AS I WRITE THIS
B-2 bombers may be on the way to attack nuclear facilities in Iran (https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/21/world/iran-israel-trump).
When I was born, WW2 was drawing to a close. Will WW3 be just starting when I die? I have led a life blessed by the love of many others (including, as I write this, a cat), good health, no personal experience of violence, a great deal of intellectual and aesthetic stimulation. My expectation is that when I die that will be that — I do not know and I believe that it is impossible to know. (Julian Barnes wrote about this in his book “Nothing to be Frightened of”, expressing his own fear of nothingness after death).
It is totally understandable that human beings, observing that everyone dies, and experiencing the wonders of nature and the mystery of consciousness, have made up stories to convince themselves and others of the continuation of the self in some way. Of these groundless expressions of optimism, my favourite is that of Rabindranath Tagore: “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come”.
Human history may, I suggest, be framed as an interaction between biological evolution and cultural evolution. Simplistically, in terms of how the species interacts with its physical environment, it has passed through stages of surviving within the environment, attempting to understand it, controlling it to the point where more and more complex societies could evolve, altering it, and now damaging it to the point where civilization could end.
We may speculate as to how inevitable it all was. Living in an environment that affords counting (pebbles on a beach, stars in the sky, fingers on a hand, as a fetus hearing the repetitive discrete beats of the mother’s heart) and requires movement within space, the development of mathematics may be considered inevitable. Control over the environment enabled the rise of communities of ever greater social and cultural complexity. From the natural face-to-face activity of bartering, the invention of the concept and practices of money may be considered natural, and its subsequent progressive abstraction all the way up to cryptocurrency today. Was capitalism, particularly in the pathological form seen in the US today and spread by globalism, inevitable? I tend to think so, and that the development of mathematics and that of capitalism, and the world-views that they inculcate, are intimately intertwined. With the impending tyranny of AI, we are entering a new stage in which we are creating a dehumanized environment.
H. G. Wells expressed a similar view when he wrote in “The Outline of History” (1920, vol. 2, ch. 41, pt. 4) that “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe”. From today’s perspective, that race appears to be over.
Let me apply the broad framework sketched above to the history of warfare. In prehistoric and early historical times, it can be seen as a natural product of evolutionary pressures to maintain the existence of a biologically, and later culturally, closely related part of the species. The development of scientific knowledge and applications has occurred in lockstep with the development of more and more effective ways of killing others. This symbiosis was expressed very clearly by Winston Churchill in his summary of the Battle of Omdurman (1898) at which he was a 23-year-old observer. The victory for the British Empire, he wrote, represented “the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the space of five hours the strongest and best-equipped savage army yet arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed and dispersed” (as quoted in “Mirrors” by Eduardo Galeano, p. 242. If you only read one history book in your life, that should be it). The British employed advanced weaponry, including machine guns, quick-firing artillery, and gunboats, while the Mahdist forces were primarily armed with spears, swords, and outdated rifles. The official statistics for the battle, according to Galeano:
among the civilized troops, 2% killed or wounded
among the savage troops, 90% killed or wounded.
And here is something else from Galeano (p. 250):
“No triumph of peace is quite as great as the supreme triumph of war” proclaimed Teddy Roosevelt, who received the Nobel Peace Prize….
His successor, William Howard Taft, invoked the natural order of things:
“The whole hemisphere will ours in fact as, by virtue of superiority of race, it already is ours morally”.
George W. Bush declared that, in invading Iraq, he was taking the war to “liberate” the Philippines as his model, both enterprises being endorsed by God. Which brings us to today, as I read that the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, is telling the President that only God’s voice matters in deciding how to take part in the Israel-Iran War.
One thing that science is clear on is that there is one human race. It originated in what we now call Africa whence a vast migration took place. It seems plausible to me that, as many have written, the diversity in skin colour and other bodily characteristics represents adaptation to greatly different physical environments. Nevertheless, many scientists and other scholars saw in Darwinism a justification for white supremacy. The ultimate expression of that scourge is the poem by Rudyard Kipling written in 1899: “The White Man’s Burden”. It expresses the view that it is the onerous duty of white people to civilize the ungrateful savages.
Here’s the first verse:
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
It was specifically written to encourage the Americans to take over the Philippines, which of course they did. A powerful counterblast, written with his “pen warmed up in Hell”, was provided by Mark Twain in “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (published in the North American Review, February 1901). Earlier he had written this: “I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass”(original salutation published in the Minneapolis Journal, 29 December 1900). It shocks me how few Americans seem to be aware of Twain’s political activities and writings as an anti-imperialist.
Overall, it seems to me that humanity’s collective intellectual resources are grossly maldistributed. Instead of trying to, for example, unravel String Theory and travel to other parts of the solar system (though that conceivably could have survival value), attention should be more focussed on understanding human folly, such as the processes whereby a voting majority of a nation of some 340 million can be scammed by a person who is manifestly morally, psychologically, and mentally defective and enabled by a cohort of amoral sychophants. Furthermore, it seems to me that more scientists need to regard what they do as not simply intellectual enquiry assumed to be beneficial to humanity and to abjure naive disengagement with politics, as is illustrated by the story of the Manhattan Project.
As I finish writing this, President Trump has arrived at Joint Base
Andrews, home of the B-2 bombers some of which have left, possibly to bomb underground nuclear facilities in Iran. The Israelis are urging him to get on with it.
And now it has been announced that three sites have been bombed, successfully according to the President: “Fordow is gone”. He will address the nation later this evening.
I face my declining years and death with equanimity, but I have three children and a 2-year-old grandchild. I hope he, and at least some other children in the world, have a future. Many, in Gaza and elsewhere, already do not.