Blowing out the Light

Events occurring in our world disturb and bewilder us. They appear to be on a path of their own. Not only can we not understand them, but they seem to be beyond all understanding. This can lead to an acceptance of our inadequacy, putting our fate in the lap of the gods.

And yet, even in this situation, we still need narratives to enable us to make sense of the world. Given its present state, however, and the apparent distance of gods in which faith has previously been placed, many traditional narratives have become strained.

One consequence has been that we make up our own stories. There are thousands of them — based in metaphysics, in theologies, in fundamentalism, in progress, in conspiracies, in technology, in biology, and much more. We seem to need such stories even when we know they are not true.

This isn’t to suggest that sense that makes sense always eludes us, just that it occurs, often, in unexpected places and appears to be trivial. One such place for me, when I was at school in the 1960s, was in the chemistry lab.

Doc Jones, our chemistry teacher was an elderly, bumbling but lovely little man with a sense of humour and a stutter. In the lab special chemicals were kept in a separate cabinet, and occasionally one of them would go missing. On these occasions, after looking in all the expected places, we would say to the Doc, “Please sir I can’t find the jar of …… anywhere”. To which the standard reply was “w..w..w..well boys (it was a boys’ school) i..i..i..if its not in one place i..i..i..i..its in another”. I can hear him like yesterday — and he was always right! That lesson has followed me throughout my life.

So, perhaps, in seeking to make sense of our world we are looking in the wrong place.

As you might gather, I’m a late starter in the game of trying to make sense of our world, even though I have now been at it for quite a long time.

The light bulb moment for me was 9/11/2001. The light bulb blew and the light went out. All the understanding and received wisdom on which my life had up to that time been lived, turned out to be wrong. Those making the major decisions in our world knew something very different to me.

In this new and different world, I was in a vacuum, in the dark. I could make no sense of it. And so for years I waited and watched to see how the alternative master plan would work out, and I waited and waited and it didn’t.

9/11 was, nevertheless, a learning experience. In the days and weeks that followed the attacks, the world, for the first time in my life, felt united. It spoke as one. It was united in its condemnation of the attacks, it was united in its sympathy and support for the people of the US, and it was united in its support for the US administration bringing those responsible to justice. The unity included the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It offered to capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to face trial in a neutral country.

Following the twelve years of comparative peace that followed the end of the Cold War, here was a wholly unexpected opportunity for bringing the world further together to build common interest, common action and common security. The offer, however, was not even acknowledged. The US was intent on its own path of war, invading Afghanistan, removing the Taliban, and moving on to Iraq. Interesting and curious.

A different insight came from my discovery of two US documents published in the year 2000, a year before 9/11. One was Joint Vision 2020 from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the other was Rebuilding America’s Defenses from the think tank Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Many signatories to the latter would subsequently be appointed to key positions in the new Bush administration of 2001. The PNAC was, in effect, the new administration in waiting.

The first of these documents identified the objective of the US military as “full spectrum” military dominance across all domains. The second identified how this vision was to be achieved. A key element was by fighting and decisively winning “multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” that would compel adversaries to “act in ways that protect America’s interests”.

The subsequent identification of an “axis of evil” provided a list of those against whom such wars would be fought. Iraq, although having no part at all in the attacks of 9/11 was at the top of that list.

Reading these documents also enabled me to make more sense of the later 9/11 Commission Report of 2004 and its finding that, despite widespread, highly informed and insistent warnings of spectacular and catastrophic attacks, it found “little evidence that the progress of the plot was disturbed by any government action, …… domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction, and did not have a plan to institute. The borders were not hardened. Transportation systems were not fortified. Electronic surveillance was not targeted against a domestic threat. State and local law enforcement were not marshaled to augment the FBI‘s efforts. The public was not warned”.¹

Bush himself was reported to have said “I’m tired of swatting at flies. I’m tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists.” The attacks of 9/11 enabled this to happen.

A third observation was how ordinary all this was. The people making the decisions to begin the war in Iraq weren’t clever or super-intelligent. They and their highly-educated, highly-paid expert advisors had no superior powers. Indeed the millions upon millions of people around the world who took to the streets prior to the invasion to protest against it, were wiser by far and had far greater insight and understanding than those few who, simply because they could, took the world into that ever-spreading disaster.

The insights gained from these observations, for me included:

• The realisation that in a world of opportunities and threats, if all we ever see are the threats, the world can and will only get worse, not better.
• The realisation that the Bush administration was intent on war long before it was elected. Fighting was its reason for being. This, however, as a realisation, was also a question — why? And how prevalent is such a tendency?
• And the realisation that, in our deeply hierarchical world of insane inequality, those with wealth and power are just as fallible, deluded, human and lost as everyone else, maybe more so, although many of them don’t know it and all, probably, will deny it.

After many years of waiting and watching, my venture for new understanding eventually began. It built upon these three insights and upon the otherwise absence of meaningful thoughts in my brain. In retrospect, I wish I had read Alasdair MacIntyre’s book After Virtue before I started.

In that book, written in 1981, MacIntyre identified the presence of a seemingly unresolvable conflict in the sphere of moral philosophy. On the one hand, and somewhat simplified, he observed that common morality grounded upon the common good was the strongly embedded morality of very many people. On the other, he observed that the arguments put forward in support of that morality had no rationally valid foundation.

On his evaluation the philosophers of the Enlightenment had sought a replacement for common morality through reason, but had failed. This has the outcome, that, without an agreed sound base on which moral values are able to be grounded, the morality of modern society is declining.²

For explaining the prevalence of common morality in his time, MacIntyre speculated that it must have been prevalent in human communities of the past, but that, with the disappearance of those communities, the context in which it had arisen and flourished had been lost.

The somewhat pessimistic conclusion he came to in 1981 was that we are advancing towards a coming age of barbarianism and darkness. We, therefore, if we are to avoid it, need to find the context perceived by MacIntyre to have been lost. This, and understanding why it was lost, is what this blog sets out to achieve.