When artefacts destroyed by Daesh matter more than people it kills

The ancient ruins of Palmyra suffer no fear or despair, no pain or anguish. They are unable to defend themselves, or to flee. They feel nothing. But humans feel for them, just as humans felt for the ancient ruins of Nineveh, Hatra and Nimrud, which also found themselves in the path of Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). The best of humanity meets the worst of humanity, and the worst of humanity wins.

Again and again, apologetically, people explain how they understand that the destruction of artefacts is not as terrible as the destruction of people. Nevertheless, it’s the artefacts that make the headlines. They are important to the people of Syria and Iraq as well, the argument goes. Their loss hurts everyone. Everyone but Daesh. The more disgust and contempt the people of Daesh generate, they more they like it.

Sadness for lost ruins is sadness for the loss of an ideal of humanity, and what it can achieve and create. Sadness for lost people is the opposite. It involves acknowledging what befell them — nothing less than the aspect of humanity that’s a little bit harder to idealise, the part that sees cruelty, destruction and chaos as perversely worthwhile, a horrible and negative achievement, but something that some humans do aspire to, nonetheless.

Britain is weary of seeing the cruelty of Daesh, and no doubt the whole world is. We no longer expect or want reporters to place themselves in that vile environment, to bring us news we’d rather not have. We are weary even of the people who appoint themselves as witnesses on the public’s behalf, watching propaganda films of people being butchered, then describing them to people who don’t want to know. We are weary of the photographs of hostages on their knees, in orange, about to be slaughtered. No one wants to see any of it.

Occasionally, something of particularly fiendish and inventive horror will punch through the wall of baffled repulsion to enter a collective consciousness that has begun to crave ignorance. What the people of Daesh do to other people has become literally unspeakable. Speaking of mere things that they destroy, even the most precious of mere things, the most utterly irreplaceable, is at least possible — a way of expressing understanding of the enormity of the horror without allowing your mind to drift towards thoughts of what it must be like to be there, amid hundreds and hundreds of miles of violent subjugation and fear, the courage it must take to stand against it, and the punishment when such courage fails.

It’s not surprising that people who do not hesitate to hack into a human neck should also have no compunction in hacking into a Greco-Roman pillar. But actually, it’s not surprising either that so many people find it easier to mourn the loss of a pillar than of a person. A pillar can stand — or fall — for an abstract idea of civilisation. A person, an individual, someone like you or me — that’s too horrible, too upsetting to dwell upon. Keeping that far away and nothing to do with life here in Britain today, that’s the challenge now.

It’s a challenge that has changed our political discourse. Foreign policy has become a neglected corner of politics, unworthy of mention throughout the election campaign, or by the new government. Few seem to mourn its passing. Even such a short time after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it seems incredible that there were people who thought they were intervening to spread liberal democracy. They were so patently misguided and arrogant that you can’t even feel anger against them, because you imagine — despite so many signs to the contrary — that it must be hard for them to live with what they unleashed. Getting rid of Saddam. Getting rid of Gaddafi. Getting rid of Al Assad. How easy it all seemed to the people who thought they knew best. Now, perhaps, we have a better understanding of why it was that so many people were willing to live under despotism.

No one claims to have the answers any longer, even though a few hawks still call for greater military intervention. A few doves call for greater humanitarian intervention too, of creating havens for refugees, a place for people to run to. Hawks and doves alike are seen as fantasists. Retreat to the home front seems total. Even Europe is seen by many as a threat, an internationalism too far. Keeping the rest of the world away is the concern now.

Net migration to Britain in 2014 was 318,000. Just 25,020 of those were asylum seekers; 2,222 people came here seeking asylum from Syria. These are very small numbers, considering the troubles people face around the world. But as a proportion of the troubles of the world we seem willing truly to share, it’s apparently far too large.

No quarter can be given to the people coming to Britain fleeing terror, because that could encourage more of those people whose suffering we can’t bear to think of, because thinking of it simply reminds us that we’d rather not be reminded. Worse, extremists could be hidden among the refugees anyway, one such being the suspected terrorist Abdul Majid Touil

The sadness that is felt for the destruction of Unesco World Heritage sites is a sadness that’s uncomplicated by uncomfortable thoughts such as the idea that Syrians can’t be saved because the modern civilisation we have built in Europe is not one we want to share — even, tremendously much, with each other. Palmyra may belong to all of humanity, but Britain most certainly does not.

Grief for Palmyra is also grief for the idea of a shared human project, in which we all want the same things and are willing to achieve and share them together. Weeping for ancient pillars is painful, but less overwhelming than weeping for a world that humans seem bent on ruining, despite all the promise of creativity that exists among us.

Daesh no doubt sees that as decadent, unable to see that there’s nothing more decadent than a self-righteous death cult that values nothing but its own nihilism.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd, 2015