Looking beyond ISIS: War, politics and ‘inner life’ on a tribal planet

Examined systematically, there is nothing unique about current patterns of war and terror on planet Earth. Rather, from time immemorial, such frenzied turmoil as we now witness most conspicuously in Iraq and Syria has followed a long-recurring script. For the most part, in the always corrosively self-limiting life of civilizations, there is nothing really new under the sun.

Still, reading the latest news of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) slaughter and enslavement, an utterly desperate query can no longer be stifled: Just how much more horror, we must finally ask, can our tormented species endure?

{mosads}This is not a silly or gratuitous question. In our universities, especially, where prevailing intellectual fashion is determined by anything but intellectual standards, our students deserve exposure to more genuinely revealing forms of learning. In essence, although they now live in a society that smugly loathes mindful study, these students will ultimately need to seek satisfaction beyond altogether vacant forms of entrepreneurship and commerce.

At a minimum, university students will now require awareness that each single individual’s personal and professional accomplishments will make sense only if the planet, as a whole, can have a correspondingly accomplished future. Such an awareness is already unhidden. For example, it is readily discoverable in the writings of the great Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.”

It also means that our wider planetary civilization can be promising only if its billions of constituent residents are permitted to strive meaningfully.

The dual-level message is rather simple: No one’s private success can be sustainable if the world, as a whole, has no tolerable future.

No conceivably gainful configuration of planet Earth can be sustainable if the great human legions and states who comprise it are themselves morally, spiritually and intellectually adrift.

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” once observed William Butler Yeats. But, just as it was for the celebrated Irish poet, today’s expanding global chaos is merely a symptom. It is, as the philosophers would say, “epiphenomenal.” It is not the truly underlying “disease.”

Plus ça change … All world politics still expresses an unchanging and deeply misplaced human deficit. This core liability is the incapacity of individuals and societies to discover authentic self-worth within themselves. Such incapacity had already been foreseen in the 18th century by America’s then-leading person of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, but today, the vital insights of the “American Transcendentalists” remain known only to an excruciatingly tiny minority.

Somehow, we humans always manage to miss what is most important. Seemingly indecipherable, there nonetheless exists a critical inner horizon to world politics. In literature, this crucial horizon can be more readily encountered in Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, than in Adam Smith, Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes. Moreover, its persistent rejection in real life already reflects the most thoroughly elemental failure of planetary political life.

This failure is the steadfast refusal of individuals, all over the world, to seek their irreducibly core identity as persons, inside themselves.

Today, in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, Kenya and myriad other places facing sudden or incremental dissolution, we discover a blindly ritualized adherence to fully tribal claims of state, class and faith.

Always, the tribe is microcosm. From the beginning, from the muddled primal promiscuity of our earliest global politics, all determinative behavior in world affairs has been driven by some kind or other of group conflict. From the identifiable human origins of our so-called “civilizations,” and from the pitiably aggregated totals of individual souls seeking some palpable forms of redemption, most people have felt themselves lost or abandoned outside a tribe.

Drawing self-worth from falsely consoling memberships in the State or the Faith or the Race or the Gang — from what Freud had called the “primal horde”; Nietzsche, more simply, the “herd”; and Kierkegaard, perhaps most insightfully, the “crowd” — we humans still cannot satisfy even the most patently minimal requirements of social coexistence. Here, of course, the ironies are staggering. After all, these starkly conspicuous human failures coincide with the species’ most extraordinary technical and scientific accomplishments.

The veneer of human civilization is still razor thin. Oddly, whole swaths of humankind remain unremittingly dedicated to ancient and atavistic sacrificial practices. Carefully justified murders are now more reassuringly cast as “holy war” or “freedom fighting,” but their net effect is corrosive and unchanged.

From the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, which ended the last of the great religious wars sparked by the Reformation, to the present precarious moment, international relations have been fashioned by a changing “balance of power” and by certain unavoidably associated expressions of war, terror, and genocide. To be sure, hope still exists, but it must now sing softly, with circumspection, inconspicuously, almost sotto voce. Although plainly counterintuitive, the time for celebrating science, modernization, globalization and even new information technologies is already partially over. To survive, together, on an imperiled planet, all of us must energetically seek to rediscover an individual life that is inconveniently detached from patterned conformance, cheap entertainments, shallow optimism and a disingenuously contrived visage of happiness.

With such a refreshingly candid expression of the awakened human spirit, we may yet learn something that is both useful and redemptive. We may learn, more precisely, that a common agony is more important than astrophysics; that a ubiquitous despair is more consequential than any financial “success”; and that shared tears can reveal much deeper meanings than ceaselessly robotic smiles.

In his landmark work, The Decline of the West, first published during World War I, Oswald Spengler inquired: “Can a desperate faith in knowledge free us from the nightmare of the grand questions?” It remains a noteworthy query, one that will never be raised in our universities, let alone on Wall Street or Main Street. Significantly, however, we may yet learn something about these critically “grand questions” by studying the visibly expanding chaos in world politics. Then, we could finally learn that the most suffocating insecurities of life on Earth can never be sufficiently undone by improving global economics, by building larger missiles, by shaping new international treaties, by always encouraging “self-determination” or by replacing one sordid regime with another, even when it is in the hallowed name of “spreading democracy.”

Seeing may require distance. Planet Earth still lacks a promising future, not because we humans have necessarily been too slow to learn what has been taught in our schools and universities, but because what we have been taught is essentially beside the point.

Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, he is the author of many major books and articles dealing with world politics, law, literature, art and philosophy. Beres’s most recent writings have been published in U.S. News & World Report, The Hill, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, The Atlantic, The Jerusalem Post, The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, The Brown Journal of World Affairs, The Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School) and Oxford University Press. His 10th book, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: Surviving Amid Chaos, will be published later this year (Rowman and Littlefield).