The forever war is over. Time to dump the hubris responsible for it, and other failed wars

Hubris ends in heartbreak. The 20-year war in Afghanistan that ended in a rout of our proxies there and bitter recrimination at home is but one example.

The dictionary definition of hubris, a Greek term “is excess of confidence or arrogance in oneself that often leads to a lack of self-awareness and harmful or self-defeating behaviors.”

For four years, this country was ruled by the hubris champion of the universe. But it is not all about Trump. The United States has been the heartland of hubris at least since World War II and arguably since its foundation. I am not going to digress too far from my topic today, which is recent and current events and not 250 years of national history, but honesty, analysis of the present, and learning lessons for the future requires a basic acknowledgment and understanding of the past.

Hubris is in the DNA of the West and, especially of the United States. Slavery, forcibly importing millions of people from another continent and for centuries enslaving them to profit, as individuals and as a nation, from their stolen labor was an act of supreme hubris. The resettling of the continent, under the false pretense that it was not already inhabited by Native Americans, was another foundational act of national hubris. The 1848 war against Mexico, that resulted in a very big land grab, was the final of the three foundational acts of national hubris that together constituted a country “from sea to shining sea.”

The dye was cast and, although numerous lesser expressions of hubris would follow in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, none have been as rationalized, successful, irreversible, and unacknowledged as the initial three. The first nation the United States built through force of arms was this one. The subsequent attempts have been less successful.

Success has eluded almost all our more recent expressions of hubris, from the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 to Afghanistan (2001-2021), through the debacles in Vietnam and Iraq. Building another nation based on your own political system and culture is a fool’s errand and the paradigm of mission impossible. Building using proxies makes it all a farce.

Beyond the failed military adventures, today hubris is implicated in almost all our national calamities, including lethal wildfires and heat waves in the West, destructive hurricanes, massive floods in the South and, especially, the Covid-19 catastrophe which, unequally but inerrantly, is hitting every state.

The combination of hubris and denial has been especially devastating. Climate change denial, promoted by politicians on the right and fossil fuels corporate interests, have obstructed an effective national response and, under Donald Trump, sabotaged the international response.

Hubris made too many Americans, to the extent they believed in climate change at all, to think it would spare us “the indispensable” nation, and hit only those countries Trump referred to as “shitholes,” including small island nations, low-lying Bangladesh, and the entire African continent.

Reality has belied this blind faith. On some days this year, peak temperatures in typically cool American cities like Portland and Seattle have exceeded those in African capitals, and people in those American cities and many others have died of heatstroke. There are cities in Louisiana and parts of Tennessee that right now look like Bangladesh in the monsoon season.

The catastrophe of Covid-19 in the United States is undoubtedly the starkest combination of American hubris, denialism, and the priority of profit over people in a society that can be fairly described as the hyper-capitalist nation par excellence.

Just as people with zero knowledge of science for years espoused outlandish conspiracy theories to argue against the findings of thousands of the best climate scientists in the world, right-wing politicians, citizens with no understanding of science, and fringe physicians have been working hard to spread disinformation and discredit eminent scientists and the findings of peer-reviewed studies on the efficacy of vaccines and masks.

All this confirms my long-held belief in the obtuseness, obstinacy, ignorance, and resistance to accepting inconvenient truths among a significant minority of the U.S. population, starting with the militantly unvaccinated.

One of those resisting vaccination, a middle-aged woman, explained her reasoning on national television by saying that she is afraid of being part of that small minority of people the vaccine might kill.This is crazy logic. The reality is we don’t have a single documented case in which a Covid vaccine has killed a person, although it cannot be precluded that a miniscule number of deaths have occurred but have been missed because of just how rare such cases are.

On the other hand, Covid-19 has killed nearly 650,000 people in the United States alone, and the numbers again are rising fast. The odds of being killed by Covid are astronomically higher than that of being killed by the vaccine so that the fear of the vaccine stated above reveals either a phobic dread or a total ignorance of the laws of probability.

Which brings me to my final point: the big lesson we can learn from Covid-19 and all the other current calamities is the need to build a better, more democratic, kinder, more equal, more generous and, especially, more educated society.

Of all the “lessons learned” people have talked about recently, the need for a vast educational campaign focused on science has hardly, if ever, been identified. Albert Camus wrote that most of the evil that is in the world is borne of ignorance. I don’t know that I agree completely with my favorite writer on that, but I do know that a lot of it does originate in ignorance. Just listen to a congressional debate or watch a “Faux News” program sometime.

Ignorance may not explain all evil, but it enables the purveyors of bunk and the salesforce of hokum to market their wares. What has happened, especially in the media, is analogous to what happens with coins. There are coins that, because of their silver or gold content, their intrinsic beauty, or their historical significance, are coveted and soon disappear from circulation. Seen a Susan B. Anthony dollar lately? The base stuff stays around forever.

Research has shown that people communicate myths more often than facts on social media.  Many don’t want to read long, carefully documented, well-argued articles in the Times or the Post. They would rather get their news bite-sized and bastardized from Facebook posts.

One last thing. After the shellacking we took in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Vietnam and in Cuba, after realizing we are not immune to natural disasters, infectious diseases, or even violent insurrections to overthrow the system, let’s dispense with the indispensable nation bit and ditch the hubris. Let’s replace it with humility and reflection.