Delusional

 

One adjective often, and correctly, used for Putin’s invasion is “delusional.” Even if he manages to pound Ukraine into scorched rubble, he’ll still be further than when he began from anything resembling victory. He and his henchmen will continue to be generally despised and feared, most intensely by the defiant Ukrainians themselves. As Hemingway wrote, “Man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Another aspect of Putin’s delusion is projection: he rationalizes that he is destroying Nazis while behaving like a Nazi himself.

 

While we’re quoting Nobel prizewinners, here is a snippet from Faulkner’s Nobel speech: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?”

 

Putin happens to be the head of one of the nine nations who could answer Faulkner’s question. But he is hardly alone in his conviction that military force backed up by nuclear weapons will yield greatness, or security, or whatever it is he hopes to gain from his colossal misjudgment. We’re all a part of the general delusion of our time, that the trillions we have consented to pour into militarism will yield genuine peace. Here’s one more quotation from a Nobel winner, this from T.S. Eliot: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

 

Mass delusion is indicated by our clinging to obsolete paradigms. Remember how certain that clerical authorities were that the earth was the center of the solar system? Another obsolete paradigm clarified by the invasion of Ukraine is the usefulness of nuclear weapons as a way to prevent war. Nuclear weapons did not deter Osama bin Laden.  Nor did they deter Putin.

 

Instead, the record of near disaster over the decades of the nuclear age underlines our good fortune to find ourselves still alive and unradiated. Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a Soviet military bunker in 1983 when two signals indicated that U.S. intercontinental missiles were headed toward the U.S.S.R. He rightly decided there must be a malfunction in the Soviet early warning system and chose not to alert his superiors, risking his career. There are a number of such stories in the public domain, which would indicate that there may be even more close calls which remain classified.

 

What logic might be powerful enough to break the trance these weapons have induced in the governments of the world? I only know what logical common sense tells me: we cannot go on like this, building and renewing weapons and playing nuclear chicken. We can’t continue forever relying on fiendishly complex computer systems that are subject to malfunction, being hacked, or coming to fatally mistaken conclusions, either on their own or in concert with the fallible humans operating them.

 

Imagine that aliens have swooped in from deep space to check up on our planet. As they circle the earth, they see no borders. It all looks like a single entity, menaced by rising temperatures and intensifying conflicts, both of which threaten the overall health of the living system upon which humans depend for their support. That is reality.

 

The aliens would say to us, “wake up from your delusion. Shake off the trance. Grow up. Learn to get along. Greater Russia is an abstraction, a fantasy, an illusion. And so are all the ‘my country right or wrong’ mythologies of America, China, and others. Nations and people have more in common than what separates you. You share a single planet and single life-support system, a common evolutionary history, a collective wish to leave your children a better life than your own, and an interdependent future where your survival depends upon each other. Avoiding blowing yourselves up is your ultimate common self-interest—a reality upon which to build an international security regime not based in deterrence, nuclear weapons, and war—based instead in the need for a further level of cooperation necessary to address your many sustainability challenges.”

 

Biden and Zelensky are doing a heroic job within the existing delusional paradigm. But it is not too soon to start thinking outside the box: nuclear weapons are the problem, not the solution that establishment thinking fatalistically assumes they are. They are a solution only in the Holocaust sense of “final solution.” One more quotation from a Nobel winner: "If God is on our side, He'll stop the next war."

What might lie beyond deterrence? Putin or no Putin, creative men and women of good will can end our present drift downstream toward the waterfall ahead. This begins by admitting that we ourselves, along with Putin, are deluded by the false power of nuclear weapons.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Is This The Best We Can Do?

 

There’s been a lot of “whataboutism” muddying the dialogue around the deeper causes of the cruel and pointless Ukraine invasion. What about the eastward expansion of NATO? What about the many arbitrary and unnecessary invasions of sovereign nations by the United States? While this back and forth may provide a momentary sensation of righteousness, it generates more heat than light, recalling playground shouts of “You started it! No, you did!”

 

The real issue is not who started it, but preventing regression to a level of violence which destroys everything while resolving nothing. “Whataboutism” implies a semi-realization that all parties are enmeshed in competitive power games that lead to violent military “solutions.”

 

Wouldn’t it be more helpful if the community of nations could begin from a humbler starting-point: instead of endless chauvinist justifications, me good/you bad, to admit that we all have rationalized our violence on the basis of national self-interest, we all, to the special delight of arms merchants, have ensured that we and our allies are provided with the most advanced weaponry, we all have violated or cancelled hard-won arms agreements, we all have dehumanized adversaries into enemy stereotypes—and this paradigm has not worked to bring us the security for which the toiling masses of this small planet yearn.

 

In spite of a dire risk of slipping over the nuclear edge, so far the global community prefers to stick with balance-of-power models of statecraft even as nuclear weapons only increase mutual paranoia and cancel out any potential “victory.” Where is the sane common sense that impressed itself upon Gorbachev and Reagan back in 1986, as they seriously considered getting rid of nukes entirely?

 

Deterrence is the sacred cow that rationalizes the status quo, but deterrence asserts that it will work forever and that there will be no mistakes—surely a bit much to ask of fallible humans. And what does it mean for the U.S. or Russia and others to refuse to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons? Isn’t this a clue that we are only semi-committed to deterrence while secretly still planning nuclear war-fighting?

 

There is a fatalistic insanity in the willingness of nations to throw trillions of dollars into ensuring that each “wins” the great game of superpower competition and prestige, while they remain unwilling to give real decision-making power, and the relatively tiny amount of resources it would take, to diplomatic processes based in the reality that we are drifting downstream toward a nuclear waterfall. After WW3 will be too late; prevention is everything. Why can’t we conceive of deterrence as a temporary stopgap as we move beyond it toward the cooperation required to mitigate climate change and pandemics? In the nuclear age, self-interest has fundamentally changed: every nation shares with every other nation, nuclear or not, a common interest in avoiding planetary annihilation, and that shared interest can form the basis of new agreements.

 

Who will lead? Where to start? Is the leverage-point in some kind of restructuring of the U.N.? Is it in a more forceful appeal to the nine nuclear nations from the sixty-odd countries that have ratified the U.N.Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons? Is it in the convening of some new permanent conference of the nine nuclear countries, or however few or many of them that might be willing to lead? Will we resignedly accept the rationalizations of the lobbyists, the politicians in the pockets of the arms dealers, the narcissistic autocrats, all of whom form a self-perpetuating system that does nothing to address our real challenges?

 

Or will we go with the compassion of millions of NGOs like Rotary International, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Campaign Against Nuclear Weapons (name—and support—your own favorite) all of whom are forging new connections in the context of what Teilhard de Chardin called the “noosphere,” a kind of global brain working outside the tired old structures of war-thinking. Which of these two parallel universes of thought will prevail? Putin’s brutality, whatever its outcome, has only pointed up the stupidity and futility of violence and  the perennial possibility of its opposite—a world that chooses survival, takes the risk of cooperation, and ensures a further stage in the unfolding human story.