Seethe df. churn, foam, agitate as if boiling.

If proof were needed that humankind is still at an infantile stage, quarrelling and venting animosities by throwing stones – or bombs – out of the toxic combination of pique, fear and jealousy that drives international affairs, the current state of the world provides it. The tragedy, for it is nothing less, is that infant humanity’s lack of wisdom and maturity is inversely proportional to its cleverness. Theodore Adorno pithily identified the problem by pointing to the development of the spear into the guided missile. Nothing could better illustrate the cleverness of our technologies in dangerous service to the immaturity of our minds. War is the starkest illustration of this truth.

It is a strange fact that in the contrast between the endeavours of the better angels of human nature – all the care we bestow in the way of hospitals, schools, civic planning, law, due processes of all kinds – and the ugly failure that is human violence, greed and injustice, it is the latter that trumps (yes) the former. It takes a single bomb to obliterate a library, an institution that represents long efforts, from the writing of the first book it contains to the provision of funds for establishing it, training librarians, bringing workmen with their bricks and cement on site, setting in motion the fulfilment of promise that a library represents to each individual who enters it and browses its shelves. One bomb, in an instant, demolishes it and all it took to bring into being, all the potential it houses. This single illustration is enough to make the point that humanity’s struggle to grow out of infantilism is a failure. It can be replicated a billion times over.

Imagine rising aloft to a point in space where one can see the smoke rising from dozens of places on the earth’s surface where fighting is going on. Imagine a colour-coding of the instruments and personnel of war – armies, navies, air force bases – together with an index of numbers, the trillions of dollars spent on them, the hundreds of millions of corpses made, just over the last hundred years, by the loosing-off of armaments. Imagine if the concerted wailing of yet further hundreds of millions of mourners were aggregated into a broadcast to every radio and television set simultaneously, filling the living rooms of every dwelling on the planet. What a roar of grief and pain that would be. This indeed happens, in some sort; yet it makes no difference.

Every time there is another instance of the perpetual mutual stone-throwing in the global kindergarten, speculation rises like hornets from a poked nest. Trump joining Israel in this chapter of its war with Iran is advertised, in the moment of its occurrence, as a ‘one and done’ event designed to prevent a hard-line theocratic regime, with its long-announced intention of obliterating Israel, from developing nuclear weapons. But no such event can possibly be ‘one and done’. To the pundits can be left a Babel of prognostications about what will follow, for consequences immediate to the event are an inevitability. But the hornets are not localised in the Middle East. The surface of humanity, like the surface of a pot of milk on a stove, seethes – churns, trembles, foams – ready to boil over. From that lofty vantage point, looking down, one can identify a multitude of pixillated likelihoods. Eastward, China licks its lips at the thought of the US embracing again the tar-baby of the Middle East, denuding the Pacific of its attention and equipment where Chinese power is growing, extending the circumference of its walls so far that when it attacks Taiwan it will do so with impunity. In Russia Putin says – proving that the inane rhetoric of the world-condition has escaped all bounds of irony – that the US attack on Iran violates international law. Putin says this! Meanwhile under cover of the loud bangs and screams of these major sites of conflict in the Middle East and Ukraine, elsewhere – in Africa and south Asia, in South America, in China’s western reaches – local oppressions, savageries, rapes, murders, continue unabated.

The bullies are ascendant. Voices of sanity, urging peace, are stifled and impotent. There is talk of concord, agreements, diplomatic and trading relationships; how much of the rhetoric is patently insincere is a speculation, but behind the policed borders that tessellate the world, national sovereignities snarl and bristle: these toys are mine, mine, mine. It is well not to forget that the inexhaustible source from which the currents rise in the seething pot are all myths: religions, ‘national identities’, partisan accounts of history – and the use made of them by people, individuals, hungry for power, motivated by greed, technologically clever but not intelligent, stunted in moral imagination, prepared to kill people, and kill again, to destroy, to get their way.

There is another image that offers itself: that of a few who hold above the turbulent flood their lighted candles, hoping to get them to the far bank unextinguished: candles of hope for a better world. That seems such a feeble phrase, given the facts; such a hopelessly idealistic, flaccid, impotent phrase; the gusts of bellowing laughter from the ‘realists’ by itself all but extinguishes the candles outright. Indeed. But there are some last laughs to be had. We remember more names of poets than names of generals, we remember more scientific discoverers than murderers. A person shoots another person in a mugging; there is a perpetrator, a victim, two players in a horrible moment; then come some dozens of others to the rescue – police, ambulance crews, medical personnel in the emergency room at the hospital, the criminal justice system; in this scenario there are quite a few lit candles. The question is not whether there is hope, it is how we are to sustain the courage and effort, against the odds we know too well, to make it overcome our despairing situation. Just to remind ourselves that the task is: to grow up at last as a species, and to set aside childish things – guns, bombs, animosity – is to take the first step.

Is that a platitude, and - given the realities - an empty one? I’d say that anyone who does not think it deeply pointful has yielded the ground to the bullies already. Saying it and meaning it matters. Defiance is called for, in resisting the would-be inevitabilities of the crudity of world affairs: the defiance of hanging on determinedly to the intention to make things better, and to refuse to accept that they cannot be, is the rebuttal to those who think that firing a gun, dropping a bomb, is ever an answer to anything.