Russian fabrications
about Ukraine are sweeping and “unspeakable.”
Still, the twentieth-century German poet Rainer Maria Rilke
can help us fathom what is actually happening. The “Dionysian
poet” was associated with variously dense philosophical
matters of “being” (in German, “Existenzphilosophie”),
but he also strove to understand certain correlative derangements
of politics. Though the particulars of such derangements
must vary from moment to moment and place to place, their
generality of core meanings will likely remain constant.
What are the
pertinent connections to be explored? Plausibly, were he
alive today, Rilke would observe that war and peace are
merely transient reflections of assorted untruths. What
we can glean from daily news reports on Ukraine are essentially
the latest human struggles for primacy (individual and collective),
belonging, and a “life-everlasting.” It is precisely
such timeless struggles for power, membership and immortality
that can best define the meanings of Vladimir Putin’s
egregious aggression against Ukraine.
What next? To
begin, these policy-related meanings ought to be expressed
conceptually. In the United States, the key questions being
asked are narrowly ad hominem (about Putin) and ad hoc (about
facts). Now it is also required that the American body politic
search conscientiously for deeper meanings.
In Russian-assaulted
Ukraine, it is noteworthy that though “we have been
to this movie before,” there still exist certain core
regularities or commonalities. By definition, these commonalities
are relevant to much wider truths. Immediately, they warrant
disciplined theoretical study. “Theories,” observed
the German poet Novalis, “are nets. Only he who casts,
will catch.”
More than anything
else, Ukraine’s barbarous victimization by Russia
demands coherent and comprehensive theorizing. The expanding
crisis in that beleaguered country has far deeper import
than what is being suggested by “experts.” Ukraine
represents more than “just” another current
catastrophe. It offers an opportunity to discover what “really”
ails this imperiled planet; that is, to identify those still-remediable
factors that are most patently and durably causal.
Russia’s
Ukraine aggression has many “sides.” It is both
microcosm (war; religious conflict; crimes of war;[8] irrational
prejudices; bitter rancor) and macrocosm (the individual
human being: non-rational; death-fearing; anti-intellectual;[9]
superstitious; self-destructive). Taken together, these
intersecting elements can become synergistic. Here, by definition,
the “whole” of combining elements would be greater
than the sum of separate “parts.”
But big questions
will still have to be answered. “Why do nation-states
put themselves in harm’s way again and again, sometimes
in the path of genuinely existential harms”? “Why
do countries that may finally access the tangible benefits
of science and education insistently fall back upon myth,
ignorance and civilizational regression?” “Why
do educated peoples continue to prefer certain exterminatory
paths in national and international affairs to the available
mechanisms of international law and humane peacemaking?
These questions
ought not be disregarded as “collateral damage”
of day-to-day US foreign policy. In The Law of Nations
(1758), classical Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel observes:
“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.” Though a “general
law” (in formal jurisprudence, a “peremptory”
law), this imperative is routinely disregarded. Why?
Though tangible
and current policy issues are most urgent, Ukraine is best
approached as metaphor for the longer term. It should be
studied accordingly. Inter alia, it could provide
scholars and policy-makers with a real-world and real-time
“laboratory.” What this laboratory could then
reveal is a visceral and overriding human death fear. Wherever
we might choose to look on planet earth, such primal terror
splits all human civilizations into “us” and
“them,” into adversarial camps of individuals
who can wittingly discover in the systematic slaughter of
certain “others” the key to their own personal
immortality.
From time immemorial,
this has been an incomparably tragic discovery. To recall
a clarifying lyric by Bob Dylan, what ultimately matters
most to individual human beings and nation-states is to
have “God on our side.” It’s a lyric with
compelling real-world analogues.
There is more.
Unless we finally take tangible steps to implement an organic
planetary civilization – a civilization based on the
immutably central truth of human “oneness” –
there will be no civilization at all. The time-urgent imperative
of this critical portent is magnified by our species’
steady “advances” in the creation of mega-weapons
and infrastructures. Augmenting this “progress,”
some major states are now committing themselves to nuclear
deterrent strategies based not “only” on threats
of “assured destruction,” but also upon recognizable
capacities for nuclear war fighting.
In such existential
matters, planet earth is still at the beginning. Until now,
we humans have consistently managed to miss what is plainly
most important. Nonetheless, the central truth here is simple:
There exists a latent but determinative “oneness”
to all world politics.
Scholars and
statesmen need a refined strategic dialectic. Often, human
beings fear solitude or “aloneness” more than
anything else on earth, sometimes even more than death.
Amid the palpable chaos and impending genocide now stampeding
across Ukraine, suffering individuals still offer their
unswerving loyalties to the stubbornly corrosive claims
of “tribe.” Everywhere, people desperate “to
belong” wittingly subordinate themselves to the endlessly
predatory expectations of nation, class and faith.
There is more.
To survive on this self-imperiling planet, we should learn
something very basic from Russia’s war on Ukraine:
All humankind must survive together, must rediscover individual
lives that are sufficiently detached from deeply-felt obligations
“to belong.” It is only after such an indispensable
rediscovery that peoples and nations could plausibly hope
to reconstruct world politics and international law on sound
footings. In the end, merely to survive, we will have to
“give birth” to more durable foundations of
global interdependence.
Unrealistic?
Of course. Still, “in the end,” as we may learn
from Italian film director Federico Fellini, “The
visionary is the only realist.”
In The
Decline of the West, a modern classic first published
during World War I, Oswald Spengler comments: “`I
believe'” is the great word against metaphysical fear
(sic.), and at the same time it is an avowal of love.'”
The welcome visionary would accept that the most suffocating
conflicts of life on earth can never be undone by improving
global economies, building larger missiles, fashioning or
abrogating international treaties, replacing one sordid
regime with another or “spreading democracy.”
Such traditional
“remedies” would be insufficient for good reason:
The planet as a whole would still remain on its lethal trajectory
of belligerent nationalism and tribal conflict. Reminds
French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in The
Phenomenon of Man : “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.” But throughout history, what may
be perfectly obvious via calculations of human Reason has
still been undermined by variously manipulative claims of
anti-Reason.
Before the
tortuous Realpolitik drama is over in world politics and
world law, humankind will need to take more seriously that
global survival requires escape from the acrimonious spirit
of national-tribes. The likelihood of ever meeting such
a daunting requirement of human “oneness” is
portentously low, but foreign policies can no longer be
constructed according to the defiling assumptions of power
politics. Aware that our “Westphalian”system
of international relations displays the same fragility as
an individual life – that is, the irremediable fragility
of not being immortal – an extraordinary shudder should
run through all “powerful” states. Even if the
Ukrainian crisis should end more quickly and successfully
than first expected, it will ultimately be revealed as just
another milestone on the twisted road to species self-destruction,
A concluding
thought dawns. Shared theologies will prove indispensable
to human survival, but this belief-system cannot be just
another chanted affirmation of competitive divinities. Whether
we believe that a transcendental supreme being created a
balanced cosmos or a chaos, ultimate survival responsibilities
will be humankind’s alone. “In the end,”
warns Goethe succinctly in Faust, “we must depend
upon creatures of our own making.”
For the moment,
it is less important that we agree on the nature of such
“creatures” than that we share a self-serving
commitment to “world order” processes. Whatever
else we might find agreeable or disagreeable, one fact will
remain incontestable: Everything must depend upon the individual
human being, the “microcosm.” Stated differently,
no nation or society can ever be better than the sum total
of its constituent “souls.” Carl G. Jung summed
it all up with an enviable candor and simplicity: “Every
civilization is the sum total of individual souls in need
of redemption.”
For the moment,
nothing more needs to be said. Following Russia’s
ongoing crimes against Ukraine, we may also learn from the
poet Rilke that those who can lead will be “those
who know that behind all speeches are still the unspeakable
lies.” Now, finally, this knowledge could offer us
a literally last chance to survive as a species.
