Chasing echoes

There are no “good” or “bad” people in the world any more than there are “good” or “bad” any other sort of animal. Normative inquiry’s a worthwhile pursuit for punishment theorists and, I suppose, for jurists determined there’s some divine rhyme or higher reason for the law of a particular land. But outside of retributive contexts — and the geopolitical arena, where pretensions to the moral high ground are a mainstay of Western foreign policy — value judgement’s largely the purview of philosophers and people studying to be philosophers, which is to say it’s confined to the Ivory Tower, or at least as a formal discipline.

Informally, we’re all amateur ethicists. We muse about, and pass judgement on, what’s “good” and what’s “bad,” what’s “right” and what’s “wrong” every day, in the process commending and condemning our fellow homo sapiens — anointing saints and adjudging sinners. There’s no underlying truth to that adjudication process, but we tend to agree that “good people” exhibit certain behavior patterns. Those allegedly virtuous proclivities tend to bear some resemblance to selflessness, empathy and what used to count as civic-mindedness, a notion that’s now quaint.

From the amateur ethicist perspective, Sarah was “good,” or “a good,” as she used to put it, noun-ifying an adjective. By contrast, I was “bad,” or “a bad.” She thought she saw something redeemable in me. She thought I was savable. I knew I wasn’t and the very fact that I entertained her deliverance campaign knowing full well it would come to nothing, testified to my irredeemability.

I met Sarah on the way down during what, at the time, counted as my most spectacular personal Icarus moment. She was working the hostess stand at a fine dining spot owned by her ex-boyfriend’s father, a classically-trained French chef. Why I noticed her that night, but never previously, I can’t say, but I can speculate. Sarah was humble in every way and right up until then, I was hubris personified. Opposites may attract, but hubris, by its very arrogant nature, reflexively avoids the humble.

That restaurant was, as far as I knew, the only real white tablecloth establishment in town, crumb sweeper service, bathroom attendant, the whole nine yards. During the halcyon days of my local racket, I spent freely there on oysters, beef tournedos and wine, faux retinue in tow, Billie Frechette on arm. Those days were recently over, leaving me to drift and wander, chasing echoes and grasping at wisps of nostalgia.

I sought refuge from the discomfit in the opulence of haughty food and drink served in familiar surroundings, but any respite I might’ve found was scuppered by the realization that unescorted by a small cortège of ersatz capodecina and girlfriends cosplaying Karen Hill, I was invisible. A veritable nobody. Just another bar guest.

More unnerving still was the decidedly unfamiliar relevance of price. I still had a fair amount of money, but it wasn’t coming in at the same rate it used to, and in some lines of business, it’d stopped coming in altogether.

The old me — the only me there was to that point — was dead, or dying. In that death, I was aware of things that hadn’t occurred to me previously, and not just the price of wagyu. Only once you fall can you see the grounded.

To live

“What a terrible year 2024 has been in terms of human suffering,” Jean-Nicolas Beuze, whose long career as a human rights advocate placed him in conflict zones around the world, lamented, in a piece published by the UN’s refugee agency towards the tail-end of what was indeed a devastatingly tragic year for our backsliding species.

To the extent it’s possible to summarize J. Bradford DeLong’s voluminous Slouching Towards Utopia, an encyclopedic retelling of modern economic history, the overarching message is that we should, all of us, be wandering blissful through the Elysium fields by now. DeLong describes the 140-year period from 1870 to 2010 — the “long 20th century” — as “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries,” a claim he justifies by reference to exponential growth, technological advancement, snowballing wealth and the end of abject poverty and subsistence living across most, but certainly not all, parts of the globe.

Starting in or around 1870, “we got full globalization, the industrial research laboratory and the modern corporation,” DeLong wrote, calling those “the keys [to] the gate that had previously kept humanity in dreadful poverty.” “On the other side of the gate,” he went on, “the trail to utopia came into view, and everything else good should have followed from that.”

Note that the latter stages of the long 20th century overlap with the fall of the Soviet Union and the apparent final victory of liberal democracy — Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” By the early-1990s, after much trial and deadly error, we’d allegedly discovered the “final form of human government,” as Fukuyama put it. He didn’t mean to suggest that other forms of government would disappear entirely, rather that as of 1991, we knew better. Or should know better.

A quarter-century after Fukuyama’s bold (and, on many scores and interpretations, naive) declaration, Yuval Noah Harari, a kind of philosopher-historian for people who might not otherwise read any philosophy, advanced a conceptually similar argument with regard to large-scale tragedies. In Homo Deus, Harari wrote that although plague, famine and war will “probably continue to claim millions of victims in the coming decades, they are no longer unavoidable tragedies beyond the understanding and control of a helpless humanity.” In other words: Most, or even all, instances of widespread human suffering from disease, hunger or conflict, are traceable in modernity to the conscious decisions of “bad” people, and thus are entirely avoidable.

In theory, then, we as a species should be rich, well-governed and largely free of physical suffering by now. But we aren’t. As DeLong wrote, the post-2010 world “instead saw global warming, economic depression, uncertainty and inequality” as well as “broad rejection of the status quo.” That rejection manifested as “political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways and for different reasons at the failure of the system of the 20th century to work for them as they thought it should.”

In the 2020s, the levee broke. A plague was visited upon humanity, two conflicts with the potential to trigger world war broke out (in Eastern Europe and the Mideast) and an already-brewing crisis of Western liberal democracy worsened materially as voters roundly rejected the neoliberal order in favor of populism, nationalism and so-called “illiberal democracy.” That political sea change in the West was animated in part by xenophobia, as waves of asylum seekers fleeing war, poverty and famine sought safety in Europe and North America.

For what it’s worth, Jacques Derrida suggested decades ago that contemporaneous narratives about ideological and economic progression were hopelessly — laughably, even — jejune. “It must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: Never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the Earth and of humanity,” Derrida wrote, in response to Fukuyama.

He wasn’t done. “Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of history,” he went on, “let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: No degree of progress allows one to ignore that never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated.”

Interregnum

For a time, I was regular. A very short time, mind you. 11 or so months. But to me it felt like 10 years.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say I tried, because I really didn’t, but I pretended to try and on some days it wasn’t all that bad. Sarah was an aspiring ceramicist and I introduced her to some art majors I knew, who in turn convinced her to go back to college. I went with her. Sort of. I had a stack of graduate B-school credits that were still good, and I desperately needed a mental diversion, so I figured I’d finish out the program — one more expensive, framed certificate testifying to my adeptness at memorization and recitation.

The son of college professors, I grew up on college campuses. Between undergraduate and grad school, I spent the first dozen years of my adult life there too, and I quite enjoyed every minute of it. Or at least I thought I did. But over the course of the single semester it took to finish the MBA, it dawned on me that I might’ve only relished intelligentsia for the stark juxtaposition with my off-campus persona. In fact, it occurred to me that without that persona, I didn’t enjoy much of anything. Because who was I, suddenly? Who was this post-me, me? Just some guy. “An average nobody,” and the idea that I might have to “live the rest of my life like a schnook” was positively terrifying.

Sarah was hyperconscious of suffering. That was her gift. In some ways, it was also her curse. She seemed to view her keen awareness of others’ anguish as a mandate — an obligation to relieve suffering wherever she found it. In me, she saw a man who suffered not because he lost his identity, but rather because he wouldn’t let go of a contrived persona — a character, in other words — to embrace a more mundane, but ultimately real, underlying selfhood.

I cared not a thing for the suffering of others which, in my defense, isn’t the same as wanting others to suffer. But the choice between my gain and the suffering of others (and that choice was, in one way or another, at the heart of my businesses) was no choice at all. As I saw it, and still see it, as long as you’re honest with your clients in whatever line of business you happen to be in, you’re more or less above board. That’s why I abhor white-collar crime: It tends towards deception and overt dishonesty, the former being distasteful and the latter as close to “wrong” as one can get with the caveat that normative judgements are inherently meaningless. If I was the proximate cause of others’ suffering, it wasn’t because they were lied to.

She and I never agreed on who I really am — on my underlying selfhood. As the recognized authority on myself, I can say with something approaching certainty that the persona wasn’t contrived. There was no character, or if there was, it was the man pretending to be regular in an agonizingly quotidian chapter of an otherwise intriguing life story.

It didn’t occur to me until years later how unimaginably cruel I was to let her persist in the notion that I’d accept a pedestrian existence in the kind of unremarkable, domestic nightmare she dreamed might be our shared future. In truth, I had no intention of sharing any sort of future with her, let alone one defined by the tedious monotony of upstanding citizenship in the sprawl of suburbia. For her, that was the natural end of anyone’s personal history and a kind of utopia: Good household governance, stability and a lack of want. For me, it was tantamount to surrender and felt a prospect worse than death.

Plague, famine and war

If you prod Gemini, the model behind Google’s not-always-reliable “AI Overviews,” it’ll confidently assess that 2024 was “a year of unprecedented conflict around the world.”

“Unprecedented” might be too strong, but the AI’s certainly correct to surmise, based on what I can only assume was a comprehensive parsing of the extant “literature” (which is to say the entire universe of searchable news stories and discoverable accounts of last year’s wanton global bloodletting) that 2024 counted as “one of the most violent years since World War II.”

You can quantify violence, most obviously by tallying the dead and maimed. According to the 2024 edition of the IISS Armed Conflict Survey, fatalities attributable to “violent events” surged 37% in the reporting period covering July of 2023 to June of 2024 versus the prior survey period which ran from July of 2022 to June of 2023.

As the figure shows, the huge percentage jump was a direct consequence of spiraling hostilities in the Mideast (in green), but the overall tally for Europe and Eurasia also rose, which is saying something considering the 2023 report covered a 12-month period defined geopolitically by the onset of full-on war in Ukraine.

“The global outlook for peace remains bleak,” IISS survey director Irene Mia despaired. The world, she said, “is experiencing an unprecedented number of conflicts.” Maybe Gemini used the right adjective after all.

One of the more prominent sources of data on the prevalence of armed conflicts around the world is the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, or UCDP, an initiative based at Uppsala University in Sweden. The UCDP’s dataset is the oldest such archive, dating to 1989. The figure below gives you a sense of the trajectory, both in terms of state-based violence and the death toll from ongoing conflicts.

As Peace Research Institute Oslo remarked, citing the UCDP figures, 2021, 2022 and 2023 “were the most violent in the last three decades,” and despite being “better” than the prior two years, 2023 still “turned out to be one of the most violent years since the end of the Cold War.” 2024 wasn’t much better, if it was any better at all.

Similarly, the Australia-based Institute for Economics & Peace said in its latest annual report that there were 56 conflicts raging around the world last year, “the most since World War II.” The think tank counted 92 countries involved in extra-territorial conflicts.

For its reports, the IISS uses Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, or ACLED which, like the UCDP, tallies conflicts around the world. The ACLED figures suggest conflicts — defined as “battles, bombings and other violent acts” — rose to 194,300 last year from just over 100,000 in 2020.

As the figure shows, deaths associated with conflicts are up commensurately to nearly a quarter million from fewer than 150,000 five year ago.

As The Washington Post wrote late last year, citing and quoting a researcher at the University of Chicago, “the ongoing breakdown in global order and rising multipolarity” have prompted major powers to “assert their regional influence and undermin[e] one another.”

The IISS’s Mia spoke to the same point, calling today’s local conflicts “increasingly intractable,” a state of affairs she attributed in part to the role of “external actors.” Conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine exemplify a “resurgence of inter-state conflicts,” “the growing internationalization of internal conflicts” and a shift in the dynamics of civil wars which, she went on, “are increasingly shaped by the intervention of regional and global powers pursuing their strategic interests.” Behind it all: “Heightened great-power competition… set against a backdrop of increasing geopolitical fragmentation.”

That state of affairs represents a complete failure of the institutional structures put in place post-World War II, most especially the UN Security Council, which the academic quoted by the Post last month aptly described as “paralyzed.” The idea after the second world war was to end great-power conflicts forever, and to limit, as much as possible, inter-state conflict of any sort given the potential for catastrophic — apocalyptic, even — outcomes. It worked, sort of, and for a while. Now, the whole project’s in tatters.

The post-War institutional structures never succeeded in limiting the incidence of violent conflict, nor did they prevent localized genocides, civil wars and state-on-state conflict involving minor and regional powers. The post-War period was also replete with examples of major powers, most obviously the United States, engaging in misbegotten military adventurism on ideological grounds, neo-colonialism and neo-imperalism all to the detriment of local populations, some of which suffered tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties as a result of America’s efforts to create a safer world through bullets, bombs, regime change and regime maintenance.

But, there was a sense post-the collapse of the USSR that global conflict of the sort witnessed earlier in the 20th century was in fact a thing of the past, and that in the arena of competing socio-political ideologies, liberal democracy had achieved a final victory as the “good” and “right” way to organize society. The West had prevailed, and although savages would be savages, the civilized world had moved well and truly beyond the primitive brutishness inherent in wars of choice and conquest to a relatively more enlightened view that favored compromise and diplomacy and would anyway steer clear of the sort of flagrant barbarism that finds consequential state actors usurping their neighbors’ right to self-determination in the name of imperial glory or weaponizing hunger as part of a collective punishment campaign against civilians for the sins of their oppressors.

And yet, here we are. Great-power conflicts are brewing anew and the idea of “great men” is back en vogue.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was remarkable not for what it said about Vladimir Putin’s designs on another puppet regime in Kyiv, and certainly not for the outbreak of conflict in an otherwise peaceful world (again, the notion that post-1990 and pre-2022, the world was a peaceful place, is the worst sort of misrepresentation even if you ignore the major conflicts which took place during that period), but rather for the extent to which it blew up (literally) the notion that even if humans are forever destined to kill one another at the drop of a hat and for not very good reasons (or no reason at all), the days of existential great-power conflict born in imperialist delirium were long gone.

As Gideon Rose wrote for Foreign Affairs this month, “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came as a shock primarily because of its scale and brazenness.” Putin’s revanchist inclinations were no secret, Rose said, but The Kremlin’s “willingness to launch a full-on war of conquest represented a new and grave challenge not just to his neighbor but to regional security and the global liberal order at large.”

Similarly, Xi Jinping’s reunification pretensions are the furthest thing from a secret. Indeed, he makes a point of describing reunification as inevitable during virtually every important speech, and the Party consistently refuses to rule out military force as a way to bring Taiwan back into a fold Beijing insists the island was never separated from in the first place. But even as the threat was always there, the odds that China might actually be willing to start a third world war if it means capturing and subduing Taiwan were considered quite remote until very recently. Now, some observers believe those odds are about even on a good day, and tilt towards confrontation on bad ones.

As for Israel, the existential imperative of preserving the Jewish state came at an enormous cost this time around — some 47,000 dead Gazans and thousands more killed in Lebanon. A majority of the dead are innocents, and whatever your opinion on the admissible scope of Israel’s deterrence-through-strength policy, history will probably frown at both the lopsided death toll and the nature of the IDF’s conduct. Maybe civilians weren’t targeted, but they certainly weren’t spared.

Suffice to say that sitting here in the second decade of the 21st century, we’re a very long way from the utopia that could’ve (should’ve) been based purely on the staggering wealth creation and accompanying advances in health science and technology witnessed over the past 150 years. Not only does the prosecution of war divert vast resources from disease-fighting initiatives and the pursuit of other technologies with the potential to make our lives longer and more fulfilling, it also costs us dearly in economic terms (the above-mentioned Institute for Economics & Peace put the global economic impact of violence at more than $19 trillion in 2023, or nearly 14% of global GDP), and creates the conditions for hunger and pestilence.

According to the UN, “catastrophic hunger” — acute malnutrition, starvation and famine — doubled last year “due largely” to fighting in Gaza and Sudan. UNICEF’s latest annual report painted the same macabre picture. More than a quarter billion people across 59 countries and locales suffered from “acute hunger” in 2023, it said, noting that “conflict remained the primary driver of food insecurity.”

It doesn’t help that humanitarian workers are having a harder and harder time getting to those in need. 2024 was the “deadliest on record for humanitarian personnel,” according to the UN humanitarian affairs office. Specifically, some 300 aid workers were killed trying to save lives. That’s “an unprecedented rate,” Tom Fletcher, the UN’s under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said in November. Many of those casualties were UNRWA workers in Gaza, and Israel would tell you the UNRWA’s overrun with terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. I won’t adjudicate that claim here, but Fletcher was keen to point out that “threats to aid workers extend beyond Gaza.”

Mass displacement in conflict zones is also conducive to the spread of disease as those fleeing the violence are crowded into unsanitary refugee camps, with Gaza and Sudan again being the most obvious, but not the only, examples. Gaza’s grappling with skin infections, polio and Hepatitis A, Sudan with malaria and measles, both with cholera. The UNHCR put the number of displaced globally at nearly 123 million as of June 2024.

In a testament the prevalence of human suffering in the 21st century, one out of every eight people in the world lived within three miles of a conflict last year, the ACLED figures cited above suggest. One in six children — nearly half a billion around the world — live in conflict zones or areas impacted by conflict, the most since modern record-keeping began. “By almost every measure, 2024 [was] one of the worst years [ever] for children in conflict [zones] both in terms of the number of children affected and the level of impact on their lives,” UNICEF executive director Catherine Russell said last month.

A decade ago, Harari wrote that “humankind has managed to do the impossible and rein in famine, plague and war.” “Today,” he pointed out in 2015, “more people die from obesity than from starvation; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed in war.” That’s probably still true 10 years later, but somehow, it rings hollow, particularly in the context of what Harari said next.

“We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war [so] when [they] break out, we feel that somebody must have screwed up and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better,” he wrote. “And it actually works. Such calamities indeed happen less and less often.”

Fast forward to 2025 and “such calamities” are on the rise. They’re happening more often, and true to Harari, we have only ourselves to blame for the attendant suffering. As DeLong observed, we should’ve had it all by now. It’s almost as if utopia, so defined anyway, was too mundane for us to happily countenance.

Leaving Eden

It was 2:30 in the morning and the dogs — her dogs — were anxious. They knew what she didn’t, or didn’t want to believe: They — her and the dogs — were seeing me for the very last time.

For nearly a year, I let her believe that even if I left town before she finished the undergraduate degree she was too old to still be working on, the plan was for her to come join me wherever I landed once she wrapped it up. I landed in Manhattan, and that was never the plan.

She couldn’t understand why I was so seemingly averse to contentment — why I couldn’t be at peace with an idyllic existence as defined by Better Homes & Gardens. Her best guess said my childlike refusal to let go of the Scorsese script prevented me from becoming the actualized adult — the “great man,” as she used to put it — whose aspirations to fulfillment were stifled by a bad guy impersonation which wasn’t alluring and was anyway past its shelf-life. She wasn’t wrong, but there was more to it.

The path to upper-middle-class, American prosperity was always a very clear one for me, and had I taken it, with no detours, I could’ve made a lot of friends, landed a lot of great jobs and lived what, on any objective interpretation, would’ve been a quasi-utopian life.

But I chose a different path, one that put me at the center of others’ suffering and one that, in the end, caused me a fair amount of suffering, physically first and then, later, mentally. For my trouble (and the troubles of others) I have a story to tell. I may not be a “great man” in the sense that she meant it, but I’m a great man in the sense that I have a legend, wildly embellished or not.

I didn’t even pretend to care that morning. She wanted a lot of promises and reassurances. She got a kiss on the forehead and $500 to help with that month’s rent instead. “You guys take care of her, ok?” I exhorted the dogs, hurrying out the door and turning the page on the only utterly unremarkable chapter of a book I’m still writing.

I spoke to Sarah again a year or so later. “I sleep a lot,” she said. “But when I wake up it all just rushes over me like a wave, and I feel sick. I just wasn’t enough for you.”

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