In James Joyce’s novel Ulysses the protagonist, Leopold Bloom, explores how to philosophically cope with the discovery that his wife is cheating on him with half of Dublin. He comes up with a long list of possible consolations, but the one that, for me, should bring him the most equanimity is this: “The apathy of the stars.”
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It comes to mind because I feel we need a certain philosophy to preserve a bit of serenity in the face of the stupidity that possesses half the world.
Of course, one option is to look the other way. For whatever reason, people like me and, by definition, the readers of this newspaper cannot afford that luxury. We consume news and closely follow, among other things, the following:
That brute force is imposed over justice everywhere; that two mentally ill people are in charge of the largest nuclear arsenals; that Israel is carrying out a hellish ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land; that in Sudan there is more bloodshed than anywhere else on Earth without anyone doing anything to achieve peace; that the human disaster in Ceuta has become another political game in Madrid; that the United States is waging an endless war in Iran and Russia is waging an endless war in Ukraine; that Argentina is stubbornly renewing its claim over what would be the most inhospitable and most unpopulated territory of its abundant geography.
Let’s focus for a moment on two of these delusions, Ukraine and the Falkland Islands. They represent two extremes: tragedy and comedy. What unites them is irrationality.
Vladimir Putin made a statement this week that was at once false, strange, and revealing. During a meeting with students in Moscow, he explained why he ordered the invasion of Ukraine. In the Arctic, he said, live orcas and polar bears. “The orcas eat those bears like little fish. Yes, they simply attack in packs – bam! – and tear them apart. It’s all very interesting. Yes, the food chain. We have to tell this to children, so they understand what kind of world we live in and why we carry out the special military operation.”
A nice lesson for Russian children. What rules the world is the law of the jungle, the survival of the strongest. For a matter of biological inevitability, according to Putin, the Russian orca must eat the Ukrainian bear cub. Fascism, in other words, is the natural order of things.
Putin explains why he ordered the invasion of Ukraine: what rules the world is the law of the jungle
In Buenos Aires, Javier Milei appeared on television to make a solemn call to recover Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands, an anachronistic (and ageographical) British imperial possession for a century and a half. Milei recalled that the Falklands cause was “the most important and sacred one we Argentines have.” Now is the time to take action, he declared, due to “the winds of change in the world favorable to our claims” and “the new geopolitical relevance of our country.”
The winds of change come from Washington. The new geopolitical relevance is because Milei’s friend who occupies the White House dropped some words this week suggesting, between the lines, that he wouldn’t mind the idea of expelling the British from the islands. The context of this historic, probably fleeting and undoubtedly frivolous change of course was the following.
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A journalist asked Trump if he was reconsidering his position regarding British sovereignty over the Falklands and he replied: “I always reconsider all my positions. This is just one of many.”
Milei recalls that the Falklands cause is “the most important and sacred one we Argentines have”
Joy in the Casa Rosada, and even more so when a couple of days later another journalist asked Trump if he would come to the defense of the British if the Argentine government repeated the failed invasion of the last century. He didn’t say no, but reminded that the British had refused to help him with “a couple of warships” after he started his current war in Iran in February.
This was enough for Milei to recover the spirit of the military dictatorship that planted the Argentine flag on the Falklands for a couple of months in 1982. It will be pure coincidence that, like the military at the time, Milei is politically cornered today.
I know the subject. During my childhood in Buenos Aires, my teacher reminded me that the Falklands were Argentine, not “the English pirates’.” I spent half of the 1982 war (until the military started threatening to kill me) working as a journalist in Argentina. I visited the Falklands a few years later. My first reaction: I want to leave now! That would be the first reaction of any Argentine who visited the islands after the glorious day when their country recovers sovereignty over an island that God created not for human life, nor for orcas or polar bears, but for penguins. There are 275 penguins for every person living on the islands.
Now, if the Falklands cause is “the most important and sacred” in a country with extraordinary natural wealth alongside a no less extraordinary rate of child malnutrition, well, you have to be Argentine to understand it. Faced with what I see as yet another case of the idiocy that runs through the world, I need, like Leopold Bloom, to resort to philosophy to avoid falling into despair.
Remembering “the apathy of the stars,” I think of the American astronomer Carl Sagan when he looked at a distant photo of Earth taken from space, “that pale blue dot.” He reflected: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s our home… The sum of our joy and suffering, thousands of self-assured religions, ideologies and economic doctrines… every mother and father, every hopeful child, every inventor and explorer, every moral teacher, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived
