Abstract: This article calls for applying intellectual ingenuity to our planet’s core survival problems: nuclear war; injustice; economic inequality and ecological catastrophe. A necessary first step is the intelligent design of alternative world futures. Though there could be no more rational decision than to heed such advice, only a handful of exceptional scholars has accepted the corresponding responsibility. Poet E.E. Cummings notwithstanding, there is no “hell of a good universe next door” to which we might ultimately retreat. Immediately, therefore, gifted thinkers and scientists should prepare to craft “blueprints” of global restructuring. Needed designs will need to be imaginative, logic-based and systemic,[1] taking close account of potentially synergistic interactions[2] between seemingly discrete threats. To the extent that requisite world order design projects would be conducted by “teams” (now a favored metaphor in government, corporate and university settings), the critical task could be modeled in part (an intellectual part) on the Manhattan Project, not to create another mega-weapon system, but to best ensure that existing nuclear weapon systems are never used.
“We doctors know a hopeless case, if…. listen: There’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.” -E.E. Cummings
The avant-garde poet’s counsel is bitterly ironic. Whatever our species progress on interplanetary space research, humankind can hardly expect authentic opportunities to migrate to “a good universe next door.” Inter alia, any survivable world system would need to begin with purposeful design processes.
But there is a fly-in-the-ointment. Apart from a tiny handful of esoteric academic programs created over the past sixty years (all of them now fully eliminated or more-or-less neglected), there has been no progress on identifying alternative world futures. Quite the contrary.
What does all this mean for rescuing an imperiled planet? How shall scholars and policy-makers understand the variously humiliating contradictions? Portentously, we humans have already given up on any once promising ideas of global community or global “oneness.” Instead, we have sheepishly followed unsuitable national leaderships to war, injustice and ecological catastrophe.
To improve on this lack of progress, an unassailably core imperative, courageous initiatives will need to be undertaken in universities. In recent years, while these institutions of “higher learning” have continued to make commendable strides in preparing students for the professions[3] (i.e., vocational education), they make virtually no decipherable moves to save the planet as a whole. In candor, what we presently witness in worldwide higher education are institutions that seek to impress constituents with opportunities for wealth and privilege, but do little to protect our common human habitat from irremediable harms.
How shall we respond in time? To understand such complex existential matters, history will deserve some evident pride of place. In the late 1960s, a small number of American universities set out to create “World Order Studies Programs.” One especially visible program began at the Yale Law School and subsequently migrated to Princeton University’s Department of Politics. Sharing some of their best scholars, Princeton and Yale encouraged capable graduate students and professors to render thoughtful designs for “alternative world futures.”[4] At that time, relevant global problems were summed up as war, population pressure, resource shortages and environmental decay.
It is now grievously urgent that informed scholars revive and enhance world order studies as a subject of disciplined academic inquiry. The first step in any such return should be a heightened awareness of global interdependence and a heightened sentiment to meet correlative challenges with meaningful intellectual efforts. Though there has never been a more critical moment for the design of alternative world futures, there has also never been so little interest in world futures design.[5] In any event, our rapidly dissembling world order could never be rescued by the always-banal reflexes of partisan political discourse.
Multiple problems stand stubbornly in our collective way. Worldwide, universities are not prepared for undertaking world order design initiatives. Expressing the reductio ad absurdum of human shortsightedness, they foster a headlong rush to measure higher education according to tangible “payback” prospects. This metric represents a vulgar and limiting standard, one that will surely be encouraged in Washington by the incoming presidential administration.
There are further questions. What is the foreseeable “lay of the land” in these educational and survival matters? Though educational cost is certainly a legitimate decisional factor, America’s universities are already being evaluated in toto by the presumed cost-effectiveness of student “investment.”
What about a once-vaunted “Western Canon” of liberal arts – literature, art. music, philosophy? It has all but disappeared from the curriculum.[6] And where it does still exist on paper, the Western Canon’s overall importance is almost always categorized as a secondary benefit. Accordingly, why should it surprise anyone that even graduates of America’s “elite universities” are palpably uneducated and that an incoming American president (1) reads nothing, nothing at all, not even the U.S. Constitution; and (2) benefits politically from his recognizable distaste for learning?
Abundant nuances and details clarify America’s cascading disfigurements. Among other things, any coherent template for world order reform must take multiple and overlapping considerations of biology into account. This means a view dictated not only by the “usual suspects” of war, injustice and ecological spoliation, but by still-latent disease pandemics that could threaten entire human civilizations.
Though we have made conspicuous progress in science and technology as a species, we remain enormously fragile and existentially vulnerable to “plague.” Over time, especially if a more refractory pandemic should sometime “synergize”[7] with catastrophic acts of war or terror (both foreseeable and unforeseeable), whole societies could be erased. What next? This is not just an American question. Rather, it defines the single most bewildering and consequential query on planet earth.
The existential task is not shrouded in mystery or abstraction. Across the continents, intellectual leaders will need to plan rationally, systematically and self-consciously for global survival. Still, without antecedent design visions supplied by gifted thinkers and academics, these leaders’ efforts will inevitably come to naught. Prima facie, there is no discoverable world order promise in any “great power” political leaders.
Quite the contrary.
Ultimately, the creative task for residually insightful global thinkers is grim and straightforward. At the outset, this task should signal a unique willingness to realign traditionally narrow judgments of national self-interest with the wider interests of humankind as a whole.[8] Although such a perplexing requirement will first appear glaringly unrealistic, nothing could be less realistic for powerful nation-states than choosing to remain on their present collision course.[9]
Left unchanged, or merely modified by token kinds of world order reform, global politics and economics will experience ever more frequent and irremediable breakdowns. To argue otherwise, or (still more foolhardy) to call for further hardening of belligerent nationalisms (the declared call of the incoming US president) would reject everything we humans have learned about civilization, science and species survival.
To call more insistently for an interminable geopolitics would represent postures of unforgivable irresponsibility.
Fundamentally, it all boils down to this: Unless we finally take proper steps to implement an organic and cooperative planetary civilization – one based on the unalterably central truth of human “oneness” – there will be no civilization at all.[10] To credibly reject this conclusion would require certain convincing expectations of ongoing evolution toward worldwide peace, justice and ecological stability. Right now, on its face, any such optimistic expectations would be preposterous ipso facto.
There is more. The imperative nature of this candid assessment is clarified by our species’ “advances” in creating mega-weapons and related infrastructures.[11] Augmenting these examples of “progress,” major states could openly commit themselves to strategies of nuclear war fighting,[12] cyber-warfare and “internet mercenaries.” The spread of internet warfare surrogates is already being undertaken on behalf of the world’s most barbarous and authoritarian regimes. In the planning of alternative world futures, designers should always bear in mind that considerations of justice and peace are mutually reinforcing.
Merely to survive, human “oneness” must rise above all other core objectives. Regarding an organic planetary civilization based on “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 Republic 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 allegedly been created for the same overriding purpose: to provide background for the drama of human salvation.
Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world considered as a part rather than a whole. Says 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 and should be justified/explained in more secular terms of understanding. We require “One World” based on something other than presumptions of belligerent nationalism or religious superiority. At its heart, any such presumption derives from the insistent human wish to acquire “power over death.” Though unrecognized, there is never any greater form of power in national or international politics than what can presumably confer personal immortality.[13]
How could it be otherwise?
We humans – all humans – are still at “The beginning.” Until now, in relentlessly primal circles, we have managed to miss what is conspicuously most important about life on earth. Nonetheless, this central truth needs to be more openly identified and continuously underscored: It is only by first recognizing an overriding species “oneness” that a survivable world order could be designed.
This critical dimension of human identity can be encountered in certain vital but generally-ignored literatures, among such philosophic figures as Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, Miguel de Unamuno and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.[14] The persistent rejection of “oneness” in “real life,” even in the world’s presumptively great universities,[15] reflects an elemental threat to every single nation-state’s physical survival.
There is more. Antecedent questions should diligently be raised. Why have we made ourselves (humans are not merely passive victims in these matters) existentially vulnerable in the first place? The correct answer must reveal a continuous worldwide willingness to seek personal identity in variegated memberships. To wit, humans ordinarily fear solitude or “aloneness” more than anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death.[16] Amid the palpably growing chaos that is stampeding across whole continents, we still abide lethal loyalties to reassuring claims of “tribe.”
Everywhere, individuals desperate “to belong” will more-or-less enthusiastically subordinate themselves to some all-consuming expectations of nation, class or faith. And more often than we might at first care to admit, such subordination carries with it an acceptance of “martyrdom.” Recalling the marooned English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, we may be reminded here that the veneer of human civilization is always razor thin. Vastly impressive scientific and medical discoveries aside, whole swaths of humankind remain open to critically defiling forms of irrationality.[17]
With such retrograde hopes, an entire species must remain in grave peril. More precisely, in the end, atavistic hopes of personal and collective immortality lie at the heart of war, terrorism[18] and genocide. The natural question should then arise: “Is this the best we can do?”
By any reasonable definition, humans remain determinedly irrational as a species. Why? The answer, in part, lies in our shortsighted views of power-politics or political “realism.”[19] Examined in the merciless light of history, these views appear strange or incomprehensible. Not until the twentieth century, after all, did international law[20] even bother to criminalize aggressive war.[21]
Hope exists, we must assume, but now it sings softly, with circumspection, inconspicuously, almost sotto voce. Though counter-intuitive, the time for celebrating science, modernization and information technologies per se is at least partially over. To survive together on this imperiled planet, each of us must first seek to rediscover an individual life that is detached from any pre-patterned obligations “to belong.” It is only after experiencing such liberating rediscovery that we could hope to reconstruct world order on intellectually reasonable foundations. These will have to be foundations of willing global interdependence and recognizable human “oneness.”
In his landmark work, The Decline of the West, originally published during World War I, Oswald Spengler inquires: “Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?”[22] This remains a profound and indispensable query. The correct answer would necessarily accept that the suffocating conflicts of life on earth can never be undone by improving global economies, building larger missiles,[23] fashioning or abrogating international treaties, replacing one sordid regime with another or even by “spreading democracy.”
Eventually, we must learn that this persistently tribal planet lacks a tolerable future not because humans have been too slow to learn what has been taught, but because what has been taught has generally been beside the point. It won’t be nearly enough if great majorities of people can somehow acquire shiny new “personal devices” or be able to own cars that can drive themselves. These are false, lazy and silly goals, manifestly contrived objectives that miss the main point of any tolerable human future: To remain alive, and do so with both dignity and reason.
Traditional “remedies” will be insufficient because the planet would remain on an inherently lethal trajectory of belligerent nationalism and tribal conflict.[24] To wit, reminds French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The Phenomenon of Man (1955): “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of `everyone for himself’ is false and against nature.”[25]
But how shall gifted scholars actually conceptualize alternative world futures based on desirable and feasible visions? What are the recognizable “rules” for such apt conceptualizations? What kinds of thinking ought to be acknowledged and implemented? How should this design thinking take purposeful account of human irrationality? “The rational is not thinkable without its other,” warned 20th-century philosopher Karl Jaspers in Reason and Existence (1935), “the non-rational, and it never appears in reality without it.”[26]
For designers of alternative world futures, pertinent thinking should be expressly dialectical.[27] This means accepting that there can never be any conclusively final or permanent visions. Always, because world system change is continuous and dynamic, heuristic models should be understood as transient. This understanding is not a regrettable sign of academic weakness or inadequacy. It is, rather, an unavoidable acknowledgment that promising “therapies” must follow correct “diagnoses.”
World order change is inevitable and unstoppable, but the precise direction of such change is inherently uncertain and potentially regressive. The scholars’ and policy makers’ task is not to seek unachievable transformations, but to enter into this dynamic process with calculated deliberateness and intelligent design methodologies. In this connection, it will need to be understood there can be no objectively appropriate or optimal world order design visions, and that all such visions should include enforceable international law.[28]
It’s time for greater specificity. Four basic steps should be followed: Values; Hypotheses; Models; Recommendations.
Values
A world system alternative could be desirable only from the standpoint of previously-stated values. In principle, at least, one scholar’s design could be another’s dystopia. Even if everyone involved could initially agree on the representative values of an improved world future (e.g., peace; social justice; economic well-being; climate change control, etc.), there would still remain widespread disagreement concerning the favored hierarchy or rank-ordering of these values.
Generally, any such hierarchy would remain a subjective judgment. There can be no objective reasons to prefer one specific value or configuration of values to any other. The only plausible exception to this judgment is the self-evidently primal value of physical survival. Here, designers would have to figure out the proper range and importance of religious faith.
Hypotheses
Once equipped with an explicit set of ranked values, scholars and policy-makers would need to link these values to specific factors expected to sustain or maximize them. These presumed linkages are known to science as hypotheses. In such tentative explanations, the selected values would serve as the “dependent variables” or subjects to be explained. Despite assorted points of flexibility, science has well-founded rules.
Hypotheses are essential to any science-based inquiry, including the design of alternative world futures. These “informed hunches” are necessary to guide the search for analytic order among many overlapping and discrepant facts. Most critically, without suitable hypotheses, there could be no reliable ways of determining which discrete facts are relevant and which are irrelevant.
Models
Models of alternative world futures should follow explicitly-statedhypotheses. These models would be determined by these antecedent hypotheses. Analyst-constructed visions are offered for the sole purpose of examining pertinent hypotheses. Without them, there could be no satisfactory way of knowing if a particular hypothesis or set of hypotheses has any genuine analytic “truth value.” Suitable hypotheses represent a core example of why the adequacy of any particular world order design process is contingent on prior methodological or philosophy of science choices.
In the world order design process, models derive from hypotheses. They provide the analytic context within which any reasonable investigation must proceed. Exactly which heuristic models are actually under consideration should depend on the already-selected hypothesis or hypotheses. This, in turn, could be more or less complex, depending upon the investigator’s own informed sense of what is most important.
Recommendations
Once relevant models have been stipulated and investigated, scholars and policy makers will need to decide whether or not to recommend them. Always, this final critical decision must be informed by the twin criteria of desirability and feasibility. Before any alternative system of world order could be judged acceptable, it would first have to appear aptly attractive in terms of the values selected and reasonably capable of implementation (“reasonably” being a largely subjective determination).
There is more. Feasibility issues are tied closely to desirability issues. They are interdependent or intersecting criteria of acceptability. Depending upon the extent of agreement on what might actually constitute a desirable world futures alternative, the feasibility of a considered design could vary from one assessment to another. This is not to suggest, however, that widespread agreement would automatically signify feasibility. Any remaining differences concerning strategies of implementation could still render a particular transformational recommendation unattainable.
The challenges of world futures design are oddly inconspicuous; nonetheless, they are critically important.[29] This importance is overriding because should the challenges remain neglected, no other human values could be satisfied. In essence, world futures design is about enhancing theoretical understanding, not just offering formal compilations of disjointed facts and figures. For “designers,” theory is a “net.” Only those who dare to cast, can catch.[30]
“Everyone knows,” says philosopher Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951), “that the world situation in which we live is not a final one.” But the nature and quality of the world situation’s next iteration will ultimately depend on humankind’s conscious choices among alternative planetary futures. By definition, these more-or-less viable options will not be ones of virtual or augmented reality, but of a foreseeably grim global context.
To survive as a species, intellect must become our most fundamental “weapon.” At the outset, world futures designers should understand that there is no “good universe next door.” Whether we like it or not, our uncertain human future can be lived only on planet earth.[31]
Hereon earth is where we must make our final stand. Moreover, we must make it now, without further delay and upon thoughtful intellectual foundations. The existential task cannot be completed by continuously propping up long-failed systems of power politics, efforts analogous to continuously resuscitating a corpse. We can progress beyond Realpolitik, but only by the purposeful fusion of imaginative vision with disciplined world order design processes.
More than anything else, such progress points toward human “oneness” as sine qua non of human survival. Without first acknowledging this guarantor, all other conceivable advancements (even on artificial intelligence (AI)) would ultimately prove extraneous. Indeed, without getting beyond recurrently superficial hopes for human rescue, we will merely continue to rearrange deck chairs on a planetary Titanic.
Then we will drown.
[1]Fifty years ago, this author recommended such a focus in his 1973 article in Policy Sciences. See Louis René Beres: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4531547 . See also by Professor Beres (with Harry R. Targ): Planning Alternative World Futures (Praeger, 1975).
[2] By definition, the “whole” of any such interactions would be greater than the sum of its “parts.”
[3] See by this writer, on Ortega y’ Gasset’s “barbarism of specialization,” Louis René Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/09/13/american-democracy-and-the-barbarism-of-specialisation/
[4] Early books in this genre by this author were: Louis René Beres and Harry R. Targ, Reordering the Planet: Constructing Alternative World Futures (1974) and Louis René Beres and Harry R. Targ, Planning Alternative World Futures: Values, Methods and Models (1975). See also, by Professor Beres, Transforming World Politics: The National Roots of World Peace (1975) and Louis René Beres, Nuclear Strategy and World Order: The United States Imperative (New York, 1982, World Order Models Project), 52 pp.
[5] Whenever the new Muses present themselves,” warned 20th century Spanish existentialist philosopher, José Ortega y’ Gasset, “the masses bristle.” See Ortega y’ Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (1925) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948, 1968), p.7.
[6] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at The Daily Princetonian: https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education
[7] Certain synergies could shed light upon an entire world system’s state of disorder (a view that would reflect what the physicists call “entropic” conditions), and could be dependent upon each pertinent decision-maker’s own subjective metaphysics of time. For an early article by this author dealing with linkages obtaining between such a metaphysics and national decision-making, see: Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-Making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.
[8] These interests must include the accelerating destruction of biodiversity on Planet Earth, a continuous natural climate catastrophe, one that naturalist David Attenborough suggests will likely end in another mass extinction. This means, inter alia, more-or-less predictable synergies between catastrophes of the natural world and catastrophes of specifically human misunderstanding. In synergistic interactions, by definition, cumulative harms (the “whole”) is necessarily greater than the sum of component harms (the “parts”).
[9] The reader may be usefully reminded here of Irish playwright Samuel Beckett’s illuminating observation in Endgame: “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another, of seeking justification always on the same plane?”
[10] Earlier visions of world order reform were based more expressly on global structure; that is, replacing the balance of power or Westphalian anarchy with some form of world government. In this connection, notes Sigmund Freud: “Wars will only be prevented with certainty if mankind unites in setting up a central authority to which the right of giving judgment upon all shall be handed over. There are clearly two separate requirements involved in this: the creation of a supreme agency and its endowment with the necessary power. One without the other would be useless.” (See: Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, cited in Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis, University of Denver, Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 10 (1973-73), p, 27.) Albert Einstein held similar views. See, for example: Otto Nathan et al. eds., Einstein on Peace (New York: 1960).
[11]The Devil in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman observes: “Man’s heart is in his weapons….in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself.”
[12] In late 2024, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has openly displayed such a corrosive commitment with regard to the war in Ukraine.
[13] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zürich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/
[14] The next generation of world order visionaries ought also to learn to build upon foundational insights of Francis Bacon, Galileo and Isaac Newton, and the more recent summarizing observation of Lewis Mumford: “Civilization is the never ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”
[15] In part, at least, this is because the “business” of universities has become vocational or professional training, not traditional education in history, science, literature and the arts. Accordingly, by this author, see Louis René Beres (Princeton): https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education
[16] See, by this author, at Horasis: Louis René Beres, https://horasis.org/an-ironic-juxtaposition-global-security-and-human-mortality/
[17] In studies of world politics, rationality and irrationality have now taken on very specific meanings. More precisely, an actor (state or sub-state) is presumed determinedly rational to the extent that its leadership always values national survival more highly than any other conceivable preference or combination of conceivable preferences. Conversely, an irrational actor might not always display such a determinable preference ordering.
[18] Under international law, terrorist movements are always Hostes humani generis, or “Common enemies of mankind.” See: Research in International Law: Draft Convention on Jurisdiction with Respect to Crime, 29 AM J. INT’L L. (Supp 1935) 435, 566 (quoting King V. Marsh (1615), 3 Bulstr. 27, 81 Eng. Rep 23 (1615) (“a pirate est Hostes humani generis”)).
[19]For the political philosophy origins of realism, see especially comment of Thrasymachus in Bk. 1, Sec. 338 of Plato, The Republic: “Right is the interest of the stronger.”
[20] Under international law, the idea of a universal obligation to global solidarity is contained, inter alia, within the core principle of jus cogens or peremptory norms. In the language of pertinent Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969: “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.”
[21] For the crime of aggression under international law, see: Resolution on the Definition of Aggression, adopted by the UN General Assembly, Dec. 14, 1974. U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 UN GAOR, Supp. (No. 31), 142, UN Doc A/9631 (1975) reprinted in 13 I.L.M., 710 (1974).
[22] Continues Spengler: “`I believe,'” is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love.'” See: The Decline of the West, his Chapter on “Pythagoras, Mohammed, Cromwell.”
[23] For early accounts by this author of expected nuclear war 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
[24] Regarding this trajectory, Niccolo Machiavelli combined Aristotle’s plan for a more scientific study of politics with various core assumptions about Realpolitik. His best known conclusion focuses on the eternally stark dilemma of practicing goodness in a world that is too often evil. “A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything, must necessarily come to grief among so many who are not good.” See: The Prince, Chapter XV. Although this argument is intuitively compelling, there must also be a corresponding willingness to disavow “naive realism,” and recognize that, in the longer term, the only outcome of “eye for an eye” conceptions in world politics will be universal “blindness.”
[25] In a similar vein, see Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations (1758), “The first general law, which is to be found in the very end of the society of Nations, is that each Nation should contribute as far as it can to the happiness and advancement of other Nations.”
[26] Jaspers addresses the antecedent question of why humans act irrationally 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 whispering’s of the irrational…. not for science, but for wizardry disguised as science….”
[27] Dialectical thinking originated in Fifth Century BCE Athens, as Zeno, author of the Paradoxes, had been acknowledged by Aristotle as its inventor. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophic/analytic method. The dialectician, says Plato, is the special one who knows how to ask and then answer vital questions. From the standpoint of a necessary refinement in world order conceptualizations, this knowledge should never be taken for granted.
[28] International law is ultimately deducible from Natural Law. According to Blackstone, each state and nation 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, one need only point out that Commentaries represent the original and core foundation of the laws of the United States.
[29] Such importance stems from the absence of any “magic bullet” or otherwise contrived remedies. In ancient Greece, the playwright Euripides sometimes concluded his plays with a deus ex machina, a “god out of the machine.” Appearing, literally, above the action, in a sort of theatrical crane, the relevant god was seemingly able to solve all sorts of dreadful complications arising from the action and thereby supply a more-or-less satisfactory ending.
[30] This convenient metaphor is generally attributed to Novalis, the late 18th-century German poet and scholar. See, for example, introductory citation by Karl R. Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Ironically, perhaps, Novalis’ fellow German poet, Goethe, had declared, in his early Faust fragment (Urfaust): “All theory, dear friend, is grey. But the golden tree of life is green.” (Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grűn des Lebens goldner Baum.)
[31]In principle, future options for space travel and colonization could suggest otherwise, but surely not “in time.” Even if we were able to take seriously the idea of a “good universe next door,” it would not be long before colonizers from earth would extend historic human defilements to their new habitat.
