Tome - thoughts of a weary traveller

We talk a lot in our culture about the fall from grace, the fall from paradise, from Eden.  The loss of innocence.  The devil, the influence of evil.  We speak of this as though it’s external – outside our own hearts and minds.  What is the heart anyway but a pump formed of muscle and gristle?

I’m sitting drinking vodka from a shot-glass.  A certain friend will recognise it as the one she brought back from New York in maybe 1997.  I can’t help looking at those towers. 

I watched them fall on TV standing with an American mate.  It’s a bit like watching the footage of the Hindenburg disaster and hearing the heart-rending commentary of the reporter at the time – but on a grand scale and with the knowledge that someone did this intentionally.  Planned and premeditated in cold blood.

I don’t really give a shit about the moral argument.  Maybe someone thought they were settling a score.  I’m interested more in what part of the human mind or spirit lends itself to such bestial behaviour.

Most people wouldn’t admit to having the kind of feelings that would make them drive a knife into a stewardess or calmly fly a passenger jet into a tall building on a bright September morning.  There are probably more who would press the teat on a bomb-release to send high-explosives and incendiaries tumbling onto a city.  Perhaps more still who would launch a missile from a distance of several hundred miles to land in the administrative centre of a city – if it was their job.

The problem is, all of the above probably felt that the act was justified in some way that they would be willing to defend.

Somewhere in a quiet street, someone is knifed or shot for what they are carrying around.  The attacker has all the justification they need – as does the rapist or the random killer of a stranger.   Even the most disturbed mind has rationalised the act at the time.  The confusion probably comes after.

We talk about a failure to be able to empathise.  We label such people psychopaths.  Was Enola Gay’s bombardier a psychopath?  Or did he justify his action with the lives saved by preventing an invasion of the Japanese mainland?  Or was he just doing his job?

And Mohamed Atta?  What was going through his mind?  It’s too easy to answer 72 virgins.

Right now, it feels like there’s something badly wrong with the world.  But two weeks ago, I stood looking at relics of ancient Mesopotamia.  The events recorded there seemed also to be barbaric. 

I grew up during the Cold War.  While the potential was there for a nuclear war that would effectively end the human era, the responsibility for doing so and the memory of the horrors of World War 2 prevented it from happening.  It didn’t stop limited acts of wickedness being perpetrated from Northern Ireland to Vietnam.

Nor did it prevent the shooting, stabbing, strangulation and battering to death of individual ordinary people the world over.

So what is “evil”?  Why do we feel the need to inflict suffering and death upon other people just like ourselves, who are born, raised as sentient beings – people with feelings of love, with dreams and hopes, imagination?

Because we also hate.  Even just for the split-second that we perform our duty, or take a wallet with thirty bucks wedged inside.  For that moment, we hate just enough to perform the act. 

I walked through slums in India with a rucksack stuffed with western possessions – a money belt full of travellers’ cheques and dollars – yet nobody bothered me.  I’ve often thought about that.  People called “Hello!” from what were little more than dog kennels, kids walked alongside wanting to hold hands, but nobody threatened me in any way.

What makes us decide to hate enough that we want to take a life?

People often blame robbery on drug use – desperation.  Maybe, sometimes.   But what about the big game?  What makes it ok to launch a Tomahawk missile from a submarine at a city?  What makes it ok to detonate a car-bomb in a busy market?  What makes it ok to fly a passenger jet into a crowded building on a September morning?

I’ve worn a uniform.  I’ve worn an office suit for the military.  I wear one now in the furtherance of bringing efficiencies to a civilian organisation – jobs will be lost.  Is my salary reward for bloodying my hands?  Maybe.

My point is that there’s something in all of us.  Forget Lucifer.  Forget Eden and serpents.  None of the blame lies outside our own person. 

It is within all of us also to care and to be agents of good.  By failing to do so, we are implicitly agents of harm.  All of us are given the potential at birth to act in ways that are harmful or good.  All of us are capable of seeing and acting upon the good and harmful actions of others.

Much of this has been eroded by an abrogation of individual responsibility to civic, state and religious powers.  History shows manifestly that these powers are routinely co-opted by interests that have anything but good in mind.

If there is a chance of bringing about an environment where empathy is allowed to work to bring good to all, individuals must play their part as the atoms of human interaction.  All people must be educated to understand what empowered human beings can achieve – individually and together, as citizens not subjects.  Even republics create their monarchies and systems of patronage – authority structures that disempower and alienate citizens without wealth.

Authority goes hand-in-hand with wealth.  Together, they control poverty.  As seen in the Indian slums, it is not necessarily poverty that creates tension and hatred. To me, it is more the existence of wealth and the authority and controls used to maintain it.

Poverty itself is constantly reinvented. In Africa, millions live lives that are almost untouched by the trappings of wealth as we understand it. Two generations before me, my own family lived lives not dissimilar.

In the affluent West today, poverty can be the failure to keep up with the accumulation of wealth. Globally, this is recognised as a threat to world stability. Countries that lag require development in order to preserve the stability required for the continued accumulation of wealth in the West.

Our system of trade spreads the problem to other countries and cultures. We create wealthy elites and equip them to maintain authority over their poor so that we get the best deal when extracting their natural resources. The iniquities that result have an effect that is as easily exported as oil and mineral ores.

That effect has the same origin as the pointless taking of a life in a quiet street. Each knife is held in a human hand. Each trigger has a finger wrapped around it. Each bomb is primed by a thinking, feeling human being.

And so this line of thought is dragged into the complexity of want, need and systems of control. But in the middle of all the complexity and confusion are individual people. It is there that the answer lies - individual actions.

Evil is a human invention.  So, too, is goodness. Both exist within us all.