DEC 02, 2019
Horses sporting gas masks.
That, of all things, has been on my mind lately. Bear with me, now. Gaze at the
ever-so-cockamamie photo. A horse, wearing a gas mask. Nothing so
illustrates the rank absurdity and irrationality of the human condition. It was
during World War I—which killed an unheard-of nine million soldiers in just
four years—that the armies of Europe still employed horses in an age of machine
guns, airplanes (eventually), tanks and poison gas attacks. Rather than call a
halt to the inane slaughter in the trenches, the world’s great powers fought
that wildly nationalistic war to its macabre conclusion. One result was horses
in gas masks. That was only a hundred years ago.
As the U.S. government, as
well as far too many Americans, remain fixated on the decidedly minor threat of
Islamist “terrorism,” two actual global existential perils persist and are
hardly addressed. I’m speaking, of course, of nuclear war and man-made, climate-based
catastrophe. Hardly any serious establishment political figure in this country
has taken meaningful action on such grave matters, mind you—busy as they are
either reflexively attacking or defending Trump’s comparably trivial policies
in Ukraine or Syria. Who noticed as the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ticked
the Doomsday Clock a stroke
closer to midnight? Who has commented on the absurd reality that one
of the two major American political parties denies the very existence of
climate change, while the (hardly progressive) Pentagon repeatedly
warns of its reality and profound consequences?
Which brings me back to the
irrational slaughter of the First World War: its philosophical meaning,
consequences, and what it, and a few subsequent events, portends for the fate
of humanity. Were the generals of the era simply dumb for sending waves of
infantrymen into the teeth of machine-gun fire, or did they face the old “wheel
problem?” It took human beings at least tens of thousands of years to even
conceive of the wheel. Seen in this context, the three or so years it took the
generals to develop a combined-arms (tanks + radios + artillery + small unit
infantry maneuver) “solution” to break the stalemate doesn’t seem quite so
awful. Not that many, if not most, senior commanders couldn’t be at times, and
especially early on, obtuse, arrogant and callous.
They and their civilian
political masters ought to have recognized, when around a million soldiers died
in the first five months of war, that as of Dec. 31, 1914, nationalism was
obsolete. Fighting for one’s “country,” the romance of national power, was
essentially—with the advent of efficient machine guns and poison gas—a suicide
pact among each country’s young men. Yet on the war raged, and soon enough, an
even bloodier Second World War broke out. This happened despite the
widespread global antiwar sentiment in the wake of the first war. Few
major governments were responsive, and despite the profound hopes
among WWII veterans that theirs would be the last, war has continued
almost endlessly into our new century.
The Second World War began
with its own horse-gas-mask, technology-ahead-of-tactics sort of absurdity,
when, in September 1939, Polish cavalrymen (to some degree apocryphally) faced
off with German tanks. But the real, philosophical, lesson of that
war’s culmination was this: If World War I should’ve made nationalism obsolete,
events in August 1945 ought to have proven that countries were themselves
outmoded. Because, when the United States (still the only country, ever, to do
so) slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with two atomic
bombs, the whole game changed.
At that point, for the first
time in organized human history and due to the fantastically destructive power
of nuclear weapons, a single nation could end the world within minutes. It is
that sort of planet that the human race has inhabited for 75 years. And we
aren’t scared enough. Until the invention and proliferation of atomic and
hydrogen bombs, no single state or empire possessed world-ending power. Even
Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler were eventually checked by
coalitions of convenience and necessity. The Macedonian spearmen were halted by
determined Afghan tribesmen; Mongol horsemen were held off by Egyptian and
European armies; and as for the Nazis, the paradoxical duo of the Soviets and
the Americans had their number.
The near certainty of
planet-destroying nuclear winter in the event of major war has forever changed
the entire geopolitical calculus. Or, at least, it should have. These days, a
“rogue” state like North Korea, or eventually the Czech Republic or Bhutan,
could end the world. Such a ludicrously tenuous situation clearly demonstrates
that the only rational model of geopolitics capable of avoiding catastrophe,
whether due to nuclear annihilation or collective climate suicide, is some sort
of world government.
The United Nations or the
European Union (but not military-focused NATO) represent the only rational
model for compromise, conversation and war avoidance. Only today, in a paragon
of inherent human irrationality, it is precisely such models against which
Western (Trump, Brexit, Orban), and other (Bolsonaro, Putin, Xi Jinping)
governments react. Collective delusion—reflected in the populist, rightward,
authoritarian global political wave—might just spell the end of organized human
life on this planet. It seems that plenty of folks worldwide are riding
nationalist nostalgia right to the edge of extinction. These sorts of strongman
leaders historically have poor records on communal action—exactly what’s now
needed to save the world.
Perhaps the key metaphysical
problem is this: Human beings simply don’t live long enough. Limited life spans
inherently seem to encourage selfish, expedient, short-term, and thus
delusional and destructive, thinking. In that sense, climate change, though
it’s becoming increasingly imminent, may just be too big (and long-term, and
existential) of a problem for the truncated life spans of most humans. Especially,
it appears, among the wealthy elites clearly living it up in what may the last
days of their species’ existence. Egyptian pharaohs, who once had themselves
entombed with their worldly treasures, have a current equivalent in the CEOs
set to drown in rising seas while their wealth is stashed in (far more virtual)
mutual funds and subprime mortgage bundles.
As oceans flood the coasts,
famine breaks out wholesale and resource-driven inter-state combat breaks out,
my guess is that most desperate people will ignore John Lennon’s advice and
turn toward religion—or the irrationality of the humanity-unique
casino/gambling culture—to endure the absurdity of their existence. Perhaps
eventually, though time is ever-so-short, people will force governments to unite,
organize and (just barely) avoid disaster. I’m rooting for humanity, no doubt,
but my own limited life experience has made me unlikely to bet on our species.
All the knowledge needed to
save the world from climate catastrophe (and even nuclear war) is on our
iPhones. Unfortunately, most Americans are too busy watching porn and trolling
their exes on Facebook to unite, organize and save themselves. It’s an
irrational, and classically human, defense mechanism of sorts. Such is life, in
all its bizarre glory, all its absurdity.
No comments:
Post a Comment