LOOKING BENEATH:
WORLD POLITICS, TRAGEDY AND "POWER OVER DEATH."
On the surface,
world politics is largely about war, terrorism, genocide
and genocide-like crimes. Below the surface, however, this
most expansive arena of human struggle is about individual
human beings who comprise nation-states and assorted sub-state
organizations. It is about the microcosm, about Miguel de
Unamuno’s “man of flesh and bone,” about
the Basque philosopher’s “man of love, suffering,
pity and death.” In the final analysis, as we can
learn from Unamuno, world politics should be understood
as the cumulative expression of “flesh and bone.”
There is more.
World politics is about power. Ultimately, “the man
of flesh and bone” – regardless of age, gender,
nationality, ethnicity or religion – seeks one form
of power above all others. Whether witting or unwitting,
this goal is power over death. The true “tragedy”
of this faith-based search is not that the “hunger
for immortality” lies beyond any tangible satisfaction
(that conclusion is perfectly obvious and indisputable),
but that it ignores a unique potential to widen into empathy
for all other human beings.
Why is ignoring
this remarkable potential “tragic” ipso
facto? The answer is both simple and complex. In essence,
it is because such visceral indifference renders impossible
any necessary withdrawals from war, terror and genocide.
More precisely, these withdrawals are not merely necessary,
they are indispensable to human survival.
There is more.
Logic and science notwithstanding, the search for power
over death is plainly universal. In the final analysis,
this search represents the most critically animating force
of world politics. The search, which can lead either to
great virtue or unparalleled evil, is generally well-hidden
in daily news headlines. For example, in Hamas terror-violence
against Israeli noncombatants, an obsessive desire for “martyrdom”
creates evil beyond measure. Still, at least in other places,
the search for power over death can contribute to a clarifying
awareness of our common human fate and a correlative awareness
of “cosmopolis” or human “oneness.”
“I believe,”
warns Oswald Spengler in his 20th century classic, The
Decline of the West” (1918-1923), “is the
one great word (sic.) against metaphysical fear.”
Though among the most important intellectual observations
of all time, the primal linkages between world politics
and power over death still remain generally unrecognized.
To be sure, by definition, such rarefied theorizing is intended
for the “Few,” not for the “Many.”
In all likelihood,
humankind will continue to focus on the symptoms of aggression,
mass killing and genocide rather than on their causes. The
plausible result of such a secondary focus (more international
criminality) is predictable. But will it also be avoidable?
What remedies
remain available? Whatever they may be, they should first
be uncovered at the conceptual or theoretical level, and
not at the superficial level of pundits and politicos. More
specifically, three basic concepts will need to be highlighted
in all of their presumptively complicated interactions.
These primal concepts are death, time and immortality.
There is more.
These bewildering concepts represent the “building
blocks” of any useful theory. Any such generalized
explanations represent the foundations of a necessary science.
In turn, science could identify variously optimal methods
of reaching useful conclusions about aggression, genocide
and global survival. Such methods would involve the stipulation,
examination and subsequent confirmation or disconfirmation
of alternative hypotheses. Taken together, these interrelated
operations provide the orthodox or classical definition
of “scientific method.”
A “next
question” dawns. How shall humankind proceed if its
national and sub-national governance is to be rescued and
improved in a world political system of unceasing acrimony,
belligerent nationalism and nuclear weapons? What can the
three concepts of death, time and immortality teach us about
the world system’s sovereignty-centered landscape,
both present and future? How shall this continuously self-defiling
planet allow itself to advance beyond the childlike explanations
and gratuitous rancor of traditional geopolitics, an advance
that is manifestly indispensable to physical survival?
To answer thoughtfully,
analysts should start with the individual human being, with
the microcosm in all of its common and universalized expressions.
Though disregarded and invisible, power over death presents
the ultimate reward for dutiful social and political compliance.
Generally, though uttered sotto voce, only in whispers,
there can be no greater power to confer anywhere on earth.
Prima facie, power over death offers the unmatchable
promise of immortality.
Faith, “Metaphysical
Fear” and the “Hunger of Immortality
We may learn
something of head-spinning import from Emmanuel Levinas:
“It is through death,” says the philosopher,
“that there is time . . . ” It follows, among
other things, that any nation that can allegedly enhance
the promise of personal immortality could also heighten
the vague promises of time.
Could there
possibly be any more enviable forms of power?
But before providing
answers, there are more basic questions. To begin, what
can such a dense abstraction have to do with US domestic
politics? These are not easy concepts to understand, especially
in the context of America’s continuously misguided
preoccupation with dissembling personalities and correlative
rancor. Significantly, no society so willing to compromise
truth on the altar of “anti-reason” should reasonably
expect to endure.
These are not
easy concepts or ideas to unravel. Nonetheless, they are
more tangibly explanatory of any nation’s existential
problems than the ritualistic recitations of most political
personalities. If chronology is in fact contingent upon
death – in brief, because human mortality puts an
irreversible “stop” to each individual’s
time – an antecedent question must be posed: How does
one gain tangible power over death, and what does any such
gain have to do with the fate of a particular state or nation?
Now, it is with
this opaque question in hand that core theoretical inquiries
should be launched.
What next? Before
venturing a proper answer to such a many-sided question,
we must first distinguish between actual power and the personal
feeling or expectation that such power lies in certain decipherable
ties to God. Unsurprisingly, we humans have always sought
reassuring links to the divine. In identifying humankind’s
pertinent ties – ties that are necessarily prior to
acquiring power over death – the most evident and
“time-tested” path involves religious faith.
It is hardly
a coincidence that every one of the world’s major
religions offers adherents alluring and more-or-less comparable
promises of immortality.
Though structured
upon anti-reason, such assurances are powerful, and come
with assorted contingencies, some of which would prove more
difficult to satisfy than others. In the main, however,
whatever the specific contingencies or nuances of differentiation
involved, a bargain is being offered to those individuals
who hope most fervidly not to die. “Normally,”
it is a gainful pact, one whereby the faithful adherent
commits to the affirmation of all true piety (“I believe)”
and prioritizes this “sacred” affirmation above
all others.
Immortality
and Martyrdom
Though Miguel
de Unamuno sees an incomparable potential for redemption
in the: hunger of immortality, there is an extraordinary
peril associated with this primal hunger. This peril is
the present day scourge of religion-based terrorism desperately
seeking “martyrdom.” In such cases, the hunger
for power over death leads directly to more death, not to
any welcome forms of interpersonal or international harmony.
Related particularities
should be noted. On occasion, the doctrinal priority “I
believe” can demand a faith-confirming end to an individual
believer’s physical life on earth, that is, an act
of martyrdom. At other times, assorted high-minded doctrines
of charity, caring and compassion notwithstanding, this
priority can require the torture and/or killing of designated
“unbelievers,” “heathen,” “apostates.”
The intention of this lethal requirement is to safeguard
“the one true faith.” We see this presently
in the ritualistic violence of jihadist terrorism.
Whatever special
circumstances of “sacrifice” may be involved
– and they need not be mutually exclusive –
reason gives way to anti-reason. Such a grotesque surrender
is no less likely in the Age of Science than it was in an
earlier Age of Belief. Regarding this worrisome allegation,
the daily news offers us all endlessly corroborative “evidence”
ex hypothesi.
Several core
truths are revealed by these clarifications. Any cumulative
hopes for an individual rising “above mortality”
can have critical consequences for the macrocosm, for war
and peace on planet earth. In the nineteenth century, at
his posthumously published Lecture on Politics (1896), German
historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual
man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly
immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich
Hegel opined in his Philosophy of Right (1820)
that the state represents “the march of God in the
world.”
These widely-cited
views in political science and philosophy tie loyalty to
the state (usually unquestioned loyalty) with the promise
of power over death. By definition, this must always be
a monumental promise, one generally recognized only in the
Platonic “shadows” of political activity. Plainly,
whenever the historian looks beyond the distracting shadows
of true images, he discovers no plausible evidence of any
such promise having been kept. Still, that discovery need
not be unwelcome. “It is in his failure,” says
Soren Kierkegaard, “that the believer finds his triumph.”
These are complicated
interconnections. Immortality represents an unfulfillable
promise, of course, but one that will nonetheless remain
both extraordinary and incomparable. During his incoherent
tenure as US president, Donald J. Trump’s openly pernicious
brand of belligerent nationalism (“America First”)
offered its believing adherents a dangerously seductive
promise. In the end, because it was founded upon a fusion
of stark ignorance with doctrinal anti-reason, “America
First” accepted a vision of time that could only enlarge
the force-multiplying spheres of violent death in world
politics.
Additional nuances
warrant competent intellectual examination. In related matters,
faith and science intersect with variously coinciding considerations
of law. The fearful “deification” of Realpolitik,
a transformation of ideology from a simple principle of
action to a sacred end in itself, drew its germinal strength
from the doctrine of sovereignty. Conceived in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries as a juridical principle of internal
order, this doctrine underwent several far-reaching metamorphoses,
whence it also became the justifying legal rationale for
international anarchy and war. More formally, this structural
decentralization was identified by classical political philosophers
as the “state of nature.”
Sovereignty
and “Metaphysical Fear”
To understand
such complex intersections, we must first understand “sovereignty.”
Established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De
Republica (1576), sovereignty quickly came to be regarded
as the supreme human political power, absolute and above
all other forms of law. In the oft-recited and oft-studied
words of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan: “Where
there is no common Power, there is no law.”
As to any correspondences
with time, which is how we have come to consider such complex
issues in the first place, Hobbes explains why this “no
law” condition should be called “war,”
even when there exists no actual “fighting.”
More precisely, because “war consisteth not in battle
only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of Time . .
. ,“ scholars and policy-makers will need to broaden
their most fundamental ideas of “war.” Though
this would first appear to be an esoteric requirement, and
one without any discernible links to real world policy-making,
exactly the opposite is true.
When it is understood
in terms of modern world politics, the doctrine of sovereignty
encourages the refractory notion that states (a) lie above
and beyond any legal regulation in their interactions with
each other, and (b) act rationally whenever they seek tangible
benefits at the expense of other states or of the global
system as a whole. Following the time of insufferable Trump
derangements, this doctrine threatened a wholesale collapse
of civilizational cooperation and world order. This dis-establishment
was spawned by the “timeless” human wish for
immortality and by variously misconceived human associations
of personal “wish fulfillment” with “everyone
for himself” foreign policies. “O my soul,”
warned Pindar, “do not aspire to immortal life but
exhaust the limits of the possible.”
Time and “State
of War” in World Politics
Without suitable
changes in the Hobbesian “tract of time,” the
global State of War nurtured by certain ideas about absolute
sovereignty points not only to an immutable human mortality,
but also toward death on unprecedented levels. One such
refractory idea is climate change denial, a currently preferred
posture of anti-reason expressed earlier by Trump-world
derangements of science and law. Left unaffected by proper
considerations of scientific analysis and refined intellect,
climate change denial could ultimately produce another mass
extinction on planet earth. At that point, time will have
lost all its once residual meanings, and death will inherit
absolutely all that still is.
This “inheritance”
will be irreversible.
Considered by
itself, immortality remains an unworthy and unseemly human
goal, both because it is scientific nonsense (“an
immortal person is a contradiction in terms”) and
because it fosters endlessly injurious human behaviors such
as war, terrorism, genocide and “martyrdom.”
The only dignified task, therefore, is not to remove individual
human hope to soar above death (that is, to achieve some
tangible sort of immortality), but to “de-link”
this futile and vainglorious search from destructive human
behaviors.
How best to
proceed with such a multi-faceted and unsatisfying task?
This is not an easy question, and one that can never be
answered in terms of Platonic shadows or reflections. Here,
there are available no science-based guidelines. Even if
there were such availability, this is not just another ordinary
problem that can yield to reason-based solutions. On the
contrary, the infinitely-distressing wish to immortality
is so deeply compelling and geographically universal that
it can never be dispelled by logical argument. What unreason
could never accomplish, remarks Friedrich Nietzsche prophetically,
can never be accomplished by reason.
Metaphysical
Fear and “Whisperings of the Irrational”
Aware of this
lethal dilemma, philosopher Karl Jaspers writes in Reason
and Anti-Reason in our Time (1952): “There is
something inside all of us that yearns not for reason but
for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but
for the whisperings of the irrational….” Understandably,
the most seductive of these irrational whisperings are those
that can offer to confer a selective power over death. But
it is from the irrational criteria of such “selection”
that far-reaching evils can quickly or incrementally be
born. This is because the promised power over death demands
the “sacrifice” of certain despised “others.”
For science,
of course, death is merely a function or outcome of biology.
Moreover, because it “presents” together with
physical decomposition and decay – and because it
calls for human comprehension of “nothingness”
within a flow of time – there can be identified no
plausible ways of replacing mystery with rationality. By
its very nature, which inevitably brings forth inconsolable
fears and paralyzing anxieties, death will never submit
to even the most refined sorts of human “management.”
Nonetheless,
at least in principle, some measure of existential relief
can be discovered in transience, that is, in the understandable
awareness that nothing is forever and that everything is
impermanent. What will be required at this stage is the
conceptual reciprocal of any imagined human decomposition.
This would mean cultivating the imagery of expanded human
significance that inevitably stems from life’s finite
duration. In scientific terms, one might best describe this
particular quality of life as a “scarcity value.”
Though seemingly
paradoxical, any such gainful “cultivation”
could represent the optimal human strategy of achieving
“immortality.”
How can humankind
arrive at such an intellectually-challenging conclusion?
We began with the view that daily news reports and assessments
are just changing reflections or shadows of deeper human
engagements. To deal satisfactorily with the recurrent horrors
of any single nation’s politics, we would first have
to understand the verifiably true sources of such reflections.
There is more.
These underpinnings of daily news events are rooted in conceptual
intersections of death, time and immortality. It is only
with a more determined understanding of these intersections
that America and Americans could hope “not to die.”
Naturally, no such hope could ever be reasonable in a literal
or scientific sense. Instead, it would need to be drawn
from the primal and determinative sentiment of Oswald Spengler’s
The Decline of the West: “I believe.”
The Barbarism
of Specialization
In the end,
world politics must always remain a second-order activity,
a distorted and distorting reflection of what is actually
important. For now, such politics continues to thrive upon
a vast personal emptiness, on a collective infirmity that
represents the disfiguring reciprocal of personal fulfillment.
“Conscious of his emptiness,” warned the German
philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Anti-Reason in
our Time (1952), “man (human) tries to make a
faith for himself (or herself) in the political realm. In
Vain.”
“In vain.”
In even an authentic
American democracy, only a few could hope to redeem themselves
and the wider nation, but these self-effacing souls would
generally remain silent, hidden, in more-or-less “deep
cover.” In a declining democracy where education is
increasingly oriented toward narrow forms of career preparation,
an orientation toward “barbaric specialization,”
these precious few can expect to be “suffocated”
by the “many.” To be sure, any such “asphyxiation,”
in any of its conceivable particularities, would represent
a very bad way to “die.”
Traditionally,
tyrants do not emerge on the political scene ex nihilo,
out of nothing. Regarding such emergence, history deserves
pride of place. Incoherent, corrupt and murderous leaders
are usually the result of a society that has long since
abandoned serious thought. When such a society no longer
asks the “big philosophical questions” –
for example, “What is the “good” in government
and politics”? or “How do I lead a virtuous
life as a person and citizen”? or “How can I
best nurture the well-being of other human beings”?
– a hideous outcome becomes unstoppable.
What is to be
done? Prima facie, humankind will need to acknowledge
the fundamental interrelatedness of all peoples and (correspondingly)
the binding universality of authoritative international
law. To survive as an organically-structured planet of interrelated
individuals, many more persons will need to become seriously
educated, not as well-trained cogs in some vast industrial
machine but as empathetic and caring citizens. “Everyone
is the other, and no one is just himself,” cautions
Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (1932), but
this elementary lesson (once discoverable in myriad sacred
texts) is not easily operationalized. Indeed, it is in this
single monumental failure of “operationalization”
that human civilization has most consequentially failed.
In the United
States. especially during its Trump-twisted context, “greatness”
was assumed to be a Darwinian or zero-sum condition, not
one wherein each individual could reasonably favor harmonious
cooperation over belligerent competition. How shall we finally
change all this, or, recalling Plato’s wisdom in The
Republic, how shall we “learn to make the souls of
the citizens better?” This is not a question that
anyone can answer in elucidating detail. Still, it is a
question that ought to be placed immediately before principal
decision-makers on our imperiled planet.
Can any sort
of rational calculation plausibly be expected? More than
likely, recalling the timeless message of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra, this expectation may “have come too soon.”
Significantly, if such a premature warning turns out to
be the case, there could be no “later.”
What is “Drawing
Near”?
“Is it
an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in
Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.”
A meaningful answer, one which lies far beyond any measuring
hands of watches or clocks, is by no means self-evident.
Yet, determining this answer has now become a sine qua non
of global political destiny. Nothing could prove more important.
Soon, humankind
will need to get solidly beyond the demeaning banalities
of geopolitics, beyond the distracting and potentially murderous
“shadows” of what is truly important. Immutably,
but also invisibly, most human residents of planet earth
will continue to regard “power over death” as
the highest conceivable form of power. It will remain unclear,
however, just how such ultimate forms of power can be linked
to America’s domestic politics and to its continuously
zero-sum foreign policies.
Meaning and
Belonging
There is more.
To look suitably beyond “shadows,” humankind
must first discover two other principal animating forces
of the political realm. These interrelated and interdependent
forces concern meaning and belonging. They represent other
true images of American politics – images additional
to ones of immortality or “power over death”
– that can bestow variously tangible feelings of personal
self-worth. Such images coalesce around those activities
that can confer pleasing human emotions of “time well
spent” in group membership. The overriding problem
is that such activities are not always benign, and can include
war, terrorism and genocide.
In his modern
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, 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
all-too-quickly suffocate private intellectual growth. For
Heidegger’s ubiquitous “The They,” the
crowning human untruth lies in “herd” acceptance
of immortality at both institutional and personal levels
and in herd encouragement of the notion that personal power
over death is sometimes derivative (recall Hegel and Treitschke)
from membership in nation-states.
History reveals,
that this can become an insidious notion.
Any reassuring
hopes about potential for personal immortality are themselves
contingent upon a specific nation-state’s or insurgent
group’s alleged “sacredness.” Here, membership
in a presumptively “sacred” group can serve
to confer life-everlasting. In The Decline of the West,
Oswald Spengler underscores the ultimate form of power in
world politics – power over death. Such power, long
associated with belligerent international relations, could
be indispensable to the conquest of “metaphysical
fear.” Though not readily apparent, what we are witnessing
daily in world politics – e.g., Iran-backed jihadist
terror group.
