Recently in an article I was reading on the al Jazeera website the author described our era as ‘awful.’ The subject was the Gaza massacre and its implications for global relations which undeniably give truth to the old saying that the decay of a neighborhood starts with a single broken window remaining broken.
If our western civilization were a neighborhood, then we could indeed say its windows are been smashed by a gang of juvenile delinquents who by the absence of consequences are assured they can do whatever they want. If Israel can annex territories not included in the 1948 UN resolution that created Israel, then Russia can take as much of Ukraine as it can afford to pay for in dead young men, the Chinese could well invade Taiwan, and the United States take over Greenland. Trump, in an interview, would not exclude using the military to achieve the annexation of Greenland, and why would he exclude using what he has at his disposal? International law? Increasingly not worth the paper it’s written on.
A powerful nation might one day decide Australia is too big for the size of its population which could be forcefully displaced to Tasmania, leaving the rest with all its resources to be occupied by hundreds of millions of settlers, maybe as moral justification claiming a god of their own making said it was in fact theirs.
At a national level it’s not much better. The vandals have been hard at work dismantling the structures upon which western civilization was erected. The rot has spread throughout the system and probably beginning with those at society’s fringes who actively and in a post-modernist way, rendered empirical truth an old fashioned concept. Legislators and the executive were quick to find advantage in truth being whatever fits the theory, or can be invented if necessary, and as a consequence today in legislation and its enforcement, truth is meaningless. The end no longer justifies the means because in the absence of an unbiased moral authority there is no longer need to justify anything.
There’s an Koan (Zen teaching story) in which a young monk goes to the master requesting permission to travel to a nearby kingdom to lecture its king on how wrong is his use of fear and repression. The master refuses the young monk permission explaining he well knows the king in question, and that he would neither listen nor change. Sometimes, the master further explains, people need to find their own way to enlightenment by a process of mistake and painful consequence. The same applies to nations, and if they fail to correct their errors then only collapse can be the outcome.
I’ve nearly finished reading T. E. Lawrence’s “Seven Pillars of Wisdom.” My liking of this book is not as an historical record of the Arab revolt, but as a tableau of existence as lived by Lawrence and his Arab fighters during the rebellion. It was living in a state of hyper-masculinity that found expression in physical and mental suffering, heroic battles, heroic friendships which often extended into a hyper-male sexual expression. I’ll have a few more comments to make, and including the irony of how Lawrence died.
And, last Sunday’s demo. Better numbers than the week before. Maybe that had something to do with the fact Sydney trains were running near normally…
