Currently we’re watching an epic, but all-too-familiar, battle between good and evil, as an aging, paranoid, and apparently unhinged autocrat attempts to subsume a neighboring state that has in recent years shown disturbing signs of achieving democracy. His instrument for achieving this has been the brute force of armored columns and artillery, bombs, guided missiles, and aircraft. The image that such an advance conjures is of a Disney giant clad in leopardskin waving a great sledgehammer as he tramples over the land. His object is the destruction of the victims’ will to resist and their grudging, but complete, acquiescence in ceding what he desires. We, like spectators at a football game, root for our favorite, usually the underdog (it's an American tradition) – the current extent (in this case, lest we repeat history) of our overt military involvement.

It’s becoming apparent, according to recent media reports, that Russian armored forces in retreat before the unexpectedly effective Ukrainian defense and counterattacks, have been seeding the ground behind them with land mines (another tradition) and committing atrocities on civilians. The town of Bucha, where bodies of civilians with hands bound behind their backs have been left lying in the streets, is a particularly horrific example. The Russians appear to be murderous losers.

The description often applied to scenes like those in Bucha is “Man's Inhumanity to Man.” I find that far too gentle; it permits the rest of us to cluck our tongues, shake our heads, and suppose ourselves superior to the brutes who commit such crimes. That’s a deadly fantasy. As Pogo once famously remarked, channeling Commodore Perry, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The title might more appropriately be “Grisly Evidence of Humanity Run Amok.”

Consider a few of the acts of honest, upstanding, righteous Americans since we arrived here. The native Americans were systematically stripped of their land and livelihood and sequestered on property nobody else wanted (until gold was illegally discovered in the Black Hills). American loyalists were hounded, murdered, or chased away by “patriots.” Slavery (just the word will do). The slaughter of Black soldiers at the Battle of the Crater and Fort Pillow. Wounded Knee. Jim Crow; lynchings. Eugenics. The Ludlow Massacre. In our own times, the immolation of Dresden and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And these are but a few examples of our humanity.

Looking at the photographs of the destruction of Ukrainian hospitals, schools, and apartment houses – not to mention the miles of burnt Russian armor and dead soldiers scattered about and left behind – it's hard not to think of them as monuments to stupidity, instead of inhumanity. How can all this appalling waste of resources, and damage to civic infrastructure, possibly be worth the goals attributed to, as far as we know, one elderly man with obvious personal problems?

In a larger sense, what sense is there in any of the wreckage with which we are constantly surrounding ourselves? It's fashionable – de rigueur, even – to quote well-known thinkers and leaders in search of wisdom. But I think of two humbler examples more appropriate in responding to the current rush of Homo sapiens toward self-extinction. One is John Lennon, whose “Imagine” ought to be hung on the wall of the United States Senate chamber. The other is poor old Rodney King, who lived and died hard, but left us with, “Can we all get along?”

Whoever created the myth of fallen humanity in Genesis was spot on. But the clerics who insist that Adam and Eve's mistake is the “original sin” have it all wrong. We're still at it, more powerfully and dangerously than ever. But it's not sin. It's stupidity.