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.
Mother Russia’s Song of Sorrow: Where have all my children gone? Gone to NATO every one, When will it ever end? When will it ever end?
No Perspective Stands Alone
How one sees the war in Ukraine depends on one’s perspective.
But that doesn’t let Putin’s Russia, or China, off the hook.
The West may well be culpable of offending Russia’s great power interests by offering Ukraine deferred membership in NATO.
Nothing could be clearer, from the great powers perspective, also called realism, or, at its starkest, offensive realism.
Counterclaim #1: the great power perspective works only from the perspective of great powers, for in it, only their interests ultimately count.
It’s working principle was never better explained than by Thucydides: “Those who can, do what they can; those who cannot, suffer what they must.” This formula is invoked in the Melian dialogue, as the justification for what we today would call genocide and a war crime.
The great power perspective, that is, realism, is not the perspective of victims, small powers, or declining powers.
But it is the perspective of caution and prudence, good and necessary things.
Realism Gives Limits Not Directions
The great power perspective is a necessary one, for it sets limits to what can be done, it counsels that one wait until the most opportune moment — or, more darkly, until foreseeable disaster looms if one fails to face a rising threat.
The great power perspective, realism, is what Don Quixote lacked. But the world needs no quixotic great powers; for then we’re all dead.
Realism shows the dangers of a course of action, regardless of the value of what is at stake, because realism does not regard values.
In sum, the great power perspective provides limits of sensible action but not values to guide or direct action.
Counterclaim #2: the great power perspective is not static, for it shifts as do the comparative underlying strengths of rival powers.
The great power perspective (realism) is ultimately not a code of conduct but a counsel of prudence. It holds only, under continuously evolving circumstances, for as long as it holds.
To be blunt: Putin’s Russia has no claim to permanent status as a great power.
In truth, that’s gone already. Putin has crippled Russia economically, stunting its economic growth, preserving primarily its dying smokestack and extractive industries, and alienating the young and educated urbanites, the human capital upon whom Russia’s future growth depends.
Putin’s Russia is the Russia of rent-seekers, oligarchs, and securocrats (siloviki, the connected ones), not the Russian people.
Putin has mortgaged Russia’s future to an unsustainable position of power in the present, and set it firmly on the road to becoming a vassal state of China.
Russia remains a great power in one aspect only. A nuclear titan, a crucial aspect of power but one that is widening continually (both in the quantity of acknowledged nuclear powers and in the range of other weapons of mass destruction available to would-be powers).
Complication #1: weapons of mass destruction.
Certainly, one does not lightly offend a nuclear power (or possessors of other weapons of mass destruction). But nor does one give them all that they demand whenever they demand it.
Such decisions are always strategic, questions of balance, involving trade-offs, calculations, astute political judgments and statecraft.
Mistakes will be made, but they will be mistakes of omission as well as of commission. Triggering great power conflict is bad, but so is permitting a fading yet belligerent power to abuse its neighbors and subject populations at will.
A like equivalency exists between triggering conflict with a rising power and permitting it to act with impunity. Even wannabee powers like North Korea or Sadaam’s Iraq can eat away at a relatively peaceful world order, if allowed.
Invoking the logic of the great power perspective, a condition of relative stability and peace — a pax Romana or pax Americana — is not disallowed for its being to the advantage of a hegemon.
European small powers are right to prefer the hegemony of an offshore balancer uninterested in annexing territory on their continent to a continental would-be hegemon eager to do so.
The tribes of Romanized Gauls were right to prefer their growing prosperity and the end of tribal raiding under the self-serving Romans to wars of displacement or extermination at the hands of land-hungry hordes of invading Germanic tribes.
Perspectives at Odds
So, let me recap the perspectives.
The great power perspective of Russia and China urges an end to the partially rules-based American-led world order, for both nations expect to benefit from a reversion to a world order in which each great power sets what rules it wishes as far as its powers extend.
This is no new world order but the same old same old, the history of empires without constraints and wars without rules. It is the history from which the Russian and Chinese empires were forged.
It is a history of blood and soil, of arrogance and impunity, of dominance and subjection.
It is no place for small nations or free persons.
Now that’s an empire! Good ol’ Genghis!
The great power perspective of America and EU/NATO Europe urges a continuation, and gradual extension, of the partially rules-based order, which, at its height, became incrementally more rules-based, and in which power became incrementally more widespread.
For, while raw military power remained heavily concentrated, America anchoring a preponderant economic weight of affluent allies, economic power was spreading, as was administrative control of international agencies.
China’s economic rise (initially aided and abetted) was an obvious sign of this.
Historically, under starker great power perspectives, economic growth and its potential in lesser powers becomes the occasion either for their conquest (the Spanish lowlands) or their destruction (Carthage).
The great power perspective of an offshore balancer and a mature great power is less dangerous to the welfare of smaller powers than that of either rising powers or economically inept ones.
And the perspective of small powers, as morally legitimate (if not more so) than that of any great power, aligns best with the perspective of a mature great power that is an offshore balancer.
This is a structural advantage, not one of national character or culture.
But that this virtue is situational makes it no less preferable to the starker, more brutal perspective.
And, besides, where national interests are directed more to private prosperity and personal fulfillment, national culture and citizen character are less directed to the belligerent goals of conquest and expansion.
And if that is the surest path to the acculturation of peaceful and productive virtues over warlike and belligerent ones, then it’s the path we should take, when we can.
When All Is Said and Dunn 