It was a show about nuclear proliferation. Made me sad to think how dangerous the world is these days. Its not so much that people die, or that wars happen, for none of that is new in history. But what is new is how much damage we can do today.
If India and Pakistan were to have gone to war a hundred years ago, millions might have died but the world would have gone on. Today we can destroy all life on the Planet, with bombs or nerve agents, or deadly diseases for which there is no inoculation.
Yet that is not news - we have gotten used this being the way we live. It got this way in the 1950s, when the United States and Russia began the Cold War and the arms race. Madness really. A war seeming to have no deaths, because the real use of such weapons is too terrible to contemplate. It probably is not good that there were no deaths. Maybe we aren't yet scared enough to draw back from the madness. Maybe we need for it to go very badly wrong before we'll find the will to draw back, and seek wisdom instead of wandering into a further descent into insanity.
Why has it come to this? Why has, at this moment in human history, humanity now come to possess the capacity to destroy all life? Is it some cruel joke by God?
I get the same kinds of repeating loop questions trying to understand terrorists. Do they ever achieve their objectives? Is there some hall of fame somewhere that I missed that celebrates the wars and political goals won by terrorists? Or is terrorism something that can't live with a rational goal at all. Maybe all it can conceive is an irrational goal. Maybe something else is going on.
What are the facts that we do know? Well, there are far too many, but I'm going to pick a few and see if that can lead us somewhere new.
To my thinking there is, to civilization, an outside and an inside. The outside is the obvious things, such as our level of technology, our size, our impact on the Planet. The inside is more subtle. It is, among other things, what matters mean. It is more like our ideas and moral values, than it is like an object, a television set or a tool.
It is my view that the inside is under transition - that we are going from one kind of civilization to another, in a big way, because the fundamental nature of the inside is changing. The inner ground is not shared anymore. It has no coherence and no stability.
This is what makes for the terrorist. Driven by fear and rage, and oblivious to the real consequences of their acts, they strike out. They reach for chaos, imagining this will lead to the form of order they desire, except for the lessons of history that show that terrorism never has worked - ever.
Terrorism is different from revolution, although the goals are the same. The terrorist believes that in making ordinary people, women, children and other non-combatants, suffer, a State can be forced to change its policies. A terrorist is basically a madman, seeding the worst kind of destruction in pursuit of an unattainable goal.
Terrorism seems to be a mental state, quite common in our time, that arises when the inside of civilization has lost its meaning and coherence. It is a psychic disturbance in the mental life of a civilization in decay. It is also infections in a way, but remains irrational in that it assumes that by striking fear into the hearts of a people, they will react rationally and give the terrorists what they want, overlooking that fear drives rationality out, and really only ever promotes retaliation in kind.
Now in terms of history, the doctrine of the Cold War, mutually assured destruction (or MAD), comes before terrorism in time. In essence, this is a sign of the State itself succumbing to the loss of meaning and coherence in civilization. In the creation of an arms race involving weapons of mass destruction, that State itself abandoned rationality in favor of the effort to control by fear. Its logic is that if I am big and scary enough, they will do what I want. Which has only created a like minded response. All other States reply with seeking themselves to be equally big and scary.
In such an decaying rationality, is it any wonder that smaller groups themselves resort to that form of fear creation to which their limited stature confines them - namely terrorism. The illogic of the Cold War leads inevitably to terrorism. Each is fear mongering, with only the scale changing.
Unfortunately, history also teaches us that the way out is always the way through, and we will, without doubt, suffer greatly acts of terror on an increasing scale. The small groups seeking to do terror, will escalate until they involve the larger groups, and the use of weapons of mass destruction seems the inevitable result.
There is in this process of the downfall of Western Civilization then, that which first clearly manifests in madness at the level of State activity (cold war, arms race). This then, like the psychic virus that it is, soon infects the most powerless, who apply then the same insane principle of believing that any thing good can come from making other people afraid.
It would seem a hopeless cause, but there are two players in the Game who want to change the rules.
The first is ordinary people, who basically are neither the State or the individual terrorist, but rather the victims of the insanity of both. More and more they act through Civil Society, through anti-war and anti-globalization movements. Their means is difference. They seek not to rule by fear, but to survive by cooperation and peace. Where the old Civilization lies in ruins in the illogic of the State, and of individual terrorist groups, a new Civilization is being reborn in the wisdom of the peace bringers.
At the very least, this can be said. There is a war going on, between those who want to rule by fear, and those who believe in human nature and in peace. The People of Peace have some powers on their side that make the so-called weapons of mass destruction and the car bombs of the terrorists look like vain fireworks on a starry summer night. In spite of all those who make trouble for others, there is something to Faith and Hope and Charity that far out weights the madness and irrationality which seems to dominate the world. The human spirit is far stronger than mere fear, and retains the power to overcome those forces of destruction. The power to create is greater than the power to destroy. Or, as used to be said: "the pen is mightier than the sword".
