Yesterday I visited one of my Iranian cousins and we had a conversation that got me thinking.
For context let me say that, as with many families these days, there is a large, bitter, and painful schism in my Iranian family (dad’s side). The schism is mainly along the lines of those who support the current regime in Iran, and those who don’t. This schism has unfortunately led to many family members no longer talking to each other. And in fact, there is a parallel schism in my American family (mom’s side). Several of my maternal uncles are quite conservative and have been Trump voters, while other maternal uncles and my one maternal aunt are more liberally-aligned. So I’ve been privileged to witness bitter familial culture wars through these parallel lenses. Between these two parallel family schisms though, I’d say the depth of passion and rancor is (not unexpectedly considering the circumstances) much higher on the Iranian side.
So yes, I was talking to this particular Iranian cousin. And this cousin is a defender of Iran’s regime. The thrust of his opinion, as he heatedly relayed it to me yesterday, was as follows:
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We live in a dog-eat-dog world, Iran especially so due to its tough geopolitical position. The late Ayatollah Khamenei, during his more than three decades in power as the Ayatollah, understood this truth, and he did what was necessary to preserve Iran’s strength and viability as an independent, self-determining nation. Part of that necessity was building a proxy network of regional strength in the Middle East to serve as a buffer to protect Iran from more direct attack. If more moderate factions had been allowed to take control of Iran’s government, then Iran would have been too wishy-washy, and would have been callously obliterated by the imperialistic cruelty of the U.S. and the West, just like what happened to Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Israel and the United States having been the aggressors who initiated the current war with Iran is the proof in the pudding that shows how right Iran’s regime was this entire time to prioritize strength, self-preservation, and preparation for war over cultural liberality. Khamenei is a modern-day Cyrus the Great, who sacrificed everything to build a strong Iran and ensure its survival. He knew he would die in the eventual war with the U.S., and as his final service to his people he chose to be martyred at the beginning of this year. He left nothing behind, no selfish accumulation of possessions like with Trump, who is busy enriching himself.
Moreover, Iran was wrong to negotiate with the U.S. during the Obama administration. In 2015, in exchange for a lessening of economic sanctions, Iran shipped eleven tons of uranium out of the country. But this made Iran weaker. Iran should have done what China did during Mao Zedong’s reign. Mao refused to negotiate with the West, even though China was being heavily pressured and sanctioned and his people were starving. Mao was willing to let his people die of starvation before he bowed to the West. China worked fast to develop a nuclear bomb. It was only then, when they had that all-important bargaining chip, that they came to the negotiating table with the West. It was Mao’s shrewd and ruthless behavior that preserved China’s regional hegemony and contributed to China’s current flourishing. Iran should have done the same. If Iran had worked faster to become a nuclear power then the region would be more stable and Iran would be safer, because Israel and the U.S. wouldn’t have dared to go into direct war with them.
If you look into the history of any great country, including the United States, then you see the same ruthlessness. Take George Washington for example. He wasn’t some namby-pamby. He prioritized the strength and viability of the nation over liberality, human rights, and mushy peace-and-love sentiment. He led a righteous, terrorist, asymmetrical insurrection against the sovereign power of his time. Under his strict rule, soldiers who were mutinous or deserted were executed, because weakness couldn’t be tolerated. After he won the war against the British, he went and systematically annihilated the villages of the Native American tribes who had sided with the British. George Washington’s actions are analogous to Iran squashing internal dissent among its people today.
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Let us set aside specific concerns regarding the veracity of my cousin’s various claims and opinions. Let us also not levy ad hominem attacks and abstain from questioning the hypocrisy of why my cousin hasn’t returned to Iran to fight for the IRGC himself and live under that government if he feels the way he does. Instead, let us examine the core of the world view around which his opinions appear to turn.
My cousin’s view of the world would seem to be a bleak (maybe he would say pragmatic?) geopolitical darwinism. In his view, a brutal theocratic dictatorship is justified if it preserves the strength and viability of the nation. So-called cultural progressiveness can be allowed only up until it threatens to erode the strength necessary for survival. Technological progress is real, but the supposed moral progress of mankind since the stone age is an illusion. Survival of the fittest has not gone away, but is rather alive and kicking. In my cousin’s view, Iran itself seems to be the preeminent value, a sort of idol, superior to and more fundamental than other values such as justice, harmony, and fair representation for the Iranian people themselves.
Anyway, I see where my cousin is coming from, and I sort of admire his passionate (if hypocritical) patriotism, but I disagree with him. I think my cousin might be unpleasantly surprised if he were to find out that I see his way of thinking as being akin to the hard-line Israelis (or hard liners in any country for that matter) that he hates. The way I see it, the government of Israel has, similar to hard-line Iranians in Iran, made Israel itself the ultimate value, the ultimate idol, and in their case they’ve put Israel the nation-state above Judaism, democracy, and everything else. They see themselves as being in an existential fight to the death with the rest of the world, a fight in which even genocide can be justified for the preservation, strength, and growth of the nation. If the people in power in Iran and Israel both feel this way, and both feel justified in acting to preserve and strengthen their respective nation states at all costs, then where does that leave us? Where does that leave the world? By sowing enmity and resentment in the hearts of their enemies, they are contributing to conditions for even more threat and conflict in the future. It is therefore self-defeating in the long-term.
By speaking of Iran and Israel I of course don’t mean to absolve the United States of blame. Everyone who knows me knows that I’ve spent a lot of my life with a huge chip on my shoulder against the U.S.’s callous imperialism (I agree and sympathize with my cousin entirely on this point). The U.S. too, it goes without saying, has acted entirely self-defeatingly with it’s state meddling and forever wars over the past 80-odd years.
While my cousin was talking, I was also reminded of the Three-Body Problem Sci-Fi book trilogy (which I’m about to spoil ahead). In that book series, humanity makes contact with an alien civilization called the Trisolarans, about 4 lightyears away in the Alpha Centauri system. The Trisolarans, as their name indicates, inhabit a planet that is in an unpredictable orbit with three suns, leading to some stable eras, but also periodic civilizational collapse during chaotic eras when their planet gets too close to one of their suns. After finding out about Earth, they make the pragmatic decision to flee their chaotic planet and come here to kill us to take over ours.
So, forgive the tangent, but it’s interesting to me that the Three-Body Problem book series posits the Dark Forest Theory as an answer to the Fermi paradox. In this theory, the universe is a dark forest, where one shouldn’t make too much noise to give oneself away. If you give yourself away then you’re at risk of being hunted and killed by a stronger predator. Thus, most planetary civilizations choose to lay low and conceal their signals of intelligent life as best they can. Is Earth now in such a transitional stage, in which we are advanced enough to send signals outside our solar system, but not so advanced as to figure out that there are all these other ruthless advanced civilizations out there, and that it may be best to prudently keep our heads down for now? If planetary unity on Earth occurs (let’s say for the sake of argument that it will happen, if only one day in the far-off future) then will we be back to square one when it comes to fighting between planetary civilizations when we begin to explore the galaxy? And then how much longer will it take for the galaxy to evolve further and achieve peace between planetary and galactic civilizations? Is it even possible at all, or is it just a dog-eat-dog, dark forest mentality forever, on larger and larger scales? I digress…
In the book, a jaded and traumatized character who’s father was killed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution is the one who initially makes contact with the Trisolarans. She believes humanity is morally bankrupt and that we can’t be trusted to save ourselves or be stewards of the planet anymore. Luckily, there are other humans who find out about the Trisolaran’s plan and we Earthlings have a couple centuries to try to get ourselves ready before the Trisolarans arrive. In the preparation stage, there is one character, Thomas Wade, who is the ultimate embodiment of dark-forest pragmatism. He operates with sociopathic efficiency and says “to survive, to preserve ourselves, anything can be used.” He attempts assassinations and drives high-risk technological leaps with complete disregard for ethics or human sentiment. Maybe Thomas Wade is to Earth as Netanyahu is to Israel and Khamenei was to Iran (I won’t even include Trump here, because I believe he only cares about himself and his immediate family – his circle of concern is close to being the smallest and most primitive possible). I found myself being somewhat sympathetic to Thomas Wade’s character, because with him humanity had their greatest chance of survival. As it so happened, circumstances in the book conspired against Thomas Wade. His plans are partly foiled by other characters and – long story short – Earth is ultimately destroyed…but wait, luckily a ship escapes the solar system, and with it a few main characters and some of Earth’s cultural and civilizational legacy. But many millions of years later those characters and that preserved cultural legacy is also seemingly destroyed with the entropic death of of the universe…and yet…and yet, even still, the book series ends with a note of hope, (“there is always hope,” said Aragorn) the hope that comes with the rebirth of a new universe at the end of the final book of the Three Body trilogy. I appreciate the ultra-long view of things that the book trilogy provides. It brings a sense of peace to recognize that all civilizations are impermanent anyway. Thus, by cultivating some sense of distance in time and place, it can help us to reflect on how myopic the desperate violence we see in the world is.
I happen to hold two nationalities and grew up between two countries, having family whom I love on two sides of a bitter geopolitical conflict. Thus, I was to some extent inoculated against a vehement one-sided nationalistic outlook. But I still feel patriotism for both the U.S. and for Iran. I think patriotism is something that naturally tends to arise in people of all nations and isn’t bad in and of itself, but that it should be recognized and checked, and not allowed to lead our decision-making. After all, where is our planet heading? Wouldn’t it be nice if the peoples of Earth came together into one community? Maybe I’m a delusional optimist, but I think this can one day be possible, and that we can do it without denying what makes us unique. I’m reminded of a line from the classic 1951 Sci-Fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still. An alien comes to Earth and is taken aback by our disharmony: “You have a system of several nations—isolated, suspicious of one another… It is a primitive system. On other planets, we have come together as one people.”
I’d like to draw a corollary to Buddhism. In buddhist spiritual practice one is taught that one’s personality or “small self” naturally arise out of causes and conditions, and isn’t something we should try to fight, push away, or destroy. However, neither should one harden around the small self, nor fall in the trap of thinking that that is all one is. I think the same applies to our sense of national identity. Fervent patriotism is a way of hardening around our national identity, and trying to make something inherently temporary to be eternal, something essentially essence-less to be essential. In so doing, one is denying reality.
I think all spirituality and religious practice (when at its best) can be a much-needed antidote to identity-hardening. In Buddhism, which is my particular path, one of the marks of existence is anattā, or no-self, meaning that beings have no essential essence, no eternal unchanging core. Nations are also like this. Both people and nations are comprised of myriad component parts that are in a state of constant change and flux. On the individual level, those myriad components have come together briefly for the duration of my lifespan to form me (and are also changing and recombining constantly during my lifespan itself) and then dissolve and go on to combine with other components to form other beings and other dharmas after I pass away. Similarly, the United States came together from a confluence of certain causes and conditions, and it too will continue to morph, change, and turn into something entirely different in the future. Iran and China, howsoever long they’ve managed to survive so far (and kudos for their ability to make it this far) will also inevitably dissolve, and their components will go on to recombine and inform the creation of other civilizations after them, just like all civilizations and peoples. Our communal memory (what we call “history”) is quite short in the grand scheme of things, and no nation will stand the test of cosmic time. Dissolution and reconstitution is the way of the universe.
I’m no historian, but allow me to illustrate my point more concretely with a clumsy example: Out of one branch of the Canaanites came the Phoenicians. The Phoenician civilization was largely destroyed but lived on in the Greeks and others. The Greeks were conquered by the Romans, but big parts of their culture were taken up and lived on in the Roman empire. The Roman Empire lives on in the legacy of the West today, including in the United States. This is a clumsy, skewed, and oversimplified example, but you get the point. You could play this game with any peoples on Earth, and we are all in some way cross-pollinated and inter-brachiated with one another. However, I want to also emphasize that while nothing has an essential essence, nothing ever truly dies either. Our myriad components become reconstituted. I don’t think this view is nihilistic at all. For me, it points to the importance of learning to become attuned with the reality of anattā and change. The small self is here, our nations do exist. But, I repeat, they are not essential or eternal.
Going back to the long-term view of things – In Buddhist cosmology, universes wax and wane in unfathomably long cycles, or kalpas. Just for fun, let me make up a story….Once upon a time there was a never-ending cycle of universes. When the most recent universe came to its inevitable end, and with it all the googolplex trillions of civilizations and worthy cultural artifacts, stories and legacies were forgotten, a new universe was formed, and with it a new beginning. In some ineffable way, however, those countless civilizations of the prior universe weren’t completely lost and forgotten. They lived on in their karma – the result of their actions – which passed into the new universe. Then, after a few billion years of the new universe’s evolution came the formation of a planet we call the Earth. Then, after billions of years of evolution on planet Earth came the species Homo Sapiens. How long has our species been around, something like 350,000 years? Let’s be realistic. It’s very probable that Homo Sapiens itself will eventually die out and/or evolve beyond all recognition, and later on our place will be supplanted by new species. Then, long-term cosmic and solar cycles will lead to the dissolution of the Earth itself and whatever species are left on it. Even if Homo Sapiens are able to survive and escape the solar system before the destruction of the Earth, they will inevitably perish when the universe itself is destroyed and reconstituted into a new universe.
So, with that ultra-long view in mind, let us come back to reflect again on our current conditions. It took from the dawn of our species until the 15th century for humanity to even find out where we all were, and how big the Earth was. Then we went through a long period of unspeakable violence, exploitation, colonialism, and conflict. We are just now coming out of the colonial era – we’re less than a century removed from it, and many are saying that Israel was the most recent (and hopefully the last) colonial state to form. We’re still in our teenage years as a species, maybe we’re in our tween years even. It will likely take many more centuries for the wounds of colonialism, and generally speaking the shock of the tectonic and violent collision of the world’s peoples, to heal. But after that, perhaps thousands of years from now, it may be possible for our wounds to have healed enough for the Earth to come together as a global community. Let us, then, adopt the cathedral mentality…a stone mason puts a stone in the foundation of a cathedral, one that he knows will not be completed until many lifetimes after he has passed away. Let us acknowledge the deep, deep wounds of our planet – some of which are being made deeper even as we speak. But let us not give in to despair. Let us not fall into a cynical dog-eat-dog mindset. Let us raise our vision to the ultra long-term. Let us have hope for our planet. Let us not get so myopic as to concretize and harden around our respective identities and nations.
One might justifiably accuse me of a sort of dreamy escapism. One might be galled that I have the audacity to articulate such a longterm vision without first acknowledging the immense pain of the people who are suffering all around the world today. “Sure, you have a vision,” one might say, “but now what is the method? To achieve this lauded harmony you cannot simply bypass all the pain in the world. Rather, you have to acknowledge and work through the pain, to cook in it. Are you yourself ready not to react in hostile retaliation when your loved ones are killed? How dare you talk of peace and planetary harmony when you yourself haven’t been truly tested?” I think these are valid criticisms, and I honestly cannot imagine how I would feel, for example, if I were a Palestinian today in the midst of this genocide…Oh dear Palestinians, I cannot fathom… I cannot fathom…
And yet! And yet!! And yet!!! I feel we must articulate a longer-term vision like I have above – we must have a North Star to base our actions around. Our news cycles, our pain, our social media, and all our crowded narratives all too often make us woefully, self-defeatingly myopic.
