It is difficult to write an article, especially in the new year, imploring humanity to stop war without giving the impression of being an unrealistic idealist. But calling for an essential rationality on a planetary scale has become crucial for our survival.
During Russia’s attack on Ukraine, we have seen the rebirth of distant memories (or memories that we hoped were confined to history) replayed on the European mainland. The razing of cities and towns, the language of genocide, the displacement and kidnap of children, the raw brutality of imperial aggression, the tussle between appeasers and the hard-nosed.
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Global scale problems
Gently prowling like a cat at the edges of a garden, there are risks around the perimeters of this war that were unknown and uncontemplated in the early years of the twentieth century.
The spread of nuclear weapons has made the possibility of a single slip from conventional confrontation to globally endangering cataclysm terrifying. It is baleful that there is a whole generation of the young, who being freed of the everyday menace of nuclear war that cast a shadow over much of the twentieth century, seem insensible to the possibility of such an extinction-causing calamity occurring in an instant.
Throughout the second half of the last century there was no end of close calls: nuclear weapons accidently dropped from planes, malfunctions of people and machines that lit up the attack warning screens of nuclear responders. They chill the mind when one considers the spread of these weapons to an ever-greater number of states many headed by irresponsible megalomaniacs. This is surely a threat that should embolden us to put aside differences.
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Hovering above these concerns are changes on a planetary scale. Rampant destruction of the natural world, extinction of species, pollution of our waters, and unknown tipping points now confront us, despite what some naysayers may believe. Longer-term consequences, caused by changing the composition of the atmosphere, a mere gossamer draped across the world, are already evident.
And let us cast our vision beyond even this planet. Apart from the morally abstruse Wernher von Braun, it was mere fantasy for most people of his era to imagine that we would use rocket technologies to wage global war. Even as he watched with satisfaction the V2 missile marvels of his troglodyte slaves rain terror on London, bludgeoning and bursting bodies and buildings, von Braun could not have imagined that this would transform into the possibility of all-out satellite war in space, or conflicts over who owns the Moon.
Today, these questions of cosmic scale must be solved before they collapse into a disastrous free-for-all in that supposedly infinite, but all too limited, blackness towards which we have gazed for thousands of years.
The attack on Ukraine
Some might ask what any of the foregoing has to do with Ukraine, but it seems to me that it has everything to do with the full-scale invasion of that country.
Mankind must not continue filling its time with medieval land-grabs and wars of aggression that degrade, possibly even foreclose, our possibilities to act together to halt, reverse or meliorate problems that could bring our tenure on Earth to an end – or at least greatly erode our quality of life and plunge us back many centuries. Russia must know this as a full participant in the space and nuclear age that has brought us to this point.
There is no reason for unshakable despondency - we have acted together before.
The Montreal Protocol that banned the substances that eat away at the ozone shield, punching a hole through it and elevating damaging levels of ultraviolet radiation, was a stupendous rallying of conjoined scientific minds. Since that landmark accomplishment of human rationality and good-will in the 1980s, the ozone-hole is beginning to repair. This is an example of what we can be, or what we might become.
It is not indefeasibly welded into our DNA that we must destroy, kill and war against each other. Nor is it a given that we cannot avoid a military or environmental tragedy on a planetary scale or on other worlds too.
Only 14 years elapsed between the discovery of the scientific basis of the ozone hole and the world agreement to prevent those chemicals from continuing their catalytic feast on subtle invisible molecules that belong to no one but protect us all.
Nor should we convince ourselves that this epiphany was some sort of fluke, never to be repeated. Rather, it was a fulsome fusion of the best practical sensibilities of humankind – the fruits of our scientific labours brought to public attention and then to international discourse and action. There is no rule to say that this cannot be repeated many times and across many of our planetary-encircling challenges.
Today, the invasion of Ukraine seems, to me at least, to have a dark edge that was not apparent in earlier times. Read the newspapers of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Alongside updates on the state of battles, advances, retreats and gallantry within the European and Pacific theaters, you will also find stories of new automobiles, crop and house prices, a pub brawl here, a tragic construction accident there. But you will notice something else about these papers: there is nothing that speaks of clouds over the very future of humanity. All of importance seemed absorbed in that singularity of war.
Read the newspapers today and, alongside the stories of Ukraine, our newsfeeds are filled with the latest measurements of greenhouse gases and their inexorable rise, of nuclear threats in other lands, of discord over space exploration, and of disappearing rainforests. It is a terrible mistake to get distracted, and an even worse one to allow these troubles to relegate the attack against Ukraine to a bullet point, one in a menu of things that need our attention.
Ending imperialism and pulling together
Ukraine is central to the concatenation of planetary worries because the war launched against it is emblematic of the millennia-long history of wars that we must now end if these other concerns are to be fixed and if we are not to allow them to wash over us like a tidal wave.
Even if we cannot end war as a phenomenon, we could use our growing potpourri of potential existential threats to lift ourselves from our convoluted arguments and impulses that lead to imperialism. We could strive for a more connected world in which we would subdue all manner of historical contortions that justify war.
Such a view is not unrealistic, nor need it be burdened with delusions of world equality and deference to the decisions of a world government. It just requires us all to gather some wisdom and appreciate that we live in an era with many more difficulties that require a sense of responsibility on the planetary scale if they are to be solved.
It requires all countries that claim to be world powers to be the first to end the scourge of colonial-era geographical expansion by military means. They must set an example in directing our gaze to problems that left unattended will overtake and envelop us with outcomes potentially even more globally destructive than those that beset us now.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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