“The dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.”
Talmud
The Lethal Pathology of Belligerent Nationalism
The belligerent nationalisms of world politics are always injurious. By any plausible standards, these adrenalized affirmations of alleged “greatness” make no sense. Moreover, this critical observation lies beyond any reasonable doubt. Uniformly, the historical dynamics of “everyone for himself” lead humankind to war, terrorism and genocide.[i]
Nothing could be more obvious.[ii]
But a corollary question does arise. Why do we humans clung tenaciously to such a persistently discredited dynamic of international relations? Why have such conspicuously failed dynamics managed to remain the determinative order of “Westphalian” diplomacy?[iii] Until our leaders can finally answer this basic question satisfactorily, there can be no durable respite from the interminable horrors of world politics.[iv]
There is more. Additional questions should be raised. To begin, we must seriously inquire: Why are there still no significant movements to build upon the human unity that lies latent in us all?[v] Why has there been so little evident dissatisfaction with continuous worldwide anarchy[vi] and with a now steadily-encroaching global chaos.[vii] Are we humans just a self-destroying leavened “mass,”[viii] an essentially inert species destined for recurrent bloodshed and inevitable extinction?[ix]
On such patently core questions, there seems little cause for optimistic replies. Though few people on earth can reasonably expect their leaders to resemble Plato’s “philosopher king,”[x] others ought at least be able to choose from among certain capable politicians who can seemingly offer more than incessant delusion. This means, inter alia, national leaders who can meaningfully apprehend the always-interrelated benefits of philosophy, culture, literature, law and science. There will, of course, be very few such commendable leaders.
The Lasting Debilities of “America First”
From the beginning of his administration, former President Donald Trump’s rancorous ideology of “America First” – the reductio ad absurdum of all belligerent nationalisms – was refractory and perilous. The bitterly defiling notion that such an exploitative and self-centered American philosophy could propel the United States in tangibly gainful directions was erroneous on its face.[xi] Drawn in large measure from earlier Jewish philosophy, the Natural Rights premises of the US Declaration of Independence and US Constitution emphasize equality and cooperation as universal human values.[xii] Such emphases are indispensable, and ought never be minimized or diminished.
There are certain particularities worth noting. In the words of 17th century jurist Samuel Pufendorf, whose legal philosophy was well-known to Thomas Jefferson and other American Founding Fathers: “One of the common duties of the Natural Law is that no one who has not acquired a peculiar right arrogate more to himself than the rest may have, but permit others to enjoy the same rights as himself.”[xiii] No American president (or any other national leader) can ever claim such a “peculiar right.”
There is more. As an expression of Donald J. Trump’s “personal brand” of belligerent nationalism, “America First” was reprehensible even on moral grounds alone. Here, this serious assessment can be made evident in expressly Jewish philosophic terms. To wit, the multiple ethical derelictions of Donald Trump’s acrimonious foreign policies violated timeless Jewish principles concerning decent and dignified human behavior. Most patently notable among these principles are cooperation,[xiv] “oneness”[xv] and community.[xvi]
“There is no longer a virtuous nation,” laments the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candle light.” Now, having at least survived the incoherent and law-violating Trump Era, Americans still have much to consider and re-consider. Under Donald Trump, policies that had once “merely” been wrong became openly murderous and potentially genocidal.[xvii] Significantly, there could be no justification for such grievous derelictions ever to be allowed to reappear.
The destabilizing consequences of Donald Trump’s errant policies have not simply gone away with the man. His corrosive legacy endures and (in some circles) flourishes. How can such in coherent circumstances still obtain?
There is more. Biological plague can reinforce the “pathologies” of anti-human governance. Longstanding perils of anarchic world politics have recently been reinforced by major pandemic perils. Logically, the Covid-19 scourge mandated not an even more corrosively competitive patterns of international relations, but a far-reaching acknowledgment of global singularity or human “oneness.” Though fiercely retrograde Trump foreign policies were widely accepted and sometimes lauded ex post facto, American thinkers have generally ignored the obvious: No foreign policy prescriptions founded upon a contrived and rancorous posture of cynicism has ever succeeded long-term.[xviii]
While the charge may first have sounded like exaggeration, bombast or hyperbole, Donald Trump’s destructive inclinations were never “just” a matter of illiterate rhetoric. Instead, they began to threaten a virulent pattern of tangible and irremediable harms, a pattern with potentially unprecedented consequences. In essence, the flagrantly absurdist Trump vision of “America First” led the United States in cumulatively mistaken directions, not toward any national or international advantage, but rather to endlessly Darwinian struggles for survival.
Such a retrograde vision ought never have been embraced by a “civilized nation,”[xix] especially at a moment of extraordinary biological peril. The obligation of all civilized states and peoples to accept worldwide interdependence or “oneness” has never been greater. Among certain other core sources, this obligation has ascertainably deep roots in Jewish philosophy.
Amid crudely fierce competitions between single states that would soon prove injurious to all of them, Americans could reasonably have expected more and more stubbornly recalcitrant military conflicts. Derivatively, the futile Trump standard of “everyone for himself” could only have produced increasingly expansive human suffering. What else ought to have been expected from a president who openly prided himself on a carefully cultivated illiteracy?[xx] This was a president, after all, who had urged the ingestion of household disinfectant to protect against Covid19, the consideration of nuclear weapons to use against hurricanes and further explorations of the Moon because “The Moon is part of Mars.”
In a still-earlier reduction to absurdity, Donald J. Trump remarked that during the 18th century Revolutionary War, “The patriot army managed to gain and keep control of all national airports.” How could such an incomprehensible statement not have quickly ended Trump’s popularity among thinking peoples?
The Primacy of “mind”
“Intellect rots the brain” said Joseph Goebbels at a Nuremberg Germany rally in 1935.
“I love the poorly educated” said American presidential candidate Donald Trump at a 2016 election rally in the United States.
Where should America go now on matters of global cooperation and global unity? The basic problem is much deeper than one of periodic elections. Though it is certainly time for seriously thinking citizens to distance themselves from any residual Trump policy precipices, such efforts could represent just the “tip” of badly-needed changes. Over time, only a suitable expansion of human empathy could realistically save this country and the larger planet as a whole. This suggests, among other things, that any such expansion by the United States would represent not some unreciprocated act of charity – that is, a mistakenly one-sided species of characteristic American benevolence – but a fully self-serving expression of rational national policy.
There is a conceptual bottom line to be noted. US national interests can no longer be served in any serious measure at the deliberate expense of other states and nations, especially in times of “plague.” Always, these American interests must be served together with those of other states and nations, sometimes even where international relations have already become grievously adversarial.
In the end, only truth can be exculpatory.
The truth? At every crucial level – military, economic and biological – American security is linked with the wider “human condition.” Among other things, what Americans witnessed hour by hour, minute by minute, during the intellectually-defiling Trump era was the dismantling of a once reason-based world power. At a moment when disease pandemic makes human solidarity more necessary than ever, we must first “dig out” from the accumulated residue of previous presidential defilements.
During their incessant and relentless Trump-era decline, Americans could no longer cling to any convincing promises of national “greatness.” At best, the Trump-inscribed red hats represented a hideous self-parody. At worst, they pointed toward a glaringly obvious and then-widening path to “apocalypse.”[xxi] For the foreseeable future, and in direct consequence of still-ongoing Trump-era derelictions, America’s national policy expectations will need to be more expressly-based upon reason[xxii] and serious thought.[xxiii]
All of this post-mortem is hardly reassuring. Nonetheless, truth is always the final arbiter, and not just in matters of law[xxiv] and policy, but also in any critical judgments of ethics. Today’s American national and geopolitical truth remains grim and sobering. There were never any credible correctives ready to be uncovered in the previous administration’s decipherable policy prescriptions.[xxv]
Empathy as a Double-Edged Sword
There is more. Especially injurious and ominous about Donald Trump’s indifference to primal human interconnections and codified human rights[xxvi] was his willful destruction of human caring. For Americans, the palpably dreadful consequences of such relentless destruction ought by now to have become obvious. The unmistakably monstrous global consequences of “Germany First” – a direct ideological antecedent of “America First” – should immediately have exhibited a stinging historical resonance. Even now, to fully understand the dissembling Trump legacy, it is best to listen to the former president’s comments “in the original German.”
For any gainful expansions of empathy to become serious would first require a president and citizenry at least minimally versed in world history.[xxvii] During the Trump years, America displayed no such learning. Going forward, however, it seems that America has at least begun its indispensable return to Reason, Rationality and “Mind.”
There exist other and deeper global roots to the fundamental problems of empathy and cooperation. Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost two hundred of which are called “nation-states,” too many human beings still find it pleasing to slay certain “others.” As for any remediating considerations of compassionate human feeling, that particular sentiment is typically reserved only for those who live within one’s own delineated “tribe.”
Expansions of empathy to include “outsiders” remain a basic condition of authentic peace, global union and “oneness.” Without such expansions, our entire species would remain dedicated to its own continuous debasement. In an age of converging nuclear and biological hazards, such dedication would represent more than just inconvenience or defilement. It would be expansively murderous.
What fixes, if any, are still available? What must Americans actually do in order to encourage wider patterns of empathy, thereby fostering more deeply caring feelings between as well as within “tribes”? How can U.S. president Joseph Biden work to meaningfully improve the state of our still-crumbling world order?[xxviii]
These are not easy questions, but they do need to be asked. Incontestably, they comprise the same precise queries that will finally need to be addressed openly by MR. Biden. So what next?
Ironically, we must initially acknowledge, the essential expansion of empathy for the many could quickly become “dreadful,” possibly improving human community, but only at the intolerable cost of private sanity. This prospectively insufferable consequence is rooted in the way we humans were originally “designed,” that is, as more-or-less “hard wired” beings, persons with distinctly recognizable and largely “impermeable” boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion toward too many others could bring about each single one’s own emotional collapse.
This point should be easy to recognize and understand. As a ready example, consider how difficult it would be if all were suddenly to feel the same compelling pangs of sympathy and compassion for various others outside our primary spheres of attachment as for those family and friends we have preferentially located “inside” this sphere.
This presents a challenging intellectual paradox. Long ago, it was examined in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a Talmudic tradition that certain scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the whole world is said to rest upon thirty-six Just Men, the Lamed-Vov. These suffering figures are otherwise indistinguishable from other ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were ever absent, the resultant tribulations of humankind would be staggering, poisoning the souls of even the newly-born.[xxix]
Such a Talmud-elucidated paradox holds potentially useful contemporary meaning for the United States. This modernized signification reveals that a widening circle of human compassion is both indispensable to civilizational survival and represents a lamentable Jewish source of private anguish.
Still more questions arise. Going forward, how shall President Joe Biden begin to deal capably with a requirement for global civilization that is both essential and unbearable? Newly informed that empathy for the many is a literal precondition of a decent and functioning world society, what can create such caring without simultaneously producing intolerable emotional pain? Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, “high-thinkers” must duly inquire: How can we be fully released from the misconceived ideology of “America First,” a zero-sum posture that had been increasing the prospects not only of war, terrorism and genocide, but also of uncontrollable disease pandemics?[xxx]
The World as System
Fundamentally, the whole world is a system. “The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature,” says the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “no matter whom…Each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others….”
Above all, America must understand that the state of America’s national union can never be any better than the state of the wider and more deeply intersecting world. This key truth obtains not “only” in reference to the more usual issues of war, peace and international law,[xxxi] but also to increasingly critical matters of disease avoidance.
For the imperiled United States, the overarching presidential objective must always be to protect the sacred dignity of each individual human being. This is exactly this high-minded and ancient Jewish goal that should now give specific policy direction to US President Joseph Biden.[xxxii]
Naturally, it will be easy to dismiss any such seemingly lofty recommendations for human dignity as silly, ethereal or “academic.” But, in reality, there could never be any greater American presidential naiveté than to champion the false Trump-era extremity of “everyone for himself.” Not only was this extremity illogical and self-destructive, it was (and remains) contrary to this nation’s founding principles of Natural Law – principles expressed not only by German jurist Samuel Pufendorf, but also by Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius and Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel.[xxxiii]
Here, located among so many other misfortunes, we would have found it impossible to battle not only the usual and better-known social/political adversaries, but also the increasingly fearful and merciless biological ones. Was this in any way a properly “Jewish orientation” to public policy, one in some conceivably close accord with traditional Talmudic notions of human “oneness?”[xxxiv]
It’s a silly question.
Without a suitable expansion of empathy, we will remain at the mercy not just of other predatory human beings, but also (as we may now note from hour to hour) of increasingly virulent pathogens. In short order, whether suddenly or in increments, the harmful synergies created by any such markedly unwelcome combinations would become palpably unbearable. What then?
The cumulative lesson here is clear, especially to those with some refined appreciation of Jewish heritage, tradition and education. Only by placing “Humanity First” can an American president ever make “America First.” The latter, which now includes an utterly indispensable capacity to combat disease pandemics as well as war, terrorism and genocide[xxxv] is not possible without the former. But first there must be cultivated a suitable and sufficiently widespread “conviction.”[xxxvi]
America, Israel and the wider world can learn from Rabbi Avraham Kook[xxxvii] that global unity is not something “outside;” rather, it exists “inside,” within all of us. The first task therefore must be to acknowledge this benevolent in-dwelling of jurisprudential judgment and Jewish philosophy. The second is to adapt this judgment and philosophy as a progressively guiding source of world policy transformations.[xxxviii] Briefly stated, unless we can all move more strenuously beyond the belligerent nationalism that held pernicious sway during the dissembling Trump years, there will be no residual sanctuary anywhere on earth.
Microcosm, Macrocosm and Human “Oneness”
One last “linkage” needs to be acknowledged and reaffirmed. This is the indissoluble nexus between “macrocosm” and “microcosm,” between world political processes and the singular person or “one.”[xxxix] In the end, everything on this planet must depend upon the dignity, courage[xl] and “emancipation” of the individual human being.
Absolutely everything.
In his seminal essay Who is Man? (1965), modern Jewish philosopher Abraham J. Heschel laments: “The emancipated man is yet to emerge.” The remedy? Heschel asks all human beings to raise the following elemental questions with themselves: “What is expected of men (people)?” “What is demanded of me?”[xli]
An obligation to resist Mass (Nietzsche would prefer “herd,” Freud “horde,” or Kierkegaard “crowd”) is taken by Heschel as prerequisite to a more sufficiently decent and peaceful “macrocosm.”[xlii] Thinking, like Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Jung, Freud, Ortega y’Gasset and others that camouflage and concealment in the Mass must give way to “being-challenged-in-the- world, the Jewish philosopher clarifies America’s own current obligation to “get beyond belligerent nationalism.” It is to demand of our national leaders a consistently more abiding respect for law, logic and Reason; not to selectively turn away from truth because of narrowly selfish presumptions of personal interest.
In this connection there is also evident very great irony. For the all-too-many Americans who abided Donald Trump’s multiple and egregious derelictions – including his open indifference to pandemic disease that bordered on becoming a “crime against humanity” – the benefits of that presidency were contrived or non-existent. For example, how could the presumed individual gain of paying fewer taxes have been judged cost-effective if the United States suffered corollary existential weakening vis-à-vis North Korea, China and Russia?
At a narrowly practical level of national and global policy-making, there seems to be no apparent purpose to remembering Rabbi Kook’s “loftiness” of “soul.”[xliii] Still, such “loftiness” is a proper exemplar of traditional Jewish philosophy, and could help various policymaking principals to modify or reform belligerent nationalism in time; that is, before it produces yet another wave of catastrophic war, terrorism and/or genocide. Even if it might first seem naive, implausible or idealistic, invoking Rabbi Kook’s high-thinking in such matters could represent a moral imperative for humanity as a whole.
The primordial “dust gathered in all four corners of the world” has a unifying meaning.
It is as a matter of human “oneness” that America and the world must now plan their plainly-intersecting futures.
No nation-state that chooses to ignore this imperative ascent toward global unity can reasonably hope to be “first.”
In this connection, millennia of disciplined Jewish thought ought not to be disregarded.
It can help show us the way.
—————–
LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D. Princeton 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with literature, art, philosophy, international relations, and international law. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he was born in Zürich, Switzerland at the end of World War II. Dr. Beres’ twelfth and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). http://www.israeldefense.co.il/en/content/surviving-amid-chaos-israels-nuclear-strategy . His pertinent writings can be found in The New York Times; The Atlantic; The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; The Hudson Review; The National Interest; JURIST; Modern Diplomacy; US News & World Report; Daily Princetonian; Yale Global Online; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Jewish Business News; Jewish Website; International Security (Harvard); Horasis (Zurich); Oxford University Press; The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Israel Defense; and several dozen national and international law journals.
[i] The legal and historical origins of this war-oriented dynamic lie in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a treaty which brought into being the extant state-system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Taken together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[ii] “Theories are nets,” reminds Karl Popper, citing to the German poet Novalis, “only he who casts, will catch.” See Popper’s epigraph to his classic, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Ironically, Novalis’ fellow German poet, Goethe, declared, in his early Faust fragment (Urfaust): “All theory, dear friend, is grey. But the golden tree of life is green.”
[iii] Since the Peace of Westphalia, the idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is a current variant – has never been more than a facile metaphor. In essence, treaty language notwithstanding, it has never had anything to do with ascertaining or maintaining any “true and just equilibrium” of power. As any such balance must ultimately be a matter of individual subjective perceptions, adversarial states can never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances of the moment are actually “balanced” in their favor. Hence, as each side must fear perpetually that it will be “left behind,” the corresponding search for balance can only produce ever-widening patterns of instability or disequilibrium.
[iv]Ironically, international law, which remains an integral part of the legal system of all states, assumes a general and reciprocal obligation of each state to supply benefits to other states and to avoid war whenever possible. This core assumption of jurisprudential solidarity is known formally as a “peremptory” or jus cogens expectation, that is, one that is not ever subject to question. It can be found in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis, Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[v]Twentieth century writer and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse would still likely respond: “The world as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish and it will.” (See Steppenwolf, 1927).
[vi] Such anarchy stands in stark contrast to the formal legal assumption of solidarity between states. This idealized assumption concerns a presumptively common struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known correctly in law as a jus cogens assumption, was already mentioned in Justinian, Grotius, and Vattel (supra). All three – Justinian, Grotius and Vattel – were familiar to Founding Fathers of the United States.
[vii] Though composed in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan may still describe a permanent vision of chaos in world politics. During such chaos, which is a “time of War,” says the English philosopher in Chapter XIII (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery.”): “… every man is Enemy to every man… and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Still, at the actual time of writing Leviathan, Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition among individual human beings. This is because of what he had called the “dreadful equality” of individual men in nature concerning the ability to kill others. Plainly, this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappeared with the continuing manufacture and spread of nuclear weapons, a spread soon apt to be exacerbated by an already-nuclear North Korea and a nearly-nuclear Iran.
[viii] In the generic clarification of Swiss psychologist and philosopher Carl G. Jung: “The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.” (See, The Undiscovered Self, 1957).
[ix] One should be reminded here of Bertrand Russell’s trenchant observation in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916): “Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”
[x]See, by this author, at Oxford University Press, Louis René Beres: https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/
[xi] For philosophical background of Realpolitik, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order, Lexington Books, 1984; and Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy, Lexington Books, 1983. Regarding this background in law or jurisprudence: “Right is the interest of the stronger,” says Thrasymachus in Bk. I, Sec. 338 of Plato, THE REPUBLIC (B. Jowett tr., 1875). “Justice is a contract neither to do nor to suffer wrong,” says Glaucon id., Bk. II, Sec. 359. See also, Philus in Bk III, Sec. 5 of Cicero, DE REPUBLICA.
[xii]See Edward S. Corwin, The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law (1955); and Alexander P. d’ Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (1951).
[xiii]See Pufendorf’s On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (1673); Chapter “On Recognition of the Natural Equality of Men.” In this section, Pufendord continues: “The same equality shows how a man should conduct himself, when he must assign their various rights to others, viz., that he must treat them as equals, and not indulge the one as against the other, except on the merits of the case.” Pufendorf was familiar to the American Founding Fathers.
[xiv]Neither international law nor US law specifically advises any particular penalties or sanctions for states that choose not to prevent or punish genocide committed by others. Nonetheless, all states, most notably the “major powers” belonging to the UN Security Council, are bound, among other things, by the peremptory obligation (defined at Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) known as pacta sunt servanda, to act in continuous “good faith.” In turn, this pacta sunt servanda obligation is itself derived from an even more basic norm of world law. Commonly known as “mutual assistance,” this civilizing norm was most famously identified within the classical interstices of international jurisprudence, most notably by the eighteenth-century legal scholar, Emmerich de Vattel in The Law of Nations (1758).
[xv] About such “oneness,” we may learn from ancient Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, “You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE, and with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality” or interconnectedness. By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking upon Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world correctly considered as a part rather than a whole. Said Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today, the idea of human oneness can be fully justified/explained in more purely secular terms of understanding.
[xvi] Martin Buber identifies the essence of every living community as “meeting.” True community, says Buber, is an authentic “binding,” not merely a “bundling together.” Furthermore, in true community, each one commits his whole being in “God’s dialogue with the world,” and each stands firm and resolute throughout this dialogue.
[xvii]On the crime of genocide, see, by this author: Louis René Beres: gwhttps://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://search.yahoo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1151&context=ilr
[xviii] “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another,” warns playwright Samuel Beckett in Endgame, “of seeking justification always on the same plane?”
[xix]Inter alia, this term is used in formal international law and diplomacy at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: https://www.icj-cij.org/en/statute
[xx] Still the best treatments of America’s long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).
[xxi] The idea here of apocalypse seems to have been born in ancient Iran (Persia), specifically, with the Manichaeism of the Zoroastrians. Interestingly, however, at least one of these documents, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, found in a Qumran cave, is a comprehensive description of Jewish military tactics and regulations at the end of the Second Commonwealth. In essence, the “Sons of Light” were expected to prevail in battle against the “Sons of Darkness” before the “end of days,” and the later fight at Masada was widely interpreted as an apocalyptic struggle between a saintly few and the wicked many.
[xxii] As we may learn from Karl Jaspers’ Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time: (1952): “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition – and really do appear to believe.” Could any words better describe the American “mass-man” (and “mass-woman”) who preferred Donald Trump’s Covid19 medical judgments to those of Dr. Anthony Fauci?
[xxiii] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…. It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[xxiv] These matters include expectations of Natural Law, which represent the original and core legal foundations of the United States. Natural Law is based upon the acceptance of certain principles of right and justice that prevail because of their own intrinsic merit. Eternal and immutable, they are external to all acts of human will and interpenetrate all human reason. This dynamic idea and its attendant tradition of human civility runs continuously from Mosaic Law and the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present day. For a comprehensive and far-reaching assessment of the natural law origins of international law, see Louis René Beres, “Justice and Realpolitik: International Law and the Prevention of Genocide,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 33, 1988, pp. 123-159. This article was adapted from Professor Beres’ earlier presentation at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 1982.
[xxv] “Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight,” asks Honore de Balzac, “withered hearts, or empty skulls?”
[xxvi] Because such indifference impacted legal standards that are fundamental and “permit no derogation,” it represented a violation of “peremptory norms.” According to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: “…a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See: Supra; Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679 (1969).
[xxvii] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically, in his justly celebrated Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…. It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge. Much of this effort was founded upon familiar (to Spinoza) certain Jewish sources.
[xxviii] The term “world order” has its contemporary origins in a scholarly movement begun at the Yale Law School in the mid- and late 1960s, and later “adopted” by the Politics Department at Princeton University in 1967-68. The present author was an early member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project, and authored several early books and articles in this once-emergent academic genre.
[xxix] Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to “soul.” Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and material accomplishment would occasion sweeping psychological misery.
[xxx]The most ominous synergies would link pandemic effects with growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by this author, see Louis René Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
[xxxi] International law is part of US domestic law. In the precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[xxxii] In Jewish tradition, empathy, justice and individual human dignity can together bring forth a vast and indispensable healing. Such key traits, commented Rabbi Avraham Kook, a thinker who was not a part of the classical stream of Jewish philosophy, must “flow directly from the holy depth of the wisdom of the Divine soul.” Rabbi Kook’s thinking does not stand in any stark or self-conscious opposition to rational and scientific investigation, nor does it intend to oppose pure feelings to raw intellect. It identifies instead a potentially useful creative tension, one between a too-abstract and too-formal intellectualism and a promisingly practical form of reason. Influenced and informed by Buddhism, Rabbi Kook envisioned humankind as possessing a natural evolutionary inclination toward collective advancement and self-perfection. Moreover, he surmised, the course of this expansive human evolution must be directed toward a progressively increased spirituality. In the final analysis, Kook understood Torah as a tangible and incontrovertible manifestation of Divine Will on earth.
[xxxiii]See, for example, Grotius The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[xxxiv]“The dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world (Talmud). This Talmudic axiom closely parallels the presumptions of Natural Law, presumptions central to fashioning the core documents of the United States. For a time, American law and legal policy, founded of course upon the learned jurisprudence of Sir William Blackstone, had acknowledged the ubiquitous obligation of all states to help one another. According to Blackstone, each state is always expected “to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon offenses against that universal law….” See: 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4, “Of Public Wrongs.” Lest anyone ask about the significance of Blackstone for now-current US national security policies, one need only point out that Commentaries were an original and core foundation of the laws of the United States. It goes without saying that this fact remained unknown to former US President Donald Trump or his still-determined acolytes. To wit, Trump policies of “America First” represented the diametric opposite of what Blackstone would have had urged or even have expected.
[xxxv]Professor Beres is the author of several major books and many law journal articles on genocide-like crimes. See, for example, Louis René Beres, “Genocide and Genocide-Like Crimes,” in M. Cherif Bassiouni., ed., International Criminal Law: Crimes (New York, Transnational Publishers, 1986), pp. 271-279.
[xxxvi]“The best lack all conviction,” reminds poet William Butler Yeats in The Second Coming, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
[xxxvii] According to Rabbi Kook, a final Divine redemption must be undertaken by and through the Jewish People. A core part of any such redemption must be the palpably greater awareness of human unity, or human oneness. In turn, proceeds this dialectic, awareness will ultimately give rise to the spreading light of loving kindness and forgiveness, even amid the eternally bitter rancor of world politics.
[xxxviii]We learn from 20th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers (Man in the Modern Age, 1951): “Everyone knows that the world situation in which we live is not a final one.”
[xxxix] Though not knowingly connected to Jewish philosophy, the writings of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard focus very explicitly on the true individual or “Single One.” For Kierkegaard, the most ruinous human evasion of all is to hide oneself within a “crowd.” The crowd, says Kierkegaard famously, is “untruth. Intellectually, it resembles what Germans philosopher Martin Heidegger later lamented as “das Man” or “The They.”
[xl]See, by this author. Professor Louis René Beres, at Yale Global (Yale University) https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage
[xli]Jewish visionary Abraham J. Heschel complements the foundational insights of Francis Bacon, Galileo and Isaac Newton and more recently Lewis Mumford: “Civilization,” says Heschel in Who Is Man? “is the never ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”
[xlii]“Is it an end that draws near,” inquired Karl Jaspers, “or a beginning?” The answer will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war German philosopher had to say about the Jungian or Freudian “mass.” In his own classic study, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represent the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can all-too-quickly suffocate personal growth and identity.
[xliii] “The loftier the soul,” wrote Rabbi Avraham Kook, “the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.”