There are a lot of things this blog intends to look at — global threats, the coming collapse of the U.S. economy, the damage to our psyche from witnessing our government erode civil liberties and engage in torture, the mismanagement of Katrina, and so on. The purpose here is not merely to add another voice to those documenting and condemning these missteps; it is more importantly to try to understand how they are being allowed to occur — and in some cases are simply brushed aside, if not actively endorsed by those in leadership positions — and why a majority of our fellow-citizens and planetary inhabitants are willing to stand by rather than taking up arms against them.
One of the most important issues here is whether we are not "overpreparing" for some disasters, such as terrorist attacks or the avian flu, while significantly under-preparing for others. Many years ago I recall an argument from a famous British systems theorist to the effect that you can never know whether you have done enough to avoid a threat; you can only ever know when you have done enough to achieve a positive goal. It is one of the reasons that we are willing to spend billions on "homeland security," because we can never know if we have done enough to thwart another terrorist attack, while neglecting the much more real and immediate challenges we face, in health, education, and public safety in the face of natural occurrences.
But there is also another level, that of personal tragedies and disasters, that is just as important to understand and to talk about. I remember my daughter coming home a few days after 9/11 and telling me of a girl friend whose father had died in an automobile accident on the same day, and whose personal grief was somehow worsened by the fact that it went unremarked and unnoticed while there was such an outpouring of grief for the 3000 or so who perished in the twin towers. Should he not also deserve a profile, a remembrance? Is she not equally bereft of a parent, a source of love and companionship and support?
How do we measure grief, and loss, and tragedy? Is it worse to have been on United Airlines Flight 93, or to have died of AIDs in Africa, or in the Rwandan genocide?
And one friend reminds me that "What we consider disasters others may consider neutral or even desirable. It depends on perspectives, values, personal resources, intelligence, wisdom, integrity, etc." Are disasters relative? After all, as Lord Keynes is said to have remarked, none of us is getting out of this one alive. Does it matter how we die, or even that we die? Clearly it is not a disaster or a tragedy that we die, since death is an intrinsic element of life. Surely the greater tragedy is not to have lived fully, to the hilt.
Yet surely also there is a difference between an individual's dying at an advanced age, after a full life of creative contribution, and a senseless murder or accident or preventable disease. We intuit that there is an inherent and natural order to things, and we are saddened or incensed at its violation. Is this not entirely appropriate? Is it not an essential aspect of being human?
And we have an even greater sense of unacceptable tragedy when we contemplate the end of the species, or of life as we know it, or of entire civilizations, whether from catastrophic climate change or nuclear conflagration. What sustainable purpose or meaning could we attribute to human life, if we knew that it would end by some mad dictator throwing a switch, or by a gradual evaporation of the atmosphere?
Our friend goes on to say, "Maybe it is more like an intelligent guide to an optimal future for people and the planet. We seem to be busy making this planet inhospitable to human habitation. Or maybe I just think too much." It is puzzling that we have such a sense of impending disaster, and such a level of self-doubt.
This also leads one to wonder about those folks who are seemingly drawn to the Apocalypse, and are ready to embrace the end of human life as the doorway to a new realm of spiritual existence. Is this simply a form of mass hysteria, a recurrence of magical or primitive thinking, a kind of rationalization? Or is it an expression of Thanatos, a hidden and repressed but nonetheless ever-present death wish? Believing ourselves to be unworthy, we yearn for an eternal perfection that saves us from ourselves, that condemns our fellow humans (if not our own immediate selves) to an ultimate conflict and a global conflagration in which all perish so that a few can be born again to sit at the right hand of God.
Surely the mere existence of such a viewpoint is evidence of a deep derangement of the human psyche, a kind of collective insanity that threatens to undermine every effort to add meaning and purpose to our lives. Is there any other way to look at this?
Jonathan Cloud
June 9, 2006
