Based on a slew
of mineral rights and land claim victories during the past
50 years, the former occupiers of entire continents (the
Americas, Australia), First Nations people, are sitting
pretty. Even though they were unable to defend territories
once under their possession, they have rather brilliantly
rewritten the rules of the game so that territory once theirs
(once were warriors), has been returned to them, which implies
that it is theirs forever, since, as they cogently argue,
they were the original occupiers.
Nota bene:
Any astrologer worth his wage knows not to leave himself
short of the ‘reversal of fortune’ card.
The great enablers
are the political establishment and its minions looking
to win votes and score points with the big G. in the sky.
Having been sold hoodwinked-line-and-sinker on a twisted
notion of moral rectitude, the land and rights forfeiters
have pleaded nolo contendere (no contest) to the
charge that it was illegal and immoral to have waged war
and dispossessed First Nations of their land.
Among the big
losers in this epochal reset is Christopher Columbus, who
for half a millennium was universally revered as an intrepid
explorer and discoverer of the Americas. In the nation’s
classrooms he’s now portrayed as a brute, his statues
have been toppled and defaced, forcing the conclusion that
decommissioning valuable art works is a small price to pay
when it comes to doing the right thing: signing appease
treaties with the new winners on the block – the erstwhile
defeated.
This flummoxing
reversal in fortune must ‘rank’ (a word also
employed as an adjective) as one of the great political
coups in the history of mankind. The losers of entire continents
have somehow managed to instill in their conquerors sufficient
guilt and shame such that the latter are now voluntarily
returning long-held lands and rights to the original occupiers.
Which begs the question: what is the point of winning if
you have to forgo the victory? What does evolutionary fitness
mean if the fit are denied the compensations and ranking
attendant to fitness?
In athletic
competitions, the very best are universally applauded and
rewarded for being the best. The runner, the sprinter who
finishes dead last is for all intents and purposes dead
at the finish line – that is forgotten. However heartbreaking
is his disappointment, no one would think of declaring him
winner as a feel good gesture.
For most of
man’s history, superior strength, intelligence and
especially weaponry determined a group’s fitness.
Females, wanting what was best for future offspring, instinctively
offered their eggs to the alpha male. Back then, there
was no confusing the winners from the losers,
and everyone stood to gain by those distinctions.
Be as it may
that in the present age the twin plagues of relativism and
the political correctness are blurring the distinction between
the fit and unfit, it would be a mistake to view this development
as outcome of modern thought. The philosopher Nietzsche
points out that this perversion of the natural order dates
back to Christianity, and in particular the 11th century
with the raising of the effete, sterile priestly class to
pre-eminence. In this new configuration, the Omegas became
the venerated while the Alphas, the manly men, the propagators
of the race, were recast as degenerate savages. “This
systematized disfiguring and castration of life is counted
holy, inviolable . . . . the worst mutilation of man that
can be imagined presented as ‘the good man.”
acidulates Nietzsche in The Will to Power.
More of the
same is happening on our watch. Now that First Nations --
empowerment's favourite poster people -- are auto-invited
to the world’s most prestigious political and economic
forums, a development that de facto transmutes
abject defeat into a trifling footnote of history, it's
only a matter of time before the battle cry to "level
the playing" field turns into a tyranny.
Yes. Victimization
works. In 2021, the federal government gifted more than
3.5 billion dollars to Canada’s aboriginals. The presumed
winners, hamstrung (impotentized) by political correctness
and therefore guilty as charged, in the spirit of absolution
are voluntarily ceding powers and privileges to a people
whom they assumed they had decimated. “There are strange
things done under the midnight sun,” writes Robert
Service, a Canadian poet who opted for the tough love and
law of the Yukon. Meanwhile, the once undisputed victorious
are being reprogrammed to honour the losers of entire continents
and to self-flagellate on their way to the many contrition
centers that are popping up like mushrooms after a hot rain.
If the winner
lacks the will (the intelligence) to esteem his victories,
to elect those exceptional attributes and qualities that
enabled him prevail over all the others, isn’t he
announcing under no uncertain terms that he is no longer
fit for the winner’s circle? Would we rather the elite
perform our vital medical surgeries, or, in the spirit of
fairness, should all cultures and ethnicities have equal
access to the scalpel? Who should we want in the cockpits
of our planes at 35,000 feet? Those who flunked Aviation
101?
If we are to
disentangle this confusion of values, it is essential that
we subscribe to and abide by the easily discernible objective
criteria that determine to whom belongs an occupied land.
Since it is in everybody’s interest to know if we
are indeed the monsters First Nations make us out to be,
if Columbus, alleged gencocider,
is guilty as charged, we will want to clarify a pecking
order of rights in respect to made-made laws that legitimize
land ownership vis á vis natural law.
Let us hypothesize
a successful lunar landing by Team-A and the subsequent
establishment of a permanent moon colony. Since they are
the first to arrive and settle there, no one would dispute
that the portion of the moon they occupy isn’t theirs.
Earthlings can insist that the moon be divvied up among
the nations of the world, but as a practical matter it belongs
to Team-A because they are there and the earthlings are
not.
A century later,
Team-B lands on another area of the moon and establishes
a colony. When Team-A learns of Team-B’s arrival,
they issue a warning that as first occupiers the moon belongs
to them and orders them to return to earth, but as a practical
consideration the land occupied by Team–B belongs
to them because they are there and Team-A isn’t, while
the rest of the moon remains up for grabs.
Let us now hypothesize
on earth a major increase in demand for the element of lithium
to power electric vehicles and to keep in check a philosophical
malaise that has rendered ¾ of earth’s adult
population manic-depressive.
As it so happens,
there are significant deposits of lithium on Team-A’s
territory, but they lack the technical know-how to mine
the element, a deficit the civilizationally more advanced
Team-B is able to supply. So in consideration of the demand
on earth and its superior technology, Team-B invades Team-A
and easily dispossesses them of their territory. Team–A
can cry to Jupiter’s moon that as first occupier the
land is theirs, and that would include all art and artifacts,
but until they can repossess what they lost it belongs to
Team-B. In other words, the spoils of war go to the victor.
That is how it has always been – until recently.
Among the first
beneficiaries of the war are the earthlings, now assured
of their daily lithium fix. It would constitute pure folly
if earthlings, who depend on lithium, were to allow themselves
to be convinced that the land currently held by Team-B should
be returned to Team-A because the latter were the first
occupiers.
Notwithstanding
the brilliant minds and wordsmiths that formulate our constitutions,
legal documents and Bill of Rights which appeal to our better
angels, we cannot rewrite who we are, which is measured
not by the words we speak but our actions and the gene sequences
that underwrite them.
Implicit in
every nation’s founding principle is the dictum: “We
have the right to be here because we are here and you are
not.”
In the Americas
and Australia, First Nations were unable to defend their
continents. An advanced military culture prevailed over
a more primitive one, and that outcome, in its decisiveness,
perfectly illustrates the method and objective of evolutionary
biology. To reverse the winner-loser result through decree
or a patently false narrative is to elevate mediocrity,
a sure formula for setting any species on its way to extinction.
Which isn’t
to say that there may not come a day when man will be able
to rewrite his genotype so that reason will be allowed a
seat at the table when negotiating territorial disputes.
But until that happens, we look to the territorial imperative’s
most consummate ambassador, Russia’s Vladimir Putin,
whose understanding of it is indistinguishable from the
manner in which it operates through him, which is why the
sum of world law and jurisprudence collapsed like a house
of cards when he decided to dispossess Ukraine of Crimea,
and more recently, set his aims on Ukraine proper.
But Putin, however
evil (that is instinctual) is not sui generis.
He is simply the imperative’s current tool of choice,
and when he is no longer with us, there will be someone
else, and again someone else, until we finally figure out
how to decommission our hard-wired obsession with territory,
if indeed we decide that such a decision will better serve
the species.
However lethal
and demeaning to the race is the primordial urge to amass,
occupy and defend territory, it could very well be that
this blind force is elemental to life everywhere in the
universe, that the brute we see reflected in the mirror
is in fact an ascendant creature, and the blood count left
in the wake of life forms fighting for top ranking is what
best guarantees the advancement of civilizations and the
evolution of species.
From caves to
castles to computation, man’s progress remains unchecked.
What we hope for today is more often than not a sure thing
for tomorrow, so long as we recognize that our fondest hopes
for the future are best served through contest and conflict,
an unforgiving, ruthless binary (we win, you lose) that
nonetheless vouchsafes the best shall prevail.
