Slow and fast violence, Ukraine, and hope
The twenty-first century’s major battle is not just between democracy and autocracy, it is also a battle for future generations‘ opportunity to live on a planet that’s worth living on.
The flood of news coming out of Ukraine in recent days might make it seem like there’s suddenly less hope in the world. A criminal regime decides to invade a country, whose only “fault” is that it tried to listen to its citizens‘ dreams about a freer future, and the world looks on. It’s as if civilisation’s progress since World War II was wiped out in a day.
When I stood on London’s Trafalgar Square and listened to the crowd that came out to support Ukraine on Sunday, I sensed something very different though. What was in the air wasn’t nationalism or fear. Rather, it was empathy. The scenes of violence we’d seen, the fates of civilians who’d spent days and nights underground trying to hold onto their bare lives, and the persistence with which Ukrainians had been defending their country, awakened compassion among the thousands of people who came, and among millions around the world. The Russian army had mobilised; now, the world’s humanity was mobilising.
In 2013, the Harvard professor Rob Nixon published his book Slow Violence, in which he reflected on the challenge of violence that comes gradually, which we can’t see unfold “live.“ Climate change or deforestation are examples of such “slow“ violence, which TV cameras cannot capture the way they capture, for example, tanks advancing on Kyiv, but which nevertheless kills lots of innocent people. The problem with slow violence is that it is often “invisible,” and so people care less about tackling it than they might care about stopping the spectacular, fast violence we can see in the news.
Looking at today’s situation, we might feel truly despondent: the world wasn’t able to prevent even the fast violence of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, so how can we expect it to deal with the slow violence of environmental degradation? “We’ll all burn here,“ one might be tempted to conclude, “if not in the fire of Putin’s rockets, then in the fire of global warming.“ But the world, that’s not just political leaders, it’s also billions of “ordinary“ people and the humanity that the situation in Ukraine is awakening among us is a reason to hope that we’ll be able to tackle these global challenges (although it won’t be without casualties).
On Sunday, people from all over the world stood side by side in London. They cared about strangers who lived on the other side of Europe, whom they never met and never will meet. Nameless protesters whom nobody forced to come, people who care about the kind of world they live in — something they perhaps even themselves hadn’t been fully aware of until a few days ago. These people are our planet’s best hope, and there are many of them. Virtually every one of us carries an impulse towards empathy with those we’ll never know personally, even if we don’t always listen to this impulse.
The twenty-first century’s major battle is not just between democracy and autocracy (a battle which some naively thought was over at the end of the Cold War), it is also a battle for future generations‘ opportunity to live on a planet that’s worth living on. Our strongest weapon in both these struggles is humanity, compassion, our innate capability for empathy. Just as our hearts break as we see the scenes coming out of Ukraine, so does seeing the destruction of our planet activate our compassion and will to act.
But our challenge is to learn how to think ahead. Violence accelerates faster than we often expect. Just as Putin’s aggression went from words into violent acts overnight, so does the “slow“ violence of environmental devastation turn from an abstract threat into a hurricane, a flood, or a famine sometimes in minutes. But when this happens, it’s too late to prevent mass suffering, just as the West failed to prevent the war in Ukraine.
If humanity learns to not only harness its innate empathy but also to foresee threats, it will win the key battles of this century.
