Athens Easter, 2022
“If there is a science, man really needs, that is philosophy, which teaches how man can reach an appropriate to him place in the world – and from which everyone can learn what to be to become a MAN.” Immanuel Kant
Easter
thoughts of the World Philosophical Forum 2022
We are all Ukrainians
Safe passage for the Ukraine is safe passage for
Humanity
• Wayfarer
do go tell, of voices, you have heard from those who fell…that every shred of
good that comes with life, was freely given by those now dead. Wayfarer, tell,
what you have heard, through tears and from the many voices from the ground. S.
Rotas, Voices from the earth, trans JL
• The great deliverance on the 8th May 1945 ended war
in Europe but did not end fascism. JL
We are living at a time when the unexpected should be
awaited, when uncertainty and mindlessness characterize a significant portion
of our current moment in history and when reason is overwhelmingly rejected.
Golgotha gets steeper and the Stations of the Cross to salvation, increase
exponentially. We call this social dementia!
The horses of the apocalypse gallop over the world today as they have
always galloped driven by social dementia. To rein them in will take a significant
change in the universal mindset necessitating a
youth driven antiwar movement worldwide and a return to applied
practical classical philosophy. After there gallop over the European continent,
1914-18 they were followed by the collapse of financial systems and the
deployment of cruel ideologies.
In the early days of the Soviet Union Nikolai Vavilov
a brilliant geneticist, plant geographer and man of public health looked to a
future in which world hunger would be eliminated. He travelled the world on
what he called a mission for all humanity collecting and storing seeds at the
Institute of Plant Industry. Ironically, he died of starvation in the Gulag
eating frozen cabbage and moldy flour before being tossed into an unmarked
grave. Vavilov was an opponent of Stalin’s favored scientist, Lysenko who
rejected Mendelian genetics and quack theories to improve crop yields were
applied following on from famine and a significant loss of productivity
resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union.
With millions of children growing up in conflict zones in horrific violence and
with extremely limited food, the invasion of the Ukraine has and is making
things worse.
Geneva 2021 was a fantastic chance to avoid the
dangers that threaten humanity. It left no signposts to the future. In its
aftermath, the Ukraine is being destroyed, its people brutally killed and
displaced, its children deprived of any tomorrow while its knock-on effects
take our world to the brink of annihilation. The cost in human life and the
destruction of any war is always difficult for the human mind to wrap itself
around.
In WWII Kiev was destroyed as part of the Soviet
scorched-earth policy and suffered almost a million casualties while close by
Babi Yar saw the largest massacre of the Holocaust. Mr. Putin with your
invasion of the Ukraine you are pushing the world towards a more aggravated
state of social dementia, which saps global empathy and shrouds it with a
pervasive madness not entirely of today’s choosing. You are responsible for
your supporters now behaving like fascists, in the streets and on the battle
field as you claim to erase fascism . Your recent Nobelist was attacked while
on a train. Drawing on your country’s
traumatic experience fighting Hitler cannot justify brutal militarism. Its continuation
futher undermines your political, economic, and moral foundations. As a
permanent member of the Security Council, charged with upholding peace, you
have flagrantly abandoned the principles of the United Nations Charter.
Unfortunately, you are not the only one. You threaten use of nuclear weapons,
diminish the status of your own people and squander its tremendous cultural
heritage.
As social dementia depletes consciousness, the more
the danger to democratic society and to human existence while its growing
persistence can precipitate WWIII. It is the shame of the civilized world. Its
greatest tragedy were the death camps in WWII,
a Nazi policy instrument for mass killing of Jewish, Slav and Roma populations.
World War I was expected to be short-lived, it wasn’t!
WWI was the war to end all wars. It didn’t. It was a war of horror, abominable
trench and chemical warfare; killed, maimed, crazed and demented. George Barnes
first British minister of pensions rose to speak to men with war casualties (1917).
British victims of war trauma, now patients at Britain’s largest limb fitting
center were assembled on the lawn waiting with crutches, eye patches, head
bandages and in wheelchairs, with empty sleeves and trouser legs and in
silence. With tears streaming down his cheeks the minister stood for a long
while and left without saying a word. At the end it left societies without
women. At the beginning organized propaganda emerged as a means of changing
British sympathies from German (the humbled power) to French, (the defeated
power). It did! It was a demonstration of the plasticity of the brain and
massive behavioral modification. As youth was lost it poetry evolved they grow
not old as we that are left grow old.
In the absence of or a limitation of education and in
a disruptive learning environments the brain can be molded in destructive ways.
Human brain en-cephalization has developed in such a way to create both
phenomenal ways of thinking, music and poetry age shall not weary them nor the
years condemn and neural centers and networks that enhance the craving for
power and profit from unsanitary conditions, ripping up the earth and from
armaments. It has given rise to
intelligent technology, an overwhelming rejection of reason and heart wrenching
sentiment and at the setting of the sun and in the morning we shall remember
them. Decision making is shifting to lower cortical levels and empathy is
losing out. The brain continues to be molded in destructive ways.
Logic tells us that the longer war goes on the more
damage is done and more profit results. Logic tells us that the more guns there
are in homes the more deaths on the street will occur, the more miles driven by
a fleet of vehicles on a given network of roads the more accidents take place, and
the more arms produced for profit the higher the likelihood of conflict. As the
world is being driven by positive feedback of authoritarianism, climate change
is undermining eco-biological negative feedback systems. Human brain
en-cephalization has developed in such a way to create both phenomenal ways of
thinking and neural centers and networks that enhance the craving for power and
profit. It has given rise to
intelligent technology and an overwhelming rejection of reason. Decision making
is shifting to lower cortical levels and empathy is losing out. The brain
continues to be molded in destructive ways. The result is social dementia and
the solution is practical classical philosophy.
Nothing though can compare to the potential
devastation posed by nuclear weapons. They are the greatest hazard to life on
earth. The risk of absolute disaster is close to one or close to certainty.
Should a button be pressed, by accident or intent, time will have run out on
humanity; any planning of disaster preparation and the protection of people and
society for tomorrow will have no meaning. At the dreaded moment, millions of
years of evolution will unravel and human consciousness and culture will
disintegrate. Then, there will be no further need for the olive branch.
At the end of WWII a spirit of
forgiving but not forgetting surfaced. Now with war in the Ukraine neither
forgiving nor forgetting is emergent. But we must remain optimistic.
Jeffrey Levett
International Gusi Peace Prize Laureate
Honorary President, World Philosophical Forum