"Survivor": A Problematic Term

Cannibalism was reported by Flavius Josephus during 

the siege of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD,

 and according to Appian, the population of Numantia 

during the Roman Siege of Numantia in the 2nd century BC 

was reduced to cannibalism and suicide.

            The story I tell below is fiction, but one "based on a true story," or, more exactly, based on my reading and listening recently to a short series of depressing (audio)books that do things like elaborate on the horrors glossed over when you find a sentence in a typical old history such as "the City of Outopos fell," or was saved, "after a protracted siege."

            Ready? You've been warned this will be an unpleasant tale. Anyway —

            During the Siege of Outopos, little Nano was a survivor and a savior of her family. When the Outopians were reduced to eating dogs and cats and rats, Nano was one of the best hunters in the town. When even the rats grew scarce, Nano would steal food from the soldiers and then from the neighbors, taking for herself only what she needed to be strong enough to find food and defend her family's meager stores, and defend her family.

            Toward the end of the siege, her family and friends had all died off except for her parents and Dano, her little sister; and when Dano began to show signs of a wasting illness and could no longer pull her weight, it was Nano who knew the differences among "mercy," "taboo," "sentimentality," and "squeamishness" — and slit the little girl's carotid artery and windpipe as cleanly and coolly as a Shoykhet of thirty years experience and field dressed Dano as efficiently as any game keeper could.

            Indeed, Nano — near miraculously! — indeed Nano even found wood and a couple of pieces of sea coal for proper cooking, and the roasted Dano was the difference between her and her parents' living to see the relief of Outopos or joining the pile of corpses to be thrown into the nearest mass grave.

            So they lived. A survivor was Nano, and a minor savior, too, a girl who loved life and her family, a person who saw what needed doing, and did it.

            See where this is going?

            "Survivor" nowadays comes out of the usage from the 1960s and after for survivors of the Nazi death camps, and our intentions in that usage are mostly good. But there are often problems.

            For one thing, we talk of someone's surviving a plane crash or an auto accident, and there's a serious problem with the idea that a rape not only might be fatal but possibly should be: an idea out of such pernicious art as Birth of a Nation, where rape — at least of a White woman by a Black man — is "a fate worse than death," or out of an 18^th-century piece of pious pornography like Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

            For another thing — well, there is my "Parable of Little Nano" and the full(er) horror of sieges and death camps and other extended atrocities: the choices such atrocities force upon victims if those victims are to survive.

            It may be permissible in a situation to choose evil, e.g., to do what is necessary to survive. Indeed, it is a moral imperative in real dilemmas to choose the lesser of two or least of several evils.

            To choose evil, though, is to choose evil; to do evil is to do evil.

            Killing and eating one's sibling is an evil act, even if one shares. My imagined heroic little Nano, however — and her real-world analogs — is and are beyond our judgment.

            She survived.

            Good. With luck she'll recover and get on with her life. If asked about the siege, she can say, "I survived, as did my parents," and she need say no more.

            We can say, "She survived," if we like, but then we should shut up. And more so in other, non-imaginary cases. If the victims want to talk, we must listen. If they don't want to talk, we should respect that decision.

            In any event, to repeat a point: with words like "victim" and "survivor," we non-victims should speak and write with very great care.

Existential Threats (19 Sept. 2014)

            An existential threat to the human species is a large-ish asteroid or middling-size comet hitting the Earth, or a mega-super-volcanic event — a Yellowstone eruption, say, as the start of a series of super eruptions — or a full-out thermonuclear war bringing on nuclear winter.
            There are things we can do about cosmic and geologic threats, but they're mostly long-haul strategies and desperate stabs at survival. We need better inventories of asteroids and planetoids and planetesimals and all, and much better understanding of geophysics generally and volcanoes in particular. So governments should be doing more of what they should be doing anyway in financing scientific research. We also need to expand programs with the "Noah's Arc" approach, preserving plant seeds and other preservable genomes, plus some human beings: shelters on Earth for the very long term, plus, as soon as affordable, colonies and the Moon and nearby planets so we do not have all the human eggs in one basket, all our genes and cultures on one vulnerable planet.
            A whole lot simpler and cheaper is a crash program for what we should be doing anyway: immediately cutting back Russian, US, and Chinese nuclear weapons to where we have enough to destroy one another only a couple times over, but (probably) too few to trigger climate disaster. And after that exercise has concentrated our figurative minds, all the countries with nukes — I'm look at you Israel, Pakistan, and India — all those with nukes can move rapidly to reduce nuclear arsenals to the handful of atomic bombs (not hydrogen) quite sufficient to deter attack.
            And then, with the human-controlled existential threat removed, we can consider working on the merely horrendous, horrific, and horrible threat of small-scale nuclear warfare or large-scale conventional wars.
            Before another politician, pundit, or other propagandizer uses the phrase "existential threat," I'd like them to consider the factoid that from 1900 C.E. to 1950, despite two world wars, the human population rose from about 1.65 billion to about 2.52 billion. They should consider the fact that the USSR suffered some 20 million deaths in World War II, and numerous other casualties, and survived as a state and society. Germany and Japan lost entire cities and had regimes toppled but still survived as societies and were again thriving countries again — West Germany, anyway — within two generations.
            So please get this straight: ISIS and terrorists and terrorism as such are not existential threats to the United States, not directly. The United States as a state, society, and people can absorb even the atomic destruction of a city or two, to say nothing of casualties in numbers well below those killed each years in gun deaths or highway accidents or from cigarettes.
            ISIS and terrorists and terrorism as such are not a direct threat to America at all — not as a state and society — but to Americans, which is different, and lesser threats to us individual Americans than tobacco, alcohol, fire-arms, reckless drivers, and the other sources of "mortality and morbidity" that are part of everyday life.
            To repeat the point, what terrorists threaten isn't America and not even many Americans but the American Republic.
            As a candidate for the US presidency, John Kerry learned that politicians commit a serious gaffe when they are (gasp!) insensitive enough to slip and allow the fact that terrorism, in geo-political terms, is a "nuisance" — a fact that can lead to the nastily pragmatic thought that one does what one can against terrorists and then, as a society, suck up the occasional losses. Terrorism has been a documented tactic since at least the time Judah Maccabee's freedom fighters were killing off Seleucids and Jewish collaborators in the victorious guerilla war commemorated each year at Hanukkah. Terrorism is a tactic; it is a tactic that can work: from time to time, it will be used.
            The Republic is at risk because we Americans can get rather extreme in our reluctance to die and overly hypocritical in talking about "bearing any cost" and using clichés like "freedom isn't free" without adding that we usually want somebody else paying for it. The threat of ISIS and terrorism and all is that the third or fourth time some Mall of America is bombed or machine-gunned by (non-White/Christian) terrorists, most Americans will be sufficiently terrorized to demand moving beyond "The National Security State" to a downright police state, where they will feel, and probably be, safer.
            We Americans don't do risk assessment very well, and for all our glorification of heroes and entrepreneurs and all, most of us are really risk-averse for ourselves and those we love — as we understand risks, which is often poorly.
            You want to reduce an existential threat? Work for rapid and radical reduction in the number of nuclear weapons in the world, starting with a risk-free, and money-saving, unilateral reduction in US nuclear weaponry. Beyond that, join the fight against language inflation and manipulation through fear. Threats can be serious without being "existential" or sensational. Global warming is not an existential threat to the human species or to the United States, but it does threaten an ironic combination of flooding and desiccation to where I live, and serious harm to millions (eventually billions?) of others who live on a coast and/or where it's hot and dry — or where it used to be cold. A group like ISIS causes great local misery and may spark a Sunni v. Shi'a (etc.!) civil war and another round of global terrorism.
            Such risks are bad enough without hyperbole.