Rant: our collective hubris and ignorance

I hope everyone is doing well in this our latest lockdown! Word is that there's going to be a Melbourne curfew announced soon. To what effect, I don't know. Unless data from COVID cases indicate that the virus is infinitely more virulent and contagious at night??!! The marginal benefit of a curfew over and above a 5km lockdown seem minimal to me.

Moving onto the rest of the world's sad news. I woke up this morning listening to reporters talking about the pandemonium at Kabul airport. Awful, awful, awful. Can you imagine burning all your files and deleting everything off your laptop and getting ready to evacuate (as embassy personnel) and seeing all the locals on the airstrip who you know may never make it out of the city because there are no commercial flights operating out of Kabul right now?

Of course here in Australia it doesn't feel like we're the losing side of a war right now, which is weird because we did send people over even if they weren't necessarily all deployed to the frontlines. I don't like war, but it seems weird that we can fight one without even feeling like we're in one. We are so far removed (and oddly desensitised) from casualties in that region, and our general understanding of that region of the world (how much do we even know about Afghanistan, it's culture, history and religion?) is so poor that it feels almost irresponsible. 

Western media is currently lamenting our intelligence gap because apparently we're all shocked that the Taliban were able to re-take Kabul so quickly. But underestimating the things we don't understand is pretty much the hallmark of western imperialism, which funnels down to our general arrogance. For so long western history has celebrated the ingenuity of European colonialism as something almost like intrinsic intelligence, from the right - dubbed racial superiority, from the more moderate left - probably something like economic foresight and luck. But I can't help but think that our history and pride is built on a partial track record of men with hubris and aggression, only recording the events where they won.

Of course most countries do this. Japan does this incredibly. I'm not trying to act shocked by what has been the status quo for millions of years - the victors write history of course. But if you're choosing to ignore half of history, then you're only learning from half the wisdom it can offer.