tribalism unbound
REPAIRING THE WORLD AT ITS SOURCE
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science
and International Law (Purdue University). He is author of many
books and articles dealing with international politics. His
columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington
Post, The Jerusalem Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press). This article was originally published
at 21
Global.
In the Introduction to his eccentric but still magisterial The
Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler acknowledges
the inspirational “philosophy of Goethe.” More precisely,
he thanks this most seminal of classical thinkers for what today
would be called his “existentialism.” This deeply
expressed gratitude references above all Goethe's undimmed awareness
that humanity must make its own future.
Always.
Indispensably,
we are reminded here that humankind “makes itself.”
But how shall we now best “operationalize” this
core understanding in the coming months and years? Can we in
any way improve our fragile planet's dwindling chances for both
security and prosperity?
The
question is by no means posed as a narrowly partisan query.
The most promising answers should have nothing to do with any
particular political party or ideology. Instead, these responses
must be shaped by a determinedly analytic effort. Moreover,
in view of the ultimate interrelatedness of all world politics,
this observation is relevant everywhere, in all countries, wherever
national leaders might also search for apt remedies to war,
terror, and broad civilizational decline.
Ultimately,
this means a greater and more open commitment to certain subtle
but still critical intersections of science and philosophy.
An antecedent question also surfaces. How does any nation empower
reason over “wizardry” when there is no recognizable
public interest in (or reward for) scientific dialectic and
truth? How shall we then proceed to “repair” the
world, an especially pressing question in light of a currently
retrograde and deformed US leadership?
One
promising answer may begin with an ancient fable: “The
fox knows many things,” said the Greek poet Archilochus,
“but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” When negotiating
the treacherous landscapes of world politics, in seeking more
promising outcomes (e.g., in North Korea, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, etc.), generality must take precedence over
particulars. But this obligation to see “one big thing”
is not altogether obvious. Still, in any science of policy,
foreign or domestic, generality-based knowledge represents the
irreducible core of all serious learning and meaning.
To
garner marketable attention, which is usually a blatantly transparent
matter of raw commerce, our current news chooses to focus on
various tantalizing but shallowly contextualized specifics.
What finally matters most, however, is something far more complex,
far more synergistic. This “something” is a consciously
cultivated capacity for the systematic identification of recurring
policy issues and problems. In the end, without fail, science
must invariably center itself on the continuous discovery of
pertinent regularities. Without such a focus, there is only
history.
Therein
lies a key problem in opposing the manifestly injurious “Trump
effect.” Inevitably, the flesh-and-blood facts concerning
war, revolution, riots, despotism, terrorism, and genocide are
more engagingly captivating to ordinary citizens than suitably
abstract theories. Yet, the real point of systematically locating
specific facts must always be a plausible and tangible improvement
of the “human condition.” In turn, any such search
for civilizational betterment must then be contingent on even
deeper forms of generalized human behaviour and individual personal
awareness. It is only by exploring the mass of individual cases
in world politics as closely intersecting parts of a much larger
class of cases, that our national leaders can ever hope to learn
something meaningfully predictive. While seemingly counter-intuitive,
it is only by deliberately seeking widely general explanations
that we can ever hope to “repair the world.” Only
by means of such a search can we ever hope for a more genuinely
cosmopolitan future.
It
is only by exploring the mass of individual cases in world politics
as closely intersecting parts of a much larger class of cases,
that our national leaders can ever hope to learn something meaningfully
predictive.
Today’s
global harms and instabilities, whether still simmering, or
already explosive, are still best understood as “symptoms”
of a more ubiquitous and consuming worldwide fragility. Accordingly,
it is unhelpful to our leaders that these symptoms should ever
be regarded as merely isolated, discrete, or in some way unique.
What are the fundamental or basic contours of such an unrelenting
general fragility? Can we ever really figure them out? Should
we even try?
One
reasonable answer concerns the seemingly irremediable incapacity
of human beings to find recoverable meaning and identity somewhere
within themselves. Typically, in a chaotic world politics, it
is something other than one's own irreducible Self (the state,
the movement, the class, the faith, etc.) that is held reverentially
as “sacred.” In consequence, our entire species
(not just the United States) remains stubbornly determined to
demarcate preferentially between “us” and “them,”
and then, always, to sustain a rigidly segmented “tribal”
universe. But without locating meaning and identity within themselves
as individual persons, human life everywhere becomes a vita
minima, an inherently corrupted existence that is grievously
emptied of all once-indispensable possibilities.
There
is more. In our perpetually fractionated universe, one where
becoming an individual is hindered by starkly demeaning entertainments
and ritualized formalizations of anti-reason, “non-members”
are conveniently designated as extraneous. The potentially fatal
end point of this twisted logic must surely be one form or another
of “tribal” extermination. It is this very same
lethal inclination that spawned both world wars and the Holocaust.
That is saying a great deal about tribalization in world politics.
Need anything more be said?
Nevertheless,
without a clear and persisting sense of an outsider, of an enemy,
of a suitably despised “other,” whole societies
would have felt insufferably lost in the “chaotic”
world. Drawing their necessary self-worth from membership in
the state or the faith or the race—from what Freud, following
Nietzsche's “herd,” had called the “horde”—such
dehumanized humans could never have reasonably hoped to satisfy
even the most elementary requirements of world peace and human
coexistence.
More
precisely, in this connection, any long hoped for visions of
“world government” or “world order”
never stood a serious chance as long as individual humans continued
to insist upon the absolute primacy of “membership.”
In principle, of course, it would seem evident that any such
insistence might still be satisfied by some negotiable transfer
of individual human loyalties to still wider circles of political
authority. In fact, however, there is precious little or no
tangible evidence that human beings can ever discover enough
satisfying exclusivity in somehow claiming membership as “citizens
of the world.”
Hence,
“America First” and equivalently corrosive slogans
elsewhere.
Truly
key questions about Iraq, Syria, Iran, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc.,
have absolutely nothing to do with counter-insurgency operations,
or with prospectively expanding American “boots on the
ground.” These are merely crude tactical considerations;
in the language of science and philosophy they are only epiphenomenal.
Accordingly, until the deeply underlying axes of conflict between
human “tribes” are finally understood, all of our
current and future war policies will remain largely beside the
point.
Violence
is never the same as power. If this point is not understood
soon, we will suffer even greater losses in certain expanding
war zones, and without any meaningful recompense.
All
things considered, hope exists, to be sure, but now it must
sing softly, in a tentative undertone. We must all first learn
to pay more rapt attention to deeply personal feelings of empathy,
anxiety, restlessness and desperation. While private human feelings
still remain unacknowledged as formidable hidden elements of
a wider and safer world politics, they are largely determinative
for international relations. Instead of embarrassingly retrograde
affirmations of a Darwinian zero-sum orientation to world affairs,
we must now learn to understand that the manifest “whole”
of global civilization can never be any greater than the aggregate
sum total of its human “parts.” In the end, what
Freud had prescribed for all human societies—a prescription
necessarily prior to creating any more helpfully humane world
order—was a “spontaneous sympathy,” a palpably
“feeling response” of one human soul for another.
While
private human feelings still remain unacknowledged as formidable
hidden elements of a wider and safer world politics, they are
largely determinative for international relations.
To
survive together, which is the only truly durable form of human
survival, the fragmented residents of this planet must finally
learn to discover an authentic and genuinely stable human existence—above
all, one that is detached from all traditionally concocted and
ultimately deadly “tribal” distinctions. This demands
an altogether fresh awareness of global interdependence and
human “oneness.” It is only in the vital expressions
of a thoroughly re-awakened human spirit that Americans can
ever learn to recognize what is most important for national
and global survival; that is, that private agony is ultimately
more predictive than macro-economics.
Beware,
warned the poet Bertolt Brecht: “The man who laughs has
simply not yet heard the horrible news.”
To
usefully improve our future foreign policies, to avoid our recurring
global misfortunes, indeed, to merely survive the Trump Era,
America (but not only America) must learn to look much more
insightfully ‘behind the news.’ In so doing, we
could finally acknowledge that the root explanations for war,
riots, revolution, despotism, terrorism and genocide are never
discoverable in plainly parasitic political institutions, or,
as corollary, in thoroughly barren political ideologies. Instead,
these core explanations lie more or less hidden, dormant, but
still promisingly latent, in the timeless personal cries of
individuals. Only when we can meet these critically underlying
human needs can we ever hope to improve the world system as
a whole.
“In
the end,” reminds Goethe, “we still depend upon
creatures of our own making.”
