It’s
an uncommon association, but certain connections have been
suggested between sovereignty (the highest form of earthly
authority) and offerings of immortality. For the most part,
at the level of philosophical investigation, such connections
have not always been subtle. Observes G F Hegel (1820) in
The Philosophy of Right: “The state is the
march of God in the world.” And from Heinrich von
Treitschke’s 1897 Lecture on Politics: “Individual
man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly
immortality.”
There is some
nuance here. Von Treitschke’s statement suggests something
“less” than the classic after-worldly meaning
of immortality. He is likely suggesting, after all, that
something akin to eternal fame and not “life everlasting,”
best represents this generally invisible dynamic of world
politics. Though there can exist no scientifically valid
ways of rank-ordering two contending meanings of immortality
over time and space, there can be little doubt that any
presumptive power over death must bestow greater satisfactions
than any purported power over personal reputation.
THE REALPOLITIK
FOUNDATION
To be sure.
there are variously assorted details. Though difficult to
understand, Realpolitik – an historical shorthand
for traditional power politics – draws its animating
force from the microcosm, from the individual. While inconspicuous,
it is this personal human search for immortality or “staying
alive” that may ultimately drive not only domestic
kingships but also comprehensive international relations.
In any final
reckoning, each state’s competitive struggle for the
“death” of other designable states may represent
a last-ditch defense against both collective and personal
annihilation. Among other things, this obscure simultaneity
suggests that the most genuine rationale of Realpolitik
is not really the acquisition of territory, wealth or “victory.”
However unwitting or “sub-conscious,” it is
the avoidance of personal death.
This is not
an easy idea for scholars and policy-makers to conceptualize,
but ignoring it could severely limit humankind’s rapidly
disappearing chances for survival. Some preliminary understandings
can be drawn from King Charles’ III recent coronation.
It is the sovereign state, blessed by God’s vicars
here on earth (in this case, the Archbishop of Canterbury)
that holds the key to life everlasting.
These ideas
are not easily understood by a country’s “mass”
or by career politicians. To begin, searches for collective
immortality based on sovereignty may signify core yearnings
to avoid personal death. Though such fervid hopes can be
nurtured only by assorted convictions of faith, not science,
the history of humankind reveals no evidence that Reason
could ever trump anti-Reason. Even in our glittering age
of advanced technology and “AI,” conspicuous
claims of non-rational belief continue to drive states and
sub-states toward an explosively violent geopolitics. Lamentably,
any corollary associations of sacredness with national armed
force would further ensure that war, terror or genocide
serve the highest imaginable forms of human power.
BASES OF DEEPER
UNDERSTANDING
But how should
these very complicated connections be better understood?
Why ought anyone acknowledge that a world politics based
upon sovereignty offers a plausible path to personal immortality?
What are the most revealing connecting factors? About the
recent coronation in London, wouldn’t we all be better
off just asking the usual prosaic questions about King Charles,
Camilla, William, Harry, etc.?
With pride of
place, history should be our starting point. In his still-illuminating
classic, Man and Crisis (1958), 20th century Spanish
philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset comments thoughtfully
and prophetically: “History is an illustrious war
against death.” Though this comment is captivating
and sets the stage for our own present queries about sovereignty
and immortality, it still represents only a partial piece
of a much wider truth: Ultimately, power over death always
represents the greatest conceivable form of power here on
earth; but acquiring such power in world politics can sometimes
“demand” the killing of assorted “others.”
Inter alia,
as more-or-less derivative from sovereign authority, there
is war, terrorism and genocide.
Credo quia absurdum,
said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe
because it is absurd.” Sovereignty offers a direct
link to immortality (collective and personal), but the palpable
rewards of power over death are too-frequently tied to engineered
violence and armed force. Often it’s a Faustian bargain.
There is more.
To acquire a politically manageable “power over death,”
individuals (microcosm) and states (macrocosm) must first
make tangible preparations to bring irreversible fatality
to purported “enemies.” At times, such viscerally
belligerent thinking could involve seductive notions of
“martyrdom.” Significantly, as we may learn
from the evening news, especially in the Middle East, these
notions may call not “only” for war, but also
for terror and genocide. In all cases, the planned mass
killing of other human beings is more-or-less comparable
to religious sacrifice, a primal ritual oriented toward
the intentional deflection of death to “others.”
There are additional
details. Scholars and policy-makers should continuously
re-examine vital underlying links between microcosm and
macrocosm. In this regard, Elias Canetti, winner of the
1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, once wrote boldly of not
being dead as the principal exemplar of ascertainable power.
Confronted with what Canetti called “terror at the
fact of death,” humankind – both individually,
and collectively – always seeks one particular advantage
above all others. This evident advantage is “to remain
standing” while others prepare to “lie down.”
In the end,
it is only those who can remain upright, however temporarily,
who are “victorious.” It is these fortunate
ones, after all, who have keenly managed to “divert”
death to “others.” By definition, there can
be no greater or more advantageous diversion.
A key lesson obtains here for states as well as individuals.
For all “players,” microcosm and macrocosm,
the situation of physical survival is the manifestly central
expression of all human power. But as sovereignty-centered
belligerent nationalism makes meaningful survival more problematic,
Realpolitik or power politics inevitably deprives states
of their most genuine power lever. Left unmodified, the
“all against all” Westphalian process effectively
creates or merely magnifies adversarial relations, and encourages
state enemies to enjoy “microcosmic” triumphs
that will remain concealed. These triumphs are the deeply-satisfying
human emotions experienced by persons when confronting powerless
individuals who are preparing to “lie down.”
SOVEREIGNTY
AND VICTORY OVER DEATH
In world politics,
the ultimate acquisition of power is never really about
land or treasure or conquest or some other reassuring evidence
of primacy. It is, rather, a presumed victory over death,
ultimately a personal triumph, one described by Heinrich
von Treitschke and G F Hegel as closely linked to the unique
prerogatives of sovereignty.
The relevant
reasoning here is straightforward. When my state is powerful,
goes the core argument, so too am I. At some point, when
this state seems ready to prevail indefinitely, I too am
granted a personal life that is gloriously unending. Stated
somewhat succinctly: An “immortal” state creates
(as its citizen or subject) the “immortal” person.
These abstract
ideas can be bewildering. Still, to actually feel such conceptual
reasoning at a palpable level, one could intentionally recall
the staggering images of mid-1930s Nazi party rallies at
Nuremberg. Leni Riefenstahl’s monumental film celebration
of Der Fuhrer, The Triumph of the Will, says it
all best. Reminding the German people of Hegel’s famous
aphorism, the legendary film underscores that a nation-state
can actually become the “march of God in the world.”
Today, in 2023,
all states continue to be driven by policies that generally
bring them neither personal satisfaction nor institutional
safety. To the contrary, all they can continue to expect
in a chaos-leaning Realpolitik world is a perpetual global
landscape of war, terrorism and genocide. In the best of
all possible worlds, however, humankind – recalling
the ancient creed of Epicurus that death fear is foolish
and irrational- would consider one indispensable query:
What is death?
A bogy. Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does
not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from
the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed
apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are
parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter.
Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished,
for it has need of things present, things future, and things
past and done with.”
States seemingly
fail to understand that death is “normally”
identified by their enemies as a zero-sum event. Anything
that is done to sustain one’s own national survival
invariably represents, for these enemy states, an intolerable
threat to their own “lives” and a diminution
of their own power over death. Reciprocally, anything that
is done to effectively eliminate hated enemies must expectedly
enhance their collective life and augment their collective
power. Ideally, these strategies fare best whenever God
is “on our side.”
There is still
more. Because of the deeply intimate associations between
collectivities/macrocosm (states) and (microcosm) individuals,
the reciprocal life advantages of death and dying can be
enjoyed doubly.
“Normally,”
even if only at a subconscious level, the living person
never really considers himself more powerful than at that
very moment when he faces the dying person. Here, as we
may learn again from Elias Canetti, the living human being
comes as close as he or she can to encountering genuine
feelings of personal immortality. In roughly similar fashion,
the “living” nation-state never really regards
itself as more powerful than at that moment when it confronts
the apparently impending “death” of a despised
enemy state. Only slightly less power-granting are those
reassuring sentiments that arise from confrontation with
a “dying” enemy state; that is, the same sentiments
experienced by a belligerent state that seeks some tangible
“victory” over another.
In both cases,
personal and collective, convention, good taste and sometimes
skilled statecraft require that zero-sum feelings about
death and power be suppressed. Such polite feelings ought
not to be flaunted; nonetheless, they do remain prospectively
vital and determinative.
GETTING BEYOND
APPEARANCES IN WORLD AND NATIONAL POLITICS
Oddly, perhaps,
in all world politics, power is so closely attached to the
presumed conquest of death (national and personal) that
core connections have been overlooked. As a result, students
and practitioners of international relations continue to
focus mainly on epiphenomena, on easily recognizable ideologies,
identifiable territories, tangible implements of warfare
(arms control and disarmament) and so on. The problem is
not that these factors are unimportant to power, but that
they are actually of a manifestly secondary or reflected
importance.
During a war,
any war, the individual soldier, a person who ordinarily
cannot experience satisfyingly tangible power during peacetime,
is offered an utterly unique opportunity to remedy such
absence. Inter alia, the pervasive presence of dead bodies
in war cannot be minimized. Actually and incontestably,
it is a central fact of belligerency. To wit, the soldier
who is surrounded by corpses and knows that he is not yet
one of them is “normally” imbued with an absolute
radiance of invulnerability, of immortality, of monumental
and perhaps incomparable power.
The adversarial
state that commands its soldiers to kill and not to die,
“feels” similarly great power at the removal
of a collective adversary. This surviving state, like the
surviving individual warrior, is transformed, indisputably
and correspondingly, into a potentially primal source of
everlasting life. Such abstract observations are hardly
fashionable among general populations or political leaders;
to the half-educated, they may even appear barbarous and
uncivilized. Yet, for now at least, scholars should be seeking
not to prescribe more appropriate behavior for sovereign
states, but to accurately describe such behavior. Among
other obligations, this means looking behind the daily news.
There is more.
Always, truth must be exculpatory. True observations may
sometimes be indecipherable or objectionable; but they are
no less true. What is most important to understand is that
to die for the sake of God is actually to not die at all.
For example, by “dying” in a divinely commanded
act of killing presumed enemies the Jihadist terrorist really
does seek to conquer death, which he fears with a special
terror, by “living forever.”
Ultimately,
the “love of death” proclaimed by Jihadist terrorists
is the ironic consequent of an all-consuming wish to avoid
death. Since the death that this enemy “loves”
is temporary and temporal, leading “in fact”
to a permanent reprieve from any real death, accepting it
as a tactical expedient becomes an easy matter. If, for
any reason, the normally welcome death of an individual
engaged in “holy war” were not expected to ensure
an authentic life ever-after, its immense attractions would
be reversed.The
greater the number of enemy corpses, the more powerful terrorists
will feel. Real power, understood as an irremediably zero-sum
commodity, is always to gain in “aliveness”
through inflicting death upon enemies.
POWER AND SURVIVAL
An enemy, whether
state or non-state, cannot possibly kill as many foes as
his primal passion for survival may demand. This means,
among other intersecting considerations, that he may seek
to induce or direct others to satisfy this particular passion.
As a practical matter, this deflecting behavior points toward
an undeniable impulse for genocide, an inclination that
could be actualized, in the future, by adversarial resort
to higher-order forms of terrorism (chemical/biological/nuclear),
and/or to “crimes against humanity.”
The sovereign
still has much to learn. But before leaders can fully understand
the true nature of enemy intentions and capabilities, they
must first acknowledge the most primary connections between
power and survival. Once it can be understood that enemy
definitions of the former are contingent upon loss of the
latter, these leaders will be positioned intellectually
to take appropriate remedial action.
The true goal
of certain adversaries is as grotesque as it is unrecognized.
This goal is to be left standing while assorted others are
made to disappear. These relentless enemies must survive
just so that their enemies do not. They cannot, by this
zero-sum reasoning, survive together. So long as the enemy
is “allowed” to exist, no matter how cooperative
or congenial it has been, some states will not feel safe.
They will not feel powerful. They will not feel power over
death.
It is always
a mistake to believe that Reason governs the world. The
true source of governance on this imperiled planet is power,
and power is ultimately the conquest of personal death.
This conquest, which displays a zero-sum quality among enemies,
is not limited to conflicts in any one region. It is always
a generic matter, a more or less universal effort that is
made especially manifest between enemies. On this generic
matter, one should consider the revealing remark of Romanian
playwright Eugene Ionesco in his Journal in 1966. Describing
killing as a purposeful affirmation of one’s own survival,
Ionesco observed:
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.
While certain
enemies accept zero-sum linkages between power and survival,
others do not. Though this may suggest that some states
stand on an enviably higher moral plane than their enemies,
it may also place the high-minded or virtuous state at a
security disadvantage, one that will make it too difficult
to “remain standing.” This consequential asymmetry
between state enemies may be addressed by reducing certain
adversarial emphases on power-survival connections and/or
by increasing enemy emphases on power-survival connections.
Difficult questions
will have to be asked. Must a state ultimately become barbarous
in order to endure? Must it “learn” to identify
true power with survival over others, a predatory posture
that cannot abide the survival of certain enemies? What
is required is not a replication of enemy leadership crimes,
but policies that recognize personal death-avoidance as
the essential starting point for national security. With
such recognition, protracted hostility and existential threat
could be rejected in their entirety and a new ethos –
one based on a firm commitment to “remain standing”
at all costs – could finally be implemented.
LIFE AND DEATH
AS ZERO-SUM QUALITIES
Core changes
will be necessary. All sovereigns must rid themselves of
the retrograde notion that killing others can confer immunity
from personal mortality. In his Will Therapy and Truth
and Reality (1936), psychologist Otto Rank affirms:
“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.”
What is being
described here remains the greatest form of power anywhere:
power over death. Americans and other residents of a deeply
interconnected planet have a right to expect that any president
of the United States or major world leader would meaningfully
attempt to understand these complex linkages. At a minimum,
this means that all of our national policies must build
upon more genuinely intellectual and scientific sorts of
understanding.
There is more.
Our “just wars,” counter-terrorism conflicts
and anti-genocide programs, must be conducted as intricate
contests of mind over mind. These contests are never just
narrowly tactical struggles of mind over matter.
Only a dual
awareness of our common human destination, which is death
and the associated futility of sacrificial violence, can
offer an accessible “medicine” against adversaries
in the global “state of nature.” Only by this
difficult awareness can we ever relieve an otherwise incessant
and still-ascending Hobbesian war of “all against
all.”
More than ever
before, history deserves pride of place. The United States
was founded upon the philosophy of Hobbes and the religion
of Calvin. This means something very different in 2023 than
it did in 1787.
What should
this particular history now signify for American foreign
policy preparation? This is not an insignificant query,
but it does presuppose an American democracy founded upon
authentic learning, not flippantly corrosive clichés
or abundantly empty witticisms. In this connection, individual
human death fear has much to do with a better understanding
of America’s national security options.
END OF PART I
