Sharing Bread

I have just struggled through Cormac McCarthy’s excruciating masterpiece, Blood Meridian, an epic meditation on Thomas Hobbes’s classic observation that the life of humankind in its natural state is “nasty, brutish, and short”. McCarthy’s main character, The Judge, a supreme being of enormous and frightening appetite for blood and war (indeed, he says, War is his God), declares at one point: “What brings men together is not the sharing of bread, but the sharing of enemies.”That dark view of human nature has been challenged philosophically at least since Jesus…and in recent years evolutionary science has produced evidence that actually sharing bread means more to us as a species than cynics, pessimists, and viewers of Fox News might ever imagine. Tribalism may be our default position, but human history has frequently shown that despite vicious, repetitious outbreaks of tribal warfare, there are plentiful examples of humans reaching hands across the water to help others. There are more than enough positive acts of global compassion and cooperation to support a more optimistic view of our kind…which really goes to the heart of what Hobbes was saying. The context from which we draw Hobbes’s nasty, brutish, and short description was his opinion of what human existence would be like without political community, to wit:

In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

We have abundant evidence that Hobbes knew what he was talking about. As human societies have become more law abiding and civil, we have seen an actual decrease in our intra-species violence. In his massive chronicle of our species, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari  reports that the 70 years since the end of World War II have created by a wide margin the most peaceful era in human history...headline grabbing incidents of terrorism, genocide, and garden-variety war notwithstanding. In the year 2000, he writes, wars caused the death of 310,000 and violent crime killed another 520,000, amounting to 1.5% of the 56 million who died that year. In a further data point (which may or may not be positive, depending upon where you fall on the glass half full/glass half empty spectrum), he reports that after the attacks of 9/11, one was more likely to die by one’s own suicidal hand than by that of a terrorist, soldier or drug dealer. Nonetheless, until a feel good movie about this precious piece of human progress is produced as a Netflix Original, people may find it hard to believe. We are so overwhelmed by the bad news that cascades down upon our weary heads each and every day. And so it goes...this is my fifth attempt to write this particular blog post. In the decade I’ve religiously been keeping this weekly blog, no subject has ever given me as much challenge as this one as I try to address the spectacle of fear and hate that unfolded before the nation in that Trump rally in North Carolina this past week. Trump declared open season on our better angels, which like birds on a wire quickly spread their wings and flew away to escape his brutishness. I could feel the shared weight of my own challenge as pundits and writers throughout the land also tried to confront the event that threatened to sink us deep beneath our hard acquired wisdom and grand national aspiration.
It’s been one of those weeks in our nation’s history for separating the wheat from the chaff…where people either put themselves on the side of forming a more perfect union…or on the side of those clinging to the long lost, discredited cause of a racist state built on the exploitation, exclusion, and expulsion of others. One who made a bold public pronouncement on where he stands was Max Boot, a lifelong Republican who had established his credentials on the national stage as a champion of the Iraq War…in other words he was an apostle of The Judge's War God. However, in an op-ed for The Washington Post this week, Boot wrote: 

Sorry, Republicans. There is nothing — nothing — more important in the United States than racism. Where you stand on that one issue defines who you are as a human being. Silence is complicity ... I am ashamed to have spent most of my life as a Republican. I have significant differences with Pressley, Tlaib, Ocasio-Cortez and Omar — perhaps even greater differences on the issues than I have with the president — but they are better Americans than Trump.

That's how you avoid becoming one of those “Good Germans” I condemned in a blog post a week ago when I warned against being too quick to reach for Nazi analogies in describing the current dreadful state of the union. Out of awe (in the worst sense of awe) of how historically monstrous The Third Reich was, I’ll stand by that warning. But no one who has ever seen newsreels, documentaries or Hollywood movies of Hitler’s rise can look at clips of that Trump rally and not see a coming attraction of a fascist state. What I found most harrowing about it was how easy it was to project people I know personally into that unhinged crowd of hate-mongers. But for proximity, they would’ve been there, gleefully united in the sharing of Trump’s enemies:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and  Ayanna Pressley
These particular enemies are not only American citizens but representatives of American citizens…each of them elected by a majority popular vote in their districts without the help of hush money payoffs to porn stars, Russian interference, or the Electoral College (the US Constitution’s third nipple). If photography had been with us since the beginning of time, our archives would be filled with images similar to those from Trump’s “Send Her Back” rally: Pictures from the Roman Colosseum during the feeding of Christians to lions; pictures taken in 1478 at the Spanish Inquisition directed against Jews, Muslims and Protestants; snapshots from the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-93; high gloss photos taken in Nazi Germany in the 1930s; Polaroids from civil rights marches in the segregated American South of the 1960s; Kodachrome from the mean streets of Boston, Massachusetts in the 1970s. What makes that picture above of Trump’s enemies different is that it is distinctively of the here and now. It is a picture of four independent, newly empowered, self-actualized, freely elected women of color which could only have been taken during our time. It is not only a picture of their progress, but of ours. I end this arduous post by going against my own advice and returning briefly, once more to the Nazis:
I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage reborn.--Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank
And there it is. I am reborn…at least for another week.