Beyond Contradiction to Interdependence
Image by Jon Tyson.
President Biden’s heartfelt comments on American political violence, while the United States continues to contribute many of the bombs which Israel has used to prosecute a near-genocidal war against Hamas, give rise to a painful sense of contradiction.
The split Mr. Biden makes between domestic and foreign policy when it comes to violence is either unconscious or politically expedient. But even political expedience reflects a larger unconsciousness that seems to be shared by many contemporary world leaders. They continue to refuse to see that national self-interest has been subsumed by global self-interest. Without exception, both the wars and the tensions that often preclude wars have become deeply irrelevant in the context of rising global temperatures, extreme weather events, and marine ecological breakdown.
Whether unconscious or expedient, the split is understandable. Leaders cannot lead too far beyond their constituents. We are well into a tremendous change in the fundamental conditions that make life possible, let alone bearable, on this planet. But apparently no politician in the U.S. and perhaps elsewhere can get elected and become an agent of positive change without trimming their sails to swerve away from some difficult, or as Al Gore put it all too long ago, inconvenient truths.
Our ambivalence, personal and collective, in the face of the global climate emergency is off the charts. It is surely a major cause of our general unease. The source of this ambivalence is a world culturally embedded in the values of consumerism, while we are engulfed by signs all around us that we need to change in order to survive.
Those bombs being shipped to Israel, and of course the thousands of nuclear weapons deployed by the most powerful countries, are integral parts of a seamless system of expediency based in the value of competition among free markets, both between arms manufacturers and between nations for general market dominance. Is there an inevitable connection between capitalism and war as Marx asserted? If we demand it and vote for it we might see a far better outcome—the creative force of the free market weaned away from weapons and unleashed upon the global climate project.
It is beyond tears to realize that the horrors of Ukraine and Gaza arise from the way humans think, from their stubbornly limited conceptions of self-interest. Mr. Putin carries on with bombing children’s hospitals in the name of a 17th century conception of his nation. Mr. Netanyahu remains in denial that no one in his region can be secure until all are. Xi Jinping makes the assumption that China will benefit from a military takeover of Taiwan that could risk nuclear confrontation. The Republican Party carries on with obsolete America First tropes. The reality of interdependence is swept under the rug. The real war, the relevant and urgent war to stabilize the climate, and the level of cooperation needed to win it, remains insufficiently addressed. Putin doesn’t seem to have a clue that his people are going to suffer far more than the Ukrainians from rapidly approaching climate effects.
Interdependence is about making connections on the basis of shared goals, climate above all. We’re still mired deeply in a competitive paradigm that is misaligned with the truth that everything I do or don’t do affects you and vice versa. Wars are not going to solve this conundrum. What will begin to solve it is applying the perennial Golden Rule found in different forms in all the world’s major religions, expanded to every area of life. I like the succinct Jewish version: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to others.”
It would be nice to have the opportunity to vote for leaders who understand the reality of interdependence that is forcing itself upon our consciousness, and to see responsive institutional changes both in our own government and in international bodies like the U.N.
In the U.S., it seems clear that whatever happens to the Biden re-election bid, Democrats may be more open to seeing the global implications of interdependence than the present Republican party. Those who see clearly have a special responsibility to reach out in a spirit of creative good will to political adversaries, be they foreign or domestic, to help make a world where good people like Joe Biden don’t have to make false distinctions between the violence of assassination at home and the violence of “foreign” wars.
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