City Of God 17

How can the City Of God be anything but a lovely chimera, a beautiful fiction, unless we are prepared to change as human beings. I am thinking again of Che Guevara writing in his journals about revolution and the new man (sic). Of course Che, like Mao and Lenin, was impatient and wanted to take that most brutal shortcut by murdering everyone he disliked or didn't agree with him. Che was not Jesus, rather he was Barabbas, the violent insurrectionist who was set free in place of Jesus. And he killed a lot of people. But no one really changed to his satisfaction, and not even Che as he was gunned down in the jungles of Bolivia and his own blood-stained hands were chopped off at the wrists. And Cuba, as we all know, is no City Of God, but a very poor and oppressed country where people live in fear of their government. On the other hand they also all have housing and free health care and post-secondary education, making them still more secure, healthier and smarter than a lot of other people. But worth the cost? Worth the massacres and the extra-judicial killings? I think not. We have to deal with our propensity towards violence if we are to really move ahead, and we are going to need to invent and devise new and improved ways of being human. How are we going to pull this off? Especially living in a society that glorifies violence, be it in the military or in sports. While they are being bombarded by video games and some of the most atrocious messages in pop culture, how are children going to be persuaded to embrace and develop the higher angels of their nature? I do not accept that aggression is part of human nature, but we still have a propensity for aggression and a history of making war and this is going to be problematic. I have been listening off and on to some lecture presentations on the ideas program of CBC Radio One featuring prominent historian Margaret McMillan speaking on our very human history and propensity for war. I don't think that Ms. McMillan would go so far as to call herself a pacifist, but I'm not sure. She has not been shy about listing the many benefits of war, how it brings societies and divergent social classes together and countries (the victor nations, that is, the conquered have always fared badly) have benefited enormously with booming economies and enhanced social programs and human rights. She has not been shy about questioning whether it is worth it, if the ends do justify the means, and she has tried to maintain as her focus the importance of preventing war from happening, no matter how inevitable it might seem to be. I would like to make one other suggestion here. In times of war, people have to work and cooperate very closely together, forget about social and economic class differences, and to focus and work together towards their survival and wellbeing as a nation. What this really does is summon forth our roots as hunter-gatherer societies, where everyone was equal because everyone had to pull together for the survival of the tribe. Agriculture and civilization changed the game. Cities, as we know and experience them, breed inequality, the very existence of cities is founded and dependent upon social inequality. The only way that this is going to change is when people make the effort and take the courage to reach across barriers and there are many ways of doing this, but it is always going to be costly. If the city of God is to become a present and prescient reality to us then we are going to have to take risks and make sacrifices. Otherwise, we are going to remain a sad collective of frightened little snobs, each clinging in their own little enclave or ghetto to their illusions of privilege, entitlement and exclusivity. Inequality of wealth and income of course are hugely to blame for this, and so much the more important to reach across the barriers. How this is going to happen, of course, is going to be up to the individual, but hopefully it isn't going to take something so horrible and tragic as a war or a killer earthquake to pull our heads out of our asses, Gentle Reader.