5 November 2024
With the US election bearing down on us full speed I can’t help but feeling a bit doomsday-ish. Without commenting one way or the other on the US candidates I have to admit that it’s crazy to me that people seem oblivious to just how bad things really have got. The divide between left and right is near war like and every day I see a new example of our society fracturing. I guess it has been a creeping assault and it has happened slowly and everyone just seems to have adjusted to it?
You know what this is all starting to remind me of? The Troubles. Only on a wider scale across Canada, US and UK, indeed the entire Anglosphere, as well as the West more generally all at once… only slightly more subdued, more protests and riots, less bombs.
This has got me thinking about civil war and discussions surrounding that subject, particularly in the US as of late. The first thing I would say is that in reality one can already be in a civil war and not know it because they don’t always look like what we picture. Often, we think of something akin to the American Civil War or more recently something like Central African Republic or Democratic Republic of the Congo etc. However this really is only one of the darker shades of this colour. Civil war can just as easily look like a small breakaway insurgency, like the nearly countless Islamic insurgencies we have seen in recent years. It can also look far more subdued than even this. It can just be an on-going perpetual state of increased instability, tension, and lawlessness. In this way one might make the argument that the US and even much of the West is in, or is nearly in a sort of low-grade civil war. This is just an idea to kick around.
My main point here is that the West looks so internally divided, just utterly broken, that is has become incapable of dealing with rather straight forward issues like immigration, law and order, or the economy, without someone setting fire to something. Even elections are becoming a challenge for some…. Americans I am looking at you. It’s at the point that I am really not all that surprised (although deeply disappointed) that our response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been so utterly feckless. It has, for the most part just been turned inward and incorporated into our own sometimes ridiculous domestic debates. I honestly don’t think we really are capable of rising up to face an external challenge anymore. Countries like Russia and China can, increasingly, pretty much do whatever they want.
Westerns don’t really seem to appreciate that there are countries / societies out there that are completely comfortable using force to subjugate others to their will. In our blissful ignorance we seem to think that because we don’t see ourselves as being willing or capable of doing that than no one else could either. The reality is far from it, not only are these others totally capable but also quite willing (even eager) to do it.
Uncomfortable as it may make you to read this, there are indeed societies built on entirely different principles than our own, that are far more Darwinist and less idealist than we are. It is also worth pointing out that we just recently arrived at this mindset after the great conflagrations of the early 20th century. We evolved to this point and not everyone is on the same evolutionary path or on the same place along that path, if you (mistakenly) view it as a clear linear path, it’s not, that’s not how evolution, especially social evolution works.
Nature seeks equilibrium yes, but it does so through a constant state of conflict. Peace is not the default setting. Even if it were, the reality is that the world is populated by radically diverse cultures and worldviews that are at odds with one another, even were that not the case, even in the most altruistic of settings self-interest and resource competition would inevitably lead to some tension or even conflict. Basically, even if everyone sought peace (they don’t) the radical differences in worldviews and cultural values makes this an impossible proposal. We need to recongnise this and be ready to stand up and face it. There is a battle that rages on never-ending for the soul of this world and the future of Humanity, and it doesn’t care if you like it or not.
I suppose that what I am getting at here, as I doom scroll twitter, is that we really need to get back to recognising what’s important and turning down the political divisiveness for short term gain. We have to start looking outward again and past immediate concerns to the big long-term picture. We need to start electing real honest to God leaders. If we don’t, one day soon we will find ourselves waking to a world that is very different than the one we think it should be, we will be caught totally unprepared and take it in the teeth. If you think that the problems we have now are bad, wait until that day. Whatever happens today, both sides of the aisle really do need to start trying to look in the mirror as much as out the window, treating opponents with honesty, and find pathways back towards the idea that what unites is far more important than what divides us.
Feature Photo: Fire at Woolworths, Belfast, 1970. Wikimedia Commons, 2024.
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