Diatribes of Jay: The Fate of Man

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To foresee a dismal but plausible fate for our species, you need only view this clip of Vladimir Putin high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) at the G-20 Summit. Having flouted the most basic rule of human civilization and every major religion—“thou shalt not kill”—they gloat about it. They do so openly, laughingly, for all the world to see.

It would be hard to imagine a worse place to flaunt thuggery. Along with the EU and the United Nations, the G-20 Summit is a crowning achievement of humanity’s post-war global order. In it, leaders of nations gather to resolve with wisdom and compromise the sort of economic problems that once led to humanity’s most terrible war (so far) and its most horrible genocide, the Holocaust.

There leaders strive to replace Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies [that] clash by night” with Reason and Science, plus a bit of applied math. They work out how to bring about John Stuart Mill’s “greatest good for the greatest number.” And they do so as if they were members of an intelligent species.

But Putin and MBS don’t seek to rule by Reason, compromise or consensus, far less general utility. Instead, they rule by force, fear and murder. Their methods scream out from the broken bodies of children and the rubble of schools and hospitals in Syria, Eastern Ukraine and Yemen.

Nor are they content to rule by collective violence, our species’ ancient scourge. The nations they lead deal in murder at retail, too. The Skirpals, father and daughter, fell by the Soviet nerve agent Novichok, right in peaceful England. The killing and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi occurred right inside a peaceful embassy in Turkey.

In Putin’s and Russia’s case, there are many more. There’s Boris Nemtsov, a promising liberal pol—Russia’s Sherrod Brown or John Kasich—cut down by gunfire not far from the Kremlin, just as a big truck passed between him and the closest surveillance camera. There’s journalist Anna Politkovskaya, shot in her building’s elevator after reporting fairly on the Second Chechen War. There’s Alexander Litvinenko, a double agent, murdered in peaceful London by poisoning with radioactive polonium.

And these are only the most sensational examples. Wikipedia tallies 165 individual journalists murdered in Russia since 1993. At least 98 died since Putin took the reins of power in 2000.

It would be hard to imagine a greater insult to human civilization than these two thugs high-fiving each other at the G-20. Perhaps you could take all the Nobel Prizes in economics ever awarded and drown them—or their recipients!—in a pool of blood. That’s the kind of insult to the waning values of the Western Enlightenment that we see frequently in the news today.

It’s hard to know precisely what the two thugs were celebrating. It’s unlikely they were gloating over the murders themselves. To them, the men killed were mere pawns. Much more likely, they were gloating over getting away with the murders and their noxious, unnecessary wars. They were two schoolboys making mischief under a weak headmaster.

And who was the weak headmaster? Our own president, of course.

Trump’s moral vacancy, his transactional approach to every crime (including his own), his evaluating everything by his own personal aggrandizement, and his own thuggish tendencies have given a green light to thugs here at home and around the world. It’s not just the white-supremacists and anti-Semites in Charlottesville and Pittsburgh. It’s not just Putin and MBS. It’s Turkey’s Erdogan, Egypt’s El-Sisi, Hungary’s Orban, the Philippines’ Duterte, Poland’s Morawiecki, and, most recently, Brazil’s Bolsonaro. The greatest irony was Erdogan, who has jailed and killed thousands himself in the aftermath of the attempted coup against him, pointing the finger at MBS for presumably ordering a single journalist’s death.

Thuggish leaders are rising like poisonous mushrooms from the forest floor, or like hideous demons in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. If this trend continues, God only knows what life on our planet will be like in a century.

Global warming will have reduced our liveable land area, destroyed much of our food supply, created constant weather uncertainty even in the most highly developed nations, and forced the greatest mass migration of miserable humanity since the last Ice Age. Our thugs will have small nukes, unimaginable bio-weapons, “designer” soldiers and assassins, and absolutely secret records and communication using quantum principles. Their tools of mayhem and murder will be as far “ahead” of today’s Novichok and radioactive polonium as they are “ahead” of the daggers and hemlock of yore.

So we had better get our moral ducks in line and clean up our species’ act. Otherwise, our new century could throw us all back to a life that is “nasty, brutish and short” for many if not most of us, despite all the promise of today’s science and technology.

The body follows where the head leads. Like our own president, the two high-fiving thugs are leading our species away from rational solutions to the most pressing existential test of our ten-millennium-long human civilization: global warming. Why? Their power to be thuggish rests in large measure on oil and gas and the wealth they bring. What happens to the next two generations as oil and gas run out, the seas rise, the weather turns not just nasty, but deadly, and a huge fraction of current industry becomes stranded assets just as the lights go out is none of their concern.

So what do we do? I can think of only two things. First, we Americans have to get a stricter headmaster, as soon as possible. Educated Republicans have to start thinking hard whether they want themselves, let alone their children and grandchildren, to live in a world where thugs high-five unpunished murders. If it happens at the G-20, it won’t be long before it starts happening at the state legislature and the city council. Monkey see, monkey do.

The second thing we must do is look more to women for leadership. Testosterone-fueled thuggery should not be the Fate of Man. Angela Merkel has kept Reason alive in the industrial heart of Europe, despite pressure from rising joblessness and the greatest mass migration since World War II. Theresa May appears to be eking out a rational and relatively amicable divorce between the UK and the EU, avoiding the horrendous alternative of a no-deal Brexit. And Nancy Pelosi appears likely to take the reins of our American legislative Resistance, with all her accumulated knowledge and experience.

Every one of these women appears to have had goals beyond personal dominance and control. And every one has used democratic and civilized means. In that regard they repeat, on a smaller scale, the immense success of Queen Elizabeth I, who raised England from the darkness of internecine royal warfare to the relative enlightenment of a science-, technology- and business-oriented culture that today dominates the world. Or at least it did until recently.

Our fate as a species is not yet sealed. We do have free will. But unless we use it to change our course, a time of great troubles threatens. If we fail to rise to the challenge of our age—if we use the tools of our technology only to sharpen our thuggery—few born in the latter half of the last century would envy anyone born in this new one.

Endnote: As the title of this post, I purposely chose that of a 1956 Russian novela (“Судьба человека”) by Mikhail Sholokhov. More properly translated “The Fate of a Man,” the title sometimes gets rendered as “The Fate of Man,” implying a more general, allegorical meaning. The story tells the fate of a Russian truck driver and soldier in World War II, who is interned in a German concentration camp, avoids execution by an act of heroism, and ends up alone after the war. His family has been killed, but he adopts a young boy whom he finds in the rubble of war. The novela is known for its keen portrayal of Russian fatalism—an aspect of Russian character that bodes ill for Russia’s development of real democracy. Thugs in high places are well aware of the daily struggle of ordinary people to survive; they exploit it in their thuggery.

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Diatribes of Jay

01 December 2018

The Fate of Man

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