Bright sunny day

Quite by surprise I woke up to a bright sunny day, quite unexpected after days of rain showers. The times being what they are, I could not help but read this for a sign of better days ahead. I am, of course, not sure of this. But hope is always welcome. Hope is fundamental, along with other fundamentals like justice, freedom, equality, kindness, love and human rights. We tend nowadays to surrender all these in favor of more pragmatic concerns; concerns especially having to do with survival and success. We had thought of the latter as polar opposites to our more fundamental values.

But therein perhaps lies the crux. We must wonder if is this polarity that is precisely dividing the world at this time.

We have seen in recent times a backlash against liberal democracy. But strangely enough, this backlash did not come from the extreme Left. The extreme Left even colludes with it, to a certain guarded extent. What one is seeing now is rather the trend towards fascism marching with the most fundamentalist political and religious Right; in a sense, the very same values that drive extremist cults of which the best known is ISIS. They are all part of the same global current. And their common characteristics are rather clear and almost impossible to miss.

Thus, when ISIS goes about destroying archeological artifacts in the ancient cities of Iraq and Syria, that horrible act draws a strange parallel to Trump’s plan to build a wall across the US-Mexican border. They come after grand visions. And while the former is a willful act of destruction, the latter builds. But it builds only to destroy. And one can already guess what will be destroyed by that act — centuries of a particular relationship having ancient historical roots. I am only talking about people, not ecology and the biological life, which use this border to proceed with their natural lives.

This urge towards grandeur reflects, of course, with Trump’s call — “Make America Great Again!” It is the urge towards grandiosity which defines the act. That, and the means employed to achieve the grand cause. And both ISIS and Trump have promised to achieve their ends by whatever means possible. ISIS has a penchant to bomb things. Trump’s penchant is no less as harsh if one is an undocumented immigrant in the US.

But the moral implications of these acts worry us even more than the acts themselves. They show the core principle of extremism itself — how human suffering can be justified and rationalized for pragmatic ends. And then some: How the most pragmatic, even selfish, ends can be disguised as moral goals. In which case, the pragmatic, no matter how obviously selfish, becomes morally justifiable. The conventional meanings we apply to the two, once specific and exclusive, now therefore become one and interchangeable.

These things are not difficult for us Filipinos to understand. We too now see a clear parallel in the events we are facing right here. And we are seeing now precisely the same demagogic scheme laid before us. The impossible grand end has been announced. The extremist means it will be achieved has been demonstrated. And it has been presented how many find it acceptable. The very same ambiguity between the moral and the pragmatic has been put before us. And it seems many are taking the bait. Is it good fortune that these events have many precedents in history?

They have always failed. Demagogues come and go. They come out of the woodworks at certain times, usually apocalyptic, and then disappear quite as suddenly as they came — more often than not, on a bright sunny day like this one, filled as it is with hope.