The Twilight of Honor
By Michael Nagler
I HAVE SO FAR not said much here about Gaza, not because it doesn’t merit attention 𑁋 far from it 𑁋 but because what’s being done there to our fellow human beings stuns the imagination. As my friend Sami Awad said to me about the latest Israeli atrocity, “My question now is how far will they go? And the answer scares me.”
An enraged, paranoid state with a violent, criminal leadership is wreaking violence on a helpless population, with the full backing 𑁋 material and political –- of the world’s superpower, with a violent, criminal leadership; all this in an international “community” incapable of meaningful intervention. Ronald Reagan’s horrendous attacks on Nicaragua invite comparison.
The war will leave Israel very badly damaged, morally, spiritually, and diplomatically. That is already happening. It will, of course, leave the Palestinian cause more pressing, and the Netherlands and other states are already recognizing a Palestinian state. But there is a much larger question, larger in its general, worldwide significance and deeper in implication: what does this atrocity say about human nature; where will it leave us on our moral trajectory? As Isaac Chotiner said in an interview for the New Yorker published August 5th, “And the big worry now is that the basic norm or value of respecting humanity and human life is just being shredded.” Without that norm, chaos and violence will be our fate. Let’s note in passing that Chotiner adds, “And everyone, whether they’re Sudanese or Palestinian or Syrian, will suffer from that.” Not Israelis? Do we not know now that perpetrators hurt themselves when they hurt others?
Fortunately, very fortunately, in fact, science and some of the general public have left behind the “swashbuckling,” highly dangerous imagination of nature “red in tooth and claw” that dominated the earlier two centuries. For instance, the phenomenon just referred to, the effect on perpetrators, has a scientific name: moral injury. This can help us, potentially, to withstand and even learn from the lessons of the disaster. Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, A Paradise Built in Hell, describes how ‘ordinary’ people step up beautifully in disasters like the Katrina floods or 9/11, or before that, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, revealing a capacity to self-organize and help others that lies normally dormant. Solnit asks, how can we evoke that mentality without the prodding of a disaster? My question is similar: how can the nightmare of Gaza evoke that response, and in such a way that man-made disasters like it stop happening?
At this human level, there are two very different ways people respond to something like Gaza. They can stare into the abyss and say, ‘There, I told you so, we are violent and always will be,’ or they will say, ‘We cannot go on like this; we have got to stop.’ As the greatest scientist of our time observed, “war cannot be humanized, it can only be abolished” (Albert Einstein).
There have been substantial efforts to abolish war 𑁋 looking primarily at European experience 𑁋 legally, by treaty arrangements, or politically, by federating experiments like the European Union with similar attempts at pan-African or Islamic supranationalism. They’ve been helpful, but they haven’t worked. What is really needed, and is not any longer implausible at this juncture in history, is neither legal nor political; it is cultural; it is, frankly, spiritual. We need to recognize the essential unity of the human family. In fact, of life. There is nothing unscientific about this vision; on the contrary. In quantum science and human psychology (and everything in between) scientists have discovered the primacy of consciousness; to quote Max Planck, the founder of quantum science, “without consciousness, nothing can be said to exist.”
That is of paramount significance because consciousness, unlike matter or energy, is absolutely unlimited by its very nature in space and time. On the level of consciousness, we are one.
We need an education based on this fundamental reality; in the outside world, we need a political order that recognizes diversity as expressions of the infinite potentials of an underlying unity; we need an education that emphasizes what all human beings (all life forms) have in common, again as the context of life’s glorious diversity. We need institutions based on that grand reality 𑁋 and fortunately, critical examples already exist and are flourishing: economic/social “islands of peace,” as the late Kenneth Boulding called them, like the Mondragón cooperatives in northeastern Spain and innumerable smaller examples worldwide, many of them created in the very cauldron of conflict with the help of peace organizations working outside organizational frameworks like the UN.
The suffering of Gaza can’t wait for the development of that world order, of course, but that suffering could be ended sooner if it were made a step toward the realization of that visionary order. We can never achieve lasting peace without that vision; with it, we can achieve anything.