We feel only what is captured by our sense-organs and then by our internal emotional assessments of the condition of this one body and of the contentment of this one mind.
We are, at the lowest level, survival-machines with features accumulated across time over our lineage.
True, we can empathize with others, but that is a function of who brought us up, who we know, who we like, and it has cultural limits ranging from the subtle to the severe.
And that brings us to our next level.
For empathy is a trait of social animals towards their own and their like.
It does not exist between predator and prey or between solitary predators.
It exists between rival packs of social animals only when there is plenty, more than enough for all.
But that is a rare condition. Call it Utopia.
We are, at the second level, social apes, viscerally, emotionally aware that our strength and survival flows from the strength and survival of our social group.
And on our standing within that group. At this level, we care far more about how our views and ourselves are viewed by our peer group than about anything as abstract and otherworldly as truth or justice in their purest essences, pruned of every trace of partisanship.
Just think of the sincere repentance of many who have violated a law after they’re caught, after they’re convicted. The law hasn’t changed. What’s changed is their exposure before their social group, their loss of standing within the group.
Stronger together
Narrowly v. Broadly Determining Influences
The more direct the determining influence on our behavior, the more narrowly deterministic that influence is.
As determining influences grow less direct – at higher levels of organization built atop more basic levels – the less narrowly deterministic that influence is.
More broadly determining influences permit a wider range of means by which a particular functional structure or process can be performed.
The most directly causal and narrowly determining level of causes is physics, the study of how the simplest units of matter and energy (and their shady cousins, dark matter and dark energy) are determined by a few universal forces (4, at last count) and a dozen and a half fundamental physical constants.
Yet distinct levels of organized structures and processes build upon physics, adding their own features and own constraints to those that objects are already imbued with from physics. (Think of epigenetics, where environmental and behavioral factors change how genes work without altering the DNA; by analogy, higher level organizational constraints can alter outcomes at that level, e.g., how full an electron shell is of electrons determines some of the properties of elements.)
And the more complexly organized the structures and processes, the greater the range of means available to perform functions required by those structures or processes.
In short, complexity multiplies the alternative means available for achieving a functional end. Can you see where this is heading as regards choice and free will?
Take evolutionary biology. Survival for animals, both predator and prey, requires sensory sampling of their surroundings to find needed resources and escape dangers. A wide variety of sense-organs (in both the signals they register and the forms and sensitivities of the organs ass embodied in a species) have evolved to perform that function, several species arriving at similar solutions independently.
Less narrowly deterministic still are calculations of personal advantage (due to fixed habits, biases and miscalculations on the choice-limiting side and pioneering innovations on the choice-expanding side).
Less still calculations of group advantage, since these must reconcile multiple individual perspectives amidst factional maneuvering.
Less still calculations of what is right — that is, of how agents should act toward one another, setting personal and group advantages aside — since these must reconcile every voiced perspective compatible with moral agency, and do so against every entrenched or consciously emerging partisan interest.
This last kind of influence, actions guided by the golden rule — or its purebred equivalent, the categorical imperative — is the least narrowly determined of all, for its only influence is an internal voice challenging our right to pursue personal or group advantage to the disadvantage of others, with other moral agents and innocents receiving the greatest consideration.
That means bending away from nature, as determined by all our lower levels, all grasping the levers of action with more muscular hands than that sometimes isolated inner voice.
For ethics and morality are the least muscular influence on the levers of action, products of an always possible yet distant culture of best practices, seeking hegemony over instincts more deeply rooted in our natural origins, narrowly deterministic, self-centered and ethnocentric as they are.
The narrowest determination is that of a physical cause, the domain of the hard sciences, where the cause (or fixed combination of causes) so reliably predicts an effect that the effect follows invariably from the cause.
This makes possible a crucial cultural habit, the scientific method.
The scientific method is designed to produce such certainty, wherever its exacting conditions can be met. What cannot be channeled into a decisive experiment — that is, a controlled observable process that either forces a predicted result or unambiguously fails to do so — cannot be dealt using the scientific method..
Level upon level, from the simple, durable and unchanging to the complex, transient and evolving
The Range and Scope of Possibilities Is What Makes for Agency
So many possibilities… but how to do it right?
The key, then, is the range of possibilities left to the object acted upon with which that object responds or reacts to the external event.
Simple objects are passive, simply following the universal laws of cause and effect.
But some objects are also subjects – that is, though objects under the laws of physics, their complex internal structures filter and shape their reactions to external events, leaving them room to maneuver.
This leaves subjects room to maneuver, complicating the causal connection between external cause, internal effect and outward reaction, by interposing many other factors, including degree of awareness, interests, motives, habits, experiences, learned skills, and so on, all of which may vary in kind or degree.
But those objects that are also subjects – that is, though objects under the laws of physics, their complex internal structures filter and shape their reactions to external events, complicate the causal connection between external cause and internal effect by interposing many other factors, including motives that may vary in kind or degree, habits, experiences, learned skills, and so on.
Three examples will suffice.
1. Genetic transcription failure,that is, mutation. Genetic transcription is a biological process that occurs in predictable predetermined patterns most of the time. But random variations are occasionally produced by various factors including radiation, internal malfunction, and so on. Mostly inconsequential, those that are consequential either work to end the lineage that carries them or work to preserve it.
So, mutations are deterministic in theory, since their causes can be sought and often found, yet indeterministic in practice, since they cannot be fully predicted or guarded against.
2. A multiplicity of means suitable to achieve a selfishly motivated end. In one sense, the end — the psychological motive that sets the end, with circumstances offering multiple conceivable pathways to that end — determines the motive narrowly and deterministically. But in another sense, the choice is open to imaginative innovation, experimental trial-and-error, and sudden insight, all limited by habits formed from prior experience, bias, tunnel vision, prejudice and unwitting assumptions and oversights.
If, from a theoretical perspective these personal idiosyncrasies, and other noise in the data, can all be imagined to be, in principle traceable to narrowly deterministic causes (a massive, paradigm-defining assumption), from a practical perspective this knowledge is beyond the agent’s reach.
In competitive contexts, this means that strategic thinking displaces scientific thinking.
Moreover, as circumstances shift, so do the possibilities for improvisation. Solving some problems means being the right person at the right place at the right time.
So, some improvisations, insights and triumphs rely on space and time aligning with the unique perspectives of individual and culture.
When Caesar was passing through a small town, a townsman called out that Caesar would not be Caesar were he born there. Caesar paused and then replied “Nor would you have been Caesar, had you been born in Rome”.
Acts responding to so many factors are determined broadly rather than narrowly. Force plays – in which the trapped player has no viable alternative to the one he is forced to adopt – are rare but possible in strategic contests.
The human fascination with games and contests of all kinds rests on the incomplete predictability of outcomes, of which gambling is a notable behavioral indicator.
Moreover, as circumstances change historically, so do the possibilities of innovation, as many forms of economic, technological, military, political and social innovation build upon prior innovations.
Empirical signs of this are the poor record of forecasters and futurists in the fields of technology, business and politics.
3. Moral dilemmas. Moral dilemmas, and the moral realm altogether, are only manifest when they run counter to the general direction of more obviously causal influences. Moral questions are about not causality but the moral worth of actions.
In other words, moral questions only arise when strong needs, desires or motives run counter to a broadly-recognized code of conduct forbidding certain acts.
Torture, and other forms of pressure, work to restrict the scope of agency by crowding out moral choice with more urgent causal concerns.
Causality, in the narrowest sense, only enters into judgments about legality or morality when the capacity for agency is questioned, in judicial determinations of criminal insanity or moral competence.
Thus, the legal certification of a defendant as a competent and responsible moral agent is a judgment that the agent was sufficiently free of narrowly deterministic influences to be held responsible for their own actions.
What’s it all for? – a la HamletWhat’s it all for? – a la Abraham and Isaac
Conclusion
Objects are narrowly determined by external causes. They have no internal environment independent of their external environment, nothing to carry information or adaptations within a genetic lineage.
Objects are nothing more than the sum of their material parts; they carry no adaptive changes embodied in a genetic lineage.
Genetic lineages introduce the capacity to build upon prior adaptations, both structural and behavioral.
Biology thus introduces the first individuals, in two senses. First, in the sense of lineages of adaptations sufficiently distinct from others to merit designation as a species. Second, in the sense of the individual organisms where such adaptations begin. Thus, organisms and species are both distinct and separate local centers for organizational patterns that simple objects lack.
This lineage of characteristic traits in species and their members adds a local and portable matrix of causal factors to their external environment that partly determines how they react to it.
Terminal force plays, like a bullet in the head, dissolve subjects, leaving only hollowed-out objects in their place. Chemistry reclaims this heap of matter from biology and forensic science pushes medicine aside.
Short of incapacitating a subject, events leave it with open-ended possibilities for reacting to the threats and opportunities, obstacles and resources, offered by their environments.
Without these locally-guided reactions, sentience would be useless and natural selection would bypass it. And evolving capacities for awareness without capacities for motor response would be supremely maladaptive.
The only utility for perishable beings with a survival instinct is to assess inputs against survival requirements, whether by impulse or calculation, and to react differentially based on the likely consequences of each foreseeable path of action.
Thus, biology is fundamentally about being broadly rather than narrowly determined by external events that leave one’s capacities intact.
I’ve talked about the OODA-Loop before (search on OODA), but it’s always worth a revisit.
I find myself living by it more and more.
Background: fighter pilots live and die by making split-second decisions under stress.
Four Steps:
Observe: take in the data streaming in
Orient: assess where the threats and opportunities are
Decide: choose a course of action
Act: execute your plan
Repeat
ReObserve
ReOrient
ReDecide
ReAct
How Life Works
Looking back from 69 years, I see that I used to be too top-down in my approach to decision-making.
I wanted a full schema in place before I took Step One.
I started slow but finished hard.
It worked well enough, but not so well as it could have done.
Now, I’m exploring everything all at once.
I make an initial assessment — enough to know where the cliffs are — and then pick a path and go!
Any assessed path works, so long as it’s not over a cliff that turns the next step into a flying leap!
As data pours in, I adjust.
I’ve modified the war cry of Silicon Valley, “Move Fast and Break Things” — that’s the point of sighting out the cliffs before you take a flying leap.
My version: Move Fast and Drop Things.
If you’re moving fast, you’re juggling many balls: much data, many assessments, decisions and plans, all of them shifting as your actions ricochet into the resistance of brute objects or the actions and reactions of other players facing the same time and resource chokepoints.
So, you’re going to drop things. Just make sure to keep the crucial balls in the air.
Getting the big things right carries the day, and if, by focusing on the key things, you miss a few small things, you can tidy things up when the show’s over.
The stars carry the show, even if the supporting cast just passes muster.
Problem-solving on the fly turns out to be as gratifying as devising the perfect scheme — but it works faster, applies more broadly and accelerates the accumulation of valuable experience, even at age 69!
I am living through a personal renaissance. That’s why you haven’t heard much from me lately: I’m up to my armpits in life!
But I’m expanding my capabilities on many fronts — and this is one of them.
Like the man said (OK, like the cyborg said): “I’ll be back”.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Upton Sinclair
“a new birth of freedom and… government of the people, by the people, for the people” Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
What’s Easy
Nothing’s easier than appealing to self-interest. So that will be pervasive in social life and in politics.
Nothing’s easier than accepting as truth opinions that support one’s interests and biases, one’s passions and sense of self — even when these become unhealthy obsessions. So that will be pervasive in social life and in politics.
What Comes of It
Historically, the first governments we hear of — the first , that is, to keep written records of their victories, reigns and actions — are top-down governments, generally run by elites composed of warriors, landowners or priests.
Of the elite, by the elite, for the elite.
At certain rare historical moments, this top-down model of government — which mostly goes unquestioned and unchallenged — gives way to a more bottom-up approach.
Democracies are commoner in the West than in the East, although the young democracies of the East — Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India and the Hong Kong that was — are center stage in the Pacific theatre.
Xi’s China even claims that such ideas as democracy, fairly contested elections and human rights are cultural peculiarities of the West, imposed by ex-colonialists and not valid in China’s sphere of influence or the Global South.
No wonder he must stamp it out in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for they give the lie to his claim.
The greater prevalence of more bottom-up forms of government in the West may be a matter of historical accidents, with Hellenic political culture exported by Alexander’s conquests and Roman political culture by its conquests, begun by the republic but extended by its emperors.
The Travails of Democracy
This more bottom-up approach is never all-inclusive.
It typically extends as far as those whose active support, military or political, is necessary to overturn the old order.
It’s usually aristocratic, when driven by warlords or military men, oligarchic when driven by landowners or merchants. Athens was unusual in being a naval power dependent on the willing service of rowers, and thus a broader swathe of society, America in being a nation of independent farmers living in self-governing colonies.
Discontent with the way things are (the search for justice, trouble-making, court conspiracies or rabble-rousing , depending on who’s doing it, and who’s viewing it) usually arises in the next circle of insiders just beyond the inmost circle where real power lies.
Power lives in concentric circles
So sedition by persuasion has been the weapon of disrupters since human history began.
In the most top-down governments, the ruling circle is narrow, so seditious persuasion works as a conspiracy among the powerful few within the second circle of power.
In the more bottom-up governments, the ruling circle is broader and more dependent on the favor (mostly as expressed via elections) of the broadest class of true citizens, those with the minimal unit of sovereign power, the vote.
Seditious persuasion works in democracies as an appeal to voters, those within that outermost circle of power, the voters.
Seditious persuasion is impatient with facts and evidence, with legal procedures and thoughtful arguments.
It appeals to interests and biases, to grievances and prejudices.
It works by slogans and insults, by baseless assertions and slander, by rumors and conspiracies theories.
The modern medium of rumor and gossip, social media, are the floodtide river carrying all before it.
The more polarized the community becomes, the more sidelined become the procedural processes for determining truth.
This includes trial verdicts, judicial verdicts, technical expertise, the scientific method, and standards of credibility in both journalism and academic research.
This partisan disregard for the slow and accountable procedural practices agreed to by all parties give way to
This includes verdicts of the higher courts, the routine compromises between parties and interests that signal normal politics, and even elections results themselves, procedural processes for determining the common good, that is, the best achievable compromise between the many interests that make up the political community.
Such procedural processes are what make a constitution, and what make it different from rule with impunity, different from rule without law or limit.Their weakness is that they take time to sift through charge and countercharge, claim and counterclaim.
Cheapshots and slogans work faster — faster than thought — as do visceral appeals, appeals to bias, prejudice and self-regard, as do playing upon grievances real or imagined, and conspiracy theories which dance above all evidence, because evidence is part of the conspiracy, too.
The seditious claim more and more reverts to the claim that no one is to be believed but the maximal leader, the one man who can lead the people out of their misery, or so he and his partisans proclaim, with ever less need for procedural processes, evidence or competent argument.
This man is the demagogue, and he has been with us for as long as democracy has.
Athens and Rome were plagued by demagogues, and at times succumbed to them, leading to such disasters as the ill-fated Athenian invasion of Syracuse or the destruction of an entire Roman army by Hannibal at Cannae.
The same factors are in play now as were in play then.
Some things never change.
Because their causes don’t.
It can always happen here, it can always happen now.
Holland’s Geert Wilders, Hungary’s Viktor Orba, France’s Marine Le Pen, waiting in the wings or already inside gumming up the center
It is our birthright as biological systems designed for self-replication, the baseline condition of our existence, at the macro level of the organism and the micro level of its cells.
But the self which we serve admits of vast variations occasioned by individual differences in capacities and temperaments and by societal differences in cultures, some acquired by birth, some acquired by choice.
Culture acquired by choice can be a renunciation of one’s culture by birth, accessories to it (as are the subcultures of occupation, profession, vocation or hobby interest), or adornments of it (as are the subcultures of dress and lingo, association and lifestyle).
Selves to be served also differ in the degree to which they are anchored in needs and desires that are asocial and atomistic, social and group-oriented, or idealistic, that is, expressing an allegiance to a code of conduct purer than any real society, a higher law.
One can think of this third, most abstract, ideological category as a self defined by a virtual community (e.g. the community of the saints, men of science, voices in the dialogue of thought). One can also think of this as a community of two, the moral agent and their ultimate all-seeing and all-knowing judge (whether that judge is conceived of as a personal God or as the judgment of History).
So, of these three most fundamental kinds of selves, the first is a selfin the individual context, the second in the social context and the third in a virtual social context.
In each case, self-determination, also known as freedom, would mean the subjection of the needs and desires of that self to no external force or authority (autonomy, in Kant’s terminology).
In the first case, we would call the person selfish.
In the second case we would call the person either fair-minded, just or righteous (accountable to more than their own self-interest) or socially conformist or opportunistically amoral, depending on our evaluation of the moral worth of the community to which it adheres.
In the third case we would call the person selfless, meaning that their ultimate loyalty is to a creed or code of ethics, above any real-world community, all of which are likely to be flawed.
Only the third case are fully realized moral agents in the strictest sense of the word, assuming, of course, the moral worth of the virtual community to which they aspire.
Presumably, everyone who sacrifices for either a real or virtual community assumes that that community has moral worth.
But real communities are inevitably flawed because they include many flawed moral agents and some defective ones — often in positions of authority, for authority and the consequent power over others draws ambitious souls.
Only virtual communities can be perfectly moral (think of them as composed of the all-stars of the league of moral agents).
But that is not to say that anyone claiming — or indeed, thinking — themselves to be perfectly moral is so. Fanatics assume their own infallibility, yet fanaticism comes from a weakness of character resulting in a need to dominate those around them.
The first case produces persons characterized by vices (bad actors, defective moral agents) and possibly even lawlessness (criminals).
The second case produces heroes, that is, persons willing to make sacrifices for their society, up to the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. Honored by all in their society, imitated by few.
The third case produces martyrs, that is, persons willing to sacrifice not only life itself, but also their social standing in their real-world community, even to the extreme of being mocked and derided as criminals. Some obvious examples of this are Jesus Christ and Alexei Navalny, alongside such fictional characters as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or movies like Cool Hand Luke and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Hello, who is this?
What’s In Your Self?
The me I want to be?
The self is a fun-house hall of mirrors.
Every aspect of the self, each of the big three, and all of the subordinate facets, is its own mirror with its own distortions.
What’s in your self?
Which of these many mirrors reflects you as you really are, in all your complexity and your changeable moods, in the limitations of your present, the baggage of your past, and the dreams of your future?
And is the self you think you are the same as the self you really are? Is it the same as the one you appear to be to others, friends and enemies, intimates and strangers, the perceptive and the oblivious?
And, if you have a God, does your God — who alone sees into the hearts of men — see you as you would wish Him to? or does he see through a whited sepulcher to the corruption inside? or maybe just to a boastful, harmless phoney, a pretend do-gooder, faking it until they make it, but never quite making it, salvageable after a stint in Purgatory.
Alternatively, taking the secular perspective, does your image of yourself — the star of the show in your own inner moral telenovela— play a real and constructive role in the world at large? Or are you in a siloed theater, you and your tribe, playing to the home crowd but no closer to a goal than when the play started, and no more in search of a common ground with the fellow citizens sharing your Constitution than are your bitterest political foes?
And sectarian red voters are doing the same thing, while thinking of themselves as marching in the vanguard of God’s earthly army, which just may be a contradiction in terms — if Jesus is the model of God meant for imitation by man.
For what weak mortal vessel has the presumption to model himself on God the Avenger, a God full of wrath, looking down scornfully on lesser beings, the smiter of the Old Testament? (And how very attractive to a certain turn of mind!)
For those who march in the Vanguard, whether millenarian Christians or loyal cadres of the Communist Party, see themselves as so immersed in a life-and-death struggle of Good against Evil that none of the usual rules apply to them.
All is permitted in a cause so absolutely just. None of the constraints and compromises of little r republican government — with its tedious separation of powers, its painfully slow consensual procedures for establishing facts and vote count and verdicts, its universal franchise and one-man one-vote districting — none of that can be allowed to slow them in their righteous advance toward goals that leave no room for any other authority, any other voice!
Extremists and fanatics are the enemies of republics — which live by compromise between distinct parts permitted to flourish as best they can, each in their own way, and by the shared constitutional consensus that holds them together as a nation and a people.
In our time, the ultimate alternative to fractious but stable and united republics, and federations of republics (like NATO and the EU), are tyrannies of the nationalist Russian type, the Communist Chinese type, or the theocratic Iranian type.
Whatever kind of self you decide yourself to be, which of these delightful paradises would like like to park that self in?
And what, fellow citizen and voter, do you intend to do about it?
Kant, in his ‘speculative’ historical writings, dictates a transcendental gunshot marriage between the realism of Machiavelli and the idealism of Rousseau (though not by name), improving on them both by revealing them as the two interpretive poles of historical interpretation, and of man’s understanding of his capacities and limitations, as they emerge over time from the real life and practices of mankind, in its two-pronged and utterly ambiguous foreseeable history.
That ambiguous future is the core bit of dark humor lying at the crux of the generally humorless Prussian’s short work Perpetual Peace. The inspirational and aspirational title is accompanied by a Dutch tavern sign, with that name lettered over a picture of a graveyard.
The crux of that dark joke is this: the unstoppable advance of man’s powers can only lead to one of two destinies. We shall either, having accumulated the powers sufficient for mutual annihilation, proceed to do just that, or we shall find a way to live together in peace and mutual respect.
Should we go the path of destruction, it will not be calculated and deliberate, but the result of the mad scramble of all to preserve themselves as best they can against the looming sense of threats from every direction. In other words, it would only be the predictable and inevitable result of world anarchy.
Should we go the path of Enlightenment — enlightened self-interest, really — it will be the result of a long sequence of gradually improving half-successes and half-failures, glacially approaching, without ever fully reaching, a world of perfect justice.
It can only take the form of a consensus acceptable to all, whose political form is the social contract and whose individual or personal form is the categorical imperative.
I’ll leave the reader to research those two complex ideas as far as they wish, but if you don’t at least Google them, what can you have to do for the next 3 minutes that’s more important?
Kant’s gunshot wedding of Machiavelli and Rousseau was the high-water mark of the Enlightenment.
To see this, read Perpetual Peace (38 pages) and the brief but brilliantly condensed “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (@13 pages). Both can be found in Kant, The Political Writings,ed. Hans Reiss, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK; 1970.
The Counter-Enlightenment
From there’s a clear and simple point to all of this toNo exit. We should have stopped at perpetual progress toward a distant and perhaps unreachable goal.
The forces of the Counter-Enlightenment now loom large.
On the Left, they take theoretical form in postmodernism and various forms of moral relativism.
On the right, they take practical form in MAGA, the Tea Party and the Freedom from Responsibility Caucus in the increasingly extremist Republican Party.
In the center, they take practical form in the narrow focus of Independents on short-term financial advantage.
So much for domestic politics.
In geopolitics, they take form in the repressions, invasions and assassinations of the Putin regime and the New World Order espoused by rogue states like Russia, China and Iran, and exploited by the complacent mid-level powers narrowly focused on expanding their own local prestige and power: India, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, with Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil and Egypt heading in the same direction. The New World Order is just the Old World Order — essentially, might makes right — that dictated most of history until the end of WWII and the pax Americana.
It was an imperfect peace — although, unlike the world orders promoted by autocrats, it allowed peaceful change, generally raised living standards, and spread voting rights, making governments more accountable.
It was limited in other ways as well. Its mandate never reached beyond America, its allies, and awkwardly independent or unaligned states like ex-NATO France, Franco’s Spain, Orban’s Hungary, pre-Modi India, Switzerland, and the like.
The New World Order is accepted by both middle and rogue powers because it frees then to pursue local hegemony.
Good for them, bad for their smaller neighbors.
It is entertained by the Global South because they focus on past injustices rather than those that the New Order will bring; by the time they realize their mistake, they will be victims, unless they rank among those with the power to exploit their smaller neighbors.
And the Global South will play both ends against the middle to maximize their own short-term advantage, which they can rightly point out was all the Global North ever did for them.
But this fence-sitting attitude — the attitude of a watchful scavenger — always comes home to roost, as the predator finishes its current meal and looks around for its next victim.
Victor and victim… unless — they say it’s happened before — the victim were to rise again (perhaps as a movement rather than as a man))
Identity is bipolar, and its chicken-and-egg poles are culture and self, reflecting each other back into infinity, like the facing mirrors in a barber shop.
mini me, many me
Afterword, whether Ill-advised or Not
From this perspective, the culture wars begin to look like a pissing match between two kinds of selves, each disrespectful and dismissive of the other, when not busy demonizing them.
That kind of crap should stay in bars — and by that I mean dives. It has no place in the politics of a republic and anchor of the Free World, which for the moment looks like it’s on the ropes.
Speaking of which, someone’s been playing Rope-a-dope with the West, reform KGB officer, now prince of peace — if J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are to be believed.
And that would be forgetting about the GOAT cheapshot artist, Donald Trump, who would happily address your kind inquiries, if he were not busy stumping up funds (and converting political donations into payments for legal fees) to placate judges and juries who are now being heard from as the slow wheels of justice (precede by investigation, evidence, testimony and unbiased reflection by jury and judge, after the caterwauling of advocates on either side ceases)grind to a conclusion.
Too bad elections are held with just time enough for viral cheapshots to hit home, eh. I mean, who needs evidence? We know what we know, right? And who has the patience, or the stamina, to wait for careful, considered deliberation? Why, it would make politics a dead bore!
Sorry for that outburst, but it’s hard to watch the possible sinking of the Republic without a twinge of emotion.
We as a nation have spent too much blood and treasure in the making of the republic to see its degradation and decline without the occasional outburst. And I just finished watching Band of Brothers, all about how we made that golden era that the MAGA crowd of America Firsters celebrates by undermining its chief and underlying basis.
But, there I go again!
What I really meant to say after apologizing for going all soapbox on you was that the original Thought was intended as a psychological and social insight, not a partisan jibe.
So, if you prefer your insights straight with no chaser, kindly disregard my subsequent lamentations.
[Revised and improved, Thursday, February 8, 2024, 2:32pm]
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; some moves are worth a thousand random steps.
Science & the Forces of Nature
Science says the world is determined by causes acting relentlessly as dictated by the universal laws of nature, impervious to worthy human ends and values.
Realism says the world of human affairs is analogous, with the situational requirements of national survival dictating conditions that limit the range within which suitable policies are found, regardless of the internal constitutional form of government.
From that follows the notorious claim that nations are as identical in their geopolitical imperatives and policies as billiard balls (Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 18).
Both claims are true, so far as they go.
No human agent — whether an individual man or a collective agency like a nation-state — can act against the laws of nature.
There are no such things as superheroes, and nations are even farther from idealized agents free from limits than are real people.
So, scientific reality must be deferred to, even when sects arise that deny the evidence of science because it undermines claims upon which their ideology’s support rests.
But reality can be ignored for a while, if the consequences are long-term. Those lacking foresight or a deep understanding of the accelerating changes going on around them may not see or recognize the consequences in their lifetimes. Sometimes a generation can pass before the consequences become apparent to all. People and nations can argue and dither, delaying effective measures until the late innings.
The risk here is that by the time the signs of trouble are too evident for even the most resistant observers to ignore,the threat may have become lethal, the cancer metastasized, leaving he who hesitates trapped in an untreatable condition (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 3).
If the threat is grave enough, science will steamroll public opinion, in its own sweet time.
So, science wins in the end, winnowing out all those who cannot or will not adapt to shifting empirical realities.
History and Its Underlying Currents
Geopolitical realism works similarly.
As with the relentless and incessant forces of nature, so with the irresistible undercurrents of history.
Leaders and nations that fail to perceive changes to which we must all adapt — whether for lack of understanding or a contrary will –will be winnowed out by the sifting processes of natural selection and its social equivalents in demographics, economics, geopolitics, and the technological advances and social reactions that drive or follow them.
They will decline or disappear, leaving standing the survivors of the old order and the emerging powers of the new order.
Evolutionary competition eliminates those unprepared for what is coming, whether natural or historical events. Those who cannot or will not adapt to changing circumstances leave the world to those who do.
But when ill-informed and unprepared leaders run nations, they can take whole nations down with them.
Both scientific and geopolitical claims about what’s coming can be disputed. Such claims, whether true or false, can win or lose the battle for public opinion.
But underlying causal forces will grind on regardless.
Sadly, in the arena of politics, manipulation, rhetoric and persuasion are more powerful than knowledge or understanding.
Wrong decisions, whether formed in free nations by public opinion, filtered through the election process, or by the proclivities and obsessions that lurk in the inner chambers of an autocrat’s mind, the causal forces at work in nature and history, not mistaken perceptions about them, determine outcomes.
Room for Maneuver; Room for Hope
So, there are causal limits against which one cannot fight. One can only adapt to them, preserving human values as best one can.
But as an agent/agency adapts to changing circumstances, it can leave room for human values, both pragmatic and moral, within its range of feasible choices, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always to some degree.
In the most extreme cases, choice may be limited to the scope of a prisoner in a concentration camp holding to their nature and their principles despite all that is done to them which they are helpless to prevent.
So, there is room for moral agents to maneuver in this relentlessly causal world that envelops us. They may not always be able to prevent undesirable outcomes, some of which are inevitable (given the circumstance that lead up to them), but they can always show the strength of their nature and their principles as they struggle against the odds.
And there are some inevitable outcomes — death and taxes among them — that cannot be prevented, but only deferred to our own advantage.
But, by deferring the inevitable, moral agents can build a life worth living — and worth having lived, when it comes to that.
…and multiply their net worth with tax deferral and the magic of compounding growth.
And, honestly, life works pretty much like that, too.
I’m not talking about geopolitics, although that is increasingly multipolar as well, as you must already know, unless your head is lodged firmly in the sand or up your nether regions.
I mean instead that no single analytical perspective unlocks all the treasure chests of knowledge.
Different perspectives, and the methods they employ, are suited to different purposes.
The Scientific Method
angles and measurements
The most obvious perspective fitted out with its own, defining method is the scientific perspective and its scientific method.
This has established itself beyond all doubt — which is not to say that the world isn’t crawling with people diving into the worldwide communal soup bowl (into which con men, cultists, social influencers, ideologues and demagogues are constantly pissing).
Anyone who doesn’t want to face facts, whether of science or of credible news reporting, has record-breaking spreads of viral gossip and nonsense laid out for their effortless consumption.
It’s a feast for burnt tongues and a sight for sore eyes!
Nonetheless, those who build their futures on firm foundations know they can’t credibly interpret data, make claims or offer explanations unable to withstand the evidence of measured and controlled experiment and observation.
Not if you have self-respect, in the deepest sense.
For the scientific method imposes standards on what one can claim with the badge of science.
But to impose standards is to place requirements and limitations.
And this is done prior to weighing any particular evidence. In other words, this is a precondition required for the practice of the method to live up to its own standards.
Such preconditions suit the method and its perspective to some matters, while unsuiting it for others.
The scientific method essentially forces all practicing scientists into a universal consensus perspective that accumulates over time a body of knowledge based on proven and repeatable results of experiments, carefully measured, and reduplicated by all who attempt reduplication while following the standards.
The universal consensus is achieved because it is built into the method as its prerequisite conditions and approved procedures.
Of course, there are disputes and divergences at the stage of hypothesizing, but the scientific method is designed to force decisive showdowns between rival hypotheses, namely, experiments for which the rival hypotheses predict conflicting measurable outcomes.
The scientific perspective is that of cause and effect. For outcomes can be predicted with certainty only where one independent variable determines a precisely measurable effect (that effect being a dependent variable wholly dependent on the variable being tested for its causal connection to the effect) when that independent variable is isolated from the other conditions (which are held constant) in the effect’s matrix of causal conditions.
Thus the scientific perspective, the perspective of cause and effect, depends upon the ability to vary one single variable — deterministic, when so isolated — from among the complete set of variables, establishing a one-to-one correspondence between the two variables by directly varying the independent variable and observing the effect of that on the dependent variable.
Here, determinism is less a claim about the world in general than an engineered condition required if the scientific method is to work properly.
Put differently, this engineered relationship of independent and dependent variables critical to the workings of the scientific method of experimentation would necessarily be correct (if the method were to be reliable), whether or not the world outside the experiment ran solely in accordance with the causal perspective.
The world, of course, run according to that perspective in at least some domains, if the scientific method were to be at all applicable. So, we can rest assured of that.
But the assumption that it is the only perspective applicable to the world is an assumption external to the scientific method itself and not necessary for that method to produce valuable results, result that are definitive in areas where the object character of event is sufficient to understand it.
The Historical Method
One obviously opposed perspective is that of the historical method, the basis of history, credible journalism and juridical verdicts, all of which require the continuous cross-referencing of the often conflicting accounts of different witnesses.
But in all of these applications, the trail of evidence is seldom alone enough to determine all we need to know to render a judgment. We must also construct interpretive narratives, making conjectures about motives, means and opportunities. Any competent investigator constructs a plausible hypothesis– a provisional or working theory — as a way to direct their search for further evidence.
Whodunnit? and Why?and How?
The Work of the Working Hypothesis
Come to think of it, working theories (working hypotheses) are crucial in the scientific method, where they are also the organizing principle used to gather evidence. For every experiment is designed to put to the test a suspected cause, which becomes the independent variable that the design of the experiment is engineered to isolate from the other variables that might add static to the measured effect attributable to the independent variable.
In science, negative results are almost as valuable as positive ones, for they eliminate rival causes, narrowing down the suspect pool. Indeed, most positive results ae preceded by a long process of eliminating alternative hypotheses, and this is especially the case where the true hypothesis is counterintuitive or (which may be much the same thing) runs counter to a dominant paradigm of the discipline.
However, the great advantage of the scientific over the historical method is that the scientific method can always hope for a decisive experiment that ends a rivalry of hypotheses for good.
For the historical method, certainty is a mirage as often as not, and its certainty is mostly certainty ‘for all practical purposes’.
So, history must live with perpetual uncertainty, and with the perpetual threat of new evidence, revisionist theories or changing social norms, any of which can overturn old judgments.
And all this uncertainty leaves much more room for advocacy which, like power, abhors a vacuum. And advocacy, if one needs reminding, is cherry-picking the facts — when not distorting them outright — to better suit one’s preconceptions.
While this creates a bias in favor of one’s pet theory, especially if it leads to further evidence, it should remain one hypothesis among many being entertained, until its rival hypotheses are excluded beyond reasonable doubt, a criterion as indispensable as it is inexact.
But, to turn Hume on his head, one cannot derive an Is from an Ought.
so, putting historical facts to use always requires a series of judgments, which can always be challenged or overturned.
But, for just this reason, it’s not enough to dispute facts without providing a viable alternative theory — and conspiracy theories with unsourced or dubious support, the classic recourse of know-nothings, don’t count.
The Historical Method & Witness Perspectives
Thus, the historical method is beset by ineradicable inexactness and uncertainties, in any case that is not a forensic slam-dunk.
This first uncertainty follows form the required method of investigation. A second uncertainty follows from the nature and character of what is being investigated.
The historical method is by nature and definition multipolar because its task is to reconcile the differing perspectives involved in a dispute.
Further (excepting any metaphysically infallible witness), the witness accounts are all, in principle, both limited in perspective and subject to bias.
Thus, the historical method cannot begin, as does the scientific method, from the presumption of possible completion in a single perspective enjoying a universal consensus among all qualified observers.
Put in positive form, the historical method involves reconciling irreducibly multiple perspectives by continuously cross-referencing them against one another and against forensic evidence, that is, evidence provided by the scientific method, in the limited, but often decisive, areas where it can be applied.
Joining the scientific and historical perspectives, one can build an assessment of the actions comprising human events, past and current, that is less certain than a purely scientific analysis, though more useful for analyzing human events than laboratory science.
The Causal Perspective
One can produce, by combining historical methods with scientific methods, a purely causal account of human events. One does this by viewing human actions as instrumental and technical, and choice as simply a matter of choosing the most effective means to ends given by the natures and situations of the historical agents.
But such a purely causal account is devoid of moral judgments as to the worth or goodness of actions and motives, for it only assesses their instrumental effectiveness as means to ends.
A vivid illustration of what this would look like is Machiavelli’s Prince, and the perspective known as realism in the field of international relations, though the perspective is applicable to all human events.
The Moral Perspective
If you balk at accepting the realist causal explanation as the final word on a human act, hesitating to leap onto the winner’s bandwagon in full acceptance of the winning tactics, you have discovered a third perspective, the moral perspective.
You may still accept the realist explanation as the causal explanation of events, yet insist that another judgment from another perspective is still called for.
Whether it is the 10 Commandments, the Golden Rule, or some other moral standard, your hesitation in joining the victors’ celebration of their deed marks you out as a human agent with a moral conscience, a moral agent.
The moral perspective is not bottom-up and data-driven like either the scientific or historical perspectives.
It is a top-down perspective, a trait caught well in terms like commandments, rules, laws, scruples, virtue, character or Kant’s categorical imperative.
The moral perspective looks to the evidence — since all human acts have precedents, customs, habits, enabling conditions, provocations or invitations, that is, they all arise with an ongoing context of personality formation and social interactions — but that is only its secondary determinant.
The primary determinant of the moral perspective is the unifying system of laws and customs or character of virtues and habits that define the acting agent, the moral subject.
Causal explanations view agents as objects caught inescapably in causal chains and causal matrices. And this we all are. but not only this.
We are all also subjects imprinting our personal character and our social culture — our individual and our communal choices — upon an environment that is, if not simply indifferent to them (i.e., existentialism, stoicism, fatalism, nihilism), then at least resistant to them, if for no other reason than because we are not the sole agents trying to impose our own character and culture upon the world.
And that’s what the moral perspective is all about: whose character and which culture should be imprinted the world, on how much of it, and through what means?
And should the world allow multiple perspectives, multiple cultures and multiple kinds of personality?
And this is what the war in Ukraine is about, and the war in Gaza, and the threat of war in Taiwan, and the culture wars raging across that part of the world free enough to permit open dissent, not to mention our daily struggle to do right by others, and be done right by them, as we all struggle to make our way in the realist’s world of researchable facts and accessible but limited resources and the current and future distribution of property and status, of skills, capabilities and powers.
Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. (Sun-Tzu)
Locked by Birth into Singular Perspectives
We are all mortal beings, born into a precarious life that must be defended, if it is not to be lost.
We must continually win our survival, pitted against the long arm of natural selection, until death do us part.
We cannot help but view the world as would survival-machines, for survival is the indispensable condition of our existence.
Noteworthy exceptions: the sheltered nestlings of the affluent classes in affluent nations. But this inherited condition comes with its own risks and pitfalls and, anyway, it seldom lasts a lifetime.
So, we lean into surviving. Or we don’t survive.
So, we support loyally those that helped us survive. We take for granted the goodness of all that helped us survive and thrive — the people, partners, family, friends and allies, and the customs, traditions and institutions as well.
We all want to preserve all that preserved us, even when that came at the expense of others.
Friends and foes is the first political distinction recognized by survival-machines.
And it persists — in disguised forms — even in the thoughtful, even in those who have worked to broaden their horizons (i.e, liberals).
Postmodernists call this perspective a grand narrative, claiming, correctly, that it pervades every culture, every cultural institution and every mind.
How could we not take for granted the conditions under which we flourished, under whose shelter we received, developed or strove to achieve all that makes us what we are: our personalities, our personal histories, our social networks, our careers and achievements?
If conditions were favorable to our flourishing, we owe them a great debt; this is the basis of family feelings and blood obligations.
If conditions were unfavorable, we look for the obstacles that inhibited us and attack them with all our force. (This is the peephole from which many postmodernists take their bearing.)
Those are the extreme cases, but most origins fall into the middle range, the range of mixed blessings.
In sum, individual perspectives are inescapably shaped by our peculiar circumstances, producing perspectives at least as various as the conditions that shaped them.
What, then, can truth be? If, indeed, it is anything at all?
The Origin of Perspective
But no perspective, standing alone, is reality or truth.
Truth must either reject all perspectives by superseding them all, or comprehend them all by incorporating all of them — more precisely, all of them that can accommodate other legitimate perspectives.
This works much in the way that journalists, detectives, and researchers sift and validate eyewitness accounts, by using methodical procedures, governed by rules.
Where possible, we should use explicit methods and procedures that can be reduplicated for confirmation or falsification, as in the scientific method.
But methods and procedures are their own keyholes, for conditions must meet certain requirements before they can be applied.
A crucial example of this is the scientific method, which applies most readily to objects whose movements are accounted for entirely by causes externalized in space and time, rather than objects engineered internally — and thus, locally and individually — to process external inputs of forces or itsensory stimuli in ways whose traits are determined by locally established types: species, psychological profiles, or the massive processing of internalized data (as in human experience and the incorporation and processing of massive data sets in Large Language Models (LLMs), the current vogue in AI.
Such local centers of ordered change — identities, one might call them — can be produced by natural selection, advanced natural cognition or the simulated cognition of the emerging deeper AI.
Blinded by Perspective
Most perspectives assume that the truth supersedes all mere perspectives.
They further assume that their inherent perspective is no mere perspective but the truth entire.
And, if they even bother to consider what their “truth” looks like to every other perspective — namely, just another mere perspective different from their own truth — they find ways to discredit all other claims, exhibiting healthy doses of confirmation bias as they do so.
They do this with little or no justification. And they all, or nearly all, do it.
How can one ever escape the trap of perspective?
The Outsider Perspective
The most readily occurring way is to stumble into the outsider perspective.
This can occur in ways that are idiosyncratic, like the daimon of which Socrates speaks in the Republic ( Book VI, 496a-e) or of the socially withdrawn or aspirational types depicted in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kroger or James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Or it can arise from the outsider status of ethnic or other minorities, as in the pre-WWII writings of the Jewish-born Kafka or the wartime resistance activities of the White Rose network, whose members’ religious affiliations were overwhelmingly with minorities in predominantly Protestant Germany.
Yet outsider perspectives can become just as insular and blinding as mainstream ones.
Two Paths to Escape
Beyond the outsider perspective, a largely involuntary response to exclusion and discrimination, I know of two other ways to escape the limitations of perspective, orthodoxy and dogma.
First, disillusionment with ideological fervor born of successive conversions. Like the outsider perspective, this too is an accident of history. But, for disillusionment to occur, one must at least have some kind of built-in bullshit-detector that lots of people lack, as exposed by today’s social media and their unforeseen but destabilizing consequences.
Soapbox Interlude
And to think, technophiles initially foresaw a new era of spreading enlightenment enabled by easy access to all of mankind’s knowledge. They forgot to consider that lies spread faster than truths in the rumor mill, and that the viral characteristics of mass communication — partly just the age-old social accelerant called gossip, partly the techno-profit engine of algorithmssensitive to the viral potential of thoughtlessly virulent posts — magnifythe distorting effects of the age-old rumor mill, effectively putting it on steroids.
The truth of the Internet is this:
Those who use it intelligently, as humanity’s most accessible research tool, will grow and prosper,
while those who use it as an amplifier for biases and prejudices and as a platform for misinformed ignorance and spite, frothing at the mouth and flaming in the cloud — will first, damage society as a whole, and then condemn themselves to ever-increasing irrelevance.
For their refusal to adapt makes them less and less fit for the knowledge economy just now revealing its real potential.
Irrelevant, but dangerous.They are a large and powerful near-majority, able to slow down needed change, and — in their recurring short-sighted isolationism — either run the ship of state aground or make it much more brutal and costly to salvage the geopolitical mess they are on the verge of leaving to us… and to their children.
This is not the time to sit on the fence and count up short-term gains or costs.
If you have a vote, use it now, and use it wisely, with your eyes on the long-term consequences.Run-of-the-mill politicos, old fogeys, even, come and go, but it takes a divisive demagogue to ruin a republic.
And, now, off my soapbox and back to my topic.
Dialogue and Dialectic: Multiple Perspectives in Dramatic Form
The second, more general and more procedural escape from the limitations of perspective is the discovery of the multi-perspectival processes of dialogue or dialectic.
The dialogue form can be a facade, of course.True dialogue must be dialectical in both form and substance.There are no shortcuts, no royal road, to real dialectical examination of the interplay of thesis and antithesis, of hypotheses and alternatives.
It’s hard work, and the pitfalls are legion. There may be no perfectly perspective-free perspective. We are, after all, limited finite and mortal beings, not gods.
Yet dialogue and dialectic both preserve opposed perspectives as they present and examine controversies.
Each begins by acknowledging that persuasion — and any chance of the emergence of consensual truth — must address all perspectives willing to submit to open debate and rational scrutiny.
It is similar to the consensus — the agreement to disagree, but to find common ground for forward movement, nonetheless — that well-constructed republics require in order to act in unison, united behind policies to which all have consented, at least procedurally.
Policies, in a balanced and functional republic, can split the difference between distinct interests, by finding a middle position, by balancing trade-offs between disparate interests, by sharing the spoils or by uniting against the threat of a common enemy.
Dialectical thinking, by contrast, must preserve incompatible perspectives within its discourse, in something like the alternative branches that arrive at different outcomes within a flow-chart.
Dialectical thinking must retain incompatibles and unresolved issues, incorporating them within its all-encompassing flow-chart of possible lines of thought.
This will include both the defensible lines of thought and the dead ends, because knowledge crucially includes knowledge learned from prior mistakes.
It will also include junctions which alternative lines of plausible argument leave undecided.
Aristotle called such junction points aporeia (undecidables), such as the one in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he considers the different senses in which we can be said to have choice and not to have it. His point there is twofold: 1) neither opposed answer by itself fully captures the matter, and 2) whichever way we answer the question changes the ethical dilemmas of a thing not at all, so it doesn’t matter for practical purposes.
Kant’s most noteworthy preservation of incompatible perspectives are the four antinomies (literally, anti-laws, by which he means paired and offsetting proofs using reductio ad absurdum (i.e., assuming the contrary thesis and exposing it as self-contradictory).
The 3rd of Kant’s antinomies is the very same aporeia of Aristotle’s mentioned above. (The other three are: 1st) that time and space are bounded/unbounded, 2nd) that matter is/isn’t reducible to simplest parts, and 4th) that there does/does not exist an absolutely necessary being (i.e., God).
Self-Image & Social Standing
If the survival-machine in man is dangerously limited in its perspective, so is the social ape in him.
We are social animals, our survival dependent upon the success of our troop — competing with other troops and other species for scarce resources — and upon our standing within our troop.
The inner reflection of social standing is self-image.
Self-image is a double challenge, to accurately appraise our world and our standing within that world. We can be wrong on either account.
Social standing and self-image matter to all social animals –they set the pecking order, among other things, and together they determine our ability to access resources,to gain allies and to pass on our culture, history and genes to succeeding generations.
But for beings able to think abstractly, to ponder what is not currently present to the senses and to imagine altered futures, making plans to bring them about, self-image assumes an even more commanding role than social standing. Outsiders, though generally at a disadvantage, sometimes upset the apple cart, becoming the new masters of new states or industries or cultural fashions.
New allegiances and alliances build upon blood ties and trials of brute strength to realign, in great part, around shared beliefs about the nature of the world we live in, and to attempts to capture that nature in systematic observation and analysis of the world, and of how best to conduct ourselves in it.
Put differently, culture is a shared communal self-image built upon learned competencies and knowledge.
Between them, society-wide culture and personal self-image add new levels of organization — anthropological, historical, sociological and psychological — variable structures atop the invariable structures of physics and chemistry, where universal laws control identical units, both simple and complex, as well as the halfway house of biology, where local environments and distinctive species lineages matter.
“Different strokes for different folks” is my half-jesting summary of human cultures and the social sciences that probe them, where perspective is ineradicable.
Biology, the middle way, is deterministic in the mechanisms of genetics, while natural selection can never be reduced further than the opposed perspectives of predator and prey — or, more generally, of competition for scarce resources.
And resources are perpetually scarce among all organisms in need of the same resources, because biological organisms reproduce and colonize to their limits, a continuation of the self-replication that sets in motion the chain-reaction of biology.
Conclusion
I conclude then that perspective is endemic to the big picture biological aspect of natural selection, and far more so to the big and kaleidoscopic picture of competing cultures, and of individuals within cultures competing for that culture’s resources and social standing.
That being the case, my position is this: truth must incorporate all perspectives defensible in open dialogue and able to withstand critical scrutiny.
Bar this, and thought can never be more than discord (the world as seen by postmodernists and by those who disparage the core desiderata of the Enlightenment).
Bar this, and communication and conciliation can never be more than a temporary armistice in the rhetorical war of words, each successive provisional consensus simply setting the terms for the next outbreak of war.
Bar this, and action can never be more than war (or the maneuverings of future belligerents in preparation for war during unstable armistices).
Bar this, and the future of humanity holds nothing but more of the same, as reflected in history and captured in realism.
There must be common ground, however multi-faceted and multi-perspectival, if the survival-machine and social ape homo sapiens is to avoid self-extinction, one prong of the fork in mankind’s destiny foreseen by Kant in Perpetual Peace.
But he foresaw another prong as well.
Our future is a choice that we will, collectively, make or — by failing to make a deliberate choice — make by default as we slide by degrees to our doom.
We will then be like the fabled frog who, never noticing the gradual rise in temperature of the stewpot in which it sits, does nothing until it is boiled alive.
Through a glass darkly, and through a keyhole narrowly.
Voters always vote for money for themselves, preferably disguised as funding for God, King and country, or their latter-day equivalents.
When hard-pressed in the pocketbook or when they feel their social status and privileges slipping, voters want money to buck those trends.
They will denigrate other needs and other priorities — especially other people’s priorities.
They will ignore obvious risks, if those risks loom just beyond the short-term horizon.
When this mood grips a political faction with legislative power, no other priorities are safe from the axe, not even those of God, King and country.
In the Trump era, red voters are failing to recognize how crucial the support of allies is to restoring the Pax Americana.
Shifting global balances of power mean this will have to be on a broader, not narrower, footing.
Yes, America first, but first among peers, not CEO over executive staff.
And, yes, America will pay more of the bill. (If you don’t understand why, read some history, in particular research who made up the wings of every Roman army, and where the lion’s share of Roman legions were stationed).
The hinges of any effort to restore the Pax Americana in 2024 are Ukraine first and Taiwan second.
If we fail in this, the Pax Americana, founded in 1945, goes from frayed to collapsed.
And then, the return of history… good, old history, like it always was before.
When All Is Said and Dunn 