Wyatt Verlen: Can We Fight Over Different Things?

By Wyatt Verlen (Currently suffering a flu. Please bring me soup.)

Logging into twitter, you scroll. A school of children bombed in Iran. Settlers committing pogroms across the West Bank. Administration officials in the United States pitching the latest conflict as religious war against Islam (which, as we have covered, is very stupid, and possibly counterproductive). In Israel, our ally, they are refusing to condemn settler violence with any real force, and just passed a death penalty law that as far as I can tell, goes much further in terms of raw racialized De Jure inequality than anything ever passed by apartheid South Africa. The gallows, apparently, is how you solve a 60 year conflict I guess.

But let’s get away from all that for a second. Foreign policy, and the injustices our tax money goes to, is only a symptom of the problem. The problem? A society that at some point stopped progressing towards a humane future.

I am not a wide eyed utopian, nor do I think that human beings will, or should ever be “perfected”. But there is a baseline of civilizing that the world underwent for a few hundred years. That baseline was demolished over the course of the first half of the twentieth century, then attempts were made to repair it in the second half, first through the great society, then through End of History liberalism.

It may be a mistake to plea for End of History liberalism, but the allure is there. Let me give an example, near and dear to my hippy dippy ecological heart: the decline in migratory fishes globally. The peace dividend at the end of the cold war should have given us a world where this issue would be a primary debate- “how best to save these fish”, not a buried story nobody cares about. The end of history should have meant we get to care about things like that. Instead we are debating about killing other people, still.

History has still not ended, and the world is all the worse for it, perhaps.