Humans, it is believed, are unique among earth’s fauna in
being able to imagine.
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| Lawrence H. Keeley helps us understand some about war in his 1996 book. |
In fact, it is such a powerful facility that the lives of
many are completely derailed through an addiction to uninhibited imagination.
The power of the mind is such that it can lock an
individual, a community, a nation or a whole raft of people around the globe
into a mindset that draws criticism from an equal number.
Being right or wrong can depend upon one’s faith, belief in
science or an alliance with whatever frippery it is that has swept around the
world ensnaring the vulnerable imaginations of people as it went.
As humans we are loaded with frailties and those fragilities
are capitalized on by those eager to see the life, and its various
incumbencies, they prefer embedded in the world community.
Imagination, with all its distortions and blemishes shapes
our lives and another of those moments upon which its continuance hinges on
imagination has just passed.
The invasion of Turkey by Australian and New Zealand
soldiers and other allied forces in April 1915 has set alight the Australian
imagination and although fundamentally wrong, hundreds of deaths are made right
through appeal to misplaced human sentimentalities.
The Anzac Day “industry” is driven by governments at all
levels and they obscure the brutality and tragedy of war behind a murkiness
that dissuades us from allowing our imaginations to focus on the actual catastrophe,
rather to be drawn in by repeatedly retold stories of mateship, valour, courage
and success in the face of overwhelming opposition.
Life for most of us, beyond a few personal highs and lows,
is pretty bland and rarely do we ever experience anything like the dynamics of
a war that allow us to unleash our emotions and imaginations.
Anzac Day is one of the moments that directly target those
sleeping emotions and imaginations tapping into our covert nationalism from
which our politicians draw their sustenance and legitimacy.
In his 1996 book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the
Peaceful Savage”, Oxford University archaeology professor, Lawrence H. Keeley, said:
“The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity,
improvisation, cooperation, vandalism, and cruelty. It is the richest field on
which to match wits and luck; no peaceful endeavour can equal its penalties for
failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.
“It remains the most theatrical of human activities,
combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce, and even
low comedy, War displays the human in extreme,” he wrote.
The good life is found in anchored emotions, with war quite
the opposite when passions are let off the leash, set free and so able to
respond without inhibition to our imaginations, wicked or otherwise.
