Barbarous obliteration and invisible immortality

Victor David Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic, 2024) has chapters on the destruction of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan that the author, or a good editor, should have abridged. Maybe the repetition, though, can drum into our heads a lesson we try to keep out: “Modern societies are not immune to the horror of a war of extinction,” and American society could also “descend into barbarism and obliteration.”

After all, America sent about 750,000 bodies into obliteration between 1861 and 1865. Southerners could have accepted in 1861 the original thirteenth amendment, approved by both the House and the Senate, which guaranteed that slavery could continue in the states where it already existed. They refused. Why? Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War (Crown, 2024) is a cautionary tale of how “the Code Duello” understanding of what honor required, plus fear of slave uprisings, led to a wild passion for secession.

Southern slaveholders resented being seen as immoral felons. They convinced themselves that slavery was a positive good and those who said otherwise were unscientific: Several distinguished anthropologists said Blacks were a different species. Many in South Carolina thought a war of extinction would never happen. A common expression, often attributed to Col. James Chesnut, was that the total amount of blood likely to be shed in a war over secession would fill “a lady’s thimble.” South Carolina Senator James Hammond gave a fiery speech about how economics would keep the North compliant: “No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”

The same attitude, incidentally, made many European leaders in 1914 believe that war (or at least a long one) was inconceivable. The result: Twenty million dead and a Russian Revolution that led to the deaths of tens of millions more. To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause (Princeton, 2024) is an 816-page history of the Russian dissident movement that seemed hopeless in the 1960s but provided some of the understructure for the Gorbachev reforms that created hope in the 1990s. The movement’s eventual success may give hope to those who year after year bravely oppose Czar Putin.

Some books about evil need to be long, but Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is an exquisitely written 138 pages. Physicists sometimes say, If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics. The same thing goes for death. Junger acknowledges ignorance: “We’re all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark.” He hopes “that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.”

Junger describes how a near-death experience undercut his atheism and how pioneering physicists with swirling lives explored quantum uncertainties. The line starts with Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who hanged himself. His brilliant successor, Fritz Hasenohrl, died leading an infantry assault in World War I. Next up was Hasenohrl’s student, Erwin Schrodinger, who made scientific breakthroughs (look up “Schrodinger’s cat”) while entangled in multiple adulteries with women and teenage girls.

In a broad sense, quantum mysteries aren’t new: Folks in ancient times understood the world is mysterious. Geocentrists and Charles Darwin thought the world and life are simple, but they’ve been proved wrong. Some say our realization of the universe’s vastness and the cellular world’s complexity has diminished man, but it also cuts against any thoughts that we live in a simulation: Only the Creator, and not his creatures, could be so creative. Harry Cliff’s Space Oddities: The Mysterious Anomalies Challenging Our Understanding of the Universe (Doubleday, 2024), points out some of the new weirdness.

Take, for example, “dark energy” and “dark matter,” two strange things that scientists say make up most of the universe. (Maybe we should call the two darks manna, after the food Hebrews ate for 40 years in the desert: The word “manna” apparently means, “what is it?”) Cliff writes about new manna: “When you hear the word ‘dark’ being used by physicists, you should get very suspicious because it generally means we don’t know what we’re talking about.” Cliff speculates about “parallel dark galaxies populated by billions of dark stars, living alongside our own: invisible, untouchable, and just out of reach.” Maybe scientists and theologians can both sing this hymn: “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise.”