Over the past month I have read essays by writers who lost all composure over the Israel-Hamas war.
These essays advocate what amounts to genocide. Some of them call for the obliteration of Israelis. Some of them call for the obliteration of Palestinians.
If there is a principle involved, it is that if you take someone’s land, they will try to murder you and your people. They will likely succeed to the extent that you would rather die than allow them to go on living.
Those words describe too many Israelis and too many Palestinians. They both think they own the same territory and see their dispossession—whether it’s in 1948, right now, or two thousand years ago—as reason to utterly destroy the dispossessor.
I’ve been watching the conflict since the 1967 war, and I don’t see any way for it to end, except in the elimination of one side or the other.
Once the children start dying there’s no way to back out. You can only go forward, by whatever means you have, toward total victory. Your rage demands it. Your dead children demand it. Your lost land demands it. Your lost future, the one you would have had before you got into this war, demands it. Your only job is to make those people gone.
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Total victory, understand, is an impossibility. Winning, even when it happens, comes with too high a price, because it requires the deliberate destruction of the victor’s consciousness, humanity, and conscience.
A vanquished enemy must be seen as the embodiment of evil, and the vanquishers must insist they had God on their side. That’s small compensation for killing a bunch of children who are essentially indistinguishable from their own 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds.
Live long enough, and those dead enemy children will haunt you, no matter how much their murders pleased your god.
You will know your god by his fruits. Whether dressed up as Allah or Yahweh, the god in question is Moloch.
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Freud got a lot of things wrong, but one of the things he got right is that it takes energy to exile a memory from consciousness, whether that memory is of a destroyed enemy, or a parent, or an out-of-fashion god.
The energetic cost of not remembering becomes too great to maintain, and what you’ve forgotten shows up if you relax for even a moment. You have to forget again and again, at the ever-higher cost of an honest understanding of your self and your history.
If it’s a god you’ve banished from your consciousness, all it takes is a moment of inattention for him to come raging back. He kicks aside any new, more human gods. Any fragile cultural truce with the divine—conceived and enforced by human impulses toward mercy and reason and consciousness—ends.
His path smoothed by rage, Moloch again walks among us. He is back to his practice of possessing a human form, sucking it dry, and reaching out to possess another.
Victor and vanquished become the dance and not the dancers. Moloch calls the tune.
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Humans don’t really have much to say about the morality of the universe. They’re weak, mortal, easily harnessed to divine purpose, easily seduced by any of the seven sins, unable to resist junk food and demagogues and false gods. The only thing they have to combat evil is the brief, fragile flame of their own consciousness. It’s a small arena.
Even when that small bit of territory is won, the war is eventually lost. If the Old Gods didn’t depend on us to be the agents of their will in this world, they’d get rid of us altogether.
When Vladimir Putin ordered the destruction of Ukraine and Chechnya, he opened a door for Moloch into this world. Ukraine was one of many such doors and Putin was one of many such door-openers, but Ukraine and Putin constitute a near-perfect object lesson in how a god can possess a human in order to achieve his ends, no matter how inhuman.
Putin should have known better. He had only to keep selling Europe natural gas and diesel for a few more decades and he and the Chinese would have ended up owning the world, or at least being the most prosperous part of it. Western Civilization’s centuries-long theft of wealth from the rest of the world was reversing. All that was required for the East to own the West was patience.
If Putin had ever been conscious, he wasn’t on the day he ordered his armies to start killing. It was an action that has proven contagious, and we’re still a long way from a time when Moloch will feel sated.
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Humans keep getting stuck with leaders who are so profoundly damaged that they cannot achieve self-awareness. After their deaths, their lives look like chronicles of murderous compulsion. After their deaths, people are relieved and thankful for deliverance.
Put Putin, Stalin, Netanyahu, the leaders of Hamas, Napoleon, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Mao, Modi, Nixon, Trump, George Custer, Mussolini, Boris Johnson and Pinochet up against a conscious leader—the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius comes to mind—and you’ll see how lucky humans can be when such a leader comes to power.
Marcus Aurelius has more consciousness in his little finger than the rest of these people put together. If you don’t believe me, take a look at his Meditations, in which he explores what it means to be a human being, even one designated an emperor-god, in a universe where the unconscious and its demons rule.
Being conscious doesn’t mean being happy, but it does mean being smart.
You should read his Meditations anyway, if you value self-awareness and want to maintain your share of it. It’s not easy reading, the first or the fiftieth time.
One of the ways you recognize consciousness, Marcus Aurelius tells you, is guilt. You do what you must do as leader of Rome or of the homeowner’s association, but you recognize that what you do to your enemies, you also do to yourself and your children.
Few lives are so short as to have no room for regret.
Consider a Buddhist comment on the difficulty of being a conscious human. It comes in the form of three challenges, the first of which is conquering the fear of living a life that must end. The second is conquering the power that possesses you once you conquer that fear. The third, once you overcome the first two, is conquering old age.
Nobody conquers old age.
Nobody conquers regret, either.
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When I taught first-year students in college, I told them that I understood they were away from home for the first time, but however free of supervision they finally felt, they weren’t free.
“The big decisions in your life have already been made by the person you were when you were ten years old,” I told them. “If you don’t believe me, just wait sixty years.”
I went further and told them about the personal unconscious—formed by the time they were ten—and the collective unconscious, formed by a couple of million years of human and proto-human existence. I told them to bet on the collective unconscious if they wanted to pick a winner.
“Politicians may look like they have free will,” I said, “but they’re delivered up by the culture. They’re where they are because they fit a cultural narrative. There are good narratives and bad ones, and if you’re lucky you’ll be born into a time when the collective story allows for decent human beings, and maybe even decent politicians.”
This sort of thing didn’t go over well when I said it, particularly with political science majors, and it probably would go over even worse now, because these days, the collective story isn’t allowing anyone, politician or not, much decency.
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Wise humans, in a rare act of conscious free will, got rid of the Old Gods and replaced them with benign spirits like Christ and Buddha and Muhammed and Baha’u’llah. But it didn’t take long for Baal and Mammon and Moloch to disguise themselves in the raiment of the new religions. Mammon, in particular, gained a lot of worshippers as the Catholics, the Mormons, and the prosperity-gospel evangelicals embraced the idea that salvation could be monetized.
But now it’s Moloch’s turn. We’ve created a world where too many people are competing for too little water, air, and land, and we’re going to fight to the death over what’s left. The result will cut down on the number of people who pray to Moloch, but anyone left standing will be as devout as you can get.