Moral Nature

Many people, even today, like to see humans as something apart from the rest of the world—the special species that either has so far outdistanced our nearest relatives that comparisons are no longer useful or even possible; or the special species created by God in his own image and likeness, and therefore not even related to the rest of brute creation. Either view massages the human sense of ourselves as elevated, different, and with ultimate dominion over all our planetary co-habitants. Made by God or Nature to rule, we can do whatever we wish to not just the domestic animals we raise and manipulate for food, but to all wild animals as well. And what particularly gives us this sense of ourselves as unique and uniquely in charge is our morality. Though our bodies may run on the same kinds of energy and operate with the same kinds of cells and bodily structures and even brains common to most life forms, and though some primates may be able to communicate using signs we’ve taught them, no other animal has an even remotely comparable sense of fairness, of compassion, of justice. And all those abstract qualities depend chiefly on our highly developed sense of reason—on our brain-centered rationality. We alone can look at a problem, figure out its origins and causes, and come up with a rational solution.

            Now anyone who has been paying attention to science in recent years knows that such views have been getting a terrible buffeting since the days of Charles Darwin. Far from being separate, Darwin showed what subsequent scientists have filled out and firmed up: we descend directly from the rest of creation, and our distance from our nearest relatives, the great apes, seems ever more narrow. We share at least 98.7% of our DNA with bonobos and chimpanzees. Which, again, might be acceptable and leave us some “special” room if only we could still claim some distinction like morality. Alas, according to Frans deWaal, a researcher at Emory University’s renowned primate lab and author of The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (Norton: 2013), this small comfort can no longer be maintained. According to deWaal, and several others he cites, recent research using neuroscience demonstrates that most of our vaunted moral and social distinctions can be found in similar form among bonobos or chimps, or both. Their roots can even be found among just about all mammals as well. What this means is that far from being a gift from the God we’ve been worshipping for several thousands of years in a variety of religions (that great theologian Ronald Reagan in 1984 said: “as morality’s foundation is religion, religion and politics are necessarily related…”), morality is actually built into our brains, especially our emotional brains.

            This seems to me to be good news. It explains that unlike many conservatives and religionists, who see humans as basically ‘bad’ and therefore in need of harsh rules and punitive controls to ‘civilize’ us, we humans, with our basic equipment deriving from apes, are programmed not only to be good but also to do good. deWaal quotes his colleague at Emory, James Rilling, to the effect that we have “emotional biases toward cooperation that can only be overcome with effortful cognitive control” (49). As deWaal explains it, this means “that our first impulse is to trust and assist; only secondarily do we weigh the option of not doing so, for which we need reasons.” Using brain-monitoring techniques, Rilling showed that when normal people aid others, “brain areas associated with reward are activated.” As deWaal succinctly puts it: Doing good feels good. To be sure, there are psychopaths in any population whose brains, for whatever reasons, lack these emotional rewards. But in a later section, deWaal follows Chris Boehm in surmising that evolution has probably worked to marginalize these outliers: the penalty, in social groups, for not cooperating can be harsh, ranging from ostracism to complete elimination—thus minimizing the propagation of those with such genes.

            What deWaal does in the rest of his book is to show that far from being imposed from above by a law-giving God, or from reasoning by deep-thinking philosophers, the moral law in fact “arises from ingrained values that have been there since the beginning of time” (228). This is especially true among animals who live and hunt cooperatively, like dogs, chimpanzees and bonobos:

The most fundamental one [i.e. value] derives from the survival value of group life. The desire to belong, to get along, to love and be loved, prompts us to do everything in our power to stay on good terms with those on whom we depend. Other social primates share this value and rely on the same filter between emotion and action [i.e. on inhibitions] to reach a mutually agreeable modus vivendi. (228).

It also applies to our Neanderthal relatives, who, recent fossil evidence shows, took care of the infirm (individuals afflicted with dwarfism, paralysis, or the inability to chew survived into adulthood) in the same way early humans did. Since Neanderthals lived hundreds of millennia before civilization and its gods, this means, again, that morality and its basis in empathy existed well before civilization itself. Further, since the evidence of empathy among primates is by now well-established (mirror neurons, the brain cells that mediate empathy and allow us to feel what another is going through, were first discovered in macaque monkeys), it seems quite clear that humans easily adopted the moral laws promoted by religions (like the ten commandments) primarily because they were already inclined to be moral. To cooperate. To help others in order that more of the group might survive. And, from the negative side, to avoid hurting others by inhibiting the impulse to do them damage. As deWaal sums it up, “a social hierarchy is a giant system of inhibitions, which is no doubt what paved the way for human morality, which is also such a system” (150).

            This latter point has great relevance for our time, it seems to me. For we are even now engaged in a great debate about what economic system best fits our human nature. Up till very recently, we have been told that capitalism is “natural,” that competition is “natural,” that the war of every individual against every other individual to monopolize resources is “natural.” But if our primate inheritance prizes cooperation, prizes helping others, inhibits us from hurting others, puts the welfare of the group or community above the individual impulse to harm or to hog everything to oneself, then this attribution of “natural” would seem to have serious shortcomings. Consider what deWaal writes about the ideas of fairness and justice, both fundamental components of any moral law. He first cites the “egalitarianism” of hunter-gatherer groups, where “hunters aren’t even allowed to carve up their own kill, in order to prevent them from favoring family and friends” (231). In other words, the inhibition against taking all for oneself or one’s family is a primary form of fairness—and ultimately, of course, a way to ensure not only that all members of the group get a share in any one individual’s luck, but also that reciprocity will dictate that the same fair division will happen when another individual brings home a kill. Many experiments have shown how ingrained this preference or insistence on an even split is, not only among humans, but also among our primate relatives. In one experiment, capuchin monkeys were playing a game, the reward for which was cucumber slices. All the monkeys were ok with this, and played the game. But when the experimenters started to reward some of the monkeys with grapes (a preferred food), the ones still given cucumbers vehemently protested, and indeed, refused to accept the cucumbers at all. They actually tried to destroy the whole game. Economists would call this refusal of perfectly good food “irrational;” but, as deWaal points out, “it is an irrationality that transcends species.” It is a deeply emotional fairness response that all primates exhibit, and that even dogs (also group hunters) exhibit as well. deWaal cites a finding by Friederike Range at the University of Vienna where “dogs refuse to lift their paw for a ‘shake’ with a human if they get nothing for it while a companion dog is rewarded” (234). deWaal summarizes these findings about fairness and justice as “ancient capacities,” which “derive from the need to preserve harmony in the face of resource competition” (234).

            Preserving harmony. The primacy of group welfare. Cooperation. Anger and refusal in the face of inequity. Suddenly it seems that much of the discontent coursing through modern societies is not derived from some outlandish and artificial notion of social justice and fair play. Suddenly it seems that humans, like all other primates, are primed to react emotionally—however irrational it may seem to some—to perceived unfairness and the unequal distribution of goods. When Occupy Wall Street protesters shout and protest about the 1 percent taking all the wealth, leaving the 99 percent with crumbs; when Bernie Sanders, running for president, rages about the obscenely unequal distribution of wealth in the United States; when fast-food workers demand a living wage in spite of their low-skilled jobs; when Greeks demand that their government refuse to pay off loans to predatory banks while cutting pensions and health care; when we all react with nausea when we read of corporate heads paying less in taxes than their secretaries; we should begin to see this not as illogical or irrational but as an upwelling from an ancient part of the primate brain that is built in to what it means to be human. And the constant harping on individuality and “looking out for number one”? That we should see as a regrettable leftover from outlier impulses that should have been, and should still be relegated to the genetic waste bin. Morals and the moral code itself derive from our deep inheritance as cooperating animals whose primary impulse is to get along in order to survive; to inhibit self-centered accumulation as destructive of group harmony; and to help others because helping others feels good.

            Only then, after we have caught up with our primate kin, might we be ready to fulfill our role as fully-human human beings. Which is to say, going even beyond the primate need for in-group survival and realizing, as only humans can, that we must share our empathy and our protection to all life forms that share this planet with us, that literally make it possible for us to even be here.

Lawrence DiStasi

Dying Before their Deaths

When commenting on the change in practices from farmers of a half-century ago to the contract growers of today, Sonia Faruqi in her book Project Animal Farm (Pegasus Books: 2015), concludes this way:

            “Animal use has become synonymous with animal abuse.”

That is really the thesis of her book in a nutshell, and something that all of us need to be reminded of again and again. Our industrial agriculture, specifically the ‘production’ of animals we use for meat and to produce our eggs and milk, has become a mass torture chamber in which animals are abused in the name of efficiency, biosecurity, feeding a hungry world, and the essential consideration of profit. To be sure, we have heard this often before. There have been countless books and documentaries and exposès of the horrors that go on at factory farms. So why this book? Because Faruqi, a one-time Wall Streeter who lost her job in the recession of 2008, has done what few have done before: she has actually visited animal farms, has stayed with and befriended the owners and contract growers, and has endured outfitting herself in the bio-hazard suits that are now necessary for anyone to slow walk through chicken facilities, egg-laying facilities, pig facilities, dairy facilities and slaughter houses. They are that toxic. Further, Faruqi has visited animal farms not only in the United States and Canada, but also in Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, and Dubai to inform us that even as Europeans and some Americans are revolting against the most disgusting practices recently revealed, large European- and American-based agribusinesses are rapidly expanding their brutal operations abroad, especially to Asia and Latin America. And everything is being exported: not just the machinery and methods and breeds to manufacture meat for McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Walmart, but also the industrial world’s appetite for meat. Here is how she puts it:

Fast food succeeds only on the basis of factory farms….Fast food chains alter not just meat production but also meat consumption. People start eating more meat, and this greater amount of meat is produced more deplorably. The low prices at fast food cash registers are a direct result of callous indifference toward farm animals. (247).

Thus, in a small country like Malaysia, Faruqi reports, there are now more than 500 KFCs, 300 Pizza Huts, and 300 McDonald’s. Furthermore, a global survey in 2004 found that Malaysians eat even more fast food than Americans do: where only 1 of every 3 Americans eats fast food once a week, 3 of every 5 Malaysians do.

            To produce all that Kentucky Fried Chicken at low prices, KFC has become the biggest “integrator” in Malaysia, setting up the machinery for chicken warehouses with always more rows of cages to keep chickens imprisoned, delivering their own fast-growing DOCs (day-old chicks) to the factory farmers, and ‘harvesting’ them within 6 weeks to be slaughtered in their own processing plants for delivery to their outlets. These are modern, genetically developed ‘super chickens.’ As Faruqi explains, computer-aided genetic selection has created breeds, like Tyson’s Cobb chicken or Aviagen’s Ross 308, that accelerate growth and the amount of breast meat to astounding levels:

In 1925, chickens reached a weight of 2-1/2 pounds in 16 weeks; today, they reach a weight of almost 6 pounds in 6 weeks (while consuming less than half the feed per pound of weight gained). It’s miraculous but torturous (100).

The torture arises because this creates chickens (and turkeys, which have the same problem: too much breast meat growing too fast: the weight of modern turkeys multiplies 300 times between birth and slaughter—now a period of only 16 weeks!) that are literally frankenfoods. Their breasts grow so big their legs can’t support them, so most spend their lives sprawled on floors covered with excrement. Worse, their internal organs can’t keep up with their explosive growth, and so they collapse of heart and lung ailments. In order to control these problems, desperate measures are required. Here’s how one of Faruqi’s informants, Terry at a factory farm in Canada, puts it:

“The lights have to be very controlled, so the chickens gain weight but don’t get heart attacks. When the lights are on, the chickens are awake and eating and gaining weight. When it’s dark, they stop eating. We don’t want them to eat too much, because their genes are weird. They grow too fast, and their heart and legs get fucked up. They get heart attacks. So, we need to control how much they eat, and we control it with the lighting levels.” ((95).

A similar problem afflicts egg-laying chickens, nearly all now kept in cages (4 to 6 chickens are crammed into a metal cage no larger than a microwave). Even at an “organic” farm in Canada, these caged egg-laying hens must be de-beaked, a cruel practice that has been banned in Europe. And why must hens be de-beaked? First, because of the torturous cage-crowding they are raised in. But also because the genetic selection used to get hens that lay more eggs works inversely with “broodiness,” i.e. the instinct to mother their chicks. It also works directly with aggressiveness. So, the more eggs they can lay, the more aggressive the hens become, and they literally become cannibals: pecking each other to death and eating the remains. Thus, de-beaking is justified by the industry as a ‘cure’ for cannibalism; as is low lighting and walling the cages so hens can’t see and imitate each other. The place where egg-laying hens (and soon all meat-producing hens as well) live has thus become a dark, filthy, toxic and dangerous dungeon that most chicken growers themselves hardly enter, preferring to control lighting, feeding and all else via computers. And all this to do that which is the only metric used in corporate farming: increasing the unit of production.

            To her credit, Sonia Faruqi doesn’t leave things there. She also visits more or less ideal animal farms and demonstrates that the animals we use for food need not be raised in medieval torture chambers. Harley Farms in Canada, for example, is reminiscent of the farms of old, though it is quite a bit larger. Run by an Englishman who had to leave his English farm during the mad cow scare, Harley Farms is a kind of animal heaven: its 400-500 beef cattle live outside almost the entire year, while its 100 sows and pigs are housed in specially-built wooden sheds. The baby piglets are kept in a barn bedded with hay and straw rather than excrement, and rather than looking zombified, the animals are lively and playful. Faruqi describes it:

I breathed deeply; the barn smelled…good. Pastoral farms smell good, I realized then, because soil and straw absorb manure and odor. The piglets are happy….Unhappy pigs, such as Charlie’s, bite each other’s tails until they bleed. Happy pigs, such as Roger’s, are calm and contented, mischievous and adventurous (127).

Of course, such farms are seen as a threat by the big industrial producers, who, in fact, tried to buy Roger Harley out, offering him a quarter of a million dollars yearly to stop him from “expressing my views” about humane farming. Fortunately, he turned them down, but most other small farmers eventually succumb. In Vermont, the emblematic small dairy farms where cows actually live to see and eat grass, are almost gone—bought out by huge operations with which they cannot compete. And around the world, the dominant trend is more epitomized by one of the KFC chicken farms in Malaysia run by a Mr. Hubib, whose operation produces some 160,000 broiler chickens every month in four giant warehouses. Not content with this, Mr. Hubib proudly explained to Faruqi that he was eagerly awaiting a new system involving cages for his broiler chickens (heretofore, cages have been used mainly for egg-laying chickens because of the fear that broilers would bruise their flesh on the wire floors of cages and reduce their value; but now, plastic flooring has solved that problem). Hubib’s numbers revealed all: where in the closed chicken houses he had currently, he could allot 0.75 square feet per chicken (in an open house, the allotment would be 1.2 sq ft.), in the new broiler cages he’ll soon have, “I give chicken only .44 square foot, and I have a lot of chicken. I have 54,000 in one barn! I make a lot of money”  (233).  

            There is much more to this eye-opening book, but you get the idea. What we have is an animal-producing system of corporate agriculture that gives the world the increased quantity of meat it has been taught to want, at the cheap prices it can afford, all going on “behind a giant subterfuge… so removed from the day-to-day lives of most people that they might as well be occurring in a separate universe” (196). And it is a huge universe. Tyson, the largest meat producer in the world, “slaughters more than 2 billion chickens a year, along with 20 million pigs and 7 million cattle” (230), while, worldwide, upwards of 70 billion farm animals are raised for food each year. Increasingly, the dreadful conditions in which they are raised is a world of animal abuse, cannibalism (“Chickens excrete the cow parts that they eat, and these parts are fed back to cows in the form of chicken feces; this strange cannibalism chain creates an alarming danger of disease, including mad cow disease” 264), and diseases like cow ringworm, whose cure is simple sunlight. But in the brave new world of industrial animal production, sunlight, like grass, is the rarest of commodities. Here is how Faruqi puts it near her conclusion:

Most farm animals today live and die without ever feeling a ray of sunshine on their backs or a blade of grass under their feet. Every hour builds upon the next in a perpetual hell, and the misery continues onward without reprieve. Existing in conditions of disease and decay, animals die before their deaths (328).

Among the many problems we face in our world, this one ranks high. For if we persist in treating animals as if they were unfeeling “things” completely unrelated to us, then it cannot be long before we also treat humans in similar ways. Indeed, we already do. For it cannot be a coincidence that the system that is now polluting the world of modern agriculture (and ourselves) was conceived in the same nation, the United States of America, that leads the world in locking up human beings, caging them in solitary confinement, depriving them of human contact, and sunlight, and all the natural sights and sounds and interactions that alone keep sentient beings human.

            Can it be long before our corporate overlords decide that these same constrained environments are economically and socially adequate for all of us—or at least the vast majority of us who cannot afford to buy our own private islands?

             

Lawrence DiStasi

            

Void at the Heart

This blog was stimulated by my wondering about the almost universal characteristic of leaders to casually send innocent people to their deaths. One need only think of beheadings by ISIS leaders in the news right now; or Israeli leader Netanyahu ordering the massacre of thousands of helpless civilians in Gaza; or even President Obama taking pride in his orders to assassinate alleged terrorists by drone—sorry about that collateral damage. Of course, it is during all-out wars that this capability (or flaw) assumes its most savage form. In fact, it was in reading about the sinking of the Lusitania during World War I (see Dead Wake, by Erik Larson, Crown: 2015) that my specific thoughts about all this were set in motion. It is important to note that prior to Germany’s U-boat campaign against merchant ships, the accepted protocol, embodied in the so-called “prize laws” of the 19^th Century, entirely forbade attacks against passenger vessels. Even with regard to merchant vessels shipping war materiel, the rules said that war ships could stop a merchant vessel to search it, but had to keep its crew safe and bring the ship to a nearby port. All this changed with Germany’s U-boat attacks, which violated all such protocols, although they mostly still refrained from attacking passenger ships. When the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania (the biggest and fastest liner then operating) left America for Liverpool in early May of 1915, though, the German Navy considered it too ripe a target to pass up. It sent its most ruthless commander and U-boat ace, Walther Schwieger, to the area, and set him loose. Thus, on May 7, when Capt. Schwieger, who was heading his U-20 back to home port after several ‘kills’, saw the mammoth ship entering his field of vision near Kinsale off the Irish coast, this “wonderful man” who “couldn’t kill a fly” never hesitated about trying to sink it. Despite the fact that the ship had no defenses, despite the fact that it was filled with almost 2,000 passengers including 33 infants and 123 Americans, despite the fact that it carried no war materiel or anything else that could be of value to Britain’s war effort, Schwieger took aim and fired his last torpedo, and the ‘great ship went down.’ Nearly 1200 civilians perished. 

            Strangely enough—especially to the British Admiralty who knew Schwieger’s submarine was in the area targeting neutral vessels but did nothing to warn the Lusitania or provide it with a destroyer escort—the sinking of the Lusitania did not bring the United States into the war, as Britain’s leaders had hoped. That would take two more years. But after a brief period of refraining from attacking neutral ships (due to bad publicity from the Lusitania sinking), Germany embarked, in early 1917, on an even more savage series of U-boat attacks. The plan, approved by Kaiser Wilhelm on January 9, 1917, authorized its U-boats, now numbering more than 100, to “sink every vessel that entered the ‘war zone,’” in the deluded hope that this would so cripple Britain’s war effort and morale that it would surrender before America was able to enter the war. The plan didn’t work, and America finally did enter the war— thanks to another deluded effort by the Kaiser to induce Mexico to join Germany’s war against the allies, in return for which Germany pledged its help in taking back Mexico’s “lost territories” in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. When the plan was exposed (see the Zimmerman Telegram, by Barbara Tuchman), President Woodrow Wilson was finally shaken from his rigid stance of neutrality, and declared war against Germany on April 2, 1917.

            What’s relevant here is that even aside from the German willingness to attack innocent civilians, the British high command, including First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, were quite willing to sacrifice their own civilians on the Lusitania in order to bring America into the war. The British Admiralty knew the whereabouts of virtually every German U-boat because their intelligence service, known as Room 40, had broken the Germans’ wireless code. They had access to every one of Capt. Schwieger’s messages—which demonstrated conclusively that he was prowling in the very area the Lusitania was entering. But they did not want to reveal their knowledge for fear the Germans would change their code. So, to protect its valuable intelligence asset, the Admiralty allowed the Lusitania to enter the U-boat zone unaware of the specific danger. Afterwards, the Admiralty sought to put the entire blame for the tragedy on the Lusitania’s captain, William Turner—again, to divert attention from itself and its secret knowledge. Nor was this callousness toward innocent life limited to the admirals. Winston Churchill, generally celebrated as one of England’s all-time greatest leaders, was quite deliberate in seeking to induce the United States into the war by any means necessary. As Erik Larson points out, Churchill early on wrote to Walter Runciman, head of England’s Board of Trade, that it was “most important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of embroiling the United States with Germany” (190). And when fear of Germany’s subs had reduced the traffic from America, Churchill told Runciman “For our part, we want the traffic—the more the better; and if some of it gets in trouble, better still.” ‘Embroiling the U.S.’ and getting its ships ‘in trouble’ are not-so-subtle ways of saying: let’s hope there are American deaths. Indeed, one of the prominent scholars investigating the Lusitania episode, Patrick Beesly, stated unequivocally that the British high command literally engaged in a conspiracy to have the Lusitania sunk:

“…on the basis of the considerable volume of information which is now available, I am reluctantly compelled to state that on balance, the most likely explanation is that there was indeed a plot, however imperfect, to endanger the Lusitania in order to involve the United States in the war.”  (324).

In short, both Winston Churchill and the British Admiralty considered it quite rational and acceptable to sacrifice thousands of innocent passengers from their own nation in order to further their war aims.

            If this were an unusual circumstance, one might attribute it to something in the genetic code or diet of German or British leaders, especially when they possess weapons or information that gives them an advantage. Unfortunately, such calculations are by no means limited to any one people or any one situation. Men (they are usually, but not exclusively men) in positions of leadership routinely make such calculations and find them acceptable. When planning for an invasion, commanding generals usually calculate their estimated losses—10% or 20% or 50%: this many thousands of men will die. In fact, in the run-up to America’s entry into World War I noted above, Secretary of State Lansing said this:

The American people are at last ready to make war on Germany, thank God. It may take two or three years. It may even take five years. It may cost a million Americans; it may cost five million. However long it may take, however many men it costs, we must go through with it…” (340).

And if the calculation involves enemy deaths, leaders tend to be even more cavalier. When the President of the United States, Harry Truman, had to decide whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japanese cities, he knew the loss of life would be massive. He decided to do it anyway, despite the fact that he knew Japan was already defeated. Winston Churchill and the allies made the same calculation—knowing Germany was already done for—when initiating the firebombing of German cities like Dresden. Bomb them back to the stone age: that was the remark made by U.S. General Curtis LeMay (the model for Dr. Strangelove) when he was urging the massive bombing of Hanoi during the Vietnam war (and also when he directed the devastating firebombing of Japanese cities in WWII). And how about the grisly term applied to the bombing of Iraq just a few years ago: shock and awe. There is something almost joyous, gleeful about these expressions made by those administering the shock and the awe. And it makes one wonder: what is it with these guys? What happens to them when they get into positions of power? Do they lose the human capacity for empathy entirely? (or are they selected precisely because they lack it to begin with?) What detaches them so entirely from the bodies they are decimating? What makes them so free from remorse? What allows someone like Paul Tibbets, the Enola Gay pilot who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, instantly evaporating 100,000 human beings, to say: “I sleep clearly every night.”

            Perhaps they are all similarly cold and calculating, thinking not in terms of flesh and blood, but numbers. Perhaps they all have a similar ability to stay above the ground, like Tibbets in his B-29: high above it all, far away from the realities on the ground below, deficient in the imagination it takes to contemplate the roasting of flesh, the screams of children, the splashing of blood and brain. Perhaps they are somehow selected from the common herd based on their ability to “see the larger picture” without getting diverted by messy details; to encourage “sacrifice” and “nobility” without involving themselves in what those words really entail. Because even when some of them, usually officers, actually do get themselves engulfed in the dirty business on the ground, they are protected by the protocols that they have carved out for themselves: that officers are treated differently, deferentially as prisoners; that heads of state, like Pinochet of Chile, or the Emperor of Japan, are normally excluded from blame and punishment when they lead their nations into war. To be sure, this doesn’t save them from the disgrace that normally falls upon war’s losers. Think of General Lee at Appomattox. Which may be—this threat of public humiliation—the most severe threat of all to such types. To avoid which they will do almost anything.

            And this opens the final consideration.

            What is it that leads many leaders—often at the very moment of their greatest successes— to initiate plans that court disaster? It is almost as if they share a tendency with the street types we hear so much about these days, to “commit suicide by cop.” That is, some guy stopped for a traffic violation suddenly decides to pull a gun and fight it out, knowing full well that it’s virtually a one-way ticket to the morgue. And the pop theory is that they have intended all along to commit suicide. Now I don’t think this is the same phenomenon as so-called suicide bombers—because presumably suicide bombers are driven either by threats or ideology or some fundamentalist hope that their certain death will be rewarded with a better existence in a virgin-filled afterlife. No, what I’m referring to is the tendency of many actual leaders—like Hitler, like Napoleon, like Kennedy or Castro—to make decisions that prove absolutely fatal. It is almost as if they want to fail, fall, be stopped. Such decisions stand out by representing such a vivid contrast with their rise to the top, where most seem to lead charmed lives, charting success after improbable success. But then, at the very apogee of their lives, they make a decision so stupid it is hard to imagine how they could not have seen the consequences. Hitler, for example, had essentially conquered all of Europe and seemed on the verge of defeating the English into the bargain. And yet, in June of 1941, he turned on his then-ally, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and diverted hundreds of thousands of troops and machinery into his attack on the eastern front. When the Soviets did not fall despite immense losses, but counterattacked instead, Hitler’s war was all but lost. But why did he do it? Hadn’t the Fuhrer read about Napoleon’s similar error in trying to occupy Moscow? Did he not know that the Grand Army of France, also at that point in control of all of Europe, was literally destroyed as a result of this blunder? Apparently not; or perhaps the Nazi leader thought he could avoid Napoleon’s mistakes. Itself a mistake. And closer to home, think of JFK and his 1962 decision to go to Texas for a campaign trip. This was shortly after his great triumph over Krushchev and Castro in defusing the Cuban missile crisis. The President was riding high. Why ignore all the counsel of his closest advisers warning of the dangerous mood in Dallas, and take such a trip? Or what about Ronald Reagan launching the Iran-Contra fiasco. Why engage in such idiocy? Or, returning to the Cuban crisis, why would Fidel agree to the Soviet proposal to place missiles ninety miles from the United States in the first place? Did he think it would go unnoticed? Unchallenged? 

            One has to wonder: what is behind such massive blunders? Shakespeare seems to argue, in the person of Macbeth, that it has to do with momentum:

                                                            “I am in blood

            Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,

            Returning were as tedious as go o‘er.”  (III.iv.136-38)

In other words, I’ve gone so far out onto a limb that retreating would be more dangerous than going forward. Surely that must be part of it, but is that all? What about something more related to the psychology at play here? The burden at the top? Surely there must be a weariness, a constantly-maintained tension that afflicts those leaders who must make life-and-death decisions daily, hourly. And these are not simply decisions affecting one or two lives, but decisions affecting whole armies, whole nations, the whole planet, where each move is fraught with often-unforeseeable consequences. And the leader is usually at the apex of criticism for each decision. Must it not be the case that at certain points, the tension simply exceeds the capacity of any human, even a cold-hearted politician, to sustain it? One thinks of Nixon talking drunkenly to the portraits in the White House at the most excruciating point of the Watergate scandal. One thinks of Lyndon Johnson finally giving in to the clamor penetrating the White House from the constant chants of “Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” and declaring on national television that he would not run again. And one thinks of Hitler, cowering in his bunker, with his Third Reich collapsing around him, and finally succumbing to a poison pill for himself and his mistress, Eva Braun.

            I don’t know. One almost gets the sense that those who hurl themselves, claw their way into national leadership positions have an unsuspected underside that eventually explodes at the surface. These are people who thrive on adulation, on the constant assurance that every move they make is great, that they are great and the work they are doing is great and will be seen by all posterity as heroic. And the other side of this need for adulation may well be the fear that at its core it is really nothing. Nothing at all. A sham. A conjuring trick. When that suspicion arises and takes over, it could move either towards a drive into recklessness—as with Clinton’s sexcapades in the Oval Office; as with Hitler’s attack on Russia—or a complete collapse of confidence, as with Nixon and Johnson. In both cases, in all cases, it reveals what may be a void at the heart of every leader. Indeed, perhaps it is the same void that allows them to order the deaths of millions without batting an eye. The same void that drives them, even unknowingly, to the negation of all they’ve worked for. The two being opposite sides of the same coin. Complementary.

            And finally, the two tendencies may operate more collectively, more globally as well. We, the entire human race, are now experiencing one of these eruptions from below. For what is the current carbon-driven crisis on this planet but the logical if self-blind result of the very industrial-technological successes humans have registered in the last 300 years? Which are beginning to seem like nothing. Like shams. In consequence of which, like lemmings, we are collectively driving ourselves towards climate catastrophe. The only question being whether we, or some pressure from somewhere below, can stop us before the final, irrevocable steps are taken. If they haven’t already have been taken, that is.

            Follow those leaders. But watch your parking meters. 

Lawrence DiStasi