No Going Back

Conflict, climate, and covid are showing us the worst of ourselves, but it might be what we need to find our collective humanity.

Tiberius wrote:

"The old world is no longer dying, it is dead. There is no going back to how things were after this genocide has been live-streamed in high definition and Technicolour for the world to see and our leaders to endorse. The bloodthirsty status quo has been revealed to too many people, and some cats will simply not go back into their bags. 

I know what the inside of skulls look like now. I know how bodies burn and how limbs come off. I know that children never look more devastatingly innocent than when they’ve been killed by a vicious army using the world’s most advanced weaponry. I know this because I’ve seen so many of them now—so many more than the sum of all the living children I will likely ever know. I know how much pain a person can bear and still exist in this world—just ask any Palestinian still alive. There are so many images I will never forget that everything outside of Gaza seems as meaningless as what colour socks I wear. 

But it’s not just the horrors of the moment—those horrors aren’t new. In spite of the increased severity, Palestinians have known these horrors for longer than I’ve existed. It’s what this horror means, as well. It means that any single tyrant can murder any of us at will with our entire families, neighbourhoods and communities and world leaders will not act to stop them. It means that savages in suits can kill us all with advanced drones and we can share the corpses of our children with billions of people, and the media will excuse it, scapegoat our kin and divert attention away by any means necessary. It means the legal apparatus set up in the wake of the Holocaust to prevent another Holocaust from occurring is meaningless, because the very nations who ratified it in law will ignore its clear imperatives and even subvert and attack those who try to enforce it. 

In this moment, Israel’s actions have cost the entire world more than anyone can quantify, and the depraved and twisted Western coalition that has supported the Israeli regime has ensured that cost is deep and that we all must bear it. We will either drift further into chaos and warfare that will touch us all, or we will achieve material change that denounces and fundamentally alters the mechanics of power—those that currently deem the blood of tens of thousands of children an insufficient currency for purchasing peace.

This, I believe, is the great battle of our time, and it’s not going away. The old world is dead, that’s for sure, and the monsters are fully in control. The question is, what can we do about it?"

And in the comments: 

"I remind people who are horrified by what is going on that over a million were killed in Iraq alone just two decades ago, but there was no social media as we have it today. . . . To be honest, the old world was only any good for the people who sat in their privilege. It's shameful it's taken the slaughter of Palestine for us to get our heads out of our arses and realise just how bad life is for so so many."

And then Bruno Boccara responded at length:

"This is a very harsh, albeit truthful. Yet I would like to contribute what I believe is a fundamental point. 

In psychosocial analysis (think psychoanalysis applied to entire societies), early indicators, at times even seemingly (but wrongly) insignificant, can reveal with an acute precision where we collectively are at psychosocially. As such, the manufactured yet accepted willingness of individuals everywhere to let go of public health during the pandemic was actually (and not in hindsight) when the world died (notice that I even abstracted from using old). Compassion and empathy, even for one’s own children not to mention oneself, disappeared then. 

This implies that the capacity and willingness to identify with one another had been erased. There is no such thing as society once that capacity seizes to exist. And rather than pandemic policies being manufactured by the Deep State, they were first and foremost a response to the extinction anxieties brought upon by the pandemic and, even if more unspoken, climate change. 

The pandemic is the fatal deed, our collective ground zero, in the sense that it revealed and exacerbated the psychosocial dynamics that became the backbone to the Age of Contempt that is now upon us. I agree that the costs of the horrors we are witnessing today exceeds our imagination. I agree about the likelihood of chaos and warfare. I also agree that major changes are urgently needed. However, as I have argued often, these will require a profound modification of our psychosocial environments. 

This implies working through collectively the myriad of societal level, largely unconscious, collective defenses mobilized that have led us where we are at right now. This goes beyond the power structure and the obvious depravity that can come with it. While it may be too late in what are likely now pre extinction ages, a good place to start - while of course stopping the genocide immediately- remains public health. If we are unable to work through collectively on an issue that affects us all directly, there is no hope to successfully address at the level of entire societies issues such as genuine capacity for identification which has been eroded by primary narcissism and grandiose fantasies fueled by consumerism and social media."

And some comments,

"The loom of climate change is eclipsed by the smaller more immediate Covid and now genocide. Maybe this is an issue with instant gratification hard wired into us but made pathological by capitalism? . . . Also further back. Iraq. Neoliberalism. Vietnam. McCarthyism. Atomic bomb. Residential schools. The Trail of Tears. Slavery. Terra Nullius. It's a social fabric built on death. On a hierarchy of who lives on top of the corpses of who. It's always been decaying. . . . I'm not sure anymore that We, identifying as a complex, disembodied, digitally mediated, mass production and consumption system, can collectively 'work through' the issues, because the issues are precisely a product of this over-inflated faux community of individual units. But, if we're lucky, the collapsing will paradoxically bring us back to living at a more human, organic level with each other, where at least there is a chance of 'working through' problems in actual physical communities over which we each have some real agency."

There have always been wars and people turning their backs on the slaughtered, and I've taught about many of them for decades, but now we can see it in real time from civilian phones. There's no ideal conflict-free time to go back to. Having resigned myself to a world with continuous wars, it was public health and governments turning their backs on their own people, here and now, that was the gut-punch. In my city, that felt like removing protections went hand in hand with bulldozing the property of unhoused people. It doesn't compare to the severity of genocide, but the carelessness and heartlessness of official actions against our own really exemplifies that this is a class conflict at a time and place where we like to pretend there are no class divisions! All are welcome, but not if you're poor or try to help prevent the spread of disease for people not privileged enough to attend private schools or work at Queen's Park, where the CO2 levels are kept low. Or attend a Davos Forum where they require a Covid PCR test upon arrival and have state-of-the-art ventilation systems with N95s available throughout. 

The bulk of us are expendable, required to work without precautions even while sick and contagious. We are and will be cannon fodder if/when the conflicts continue to grow. 

But I appreciate that final commenter - that maybe we've all seen things that will bring us around to finally working collectively and globally, towards a sense of humanity and community. We did used to care about collective public health after all. From Henry Madison and commenters:

"70% of those infected with polio are asymptomatic. 25% get mild disease. And yet there was a global effort to eliminate, and now eradicate, the disease. Because once upon a time communities didn't partition themselves into 'normal' and 'vulnerable' people. . . . Fewer than 1% experience any sort of paralysis, and only like 0.01% of people needed an iron lung. . . . And yet we still mounted a massive international effort to eliminate and then eradicate the disease. . . . It was, still is, possible to eliminate SARS-CoV-2. It is actually quite easy, but it will not be done because humanity has mentally and morally fallen to a level from which it can no longer recover, so it is heading towards self-extinction. . . . These days, the mantra is 'if it doesn't personally affect me right now, then it doesn't matter.' . . . The adolescent life philosophy. Though I think that even short-changes adolescents now. . . . And communities and leaders didn't homicidally obfuscate with blather about 'individual choice' and 'individual responsibility' that atomizes any shared effort/shared reality. And parents literally protested energetically that the polio vaccines weren't available fast/fully enough. 

I hold out a sliver of hope that we can find ourselves again. But the big question is, how far will the pendulum swing towards acceptance of atrocities before it begins its journey back again.