“Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”
These words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, from his book The Phenomenon of Man, may well be worth meditating on every day. The forces of . . . love? That is to say, the forces of connection, the need to be part of an evolving whole.
Perhaps this is my mission in life: to help free these words from the academic cage that contains them. My God, this isn’t just “philosophy.” These words are geopolitical — even though the core concept here . . . love . . . has been linguistically belittled the moment it steps beyond the personal. At best, it’s an abstraction: “love of country,” i.e., patriotism. At worst, it’s a cynical snort.
How can anyone talk about love when the war in the Middle East — just one of oh so many across the planet going on right now, shattering lives, shattering communities, killing children — is about to widen?
“Israel’s rampage in Lebanon,” writes Khury Petersen-Smith, “has killed more than a thousand people in two weeks, wounded thousands more (including many maimed for life), and displaced hundreds of thousands.”
And all this, of course, is in the wake of a year of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, with the pathetic complicity of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe. Attempted negotiations have gotten nowhere. As Benjamin Netanyahu continues to teach the world: Once you start killing, you can’t stop — until you “finish the job.” The only way to justify mass murder is with more of the same.
And beyond these wars around the planet, we have the greatest global unifier of all, sometimes referred to, oh so respectfully, as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), but usually just called nuclear proliferation. As Norman Solomon notes: “In 2023, the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91 billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was the U.S. share.”
Should anger over some issue or other lead to a nuclear “exchange,” which then expands into total MAD, we’ll wind up not just with incomprehensible death and wreckage from the bombs but: “nuclear winter.” And, Solomon writes, “the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.”
You could call it, he notes: “More than 1,000 Holocausts.”
The situation is suicidally insane, but all it seems to amount to is a geopolitical shrug. We’re still a planet carved into nations, and every nation has borders; every nation has “interests.” And while reason prevails to a certain extent as world leaders deal with these interests, we remain overwhelmed with the belief that we have “enemies.” Enemies are different from us and they’re out to get us. Be afraid. Be very afraid! And let that fear unite you ever more deeply into oneness with others who have the same enemy.
And, as the United States has demonstrated oh so clearly over the last century, the greater you are as a nation, the more enemies you have. When I was young, our primary enemies were the communists, because of whom we had to go to war with North Korea, then with Vietnam — destroy the countries, kill a few million people, then quietly leave (having accomplished nothing related to our interests).
When Communism collapsed, our enemies became the terrorists, and they’re still our enemies despite 20 years of war against them in Afghanistan, despite our destruction of Iraq, despite our proxy war with them in the Middle East, despite . . . despite . . . whatever we do.
As horrifically stupid and pointless and destructive as these wars are, global militarism evokes no public cynicism. On the contrary, it remains the god we worship — primarily financially, of course. Worldwide, some 2.4 trillion U.S. dollars are given to this god, with the U.S. itself accounting for nearly half the total: almost a trillion dollars. We have no choice! At least not as long as nationalism is the limit of our vision.
This certainty feels virtually impenetrable — at least here in the U.S., which absorbs only a small amount of the impact militarism wreaks on humanity. We don’t hear bombers or drones flying over our homes every day. Our cities are not bombed. When’s the last time you’ve had to dig a child out of the bombed rubble?
In our insulation and safety, war oh so easily remains an abstraction — and an inevitability . . . for others to endure. End of thought process.
So I reach out desperately to Teilhard, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King, to all the other spiritual leaders of humanity, who tell us that life is profoundly complex, not linear. It’s not a matter of winning or losing, but connecting with all of humanity, with all of life — even with our oppressors. It’s about expanding our awareness, expanding the whole. In the many columns I’ve written over the years about Restorative Justice — about healing rather than punishment — I’ve used the phrase “power with, not power over.”
This is what love is. Only minimally has it penetrated our politics. And our politics do not acknowledge that all of us matter, that the world is sacred. Oh! Cut to the soul! We’re stuck with the language of the moment. This language forces its certainties upon us. It minimizes the unknown. In our present linguistic awareness, love is personal; it’s certainly not geopolitical. At that level, it’s a joke.
So I bring Teilhard back in to help us move beyond this: “Some day,” he has written, “after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
Robert Koehler ([email protected]), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.
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