The age of reason we are living through may turn out to be a blip in our bloody history
On 29 September 1941, a 30-yearold woman called Dina Pronicheva turned up, as instructed, at a street corner in western Kyiv. The city had fallen to the Wehrmacht, and its Jewish inhabitants were told to assemble, with their valuables and travel documents, for resettlement. Some arrived early, wanting good seats on what they assumed would be trains. But there were no trains. As the crowd of people were moved towards the Jewish cemetery, Dina heard bursts of gunfire and suddenly understood what was about to happen. She was married to a Russian – hence her non-Jewish surname – and, thinking quickly, she told the German guards that she was a gentile. They ordered her to stand to one side, which is why we have her account of what happened next.
In batches, the Jews of Kyiv were divested of their money, clothes and jewellery and shot, falling into a ravine called Babyn Yar. Parents and children begged to be killed together. One mother spent her last moments breastfeeding her baby. The child was hurled, still alive, into the mass of corpses, and she leapt after it. They were among the 33,771 civilians murdered that day.
I’m sorry: I know that paragraph wasn’t easy to read. Believe me, it wasn’t much fun to write. But I want to put Ukraine’s present agonies into their full, horrific context. Between 1933 and 1945, Ukraine had the highest mortality rate on earth. Again and again, its people suffered indiscriminate slaughter at the hands of the authorities: the liquidation of the kulaks, the campaigns against supposed Polish and Ukrainian nationalists, the starvation of Soviet and German POWs, the Einsatzgruppen massacres, the NKVD executions, the reprisal killings.
Until three weeks ago, such things seemed utterly removed from our experience. The events might have been within living memory, but they were nonetheless hard to picture. The world appeared to have moved, as Churchill promised, into broad, sunlit uplands. Wars were less frequent and less lethal. War crimes were tried and punished. The concept of individual rights spread across the continents. Governments became answerable to their populations.
Yes, there were still human rights violations and even, in Bosnia and Rwanda, genocides. But they were understood as blips, throwbacks, rude survivals from an earlier epoch. Now, though, we find ourselves wondering whether it might be the other way around. Might it be our own age, the age of law codes and democracies and international accords, that is the blip? Might we be reaching the end of an interglacial, and returning to the cold, dark stretches that defined most of human civilisation?
We think of the First and Second World Wars as uniquely destructive; but, in the longer view, they were terrifyingly typical. Yes, in terms of absolute numbers killed, the Second World War heads the league. But that is because there were more human beings on the planet than in ancient or medieval times. As a proportion of the global population, earlier conflicts, from the Mongol conquests to the Taiping Rebellion were more lethal.
Indeed, as Steven Pinker showed in his magnus opus The Better Angels of our Nature, there has been a long-term decline in every kind of violence: war, homicide, rape, child abuse, slavery – a process he attributes to “the erosion of family, tribe, tradition and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason and science”.
His findings are counterintuitive and, in my experience, many people refuse flat out to believe them. We are attuned to bad news. We are far more aware of the fighting in Ukraine than of the absence of fighting in Vietnam or former Yugoslavia. Yet Pinker’s statistics are unanswerable.
What makes the current atrocities stand out is the same thing that makes the Holodomor and the Holocaust stand out, namely their proximity to us in time. We struggle to imagine how Mongol raids must have been experienced by medieval villagers. But when we look at pictures of mid-20th century Kyiv, we see people who used telephones, took photographs, drove to work wearing suits. What was true of the victims was also true of the perpetrators.
Historically, though, there was nothing unique about those abominations. From the rise of the first city-states in Egypt, Mesopotamia and China, human relations were characterised by conquest and slavery. Despotic emperors would seize territory, slaughter the men and enslave the women and children, muscle power being, in those days, the most valuable resource. The Gulags and the concentration camps were a grisly 20th-century refinement, but the principle of working captured populations to death, or of condemning entire groups on grounds of ethnicity, is as old as civilisation.
Consider, to pluck an example at random, the Biblical Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, after whom the Babyn Yar survivor was ultimately named. Her story is told in Genesis 34. She was abducted and raped by Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, who then asked her family for permission to marry her. Jacob agreed on condition that the men of Shechem’s tribe accepted circumcision. The Hivites duly performed the rite. But while they were still “sore” from their circumcision, Jacob’s sons “came upon the city boldly and slew all the males”.
The story strikes modern readers as shocking, but it is we who are the exception. For almost all human history, few would have thought Jacob’s behaviour reprehensible. The oldest ethic was “my tribe good, your tribe bad”. Our contemporary objections to the story – to the sexual violence, the trickery and the indiscriminate massacre – would have been subordinated to the fiercer imperative of vendetta.
Could we be returning to that older ethic? We might dismiss Putin as an outlier. But can we be certain that he is not also an augur? It might seem a trivial thing, but look at how quickly we have extended our quarrel with Putin to all Russians. An orchestra in Montreal cancels a Russian pianist, despite his opposition to the invasion; Tchaikovsky is dropped from programmes; Russian paintings are removed from exhibitions. My tribe good, your tribe bad.
These cancellations are happening in a culture newly primed to categorise and condemn. We damn institutions for some ancient benefaction. We stop publishing authors because of opinions that had nothing to do with their work. We teach identity politics, encouraging people to believe that they have grievances or obligations purely on grounds of their physiognomy.
Can we still rely on Pinker’s thesis, derived ultimately from the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, of expanding moral circles? The publication of his book in 2011 was followed by the Syrian war – another enormity in which Putin had a bloody hand – which reversed some of the graphs showing declining violence. The second decade of this century saw the global trend towards law-based democracy thrown into reverse. The lockdowns revealed a terrifying appetite for authoritarian rule, even in traditionally liberal societies. Perhaps we have passed the uplands and are back in the shadows.
Yet there are signs of hope. Ukraine’s war is, in effect, a struggle for western values. Ukrainians want their politicians to be servants, not masters. They want free elections, secure property rights, impartial courts. These things are recent constructions; but they have plainly not lost their inspirational force, their ability to engender heroism. So far, most western societies have also rallied to the defence of their values. Putin’s aggression against a country that offered him no threat has jolted even the far right continental parties out of their grotesque admiration for him.
Still, are we clear about what it is we are defending? Do we continue to believe that individuals trump groups and that laws must be general, equal and certain? Or are we sliding into our own version of collectivism, where group rights are what count, where we are treated differently according to our physical characteristics, and where the greatest achievement of the West – the dissemination of science, law, and the Enlightenment – is regarded as contemptible imperialism?
Liberty does not come naturally. Unless we acculturate each new generation, we will revert to the tribal instincts encoded deep in our DNA. I wish I could be confident that our schools and other institutions were teaching the difficult concepts of personal autonomy and individual responsibility. It would be tragic if Ukrainians were fighting and dying for a vision of westernisation, which, in the West itself, is being lost.
An ugly, old tribal mentality is threatening to engulf us
Might we be returning to the cold, dark stretches that defined most of human civilisation?