There are events so disfiguring that their impact and interpretation strip us of the accoutrements of ordinary life which serve as a buffer between consciousness and the depths of human cruelty. Last year, 7 October was the first day in a year-long global enlistment in events of this kind. Not one global earthquake, but millions – so many and so powerful we have been permanently shaken from prior conceptions of what is justified and what is acceptable. We are not human in the way we were before. And the power of the transformation is precisely that we can pretend it has not happened. More than 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Strip’s health ministry (an agency of Hamas), while people around the world have watched and discussed the merits of these deaths, just as other equally heartless people watched the horrors perpetrated on 7 October and justified or denied that they had taken place. For those of us blessedly safe from the conflagrations, it is our participation in this debased discourse that marks us. On X, on campuses, in the major newspapers of every metropolitan centre, we watch, discuss and debate about the virtues of certain horrors and the hellishness of others, and go on with our days. Two million people have been trapped and forced into subhuman conditions in the Gaza Strip for an entire year, but in London or Washington, the sun rises and sets on a vista just like the one which greeted us on 6 October 2023. The mood in our streets is the same. But the people who live on them are permanently altered.
There have been other events in human history which have transfixed onlookers across the world. One, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, reshaped the European Enlightenment. The earthquake struck Lisbon on the morning of 1 November – All Saints’ Day, one of the holiest days of the Christian calendar year. It impacted most of the city in churches which collapsed on the communicants. The quake was followed by a tsunami and a great fire ignited by the candles shaken from their holders in homes around the city. Smoke from that fire asphyxiated people up to 30 metres from the flames. On a single day, between 30,000 and 40,000 people died in just Lisbon itself. The catastrophe levelled most of the city and traumatised all of Europe, including Enlightenment philosophers such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Kant, who read about it from afar. All three were profoundly affected by the disaster and its implications but Voltaire especially. His very conception of evil was transformed in its wake, and so has ours been in turn. In “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster”, he professed a profound confusion and horror at the wreckage:
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts –
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
Unlike the Lisbon earthquake, the tens of thousands who have been killed in the wedge between the river and the sea this year, the hospitals that have been levelled, the babies who have been suffocated beneath rubble, the families who have been shot to death in their own homes – all of these horrors were the result of human choices, machinery, and funds. These earthquakes were man-made. The Lisbon earthquake transformed humanity’s conception of evil because of a natural catastrophe. This past year should transform ours because of millions of unnatural, human crimes. This was a bloody, cursed year. This year has disfigured us, it has destroyed the contrivances invented to hide our hideous nature from ourselves. It is possible to avert attention, but it is not possible to be human in the dregs of 2024 and not know that we have witnessed, participated in, justified, and in some cases directly perpetrated great evil. There have been years like this before and there will be years like this again: this is how human beings are. No generation escapes a reckoning with human ugliness.
Some 14 years after Voltaire penned his poem, he observed in print that “if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him”. The perversion of God’s authority oils every inch of this fallen year. It is impossible to look squarely at the crimes of the last year without seeing the fingerprints of an invented God. It is in His name that the acts were done and continue to be committed. In the spirit of the terrorists who launched an attack on Israel and raped and murdered its citizens, every single day since 7 October 2023 the Netanyahu government has invoked the authority of a perverse human invention to justify the desecration of our most basic, precious necessity: the value of human life. The worth of Palestinian and Israeli life has been grossly desecrated. We cannot have one without the other, and we dishonour both. Netanyahu’s bloodlust is consistent with Hamas’s brutality. It is a perverse acquiescence in the reality in which Hamas’s attack took place: a reality in which babies can be ripped from their mother’s wombs and women can be raped with knives and bodies can be stacked and burned and schoolchildren can be starved and days can stretch into months while two million people hunt in a blasted strip for drinkable water. All of these crimes are born of the same contempt for human life, and of the same insane conviction that God has bestowed worth unevenly, that God distinguished between those people who must be protected and all the rest who can be justifiably raped, starved, blown to bits, tortured, and in every sense crushed.
And for 12 months the rest of us have watched and cheered or condemned, and then gone on living. Twelve months of conscription in our own debasement. Twelve months of constant, irrepressible evidence of the cheap brutality of human beings and human life. When we say the war is justified, we disavow human worth. When we say Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists are freedom fighters, we disavow human worth. When we say nothing at all, we disavow human worth. None of us get out of this clean. On 7 October 2023 the kind of blood curdling cruelties which we have been averting our eyes to since the dawn of human history were perpetrated on video. Those videos were the first in a year-long catalogue of human depravity.
The anniversary of our debasement dawns. What does it mean to be human now?
[See also: Letter from Gaza: a year of devastation]
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