CIVILIZATION'S END?

Cities are the incubators of civilization. This fact comes to mind when traveling into New York City from my home in New Jersey, I cross the George Washington Bridge. As the City first comes into view, I am occasionally struck by a sense of awe. It is not the awe when contemplating wide open and austere natural environments. It is rather a sense of awe that emerges from the wonders of human creation.

Here we have a city of eight million people teeming with life. While New York doesn't function perfectly and its residents are often fractious and like to argue (I know this well; I was born and raised in New York), I am amazed at how it works given the complexity of the contrivances needed for it to do so. I think of all the unseen water, sewer, and gas lines underground. The wiring needed to bring electricity to its innumerable buildings. The lines that convey water to all the sinks and toilets in all its apartments, offices, and stores, many rising dozens of storeys into the air. The garbage pick up, essential to maintaining health, and without it, the City would quickly become unlivable. And then there is the subway, a source of childhood enchantment; it's an entire railroad system thundering underground, that almost never stops, inclusive of more than 400 stations and almost a thousand miles of track. All of this and much more. I cannot begin to think about the continuing maintenance, repair, and rebuilding, all requiring oversight and planning to keep the City humming. New York City is a study in coordinated chaos writ large. What I see is the infrastructure out of which culture emerges. In short, New York and all the world's great cities are wondrous products of human civilization. While much may seem mundane, it's among humanity's greatest achievements.

Here is a very different hallmark of civilization. I taught human rights for 20 years in the graduate division of Columbia University. Columbia is one of the world's centers of human rights study and research, and I was privileged to work in an environment of intellectually accomplished students and colleagues. As I mentioned in a previous essay, human rights are a radical achievement of the modern age. Whereas people have possessed rights for hundreds of years, those rights were differentiated and limited depending on one's sex, race, ethnicity, economic capacity, and other accidental properties. It is only within the past eight decades or so that these differences were abolished. With the emergence of human rights, which in principle have been accepted by almost all nations, the only attribute that endows a person with rights is that he or she is a human being. It was a revolutionary step that has promoted equality, and given that human rights include not only political, but economic rights as well, the human rights culture has been a major step toward fostering human welfare. The emergence of human rights has been an extraordinary civilizing achievement.

My classroom was itself an exemplification of civilization. Human rights are a global phenomenon, and my program attracted a large number of international students. I had students from mainland China, women from Saudi Arabia, and even students from the Islamic Republic of Iran. My students formed an environment of riches, marked by their extraordinary diversity, as they came together in one of the world's great universities to immerse themselves in a discipline of global application. My students and I met for shared exploration across lines of difference in the pursuit of learning. Human rights lie on the interface of academic inquiry and activism. Many of my students have gone on to careers dedicated to the protection and promotion of rights, some domestically, some in the developing world. There was much in my classrooms that expressed high civilizational achievement.

We who live in the 21st century reside atop 10,000 years of the collective building of civilization. Each person, our contemporaries and the multiple generations that have come before us, has done their share. They have contributed their intelligence, their labor, and their vision to the collective project of furthering humankind. Despite the frequent backsliding and regression into violence, cruelty, and war, the innumerable achievements of humankind have been remarkable beyond description. We can consider the refinement of thought and new ideas, often manifesting brilliance, the creative expression revealed in art, music, and other achievements we associate with culture. There are the wonders of science, both theoretical and applied, that have comprised one of the endeavors which we can, without hesitation, conclude has been a marked success in the career of humankind. We who are alive now sit at the pinnacle of all the human effort that has preceded us and has led to this moment.

It was the philosopher, John Dewey, who held that life continually confronts us with problems. In the face of problems, human beings often collaboratively pool their intelligence, experimentally test hypotheses to overcome those problems, and create solutions that practically work and conduce to greater satisfaction, until new problems emerge, as they always do. And on it goes. It is with such slow steps that creativity is evoked, discoveries made, and our civilization is built and maintained.

The fund of knowledge that humanity has created, the extraordinary accomplishments human intelligence, labor, and perseverance have generated, are, of course, beyond calculation. While there may be a penchant to focus on the negative, empirical circumstances indicate that the human condition is notably improving.

A powerful argument defending the notion that the human condition has gotten better, and ours may, in fact, be the best of all times, has been exhaustively made by the Harvard cognitive psychologist, Stephen Pinker, in two magisterial books, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now. In the former, published in 2011, Pinker has amassed a huge amount of data to show that previous eras were far more violent than our own; the chances of a person dying a violent death from criminal homicide, war, and other causes were much greater in previous centuries. While we can lament the wars surging in Congo, Sudan, Gaza, and elsewhere, and agonize over their death tolls, far fewer are killed in today's wars than in the numerous wars that were waged during the Cold War.

The range of issues reviewed in Enlightenment Now is much broader. In that text, Pinker contends that when we consider major indicators, human beings are better off now than we ever have been. People live longer, they are healthier, better educated, more prosperous, enjoy greater rights, and the spread of democracy. By many measures, people are generally happier than at any time in human history. I can cite a circumstance concerning my father that anecdotally verifies one of Pinker's findings. My father was born in Ukraine in 1903. At the time of his birth, the average lifespan of people across the globe was not much in excess of 40 years. Today, it exceeds 70 years, and this includes those who die in infancy and early childhood. It is Pinker's contention that such extraordinary improvements in the human condition have not been a product of magic, but emerged by rationally and structurally organizing society in order to bring about more practical, efficient, and humane ends. It was the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries that prioritized reason, science, experimentation, and ushered in democracy and secular governance. It was these advances and their application that led to the spectacular improvement of the human condition overall.

When I reflect on the achievements of humankind over the long view, and our role in sustaining civilization, I turn again to the thoughts of John Dewey, whose philosophy so faithfully reflected the values of modernity and liberal democracy. He ended his book, A Common Faith, a brief treatise on the reformulation of religion in contemporary times, with the following thought:

“The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we received so that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible, and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of humanity. It remains to make it explicit and militant.”

Enter Donald Trump. Legions of articles, books, and news stories have documented and analyzed how Donald Trump is destroying our liberal democracy. Trump is a notoriously small man, a pathological narcissist, for whom policy is an expression of his impulses and peeves. There is no sense of the common good, which psychologically would require a capacity for empathy. But Trump has none. Authoritarianism and sadism are descriptive of his political objectives and their implementation.

But Trump is not merely committed to destroying democracy. With his impulsive brutality, he is committed to destroying the finest fruits of civilization itself.

We can start with my own Columbia University. Education is the touchstone of a civilized society. It speaks to personal refinement and the refinement of societies at large. Education fulfills our innate capacity for curiosity. Society progresses through the pursuit of knowledge and sustaining an educated populace. The fruits of education speak to what is best and most admirable in a culture. American higher education has been the envy of the world. People from foreign cultures seek to come here to better their own lives and the advancement of their native countries.

Trump has declared war on American Universities, especially the best, most prestigious ones that he despises and sees as identified with liberal values, progressivism, and Democrats, whom he hates and defines as his enemies. It is a hatred he continues to employ to stoke the emotions and loyalty of his base. Trump declared in his first campaign for the presidency, “I love the poorly educated.” It was a rhetorical instrument to buoy the support of the white working class that comprises the mainstream of his MAGA followers. It is also an expression of what he doesn't value. He himself does not read. He is remarkably incurious and is notoriously ignorant of the American history of which he is a prime legatee. His knowledge seems to be tightly bound by his excessive egotism and narrow, crude interests. In 2017, on viewing a monument commemorating the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was documented that Trump was ignorant of the significance of the event.

Trump initially withdrew 400 million dollars in research grants from Columbia, invoking the University's failure to adequately protect its Jewish students. Trump's alleged concern about Jews is a front to weaken the functioning and status, as noted, of America's great universities. It is impossible to conclude how the administration confronts antisemitism by destroying essential medical research. Columbia's leadership decided to bargain and has restored half of what the administration had taken away. But, in return, it agreed to a monitor to oversee academic choices. By doing so, Columbia has permitted the proverbial camel's nose to enter the tent and thereby has set up a compromising template that the Trump administration can readily employ to limit the academic freedom of other universities.

The broader picture illuminating Trump's contempt for higher education disparages the role of knowledge and the intellect in evoking what is best in humanity. It is to suppress progress and America's contributions to the world at large. It is a formula for transforming America into a third-rate country. In multiple manifestations, it is an assault on civilized values.

Civilization or Barbarism

Trump exemplifies and promotes numerous examples of this assault, too numerous to outline in a brief article. When considered most comprehensively, we may conclude that the opposite of civilization is barbarism. We can define barbarism as the expansion of power over others laced with cruelty, while failing to care for those who are relatively powerless, vulnerable, and in need of protection. Barbarism speaks to immunity to the pain and suffering of others.

Trump, his politics and persona, are a strident assault on the substance and face of civilization. His initiatives are endemic to this assault, and again, too numerous to cite in a single essay. We need to view the consequences of his policy through the lens of pain and suffering. The dismantling of U.S. A.I.D. will result in the deaths of millions of vulnerable children and young mothers, and other vulnerable people in among the poorest regions on the globe. The move toward universal health care, and the recognition of heath care as a right constitutive of one's humanity, is a moral index of a civilized society. Trump is beginning to shred what have been long fought-for protections. We can measure the loss of civilization by appreciating the pain and suffering that result from the policies that bring it about. We need to put ourselves in the place of households struggling to make ends meet; the 40% who live from check to check. With Medicaid removed, we need to imagine the anxiety of those families needing to make the impossible choice of paying the monthly rent or purchasing necessary medical care for an ill child. And what of families with children who are chronically disabled,s for whom dependence on government support is a thin but necessary lifeline? Medicaid supports seniors in nursing homes. With that support removed, it should not be hard to imagine the anxiety and desperation of families struggling to find support for elderly loved ones.

The arrest, detention, and deportation of immigrants should shock the conscience. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, many masked and without identification, are engaging in arrests, taking workers out of factories, fields that they farm, and even immigration courts when they obediently appear for their hearing. Such conduct is thuggish and is reminiscent of the brown shirts of the Nazi regime. As in the first Trump term, children are being snatched from their parents. These policies, and many more, are unspeakably inhuman and should be seen as a cause of national shame.

Most strident has been Trump's promotion of white supremacy and hatred for those he finds distasteful. Trump, in a strategy well-honed by the Nazi regime, unifies his base of support by scapegoating those whom he implicitly identifies as true Americans – immigrants, people of color, and the disabled. He also readily denigrates women and has aggressively suppressed those whom he construes as gender anomalous. As the United States had grown more demographically pluralistic, Trump is committed to turning back the clock to a time when white people were unquestionably hegemonic, women remained at home, and minorities were expected to know their place. This commitment enables the "othering” of those who do not reflect his favored profile. It lays the groundwork for a value system that allows for belittlement and hate to rise to the surface. It has raised the temperature of nastiness and has aggravated social divisions that have turned those who differ into enemies.

In the Trump world, there is no social unity. Kindness is nowhere to be found, either in his rhetoric or his policies. He has thrown a pall of darkness over American society and its future. He has injected a moral sickness into the lives of Americans. He has replaced our creative aspirations that strive to build a more civilized life for our families, our neighbors, and those who share with us the American project with a condition of barbarism.

We are living through a nightmare, but we must reclaim the light. We need to struggle to restore our democratic institutions on which our freedom is based. But even more deeply, as we go about our personal lives, we need to live out those values that speak to the best that is in us – compassion, kindness, decency, respect, and appreciation for those who are different from us. If we lose these values, we will relinquish what we are ultimately politically struggling to retain. Such values, expressed in the smaller circle of life, are accessible to us every day. Their active presence in our lives is also a form of resistance.