Will this be the Year of the Thugs veering the planet for all of us?

For some of us this feels like the start of history, a new historical cycle, which will be more destructive than anything this Earth has seen before.

How good humans are at hating, how ingenious with their ways of annihilating those who have something others want. Picture: Vyacheslav Prokofyev/ AFP

Who are we? As humans, as a species. What image from a movie would best sum us up, as we career into the ever darkening miasma of this year? UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps recently noted that we have moved from a “postwar world to a prewar world”. And the movie moment that best illustrates this madness, for me? The opening of Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of our human antecedents discovers they can use a bone as weaponry; that they can force others of their species from a pool of water –from the precious resources and land they want – through newly-found ordnance that their fellow creatures haven’t thought to use. In the end, aggressive thuggery dominates. Destroys. And it was ever thus.

Will this be the Year of the Thugs veering the planet for all of us? Those lovely leaders among us with little regard for humans of other religions, races, lands. Some have been quick out of the starting blocks, of course; others are jostling in the wings, hungry for their go at chaos. How good humans are at hating, how ingenious with their ways of annihilating those who have something others want. For this is what it is to be human.

What path will those who hanker for war lead us down? Global shipping routes are intensely vulnerable, as we’ve seen recently in the Red Sea; a blockade of Taiwan would be catastrophic. And what of those aggrieved nations to the north with their wounded sense of national pride? Ian McEwan wrote in Nutshell, “An expert in international relations, a reasonable woman with a rich deep voice, advised me that the world was not well. She considered two common states of mind: self-pity and aggression. Each one a poor choice for individuals. In combination, for groups or nations, a noxious brew that lately intoxicated the Russians in Ukraine, as it once had their friends, the Serbs in their part of the world. We were belittled, now we will prove ourselves … the cup is drained, the same cry goes up: we’ve been humiliated, we’ll be avenged.”

That was Germany after World War I, of course, and it is several nation states now. Again. The horror runs deep and it is endless horror and there will always be horror. Not for the first time do I think how lucky we are to be so far away from the ill winds of a fractious world, yet we are drawn ever closer to the torments of northern hemisphere nations.

How foolish and blinkered Francis Fukuyama’s triumphant declaration of “the end of history” appears now, centred as it was on the ascendancy of American-style liberal democracy after the Berlin Wall’s fall. Because the darkness goes on, and will continue to go on, for this is us. Humans. We can’t help ourselves. We’re all umbrellaed by a dark shadow: the aggression of us. The species who long, long ago found a bone, and turned it into a weapon, and pushed others away with violence, which is war, and it was ever thus.

Poor things, all of us. The title of a recent film and a reflection on humanity as we all try so valiantly to live good, quiet, peaceful lives yet are thwarted again and again by fellow humans. There’s so much to love about life, so much wonder at this extraordinary gift of a planet. The great beauty of it, and the great beauty of its alpha species, humans, deeply flawed but extraordinarily creative and inventive too. “People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’ cruelty of man,” Dostoyevsky wrote, “but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts. No animals could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.”

Are things improving? Are we on an upward curve here? It doesn’t feel like it, Francis. For some of us this feels like the start of history, a new historical cycle, which will be more destructive than anything this Earth has seen before.