The Army of Life
The Rising of the Storm Part IV
It seems that there is a force or power at the very root of the creative process that works towards its corruption and fall. Only the overthrow of all that is just, beautiful and conducive to the advancement of society in goodness and love will satisfy its Moloch-like greed.
Martin Israel, The Pearl of Great Price
“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
This essay is also available in audio:
You might say this series on the Rising of the Storm is now redundant. For the storm is already here.
The devastating violence in Israel-Palestine has woken the world to the ever-intensifying danger of a Third World War. And even if the full force of that catastrophe has not yet been unleashed on those of us who live in the West, many of our fellow human beings are already in its inferno. Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians and Ukrainians are only the most obvious examples. Just last month, 100,000 Armenians were ethnically cleansed by Azerbaijan from the land where they had lived for millennia. Yet who among us even noticed?
The fate of these peoples may offer a premonition of what may be in store for many of us if the worst comes to pass. Which is why, strange as it may seem, I do not believe what we need at this moment is yet another discourse on who is right or wrong. This essay will not add to the social media slanging match. Instead, it seeks to look beneath the storm-wracked sea in search of the deeper tides driving the tumult on the surface.
For the purpose of these Fragments was never to indulge in wafty esoteric rumination, despite any appearances to the contrary. Instead, it was born of a hunch that the loss of our relationship to what I call the sacred dimension of reality somehow underpins every facet of our meta-crisis. That loss has profoundly practical implications for our lives.
That’s why this project is always evolving, a work-in-progress that runs in parallel to real world events, reflecting on what light they shed on the sacred and vice versa. That work grows more urgent every day.
For the irrational forces that I have sought to call out in this series – this is their moment. The fate of the Middle East and the world is probably more in their hands than under the conscious control of those nominally in charge. Those supposed leaders are merely castaways, swept along by currents they cannot see or do not understand.
In Part 2 of this series, I looked at how such irrational mythic forces had taken hold of both Israel’s Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu and his sworn enemy, Iran’s Islamist government. Those forces are on full display in the current crisis.
Take the language of Netanyahu. It is full of messianic rhetoric inspired by mythic vision. In a tweet deleted after the tragedy of the al-Ahli hospital blast, he wrote, “We are the children of light, they are the children of darkness”. He repeated this framing in a speech announcing the imminent ground invasion of Gaza and then went on to evoke religious prophecy, “[the Jewish people] shall fulfil the prophecy of Isiah. There will no longer be stealing at your borders and your gates will be of glory.”
The line appears to be a reference to Isiah 60:18 which says, “Violence shall no more be heard in your land, devastation or destruction within your borders; you shall call your walls Salvation, and your gates Praise.”
Just stop and think of the implications of this: that the leader of Israel should so openly see a military operation in Biblical terms, as the fulfilment of a prophecy thousands of years old. Does that remind you of anyone? Does it give you confidence that such a person might listen to rational calls for restraint? That they would plot a measured course through the geopolitical perils of the moment?
Thousands in Israel are calling for Netanyahu to resign, though most only once the war in Gaza is over. By then it will be too late. A key part of Netanyahu’s vision is that he must lead the final decisive struggle against Iran. This is his last and perhaps best chance and it will be extraordinary if he does not take it. By doing so, as some Israelis point out, he will “lead his country to suicide”. This is the man to whom our own leaders offer blind support.
For their part, one can only wonder to what extent the Hamas attacks of October 7th,, and the increasing violence by Iranian-supported militias across the Middle East, also represent a manifestation of what I traced in Part 2.
The Iranian regime and its Revolutionary Guard have long sought to sow chaos to usher in the end of days and the coming of their messiah, the 12th Imam. Their current rhetoric drips with religious fervour, just like Netanyahu’s. The Commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard recently declared, “Gaza is the staff of Moses that will devour the Pharaohs if they enter on the ground”. Even their unmanned attack drones are all religiously named either after companions of the Prophet or, more ominously, the destroyer of Jewish fortresses.
Against this, the rational analysts reassure us that Iran does not want war, as it would not serve their geopolitical interests. We have been here before. Once again, the mythic understanding is missing, just as it was with Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. We know that rational concerns are quickly cast aside in the prosecution of holy war.
The question, as my two-year old daughter would put it, is why? As with every child’s question, the simplicity of it is actually quite hard to answer. Can we, the supposed adults, really understand what has brought us to this apocalyptic place? And now we are here, what can we – ordinary people like you and me – do about it?
To answer those questions we must understand what we are up against. For it is only by trying to understand the deeper reasons for our strife that we can divine an appropriate way to meet it. I feel in my bones that somewhere way down in their deepest essence all the world’s diverse conflicts are connected, despite their apparently unique contexts. We have to search for the source.
So what clues do we have?
The first quality that unites them is the stripping of humanity from the other side. Ukrainians call Russians “orcs”, unredeemable beasts of evil from Tolkien’s fantasy world. The Russians in return label Ukrainians as Nazis or Satanists. Hamas claims to distinguish between Zionists and Jews yet this nuance seems to have made little difference in the indiscriminate massacres of October 7th. For their part, time and again Israel’s political and military leadership have said they’re fighting “human animals” or that all of Gaza’s 2.3 million people are culpable for Hamas’s crimes. They, of all people, should know where such rhetoric leads.
For me, the touchstone is the treatment of children. Violence directed against the truly innocent surely transcends the moral relativism of so many of our wars and divisions. I’ve yet to encounter a cause that could ever justify the killing of a baby, whether by knives, guns, bombs or siege.
But taking the devastation in Israel-Palestine as the most pressing example, there appears to be a disturbing dilution of this most basic principle depending on your choice of side. Thus the kidnapping or murder of Israeli babies might be excused as a reaction against apartheid and occupation; the slaughter of Palestinian children as a tolerable by-product of Israel’s right to self-defence.
In some quarters the views are much worse. There are actually voices which declare publicly that the children dying in these wars somehow deserve it. That they have brought death on themselves.
Of course, some would say it has always been this way. Violence is part of human nature, plus ca change. I don’t believe this is true. For me, the tide of human cruelty ebbs and flows throughout history. Our times are a high water mark.
We are witnessing an epidemic of savagery, in which no-one even pretends to abide by the rules any more, performative as they long might have been. Places held as sanctuaries for centuries like hospitals, churches, even schools have become killing grounds. We no longer hold the belief that all life is sacred, far from it. All life has become a legitimate target.
We do have a word to describe this phenomenon. And no, it’s not “collateral damage”, barbaric euphemisms like “mowing the lawn”, not even “civilian casualty” or any of the other apparently dry jargon used to mask the reality of a baby whose ten day old body has been lacerated by shrapnel or a child tied up and shot in cold blood.
The proper word for such actions is evil.
Did you just recoil at the term? That’s understandable. For as our sense of the sacred has dwindled, the notion of evil has gone out of fashion too, such that it feels applicable to cartoon villains, nothing more. A group of philosophers and psychologists now exist who are labelled “evil-sceptics”. True to our culture’s secular perspective, they call for the concept to be discarded completely because its mysterious, metaphysical implications are unacceptable. They believe all behaviour, even the worst, is explicable in human terms.
Like many of the subjects covered in these Fragments, you probably will not believe something until you have experienced it yourself. So it is easy to discount the notion of evil from the corridors of academia or an office, where the worst thing you ever have to face is a horrible video posted online that makes you wince as you sip your morning coffee. Yet the philosophical arguments of these secular sceptics are divorced from reality.
In my own career, I have seen the consequences of acts of such tremendous, unjustified cruelty, they should properly be called evil: two toddlers paralysed from the neck down when fighters from a rebel group tried to physically twist their heads off in Congo; the trauma of teenage girls sold into sexual slavery by the Islamic State; Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets at medics carrying a stretcher on which my wounded friend lay; the use of chlorine gas against Syrian children. Trust me; evil exists.
The language we use implies an acceptance of this truth even as the philosophers quibble about it. Take the phrase “pure evil”. Have you noticed how often that phrase is used in our world today, to describe everything from the Hamas attacks to sadistic serial killers? Even the relatively unremarkable Polish politician Donald Tusk was described as pure evil by his right-wing opponents in their recent election. It’s interesting to note that every example of the phrase “pure evil” cited in the Collins online dictionary dates from the twenty-first century.
It suggests that something persists even in the modern world that forces us to reach for a spiritual language, as much as we would like to believe we had outgrown it. We feel in our bones, even if we deny in our minds, that there is a quality of wrongdoing that goes beyond human terms. It is a spiritual quality. An absolute.
The example of Donald Tusk is weirdly revealing. For when he took office, Tusk too declared that his opponents’ loss was “the end of evil times”. Both sides claimed the election was existential for Poland. How best to explain that two political sides, who after all share the same language and land, who eat the same food and breathe the same air, could have come to view each other as the embodiment of absolute evil?
What is more, similar existential divisions seem to be everywhere. Humanity is shattered into pieces and increasingly we see our opponents as something inhuman. How has that happened? And how could it have spread, as it appears, to the ends of the earth?
Analysts and academics, rooted in a secular paradigm, would offer a wide range of explanations: it’s social media, algorithms that thrive on hatred, right-wing populism, left-wing wokery, Covid-19, economic pressures, immigration pressures, climate change. You could fill in more I’m sure. Yet are any of those explanations sufficient to explain a plague so virulent and so widespread? You might think so; I don’t. For me, a satisfactory explanation constantly recedes from our grasp, like the end of a malevolent rainbow.
This was the point of my previous essay about Hitler. The accepted understanding asks us to believe that because Hitler was beaten up by his Dad as a boy, or because he was angry at Germany’s wartime defeat, or because of the economic humiliation he saw his country suffer, he was willing to lead that same country he loved into utter devastation, to fight to the end and murder millions of men, women and children in the process. As I said, for me, these explanations cannot hope to account for horror of such magnitude.
Yet even people who read that essay and found its argument compelling still ultimately recoiled from its conclusion: that something else was at work. Yet ultimately their position is itself a matter of faith; faith in our current cultural paradigm which reassures us that forces of evil do not exist.
I know that for most of you turning to this explanation is the intellectual equivalent of blaming our troubles on invaders from Mars. But I hope that you wouldn’t even be reading these Fragments unless you had an open mind. So perhaps come with me on one of those little thought experiments, even if this one reads more like a myth or a fairy tale.
The first thing worth noting is that if you look at human cultures across time and space, you’ll find this central assumption of our own civilization is in the minority. It is actually an expression of our Western arrogance that we are convinced we know more about reality than almost every other human that ever lived.
Most other human societies would not even ponder the question. For them, it was simply accepted that man shared the world with a wide variety of non-human forces and that these could work to malign as much as benign ends. Such forces were constantly seeking to find a way into our mundane world to wreak havoc from the personal to political scale. From this perspective, Hitler and the Nazis were a moment when they openly showed their hand. Could today be another?
For it is not just our politics that is charged with inhumanity. I see it on my own streets. Just yesterday, I watched crowds hurry past a homeless man who was howling, literally howling, for help, as he sat on a stone pavement in the pouring rain. “Will nobody help me?” he pleaded. “Does no-one have a heart? Everyone is just walking past!” A mother with a pram and a daughter in uniform were waiting at the lights just a couple of feet away. They were chatting and joking as if the howling man did not exist, though his cries must have drowned out their voices.
The materialists would say it’s absurd to suggest that the callous disregard of a man in distress and the brutal wars of our time are connected. Maybe so. Certainly none of the politicians, academics or experts in the West would take such an idea seriously any more, except perhaps the odd Republican president.
Among artists it is a different story.
I mentioned Joseph Roth and his book on The Antichrist last time. Roth’s portrayal of a malevolent force was particularly interesting as he saw its manifestations throughout his society, from advances in technology to corruption in the media all the way down to the blind hatred he encountered in individuals.
Roth was Jewish with a strong affection for Catholicism, which might explain how he came to his views. Yet belief in such a force is not confined to the religiously minded alone. In his most famous poem, the beat poet Alan Ginsberg famously ascribed the ills of his generation to the Canaanite demon of child sacrifice, Moloch.
He saw its manifestations everywhere.
What sphinx of cement and aluminium bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!...
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
Moloch also makes an appearance in one the most celebrated films of the silent era, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Encountering the underworld where workers slave to power his father’s glittering city, the hero has a terrible vision of the demon’s presence behind the machines’ surface appearance. The film is a powerful allegory of the way our capitalist society operates right to the present day.
I can almost hear you shouting, it’s a metaphor, Ed! Don’t be so literal. You cannot seriously believe in Moloch or the Antichrist. Cancel my subscription forthwith!
Well before you go, can I just point out that we have the same problem here as we did in the Introduction to these Fragments. Just as the names of the sacred are manifold, so too are those of the cosmic forces of evil arrayed against us – the names of demons like Azrael and Moloch, Antichrist and the devil. Some even call it Progress itself. Yet any name we turn to is already a laughable cliché, thanks to the centuries of associations that come with it.
I would humbly suggest that the limitations of our language do not prove that these forces do not exist. Instead, they reflect the central premise and challenge of these Fragments. First, to ask if there is more to this world than our current cultural paradigm allows? And, if there is, how can we talk about it in a way that makes sense to our times?
It will take a while to arrive at the answers to those questions. So, for now, let us just play the myth out to its end.
Let us make believe that the ancient understandings still hold true: that forces of spiritual evil exist, even in our world of glass and steel. That across time we, the human race, have an enemy. An eternal sacred adversary.
Imagine if we could say with certainty that the violence, the hatred, the inhumanity sweeping our world was being sown by that unseen adversary. That it sought to encourage us to destroy each other and the world, everything indeed that it is our sacred duty to nurture and defend. Might that not explain a few things that otherwise appear incomprehensible?
One thing would be clear: if the object of its malice is us, human beings, it is not going to restrict itself to one side or the other. No, it’ll work through Israelis and Palestinians, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and atheists, any race, any party or creed. It would explore every avenue to further its purpose: to confound us, to divide us, to debase us and desecrate all that we should hold dear. Its victory comes when we abandon our principles, our humanity, and are cruel to one another. It is, in essence, anti-life.
A few surprisingly practical principles would flow from this knowledge.
It would help us realise that behind all our wars lies a spiritual war. A clash between something more ancient than any ethnic or political or national cause. We would no longer blindly take sides. Instead we would look to the actions and words of those we encountered and ask: does this person stand with life or against it?
For our motto would once again be that all life is sacred. That human beings are created equal. That the life of one is just as precious as that of any other, just as the death of any one is as tragic.
We would know that peoples on all sides would need need help to remove the anti-life forces from their midst. We would empower those voices that hold on to a vision of life, one that fosters unity not division, love and not hatred, a longing for peace based on mutual respect. Such voices have been heard, even in the midst of the chaos, yet they have swiftly been silenced or shouted down.
We would also know that though our fellow human beings might be capable of evil, that though they might wittingly or unwittingly serve our adversary, the evil does not belong to them. It is not inherent in their nature. Rather they have been outwitted, brainwashed, even possessed by our enemy.
And while we would know that it might take conflict and violence to banish the adversary from their midst, we would not question or denigrate the humanity of our opponents even when at war. We would do all we could to preserve life on our side and theirs. Once they had been released from the spell, compassion, forgiveness and magnanimity would be the watchwords for how we treated them.
These principles would be the starting point for a movement to challenge this sacred adversary. To give us a guiding light by which we could navigate the storm. To build the army the world truly needs and yet couldn’t be more lacking: an army in service of Life.
Of course, the deeper I go into this work on the sacred, the more I have realised the impossibility of ever saying anything definitive about any of it. We will never have certainty about the unseen and that is something our culture will always struggle with. We do not believe anything unless it is backed up by data.
Yet the only real fact is that we will never know. The sacred dimension of life is sophisticated, its subtlety eludes us. That is its glorious mystery.
Time may give us more clues. For if some truth does lurk in these Fragments, then the tensions and conflicts we see now are – unbelievably – only the overture. Israel-Palestine will not be the only place where our adversary makes a home. In the struggle to come, there may be no simple sides, no goodies or baddies, just baddies of different degrees.
So I would end by saying that you do not have to believe in the myth to take the principles to heart. Whether seen through a sacred or a secular lens, they enshrine the same thing: humanity. A faith in it, a trust in it, a determination to uphold it, to see it as something precious, even holy. Indeed, even in this horrific conflict, flickers of that faith have already been seen, most movingly among Israeli relatives of those taken hostage.
If the worst comes to pass, if the great war comes, the principles of this essay and of humanity will cease to be a dreamy ideal, an academic exercise or an opportunity to virtue signal on social media. They will come to be our hope in the struggle.
A struggle that will test them by fire.