Wars waged around us, and within us, all the time

by Harold Bauer –

“Conflict is a part of life” is a cliché, as is, that “war has a long human history and prehistory.”  Rarely are canards researched.  The German, Nobel Laureate in Medicine, Konrad Lorenz, suggested, strange members of the same species placed in a small container, like fish, lizards, robins, rats or primates, will fight.  Strangers with no flight exit, no relationship, thus, fight.  Different species don’t.  This sounded simplistic, so I went on to the field-studies of behaving vertebrates.

As a psychology graduate student, I studied “territory in Yellow Warblers” in a marsh.   I learned how bird territory functioned as a system of sharing with kin, while dispersing interlopers.  These warblers had conscientious mates, zipping about for food, building nests, raising young and defending a small area from interlopers with some success.  Continuing to the forests of East Africa, I studied chimpanzees, our closest living ancestors, in fact, for years.  We learned how they loved their young, were kind to friends and respected strangers in their hunter-gatherer community.  Interloping males had to run away.  After years we understood from the inside, how they defended their separate communities, and mutually found mates, in a version of chimpanzee us versus them.  Communities were patrolled repelling interloping males.  Relationships became stressed, due to human over-population leading to near total deforestation, aka habitat destruction, so, my chimpanzee relatives are dwindling.

Our proto-human, hunter-gatherer ape societies evolved 6 million years ago, from our least common African ape ancestors.  Recently, humans dispersed from Africa, globally. Dispersal of hunter-gatherers over the earth, they were imagined as barbarians, thieves, rapists, murderers and so forth.  Humans became agrarian and, now, global and industrial.  Villages, cities and states became the norm.  Barbarians were still them.  I grew up with loving parents, as millions do, in fearful-ignorant bigotry.  Public college, SUNY educations, excelled us away from bigotry to a liberal, we the people, understanding of the world.   

Now this American public education is being undermined.  Americans are now subjected to regular taunts of white nationalism, as well as, discouragement from civil and voting rights.  Conscientious tax-paying workers are deported or imprisoned, rather than finding a negotiated, legislative solution.  Apparently, if you cannot afford health care, you don’t deserve it, as no replacement was supported in dozens of Congressional votes.  If you cannot afford to get old, don’t, seems to be another current American regression to the 19th Century.  So, why is gross violence moving towards tyranny, so surprising to us?  Maybe it’s the scale, frame and rationale.

Look at current events.  Immorality starts tyranny with making an exception for itself.  American aren’t exceptional.  On Monday, May 14, 2018, over two thousand unarmed Palestinians were shot by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip, protesting the U.S. President’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israeli’s capital.  Amazon’s Human Flow documents Gaza’s plight.  Trump broke with recent Western agreements, which wanted good for three Abrahamic religion’s historic interests in Jerusalem.  It’s a world city.   The Gaza Strip is walled off from Egypt and Israeli, caging in over a million people.   Over a hundred died that Monday.  Many hundreds of the massacre’s survivors received minimal care, nursing life-long disabilities.   The U.S. gives Israeli billions in military aid yearly, yet, where is morality?  Forty miles away, that day, Israeli leaders and the Trump family spoke of inevitability in front of a new plaque for a Jerusalem, U.S. embassy.  They claimed the shootings were staged for Iranian propaganda.  Trump also broke the long negotiated, Iranian Nuclear Treaty, and last year, the epic Paris Climate Accords.  Breaking nuke & climate treaties put us on a thinner edge of existence.

We doubled human population numbers, since the 60s, while social media instantly, promotes opinion or fallacies as truth or fact.  Civil democracies require informed, caring and inclusive actions based upon scientific facts.  Critical journalism is needed, and, now, candidate nominations and voter participation.  Social media confabulations are attention getting, instant echo chambers of mob rule, that diminish argument and critical thought, for feel-good fallacies.

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan of the University of Toronto admonished us that the media was the message.   Your relationship to “others” was changing electronically, now, digitally.  Although debates continue, the unprecedented rise of digital social media challenge our constitutional democracies, founded on a science educated, critically informed electorate.   External enemies now immediately troll the internet, on several platforms, to exploit our internal strife.  The American institutional balance of power, the very roots of our 18th Century U.S. Constitution, is being pulled apart without legislative or judicial deliberation.   

For example, currently, our U.S. Senate Majority leader wants to appoint Federal judges post haste, while blocking them previously.   Isolating media silos in the 21st Century, creates social media nationalism, due to people spending hours per day interacting with strangers, rather than real, complicated relationships and policy nuances.

So, where are we, nearly 8 billion people, now?  NASA astronauts see how amazingly thin, our atmosphere is compared to the endless void of black space.  Burning fossil fuels is causing rapid climate change in our spaceship earth’s atmosphere.  Renewable energy and passive design are positive choices.  Climate change hits the poorest, and is a cause of the tragic, human induced, sixth mass extinction event.  Climate change is a fact, not a Chinese conspiracy, to act on.

The conflicts waged in brains, between flight-fight, versus stay-share, are contained by an amazingly thin veneer of civilized greetings, conversations and departures that maintain facts in trusted relationships of women & men’s empowerment and choice.   Such framing diplomacy and civility may be distrusted as annoying or even political correctness, but consider the alternatives of war deaths or even the risk of human extinction.   Climate change and war are existentially serious.  In both arenas of willful, apocalypse, we can expect to fall off these amazingly thin edges.