The entire world is still in shock at the sickening barbarism in the Negev desert in southern Israel, with murderous scenes that seem straight from the worst of ancient-world brutality inflicted on a mass scale without pity. The terror in the desert set in motion a trajectory of escalation that has already led to more suffering and death of innocents, drawing in more nations, tearing apart some alliances and reinforcing some new ones and squandering material resources in times of great need.
We have to face a ghastly prospect: This could be the onset of World War III or at least some version of it.
History shows that war often follows economic calamity, social anomy, and political upheaval. Coming at this terrible stage of history, just as we’re digging out of the injurious COVID-19 pandemic response, with rising poverty, ill health, unprecedented population movements, and rampant demoralization of the public in many countries, with freedom and rights barely hanging on as ideals, and prosperity slipping away and state power rising as never before, we’re being tested as individuals and as whole nations.
We wonder how we got to this place where might determines right and how, in a few short years, we went from seeming progress around the world, with what felt like a growing consensus for freedom, to now finding ourselves swimming in a sea of confusion and even horror. No one has a full answer. The buildup of the violent ethos of the past few years has been slow and deliberate and yet seemingly fast in a historical context.
Civilized values have become unraveled. The scenes of this past weekend are a symptom of that.
War, depression, and other forms of global crisis tend to push aside all other concerns, which is why bad actors foment them. Only a few years ago, we were all dug into our various ideological paradigms, parties, and tribes, working on the finer details of policies and ideas and fighting over small points. Looking back now, it seems more like a parlor game than real life.
What was brewing under the surface, few really understood, but what was building behind the scenes was a challenge to the core ideals of social and political order for almost 1,000 years since the Magna Carta first limited the power of the rulers. What dawned gradually was a world with high ideals that centered on the aspiration of a better life for as many people as possible.
Too often before the great unraveling, pundits and leaders toyed with the idea of dispensing with enlightenment values as if they were outmoded and probably in need of replacement to serve some other end.
“To take on the coronavirus, go Medieval on it,” The New York Times stated on Feb. 28, 2020.
This was the lead virus reporter explaining that we need to dispense with modernity and deploy all the powers of the state to fight the microbial kingdom the world over.
That article was truly insane and appallingly dangerous, a rejection of everything humanity had learned for centuries about infectious disease. But the claim became doctrine at the most important news source in the United States if not the entire world.
It was a very scary omen, one that rattled me to my very core at the time. I knew for sure that by running this piece, the paper wasn’t merely proposing an opinion. They had decided to go all in for the unthinkable and unworkable, and I knew for sure that doing so would unleash some uncertain hell, perhaps one without limit. Why? Because such a war couldn’t be won under any circumstances. Just the attempt alone could potentially blot out all other values.
Two weeks went by, and it happened. The Constitution became a dead letter, and the Bill of Rights, too. There was a strange valorization of compulsion that was unleashed in the land, even as freedom itself was ridiculed as stupid and dangerous. They went so far as to close churches and schools for kids, not just for two weeks but for a year or even two, even as the censors got to work curating the public mind into what we can and can’t say and even think.
Then, of course, because of the United States’ outsized reputation in the world as a great protector of freedom, the influence of this policy spread in all directions. Governments had a field day, as raw power replaced basic respect for rights and liberties.
Every country was ripped apart. Civic trust led to hatred, organic social routines and rituals were replaced by the rule of supposed experts, and the wisdom of the ages even in areas of science was blotted out to be replaced by potions imposed by crony capitalists on the make, who somehow managed to be so influential over public life as to have governments force their citizens to comply with untested medicines. This was the turning point in the United States, Europe, and especially in Israel, which found itself neglecting security issues for the war on the virus.
All of this unleashed the proverbial Pandora’s box of evil, from widespread moral disorientation to substance abuse to community and familial breakup to economic devastation to educational loss—none of which any person in charge takes responsibility for. Instead, the lies continue and escalate, too, almost as if the truth is no longer a thing that anyone in power values. And this attitude has transferred down the levels of the social order. People today are headed toward a nihilistic pit of thinking that none of the old wisdom matters. Our history is corrupt, they say, so we might as well tear up the whole of what we were and experiment with something completely new.
The trouble is that the news is about nothing but division, hate, violence, and disregard for the basic dignities and rights for which our ancestors fought many generations to achieve. Speaking for myself, I never previously realized just how fragile liberty all was (a “delicate fruit,” said Lord Acton). I had assumed that our civic protocols and habits of trust would always be with us, because, after all, humanity has a remarkable capacity for learning from our successes and failures and gradually improving the world. That presumption turns out to be my single worst intellectual error.
Looking back now, we’re all seeking to find historical analogies for our times. We’re inexorably drawn back to the two previous world wars. The first great war hit seemingly out of nowhere, a product of bureaucratic bungling and elite arrogance. It left us with nothing but wreckage and a new awareness of the human capacity for evil. But history wasn’t done with us yet.
Only a few decades later, the bloodshed became worse as the map of once-civilized Europe was painted black with insane ideology that ended in unspeakable carnage. We crawled our way out of that calamity only to find ourselves in a standoff with a superpower over weapons of mass destruction. The prospect of nuclear war terrorized generations and kept the “best and brightest” in a position of decision-making power over life and death.
At the end of the Cold War, we were all perhaps tempted by the idea that we were done with all that. We were destined for decades if not centuries of peace and prosperity. But perhaps we forgot that those results don’t happen automatically. They’re a consequence of a people who believe in something, some truths that we have elevated above all others.
Among those truths is the belief that human dignity is a central principle, human beings have rights, peace is better than violence, diplomacy is better than war, voluntarism is always better than force, and no ideological dreams should ever be permitted to override the aspirations of a common person to live a better life.
Transgressing on those principles introduces great peril to the orderly and prosperous world that we had come to take for granted. We find ourselves trying to find our way back to the hopes that we lost. The hell we’re experiencing gradually and then all at once is born of minds and hearts gone very wrong.
So, too, the solution is in the human mind and human heart.
As we witness a world in decline on all fronts, looking for hope wherever we can find it, let us have renewed appreciation for the fragility of the good life and all those who came before to grant that as our inheritance. We give them the highest honor to think and act as they did to build better lives and a better world. We should all work to turn back the tide of violence and hate before it’s too late for this generation.
