of aliens show us—or at least our national security states—to be the baddies.
Revealing that human beings are the real threat in a close-encounter scenario is an inversion of the Reagan wish, and a blind spot in the IR conventional wisdom. Some of Spielberg’s child-eye POV comes into play here with an absurd subplot woven throughout the film. We see glimpses of being on the brink of war on the Korean Peninsula (plausible enough), but in a manner that somehow puts civilization on the edge of world war, igniting, in turn, a panic in the US that leads to runs on gas stations and grocery stores. Why? Who knows, but it’s supposed to give stakes: The alien truth is the one thing that can override our mechanical clanking toward global annihilation. The thing that can bind humanity.
But we lived through a real-life North Korean nuclear crisis in 2017—I documented it. Most people couldn’t be bothered to pay attention. Suffice it to say that the geopolitics of Disclosure Day were undercooked, taking away from, rather than adding to, a feeling of stakes.
Still, the greater ambition of Disclosure Day is not its critique of national-security-think; it’s how it proposes to overcome it, with empathy.
A recurring (heavy-handed) theme is that empathy is a superpower. Emily Blunt, who may well snag an Oscar for her performance, uses the gift of super-empathy (bestowed in her by the aliens) to get out of sticky situations ranging from a speeding ticket to a black-site detention center. And the great Colman Domingo, an implausibly outfitted resistance leader (sporting a cardigan in every scene) tells the ends-justify-the-means ringleader of Wardex that empathy is “the foremost evolutionary advantage” that humanity has. “The rejection of this understanding,” he says, “is leading to our extinction.”
It’s hard to disagree with that.
And without spoiling too much, the movie’s crescendo implies that empathy is the only thing that can stop humankind’s self-destruction. But that’s true in the same way that peace is the best way to prevent war; it’s tautological.
What’s both special and inadequate here is that Spielberg is using the only language he knows to share his answer to William James’s eternal challenge to those of us who would struggle for peace. James was a pacifist, pragmatist, and vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League (which is such a dope name that I have a mind to revive it). And in 1910, James published an essay called “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Every antiwar military veteran I know has wrestled with it; that’s also how I came to it a decade ago.
James acknowledged the productive forces that war unleashed. Brotherhood—a gendered solidarity—subsumes the individual into a greater cause that at once feels divine and commands real power. People power. You might even call it socialism. We live for each other, and in so doing we cooperate. The only problem is the war bit—the community and collective action that war generates requires the most dehumanizing activity man can engage in. And so James challenged us to discover the moral equivalent of war. Something must light a fire sufficient to bind us in solidarity but without dehumanizing our fellows.
Every word of James’s essay deserves consideration, but let me share a key passage:
I devoutly believe in the reign of peace and in the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium. The fatalistic view of the war function is to me nonsense…
But I do not believe that peace either ought to be or will be permanent on this globe, unless the states, pacifically organized, preserve some of the old elements of army-discipline. A permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy…
The martial type of character can be bred without war. Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound everywhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree if its imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state…The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as part history has inflamed the military temper.
I don’t know if Spielberg has read James, but Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s unequivocal answer to the moral equivalent of war: Empathy. The issue is scale.
Class consciousness should be the moral equivalent of war, but precious few of us have it. You might say the same about empathy. Empathy really could be the moral equivalent of war, just as Spielberg wishes it to be, if a critical mass of people possessed it. But in the US at least, fully half of the electorate has an explicit politics grounded in rejecting empathy and embracing exclusion.
Liberals are a diverse bunch, but the best of them would have us look inside ourselves for solutions to the world’s crises. That’s necessary but insufficient. Personal reckonings cannot be mutually exclusive with seeing and analyzing the structures that produce our crises. That produce our lack of empathy. The individual, as the unit of analysis, is an insufficient answer to a system-level problem.
Spielberg’s humanism isn’t just asking us to be empathetic; it’s proposing that radical empathy is the path to a better world. I would agree that empathy offers the possibility of redemption for us all. His theory is one I want to believe in, and taken on its own terms, the film gives a zing of hope in favor of it.
But as I walked out of the theater, I recalled that, since October 7, 2023, if not much earlier, Spielberg’s own politics have not exactly lived up to his message. And that raises an uncomfortable question for someone who undoubtedly lives a most comfortable life: What can empathy even mean for a person who does not see power from the standpoint of its victims?
The final word of Disclosure Day is meant to be counsel, “Listen.” But listen to whom?
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I covered Independence Day over on The Bang-Bang Podcast, with guest Morgan Spector. One of our best episodes.
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