THIS HAS BEEN an exceptionally bleak year politically. Putin’s campaign of an unjustified and barbarous invasion of a neighbour, Ukraine, undergirded by disinformation and lies, has dragged on and on. To what end all this fear and hate and pain? And now Israel’s campaign of assassinations in Lebanon is threatening to turn that already ravaged country into another Gaza, a landscape of rubble and ruined human lives. But it also signals and symbolises a much more existential threat to the world order, to all our assumptions about national integrity and sovereignty.

These are just two examples, but almost overnight, it seems the entire international order is on the cusp of collapse. We may not have sympathy for Hezbollah or Hamas, but the massive destabilisation of human dignity is now not coming from them but from what we might call state-sponsored terrorism. A confidence that superior military force will deliver the goods is backed by religious ideology, a deranged Zionism in Israel’s case, and a sick parody of Orthodox Christianity for Putin.

We sense instability in many places. China swaggers across the Pacific with threats of invasion in one pocket and bribes in the other. Biden, roi fainéant (do-nothing king) of what is still the most powerful country in the world, pours armaments into the conflagrations in Palestine and the Ukraine, while chanting his own exceptionalist mantras.

Meanwhile in many places around the world the crudest populism and conspiracy theories are spread intentionally across the internet. The rhetoric of peace is still strummed in the corridors of the United Nations, but the Security Council has become inadequate, a grotesque symbol of the paralysis of peace-making.

An almost exclusive reliance on military hardware is common to all these crucial players in international politics. They have militarised the world as never before. Amoral actions, including deploying hunger and disease as weapons, are part of their massive investments in the most sophisticated weaponry. And now they’re brandishing even nuclear weapons as just one more tool in their war chest. Even our neighbour Australia is drifting into a nuclear alliance without any apparent hesitation.

The price for this idolisation of weaponry is being paid for primarily by the innocent civilians — children, mothers, fathers, grandparents, medics, teachers, aid workers, journalists — caught in the middle. Food, medicines and other aid are withheld. Hospitals, schools and sacred sites are targeted.

The long-term cost to human dignity is unthinkable, not only in terms of the direct destruction of infrastructure, dams and agriculture, but in the diversion of resources to war. This stops countries from meeting our primary global challenges: the ongoing degradation of the environment and the floods of desperate refugees across the globe.

How did we get to this perilous state? The Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska writes:

A gale

Stripped all the leaves from the trees last night

Except for one leaf

Left

To sway solo on a naked branch.

With this example

Violence demonstrates

That yes of course —

It takes its little joke from time to time.

The truth is that when we cross a certain line, we cease to be human. As responsible citizens we need to stand back from the dreadful accounts and images which assail us every day. Like many of you, I pray each day the Our Father, hallowing what deserves to be hallowed, yearning for God’s Kingdom. I suspect we are bleeding inwardly.

But it is equally urgent to put on the hard hat of reason. Politics and wars are the work of humans and they can be turned around. Behind so many of these policies lurk sick ideologies. We have the moral and spiritual resources to critique, denounce and replace them. Future generations may depend on us acting now.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 298 November 2024: 20