If there were a “true religion” God, perhaps, would have created fewer of them for waging wars that seem to pit all against all. However, despite mankind’s many religions and near 7,000 living languages, there may be a sufficient progressive tendency to bond toward the mild, moderate, and virtuous middle however we may conceive — of have conceived — of the meaning of our existence. Developing that bond, tending toward good, minimizing the power and impact of dogmatic absolutists may be our common struggle.
While mentioning the Soviet, now post-Soviet, vision accompanied by the familiar oligarchies of kleptocrats mad for power and wealth (and their display), one should not overlook elements of the Christian mythos in Hitlerism and its propagation in the Muslim world during and after World War II. This old fighting is not only or always about belief and religion: it is about the language-shaped character of humanity and the idea of human virtue and dimensions, ideals, and values associated with the same, e.g., “dignity, equality, fraternity”; human rights, equal justice; the balance between communitarianism and individualism; idealism itself.
As some doors may open on a new world, others may close, and we hope — I hope together we hope — that the door closes firmly over time on absolutism, dictatorship, terrorism, and totalitarianism.
Pretty words.
Across social divides, the human heart suffers from a sympathetic astigmatism: “the good” are in about the same place emotionally — please stop the fighting! — but also a different place for each language-informed and poetry-embracing mind and spirit. Nonetheless, the horror meted out in such as the Syrian Civil War, where the razory madness of a brutal dictatorship matched to an implacably evil fascist religious movement — just set all those millions in the middle aside for a moment — have been out on full display, tells that an end is wanted and the vision need not be Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or atheist or Arab or anything other than the largest possible human response to the twin obscenities of the unrestrained greed and sadism of the unconscionable and ruthless.
Now return to those millions traumatized at least, displaced most likely, maimed at worst — although the worst, the dead, number beneath the first million on the grim statistician’s abacus — and their inability to date to grapple with the twinned evils noted. They can do it, they can stand up on their own land, but only if — IF — they can arrange themselves with others, including those they may have believed competitors, enemies, rivals, and threats.
As with Syria, so the world: the want is for a bonded middle force that today does not exist.
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