ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: It is hard to believe the world can circle back to peace

While Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were playing summitry in Alaska last week, the US military was “clearing vegetation” and restoring Tinian Island in the Pacific Ocean.

The island was once the largest military airbase in the world, and the launch pad for US planes that carried the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan 80 years ago. All the while, China continues to build its military strength and expand its sphere of geopolitical influence and military presence.

It all seems so familiar, the build-up to war. We have seen it all before, but our understanding of these things could do with some help. A predominant way of thinking is shaped by the idea that things in the social world run in cycles. It’s not quite that simple. 

This “logic of cycles” suggests that the social relations between people, (as opposed to natural systems) were a mechanical or technical process, and therefore perfectly predictable. Much of this type of thinking draws on economics, or rationalist postulates about short and long cycles. This logic of cycles makes us feel good about ourselves and suggests that we know, or that we are fully on top of what is and what may come.

We look back at history and try to see cyclical patterns; cycles of war and peace, famine and feast, or hardship and prosperity. To the extent that there is a pattern, it’s probably best explained by greed, selfishness, notions of exceptionalism, beliefs in divine right and even of revenge or injured pride — and bald nihilism. Consider that Adolf Hitler would rather have killed the entirety of Germany than stop his genocidal quest or allow a foreign invasion and takeover. If he couldn’t get his way, Hitler thought nobody (and nothing) else should exist. 

Given all these human traits the most basic human need is to feed, clothe and shelter ourselves. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that we will some day circle back, away from pursuing those basic needs. It is easier to believe that we are constantly searching for ways to improve or better ways we feed, clothe and shelter ourselves. When selfishness, notions of exceptionalism, pride or divine right (or nihilism) step in, we are prepared to die and kill to protect our sources of food, shelter and clothing. 

It is with the recurrence of our turn to war (invariably to protect sources of food, shelter or clothing often presented as “interests”) where the cyclical movements lose credibility. I want to say that claims of cycles “fall flat,” but I have to leave room for irrationalities, and the likelihood that I may well be wrong.

We believe China wants to restore its pride (civilisational pride is a topic for another time), and that the US wants to prevent a fall from pride and shore-up its interests, each believing they’re exceptional. It’s easy to make the argument that we have seen all of this before, and we have, and I have made this argument before, but instead of relying on the logic of cycles and saying “we’re doing it again” it’s probably a lot wiser to say “we’re still doing it”.

One difference is that we are becoming more efficient and effective at killing and causing destruction. In this latter instance I draw on arguments by survivors of the Nazi holocaust (I name the Nazis because we should always bear in mind who the villains were) Elie Wiesel and Samuel Pisar, and genocide scholars Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, that there was an almost natural “progression” of the act of killing from Auschwitz to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So yes, we have seen it all before, because we have consistently been killing and destroying each other since at least the Sumerians in 2400 BCE. There are apparent patterns, but the logic of cycles suggests we may circle back to peace, which is exceedingly difficult to imagine.

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.