War and it surrogates have dominated human civilizations for at least 12,000 years. The language of war winds through our consciousness like a bloody river. We (humans) know it is insane behavior and have always known this.
Our religions speak of peace and have strictures against war that are rationalized away and ignored.
Barbara Ehrenreich, in her book Blood Rites, posits that the origins of war lie in two places.
First is our position in earliest times not as the apex predator, but as prey. War was a magical reenactment of the primal battle with the apex predators of the time.
The second is in the hunting out of the big game sometime around 12,000 years ago. There were young men left unemployed with the advent of farming.
Organized theft from other tribes gave them something to do and prevented them from acting out in their own homes. Over time this behavior was institutionalized. And then became the center post of human affairs. Wars and rumors of war.
The invention of the atomic bomb in 1945 (at the end of the most massive war in history) upped the ante beyond what sane people could tolerate, and yet we somehow have built enough of these weapons to blow the earth to smithereens 1000 times over.
Because we can’t actually use this weapon there is now a plethora of surrogates for war. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on terrorism. None of these can ever be won. There will be no victor, no vanquished. And ever the temptation looms to use the nukes. It is not sane. War is not sane.
War creeps into our daily lives even in the so-called peacetime. In the United States there is a cold civil war raging. It is getting hotter all the time. Around the world there are small skirmishes and the cold hand of economic colonization. A proxy for war.
The language of capitalism is rife with the words and ideologies of war. This is no accident. This mirrors the much older language of patriarchy.
“The Bomb" was only about a dozen years old when I was born. The ability to destroy all of creation in the hands of fragile, flawed humans. Some of whom are lacking in a moral compass of any kind. We were raised under that shadow and knew its edges too well.
Even before the wall fell, our collective ability to think about something of that awful magnitude was fading. We were becoming numb.
After the wall fell, we pushed the reality safely to the back of our human consciousness. Except for a few professors of social science we went on our merry way.
But the threat did not go away. We have more nuclear weapons, and worse ones, then ever. And that is why I am anxious. It could better be described as the essential existential angst--a curse of my generation.
The truth is as it has always been: atomic weapons are an abomination and should all be destroyed and the knowledge of them become so taboo that H. sapiens never tries anything like it again.
That is what should happen, but won’t. We are fools.
I am focusing on this part of the mess because it sits at the foundation of the entire catastrophe and has for 75 years.
Without nukes the need for NATO would not exist. Without nukes “negotiation” could be conducted on a level playing field without fear of setting off a war that would extinguish life on earth.
And those are just the geopolitical considerations.
The spiritual considerations condemn our entire species.
We are simply not fit to have such weapons and if we were the proof would be in our rejection of them.
A device the only purpose of which is destruction of life on earth is a crime against nature and a sin against this living earth.
James Hillman in A Terrible Love of War tell us that the classical gods represent aspect of the human psyche that can’t be wished away. Aries/Mars exists in the pantheon because he exists in us.
If we are ever to overcome this pox on all our houses, we must face the truth. The violence is inside of us and must be expressed or transformed.
We must also transform our language as the way we speak and what we speak of informs our behavior. Just suppressing is not enough.
Take a look at any “peace” center or church full of people preaching peace. The backbiting, territoriality, and simmering violence clothed as virtue is palpable. I once sat through 3 hours of a meeting that got side-tracked by vegans who did not want cow milk with the coffee. It almost came to blows. This is what happens when the “peacemakers” bypass the inner work.
And speaking of coffee—we in the west and global north live on the violent exploitation of people and eco-systems around the world. This is what supplies our comfortable lifestyles. This too is a kind of war.
If we are ever to fix this, we must confront this truth as well. It is not your personal fault, nor is it mine. But it is true, nevertheless. And if we want to heal it, we must first own it.
I do not have the big answer here. There have been only a handful of people who have solved this within themselves. They are called saints and ascended masters.
But the time has come. The earth and other life forms can no longer bear our weight. This is the beginning of an inquiry. I truly believe that enough of us can learn how to honor the energy of Aries within us without destroying the earth, other beings, or ourselves. We can LEARN. And we must.