Each of us is so close to
human nature that our perception of it may be blurry or partial. One of Freud’s
contributions is the insight that we don’t even know ourselves completely,
given the existence of the subconscious. This is also true of trying to
comprehend human nature at a distance, as whether humanity is or is not by
nature compassionate to people who are suffering greatly at a distance. The sheer
duration of the extreme suffering of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza in the midst
of ongoing military attacks by Russia and Israel, respectively, beginning in
the early 2020s, and the sheer impunity absent any interventionist coalitions
of countries from around the world combine to give a negative verdict on human
nature concerning compassion from a distance. It can even be said that the
ongoing passive complicity around the world impugns not only us, but human
nature itself. While less explicit than in furnishing weapons to Russia or
Israel, the complicity of human nature is more serious, for even as geopolitics
change, human nature is static, at least in a non-evolutionary timespan. Given
the extreme suffering in Gaza in particular, the lack of political will around
the world to step in militarily and assume control of Gaza may mean that human
nature itself is worse than hell on earth.
The director of the
International Committee of the Red Cross, Mirjana Spoljaric, claimed in early
June, 2025 that “humanity is failing” as it has collectively “watched the
horrors” of the Israeli offensive that had rendered conditions in Gaza worse
than hell on earth.[1] Given
the leveling of towns and cities and the deliberate blocking of food and medical
supplies for months even as 1.2 million residents could not leave the territory
allegedly to make life untenable so the population would be exterminated, it is
easy to heap blame on the Israeli officials for going too far in exacting
revenge for the Hamas attack in which only 1,200 were killed and a few hundred Israelis
were taken hostage. The fallacy, or excuse, of collective justice plus allowing
the victims to exact it is a damning indictment on the Israeli government and even
the state of Israel as deserving sovereignty. Such a verdict is easily made; it
is much more difficult to turn a negative verdict on the rest of us as we and
our respective governments around the world have passively refused to step in
militarily.
“It has become worse,”
Spoljaric said. “We cannot continue to watch what is happening. It’s surpassing
any acceptable, legal, moral, and humane standard. The level of destruction,
the level of suffering. More importantly, the fact that we are watching a
people entirely stripped of its human dignity. It should really shock our
collective conscience.”[2]
I think it has, so the question is why there is such a gap between being
shocked morally and deciding to take action and then actually doing so.
The International Red Cross is
the custodian of the Geneva Conventions, which is the corpus of international
law that regulates the conduct of war and is designed to protect civilians. The
most recent version, the fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, was adopted after
the Second World War with the intention of preventing the killing of civilians “from
happening again.”[3] This
is of course an allusion to Nazi Germany, which had killed roughly 20 million
Slavs in Eastern Europe and millions more, including Jews from Poland, Czechoslovakia
and Hungary westward. Ironically, Adolf Eichmann, who had managed the trains to
and from the death camps, was convicted by an Israeli court because he
had ignored Himmler’s direct order NOT to force Hungarian Jews to walk
to a death camp in Poland; Eichmann could not claim that he was just following
orders, and this is how he lost the case and his life.
As uncomfortable as it must be
for Israeli officials to be likened to Nazi officials, the discomfort of the
rest of us in being confronted with the verdict of our own passive complicity
or at least our refusal to act on the basis of shocked conscience is surely much
less. I suspect most of us reflect on the negative verdict on human nature as
if reading a weather forecast of rain ahead. I contend that we are alienated
from our own nature as a species, and that support for this and our lack of humane
discomfort from having remained passive bystanders willing at most to go to a
political protest is in the sheer impunity that both Putin and Netanyahu have been
able to leverage in their respective one-sided military invasions.
If the dire verdict of our sordid human nature, which none of us can escape, is reasonable, then perhaps the question of whether our species deserves not to go extinct from the species-induced climate disequilibrium (i.e., the warming, over all, of the planet) can be revisited. Prior to 2022, and especially during the Coronavirus global pandemic, we could forgive our collective species for having polluted as if there were no tomorrow—that our penchant for instant gratification and outright greed are not enough to warrant extinction as if it were a divine punishment like Noah’s flood. After 2022, however, our calculous could be different—more dire for our species being worthy of survival from its self-induced and perpetuated ongoing and uncorrected climate crisis. The refusal of even democratic governments around the world to jointly step in as over a million residents of Gaza had reached a living condition worse than hell on earth is arguably morally worse than having refused to regulate carbon emissions sufficiently and then take drastic measures when the global average temperature reached 1.5C degrees. Leaving governments to enforce the Paris Agreement of 2016 themselves is bad enough; standing by while reports of Israeli soldiers killing Palestinians, including babies, as a pastime and leveling even cities is much more unethical because of the extremity and scale of the human suffering. That even such a verdict being made explicit would not make any difference in practicality is a foregone conclusion that only confirms the sordid verdict. It is not as if no wiggle-room is in human nature, or that life is entirely deterministic, so we are indeed culpable both as individuals and as a species rather than being victims of our own innate nature.
As sordid as selfishness is, even what Jonathan Edwards calls “compound self-love,” in which benefits are extended to other people rather than only to oneself, is not sufficient to save us from the damning verdict. As a Christian theologian in the eighteenth century, Edwards maintained that because God is love (ultimately of being in general assenting to being, and thus to us in so far as we exist), divine love, or agape, is ultimately unconditional. Yet from our limited vantage point, it is useful to wonder why a perfect being would love such a species as looks the other way as a people face worse than hell on earth on an ongoing basis. It is easy enough to believe that Yahweh will punish Israel for incessantly disobeying the Commandment against (mass) murder; it is much more difficult to come up with a rationale as to why God should love the rest of us even though God is love and thus cannot be otherwise. We most certainly can be otherwise. The question may ultimately be whether our species is worth being loved even by unconditional love itself.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
