The Ogre of An Issue Neglected in this Election

The candidates and the media will have lots of catty, histrionic arguments about trivial issues, such as calling one’s opponent weird, and will pay scant attention to foreign policy

By

David Gottfried

As usual, the presidential election seems like a food-fight for intellectually stunted children.   We are arguing about who called whom “weird.”  We are arguing about the way in which one shows affection to one’s spouse.  After all, these stupid issues make for good  copy and better ratings than serious discussions about foreign policy.

The war between Ukraine and Russia drags on and worsens.  China is roaring the way the British lion long ceased to roar.   Iran and its subordinate quasi states, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, seem so intent on starting a thermonuclear conflagration that they seem a tad like Southern fundamentalists juiced up with dreams of Armageddon.  

And what will the candidates have to say about these issues.  They will tell us that they love America, will offer firm leadership and be prudent and reasonable and decisive.  Yeah, like I really expected them to get on the fucking boob tube and tell us that they hate America, will offer wobbly, irresolute leadership and be reckless, unreasonable and indecisive.  Watching a wrestling match is an infinitely more sensible entertainment option.   

I am not interested in merely understanding national quarrels.  I want to understand the unstated, broader and seismic shifts that make nations want to kill  each other.     

The Past Two Centuries Have Been the Most Momentous and Calamitous Centuries in the Many Millennia of Human History 

In the last two centuries, the world has witnessed three marvels whose consequences have “shaken the earth and cracked the sky.”   These epic developments include:

A)  The blistering and behemothic augmentation of Western Power in the 19th Century as Africa, Asia and Latin America were increasingly colonized and cannibalized by the “Onward Christian soldiers” of Europe;

B) The self-immolation of Western Power in World War One and Two  as European Christendom effectively committed suicide; and

C) The adamant and ardent rise of Eastern and Third World Power as the Far Eastern and largely tropical and torrid nations of the earth have, since World War Two, seethed with various political and religious ideologies including communism, pan Arabism and Muslim-centric secular faiths.

Many “historians” and polemicists have ready explanations for the aforementioned whirlwinds of change.  Susan Sontag, who most people haven’t read but who throngs of woman adore because she was a woman with a signature expanse of gray hair on her scalp, said that the West  had assumed so much power because it was, in her words, “The cancer of human history.”  (She said this in 1968, only two years after she wrote “Illness as Metaphor” in which she decried the tendency to liken political problems to physical illness.)  For Bernard Lewis, an orientalist who taught at Princeton, political ferment in Islam was largely the product of some of the illogical and contradictory tensions in the Koran.  

I strongly doubt the veracity of Ms. Sontag’s charge that the white race is the cancer of human history.   I have little doubt that if the Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt or the tyrants of Babylon knew how to synthesize Zyklon B (The aerosolized cyanide used in the Nazi gas chambers), they would have used them.   Although I have often thought that Bernard Lewis was onto something when he hypothesized that Muslim mayhem originated in the contradictions in the Koran, I have become less confident of his ideas upon pondering the enormous schism between the harsh and downright vindictive morality of the Old Testament and contemporary Jewish morals and mores which are relatively permissive (I am not referring to the Hasidic or the Haredim.)   

And so I have decided to do my own heavy thinking. 

It has occurred to me that the biggest motive forces in the wars, political turmoil and human displacements of the past two hundred years are, in large part, A) Improvements in Public Health and B) Free Trade. 

Improvements in Public Health Made Nations Aspire to Stardom

Improvements in Public Health are no side order to be served alongside wars and assassinations in the study of history; they are the meat and potatoes of politics, social studies and life itself.

When I was in school, public health was taught at the end of the day, after the fundamentals of the curriculum were pounded into our heads and while our thoughts drifted onto post 3 PM concerns.    However, public health is vitally related to population, and the burgeoning and ballooning population of Europe, in the 19 th century, bequeathed the increasingly ballistic and belligerent developments in Europe in the latter part of the 19th century and the seminal explosions of 1914.  Similarly, sharp increases in population, in the third world, have made Napolean’s sleeping giant (Footnote 1) a potent and ominous competitor for global power.

Human History Until the Past Two Hundred Years

Through most of human history, the great majority of people suffered from a subsistence level of economic life as they had barely enough for food, clothing and shelter.      Famine was frequent.   Productivity was a paltry fraction of what it is today.  The simplest diseases often had catastrophic results as our armamentarium against illness was mostly empty and we were not yet cognizant of the germ theory of disease, i.e., the realization that stuff that comes in  contact with bodily orifices and open wounds had to be scrupulously cleaned because they were teeming with millions of microscopic and often deadly microorganisms. (Footnote 2)  In the past two centuries, public health and productivity started to soar.

The germ theory of disease radicalized medicine and instigated dramatic improvements in health.   After we heeded the sage counsel of Louis Pasteur and Lister, and began to sterilize medical instruments, getting medical treatment became something better than going to a witch doctor.   Prior to the advent of the germ theory of disease only poor people went to hospitals as hospitals were a place to segregate the dying from the rest of us;  hospitals were bleak  concentrations of ill health where infections readily spread between patients.  Indeed, doctors formerly looked like people who butchered meat at the A&P as their coats bore  the blood of patients they had seen only minutes before.  Hospitals were such dire and deadly ante rooms to hell that in New York City’s Bellevue, in the 1940’s, an Irish newborn died because her mother was too weak to defend it from the swarms of rats that had descended upon the baby during the monstrous midnight hours.  (Of course, mainstream America couldn’t have cared less.  In Manhattan, the same Manhattan Island where poverty stricken Irish babies were eaten by rats, one of the hottest and most popular theatrical acts, in the late 19th century, was a comedic skit in which two white Protestant men “impersonated” poor Irish cleaning women.)        

Through most of human history, both the birth rate and the death rate were high:  People had lots of children, a great many or most of them died, and the population was either static or slowly rose.  

The germ theory of disease, and many other developments, knocked the death rate down:  In England, in the late 18th century, a vaccine for smallpox was invented (Some medical historians claim that a smallpox vaccine was developed in Byzantium, or the Eastern Roman Empire, in the depths of the Middle Ages.)  Also, the industrial revolution increased our productivity dramatically.    The development of the internal combustion engine sired tractors and the amount of acreage that can be plowed with a tractor vastly surpasses the acreage that can be tamed with an ox.   

In the 19th century, the death rate collapsed, and the population throughout Europe started to soar as the birth rate was still very high. 

Free Trade and the Uprooting of the English Countryside

Also, free trade increased the ranks of those men who were looking for work and whom the government decided to draft into military service.

In 1830, or thereabouts, England passed the Corn Laws.  These statutes removed tariffs on imported grain. 

Cheap French grain flooded the British market, and the price of grain collapsed.  Millions of English people, whose agricultural services were no longer needed, were evicted from the  countryside.  The cities became huge hot houses of discontent and economic anguish. 

The burgeoning population of England, and the ejectment of so many Britons from the English countryside because of the increased importation of foreign foodstuffs, meant that England needed new territories to colonize and rule.

“The Guns of August” Still Reverberate

While England and other European countries took on colonies with the ease of a rat picking up lice, Germany did not start gathering colonies until the end of the 19th century because Germany was not a unified nation until 1870. (The reasons for German disunity must be reserved for another essay)  After Germany became one country, it was impatient to catch up to other European nations. Germany was a  decidedly belligerent nation and was enraged because of, among other things, its historical retardation in developing an empire along the lines of Great Britain, the greatest source of German envy.  

The mounting animosity between the European states seemed remarkable.  When dynamite had been discovered, peace advocates thought that its potential for destruction was so calamitous that it would spur the world to outlaw war.  The man who invented dynamite, a Mr. Nobel, established the Nobel prize to extoll peace and eradicate war.

Shortly thereafter, Europe turned its back on eradicating war, and in World War One, the Austrian Empire (also known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire), which had fancied itself the first daughter of the Roman Church, considered it  her duty as a valiant Christian soldier to shower opposing troops, who were also largely Christian, with poison gas.  

Christendom died long before Look magazine (or it might have been Life magazine) published, in the late 1960’s, an article with the headline “Is G-d dead.”  

Since World War Two, a succession of messianic Machiavellis have stoked the waves of resentment through hot and dusty streets from Algiers to Cairo to Saigon and whipped up a sandstorm of riots and revolution.   In part, this must have originated in explosive population grown.   After all, the colonization of the third world brought Western, medical knowledge to the third world and was a boon to population growth.    For example, in the war between Iran and Iraq, which consumed most of the 1980’s, hundreds of thousands of men fought at the Southernmost part of the border between the two countries, a region which the NY Times once said, harbored temperatures of 140 degrees.   (I think that article had to have been in error, but if it was 120 degrees, would such  an atmospheric fever have been in any way pleasant)  

Footnote 1: Napolean said that China was the world’s sleeping giant

Footnote 2: This is one of the few things that makes me believe in G-d.  Although we did not consciously know, until modern times, that hydrogen peroxide could kill harmful bacteria, our bodies knew this millions of years ago as some of our immune system cells have miniature hydrogen peroxide factories which spray some invading microorganisms with hydrogen peroxide.