The death wish

The Combat of Ares and Athena, Jacques-Louis David

No, my friends, I'm not speaking of progressively worse series of films starring Charles Bronson, which played on white people's fear of crime in the 1970s. 

More appropriately, it's called the "death drive":

The famed psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud believed that people were ruled by two primary forces: the life instinct (Eros) and the death instinct (Thanatos). These two competing forces work together, and often in competition, to guide and direct human behavior.

Freud's concept of Thanatos is rooted in the law of entropy, or the idea that all systems eventually reach their lowest point. This can be contrasted with Eros, which is focused on the propagation of life. According to Freud, both instincts are in a constant and dynamic state of tension.

I wasn't going to write anything this week, as I'm on vacation. But even in my state of actively tuning out the news as I try to restore some equanimity, I feel like I need to address this.

To my eye, if I can get all Star Wars, we are out of balance. And at the moment it's quite easy to see which side of the Force is dominant.

Right now in the West, if not in all of humanity, the death drive is ascendant. The planet and the species face innumerable threats to its continued existence. The solutions are available. And yet we keep circling down the drain at an ever increasing rate. And it is not so much that we are unable or unwilling to confront extinction-level events. It's as if we are rushing towards them, welcoming them with open arms. We have given ourselves over to death, and doing so at a time when our technology can quite easily and completely satisfy that desire.

It's hard for me to understand what is driving this collective plunging over the cliff to certain death. Before the 20th century, such a manifestation would have been, at worst, localized. The technology didn't exist to wipe human life off the face of the earth.

But beginning with the First World War, humanity has been in one long flirtation with death. That it hasn't wiped itself out is testament to the enduring power of Eros to counter Thanatos.

However, the world is now being buffeted by movements which are millenarian and await the End. These movements are not only religious. We see political movements which posit that their cultures are threatened with extinction, and must be preserved by any means necessary. Sadly, those means would necessitate the death of millions. We see it in Russia, in Hungary. The spiritual successors to the German Nazis are on the cusp of power in the next general election. And of course, in the United States, a bare plurality of those who voted decided to choose certain death.

Why did they do that? Well, quite simply, "It can't get that bad." That, of course, is a lie. Human history is a litany of things going from bad to worse before they get better. But, again, as I wrote above, humanity has never had the technology it now possesses to completely obliterate itself. We have reached the point in history where our cleverness at invention has outstripped our wisdom to control those inventions. 

Look at artificial intelligence. It's a tool. As such, tools are neutral. They gain meaning by how you use them. You can use a hammer to drive in a nail, or to cave in someone's skull. Same tool, different purposes. AI has many uses in science which could speed up research by years, if not decades. But our headlong rush with no thought as to how the technology could be used to ill purposes is turning this tool into the cause of our destruction.

But back to our embracing of Thanatos. Why is life being destroyed in service of death?

Where do I begin? The apathy of a culture weaned on reality television? The idea that all meaning is fungible, and nothing is "true"? Selfishness and greed masquerading as "efficiency"? 

For me, death is king right now because life is both boring and hard.

Life requires that you care. Life requires that you pay attention. Life requires that you look beyond yourself and take in your neighbor, whether he lives next door or on another continent. Life requires that you see humanity as part of yourself, not something alien, foreign. And our human culture is simply not operating on that level. It never has. But before, we were separated by mountains and oceans. Now, we are cheek-to-jowl, and one wrong move could end our existence. But we are still mired in the culture in which the person in the next village, the next town, the next nation is the enemy. You might trade with them, you might visit them, but they will always be the Other. 

The death drive is a spectacle. It is easy to sate. It is easy to turn it into entertainment. It lures you in and enmeshes you. You think you could be that tough guy on screen killing all the baddies and never getting hurt. You think you're Jason Bourne, or 007, or Blade. A movie filled with violence will get rated R. One filled with sex probably won't even see wide release.

I wish I could tell you with confidence that we will survive this current flirtation with Thanatos. I think we will. I hope we will. But I have to be honest and say it's no sure thing. We can hope that humanity will collectively say "enough" before the breaking point. Or, perhaps, "enough" will only come at that breaking point, where Eros suddenly revives and pulls us out of our terminal trajectory. And the world which will then be born is one which will, perhaps, be wiser, but needn't have existed if the species had taken better care of itself and the one earth it shares. 

Hard lessons will have to be learned. I don't see any way around that. Humanity has put its hand into the flame; it will have to pull it out and treat the wound. If, that is, it's not lost in mania.