Human nature consistently defies definition.
Much as we would like to portray ourselves as the noblest of God’s creations, the truth is inescapable. And the truth is simple: We are not what we are expected to be or should have been. That lends a jarring note to our opinion of ourselves. We trek down to our mosques and churches and temples and synagogues to speak to the Almighty, in our different ways, to beseech Him to make life a better proposition for us than it has so far been.
And yet, when religions clash on the streets, when faith leads us to spill blood in defence of our diverse religious beliefs, we sit back, to ask why we do that. But that is something that has happened across millennia.
We do not have the answers.
Today, as hundreds of thousands of people flee their endangered homeland of Ukraine, we ask why war must so cruelly compel societies into seeking refuge away from home. In the falling snow, in the cold winds blowing all day, in the bitter rain worsening life for them, these Ukrainians are massed along the borders their hapless country shares with its neighbours.
Many of them will not have the good fortune to find homes, however temporary, beyond those frontiers. But does the world care? Does Vladimir Putin care? The invasion of Ukraine is once more a manifestation of the dark thoughts which govern human nature.
Aggression, for centuries a characteristic of human behaviour, remains a terrible norm in these putatively sophisticated times. Ah, that term, “sophistication,” raises fresh new questions. When a powerful state decides that the pummeling of a weaker one is in order, when its leader places his nuclear arsenal on alert only because he needs to occupy a country he is fixated on, you ask: Where is the sophistication in all this maladroit behaviour?
We are reminded endlessly that we inhabit a post-modern era, meaning that we have all reached a level of understanding of life which extends to our knowledge of the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope is, as we speak, on its ceaseless journey into the deeper regions of the universe. It will map the beginnings billions of years ago of the cosmic system, and will send back to us images of the earliest stars formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang.
Human ingenuity is at work, indeed has especially been at work since the world entered the space age in the late 1950s. The moon landing in July 1969 raised in us the hope, a year after our experience of the battering of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Pact powers, a year after the massacre in Mỹ Lai, that the better part of our nature was finally taking over. Suddenly the Hobbesian denunciation of man’s nature -- “the condition of man … is a war of everyone against everyone” -- did not matter anymore. It was the poet Archibald MacLeish who spoke for us -- told us that we were all brothers in the universe, brothers who knew they were truly brothers.
We were naïve to cast Thomas Hobbes to the winds. Hobbes has always been there. When Putin’s predecessors in the unleashing of unprovoked aggression, George W Bush and Tony Blair, pushed their soldiers into destroying an orderly, beautiful, and culturally sophisticated Iraq in 2003, we knew the Hobbesian yet underlined our view of ourselves. The fanatics brought the twin towers down in New York, the Taliban and then al-Qaeda and Islamic State disseminated the language of hate in the name of religion. Hobbes was there, as he was there when Joe Biden decided on a precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan just months ago.
We are still haunted by images of hundreds of desperate Afghans sprinting alongside a mammoth US military aircraft, in the faint hope that it would stop to collect them on board and fly them out to safety. Afghans suffer even as we write. Biden has taken away half of their frozen assets abroad, to compensate families of the victims of 9/11.
The people of Afghanistan had no role in 9/11, and yet Biden has chosen to punish them. He does not listen. Which politician in a powerful country has ever heard the sobs of the poor? Putin has no compassion for Ukraine’s frightened, huddled masses, for he governs a powerful country.
But then, observe the irony.
In these two years which have gone by since the coronavirus burst over our world, five million-plus people have gone to early graves on this blighted, yet strangely ethereal, planet. Those images of our home, of earthrise, from far out in space are proof of the beauty of Creation. Medical science has scrambled to save lives, from one end of the world to the other. Vaccines and boosters have come on a fast-track industrial scale, because Covid-19 was collective pain for all of us, because we shared the pain.
And because we shared it, it made sense to pool our efforts in saving ourselves without discrimination, without our political and religious and social preferences. In space science and in our response to the coronavirus, we have not permitted discrimination, of any kind, to come in. All those bodies draped in shrouds, placed in coffins or cremated through the long nights by the river brought us together in collective grief. We remembered, again, MacLeish. We were reinforced in our belief that human nature was not what Hobbes thought it was.
We were to be proven wrong again. The rise of inexcusable affluence through the machinery of corruption everywhere puts societies to shame, creates an ever-widening chasm between the grasping rich and the gasping dirt poor inhabiting the globe. Journals in the West trip over one another in celebrating the lives of the world’s richest individuals, with little shame. Obesity bores into the health of the laidback rich even as the children of the poor go scavenging for food leftovers in lands condemned to damnation.
War and pestilence are our perennials; and avarice drives us as we occupy lands historically the homes of the indigenous across the globe. Ice melts, rivers run dry, forests die, and deserts expand. Climate change is our new curse.
In a world of Vladimir Putin, Min Aung Hlaing, and Jair Bolsonaro, good men in love with their people, with humankind -- and Volodymir Zelenskyy is among them -- pay a price for their honesty of purpose. Our planet is in great need of men following in the footsteps of the purposeful Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales.
Where do we come by them?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist and biographer.
