How can humans be so focused on killing so many others?
By Lethbridge Herald on December 28, 2024.
Editor:
We do live in interesting times, a time of wars and rumors of war, Irreversible climate change, and endless political debate that resolves nothing, and the list goes on. I’m old enough to have memories of the Second World WAr. I also remember, in the 1950s, knowing young men from my community who were not much older than I was who had fought and served in the Korean Conflict.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, I thought to myself, “How is this possible?
How in this modern age can we humans still be deliberately setting out to kill vast numbers of our fellow beings. Have we not learned anything from the past? Have we not learned from the mistakes of previous generations?” And today we are witnessing other bloody, mindless conflicts in the Middle East and Sudan. Why can’t we human beings sit down peacefully and have intelligent dialogue to resolve our differences?
A few months back, philosopher Andy Clark published a book entitled The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.
His overall contention is that certain perceptions of reality held by any given individual, and I’m simplifying here, become hardwired, and perceived as reality. This often leads to decisions that can be harmful to others and harmful to themselves. These perceptions are often delusional. We still have people who believe the world is flat!
Citing Clark’s ideas, Randolph Mank, a former Canadian diplomat, in an opinion piece published a few months back in the Lethbridge Herald expressed the idea that delusional perceptions could explain Vladimir Putin’s actions in Ukraine.
These often-felt perceptions could also go a long way to explain the destructive behaviors of many historical figures such as Hitler, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and Alexander the Great. The cost in human lives and the untold suffering caused by their actions did not seem to affect them in anyway whatsoever.
The devastation caused by these figures over the centuries is mind boggling. Today in Ukraine, the Middle East, the Gulf wars, and the invasion of Afghanistan are recent examples of what most analysts and historians consider bad decisions based on faulty logic, misinformation, inflated egos, and distorted delusions.
The Golden Rule is pontificated by all the world’s great religions. We are now in the season of celebration of the birth of the “Prince of Peace.” The last two world wars were fought, for the most part, by Christian nations. Go figure!
Here’s my solution. Most reasonably informed individuals know that the biggest industry in the world is the arms industry. Back in the 1950s, President Dwight Eisen, however, warned us to “beware of the military industrial complex.”
Some of the brightest, most creative innovative minds dream up new and clever ways to kill more people, things like cluster bombs that are still killing and maiming innocent people in Southeast Asia fifty years after they were dropped during the Viet Nam War, and my favourite, so-called weapons of mass destruction! We humans are very smart in so many ways; we now have the capacity to wipe out all of humanity with the push of a button!
A few years after the First World War, the author Thomas Hardy wrote “Peace upon earth! was said. We sing it and pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass, we got as far as poison- gas.”
and at the end of the Second World War, General Omar Bradley stated, “Ours is a world of ethical infants. We know more about war than about peace, more about killing. then we know about living.”
To put it in plain language, what these commentators are saying is that we humans, smart as we think we are in so many ways, are really learning disabled! We seem Incapable of learning from our past mistakes. The Spanish- American philosopher George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” He also said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Somehow, we must break this repeated cycle of self-destruction.
So, here’s my suggestion: The amount of money spent each year on researching, developing, and producing weapons of mass destruction and all sorts of other devious things is in the trillions of dollars.
Why don’t we allocate a simple amount from those dollars, say 10 per cent, to research, develop and, implement ways to teach us learning disabled humans how to respect and, yes. love one another as we have been preached to by the prophets of old since Day One.
Years ago, again back in the 1950s, a world-renowned paleontologist, theologian and philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. wrote “The day will come when, after harnessing the either, the winds, tides, gravitation, we shall harness, for God, the energies of love, and, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.” Let’s hope that day comes soon.
Robert Campbell
Lethbridge
22-21
Well said Robert.
Sadly, we are only going to see more devastation as the Biblical prophesies play out in these end of the end of times. We must prepare!
It is sad when you see the terrorist attacks so inhumane that they focus on killing pregnant women by ripping open their bellies, burning babies and children, raping and dismembering, innocent men, women and children who are non-combatants as we saw in Israel over a year ago, and the world blaming Israel? Did the UN and the ICC charge Assad for torturing his own people on a regular basis or using chemical weapons on them or the other atrocities? No! The terrorists continue in break inernational law by using hospitals, schools, mosques and playgrounds as headquaters, hiding behind women and children, but the international community doesn’t condemn the terrorists, clear violations in international law.
The only hope we have is that is all ends soon when Christ returns and the demons of Hell are thrown into the pit to end such demonic attacks!
We won’t change what is coming, but we must prepare for it and be kind to one another as it unfolds!