That which is inescapable
This is an excerpt from my journal in which I comment about processes in our world that do not fit into some neat divide between right or wrong.
Twenty minutes to midnight. I am back from the nightly hike. As always, I have my four dogs for company. Hoot… Hoot… Hoot… The owl is nearby. It is here to hunt and kill for its survival. There is no point in arguing whether this is right or wrong. Those are narrow categories that apply to a subset of human affairs. The owl simply acts. Even though there is some variability to its behaviour, it is framed by an overarching constraint that it cannot modify. To be a bird of prey is the predicament its nature makes unavoidable.
The same is true for human volition. Whatever manoeuvring space is available is ultimately delineated by a prior condition that the individual cannot escape from. Like the birds of prey, human has to kill in order to live; kill at all times. Whether this is meat or vegetables is secondary to the fact that some form of life has to be consumed.
For the cosmos as a whole, there is no loss. These are the workings of transfiguration. The same star dust continues to shape-shift, sometimes as a galaxy, at others as a puppy. What comes goes, only to come again. A circular motion that does not repeat itself in exact copies. An everlasting helix.
A dog with sufficient size, strength, and drive, such as any of my dogs, will attack and eliminate cats. Not out of hunger, but to preemptively reduce the number of competitors. It does not matter that I am the guarantor of food. They are still hardwired to treat “others” with extreme prejudice.
Plants are no different. It is only after I clearer the bramble from most of my land, and kept the space open, that almond trees and blackthorns, among others, started to grow. Some forms of vegetable life cooperate with each other, while others compete for land, water, air, and sunshine.
Everywhere I look, I find tension and release, attraction and repulsion, friendship and enmity, leadership and subservience. All nested towards infinity. None of this is specific to human beings. Yet many think they are above the rest. They fancy themselves are purely spiritual beings who occupy some higher moral ground when, in reality, we are all governed by the same forces that non even the sun can defy.
Our world, the small milieu of human affairs, is heading full speed towards a planet-wide conflagration. The Europeans are shifting to a militarised economy as they remain committed to their forever war against Russia. The Japanese are casting aside whatever nominal pacifism they were once committed to in their renewed ambition to control larger parts of east Asia while providing an antipode to the Chinese. China will eventually transmogrify into what Westerners think it already is. And so on.
It is understandable why we want to find someone to blame for all this. A person or group has to be responsible and there must be some grand plan behind it all. We cannot accept that we have no control over the framework we operate in. Even in our darkest hours, we search for a good story with unlikely heroes and shady characters. Whether it is the imperialists, the globalists, the nationalists, the militarists, the fundamentalists, the Zionists, the Jihadis, and more, each adds a layer of explanatory narrative on top of processes that are decisively beyond their reach.
Humans are compelled into action by powerful drives they cannot opt out of. To survive, which entails cooperation and competition. Instrumental are the forces that lead humans to pursue conquest, glory, and domination. Even the otherwise innocuous outlook of the explorer, be it in physical or mental space, bestows some kind of advantage vis-à -vis one’s competition; an advantage that can be exploited when necessary. Necessity guides us.
Even when there is no warfare, society at-large experiences the incessant transfiguration that creates some and annihilates others. From employment to unemployment, success to failure, enrichment to impoverishment. It flows, it comes, it goes. A macro view of history exposes the same patterns, of shifting political geographies, of alliances that evolve, of enemies that become friends before squabbling again, of intellectuals who believe they learn from the past as they boldly move ever closer to some supposed enlightenment only to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors.
There is no rest. No form of life stays in place. An individual person, which in actuality is a system of systems, also changes continuously: eating, moving, sleeping, ageing… The entropy of our entire reality is the precondition for its configuration anew. It does not come from nothing and will not go towards nothing. It simply is.
Yet I cannot help but recognise my emotions. I feel disappointed that we cannot rely on our common sense to manage our affairs. It is not “common”, alas! The distribution of character traits and talents is such. Some have a more pronounced rational side. Others are led by emotion. There is no right or wrong, no better or worse. This may even be the optimal arrangement if we think of it in terms of economising resources at scale: have few that are inventors and pioneers, and let the many be capable of replicating the results. An expensive computation, which amounts to some discovery, need only be performed once before it is reproduced much more cheaply through imitation.
I learnt how to program, for example. I merely follow in the footsteps of others who had to do all the hard work of inventing the relevant paradigms and clearing the path as it were. If so, I cannot bemoan the distribution of skills among our kind. It ultimately is what defines life as we experience it, both for the parts we cherish and those we loath.
Some will try to remake people in a certain image, such as through indoctrination, religious absolutism, or even eugenics and designer babies. This is the exploratory part, underpinned by the want for safety. The uniform or the homogeneous is that which can be predicted and, thus, that which can be measured and guarded against. Yet the explorer is at odds with the underlying motivation to find a totalising integrating force. They need sufficient openendedness to make excursions that others have not even fathomed.
Perhaps we can have different types of people with a distribution unlike what we are used to. It might even be viable. Though it may also reveal to those daring souls that they did not know what they were wishing for.
Who is to blame? Nobody. Every form of life does that which its condition renderes inescapable.