![]() Moreover, its persistent rejection in real life already reflects the most thoroughly elemental failure of planetary political life. In literature, this crucial horizon can be more readily encountered in Sören Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, than in Adam Smith, Karl Marx or John Maynard Keynes. Seemingly indecipherable, there nonetheless exists a critical inner horizon to world politics. Somehow, we humans always manage to miss what is most important. Such incapacity had already been foreseen in the 18th century by America’s then-leading person of letters, Ralph Waldo Emerson, but today, the vital insights of the “American Transcendentalists” remain known only to an excruciatingly tiny minority. This core liability is the incapacity of individuals and societies to discover authentic self-worth within themselves. Plus ça change … All world politics still expresses an unchanging and deeply misplaced human deficit. It is, as the philosophers would say, “epiphenomenal.” It is not the truly underlying “disease.” But, just as it was for the celebrated Irish poet, today’s expanding global chaos is merely a symptom. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” once observed William Butler Yeats. No conceivably gainful configuration of planet Earth can be sustainable if the great human legions and states who comprise it are themselves morally, spiritually and intellectually adrift. The dual-level message is rather simple: No one’s private success can be sustainable if the world, as a whole, has no tolerable future. It also means that our wider planetary civilization can be promising only if its billions of constituent residents are permitted to strive meaningfully. No element can move and grow except with and by all the others with itself.” For example, it is readily discoverable in the writings of the great Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin: “The egocentric ideal of a future reserved for those who have managed to attain egoistically the extremity of ‘everyone for himself’ is false and against nature. In essence, although they now live in a society that smugly loathes mindful study, these students will ultimately need to seek satisfaction beyond altogether vacant forms of entrepreneurship and commerce.Īt a minimum, university students will now require awareness that each single individual’s personal and professional accomplishments will make sense only if the planet, as a whole, can have a correspondingly accomplished future. In our universities, especially, where prevailing intellectual fashion is determined by anything but intellectual standards, our students deserve exposure to more genuinely revealing forms of learning. This is not a silly or gratuitous question. Still, reading the latest news of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) slaughter and enslavement, an utterly desperate query can no longer be stifled: Just how much more horror, we must finally ask, can our tormented species endure? For the most part, in the always corrosively self-limiting life of civilizations, there is nothing really new under the sun. Rather, from time immemorial, such frenzied turmoil as we now witness most conspicuously in Iraq and Syria has followed a long-recurring script. Examined systematically, there is nothing unique about current patterns of war and terror on planet Earth.
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