I have been watching the transcendentally fantastic Shogun on the box. In this tragic drama, set wonderfully and authentically in the 1600’s Japan, various factions (daimos) vie for absolute power and wealth, while ordinary folk are decimated and used as fodder for their leaders’ imperial aspirations. I recommend it as simply brilliant, though violent and brutal and overly suicidal. It’s so wonderfully rendered and acted and shot, with such a great story and near perfect ending, that it lingers long in one’s imagination after all it’s novelesque episodes are long over. Speaking of novels, James Clavell‘s novel, on which Shogun is based, is equally absorbing. It’s one of six epic door-stoppers (Shogun, Tai-pan, King Rat, Nobel House , Gai-Jin, and Whirlwind). Clavell mostly wrote on Japanese history and culture, and there’s a wealth of history, spirituality and culture embedded therein.

After that eastward journeying, one can ‘go west’, young man/woman/person, and watch The Sopranos re runs. In this gem of a show various members of organized crime groups vie for power and wealth in New York and New Jersey while cosa nostra groups are dispatched in various gruesome ways. Speaking of western power struggles Succession is another fantastic show: less blood, more psychic horror. Its a a black comedy drama so close to real life that it actually influenced certain legal moves made by the Murdoch family members in their real life succession struggles. In Succession, members of a Media mogul’s immediate family vie for power over a vast media empire while destroying each other with a breathtaking casual cruelty. Speaking of destruction, in Breaking Bad, one of the greatest shows ever made, an underachiving high school chemistry teacher with a 160 IQ murders his way to the top of the New Mexico meth trade. Incidentally Walter White, the chemistry teacher protagonist only begins to cook meth because of the rapacious US Health Insurance Industry, who would never cover the costs of his lung cancer diagnosis. This is tragically ironic considering the recent real-life killing of chief Executive of United Health Care, Brian Thompson. No motive has yet been established for this slaying, but bullets found were etched with the words ‘delay, deny, defend‘ in the possession of the person charged, who is now a kind of celebrity killer in waiting, and apparently terribly handsome. I have to say I don’t see it.

Switch over to the News and see how Bashir al Hassad, a monster of epic proportions, among the many monsters of epic proportions alive and well on Earth, has fled to Russia with his family lest he be dispatched for his industrial scale mass slaughter and torture over the last fifteen years. Speaking of mass slaughter, we have the situation in Ukraine or Palestine – another series of wars among the many happening in any given year. Art and life tend to reflect each other, in fascinating ways n’est pas? There are so many stories, novels, movies, comics, TV Shows – about wars and killing in particular, it gives one pause. Killing people is apparently easy, and apparently fun too, and seems to fix our problems with bad people easily. ‘Pull that trigger, boy, and bring Dad back, eh?’

Moving on, have you seen, for instance, Deadpool, Death Wish, or Dirty Harry? Everyone has, pretty much. Here we have well written likable and complex heroes excellently acted, all portraying, well, serial killers really, and all executing ‘bad guys’ in the name of the law, or murder moralised as justified homicide, or as codes of honour, or justified revenge for terrible pain inflicted. Try John Wick for instance – an awesome movie series with a phenomenal body count that all began because a gift from John’s then dead wife, a puppy, was killed by scumbag intruders.

A theory floating recently round in the ether, probably from the dramedy show Mr Inbetween, which I elsewhere eulogize, is that WWII is a case of justified violence. Well, Hitler had to be stopped, absolutely, but did it end the war? Really? Didn’t it morph into the Cold War? It is said the cold war ended in the 80’s, but that’s questionable. Firstly isn’t the Cold War or the nuclear threat something still omnipresent and even more terrifying than non nuclear war? Secondly, let’s be clear on this: all psychopathic racist monsters need to be stopped, but then there’s the little matter of people like Joe Stalin, another charmer just like Der Furher, who, along with the Allies, helped stop dear old Adolph, may his name forever be held in infamy. Stalin killed 20 (Montefiore) million of his own people, a ridiculously gobsmacking number, and he ‘won’ the war, atom bomb no no atom bomb, on Japan (a much debated issue, freely admitted). Then there’s Chairman Mao, in China, who killed 80 million of his own people. Comparisons are odious, but World War 2 for instance, caused 75 million deaths, and paved the way for the nuclear age. For a chilling expose on near total nuclear annihilation via epic screw-ups during the Cold War try Command and Control, by Eric Schlosser, another tome to keep one up at night. One way or the other, the corpses keep on piling up as war follows war follows another act of genocide. Who stopped Mao, or Stalin, or Pol Pot, or other war criminals? Er, no one. They died peacefully of natural causes: stroke, heart attack or old age. The list of such charmers who died of natural causes is somewhat unsettling. Authoritarianism is seemingly a viable career choice if you are a human being, even though all empires, even ones upon which the sun never sets, all in the end, dissolve, and disappear. Rinse and repeat, so it seems.

Thinking about just another case of history repeating itself, if one wants a really graphic account of genocide, theres Goldhagen‘s Worse Than War which is a nightmare-inducing forensic account of Genocide, Eliminationism, and the myriad creative ways we snuff each other out. Since the dawn of humanity we have been killing each other, acording to Yuval Noah Harari in the excellent and thoughtful Sapiens. In fact, according to Harari originally there were Neantherthals, Denisovans and other species of proto humans floating around the planet 100,000 years ago. Harari postulates that early Homo Sapiens gradually wiped them out, which is why we have no genetic cousins, except chimps maybe, to take tea with every Tuesday after choir practise. We should, I think, be more welcoming to our relatives. Joking aside, we are good at killing, excellent actually. I mean we were so good at hunting and killing that we got groupies from other species. Humans started to get followed round by wolves about 30,000 years ago, for many reasons. We had lots of yummy leftovers from our hunting, and also, nobody messed with Homo Sapiens, except maybe other Homo Sapiens, whom human apex predators killed with great skill. Canis Lupus is about 99% genetically similar to canis familaris, in other words Fluffy, the family pooch who licks and snuggles your baby when he or she cries, or fetches the newspaper, or a copy of War and Peace for Grandma, or climbs onto the couch when we watch the TV, is very, very like those howling packs we hear at night when out camping in the forests far from our burgeoning megacities. Back in the day, thirty millennia ago give or take, those were huge animals those wolves, much bigger than the wolves of today, faster, stronger, more ruthless. In other words we were such good predators that other bigger, stronger, faster, furrier predators became our pets. Why? Because it was an easier source of food and they felt safer with us than other species. Friendship with the bully is a really safe bet evolutionarily speaking, especially if comparatively speaking said bully has an IQ the size of Long Island comparatively and could kill you in a dozen delightful ways. Now thats really interesting and scary too. We are badass, and history has shown that’s not such a good thing to be so badass. Try ICBMs or Shogun, for instance. It could all end in tears, possibly.

Alpha predators, ironically, don’t last long. They’re so good at killing that they got to be dirt napped, for safety’s sake if nothing else. Gifted killers are a societal liability and a danger to other species, even their own. Nobody of whatever species likes to live near a creature that might eat them, their children, or their relatives, or just kill you off because they can. For us, meaning humans, creatures flee when they see us. We are worse than anything ever experienced before. Wolves, the creatures who befriended us and we turned into pets, were otherwise hunted to extinction in areas – to such an extent that they had to be re introduced. Dinosaurs died because of the ice age, so they say, but humans and other species were rather good at killing them too, lets not forget. Every Godzilla movie ever made is about humans deploying technology to eliminate the super dinosaur. Predator is not really a movie about aliens killing for sport, its more about the objectification of what humans are best at – killing off the opposition, just for kicks. Arnie kills the alien predator in the movie. Now he’s top dog. Other big toothed serial killers got eaten or died alone on some savannah, starved to death from their usual prey evading and escaping them. Being a killer is a liability. Kill or be killed is a zero sum game. Invariably someone tries or succeeds in killing them, or worse, they die off.

For us, its different. Right now our planet is starved of predators – except one. As Agent Smith in the Matrix movie says while he is torturing Morpheus: “Human beings are a disease, and we are the cure.” We have no predators left, save heart disease and cancer and our own self-annihilating tendencies, and we are spreading across the planet to such an extent that Earth’s climate is being destroyed and we will soon run out of food, resources, and space. We are looking to kick off this planet and colonise elsewhere. We are back to Zero Sum Games (yep, I just put capitals, right there). In chess, for instance (one of our most popular games) what happens after you kill the king? Play another game, of course, and when you do – it all starts over again. Killing is winning, that’s the trick. In chess as in war, its time to die or kill the other king, which is why it’s the game of choice of empire builders. There’s another more boring less adrenaline pumping game we could play: making friends with your neighbour and being prepared to share and share alike. This is entirely another question.

In the very fictional future Star Trek, Captains Pike and later Kirk went out to seek out new life and new civilization – not to conquer but to befriend. The idea (laughed at now considering franchises of the show garbaged the idea by insinuating war and conflict was some kind of act of self-realization) being that humanity had actually evolved beyond the insanity of war and had sought friendship with other species. This central idea of non-interfernce with other cultures and solidarity and friendships with what was known as the United Federation of Planets, was one of the main selling points of the show and acted as an inspiration and counterpoint to the insanity of the cold war. The show became an unexpected massive worldwide hit. People identified with this aspiration, it’s philosophical underpinnings, its desire to heal the broken bonds of human and non-human relationships, the need to stop hunting animals, and the desire for us all to live peacefully. I will pass over in silence the later series, some of whom work well, others who are simply antithetical to Star Trek philosophy.

Which leads us right back to the idea of us as hunter killers. This planet, the only astronomical object we are sure has life (wiki), this home we are living on, is apparently being eaten alive. Animals are being subjected to genocide, not to mention our human brothers and sisters and others. It’s an unsustainable way of being in this world. We are facing a mass-extinction event from war, from climate change, or from the amount of garbage we are rapidly accumulating.

So, anyway this is what I really was getting at all along. This is the punchline. I keep thinking of the Emperor Penguin, one of my favourite beings with whom I share this beautiful blue ball we all live upon. They, dying off from climate change, live on the South Pole, and they survive temperatures of minus seventy degrees down there by doing one thing. They cuddle, or as the biologists like to put it, they huddle. I saw them do this on a documentary program about our relationship with dogs. The only way the penguins can survive is by doing this. If they don’t huddle, they freeze and their children die. I see them. Hundreds . There is something there, warm in the dark, as night draws on, and we alone, hurtling through the infinite darkness of space…