Since the fateful February day when Russian troops invaded Ukraine, we have been bombarded with images and stories of the horror of war. The comments of one refugee fleeing Kyiv stood out in particular: “I can’t believe it happens [sic] now in the 21st century”.1
While understandable for someone who has gone through so much trauma, the intuitive disbelief that such things could happen today is worth dissecting. Something does seem rather shocking about the images of violence against the backdrop of modern Western cities. We expect this sort of thing to happen in places such as war-torn Syria or in the distant past, but something about seeing a family being blown up while driving through a neighborhood not too dissimilar from our own strikes a much harsher chord. After all, there has been much less outrage over similar atrocities committed against civilians in Syria, Nigeria, and Yemen. One could easily play the race card on this, but I suspect the difference lies in something deeper, an intuition derived from the West’s belief in progress and liberal democracy.
The West has a deep-seated belief that things should inevitably improve with the passage of time. Hence why a particularly bigoted remark might be met with the response “it’s the (current year)!” This attitude has not been unprecedented in history. After the slaughter in the trenches in WWI, it was declared to be the “war to end all wars”. The world would last barely two decades before going up in flames once more. After the simmering tension of the latter half of the twentieth century, the end of the Cold War in the 1990s brought an expectation of peace and prosperity. The old enemy of communism was defeated, and the triumph of liberal democracy would bring life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to the world. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama postulated the “end of history”, by which he meant that liberal democracy was the ideological endpoint of human intellectual history.
Such bold assertions have been clearly dashed by the rise of nationalism in the West, expansion of Islam in the global South, and aggressiveness of China in the East. Yet, our civilization cannot quite seem to escape this expectation of progress — that our life should naturally be much better than the grim and bigoted past. And certainly, in the material sense, it is. We enjoy longer lives and higher standards of living than any age in human history. Yet our intuition of progress’s inevitability also extends into the moral realm. We expect that the darkest days of history are behind us. We look back to the atrocities of the 20th century committed at the hands of Nazi and Communist killers with just horror and imagine ourselves as never following in their footsteps.
It is a classic case of what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery:” that baseless assumption that one’s own generation is better than the ones that preceded it. This chronological snobbery plays out not only as a distaste for anything that is old, but also as a disregard for civilizations less progressive than our own. Hence, why war is considered so banal in “backward” places such as Africa or the Middle East, yet to see modern Europe in flames is almost unthinkable. Having become complacent through years of peacetime, the idea of war coming to the world of iPhones, fast food, and HR departments seems hard to imagine. After all, we are surely decent, civilized people with our beliefs in equality, freedom, and tolerance. Russian bombs falling on civilians in Ukraine is so shocking because it harkens back to the dark days that we thought we left behind in 1945. The narrative of progressives expecting the spread of inclusion and peace to the world has been shattered by the sound of air raid sirens in Kyiv and rockets in Mariupol. That Russia can so blatantly disregard human life is shocking to us.
Yet, the dark reality is that none of this is really unprecedented given human nature. Even in our country, our tolerance and liberal democracy can only be but a thin veneer over barbarism. Already our own civilization disguises the slaughter of millions of unborn children as “healthcare.” If we learn anything from history, it should be that all the technology in the world can only paper over man’s sinful propensity to brutality. The 20th century showed how ordinary men can become murderous accomplices to authoritarian regimes, and human nature has not changed since. The sudden bloodlust online for seeing Russian soldiers blown to shreds is a small reminder it doesn’t take much to provoke the darkest instincts within us. The violence in Ukraine reminds us that war and death are never as far over the horizon as we would like to think. We may think we are immune to the horrors of war, but it would be foolish to think it could never happen here.
The war in Ukraine should be a sobering reminder of our sin and mortality. It is but by God’s common grace that we do not descend into barbarism and war. Let us heed Christ’s words in the wake of tragedy in Luke 13: “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
