To Be or Not?

Dresden February l945 (German Federal Archive)

In a Times Sunday Review piece “Do I Have a Right to Be?” (NYT, 7/5/14)  Peter Atterton, quotes the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas thusly: “What is natural becomes the most problematic. Do I have the right to be? Is being in the world not taking the place of someone?” Attterton is positing a variation of Edward Lorenz’s “Butterfly Effect” which he describes as “the manner in which small occurrences (like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings) can have enormous consequences.” His “Barbarian Effect” is slightly larger in scope since it asks about the effect of genocide and proposes the notion that for every living person there is someone who did not come into existence because of mass extinction--whether it’s the Holocaust, the Inquisition or the Lisbon earthquake which Voltaire memorialized in Candide. But Atherton’s point is actually more profound since it is pointing to the fact that our current devils whether they are Boko Haram or ISIL have no monopoly on terror. We are all creatures whose existences have been predicated on calamities. Some of them are accidents of nature like the plague, but many others are man made. How many native Americans didn’t come into the world due to colonization. How the West Was Won was the title of a popular 60’s movie. Besides the 6,000,000 murdered in the Holocaust, there are Hiroshima and Nagasaki which claimed almost 250,000 and Dresden in which approxiately 25,000 may have died in one concerted aerial attack. Life settles down and the illusion of normalcy occurs, but history is like a haunted house filled with the ghosts not just of the murdered, but of those who never had a chance to live.

Homeland II

photo of Jean Bethke Elshtain: Kevin W. Weinstein/ Associated Press

    “Jean Bethke Elshtain, a Guiding Light For Policy Makers After 9/11, Dies at 72,” was the headline of a recent obit (NYT, 8/15/13). Elshtain was Laura Spellman Rockfeller professor of social and political ethics at the University of Chicago. In Paul Vitello’s post-mortem she’s quoted as saying “an image that crowds out many others in my mind is that of tens of thousands fleeing New York City by foot. As I watched and wept, I recalled something I had said many times in my classes on war: ‘Americans don’t have living memories of what it means to flee a  city in flames. Americans have not been horrified by refugees fleeing burning cities.’ No more. Now we know.” There was a Battle of Britain. There was D-Day. There was the bombing of Dresden. Atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but as a world power, with the exception of the 9/11 and the earlier World Trade Center bombing (and discounting, of course, the Revolutionary and Civil Wars), modern day Americans, who are not in the military, have remained curiously immune from the wars they have fought. But Elshtain’s quote is prescient. Are we on the precipice of a whole new era in which average Americans will be personally affected by world events? Will there be new forms of cyber terror that will wreak havoc with the juggernaut of American prosperity? Perhaps weather events like Sandy, that paralyzed the Northeast last fall, shutting down major cities and leaving a massive path of destruction in their wake, presage the kinds of Armageddon, Europeans and others have experienced in the great wars and which we will no longer be able to excape.

The Trolley Problem

Philippa Foot, the English philosopher who put forth the Trolley Problem, recently died (“Philippa Foot, Renowned Philosopher, Dies at 90,” NYT, l0/9/10). The Trolley Problem is one of those conundrums like the Prisoner’s Dilemma that presents ethical decisions in a utilitarian context. In short, a run-away trolley is about to kill five track men, but can be diverted so that it will only kill one worker. What should the driver do? Clearly, by diverting the tram, the driver is playing God, deciding who shall live and who shall die. In addition, implicit in the seemingly rational decision to kill one man over five is the notion that life can be quantitatively valued. Surely five lives are worth more than one. But are they? The United States sentenced many of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to horrible deaths in which they were literally incinerated in order to force a Japanese surrender. But this nuclear holocaust saved many lives. The firebombing of Dresden is a lesser example. Ironically, the U.S. implementation of similar tactics in later wars—napalming in Vietnam and massive air assaults, most recently in Iraq—proved to be far less successful. It’s as if the tram that mowed down the one track worker became a possessed evil spirit and returned to knock off the other five. However difficult these arguments become, underlying them is a belief in the power or reason, rationality and logic. Significantly, Foot, who was the granddaughter of Grover Cleveland, was an activist and obviously a believer in the possibility of making decisions for the Greater Good, as evidenced in her having helped to create Oxfam.

World Without End

They say that by August two new relief wells will be drilled in the gulf, which will help to drain off the oil that has been polluting the waters, killing wildlife, ruining the fishing and tourist industries in the gulf states, and giving a whole sector of the American population their first experience of Armageddon. Actually, life has always been difficult. Plagues in the Middle Ages were followed by the religious ecstasy and slaughter of the Inquisition, but now the earth seems a little like Swiss cheese. In certain areas like, say, Provence or the little country of Lichtenstein, where one of the main industries is the manufacture of postage stamps, you might as well be occupying one of the holographic levels of Star Trek, as the landscape has an idyllic, pre-Adamic feeling. But if you’re a Katrina veteran or a woman seeking education in Afghanistan, only to have acid thrown in your face, you occupy the universe of Brueghel and Bosch, the two great interpreters of the grotesque. If it’s been done, it’s been said, and if it’s been said, it’s been done is an old saw that is often brought out with respect to pornography, and the same might be said of calamity. Auschwitz and Buchenwald were off the charts in terms of brutality. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the rape of Nanking, in which the Japanese army performed vivisections on their enemies—all are singular for their intentionality. Idi Amin, the savagery of the Janjaweed militias, Rwanda, the genocide of the Tutsi, the repression of the military dictatorship of Myanmar, and the raw juggernaut of Kim Jong-il’s brand of atavism—all test the extent and agency of man-made evil. Yet since the dawn of recorded time humans have been confronted with adversity. Only serendipity explains the burial of Pompeii or, most recently, the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. If a meteor hadn’t hit the earth, there wouldn’t have been an ice age, which prompted the extinction of the dinosaurs, and Australopithecus and Homo habilis, our primate ancestors, might never have survived the pterodactyls.