Are We Fit To Live?

If you really take it all in, the news most days tells you that the human species is not fit to live. What we've done with our power is scandalous to the extreme. We destroy the planet that sustains us. We destroy the habitat and the lives of the life that also sustains us, and the creatures that are our only known companions in the universe. And we destroy each other--we kill and maim strangers, and we kill and maim members of our own communities, and those entrusted to our care.

We look at Darfur and elsewhere in Africa, in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East, and anywhere there is cruel violence and great poverty, disease and lots of guns, and the only reactions possible begin with horror and shame. But we in the U.S. don't any longer have to look that far. Apart from the normal neglect of the poor and physically and mentally ill, and besides what our firepower is doing elsewhere, we can look to our torture camps, our prisons and our own armed forces, just for starters.

Today we see what one man has endured, with hardly a peep from his community, or another man treated perhaps with less violence but with the kind of injustice that should not be tolerated in this nation. (Both of these links are to Glenn Greenwald's excellent blog, but they in turn link to the appropriate New York Times reportage.)

This violence--and there is no other name for it--extends to our own. Today's NPR report is the latest to highlight the scandal of how the U.S. military treats its own--specifically in this case, those with mental and emotional trauma caused by the warring that the military sends them to do. But the U.S. military and U.S. government shirking their responsibilities to soldiers in the most cynical ways is even more widespread than this. Substandard medical care, and the refusal to even give that; using every pretext and gimmick and trick to deny veterans their benefits; the failure to take care of soldiers' families, and on and on.

The denial of mental and emotional trauma benefits is part of the denial of mental and emotional trauma, which is part of the lie of military service: because they are afraid that if the true cost is known, they will have fewer bodies to throw into battle. Yet it has been clear for a hundred years that virtually noone who has been in battle or even in the armed services escapes some mental and emotional consequences.

And why do authorities get away with torture under any other name? How could so many people be held and subjected to torture without charge or trial for so long, without journalists clamoring for facts and the community clamoring for the truth? It's the denial that is the cold part of war fever.

War Fever--it is expressed in so many ways, actively when bloodlust takes over, passively when flagwavers get a thrill regardless of consequences, and darkly threaten anyone who isn't feverish, who asks questions. We've known about War Fever since before Shakespeare--that's part of what "let loose the dogs of war" means--and yet it comes upon a society in the 21st century as if brand new.

What must we do to deserve to live as a society, as civilization, as a species? We have to get better. To do that, we must first of all believe that we can get better. We aren't fated by human nature or selfish genes or any other propaganda that soothes our conscience while it promotes the interests of those who exploit us for their wealth and power. We must have hope, and faith in ourselves. And all of this will be harder than the reflexive excuses or reversions to violence, projection, scapegoating and denial, and all the other easy steps in the perennial spiral to self-destruction.

Then we have to do something about it. We can't throw up our hands--and apparently it's not enough to know the facts of how we behave badly. We must develop and use the skills that will help us to be better.

We can't revert to managing behaviors because some greater power will punish us. We have to go beyond other kinds of fevers that draw their power from guilt and despair of who and what we are, and that in the guise of religions inevitably lead to the exploitation by the few and war of sect against sect in the name of love and truth.

From traditions and new knowledge in the West and the East and everywhere in our world, we have skills and vocabularies that begin with self-knowledge and embrace better ways of communicating and resolving conflicts. Jung issued his great cry nearly a half century ago--that our problems begin in the human psyche, and yet we know nothing about it. And what we do know, we don't use.

This is hardly a gooey sort of prescription. Because in the course of learning about ourselves, our psyches and our nature as human beings in this world, we learn how we are manipulated and exploited to serve the selfish and cynical interests of the destroyers, and how we can prevent their efforts from succeeding.

We have a long way to go, in a very short time. Whether we as a species and a civilization are fit to live--in the Darwinian as well as the moral meaning of those words--will be decided by our interactions with the planet, with each other and within ourselves.