When the World Tilts: Living in Uncertain Times

Masuleh, Gilan Province, Iran

As the conflict in the Middle East swells to encompass more of the globe, largely on the basis of historic alliances, it feels somewhat similar to the opening act of World War I. This is not to suggest that we all must rush into hysteria (not that it would be productive if we did), but rather that parallels can make for interesting thought experiments.

For example, imagine if you were living through the opening of World War I and further, that you knew the devastation that would be wrought over the next few years… what would you do differently?

As an ordinary member of society with no role of power, you may find that the answer is eerily close to nothing. What’s more unsettling still is the way life’s ordinary woes would continue unabated, even as men were maimed in the trenches.

You would still need to deal with mundane sicknesses, predictable deaths, ordinary accidents, family feuds, and even workplace rivalries. It would seem so preposterous in some sense. How could your work colleague be mired in envy while her son is fighting in one of the deadliest wars the world has known? And yet, people do not cease to be human in wartime.

So while we think of the years of both World Wars as being defined by the warfare, they were also times in which ordinary people had to make routine decisions about how to live.

Knowing the devastation and the widespread cultural change that took place thereafter, would you counsel a young man in that era to go to college and thus plan a life? How about have a child? Because alongside the negative, ordinary toil that people had to endure, they also had to find ways to choose the good. Baptisms, weddings, graduations, births, and ordinary but not trivial moments of laughter took place. People chose to live, even amongst uncertainty and loss. Life could not and would not wait for them. They would continue to age whether they chose to exercise their sense of agency or not. The years would pass.

We are more in-tune with the news cycle than such people could dream of, even as they sat glued to a radio to hear updates on casualties and victories. We hear various perspectives from commentators, see footage of wartime devastation almost as it happens, and get bombarded by headlines throughout every hour, if we choose not to look away. Whether it’s a war or just the typical array of news snippets from around the world, some people find themselves so addicted to what’s happening that they forget to live themselves. Glued to a screen, they live only through the misery of others. It’s a terrible secession from joy.

Imagine if those who lived during the time of the World Wars had just stopped. If they had put a halt on every gathering, every ambition, not because of real obstacles but merely because they were too distrusting of tomorrow and too addicted to the stream of updates.

A secondary travesty would exist in that they lost things through surrender and self-erasure even while the men of the battlefield fought for victory. The events that punctuate life would have been skipped over, such that people would be living an elongated death.

Regardless of whether this becomes a larger war, we would do well not to neglect the battles that are before us as individuals. Those decisions made in the home and the family demand their own courage, and they build generations. They forge the civilization that men are willing to defend.