When a reporter once asked Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of Western civilization, he is said to have replied, “It would be a good idea.” Indeed, it would.
Canadians and our natural cousins and neighbours in America have grown up in our similar cultures wearing similar blinders. We’ve long seen ourselves as “the good guys,” historically combating fascism and Asian imperialism, and protecting the wealth-producing economy here in North America, all within the genial heritage of liberal democracy.
Generally overlooked or downplayed in our national myths has been the massacre and/or opportunistic abuse of Indigenous peoples. (Perhaps current Canadian efforts at reconciliation will go at least some way toward ameliorating these wrongs.) Truly, the most astonishing atrocities can be normalized to any observer through repeated exposure, especially when there is some real or imagined advantage to perceiving such actions as beneficial, or at worst, harmless, as with the absurd rationalizations put forward (and for many years accepted!) for residential schools.
We seem willful not to learn, to refuse to acknowledge documented tragedies and ongoing threats (e.g. climate change and pollution of nearly every kind), but instead are comfortably terrorized by imaginary harms (immigrant rapists). In response, we commit vicious acts to prevent such harms’ possible occurrence (caging children after separating them from their natural parents).
Absurdly, as recently as April, white evangelical Christian support for Trump, the instigator of the most xenophobic North American anti-immigration policies in recent history, stood at 75 per cent! Apparently, these particular Christians have never accepted the admonitions of Jesus, who said, “Suffer [allow] the little children to come unto me,” or of St. Paul, who in his letter to the Galatians advised that we should “carry one another’s burdens,” and in this way “fulfill the Law of Christ.” They don’t even ask themselves, “Who would Jesus deport?”
When deciding upon whom or what to inflict our hostile indifference, we are very poor discriminators. We prefer the weak, of course, victims who can’t put up much of a fight. Thus, willful inhumanity to immigrant children is characterized merely as a policy of necessary discipline to discourage immigration. Never mind that these hopeful refugees might be fleeing death squads. Not our problem.
Our ongoing dismemberment of the natural world further exemplifies our casual acceptance of our cultural ethos of grabbing what goodies we can for ourselves, with scant regard for the ongoing victimization of the future implicit in our methods. It has been understood for decades that our systematic exploitation of the natural world as both a source for wealth and sink for waste has a limited operational lifespan.
Currently, because of human interference, our natural world is suffering a sixth great biological extinction (the fifth was during the time of dinosaurs), with “an estimated one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds headed for oblivion.” Evidence of this destruction may be found worldwide. (See Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.)
It’s tempting to agree with Gandhi, that for all our technical glitz, true civilization has never really taken hold here. Rather Nietzsche’s madness reigns.