BIOLOGICAL SAMENESS AND
SPECIES UNIFICATION
The unity and
interdependence of humankind is not subject to reasonable
challenge. Beginning with our biological sameness, species’
commonality includes a broad variety of human needs and
expectations. In the end, it is our immutable mortality
that most plainly makes us all one. At the same time, it
is our common search for power over death that gives rise
to war, terrorism and genocide.
These are complex
issues, ones not ordinarily explored in magazines, newspapers,
social media or universities. Indeed, nothing is now more
conspicuous than the incapacity of the traditional world
legal processes to ensure even rudimentary species survival.
No other plausible conclusion can be drawn from the relentless
barbarism of belligerent nationalism or Realpolitik.
In primal matters
of biology—in matters of being human—we are
all essentially the same. But that vital sameness is not
exclusively biological. Prima facie, it also carries over
to humankind’s multiple and intersecting needs as
communities, nations and planet. If it could be better understood,
we would all stand an improved chance of creating dignified
legal futures.
Legal Meanings
and Expectations
Where do we
actually stand on global legal reform and transformation?
Virtually all nation-states, including the major world powers,
remain oriented toward the diametric opposite of planet-wide
solidarity. Significantly, this ill-fated orientation has
no basis in codified or customary international law.
There is more.
These are not mere matters of common sense. In 1758, in
The Law of Nations, Swiss legal scholar Emmerich de Vattel
affirmed the primacy of human community and interdependence.
Observed the classical jurist: “Nations….are
bound mutually to advance human society . . . The first
general law . . . is that each nation should contribute
as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other
Nations.”
Vattel’s
visionary ideals have never held any discernible sway in
global politics (they have always been regarded as fanciful
or utopian), but today, especially after Russia’s
aggression against Ukraine, they have been pushed still
further beyond the pale.
Some core questions
are no longer asked. To wit: Why should any powerful country
seek geopolitical advantage without expecting any net benefit?
Left unmodified, the most palpable effect of these traditional
orientations will be a more rapidly accelerating global
tribalism. To the extent that the corollary effects of false
communion could sometime ignite a nuclear conflict, these
effects (whether sudden or incremental) could propel our
legally disordered planet toward irreversible chaos.
Ultimately,
if we humans are going to survive as a species, historical
truth must prevail over political manipulation. An unavoidable
conclusion here is that any continuance of national safety
and prosperity must always be linked with its wider global
impact. Accordingly, it is foolish to suppose that this
nation—or, indeed, any nation—could expect law-based
security at the expense of other belligerent nations.
“ONENESS”
AND SPECIES VULNERABILITY
The bottom line
of global oneness is clear. We (individuals and nations)
are all in the soup together. The Covid pandemic, of course,
has been universal. It ought to provide impetus not only
for mitigating a particular disease pathology but also for
institutionalizing much wider patterns of global legal cooperation.
The evidence
is unambiguous. By its very nature, any celebration of belligerent
nationalism is crude and injurious to law. The only sensible
posture for the United States and the wider world must now
be some plausible variation of a single planetary future.
Such an improved vision might not be all that difficult
to operationalize if there were first some antecedent political
will. This vision is supported not only by millennia of
international law but also by historical evidence, accumulated
science and formal logic.
The most basic
idea behind a gainful human oneness is discoverable in the
words of Pierre Teilhard De Chardin. “The egocentric
ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to
attain egoistically the extremity of everyone for himself,”
summarizes the French Jesuit scientist and philosopher,
“is false and against nature. No element can move
and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”
The key message
here is simple, straightforward and illogical to contest.
This message communicates, among other things, that no single
country’s individual success can ever be achieved
as a zero-sum matter. We should learn from the same message
that no narrowly national success is sustainable if the
world must thereby expect failure.
Credo quia absurdum,
said the ancient philosophers: “I believe because
it is absurd.” In principle, at least, pandemic can
help to bring discrepant civilizational matters into focus.
No conceivable re-configuration of Planet Earth can prove
gainful if the human legions who comprise it remain morally,
spiritually, economically and intellectually segmented.
The prescient
philosophers are correct. For the world as a whole, chaos
and anarchy are never the genuinely underlying disease.
That more determinative pathology remains rooted in certain
great and powerful states that fail to acknowledge human
interrelatedness. Significantly, this unforgivable incapacity
to acknowledge our species’ biological oneness has
already become an existential problem.
THE PROMISE
OF PLANETIZATION AND COSMPOLIS
What should
we now expect concerning law-based world community or planetization?
Left fractured and unimproved, world politics will only
further encourage an already basic human deficit. This deficit
is the incapacity of individual citizens and their respective
states to discover authentic self-worth as individuals.
Such an enduring liability was prominently foreseen in the
eighteenth century by America’s then-leading person
of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Today, unsurprisingly,
the still-vital insights of Emerson’s American Transcendentalism
remain recognizable to only a tiny minority of citizens.
How could it be different? In the present-day United States,
almost no one reads serious books of literature, science
or philosophy. This observation is offered here not in any
offhanded or gratuitously mean-spirited fashion, but merely
as a simple fact of American life, one famously commented
upon during the first third of the nineteenth century by
French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville. This same observation
led the founding fathers of the United States to rail against
mass in the new nation’s formal governance.
In essence,
the United States was never even imagined as a democracy.
Back in the 18th century, creating a republic was revolutionary
enough.
Looking ahead,
our relevant focus should be on world law and getting beyond
geopolitical state-centrism. From pandemic control to nuclear
war avoidance, belligerent nationalism remains both indecent
and misconceived. Russia’s ongoing crimes against
Ukraine are an unambiguous case in point.
Left to fester
on its own intrinsic demerits, this atavistic mantra would
do little more than harden the hearts of America’s
most recalcitrant state enemies. What we need now, as Americans,
as citizens of other countries, or simply as worried inhabitants
of an imperiled planet is a marked broadening of support
for global oneness. However implausible and visionary, such
a broadening ultimately represents a sine qua non of species
survival. What we require is cosmopolis.
From the 1648
Peace of Westphalia, which ended the last of the religious
wars sparked by the Reformation, international relations
and international law have been shaped by an ever-changing
but perpetually unstable balance of power. Hope still exists,
more or less, but today it must sing softly, in an embarrassed
undertone, sotto voce. Although counter-intuitive, the time
for any visceral celebrations of militant nationalism and
military technology is at least partially over.
QUO VADIS?
What is to be
done? Macrocosm follows microcosm. To survive on a fragmented
planet, all of us, together, must seek to rediscover a consciously
individual life, one that is wittingly detached from pre-patterned
kinds of nationalistic conformance. There should be no further
tolerance of any falsely imagined tribal happiness. United
States legal obligations to peace and justice in the short
term require policies that respond purposefully to Russian
aggression and related crimes, but even the most successful
of these policies would still ignore a more overriding human
obligation. To use a popular metaphor, these policies could
only “kick the can” of global civilization or
“cosmopolis” further “down the road.”
Then we could
finally learn that the most suffocating insecurities of
life on earth can never be undone by militarizing global
economics, by building larger missiles or by traditionally
realistic definitions of national security. Nonetheless,
the blatant insufficiencies of “Westphalian”
international law need not call ipso facto for world government.
As an immediately obvious weakness of any such call, we
need only consider the problem of institutionalized reconciliations
with corrosive adversaries, e.g. Vladimir Putin’s
Russia.
In the end,
whatever happens in the crumbling world of politics, sovereignty
and nationality, truth must remain exculpatory. In a uniquely
promising paradox, this pandemic can help us see a much
larger truth than the ones we have wrongly cultivated for
centuries. This broadly relevant legal truth is that world
citizens must become more explicitly conscious of human
unity and relatedness. Such a substantially heightened consciousness
is not a luxury we can simply choose to accept or reject.
Its selection
is indispensable. Such selection represents a firm prerequisite
of national and species survival. “Civilization,”
offers Lewis Mumford In the Name of Sanity (1954), “is
the never-ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”
Visionary prophets of world integration and human oneness
ought to no longer be dismissed out of hand as foolishly
utopian. Now, more than ever, they define the invariant
wellsprings of human survival.
There is more.
What we must ultimately accomplish is not only the survival
of Homo sapiens as a species, but also humanitas, each person’s
dignity as an individual. The world system’s continuing
reliance on belligerent nationalism or geopolitics suggests
the possibility of coinciding extinctions.
Macrocosm follows
microcosm. All things human must be seen in their totality.
By itself, the corona virus pandemic has been uniformly
harmful. At the same time, and because it has represented
a lethal threat to the world as a whole, it could have been
viewed as a potentially life-affirming human unifier.
Until today,
that was an opportunity overlooked and ignored.
EXISTENTIAL
RESPONSIBILITIES
“In the
end,” Goethe reminds us, “we are creatures of
our own making.” Every national society, the United
States in particular, will need to embrace leaders who can
finally understand the steeply complex meanings of human
interdependence. In this auspicious embrace, all will need
to understand the differences between a “freedom”
that is uniformly beneficial and one that selectively disregards
the needs of billions.
What we most
desperately require are not refractory affirmations of homicidal
indifference, but a renewed awareness that true knowledge
represents more than affectation or contrivance. Going forward,
public policy should follow disciplined logic and rigorous
theorizing. Anything else would represent an inexcusable
wizardry and lead us even further astray from residually
unifying world order opportunities.
The prescribed
task before us is complex, daunting, many-sided and bewildering;
still, there are no sane and defensible alternatives. Whatever
policy particulars we might ultimately adopt as a nation,
America’s initial focus must remain steadfast on calculated
considerations of human interrelatedness and human mind.
The seat-of-the-pants Trump paradigm of bitter rancor and
endless conflict drove us still further from species survival,
humanitas and lawful behavior. That paradigm, especially
its overtly-aggressive emphases on Realpolitik or power
politics, was a dissembling blueprint for national and systemic
fragmentation.
Certain disciplined
conclusions should readily present themselves. The anarchic
or Westphalian world legal order in which humankind has
endured for centuries is no longer tolerable. Trapped in
the crosscurrents of nuclear proliferation and belligerent
geopolitics, this crumbling global architecture is destined
for incremental dissolution or catastrophic collapse. Understood
as a matter of law, either outcome must be prevented by
suitable intellectual effort. In the final analysis, this
means fashioning capable designs of more promising world
legal futures. To be sure, world unity and cosmopolis represent
the only realistic hope for law-based global survival.
