A thinking essay by the NYT’s Frank Bruni. Though he refers in passing to stupidity during the Pandemic, this essay is really about his thoughts on the invasion of Ukraine and Putin’s intentions behind it. It is also about our being lulled into assuming that a military aggression like this was way behind the kind of world we believed we had wrought. That indeed greed and conquest will always be part of the human psyche.
Frank Bruni writes: What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? The Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin. Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither. I don’t know if it’s a boomer thing, a modern thing, an elite thing or some other thing, but in my lifetime, in this country, among many of my generational peers, there has been a sense that people had learned particular lessons and were evolving past extremes of pettiness and barbarism, certainly in the corners of the globe deemed more enlightened. In Europe, so devastated and so educated by World War II, sovereign nations wouldn’t be invaded just because their neighbors were mightier, meaner and more rapacious. That was a grandiosity and folly of the past — before the European Union and before all of our “advances,” a word we’ve used so frequently and clung to so tightly, as if the accretion of knowledge and the epiphanies of science were guarantors, or at least harbingers, of affluence and peace. This perspective wasn’t just overly optimistic about history’s arc. It was blind to the present — to the unabated factionalism in the Middle East, to the blood spilled on borders all around the world, to the enduring and enduringly potent strains of territorialism and tribalism, to human nature. We are creatures of magnificent grace, capable of extraordinary altruism and empathy, and I usually choose to focus on that. But we are also acquisitive, aggressive, envious, suspicious. Look no further than the theaters of political warfare here in the United States — exemplar and tribune of the West — for evidence aplenty of that. Knowledge is no antidote to the most destructive human qualities. It’s no vaccine. To wit: vaccines. As my Times colleague Bret Stephens recently noted about conspiracy-minded Americans of the current moment: “Here we are with a vaccine that can save you from dying or going to the hospital with Covid, and tens of millions of people refuse to help themselves by taking it. Which goes to prove that no pandemic is deadlier than stupidity.” We scale fresh zeniths of sophistication; we tumble into the same old savagery. We devise technologies to usher us into a new information age; they become tools of misinformation. Three steps forward, two steps back, because, as my colleague David Brooks wrote last week, we’ve been cavalier about the constant hard work of progress and inadequately mindful of the full, messy spectrum of human tendencies. It’s not just that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it; it’s that the past repeats itself, not precisely but to a significant degree, because the psychologies that shaped it survive it. I was struck by a passage in Madeleine Albright’s excellent guest essay yesterday about Putin and her first impressions when, as the U.S. secretary of state, she met him in 2000. In the notes that she wrote down of their encounter, she remarked not only that he was “small and pale” but also that he was “embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.” He has stewed in that embarrassment ever since. He has grown more intent and less inhibited. And now the small and pale man has struck. He announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine today. He ordered and commenced a sweeping invasion by land, air and sea. By late this morning there were already reports of dozens of Ukrainian casualties, and there were explosions not just near the Russian border but also in cities all across the country, whose citizens find themselves at the mercy of Putin’s megalomania. Embarrassment, vanity, viciousness: History never moves on or gets past these forces, which drove invasions and conquests in centuries past and will drive invasions and conquests in years to come. There should be no great shock about Russia’s audacious attack on Ukraine — only profound sadness and painstaking thought about what to do and what’s to come. Roland Toronto.
