Tears, humanity and history.

Or what the Ukrainian crisis tells us about our own morality.

This morning I logged onto Twitter and wept. For days I had been doom-scrolling the crisis in Ukraine with a growing sense of disbelief and despair. Disbelief that this could be happening again in Europe after 77 years of peace, and despair about my ability to make a difference.

The trigger was a Russian soldier’s message to his mother describing the desperate attempts by Ukrainian civilians to halt the Russian advance on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. At time of writing, the texts, which were obtained by Ukrainian intelligence and read out on the floor of the United Nations on Monday, have not been verified, but to my weary eyes they looked heart-breakingly authentic (you can read the texts here and judge for yourself).

It was the unnamed soldier’s final text, allegedly written “moments” before he was killed, that got to me:

“They are falling under our armoured vehicles, throwing themselves under the wheels and not allowing us to pass. They call us fascists, mama. This is so hard.”

It is hard for us to follow orders when everything in our experience tell us those orders are wrong, and even harder when those orders violate our sense that we are fundamentally “decent” human beings .Yet from the mutual slaughter of the First World War to Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the wars in Bosnia and now Ukraine, history is full of examples that contradict the notion that we are moral beings and that civilization is a story of moral progress.

Instead, at times such as these, it is easy to feel that history is heading in the wrong direction, that we are on a path back to the Gulag and the concentration camp.

The reason I became a journalist and, subsequently, a historian, is that I hoped that by bearing witness to important events and understanding their contexts and causes I could help make a difference. But if the coronavirus pandemic has taught me anything it is that politicians and those in positions to actually make a difference pay little heed to what journalists or historians have to say. Nor, to judge by the British Prime Minister’s recent decision to ignore the advice of his expert advisors on SAGE and lift the UK’s remaining coronavirus restrictions, do they have much time for scientists either.

This rejection of expertise in all its forms helps explain why no sooner we exit one crisis than we lurch into another. But, as I explain in my book, this is not simply a matter of expertise but of being prepared to interrogate and challenge claims to expertise and think outside the box. Thus, on the very day that Boris Johnson declared “freedom” from the coronavirus restrictions, signalling that as far as his administration was concerned the pandemic was over, Vladimir Putin ordered his troops and tanks into the Ukraine, contradicting military and diplomatic experts who had just assured us he was massing his forces on Ukraine’s border in order to enhance his negotiating position and had no intention of provoking a war in Europe.

That was a mere five days ago. Today, to believe the feverish reports from the front line, Russia has unleashed thermobaric missiles – so-called “vacuum” bombs that cause devastating pressure waves that rupture the lungs of innocent bystanders – and has also bombed Kyiv’s TV tower next to the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial where in 1941 some 34,000 Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. In the light of this, Putin’s threat to deploy nuclear weapons by mobilising his “deterrence forces”, no longer looks as unlikely as before.

A bomb hits Kyiv's TV tower in the same park where the Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial is located

Such disregard for international law and humanitarian conventions challenges the belief that there is such a thing as a higher moral law or that we, as human beings, have evolved a suite of emotional responses that regulate our behaviour towards others and which can be counted on in times of moral jeopardy. Instead, it as if we have been thrown back into a Nietzschean nightmare, the “great spectacle” Neitzsche envisaged in On the Genealogy of Morals in which morality perishes and is supplanted by the “will to truth”.

According to the moral philosopher Jonathan Glover there are two responses to this: either we can appeal to peoples’ self-interest and hope that rationality and common sense will eventually prevail, or we can look to what he calls our “moral resources”. These, he argues in Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, are a surer bulwark against acts of atrocity and cruelty than vague notions of “moral identity” – the idea that we are not the sort of people who would do atrocious things when, to judge by the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, we patently are.

Instead, he argues we need to cultivate our moral imaginations and cage the monsters within us by cultivating the distinctive psychological responses that define us as social and moral beings: namely, sympathy for others and the recognition that human dignity is an end in itself.

Nor should we give up on history: instead, Glover argues we need to bring morality and history together by grounding our idea of what traits are good or bad on an empirical understanding of people and what great atrocities tell us about human psychology.

We do not know what prompted the unnamed Russian soldier to question the story he had been fed. Perhaps, being called a “fascist” violated his moral identity, or perhaps he was the sort of person who had always looked out for others and could not bring himself to shoot innocent civilians whose behaviour made him ashamed of his uniform and what it represented.

But I take comfort in the thought that by studying what caused him to hesitate, we may all learn to be become better human beings – and, in my case, perhaps a better historian too.