There is more.
While certain enemies accept the zero-sum linkages between
power and survival, others do not. Although this may suggest
that some states stand on an enviably higher moral plane than
their enemies, it may also place the high-minded or virtuous
state at a security disadvantage, one that will make it too
difficult to “remain standing.” This disturbingly
consequential asymmetry between state enemies may be addressed
by reducing certain adversarial emphases on power-survival
connections, and/or by increasing enemy emphases on power-survival
connections.
Questions must
be asked. Must a state ultimately become barbarous in order
to endure? Must it “learn” to identify true power
with survival over others, a predatory species survival that
cannot abide the survival of enemies?
Prima facie,
what is required is not a replication of enemy leadership
crimes, but policies that finally recognize death-avoidance
as the essential starting point for national security and
national defense. With such recognition, visceral hostility
and existential threat could be rejected in toto, and an altogether
new ethos – one based on a firm commitment to “remain
standing” at all costs – could be implemented.
A RETROGRADE NOTION
Core changes are
necessary. All must finally rid themselves of the retrograde
notion that killing another can confer immunity from personal
mortality. In his Will Therapy and Truth and Reality, psychologist
Otto Rank affirms: “The death fear of the ego is lessened
by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death
of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being
killed.” What is being described here is still the greatest
form of power discoverable anywhere: power over death. Americans
and other residents of a deeply interconnected planet have
a right to expect that any president of the United States
or major world leader would attempt to understand these complex
linkages.
At a minimum,
all of our national policies must build upon more genuinely
intellectual and scientific sorts of understanding.
Always, our “just
wars,” counter-terrorism conflicts and anti-genocide
programs must be fought or conducted as intricate contests
of mind over mind, and not just as narrowly tactical struggles
of mind over matter.
Only a dual awareness
of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated
futility of sacrificial violence, can offer an accessible
“medicine” against foreseeable adversaries in
the global “state of nature.” Only this difficult
awareness can we relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending
Hobbesian war of “all against all.”
More than ever
before, history deserves reasonable pride of place. The United
States, America’s current president should recall, was
founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion of
Calvin. Nonetheless, this means something very different in
2021 than it did back in 1787.
What should this
particular history now signify for American foreign policy
preparation? This is not an insignificant query, but it does
presuppose an American democracy founded upon authentic learning,
not (recalling the Trump presidency) on flippantly corrosive
clichés or abundantly empty witticisms. In this connection,
individual human death fear has much to do with a better understanding
of America’s national security prospects. Only a people
who can feel deeply within itself the unalterable fate and
suffering of a broader global population will ever be able
to decently embrace compassion, coexistence and empathy.
In the end, a
“triumph of death” in one form or another is irresistible
and inevitable, and attempts to avoid death by killing certain
“despised others” are both futile and inglorious.
Going forward, therefore, it is high time for new and more
creative thinking about global security and human immortality.
Instead of simply denying death, a cowardly and potentially
corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labeled “wish fulfillment”
in The Future of an Illusion (1927), we must finally acknowledge
the obvious, and view it as a too-long-overlooked blessing.
Ultimately, with such an eleventh-hour acknowledgment, all
people and all nations on this endangered planet could begin
to think more insightfully about our immutably common destiny.
In turn, this means using an always-overriding human commonality
as the secure basis for expanding empathy and worldwide cooperation.
RETREAT FROM REALPOLITIK
This is a visionary
and fanciful prescription, one rather unlikely to be grasped
in time. But there is still a plausible way to begin. This
way would require the leaders of all major states to recognize
that they are not in any meaningful way “world powers”
(all are equally “mortal;” none have any verifiable
“power over death”) and that a coordinated retreat
from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition would
now be self-interested.
There are other
considerations. The primary planetary survival task is a markedly
intellectual one, but unprecedented human courage will also
be needed. For the required national leadership initiatives,
we could have no good reason to ever expect the arrival of
a Platonic philosopher-king; still, even some ordinary political
leaders could conceivably prove themselves up to the extraordinary
task at hand. For this to happen, enlightened citizens of
all countries must first cast aside all historically discredited
ways of thinking about world politics, and (per the specific
insights of twentieth-century German thinker Karl Jaspers)
do whatever possible to elevate empirical science and “mind”
over blind faith and stultifying “mystery.”
“In endowing
us with memory,” writes philosopher George Santayana,
“nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable
to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. The
more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the
more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience
of death; still, without really knowing it, this very conviction
and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.”
The legacy of
Westphalia (1648 treaty) includes sacrilization of the state.
Although we may discover such murderous sacrilization in the
writings of Hegel, Fichte, von Treitschke and various others,
there have also always been voices of a different sort. For
Nietzsche, the state is “the coldest of all cold monsters.”
It is, he says in Zarathustra, “for the superfluous
that the state was invented.” In a similar vein, we
may consider the corroborating view of Jose Ortega y’Gasset
in the Revolt of the Masses. Here, the Spanish philosopher
identifies the state as “the greatest danger, always
mustering its immense resources “to crush beneath it
any creative minority which disturbs it….”
In all global
politics, it now warrants further repeating, there can be
no greater form of presumed power than power over death.
HUMAN COMMONALITY
OR SPECIES “ONENESS”
For the most part,
it is not for us to choose when we should die. Instead, our
words, our destinies, will lie far beyond any discernible
considerations of conscious decision or individual selection.
Still, we can choose to recognize our shared human fate and
especially our derivative interdependence. This unbreakable
intellectual recognition could carry with it significant global
promise, one that remained distressingly distant and unacknowledged
in the dissembling Trump White House years.
Much as we might
prefer to comfort ourselves with various qualitative presumptions
of societal hierarchy and national differentiation –
the stock in trade of Donald J. Trump’s administration
– we humans are all pretty much the same. Already, this
incontestable sameness is plainly manifest to capable scientists
and physicians. Our single most important human similarity,
and the one least subject to any reasonable hint of counter-argument,
is that we all die.
It is from the
universal terror of this common fate that Westphalian law
invests nation-states with the singularly “sacred”
attributes of sovereignty.
And it is from
the incontestable commonality of death that humankind can
finally escape from the predatory embrace of power politics
or Realpolitik in world politics.
Ironically, whatever
our more-or-less divergent views on what might actually happen
to us after death, the basic mortality that we share could
still represent the last best chance we have for viable global
coexistence and governance. This is the case, however, only
if we can first accomplish the astoundingly difficult leap
from acknowledging a shared fate as mortal beings to “operationalizing”
our species’ more expressly generalized feelings of
empathy and cooperation.
There is more.
Across an entire planet, we can care for one another as humans,
but only after we have first accepted that the judgment of
aresolutely common fate will not be waived by any harms that
we may choose to inflict upon “others,” that is,
upon the “unworthy.” While markedly inconspicuous,
modern crimes of war, terror, and genocide are often “just”
sanitized expressions of religious sacrifice. In the most
starkly egregious instances, any corresponding violence could
represent a consummate human hope of overcoming private mortality
through the targeted mass killing or exclusion of certain
specific “outsiders.”
It’s a murderous
calculus, and not a new thought. Consider psychologist Ernest
Becker’s ironic paraphrase of Elias Canetti in Escape
from Evil: “ . . . each organism raises its head
over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares
life good.”
There is a deeply
insightful observation latent in this idea. It is the uniquely
dangerous notion that killing can confer immunity from one’s
own mortality. Similarly, in Will Therapy and Truth and Reality,
psychologist Otto Rank affirms: “The death fear of the
ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other.
Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from
the penalty of being killed.” What is being described
here is plainly the greatest form of power discoverable anywhere:
power over death.
PROBLEMS OF MIND
Americans and
various other residents of our interconnected planet have
a right to expect that any president of the United States
should attempt to seriously understand such vital and complex
linkages. Here, America’s national policies must build
upon more genuinely intellectual sorts of understanding. Always,
our just wars, counter-terrorism conflicts, and anti-genocide
programs must be fought or conducted as fully intricate contests
of mind over mind, and not just as narrowly tactical struggles
of mind over matter.
Only a dual awareness
of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated
futility of sacrificial violence, can offer accessible “medicine”
against North Korea, China, Russia, Iran, and assorted other
more-or-less foreseeable adversaries in the global “state
of nature.” This “natural” condition of
anarchy was already well known to the Founding Fathers of
the United States (most of whom had read Locke, Rousseau,
Grotius, Hobbes, Vattel and Blackstone. Now, only this difficult
awareness can relieve an otherwise incessant and still-ascending
Hobbesian war of “all against all.”
More than ever
before, history deserves a reasonable pride of place. America
was expressly founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the
religion of Calvin. But this means something quite different
in 2021 than it did back in 1787.
What more precisely
should this particular history signify for Biden White House
foreign policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query,
but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon
some measure of authentic learning, not on flippantly corrosive
clichés or abundantly empty witticisms. For the foreseeable
future, this is not a plausible presupposition.
Human death fear
has much to do with acquiring a better understanding of America’s
current enemies, both national and sub-national (terrorist).
Reciprocally, only a people who can feel deeply within itself
the unalterable fate and suffering of a much broader global
population will ever be able to embrace compassion and “rationally”
reject collective violence. To be sure, this new American
president should prepare to understand what this implies,
both with pointedly specific reference to the United States
and to this country’s various (and still increasing)
state and sub-state adversaries.
Always, the existence
of system in the world is obvious, immutable and pertinent.
Accordingly, America First actually meant America Alone and
America Last. America could never be truly “first”
so long as its president insisted upon achieving such status
at the grievous expense of so many others, and while failing
to understand that international law is part of the law of
the United States. To again seek to secure ourselves by diminishing
others would merely be a retrograde playbook for ever-recurrent
instances of war, terror and genocide.
In the end, of
course, for all humankind, the “triumph of death”
is irresistible and inevitable. Attempts to somehow avoid
death by killing certain despised “others” are
both futile and inglorious. Going forward, it is high time
for new and more creative thinking about global security and
human immortality. Instead of denying death, a cowardly and
potentially corrosive emotion that Sigmund Freud labeled “wish
fulfillment” (see The Future of an Illusion, 1927),
we must finally acknowledge the obvious, perhaps even viewing
it as a long-overlooked blessing. With such an eleventh-hour
acknowledgment, all people and all nations on this imperiled
planet could begin to draw purposefully from our immutably
common destiny – that is, from our conspicuously shared
mortality. Among other things, this means using that always-overriding
commonality as the intellectual basis for expanding empathy
and a closely-corresponding pattern of worldwide integration.
It is, to be sure,
a visionary and fanciful prescription, one unlikely to be
grasped in time. But there is still a practical way to begin.
It would require the leaders of major states to recognize
that they are not in any genuinely meaningful way “world
powers” (in the sense that all are equally “mortal;”
that none has “power over death”) and that a coordinated
retreat from Realpolitik or traditional geopolitical competition
must be utterly self-interested and indispensable.
COURAGE AND MORALITY
It follows from
all this that the primary planetary survival task is a markedly
intellectual one, a matter of “mind,” but unprecedented
courage will also be needed. For the required national leadership
initiatives, we could have no reason to expect the timely
arrival of a Platonic philosopher-king, but even some ordinary
political leaders could conceivably be up to the task, to
become extraordinary. For this to happen, enlightened citizens
of all countries would first have to cast aside all historically
discredited ways of thinking about global survival, and do
whatever deemed possible to elevate science over blind faith
and “mystery.”
“In endowing
us with memory,” writes George Santayana, “nature
has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective
creation . . . the truth of mortality . . . The more we reflect,
the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and
penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without
knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will
have raised us, in a way, above mortality.”
Though few will
actually understand, such a “raising” is necessarily
antecedent to human survival in world politics, though only
if it is linked purposefully and self-consciously to global
integration. Is it an end that draws near,” inquired
Karl Jaspers, “or a beginning?” The correct answer
will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war
philosopher had to say about the Jungian/Freudian “mass.”
In his classic
study, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments
what he calls, in German, das Mann, or “The They.”
Drawing fruitfully upon certain earlier seminal insights of
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard as well as Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s
“The They” represents the ever-present herd, crowd,
horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored
by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can quickly
suffocate indispensable intellectual growth. For Heidegger’s
“The They,” the crowning untruth lies in (1) its
acceptance of immortality at both institutional and personal
levels, and (2) its encouragement of the seductive notion
that personal power over death is associated with (or actually
derivative from) the “sacredness” of nation-states.
SOME FINAL CLARIFICATIONS
The arena of world
politics (macrocosm) is endlessly violent because individual
human beings (microcosm) compulsively fear death. Though patently
ironic, the murderous connections are utterly longstanding
and difficult to dispute. Already, in the 19th century, Heinrich
von Treitschke convincingly linked world politics and “earthly
immortality.” Even before this author of Lectures on
Politics, George F. Hegel had identified the state in The
Philosophy of Right as the “march God in the world.”
Ultimately, states
battle against other states on behalf of individual human
salvation. While the typical result of such battles has always
been death and mega death, and not long or eternal life, an
overriding mythology still endures. This is the strange belief
that it is in war, not in perpetual peace, that humans are
able to acquire power over death. Sometimes, this acquisition
is intended to be direct – that is, an immediate consequence
of killing on the side of God. More generally, however, such
power over death devolves indirectly to general populations
that are not actually involved in the business of killing.
After all, even such de facto “bystanders” can
still have God on their side.
None of this is
to deny the validity of more traditional and conspicuous explanations
of Realpolitik or power politics, namely that these strugglers
are about tangible goods, geography or “national security.”
To be sure, these conspicuous explanations are not mistaken;
they are however, both trivial and epiphenomenal. Such explanations
are generally correct, but merely as secondary reflections
of what is most genuinely important.
In William Goldings’
novel Lord of the Flies, the marooned boys make grotesque
war upon one another because they have suddenly been thrust
into a netherworld of anarchy and chaos, but only because
this dissembling exile from “civilization” now
threatens them with personal death. It is only after they
have settled upon an amorphous but ubiquitous horror (“the
beast”) that they decide to wage a titanic struggle
to survive. And in what amounts to yet another irony of upholding
policies of inflicting death in order to bring freedom from
death, the boys are rescued by a military ship, a naval vessel
that will transport them from their primal state of nature
on the island to the more comprehensive state of nature in
world politics.
In essence, readers
learn, the rancorous and barbarous conditions that had obtained
on the deserted island were actually just a microcosm of the
wider system of international relations. But who can now rescue
this wider system of Realpolitik from itself? Before we can
meaningfully answer this core question, scholars and policy-makers
will need to probe more closely behind the visible events
the day, beyond mere reflection. Above all, this probe will
have to be suitably theoretical.
Theoretic generality
is a trait of all serious scientific meaning, and scientific
inquiry in such matters is indispensable.
In the beginning,
in that primal promiscuity in which the lethal swerve toward
politics first arose, forerunners of modern nation-states
established a system of perpetual struggle and violent conflict,
a system absolutely destined to fail. Captivated by this self-destroying
system of international relations, states still allow the
degrading spirit of Realpolitik to spread everywhere unchecked,
like an ideological gangrene on the surface of the earth.
Rejecting all pertinent standards of logic and correct reasoning,
this inherently false consciousness of power politics imposes
no reasonable standards upon itself. It continues to be rife,
despite its endless rebuffs. Somehow, Realpolitik takes its
long history of defeat as victory. Prima facie, it’s
a-historical proponents have never learned anything.
The vast majority
of human beings are unable to accept the biological truth
of mortality. Understood in terms of world politics, this
suggests, inter alia, that state sovereignty will
likely continue to be viewed by many as a suitable institutional
antidote to personal death. To be sure, such a view may not
be explicitly apparent even to Realpolitik adherents, and
it would very likely disregard certain palpable benefits other
than a presumed power over death (e.g., enhanced personal
status of belonging to a “powerful” country).
Nonetheless, it is a perspective that will not simply fade
away graciously on its own.
It is high time
for candor. Whatever our in-principle preferences, the plain
fact of having been born augurs badly for the promise of immortality.
Accordingly, the primal human inclination to deny an apparently
unbearable truth will continue to generate the same terrors
from which we allegedly seek refuge. The irony is staggering,
but incontestable.
In its obvious
desperation to live perpetually, humankind has embraces a
cornucopia of faiths that offer life everlasting is exchange
for unchallengeable loyalty. Such loyalty is then transferred
from faith to State, which battles (or prepares to battle)
with other states. Though historians, political scientists
and pundits routinely describe such conflicts as a tangible
struggle for secular influence (power politics), it is often
something different altogether. This is a struggle between
Good and Bad, Right and Wrong, Decency and Indecency, even
the “Sons of Light” and the “Sons of Darkness.”
In this last example, apocalyptic imagery of the Dead Sea
Scrolls is invoked not because any or all of a combatant state’s
rationale is necessarily religious, but because such imagery
best portrays the enormity of ideological attachments.
In the United
States, ideas of prevailing apocalyptic contest obtained widely
during the 1950s Eisenhower years, and also later during the
Reagan Administration. More recently, Donald Trump’s
core message of “American First” was assuredly
not without underlying or implicit references to righteous
struggles in world politics with “God on our Side.”
Unambiguously, for several million Trump supporters, their
leader’s slogan of “America First” was essentially
an eschatological code term used to signal impending End Times.
“Death,”
says Norbert Elias, “is the absolute end of the person.
So the greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps
corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger experienced.”
Now, major state sin world politics must strive more vigorously
to reduce the magnitude and likelihood of anticipated existential
danger. In this connection, they must remain wary of planting
new false hopes that offer only illusions of personal survival
through perpetual international war or war-planning.
Today, the world
remains full of corrosive noise and gratuitous rancor, but
it is still possible to listen for real “music.”
For this to happen, however, leaders, citizens and subjects
will first have to detach themselves from various mythical
promises of acquiring power over death. In the most promising
of all possible worlds, the pervasively underlying human death
fear could itself be made to disappear, but this auspicious
prospect seems blatantly implausible. It follows, inevitably,
that more “gentle” orientations will be required
for world politics than those still discoverable within the
perpetually self-destroying dynamics of Realpolitik.
