People kill people. People torture and imprison people. People destroy or enslave whole populations of other people. Ho, hum. Pass the ketchup, please.
The Holocaust – what a horror! The Nazis – inhuman beasts! Atypical? Not really. The scale, the typical German efficiency and documentation, its coincidence with World War Two, and the survival of substantial numbers of victims to give testimony, support its high visibility. But let’s peer into the mists of history, shall we? Ancient wisdom, whether Chinese (Lao-tse) or Greek (Sophocles) tells us that over time, everything not only changes, but even turns into its opposite!
The Nazis coldbloodedly and inhumanely slaughtered the Jews, and other “non-Aryans.” The ancient Hebrews, descendants of Israel (Jacob) and ancestors of modern Jews, coldbloodedly and inhumanely slaughtered whole populations, as explicitly recorded in the Bible. They attacked cities in the “Promised Land” and killed every soul: man, woman, and child, so that they could take over the land for themselves: genocide by any reasonable definition.
Deuteronomy (King James version)
3:4 And we took all his cities at that time, there was not a city which we took not from them, threescore cities, all the region of Argob, the kingdom of Og in Bashan.
3:6 And we utterly destroyed them, as we did unto Sihon king of Heshbon, utterly destroying the men, women, and children, of every city.
Joshua
6:21 And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.
8:26 For Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.
10:40 So Joshua smote all the country of the hills, and of the south, and of the vale, and of the springs, and all their kings: he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the LORD God of Israel commanded.
The people of these cities did nothing to provoke the Jews; the Jews simply invaded, in order to murder them and steal all their possessions. The Ten commandments prohibit such behavior:
Exodus
20:13 Thou shalt not kill.
20:15 Thou shalt not steal.
But the commandments apparently don’t apply when “God” gives direct orders, just as murder laws don’t apply to soldiers who kill in wartime.
The Jews justified this behavior by the reason that “God” told them to do it. The Nazi war criminals justified theirs with the excuse that Hitler told them to do it. Does obeying an authority absolve one of responsibility in commiting a criminal act? Even if that authority is (your) god? The Hebrews of the Moses age and the Nazis both followed a charismatic leader, believed that they had the destiny to conquer and rule over other peoples, believed that they were the chosen people, that they had special privileges because of their particular ancestors, that they had the right to lands occupied by others… But “the victors write the history.” If you kill a whole population, no widows remain to grieve; no sons to revenge. The Israelites won, the Hitlerites lost.
Now before you jump down my throat for such “anti-Semitic” statements, some of my direct ancestors would have certainly wound up in Nazi concentration camps if they had not had the luck, timing, and resources to emigrate; undoubtedly some of my less direct relatives did.
I’m not saying this to put down the Jews or justify the behavior of the Nazis. People do behave this way, and have done so for all of recorded history. Probably nearly everyone in the world has ancestors who behaved brutally towards other humans.
We are indebted to the ancient Hebrews for leaving such a precise record of what today would be called “crimes against humanity.” But against the background of history? Again, ho, hum.
For example, Tamerlane; Timur meant “Iron,” just as the name of Stalin, another despotic ruler, meant “Steel.”
...Scholars estimate that his military campaigns caused the deaths of 17 million people, amounting to about 5% of the world population at the time.
…When Herat did not surrender he reduced the city to rubble and massacred most of its citizens.
…Timur destroyed Isfizar, and the prisoners were cemented into the walls alive.
…after Isfahan revolted against Timur’s taxes by killing the tax collectors and some of Timur’s soldiers, he ordered the massacre of the city’s citizens; the death toll is reckoned at between 100,000 and 200,000. An eye-witness counted more than 28 towers constructed of about 1,500 heads each.
…Before the battle for Delhi, Timur executed 100,000 captives.
Baghdad: …Timur ordered that every soldier should return with at least two severed human heads to show him. When they ran out of men to kill, many warriors killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign, and when they ran out of prisoners to kill, many resorted to beheading their own wives.
– Wikipedia
Ghengis Khan:
…The Persian scholar Juvayni states that 50,000 Mongol soldiers were given the task of executing twenty-four Urgench citizens each, which would mean that 1.2 million people were killed. The sacking of Urgench is considered one of the bloodiest massacres in human history. – Wikipedia
In the “Mr. Villain of World History” contest, Hitler would not even win the bronze medal. As we have seen in the Pol Pot regime of Cambodia and in other countries, such massive brutalities did not stop after World War 2 and the defeat of the Nazis and revelation of their crimes.
Today people, even children, can watch an “action” film, for example many with Arnold Swarzenegger, or the Star Wars series, and see people killing people by dozens and hundreds without any hesitation or remorse, so it just seems “normal.” Before films people could read the Bible and perceive essentially the same thing. The films, like the Bible, ignore the humanity of those killed, their human lives and feelings, and that each of them would have a network of relations and friends who would grieve for them. After all, they were the “bad guys.” Such films line the pockets of their makers and pay for many a mansion and luxury yacht. Steven King and others garner fame and wealth from similar dehumanizing literature. Video games’ bread-and-butter derive from shooting “enemies.” Armchair warriors enjoy and pay well for such vicarious experiences.
Why draw attention to this? If you are human, as I presume since you are reading this you probably are, this is your heritage. Welcome to the club.
I haven’t noticed any headlines lately proclaiming, “Still Enough Nuclear Bombs to Destroy Civilization as We Know it!”
Researchers estimate over 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world, well more than one for each city of over 100,000 people. These average 20 times more powerful than “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” respectively dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.*
We generally assume, and rightly, that if a person repeatedly behaved a certain way, that person likely will continue that behavior. “Once a X, always a X.” Humanity, an abstract idea, just a great number of actual people, follows the same pattern. Looked at on a grand scale, “boys will be boys.” But now the toys of the boys can destroy even a megalopolis.
Setting aside what people believe, such as gods and other ideologies, and simply observing their behavior, as an ethologist observes animals, that is what they do. They periodically destroy each other in the most frightful ways.
An objective observer might hypothesize that humanity, considered as a supra-organism, suffers from a serious disease. If you saw a dog periodically biting its own leg, you would say there is something wrong with that animal! G. I. Gurdjieff, in Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (1950), portrayed humans as an aberrant exception among “3-brained beings” existing in the cosmos, Earth the only planet where beings behaved in such an insane way. He blamed the problem on the “consequences of the Organ Kundabuffer.”
What can you do? Fight and struggle against other humans that you perceive as being the problem, such as “the Super-Rich,” the “One Percent,” “Dictators,” “Criminals,” “Capitalists,” and so on? Opposing other humans simply perpetuates the problem. “But we’re the Good Guys!” Sorry – every side in every war thinks that.
As a cell in the body of humanity, this disease infects you too. As stated in Islam, the “Greater Jihad” is within. Hint: did you enjoy Star Wars without disgust at all the killings? “That’s different, it’s not real,” you may object, “It’s just a story.” Well, everything is “just” a story. That’s how the human mind works, how it makes sense of the endless flow of phenomena: making it into stories. History (his story): our collective story.
Remember that though history points the finger at Tamerlane, Hitler, Stalin, and other such, their inferiors, humans with decision making capacity, actually committed the atrocious acts. Tamerlane or Hitler alone would have accomplished less than a modern mass murderer equipped with an assault rifle. News reporters complain about power-loving people who use high technology such as Facebook to control people (see 2016 U.S.A. presidential election). They fail to ask why people can be so easily controlled. Power-loving people will continue to use whatever means available to manipulate people as long as people fall for it. Shakespeare understood this well. Read Julius Caesar for a glimpse of his ideas on the subject, especially the speeches of Brutus and Anthony and the crowd’s response.
Some people wake up a little and glimpse their own will-lessness, then project it outward. For example, covid-19 conspiracy theorists. “The problem is those ‘bad guys’ out there. If we could just get rid of the power hungry controllers, then everything would be all right. We’re not the problem, they’re the problem.” Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Putin, Xi Jinping; name your villain. Believing that one’s character and integrity depend on others’ actions allows one to avoid seeing “the terror of the situation.” Certainly easier than actually realizing your own nothingness and beginning to begin to work on that. Especially if you don’t have anyone around ready to coach you or know anyone who has “gone through the mill.”
I got news for you: as long as you project this particular drama, some actor will play those roles, just as in the War on Drugs, some actor will always step up to play the role of “Drug Kingpin.” “The Show Must Go On.” Seems people get a kick from these Cops-and-Robbers games.
When will humanity quit these boring childish games and stage more interesting Cosmic Drama? Get your coat, dear, we’re going home.
Possibilities
Might humans live peacefully together, permanently “beat their swords into plowshares?” Can any doctor cure this sickness?
Does “human nature” dictate this brutality? Or did it perhaps ride in on the back of civilization? Jared Diamond observed that in the “stone age” culture of New Guinea, when 2 men from different villages met, they would immediately discuss whether they had any kinship, however remote, so they would not have to try to kill each other. (Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997).
Humans are both higher and lower than animals. An animal has a natural nobility which requires no special effort. A lion already knows how to be a lion, an eagle knows how to fly high, stoop, and hunt. But a human would not be human without training and effort. Even the skeletal-muscular system does not operate optimally without applied forms. An untrained human will slump, will not attain the best and healthiest posture, but observe your dog or cat: they instinctively use their bodies perfectly. The same goes for using the intellect, emotions, and other faculties.
Animals have nature, but not humans. Philosophers seek “Human Nature” in vain. Animals act from instinct, for the most part; humans from culture. Humans inherit from genetics no unique behaviors, diets, or habitats, but culturally adapt these to circumstances. However, the cultural imprints from early life control most humans’ behavior as rigidly as instinct controls animals. “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” As known to Aristotle and the Jesuits, imprints and conditioning before the age of seven form the personality for the lifetime of most.
The theoretical human which lacked cultural forms such as language and customs would rank lower than an animal, having no given natural form of its own, stories like Mowgli and Tarzan to the contrary. Born human, we carry such a burden. Calderon de la Barca: “The main offense of man is to have been born.” (Life is a Dream, 1636). Our great potential carries responsibility. You cannot escape from the burden of decision, of evaluating: choosing your values. Though of course you can make the decision, as most do, to let others decide for you, to simply accept the imprinting from your ancestors and culture without question.
We project human values onto animals, but the “King of the Beasts” can’t change, as the “Cowardly Lion” did in Wizard of Oz. Humans can, and do change. Virtue (from Latin vir = “man”) requires effort. If a person dislikes alcohol, abstaining from it implies no virtue, however others may admire it.
Without a human nature, no objective morality can exist which applies to all cultures. Shakespeare: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Hamlet). As Marquis de Sade pointed out, anything “good” in one culture has been “bad” in another time and place, and vice versa.
The crux: humans have greater potential than animals since they can adjust their behavior according to forms and ideas. Who’s to judge some behavior as good or bad? You could even call humans, as indeed some do, a cancer of the Biosphere – William S. Burroughs (Western Lands, 1987) named them the “bad animal” – which should be destroyed.
Yet maybe we can extract this baby, with a possible wonderful long life, from our collective historical dirty bathwater. If humans have no nature, then we can create our “nature;” we can consciously design cultures. But we have a slight problem here: you can’t start fresh. You can’t just start with a batch of fresh, unconditioned humans, and program a new culture into them, as if they were off-the-shelf computers. Even if you had, as in Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932), factory fresh human babies without personal parents, adults already imprinted with a previous culture would have to train them.
In Gurdjieff’s story, mentioned above, long ago the “Cosmic Engineers” removed this malicious “Organ Kundabuffer” from the human body, but its consequences continue to be transmitted from generation to generation. You can’t just replace the damaged part, like an old automobile, and send it back out on the streets. Honk, honk.
Robert A. Heinlein, whom the establishment didn’t recognize as a philosopher because he wrote science fiction novels instead of scholarly tomes, invented a character who politically classed himself a “Rational Anarchist.” (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 1966) In a perfect world, with each person mature, responsible, ethical… in a word, conscious, anarchy would be a great idea. Hmmm, yes, well, maybe in ten thousand years or so.
So what to do? Have we painted our collective self into a cosmic corner? The Institute of Ecotechnics used as its logo a design based on the Zen koan: put a gosling into a bottle and raise it to an adult goose; then how to get the goose out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or killing the goose? How indeed. The goose humanity in the bottle of our history, traditions, and cultures.
To quote from the sage Mullah Nasrudin, “Just because you can ask a question, doesn’t mean there is a simple answer.”
Cultures traditionally see themselves as “The People,” and those from other cultures as less than human (strangers, outlanders, barbarians.) Now, one meta-culture, the Ethnosphere, comprises all cultures, which share one economy, the eco-sphere.
Economy means managing the house. All humans share our house, the Biosphere. Women manage the house better naturally so the future network of city-states (if humanity survives) will be ruled by councils of wise women. Those who dream of grandeur and glory can turn their sights outward. Assisting the evolution of Life, the Universe, and Everything (Douglas Adams, 1982) by spreading biospheres around the solar system and to other stars: a task more than worthy of the ambitions of a future Tamerlane or Ghengis Khan.
Evidence indicates that women possibly ruled prehistoric civilization in Europe and the Near East, until a patriarchal revolution reduced women to possessions. As men wanted to leave their property to their own sons, they controlled women’s freedom tightly.
In the traditional marriage ceremony, the father “gives away” the bride to the groom. The father owned the woman until she married, and then her husband owned her. A woman, all her life, had to be owned by some man.
Consider the different standards towards sexuality. Popular culture puts down a woman who enjoys sexual relations with multiple men as “slut,” whereas a male “slut” earns the congratulatory term “stud,” or “he-man.” Why is there no term “she-woman?”
Although women have participated much more in production and politics in the last 50 years, the whole system roots in patriarchal values. From Darwin’s idea that evolution proceeds mainly from competition (“survival of the fittest” – “nature red in tooth and claw”) arose social Darwinism: progress comes from (male) people fighting each other for control of limited resources. Lynn Margulis (Microcosmos, 1987) and others proposed a different, more feminine perspective: evolution relies more on cooperation and symbiosis. Instead of the dog-eat-dog world, “I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine.” ** Male dominance, “progress,” and competition produced today’s world: nation-states armed to the teeth and rapacious profit-maximizing corporations. A healthy future calls for balance between the adventurous male archetype and the nurturing sharing female archetype.
Women bear children, so they personally feel, right there in the body, for future generations. They have an instinct to rear children so they value stability.
So far the “good ole boy” club has allowed a few women in, providing they act like the boys (“Iron Ladies” Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel.) That won’t suffice; the institutions themselves must transform and incorporate genuine feminine values. Otherwise nothing will change. And if nothing fundamental changes, “progress” leads to regress and disaster. Values for the New Age: Synergy, Cooperation, Harmony, Balance.
Male humans invented a God (recognized by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) to authorize them to use and exploit all life and materials on Earth (including of course female humans). Thanks again to the Hebrews for recording this: Genesis 1:26 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”
Time to compost God and those old ideas into soil to grow fresh living concepts. In the words of Shakespeare: “The Earth, that’s nature’s mother, is her tomb/ What is her burying grave, that is her womb/ And from her womb children of diverse kind/ We, sucking on her natural bosom find.” – Romeo and Juliet.
We have come to the end of the usefulness of Western straight-line progress; we must return to the circle. Everything affects everything else; you can’t “throw away” anything. Throw to where? Nothing disappears, but gets broken down and re-used. Or not.
As John Lennon sang, “Imagine all the people, sharing all the world… I wonder if you can.”
Notes:
* “Little Boy,” 15 kilotons, Hiroshima. “Fat Man,” 20 kilotons, Nagasaki.
Total nuclear weapons today estimated 13,400. – ploughshares.org
The average nuclear weapon size is about 440 kilotonnes at full yield but a large portion of those bombs can be adjusted in the field to a very small fraction of their potential yield. The largest weapons still fielded by America are a bit over one megaton. – quora.com
About 500 cities in world over 1 million. – Wikipedia
4037 cities with over 100 thousand. (2015) – brilliantmaps.com
** The very cells that compose our bodies originated from symbioses of different types of cells. Our bodies could not process food without symbiotic gut bacteria. And the great Biosphere works on the same principle: plants and algae use sunlight, animals eat plants and give their excrement and eventually bodies back to fertilize the plants; animals also breathe the oxygen released by plants and exhale carbon which the plants use. Microorganisms cycle materials in a similar way.