Any concerted study of politics or history can get extremely complicated. Thus we look for principles that may help us understand and predict trends. And sometimes we like to play the game of ‘What if….”
However, ‘what if’ scenarios sometimes follow on unwarranted or preposterous presuppositions or unlikely relationships and outcomes. It is then not an effort to gain insights into history or likely political outcomes, but a game of fantasy.
Politics, history and human psychology cannot escape the study and observation of selfishness. A caring and informed study of history reveals something quite unsettling about selfishness: it is common, and it is not something that individuals alone evidence, but also communities, polities, ethnic groups and nations. There have been many instances where a nation went to war against another nation largely because the deciding nation guessed that it would win.
But winning and losing have no connection to morality at all. In the Pulitzer Prize winning The Guns of August, the author, Barbara Tuchman, examines the German attitude toward war, and especially a war with France, in the early years of the twentieth century. An entire battle plan was drawn out concerning how to invade and conquer France. But what was interesting was that this was not really a defensive plan at all, but a plan of conquest. You see, the Germans had gained their full political identity as a nation-state in 1871 in a victory over the French. And since that time (1871 to 1910), Germany had gotten much, much stronger militarily, and its naval power had grown to rival that of the greatest sea power then ever in existence: Great Britain. The Germans were obviously jealous of Britain and France, because in the decades preceding 1910 these two nations had established vast overseas empires. Where’s our “place in the sun,” the German leadership asked, jealousy evident in the question itself.
Jealousy and selfishness come from somewhere. They do not just arrive inexplicably. They arrive invisibly because they are part of a natural process. Let me explain.
When we talk about the human individual, we always need to understand that he or she is a creature of evolutionary biology. Nature intends more than anything else that the individual creature survive (to later potentially procreate, of course). But to achieve this nature gives the being what we might call survival predilections. And some of these predilections are observably selfish.
Let’s examine human selfishness in more detail. Sometimes a person seems to be ‘selfish’ in some specific behavior, but there is often the assumption that this is the end of the matter: that the person is selfish is the final conclusion, and no further inquiry or analysis is undertaken. Sometimes a person behaves in a way that is deemed selfish, ignorant, or prideful. And these come from something very interesting in the human personality. Nature affords the person not just a ‘selfish’ survival instinct, but a tendency to develop a self-image, and to enhance and protect that self-image as a component of a longer-term survival design. It works like this:
Let us take two hypothetical people, Man A and Man B. Man A is born with no pride and no discernable self-image. Man B is born with an instinct to develop an assertive self-concept and pride. Man A gets into an intense power struggle with Man B; one of them is killed by the other. Man B must always be favored to prevail (all other things being equal). And can you guess why? There are two reasons: the first is that, having developed strong opinions about himself and his abilities, Man B fights with the greater resolution. Secondly, Man B has allies. In this hypothetical there are another eight grown males there when the lethal battle takes place, and seven of them or perhaps even all eight, take the side of Man B. Why? It is because the very nature of pride tilts toward the greater attainment of social status. While Man A does not care what others think, Man B cares very much. His egoism is of a social sort, and he is proud that he has many followers.
It is said that, “we are all descended from a successful soldier.” This maxim may seem at first unsettling. But it is nonetheless very true. “Survival of the fittest” has indeed had the general effect of whittling down the gene pool in certain ways over the last several hundred thousand years (and doubtless before that too!). And what is a “successful soldier” other than a successful killer? The ability and factual act of killing is there in human DNA today, whether we like to think about this fact or not.
This is not to say that there are not kindnesses and compassionate virtues that have found their way into human DNA too. This writing must not be so construed as to wrongly guess that the writer claims we are all murderers and nothing else. Here it is only claimed that we are all descended from the successful soldiers.
So, there is at least something in us that can kill, at least in very dire circumstances, such as war.
What will we need now, in the twenty-first century, to succeed to the twenty-second and twenty-third. What we have now are mostly not battlefields, fortunately. So, pride and status may not be so necessary to survival in modern times – at least not in the societies of what is sometimes called the “First World.” But it is too late! Hundreds of generations of biology cannot be undone in a short few! We are still biologically programmed also to kill; and importantly, also to be prideful, self-conceited, ambitious and selfish.
As referenced earlier in this writing, the selfishness of individuals does indeed make its way again and again into larger political agendas. And we cannot easily change the fact that the psychological predispositions that conduce to war and bellicosity are still biologically within us.
In an unalterably nuclear age, one might contend that humankind has little hope of surviving the next several hundred years. During the Cold War (c. 1945 to 1991) there was always the exculpation of the nuclear arms race in citing that the United States was in a desperate global ideological match with extremely ambitious communism. At the end of the Cold War, there was some speculation that the nuclear problem might find a resolution. But in 1990 there were eight nuclear powers on earth, and a quarter century later there are nine. These simple facts suggest something very worrisome about continued human existence into the indefinite future.
And there is also the certainty that technology will develop new threats to human existence in the coming centuries. How shall we survive them when we cannot solve the very first: nuclear weapons?
There was a book published several years ago called The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb. The “five” referenced in the title were Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, William Perry, Sam Nunn and a nuclear scientist named Sidney Drell. They tried to work together to get nations to understand the threat that nuclear weapons posed and get them to agree on a disarmament solution. This effort dates to approximately 2007, and the book was published five years later.
It is incredible that five people who were each considered so smart can behave in such an ignorant way! Kissinger, the most famous of the several individuals, having won a Nobel Peace Prize, and himself a very well-known adherent of realpolitik thinking, ought to have known that their plan would come to nothing. Worse than nothing, their plan demonstrates how feckless and inane disarmament talk is. Of course no nation is going to give up its hard-earned nuclear “defenses” when there can be no reliable assurance that some other international arrangement will afford security – that the nation will not be bombed, attacked, invaded, intimidated or overrun.
We must confess, no matter how scary it is to write or utter the words: There is no solution to the nuclear arms conundrum! We will have nuclear weapons as long as we have distrust, and that is likely to be a very, very long time!
At this point, we are all ready to throw up our hands in disgust and give up. But there is one thing we can do to allow even a slight chance of someday finding a remedy to the threat of nuclear annihilation. We’ve got to alter the fundamental paradigm of distrust. We can work to advance human rights, and as we do so, decrease the objectification, inconsideration, subjugation and oppression of human beings. A global increase in the compassionate and civilized treatment of all human beings in all circumstances cannot other than build an atmosphere of greater trust. Greater trust surely would tend to facilitate the possible tackling of this nuclear problem in ways that are unavailable to present-day humankind.
There is always the problem of drone warfare against nefarious terrorism, of course. But the dire need for some hope, no matter how remote, must push us through such distractions.
Any truly monumental change in the nuclear dilemma will include unilateral strategies. This means that we who consider ourselves civilized must act without trying to get others to do what we think they ought to do. We act. We grow the group that is upholding (all) human rights. We deepen human rights by the deepening of our own civilizational integrity. We must not expect “partnership” from states that are utterly tyrannical, such as North Korea. Diplomacy will have no effect on North Korea. Neither will threats. But a deepening and widening understanding of, and commitment to, human rights will ultimately isolate North Korea in ways the present world, with its abundant hypocrisy, cannot.
There is probably little chance that even the most visionary, tireless and widespread human rights advances will significantly help bring about the eventual solution to the nuclear conundrum. But there is probably only the regrettable choice of this one-percent-chance option and something even more unlikely, even more absurd. One thing is certain: diplomacy cannot solve this problem.
Does anyone have any more constructive suggestions?