1: The Nuclear Conundrum – the Realpolitik End of War Without End

Prehistory is distinguished from history by the (general) non-use or non-survival of writing of the former. Language, and more precisely writing, is the sine qua non of any lasting civilization of any note. And the accumulation of knowledge is always necessary to the accumulation of power. And power logically conduces to the greater control over destiny. And this power enhancement is why civilizations are and have been advantaged over barbarism. The language of barbarism is violence, and the language of civilization is language. (No claim is made here about the elements of a veritable culture.) We might conceptualize history – the ‘history of civilization’ – as extending fully into the present, in which prevailing political entities use and used language – and weaponry too, and that’s why we are only novices at civilization.

Oppressions arrive from the causes of fear and distrust.

Enhanced trust cannot work effectively and forcefully by any means but widespread and abiding adherence to human rights principles. We must usher in a new period of history, where we take civilized values seriously, consistently and unilaterally. This separate period must be made real! It will be a period in which disgruntled or rogue political leadership will be ostracized, shamed and disadvantaged with the logical result that very little dangerous roguishness is ever evident. Why does rape virtually always take place in the shadow of darkness? It is because the negative consequences of such criminality are so certain and immediate in daylight. And why should roguish political conduct be any different? The certain glare of shame brings about the rarity!

But roguishness is just a familiar part of human profligacy. Why and how should it ever disappear?
 It should disappear because the demise of our species (or, our arch-achievement, civilization) depends utterly upon it! A familiar fundamental of realpolitik ideology is that human beings are, by their nature, ever base, self-serving and ambitious. And the first cousin of that cynical worldview states that it is dangerous – indeed folly – to even consider that human beings can ever be or become anything other than base, self-serving and ambitious.

What human beings are by nature is a question separate from the question of what fate has lain upon us. Let us for a moment set aside assertions about “human nature” and look frankly at the world of the twenty-first century, and not shrink from it just because it is scary. Although we’re becoming practiced in not thinking about it, ours is a time of mind-boggling destructive capacity. Witness the Armageddons of erstwhile science fiction stories come to life in the very real, very contemporary prospect of global thermonuclear war! And the English language now employs an apposite acronym, “MAD”, mutual assured destruction, to summarize the outcome of such a catastrophe.

A candid appraisal of the modern world: it is folly not to recognize that our base and self-serving “human nature” will not sustain us, that our demise is predicted in such an unalloyed and unaltered “nature”. We can maintain our existence for a day or a year, or even a century, but we cannot undo the threat of our extinction in the interminable continuation of the present geopolitical status quo. In the early 1960s, when American president John F. Kennedy stated, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind,” his were not the lunatic ravings of a madman, but the cogently expressed concerns of a man aware of MAD. We’ve now arrived at a world with no less than nine nuclear-armed nations, and exactly zero of these presently have any intention of dispossessing themselves of the technology in the foreseeable future.

And their reasons are transpicuous: any nation thus armed is virtually immune from hostile invasion, or an aerial assault by a hostile army or military. This security works as a chronic tonic: the nations in the nuclear club live within a continual shield of  security. Why should they ever give the weapons up?

But I digress. Their reasons are not pertinent to the present writing. The point here is that this dangerous world is real, not prospective, and that the nations that have nuclear weapons cannot be realistically expected to give them up. This is the reality! We arrive at a fateful precipice with no opportunity to back away. How does any species go about solving a conundrum so unsolvable? What can be done when the doing is as imperative as it is impossible? We are quite short on options! Ours is now only to sculpt a new, less misanthropic, and thus less dangerous geopolitical paradigm. At the very core of any coherent survival agenda are two prescriptive words which contain the smallest scintilla of hope: human rights. Unfortunately, that scintilla is all we have to work with.

And, if some exceedingly bright, non-sophistical thinker has a counter-suggestion regarding how such a profound paradigm shift can be effectuated, surely all of us are ready to hear it!

As civilization is advantaged over barbarism, so our “advantage” now is in the continued advancement of human rights norms. What we have called “civilization” is a self-serving arrogation, an egoistic summation of our most salient social achievement as a species. But what we have now won’t do over the long term. It will not give us the survival we intend. We must abandon not just the conspicuous widespread violence of war, but the more subtle ideational constructs that inevitably conduce to war. And this is, simply put, our acquiescence to oppressions of many sorts. What we’re talking about here is the abandonment of oppression as “justice”.

I will write more about the definition of oppression, instances of this, how human rights views oppression, and why the abandoning of oppression values is absolutely necessary to our survival as a species. What we need now is not power enhancement, but wisdom enhancement. We need to see the usefulness to posterity of a burgeoning human rights ethic.

The bombs are sitting there, waiting for just one fateful day, one moment, one chance misadventure to mobilize them.

Shall we wait too? Or shall we work sedulously for the greater surety of our survival by championing basic human rights?

More about the imperative of human rights later.