War & Peace Quote by Peter Singer

Singer’s joke lands because it punctures a modern fantasy: that faster information automatically equals greater agency. By imagining “ancient recipients of instant news,” he smuggles a very contemporary assumption into an obviously incompatible world. Yes, Xerxes could get a push notification from the front lines. No, that wouldn’t compress the brute logistics of empire. Armies still have to eat, march, and coordinate; ships still move at the speed of wind; political authority still travels through couriers, rituals, and fear. The punchline is basically a shrug at techno-utopianism, delivered with a philosopher’s deadpan.

The Xerxes detail is doing heavy lifting. Singer picks a figure synonymous with scale, ambition, and sluggish imperial machinery. “Three months to get his army together” reads like a deliberately mundane fact amid epic history, which is precisely the point: information is the glamorous part of the story; mobilization is the unsexy bottleneck. “He might not get home for years” adds a second constraint: distance and time don’t just slow decisions, they reshape lives and outcomes. Instant news can’t give you back the calendar.

Contextually, this fits Singer’s broader ethical project: separating what feels morally urgent from what materially changes our capacity to act. If even an emperor can be informationally rich but operationally trapped, the subtext is a warning for us: don’t confuse awareness with responsibility discharged. Instant knowledge can intensify anxiety and moral pressure, but it doesn’t automatically build the institutions, coordination, or will needed to respond.