We Are Who We Are

     Before Winston Churchill became a global phenomenon and was instrumental in helping the Allies defeat Germany as well as becoming a bulwark against the Soviet threat, he was a member of the British Parliament, as well as a cabinet officer...AND a prolific writer. Needless to say, he was one of the seminal figures of the 20th century. For me, one of his more famous quotes, while not really original, was "The story of the human race, is war." He was echoing many historians/philosophers before him like the pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher Heraclitus who went even further by saying "War is the father of all things." I got to thinking about these somewhat melancholy and slightly depressing things when I realized that the two wars at the forefront of news and conversation lately, Israel/Hamas and Russia/Ukraine, could go on for a long time. In fact, one could make the argument that both conflicts have been ongoing for decades, if not centuries, with just a few timeouts interspersed here and there. We are who we are.

    Now, because I'm a dork, I decided to do a little research and see if there were other armed conflicts going on around the world that I might be unfamiliar with. What did you find out, Boss? Well, my little killing machine, there are many. Without reciting the lineups throughout the world, we'll just divvy up the various regions. These are the number of armed conflicts (not just shouting matches) that a European think tank called the Geneva Academy is keeping track of on a constant basis: The Middle East and North Africa - more than 45; Africa - more than 35; Asia - 21; Europe - 7; Latin America - 6. As you can see, we are a warring species. We are who we are.

    Now, you might look at this list and say, "But Peter, notice there aren't any active conflicts in Western Europe or North America. We're the civilized ones." I'll grant you that. And to be fair, I would venture to guess that North America has been one of the most, if not the most, peaceful regions on the planet for a while now. Maybe we are just a tad better at heeding Abraham Lincoln’s advice to always try and call upon the “better angels of our nature”. Or, maybe, some societies are simply incapable of accessing those better angels. However, I’ll leave that question to people much smarter than I am. But just to give two examples of other possibilities: 1) During the height of the anti-Jewish protests AFTER Israel was attacked and their civilian population was raped, sodomized, and then murdered...things could have gotten really ugly here in the US. And in some places it did get a little crazy; maybe not full blown, grab your Uzi, crazy...but trust me, it was bad. I was there. To my slight embarrassment, I did my share of yelling, insulting, and getting caught up in the incivility of it all: 2) The riots after the George Floyd murder. While it didn't reach the heights of 1968 and Watts, and other cities at the time, it was bad and it could have gotten a lot worse. I mean, I'll never understand people torching businesses owned by the very people they are supposedly fighting/marching for, but that's just me.

    My point is that even though there might be a little more civility here, we also often teeter on the edge of becoming a part of those numbers I quoted above from the Geneva Academy. In case you forgot, it has happened here; the bloodiest war we ever fought in was the one right here on our own soil...against each other. Which led me to thinking about, with the help of Victor Davis Hanson, the wars that actually destroyed whole civilizations, sometimes overnight. Hanson is a Classicist/Historian who teaches at Stanford University and wears his genius ever so lightly. Which means that he can write and teach so that dopes like me can understand. And in his latest must-read work, The End of Everything; How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic Books), Hanson reminds me of what I learned in college from the great Dr. James Cameron; that the lessons of the past can be incredibly relevant to what we experience today. 

    I'm not here to critique the book, but just to remind anyone who might be interested, how we should learn from what went on before. Hanson's narrative focuses on four civilization-altering conflicts (and by "altering" I mean destroying). Yes, dear reader, entire civilizations...gone; in the blink of an historical eye. First, it's Alexander The Great's destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C.; then there’s Scipio Aemilianus's annihilation of Carthage in 146 B.C.; next up is Sultan Mehmet II's utter conquest of Constantinople on "Black Tuesday," May 29, 1453 (that's right kids, ONE DAY!); and finally it’s Hernan Cortes's siege and subsequent removing from the face of the earth the city of Tenochtitlan, which was the seat of the great Aztec empire, in 1521. 

    Hanson's narrative reminded me once again there are many ways in which a city, or people, or an entire civilization, can just vanish. Nature can do it, and she does it well, but that's not what we're talking about; nor does he focus on genocides, pogroms, and exterminations that we have become all too familiar with and that have punctuated mankind's adventure regularly since the dawn of civilization. He doesn't even discuss the mind-numbing, industrialized slaughter of our age...20 million killed in the First World War or the seventy-some million who perished in the Second. And if I may presume to speak for Professor Hanson, it almost feels like his main points in each of these vignettes are admonitory. He's trying to tell us that "how civilizations disappear" (which is the title of his introduction) is not just of interest to history geeks like me. It's just as pertinent to everyone now in the 21st century. We should be reminded of the "naivete" of past civilizations and their leaders. "The continual disappearance of prior cultures," Hanson writes, "should warn us that even familiar twenty-first century states can become as fragile as their ancient counterparts, given that the arts of destruction march in tandem with improvements in defense."

    I think, sometimes, we get a little comfortable with our place in the universe. It's difficult for us to heed warnings like the ones Hanson is giving us. I get it. We are quite rich and quite comfortable. How could it all just be obliterated into oblivion? I'm reminded of the great conversation in Ernest Hemmingway's novel The Sun Also Rises. "How did you go bankrupt?" one character asks another. "Two ways," he replied. "Gradually, then suddenly." It's funny how life works that way...for individuals and even for civilizations. Gradually…then suddenly. One major lesson in these episodes concerns the suddenness and speed of the apocalypse. And it can be frighteningly unexpected. 

    The second main lesson, I think, has to do with human nature. The more things change and improve as far as our technology is concerned, the more human nature stays the same. We seem eternally gullible and indeed, ignorant about the intent, hatred, ruthlessness, and capability of those who wish to do us harm. As I said before, we are affluent and we have much leisure time which makes it easy to retreat to nonchalance and a certain naivete. We talk about, and at times, assume we are part of a global village or global community. Please, just stop. We are not a village, let alone a community. A community presupposes common values, mores, and political belief systems. Does anyone think that the majority of nations share our values, mores, or political belief system? Have you glanced at the daily machinations of the United Nations, lately? I didn't think so. I mean, we grow more and more interconnected, and our world grows increasingly more vulnerable and dangerous. Why? Because the margins of human error and misunderstanding shrink exponentially - from Ukraine to Taiwan and back to the Middle East. 

    Hubris is also one of Hanson’s main thoughts throughout the book and is a central part of his argument, in which he says, "We should remember that the world wars of the last century likely took more human life than all armed conflicts combined since the dawn of Western civilization twenty-five hundred years prior. And they did so with offensive weapons already obsolete, and all too familiar destructive agendas that persist today, unchanged since antiquity. As for the targets of aggression, the old mentalities and delusions that doomed the Thebans, the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, and the Aztecs are also still very much with us, especially the last thoughts of the slaughtered: "It cannot happen here."

    Cormac McCarthy in his war and blood-stained epic Blood Meridian ends with the epigraph, "Clark, who led last year's expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and Univ. of Berkley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a re-examination of a 300,000-year old fossil skull found in the same region earlier showed evidence of having been scalped." We are who we are.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com