By
Prof. Louis René Beres
Africa-Press – Eritrea. “The State is the march of God in the world.”-Georg Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820)
An Inconspicuous Struggle
Ultimately, world politics is not about military strategy, national wealth or relative power. At its core, this largest possible arena of human interaction reflects variously primal struggles oflife against death. At the surface, these struggles are seemingly endless and are waged at themacrocosmic level of empires, states and sub-state insurgent groups. But beneath the surface, it is something microcosmic that most determinedly animates global political life.
This “something” need not seem bewildering. In essence, it references individual human needs and expectations. The pertinent causal connections hold for both nationaland international politics, separately and in their still-plausible intersections.
Above all else, individuals seek personal immortality or “power over death.”Though it is a glaringly universal search, faith-based assumptions have greater impact in certain regions of the world than in others. To wit, the tangible jihadi embrace of “martyrdom” operations makes Islamist terror groups most consequential in the Middle East.
There is more. Fundamentally, these issues are all intellect or mind-centered. Accordingly, a primal search for “being” demands variously complex kinds of understanding. As we might expect, these challenging forms of insight will be more readily decipherable by the “Few” than the “Many.”[1]
In the final analysis, world politics is never about the “greatness” or secular supremacy of a particular nation-state, empire or insurgency. Rather, it is about acquiring the highest imaginable form of human power. Ipso facto, this means the power of “living forever” or “power over death.”[2]
There are abundant nuances and particulars. Science-based acknowledgments of human mortality have never led our species to far-reaching feelings of empathy.[3] This apparent contradiction has occasioned more than disappointment. It has spawned continuous wars of cruelty, exploitation and extermination. As examples, we should inquire more specifically: What can this contradiction tell us about Russia’s aggression against Ukraine; the India-Pakistan conflict; Israel’s nuclear security concerns about Iran; or jihadist terror violence in the Middle East?
Through the ages, too often with “God on our Side,” conflicting states, peoples and religions have presumed that personal immortality can be acquired, but not without first managing to kill certain designated populations of expressly despised “others.” With palpably great “success,” such sanctification of mass killing has promised life-everlasting to millions, especially in those societies that very conspicuously prefer mystification to reason. Ominously, this false promise obtains only at the “sacrificial” expense of assorted “heathen,” “blasphemers,” or “apostates.” The best current example would be Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) and its manipulated promise of life-everlasting to “martyrs.”[4]
To clarify further, art can be helpful. Art is a lie that lets us see the truth. When he painted The Triumph of Death in 1562, Peter Bruegel drew upon his own direct experience with religious war and disease pandemic. In the sixteenth century, Bruegel had already understood that any intersection of these horrors (one man-made, the other natural) could be ill-fated, “force-multiplying” and “synergistic.”
What does it actually mean for an intersection to be synergistic? By definition, whenever specific outcomes are “in synergy,” the whole of any negative experience must be greater than the sum of its parts. This signifies, among other things, that human death counts can become exponential. It may also mean, at least in principle, that death in world politics can seem “even handed” and universal and that any once-presumed immortality benefits of war or terror are simply an illusion. In these often recurring circumstances, any “triumph of death” is apt to be all-consuming and tangibly undimmed.
There is more. Some pertinent points will be axiomatic. Viable preparations for promising national security navigations of world politics should begin with the “microcosm,” with the individual human being. More than anything else, the primal death fear of “not being” is determinative. When it is considered together with the understanding that such an overriding fear can create irresistible inclinations to collective violence, this troubling insight could reveal long overlooked foreign policy errors and opportunities.
The Ubiquity of Human Death Fear
We humans still fail to understand something altogether primary: The universal apprehension of death, duly acknowledged as common human anguish, could help us to prevent war, terrorism and genocide. If creatively “exploited,” this fateful apprehension could invite a steadily expanding ambit of species empathy and trans-national compassion. Could anything be more welcome or more necessary?
For scholars and policy-makers, it’s high time to be reminded of Heinrich von Treitschke’s Lectures on Politics. Citing approvingly to Fichte, Treitschke clarifies the issue succinctly: “Individual man sees in his country the realization of his earthly immortality.” There could be more highly-valued association.[5]
Social scientists would call such complex issues “multi-factorial.” Amid so many vital matters of word politics and national security, policy postures, wherever possible, should reflect provenance. No nation-state could ever be saved or even assisted by randomly rancorous political solutions fashioned ex nihilo, out of nothing, Always, such solutions should represent the intellectually well-reasoned product of historical exegesis and a refined scientific understanding.[6]
To succeed in meaningful ways, national security policies should steer clear of leadership calls to gratuitous belligerence or acrimonious relations (e.g., the sort of dissembling calls associated with former US president Donald J. Trump). Instead, they should reflect a primary collective commitment to global cooperation and species singularity. Only then, together with other states in world politics, could any one state ever hope to become “first.” With an early prescience, Emmerich de Vattel noted, in The Law of Nations or the Principles of Natural Law (1758): “Nations, being no less subject to the laws of nature than individuals, what one man owes to other men, one Nation, in its turn, owes to other Nations.”
Later, the celebrated eighteenth-century jurist continued: “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.” As we may learn from the Swiss legal scholar, narrowly nationalistic or nativist foreign policies represent the diametric opposite of what is actually required. Significantly, this same “general law” figures importantly in William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England – the de facto 18th century blueprint of all subsequent United States law.
What Is to Be Done?
What is required of us? In world politics, appropriately durable remediation will demand more penetrating depth of theoretic thought. National leaders will have to accept a fully imaginative and broadly global set of strategic policy understandings. This challenging compilation could then express a subtle but irrefutable intellectual awareness. It is that the outer worlds of politics and statecraft are essentially a mirrored reflection of our private selves.
In aptly scientific or philosophical terms, these “outer worlds” are best described as epiphenomenal.
Key national leaders will need to fathom all of this. It is only within the deeply opaque mysteries of individual human mortality – mysteries focused on an effectively timeless and universal preoccupation with acquiring earthly power over death – that we could finally discover the central truths of world politics. Whether we look toward more secure management of terrorism, war, or genocide, any continuous posture of belligerent nationalism or its equivalent would stigmatize and undermine our planet’s most sacred survival obligations.
Everywhere there remains much to learn. At a minimum, no nation’s leaders should ever attach any credible hopes for an improved national security policy by clinging to variously contrived examples of “exceptionalism.” Though unacknowledged in even our best schools and universities, there remains a noteworthy gap between humankind’s steadily-advancing technical understanding and its unceasingly violent passions. On any single day, and with little advance warning, it could become an irremediably fateful gap.
Where shall we go from here? Exeunt omnes? Or do we gainfully assess the individual human being in world politics?
Scholars and policy-makers should return to examining the microcosm. Leaving aside certain intellectual advantages, we humans are not the same kind of killers as other species. Of course, theredoes exist rampant killing among “lower animals,” but this behavior is generally purposeful, not merely gratuitous. Mostly, it is survival driven. It is “natural.” Biologically, it “makes sense.”
There is more. What sort of human species, we shall need to inquire, can tolerate or even venerate hideously maladaptive sources of personal gratification? To what extent, if any, is this venal quality related to our steadily-diminishing prospects for building global civilization upon essential premises of human interdependence or “oneness”? Once more, too, we should inquire: To what extent, if any, does human murderousness derive from a primary and more-or-less ubiquitous human death fear?
This last question is more important than it is obvious, even for the rational formulation of national foreign policies and for implementing certain corollary obligations of national strategy, global consciousness and world legal order.
Can We Accept That Everyone Must Die?
“Our unconscious,” wrote Freud, “does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.” What we ordinarily describe as heroism may in some cases be nothing more than denial. And yet, however widely disregarded, an expanded acceptance of personal mortality could represent the very last best chance we have to endure as a once-enviable species.
During the Trojan War, as we may learn from Homer, Achilles led Greek warriors to battle against Troy with the galvanizing rallying cry: “Onward, for immortality.” It has remained an incomparably important call for geopolitical competition. This should be unsurprising. After all, there could be no more irresistible human goal.
Can national leaders learn something here that might benefit both the particular nation and the wider global community, something that could move us gainfully beyond Schadenfreude (taking pleasure from the sufferings of others) and toward viable forms of a wider human cooperation? To be sure, the latter represents the only plausible path to the former. These core orientations are not mutually exclusive; always, they are mutually reinforcing.
Death “happens” to everyone, but our potentially useful awareness of this expectation is blunted by multiple deceptions. To somehow accept forthrightly that we are all authentically flesh and blood creatures of biology is more than most humans can comfortably bear. “Normally,” there is even a peculiar embarrassment felt by the living in the presence of the dead and dying.
It is almost as if death and dying had been reserved for “others.”
It is as if death were an “affliction” that can never darken our own personal and presumptively “eternal” lives. Judged by a now near-universal obsession with social media, and with being recognizably “connected,” this view may be rooted, at least in part, in the potent idea of personal death as the last and most insufferable extremity of being left “alone” – an unforgivable desertion in a persistently pointless universe.
That we, as individuals, should still cleave so desperately to allegedly sacred promises of redemption and immortality is not, by itself, a survival issue. It becomes an existential problem, and one that we may convincingly associate with war, terrorism, orgenocide,only when these promises are forcibly reserved to certain selected national segments of humanity and are subsequently denied to “less-worthy” nations.
In the end, all national and global politics are merely reflection, a thinly symptomatic expression of more deeply underlying andtroublesome private needs. The most pressing of all these accumulated needs is generally the avoidance of personal death. Stated differently, such avoidance is presumptively in almost everyone’s overriding interest.
It is time to look more seriously behind the news. In all global politics, it warrants repeating, there is no greater form of power than a presumed power over death. But what can we actually learn from this assessment that would have palpable practical benefit?
For the most part, prima facie, it’s not for us to choose when to die. Instead, our words, our faces, and even our irrepressible human countenance will sometime lie immeasurably beyond any considerations of conscious decision or individual choice. Still, we can choose to finally recognize our shared human fate and our derivative interdependence. Such a powerful intellectual recognition could carry with it a significant global promise, one that remains wholly unacknowledged in present-day world politics.
Much as we might prefer to comfort ourselves with various presumptions of societal hierarchy and national differentiation, we humans are all pretty much the same. This evident sameness is already obvious to all capable scientists and physicians. Our single most important similarity, and the one least subject to any reasonable hints of counter-argument, is thatwe all die.
A Final Opportunity?
Whatever our more-or-less divergent views on what might actually happen to us after death, the basic mortality that we conspicuously share represents the last best chance we have for global “oneness” and planet-wide coexistence. This is the case, however, only if we can first accomplish the treacherous leap from merely acknowledging a shared common fate to actually operationalizing generalized feelings of caring.
There is more. Across a continuously fragmenting planet, wehumans can still care for one another as humans, but only after we have first accepted that the resolute judgment of a common fate will not be waived by harms intentionally inflicted on “other.” While inconspicuous, ancient and modern crimes of war, terror, and genocide are often “just” conveniently sanitized expressions of religious sacrifice. In these species-defiling cases, mass killing or the rigid exclusion of certain specifically delineated “outsiders” represents a presumptively optimal path to “life everlasting.”
It’s not a new thought, nor could it ever stem from any narrowly secular belief system. Accordingly, we should consider psychologist Ernest Becker’s illuminating paraphrase of Elias Canetti in Escape from Evil (1975): “…. each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.” In the same vein, playwright Eugene Ionesco writes in his Journal (1966):
I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemy’s death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society: that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving one’s feelings, of warding off one’s own death.
There is very deep insight here. It reflects the notion that killing another human being can sometimes confer immunity from one’s own mortality. To clarify, in his Will Therapy (1936), psychologist Otto Rank argues: “The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the Other. Through the death of the Other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of being killed.”
In Greek theatre and mythology, religious sacrifice can even be inflicted upon close relatives and family, but not for the self-centered purpose of diminishing one’s own mortality. To recall Euripides’ Electra, Clytemnestra argues that the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia could still have been permissible if Agamemnon’s true objective had been to prevent sack of the city, to help his home, to rescue his children, sacrificing one only to save the others. In these specific circumstances, sacrificial violence –whether directed at enemies or at relatives or friends – is less about garnering personal power over death than about safeguarding life.
Cultivating Dual Awareness
Only a dual awareness of our common human destination, which is death, and the associated futility of sacrificial violence in any form, can offer an accessible “medicine” against war, terror and genocide. Only this difficult awareness can ever relieve an otherwise incessant Hobbesian war of “all against all.” Only with this courageous awareness can we truly understand the core meanings of world politics and national strategy.
Though largely unexamined, human death fear has much to do with capable understanding of a state’s national security orientations and options. Only a people who can feel within itself the fate and suffering of a broader human population will ever be able to embrace empathy and war avoidance as its foreign policy. Should we continue to conceptualize world politics as a narrowly zero-sum conflict of “us versus them,” a secular arena for Hegel’s “march of God,”[7] there will be continuously-escalating global violence.
For us as individuals – that is, for absolutely all of us – the “triumph of death” is immutable. Attempts to deflect personal death by killing certain reviled “others” must remain futile and inglorious. In essence, now it is high time for new and creative thinking about global security and human immortality. Instead of denying death at every turn, a denial that Sigmund Freud termed “wish fulfillment” in The Future of an Illusion (1927) and elsewhere, we must finally acknowledge the obvious.
The planetary and national survival task is an intellectual one, always, but unprecedented amounts of human courage will also be needed. For required national leadership initiatives, we can have no good reason to expect any rescuing deus ex machina (recalling Euripides, a “god out of the machine”). Equally fanciful and ill-fated would be to expect the arrival of a Platonic “philosopher-king.” For this to happen, enlightened citizens of many countries would first need to cast aside their historically discredited ways of thinking about world politics and national security, doing everything possible to elevate empirical science (“mind”)[8] over illusion and belligerent nationalism.
“In endowing us with memory,” wrote philosopher George Santayana, “nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation, the truth of mortality. The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without knowing it, perhaps, this conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.” Though few will immediately understand, such a needed elevation of memory and idea is already an invariant sine qua non for human survival.
Nineteenth century philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel was sorely mistaken. No State or organization can ever represent “the march of God in the world.” To survive as a species, humankind ought never to understand world politics as a consuming struggle of “life against death.” Far better that we should think of such politics as a last arena in which to create life-extending cooperation.
Some facts of life are simply not subject to challenge. These facts are incontestable. By definition, humans can never stave off the ultimate triumph of death. What we can finally reject is the illusion that war, terror and genocide, when inflicted upon designated “enemies,” can somehow extend our own personal lives, perhaps even forever. Today this corrosive illusion is most ominous in the jihadi Middle East.
In world politics, no other problem could be more urgent. In all recorded history, no illusion has ever proven to be more intellectually barren or continuously lethal than the one linking designated mass killing behaviors to personal immortality. Reciprocally, only a full-fledged retreat from this dreadful illusion could ever allow the indispensable triumph of life over death.
[1] This bifurcation represents a core element of Jose Ortega y’ Gasset’s 20th century philosophic classic, The Revolt of the Masses (1930).
[2] But recall the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in God, Death and Time (2000): “An immortal person is a contradiction in terms.”
[3] Sigmund Freud examined such indispensable feelings as a “spontaneous sympathy of souls.”
[4] This promise is manipulated not because it is always made without ideological conviction, but because Hamas leaders typically place themselves and their families out of harm’s way, in such places as Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia or Turkey.
[5] But an antecedent question must inquire: Is Treitschke’s “earthly immortality” the same as “power over death?”
[6] On such understanding, we may consider an earlier remark by Thomas Mann that identifies the downfall of civilizations with “the gradual absorption of the educated classes by the masses, the `simplification’ of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.” In short, Mann warned against “barbarization.” See Stanley Corngold, The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022), ix. The present writer (Louis René Beres) also has core life connections to Zürich and Princeton.
[7] Still, we must consider the contra view of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1932). Here, Ortega identifies the state not as a convenient source of immortality, but as the very opposite. For him, the state is “the greatest danger,” mustering its immense and irresistible resources “to crush beneath it any creative minority that disturbs it….” Earlier, in his chapter “On the New Idol” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote similarly: “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters…All-too-many are born – for the superfluous the state was invented.” Later, in the same chapter: “A hellish artifice was invented there (the state), a horse of death…Indeed, a dying for many was invented there; verily, a great service to all preachers of death!”
[8] 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.
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