If They Came

I want to try something with you. Imagine that tomorrow, the whole species was visited.

Not invaded, though it would certainly feel that way at first. Not threatened. Visited — by a civilization from somewhere else in the galaxy, older than we are, wiser than we are, sober in the way that very old wise things are sober. Imagine that they had been watching us for a while, and that what they saw, when they looked, was a species of extraordinary intelligence and creativity and love that had built itself into a trap — nations fully capable of ending themselves, with no one above the nations. Imagine that they had decided, after long deliberation, that they could not stand by and watch the ending. That the impact on the solar system, if we drove ourselves off the nuclear cliff, was more than they were willing to accept. That they had, in the way of such civilizations, a certain responsibility toward a neighbor about to fall.

Imagine that they came. Not with weapons pointed at us, but with a polite, overwhelming capacity to say no. Imagine they said, more or less: We are going to be here for a while. We are not here to colonize you. We are not here to take your resources. We are not here to tell you how to live. We are only here to hold a line. The line is this: no nation may make war on another nation while we are here. That is our single rule. You may do everything else you have been doing. We will not enter your elections, or your religions, or your markets, or your homes. But if you try to launch an army, or a missile, or a bomber, at another people, we will stop you. And our powers are much greater than yours.

Sit with this for a moment, because I think if you let yourself, you will notice something.

At first, your system would flood with fear. The sovereignty of your country is being overridden. Something bigger than you is deciding something for you. The conditioning of your whole life — which is the conditioning of every human life for the last five thousand years — would rebel. You would be terrified.

And then, if you let a little more time pass, something else would begin to happen underneath the fear. Notice it, because this is the thing I want you to feel.

You would begin to breathe.

The low thrum you have been carrying in your nervous system — the one you barely know is there, the one that sits beneath all the ordinary worries of your life, the one that is the ambient hum of a species living under Mutually Assured Destruction — would loosen. Some very deep part of you would register that the worst thing was not going to happen. Not tomorrow. Not this year. Not this decade. The thing you have been holding against, without knowing you were holding against it, would be held, for once, by something other than you.

And because that one fear had been put to rest, you would find — perhaps to your surprise — that you had far more capacity for the rest of your life than you had realized. The ordinary business of being human, which is already plenty, would feel closer to being the whole of the thing. The ordinary troubles of your actual day — sickness, relationships, money, meaning — would still be there, but they would no longer be playing out against the silent background drone of and any moment the world could end.

Can you feel it? Even as a thought experiment — can you feel what your body does when it imagines that one fear lifted?

That is what the fulfillment of the sovereignty instinct at the planetary scale would feel like. Not tyranny. Not the loss of anything that matters. The end of one specific fear. The end of the specific fear.

In the thought experiment, after perhaps ten years of holding the line, the visitors would have satisfied themselves that we had learned — that we had built, among ourselves, a sovereign above the nations that could do for us what they had been doing. And then they would leave. And the peace would be ours to keep or to lose, with all the fragility that any human peace carries. But we would have felt it. We would know, for the rest of our lives, what the other thing had felt like. That memory is not nothing. For a species that has never felt this, even a decade of that memory would change us.

But we do not have such benevolent visitors. What we have, instead, is closer to a room full of terrified, armed toddlers — each watching the others with vigilant suspicion — and no one above them whose job it is to keep the peace. There is no adult in the room.

But we do have a letter.