One of Earth’s most intelligent creatures, the novelist Margaret Atwood, was asked in a magazine interview in 2019 to name her greatest fear. “That human beings will follow their stupid and greedy side, rather than their smart side, and go down the plughole,” she replied. “We’re circling the rim.”
Six years on and the suck of that plughole is threatening to become irresistible. The existential forces of warfare, climate change, artificial intelligence, social inequality and disinformation are aligning and Atwood’s words, as so often, have the ring of prophecy. Humankind just might prove the species that was too selfish to save itself.
There was a time when we might have expected that if a day ever arrived when our planet’s political leaders were seeing masses of people being exterminated on their screens, they would rush to stop it. Instead, they let it go on for 20 months – so far – and let the corpses of more than 55,000 men, women, children and babies pile up in Gaza.
We might have expected that if scientists’ predictions came true and environmental pollution started making human life untenable in parts of our world, we would instantly mend our ways. Instead, we’re drowning in outsize cars, aerosols, plastic, data centres, incessant air travel and an insatiable shopping spree while climate refugees are drowning at sea.
We might have expected that should a proven liar, sex offender, falsifier of business records and instigator of an insurrection ever become president of the United States and behave as a despot, other world leaders would have the guts to tell him what’s what. Instead, they queue up bearing him gifts and obsequious invitations for state visits.
Political integrity is so last year.
The thing about human evolution is that it will not stop until every last one of us is gone, and the way we are evolving does not augur well for our long-term survival. It is only 89 seconds to midnight on the Doomsday clock, the closest its hands have ever come to the moment of Apocalypse. And still the EU has decided to pour more money into the coffers of the arms industry while retaining its trade deal with Israel, a prolific weapons-user. And still women in Afghanistan are forbidden by law to let their voices be heard in public and the rest of the world complicitly matches that silence.
The instinct that enough is never quite enough is our species’ Achilles heel. Donald Trump is its embodiment. He holds the most powerful political position on Earth, the one supposed to buffer others, but he exploits it to feather his own nest. His first foreign tour was to Middle East oil kingdoms where his family has hotel, golf resort and crypto business interests. He fancies turning Gaza into a Mar-a-Lago on the Med while anti-corruption protests take place in Serbia over a planned Trump-brand hotel on what was until recently a protected historic site in Belgrade. Because one half of us regards elsewhere as a business opportunity to be mined, the other half flees elsewhere only to get burned out of their new homes. See Ballymena this week.
Trump is transactional. That’s the fashionable euphemism for “if I give you this, you have to give me that”. He has no qualms about accepting Qatar’s gift of a Boeing 747 and is willing to let Vladimir Putin keep Crimea and the parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia that Russia has conquered since invading Ukraine in 2022 in exchange for lucrative Russia-US deals. He has already extracted rights to Ukraine’s natural resources. He did not have to illegally or violently wrest power to do this. He was given it by more than 77 million Americans who voted for him after law courts had found he cooked company books, paid hush money to a porn actress and sexually abused another woman in a store changing room. Sleaze pays in the world’s self-proclaimed greatest democracy where the candidate with the biggest bucks gets to sleep in the White House. Elon Musk was probably right when he said Trump would not be president were it not for his $300 million campaign donations.
The risk we take in a democracy is that voters’ self-interest can vest power in dirty hands, especially when voters have been repeatedly failed by previous administrations. It’s the Charlie Haughey Syndrome. Just as Americans looked at billionaire Trump and thought he would make them rich too, Irish voters looked at Haughey’s private island, his mansion and his yacht and, ignoring niggles about where he got all the loot, expected a rags-to-riches miracle for them too. There goes the slide from finer feelings of compassion and fraternity.
Capitalism and democracy make dangerous bedfellows. When money becomes the be-all and end-all, the guiding principle becomes what’s in it for me? It’s a vicious, unvirtuous circle. As Bill Clinton’s campaign strategist, James Carville, acknowledged, it’s about “the economy, stupid”. Ireland has this weird dichotomy of being, on the one hand, phenomenally generous to charitable causes and, on the other hand, disposed to self-interested clientelist politics. We call it “mé féinism”.
That’s the “stupid” bit Atwood fears and it’s demoralising, but the “greedy” bit is showing reasons for hope. She has also said, after all, that “within every dystopia there’s a little utopia”. We are seeing glimpses of that dawn now. On Saturday nights in Tel Aviv, more and more Israeli citizens have been joining a protest in Kaplan Street against the slaughter in Gaza and anti-deportation protests are growing in the US.
Citizens of the world, despairing of political cynicism, are refusing to be rendered numb in the face of man’s inhumanity to man. The Madleen boat that symbolically carried aid towards the Gaza coast before being intercepted by Israel provided the precursor for this weekend’s Global March to Gaza by delegations from every continent and more than 50 countries, including Ireland.
Governments, at last, are starting to respond. People power is what will save us all.
Miriam de Búrca, an artist and lecturer, says she and others have joined the March to Gaza because “our collective sense of humanity is being undermined and eroded”.
May they go safe.
