By Eric Le Roy
Aubade by Louis MacNeice
Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,
Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue,
What have we after that to look forward to?
Not the twilight of the gods but a precise dawn
of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.
Content 18+ Years ago my generation was treated to a kind of ‘60s-style rebellion flick (now of ‘cult’ status) starring a main-most actor named Paul Newman; the movie was called “Cool Hand Luke.” In it, a petty criminal (Newman) is arrested for ripping off a bunch of parking meters and sent to serve his sentence on a work gang in blistering hot Florida. The guards are redneck to the bone; one in particular glares through impenetrable sunglasses at the convicts.
It’s pretty bleak, but Luke is a quirky guy with a spirit part mercury, part iron. He rebels, escapes, gets recaptured and finally is shot to death by one of the uniformed thugs.. His last words to the warden are these: “What we have here is a failure to communicate!” It became a meme, symbolic of the divide between the hairy “Hell No, We Won’t Go” hippy sons who were against the Vietnam War and their short-cropped bulldog fathers who had fought in World War II.and were proud of their medals and drank beer down at the American Legion.
I thought of that film and the famous words at the end while reading Artem’s article “If You Choose Not to be a Bastard (nice hook), Live with Purpose, Die with Ease”, the gist of which appears to be that War is Irrational and the best (maybe only) way to combat it is through the exercise of Rational Thinking and its twin pillar Logic. It goes on further to suggest a quiet, maybe even unspoken rebellion on part of the individual should be, put simply, to do the next ‘right thing’ irrespective of what others are doing. In other words, “… there remains one constant, one element within our control—our own behavior. Though we cannot always change the external world, we can regulate the internal one.” (Artem)
I have heard – and I respect the opinion – that people like me who love animals but still eat meat are really hypocrites at heart – weak sods who have noble sentiments but feeble resolve. The Vegetarians smile scornfully and the Wegans strut about, while I, spineless I, clamp down on my double cheeseburger. And I confess it’s true. And my pathetic defense has always been that if I thought it would save one cow or pig I would never touch the stuff again, but I know – I know – that my abstinence would never save a single one of them. So I might as well tuck into my burger. It’s the coward’s way out, I understand. But it is also based on Logic and Reality.
It’s the strange mixture of emotions I have always had about Martyrs. These people defy the authorities even when it’s obvious that if they don’t straighten up they are facing hideous executions: burning at the stake, being dragged through the streets on their faces, mutilated, disemboweled, etc. And while you admire their courage (“Theobald the Pious preached the Gospel even as he was being Eviscerated by the Mob” ; “Penrod the Penniless sang hymns while the Flames rose to engulf him”) you have to wonder (and to me this is being very rational), what good did it do? Sure, 100 or 200 years after their death, some gilded prelate in ceremonial gowns proclaims the poor fellow or lady a “Saint”.
And nobody cares. Most of the time, nobody can even remember why they are saints. And 100 or 200 years from now, we’ll all probably be eating synthetic food from special capsules, and people will scratch their heads and butts trying to understand what all the meat-eaters and vegetarians were fussing about. The same as educated agnostics and atheists today find it hard to imagine the unspeakable brutalities inflicted by Protestants and Catholics against each other in the service of their “Loving God.”
Rational. Logic. It suggests that if we but place our heads above the fray, arching our necks even as far as the clouds, we can take the individual Highroad. We can say “NO!” to all wars. And we will feel that we have done our bit. We will be the Vegetarians of Peace. And, let’s imagine that I am being sarcastic, I say, “Spot on, Artem! It is up to us, each one of us, as individuals to take a stand. Let the others do as they wish, but I shall remain uncompromised and uncorrupted!”
But I would suggest that there is one basic but deadly flaw in all this rah rah stuff about being rational, logical, and civilized in our superiority to the Masters of Mayhem and the ‘Dogs of War.’
And I say this because I think that Artem is wrong in the same way that Cool Hand Luke was wrong: it is not some breakdown of the rational mind that leads to war, nor is it any ‘failure to communicate’. Indeed, the problem is exactly the opposite. War is very often a totally rational enterprise enacted by people and governments who understand each other perfectly. Thus the general scheme is not a sorting out of the mind’s fumbling inaccuracies and vague vicissitudes but rather the unrelenting imposition of its Will and the execution of its Plan. (Pretty effing grim, isn’t it, my conclusion? But wrong? I don’t think so.)
But I stand by it, and it is precisely this belief that bolsters my conviction that the human race is ultimately doomed to self-destruction (unless we quickly develop one hell of a massive and speedy spaceship to the stars). A few years ago, I started teaching World HIstory to Chinese students. I have always loved history and seen how it is badly taught most of the time, with an emphasis on kings, popes, battles, and dates instead of trying to get inside the heads of the people who actually lived through and created the history. I have tried to correct that ‘mail-it-in’ style of teaching, and I am no sluggard when it comes to reading primary and secondary material.
What I have seen is very discouraging. Discounting the prehistoric people and their certain confrontations, the world has been engaged in non-stop warfare since the Sumerians. It has never ceased, nor faltered in its shiny-booted march to the battlefield; it has never changed except for two facts: (1) the weapons of war have kept getting more and more sophisticated (re: deadly) since the days of stones and clubs, and (2) there has Never Yet been a weapon of war that wasn’t eventually used (the fragile exception being nuclear, although you could make a case for the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans on Japan as nuclear warfare.) And the nuclear missiles are pointing directly at us as I speak, just waiting for some itchy trigger finger (probably attached to a religious fanatic or idealist who walks around saying ‘Power to the People’) to send the pinball machine of mass annihilation boinging with its bright bling of silver balls into lights-out action.
And you know what? Far from being irrational, almost all of these wars were orchestrated (if not always fought) by people who knew EXACTLY what they were doing. This extends to other abominations that dot the human record, such as slavery and genocide. The slave traders were in No Doubt as to what they wanted: Human Bodies (alive and breathing) to make Money. The Nazis had No Doubt what they wanted: a ‘pure’ race without Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, etc. Nothing could possibly have been more calculated. That such murderous impulses reflect the ‘dark side’ of human nature that Artem refers to, I have no doubt, but the motives are rational even if the rapes, mutilations and dismemberments exceed that level in the most heinous ways imaginable.. In the old days, the babies of the conquered were thrown from the roofs, and the wives of the now dead men and mothers of the shattered infants were made into concubines if they were pretty and kitchen scrubbers if they were not. WHAT could be more logical? Was it Cruel? Merciless? Filthily disgusting? YES, of course. Crazy? Irrational? Not at all. Those babies flung from the towers might have grown up to be princes seeking retribution.
And the worst part of it is that the history books I have been using for my students try to tell the story of the human nations simultaneously, that is, one chapter will be about Egypt, the next India, the one of that about China, then Europe, then the ‘Americas’, and so on. Most of these different people never met in the ‘way back when’, but they all did the same thing, don’t kid yourself. A lot of wishful people tend to romanticize the victims; however, any honest research reveals the fact that Africans and Native Americans also fought their wars, engaged in human sacrifice, and showed no mercy to the defeated. ALWAYS for a Reason. When the Spanish Conquistadors drove the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas to extinction, they did it for a series of reasons, GOLD being foremost and LAND FOR SPAIN just slightly to the rear. The slaughter itself may have exceeded the bounds of decency but not of reason: the executioners performed the mass executions with clearly defined purposes. In the Battle of Leningrad, the Germans used every rational strategic means at their disposal to break the city, while the Russians inside used every rational means at their disposal (including eating their own dead) in order to survive. Every bit of it reflected the engines of the human mind at their most active and productive: one set on destruction, the other on survival.
Why, when investigating a murder, do the police search for a ‘motive’? Why do they not assume that the killer acted for no reason? Instead, they ask: Was it for money? Was it jealousy? Revenge? And why do historians carefully examine the old records and documents, trying to ascertain the reasons behind the coups, revolutions, and invasions? For example, the French Revolution did not happen because somebody suddenly ‘lost his head’ (pun intended!). It happened for many reasons. Even Ropespierre had ‘reasons’ when he made sure that people did indeed start losing their heads. Was that the moment when reason was supplanted by insanity? Or was it ‘reason’ taken to what Robespierre saw as an logical extension and outcome? Simply because something is cruel or wicked does not mean that it is unreasonable.
There have been psychologists who defined ‘insanity’ as a ‘form of adjustment’. In other words, the individual, failing, try after try, to ‘get it right’ simply trashes the whole operation and dives willingly into the mental chaos which seems the only reasonable solution left to him/her. Suicide itself is the faculty of Reason, overloaded by what it perceives as the Unreasonableness of life, choosing the pure logic of nothingness over the chaos of ‘somethingness.”
So what does this leave us with in terms of addressing Artem’s thesis that ‘reason, logic, and rational thinking are the tools we must use in order to prevail against evil, i.e., in this case warfare? His premise, I believe, is based on a single mistaken assumption, which is that people are basically ‘good’ . It’s like in Orwell’s 1984, Winston is the voice of reason and, potentially, ‘goodness’ and Big Brother the force of evil. (Evil wins.) The truth is, sadly, that although some people – maybe even many – are ‘good’, just as many or more, perhaps, are not ‘good’. It does not automatically follow that the ‘good’ are being reasonable while the ‘bad’ are not. It simply means that they have different motives.
History has correctly been identified as ‘a chronicle of bloodshed’. Moreover, all we have to do is enroll in ‘Ecology 101’ to understand that, in the history of the world, the homo sapien has ruined or driven to extinction almost everything he/she has touched. Most of that destruction was planned and carried out by the sheerest and most formulaic of reasons.
Thus, we will have a better world when we have better people. Being ‘better’ has less to do with ‘reason’ and ‘logic’ than experiencing a collective sea change in substance. Of course, the individual, seeking authenticity may cry out from his lonely tower or howl from the mountain peak – lonely wolf that he is. Or, as St. Paul wrote in Corthinthians:
“And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.
3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”
It does not take a practicing Christian or a disciple of Jesus to see the wisdom in those words. Even the most cynical layman should be able to understand that, God or no God, the edifice of sustained civilization ultimately rests on some great universal epiphany that changes assholes into apple pie. In my book, it ain’t gonna happen. The human animal – with religion or without – this existential, civilized monster, has reasoned its way into the ticking time bomb that is the present world.
Individual rebellion, as Artem advocates, represents a noble choice of how to exist. But it’s all dancing in the dark, my friend. Nor will you have the slightest problem communicating this ideal to others (even as you have to me), for what we are stuck with here is NOT a ‘failure to communicate’ but a world full of people oblivious of and indifferent to anything that challenges the deformity of their minds which devilish EGO spawns and the calculations of the spreadsheet supports. Humankind is a pack of utterly lucid monsters who sometimes, after a good meal or a bloody conquest, may pause amid the gore and look up at the stars.
