[The Incredible Hulk?]

DEATH, THE HERD AND HUMAN SURVIVAL. Louis Rene Beres.
International Journal on World Peace 16.3 (Sept 1999): p3.


Behind the play of nations and their wars lies the wish of individual citizens, acting like a herd in denying their own finitude, to achieve immortality. States have become gods and must be desacralized if our terrible wars are to end. Individuals, not states, should be viewed as sacred. They should find their true identity in personal virtue, not in a blind loyalty to a state which promises immortality but leads them down the path to extinction.

The world is full of noise, but if we listen carefully we can hear the real music that will transform ourselves into purposeful beings and our states into purposeful communities. Why is an entire planet now in jeopardy? The usual answers are cast in terms of the language of world politics. The nations of the world continue to defer to the primacy of Realpolitik. Insufficient resources and hopes are committed to arms control. The post-War polarity of East and West has been transformed into an era of exceedingly cruel ethnic conflicts. And without the assurances of authentic world authority structures, each state's uncertainty about the intentions of adversary states encourages growing membership in the nuclear club.

Although these answers are certainly correct, they are also trivial. The struggle for world power is always epiphenomenal. It is what underlies this struggle, what animates competition between states, that represents the authentic source of unconventional war and terrorism. I refer to the individual human being's all-consuming fear of death and to the corollary drive of individuals for immortality.

This calls forth a terrible irony. Dreading, more than anything else, animality decomposition and decay, humankind sees salvation in an endless display of holy wars disguised as the natural expression of global competition. But as these wars could require millions to pass through fire, they can only ensure the very evil they have been invented to dispel. While these excursions into organized barbarism are designed to reveal potency and overcome earthly limitations, they inevitably make life impossible.

It is not enough to have God on our side. The whole world contradicts not only eternal life, but even a short, temporal one. As for states, which are always an expression of faith and which have always (even long before Hegel) regarded themselves as the "march of God in the world," their ceaseless search for power is spawned by the primal terror of individuals, but it is their fate to create necropolis.

Consider the desolate metaphysics of our time. Living in what Camus called an "unsacrosanct moment in history," we have nonetheless finalized the transfer of sanctity to governments. It follows that ideology in most states has become theology, and that opposition to particular policies-- even in the most democratic of societies--represents not dissent but "blasphemy."

Why, then, did America hate the Soviet Union? Because that country was a despotism? This is hardly likely, inasmuch as the US has had no difficulty including in the "free world" several dozen other states whose respect for human dignity was always substantially worse than that of the former USSR.

The answer lies elsewhere. More precisely, it can be discovered in a population that saw such hatred as the sacred obligation of a properly God-fearing population to oppose the forces of darkness. Although superpower competition had always been explained in learned journals and popular magazines as a purely secular expression of the struggle for power, its real origins must be found in an entirely different region--a region defined by myth, mysticism and desperation.

The problem is always one of individuals. Our leaders could sustain an anti-Soviet theology only because it satisfied the particular cravings of people. By treating the Soviet Union as a pernicious society, Americans affirmed that they belonged to an elite, one that was based on goodness. There were no special requirements for membership in this elite, no standards of excellence that had to be met, only citizenship in the United States.

Of course, the antagonistic polarity of US-Soviet relations might itself have been an expression of a more general need to establish meaning through contrived hatred of outsiders. Such hatred had been described interestingly by Edward Thompson in Beyond the Cold War:

The threat of the Other is grounded upon a profound and universal human need. It is intrinsic to human bonding. We cannot define whom "We" are without also defining "them"--those who are not need not be perceived as threatening: they may be seen only as different from "us"--from our family, our community, our nation: "they" are others who do not "belong." But if "they" are seen as threatening to us, then our own internal bonding will be all the stronger.... Rome required barbarians, Christendom required pagans, Protestant and Catholic Europe required each other. Patriotism is love of one's own country; but it is also hatred or fear or suspicion of others.... Today the Western hemisphere has been divided into two parts, each of which sees itself as threatened by the Other; yet at the same time this continuing threat has become necessary to provide internal bonding and social discipline within each part. Moreover, this threat of the Other has been internalized within both Soviet and American culture, so that t he very self-identity of many American and Soviet citizens is bound up with the ideological premises of the Cold War.

To a very real extent, the individual American supported permanent rivalry with the Soviet Union largely out of fear of being alone, outside the herd. That individual thus found the existence of an "Evil Empire" absolutely necessary. Small matter that the Soviet Union was essentially a state like his or her own, comprised of people like himself or herself. Driven to devalue reason at the outset, this. American was impervious to logic, responding only to the strong emotional benefits of belonging.

Why such a desperate need to belong? The answer lies in our marked incapacity to find self-worth within ourselves. This incapacity, in turn, is nurtured by a society that ruggedly despises individualism. Offering a cornucopia of "things" to those who would maintain proper faith, this society is determined to positively cancel the individual.

How ironic! America defended its opposition to the Soviet Union largely in terms of the need to counter Eastern collectivism with Western individualism. Yet, the real rationale of this opposition had always been in the fundamentally symmetrical anti-individualism of the two countries.

Consider the populus in American society. Unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans, the term is essentially equivalent to "all citizens." Asked to identify "The People," Cicero and Livy would have offered important distinctions based on the performance of "useful service" (see Cicero's De Republica), but for the United States no such distinctions are revealed. While the Latin authors deplored the taste and judgments of the Many (Livy, for example, says "nothing is so valueless as the minds of the multitude"), America still sees only a seamless web of We The People.

Where is the individual in this web? He or she no longer exists as a person, but only as a member. For America, it does not matter if the multitude is vulgar or sublime, as long as one is able to belong. For the United States today, demos is not the path to virtue but the valley of mediocrity and despair.

Almost devoid of those rare, noble and quixotic souls who will not stoop to prevailing wickedness, malice, corruption and venality, The People of this valley have become the natural enemy of excellence. Before this condition can change, it will be necessary for many to emerge from the low estate of the herd--from the lethal confines of the merely gregarious--and to display innate powers both cultivated and unspoiled--sound, free from imitation and mimicry; displaying that individualization without extravagance that is genuine and unpretentious.

But how? Woodrow Wilson, in an 1897 essay titled "On Being Human," had an answer:

Nevertheless, Wilson's advice has gone unheeded. A bargain has been struck. We Americans are free as a people, but only at the price of self-renunciation. The individual American who would challenge the state "religion" of the moment must always expect exclusion. Athens, as we recall, precisely at its freest moment, created ostracism, banished the authentic thinkers and poisoned the most honest philosopher.

By what means is this self-liberation to be effected--this emancipation from affectation and the bondage of being like other people? Is it open to us to choose to be genuine? I see nothing insuperable in the way, except for those who are hopelessly lacking in a sense of humor. It depends upon the range and scale of your observation whether you can strike the balance of genuineness or not.... The art of being human begins with the practice of being genuine, and following standards of conduct which the world has tested.

America's fatal obsession with the Soviet Union was also closely related to our hopes to live forever. What, exactly, were the connections? They concerned the official atheism of the USSR. And why should America have found formal godlessness so disconcerting? It is because most Americans cannot accept the finitude of life (over 95 percent of the US population believes in life after death) and because the very presence of the Soviet Union represented an intolerable challenge to immortality.

Not surprisingly, the idea of nuclear war as a cleansing and ultimately life-giving kind of catastrophe has sometimes lurked among America's highest policy-makers, whose fascination with scriptural prophecy can threaten deliberate flirtations with Armageddon. As former President Reagan remarked in 1971: "Everything is falling into place.... Now that Russia has set itself against God...it fits the description of Gog (the nation that will lead all of the other powers of darkness against Israel) perfectly"

Reagan's Evil Empire, therefore, was much more than a clever metaphor. It was a profoundly theological characterization of an enemy that might ultimately have been met in Final Battle. The fact that America may have been willing to fight this battle did not signify a coming to terms with death. Quite the contrary! Because the Apocalypse signifies not only destruction, but deliverance, the battle would have been fought to make possible eternal life. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Americans would deny such eschatological thinking, but it operates, nonetheless.

There is another way that obsessive anti-Sovietism fed off America's fear of death. For those who went along with Sovietophobia, rewards abounded. Not only was obedience requited with a sense of belonging, it was also helpful to those who wished to "live well."

What do these material rewards have to do with denials of mortality? From earliest recorded history, humankind has resorted to wealth to confound the primal forces of animal boundness, decomposition and decay. Today countless Americans understand that money is power, that it can transform smallness and helplessness into durability and control. What god would be presumptuous enough to cause a rich and powerful citizen to sleep in the dust?

But what are the connections between money and "going along?" Contemporary Americans have entered into a Faustian bargain wherein "things" are exchanged for silence. Nourished from earliest childhood to share in the state religion of hatred toward another society, baby boomers learned very quickly that questions about this religion represented not dissent but blasphemy. Accepting the right of government to bind all private wills into its own sacred purposes, we still acknowledge no legitimate political function for ourselves in foreign affairs save obedience.

In the end, to rid ourselves of a foreign policy deformed by contrived hatreds--if not the hatreds of the Cold War, then the "new" hatreds of ethnic warfare--we will need to discover meaningful bases of status and self-worth. To continue to survive as a nation, we cannot continue to draw meaning from membership in The Herd. Reconstructing ourselves on the ruins of herd theology, we must begin to distance ourselves from loyalties that acknowledge only self-contempt, loyalties that demand war and ultimately oblivion.

For now, the herd is not only lonely, but lethal. Left unchallenged as the source of private identity, it will prod us to accept any lie with indifference. Where this lie informs us that our value as Americans flows from a caricatural contest with another society or people, it may push us beyond the limits of safety into collective annihilation.

The remedy? It is, in part, the desacrilization of the state. Reeducated to learn that the antitheses between "us" and "them" are only the verbal expressions of an invented game, We The People might still discover a far more productive expression for our fears. Rather than sustain a structure of world politics that can only transform our worst nightmares into prophetic dreams, we could inform the creation of a new world order of harmony and dignity.

How shall such a desacrilization come to pass? What must be done if each individual life, not each individual state, is to be a sanctification? The answer certainly cannot be found in reason. Throughout history, the implications of correct argument have always been overcome by the most palpable nonsense.

No, we must look elsewhere, beyond the rules of logical inference, into the very depths of human activity. We must look not to Plato, but to Freud; not to Cicero, but to Kierkegaard, to Stirner, to Nietzsche, to Hesse.

And we must look to Schopenhauer. This contemporary of Hegel rested his philosophy upon the Kantian distinction between what is and what is rationally knowable. Seizing upon the idea that we can never know our true nature by rational inference, Schopenhauer taught that we can still be perfectly aware of it via the will, a primordial force that opposes all deliberate thought with the search for perpetual life.

What a mistake it is to assume that Reason governs the world. Should we stand only in the tradition of Greek philosophy and Renaissance science, we would discover little to support a purposeful individual life. On the contrary, it is the utter pointlessness of individual life that is underscored by the application of reason and system to the vast panorama of life in general.

Everywhere in the panorama of non-human life, nature cares only for the form or for the species. It appears wholly indifferent to the fate of individual members. Insects and fishes perish in masses, the individual creatures seemingly content to litter the earth with their corpses so long as the species can persist unaltered. Everywhere outside the human community numberless creatures behave as if nature would only mock the idea of transcendent worth for individual life.

Humankind is different. Of course, the spectacle of catastrophe and annihilation has been with us from the beginning, and the seeming insignificance of individual life would appear to be confirmed by every earthquake or typhoon, by every pestilence or epidemic, by every war or holocaust. Yet, each of us is unwilling to accept a fate that points not only to extinction, but to extinction with insignificance.

Where do we turn? It is to promises of immortality And from where do we hear such promises? From religion, to be sure, but also from states that have deigned to represent God in his planetary political duties.

How do these states sustain the promise of immortality? One way is through the legitimization of the killing of other human beings. And why is such killing an affirmation of one's own life? An answer is offered by Eugene Ionesco in his Journal (1966):

I must kill my visible enemy, the one who is determined to take my life, to prevent him from killing me. Killing gives me a feeling of relief, because I am dimly aware that in killing him, I have killed death. My enemy's death cannot be held against me, it is no longer a source of anguish, if I killed him with the approval of society: that is the purpose of war. Killing is a way of relieving one's feelings, of warding off one's own death.

There are two separate but interdependent ideas here. The first is the rather pragmatic and mundane observation that killing someone who would otherwise kill you is a life-supporting action. Why assume that your intended victim would otherwise be your assassin? Because, of course, your own government has clarified precisely who is friend and who is foe. The second, far more complex idea, is that killing in general confers immunity from mortality This idea, of death as a zero-sum commodity, is captured by Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good." Or according to Otto Rank's Will Therapy and Truth and Reality: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed."

It is time, in the Spanish philosopher Unamuno's words, "to consider our mortal destiny without flinching." This, lamentably, is easier said than done, because the human instinct that clings to life flees from death as the very prototype of evil, and because each singular individual is able to counter the observed fact of mortality with entire categories of exceptions. Such solipsistic boasts have been identified by George Santayana in Reason in Religion:

Any proud barbarian, with a tincture of transcendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. "Creatures that perish," he might say, "are and can be nothing but puppets and painted shadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; it scorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments. The world, which I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operation and consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The death prophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight and courage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me."

Nevertheless, the fact of having been born is a bad augury for immortality, and the human inclination to rebel against an apparently unbearable truth inevitably produces the very terrors from which individuals seek to escape. Desperate to live perpetually, humankind embraces a whole cornucopia of faiths that offer life everlasting in exchange for undying loyalty In the end, such loyalty is transferred from the faith to the state, which battles with other states in what political scientists would describe as a struggle for power, but which is often, in reality, a war between the presumed Sons of Light ("Us") and the presumed Sons of Darkness ("Them"). The advantage to being on the side of the Sons of Light in such a significant contest is nothing less than the prospect of eternal life.

How, then, do we end these terrible wars? Most important, we must first understand them as manifestations of humankind's unwillingness to accept personal death. Death defines world politics because individuals wish to escape death. The ironies are staggering, but the connections persist and remain unexamined.

Freed from their unwillingness to accept the finitude of life, individuals could finally agree upon a descralization of states, upon a covenant with all other individuals to treat the political as a secular realm of unalterably mundane limits. With such an agreement, the passion for "victory" would be greatly abridged, and the rationale of war between states severely impaired. Over time, every polis could become a cosmopolis, and the "realism" of power struggles between states could be revealed for what it has always been, a "religious" myth.

But we are back at the beginning. How may we be instructed to accept our own personal mortality? Epicurus had an answer. In his letter to Menoeceus, he counsels:

Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation, And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it an infinite span of time, but because it takes away the craving for immortality.

More than two thousand years later, Santayana settled upon similar conclusions:

In endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly unimaginable to the unreflective creation... the truth of mortality....The more we reflect, the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it, perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a way, above mortality.

As it is memory that makes mortality an incontestable truth, says Santayana, so it is also memory that opens to us all an ideal immortaliy, an "immortality in representation," an opportunity to accept the knowledge of natural death as an occasion to "live in the spirit."

By accepting death, then, each moment of life becomes vastly more rich in joy, meaning and potentiality. Detached from the falsehood that existence can conquer temporality, each individual may experience an authentic notion of immortality, one that "quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the truth of those moments and their inalienable values."

We see, then, that the joy and sufficiency of single moments represents the only means open to humankind for witnessing the glory of eternity. Yet, reasonable as this may be, it is a conclusion not readily transmitted to an entire species. Indeed, in a world where the happy filling of a single hour is far beyond the reach of billions, it is a conclusion without any likelihood of being taken seriously.

Taken by itself, the probable truth of mortality has little to do with its widespread acceptance. "Truth," as Schopenhauer notes in The World as Will and Idea, "cannot appear naked before the people." Our persistent attachment to life does not spring from knowledge and reflection, but from the will to live. It follows that to weaken this attachment in a fashion that would ultimately permit humankind to experience a new world politics, it is our will that must be transformed. Only then will we be able to come to grips with the real Idea of world politics and with the requirements for a durable peace.

We seem to hold on to life at all costs. Although religion springs from the need to maintain this grip, theological leadership is normally not at odds with the state. Indeed, today the leadership of the state itself speaks with a quasi-religious authority.

The state itself has become sacred. Everyone, of course, will protest this description with horror and indignation (especially in the democratic, secular West), but some facts are incontestable. Throughout much of the contemporary world, the expectations of government are always cast in terms of religious obligation. And in those places where the peremptory claims of faith are in conflict with such expectations, it is the latter that invariably prevail. With states as the new gods, the profane is not only permissible, it is altogether sacred.

Let us pause for a moment to consider the changing place of the State in world affairs. Although it has long been observed that states must continually search for an improved power position as a practical matter, the sacralization of the state is a development of modern times. This sacralization, representing a break from the traditional political realism of Thucydides, Thrasymachus and Machiavelli, was fully developed in Germany. From Fichte and Hegel, through Ranke and von Treitschke, the modern transformation of Realpolitik has led states to their current rendezvous with war and genocide.

Today the state assumes its own rationale. Holding its will as preeminent, it has become intent upon sacrificing private interests and personal life at the altar of global competition. A new god, the state is now a providence of which everything is accepted and nothing expected. The fact that it is prepared to become an executioner state is not hard to reconcile with its commitment to "Goodness," as war can be a legitimate expression of the sacred.

The problem of the omnivorous state, subordinating all individual sensibilities to the idea of unlimited internal and external jurisdiction, was foreseen brilliantly in the 1930s by Jose Ortega y Gasset. In his The Revolt of the Masses, Ortega correctly identifies the state as "the greatest danger," mustering its immense and unassailable resources "to crush beneath it any creative minority which disturbs it--disturbs it in any order of things: in politics, in ideas, in industry." Set in motion by individuals whom it has already rendered anonymous, the state establishes its machinery above society so that humankind comes to live for the state, for the governmental apparatus:

And as, after all, it is only a machine whose existence and maintenance depend on the vital supports around it, the State, after sucking out the very marrow of society, will be left bloodless, a skeleton, dead with that rusty death of machinery, more gruesome than the death of a living organism.

Ortega's characterization of the State was prefigured by Nietzsche. "State," he exclaims in the First Part of Zarathustra, "is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly, it tells lies too and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life."

The state that commits itself to mass butchery does not intend to do evil. On the contrary, accepting Hegel's description in the Philosophy of Right that "the State is the actuality of the ethical Idea," it commits itself to death for the sake of life, prodding killing with conviction and pure heart. A sanctified killer, the state that accepts Realpolitik generates an incessant search for victims. Though mired in blood, the search is tranquil and self-assured, born of the knowledge that its deeds are neither infamous nor shameful, but heroic.

Rationalist philosophy had derived the idea of national sovereignty from the notion of individual liberty, but cast in its modern (i.e, after the 17th century and the Treaty of Westphalia) expression the idea has acted to oppose human dignity and human rights. Left to develop on its continuous flight from reason, the legacy of national "self-determination" and unrestrained nationalism can only be endless loathing and slaughter. Ultimately, as Lewis Mumford has observed, all human energies will be placed at the disposal of a murderous "megamachine" with whose advent we will all be drawn unsparingly into a "dreadful ceremony" of worldwide sacrifice.

With Hegel's characterization of the state as "the march of God in the world," John Locke's notion of a Social Contract--the notion upon which the United States was founded--is fully disposed of, relegated to the ash heap of history. While the purpose of the state, for Locke, is to provide protection that is otherwise unavailable to individuals--the "preservation of their lives, liberties and estates"--for Hegel the state stands above any private interests. It is the spirit of the state, Volksgeist, rather than of individuals, that is the presumed creator of advanced civilization. And it is in war, rather than in peace, that a state is judged to demonstrate its true worth and potential.

Let us look specifically at our own country. Current leaders of the United States are not content with despising the spirit of the Age of Reason, the spirit that gave birth to America. Often, they execrate this spirit as a source of impiety. As a result, they have fostered a form of Realpolitik that goes far beyond the bounds of an earlier pattern of reluctant pragmatism. In this form, the perceived interests of the United States are the ultimate value, even though their lack of congruence with private and worldwide interests renders them self-destructive.

It follows from all this that before the US can extricate itself from the predatory embrace of Realpolitik, individual Americans will need to discover alternative and more authentic sources of faith. Worn threadbare, militaristic nationalism must be identified prominently with death and despair. It must no longer be regarded as a source of life.

How easily humankind still gives itself to the new gods. Promised relief from the most terrifying of possibilities-death and disappearance- our species regularly surrenders itself to formal structures of power and immunity. Ironically, such surrender brings about an enlargement of the very terrors that created the new gods in the first place, but we surrender, nonetheless. In the words of William Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), we lay waste to ourselves by embracing the "political plague-mongers," a necrophilous partnership that promises purity and vitality through the killing of "outsiders."

Fear of death, to summarize, not only cripples life, it also creates entire fields of premature corpses. But how can we be reminded of our mortality in a productive way, a way that would point to a new and dignified polity and, significantly, to fewer untimely deaths? One answer lies in the ethics of Epicurus, an enlightened creed whose prescriptions for disciplined will are essential for international stability.

The creed of Epicurus is not the caricatural hedonism so falsely associated with the philosopher, but an independence of desire and a freedom from fear-of death especially. When, therefore in the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus maintains that pleasure is "the end," he says explicitly:

... we do not mean the pleasures of profligates and those that consist in sensuality, as is supposed by some who are either ignorant or disagree with us or do not understand, but freedom from pain in the body and from trouble in the mind. For it is not continuous drinkings and revellings, nor the satisfaction of lusts, nor the enjoyment of fish and other luxuries of the wealthy table, which produce a pleasant life, but sober reasoning, searching out the motives for all choice and avoidance, and banishing mere opinions, to which are due the greatest disturbance of the spirit.

Sober reasoning, above all, turns our confidence towards death and our caution towards the fear of death. Aware that Socrates called such fears "bogies" (Plato, Phaedo), Epictetus says, in Book II, Chapter I of the Discourses:

What is death? A bogy Turn it round and see what it is: you see it does not bite. The stuff of the body was bound to be parted from the airy element, either now or hereafter, as it existed apart from it before. Why then are you vexed if they are parted now? For if not parted now, they will be hereafter. Why so? That the revolution of the universe may be accomplished, for it has need of things present, things future, and things past and done with.

We are each "a little soul, carrying a corpse," as Marcus Aurelius says citing Epictetus, but what sort of soul bears such a heavy burden? Is it the soul of the Platonic tradition described by Descartes in the final paragraph of Part V of the Discourse on Method ("...in its nature entirely independent of the body, and in consequence that it is not liable to die with it")? Such questions of metaphysics lie far beyond the purview of a political scientist--even one who has been freed from the tyrannies of vacant empiricism--but they must be raised before we can ask the next question: How can we best liberate citizens from the "bogy" of death as a means of rescuing world order?

To answer such questions we needn't contrast Descartes with the Epicureans (if we did, we should probably focus on the most complete exposition of the Epicurean system, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius), or with Spinoza, Locke or Hume. All we need to recognize is, as Santayana notes in Volume Three of The Life of Reason, that "everything moves in the midst of death." Raised by this understanding "above mortality" the triumphant soul of constantly perishing bodies acknowledges that everything, everywhere, is in flux, and that even the most enduring satisfactions are not at odds with personal transience.

But let us take leave of the metaphysical, and return to the vastly more concrete realm of international affairs and US foreign policy What, exactly, must be done to bring individual Americans to the liberation offered by Santayana? Very little, if anything! "Immortal reason," Santayana notwithstanding, will not wean our minds from mortal concerns. Perhaps, over time, humankind will envisage the eternal and detach its affections from the world of flux, but that time is far in the future. For now, we must rely on something else, something far less awesome and far more mundane. We must rely on an expanding awareness that states in general, and the United States in particular, are not the Hegelian "march of God in the world," but the vicars of annihilation and that the triumph of the herd in world politics can only hasten the prospect of individual death.

This, then, is an altogether different kind of understanding. Rather than rescue American foreign policy by freeing the citizenry from fear of death, it recommends educating this populace to the truth of an incontestable relationship between death and geopolitics. By surrendering ourselves to states, we encourage not immortality but extinction. It is a relationship that can be more widely understood.

There are great ironies involved. Although the corrosive calculus of geopolitics has now made possible the deliberate killing of all life, populations all over the planet turn increasingly to states for security. It is the dreadful ingenuity of states that makes possible death in the millions, but it is in the expressions of that ingenuity that people seek safety. Indeed, as the threat of nuclear annihilation looms ever larger, the citizens of nuclear states reaffirm their segmented loyalties, moved by the persistent unreason that is, after all, the most indelible badge of humankind.

It follows from this that increasing human uncertainty brought about by an unprecedented vulnerability to disappearance is likely to undermine rather than support the education we require. Curiously, therefore, before we can implement such education we will need to reduce the perceived threat of nuclear war and enlarge the belief that nuclear stability (as a short-term objective) is within our grasp. To make this possible we must continue to make progress on the usual and mainstream arms control measures and on the associated strategies of international cooperation and reconciliation.

"Death," says Norbert Elias in The Loneliness of the Dying, "is the absolute end of the person. So the greater resistance to its demythologization perhaps corresponds to the greater magnitude of danger experienced." Let us, then, reduce the magnitude of danger, both experienced and anticipated. But let us also be wary of nurturing new mythologies, of planting false hopes that offer illusions of survival in a post-apocalypse world. Always desperate to grasp at promises that allay the fears of personal transience, individual human beings are only too anxious to accept wish-fantasies of security in the midst of preparations for Armageddon.

Sapere aude! "Dare to know"! This motto for the Enlightenment suggested by Immanuel Kant acquires a special meaning at the end of a millennium. Just as repression of the fear of death by individuals can occasion activities that impair the forces of self-preservation, so can humankind impair its prospects for survival by denying the possibility of collective disintegration.

Perhaps the closest we can come to really understanding what it would be like to endure a nuclear conflict is by studying the anatomy of life in the death camps of Nazi Germany and the aftermath of atomic holocaust in Japan. Although the analogies are certainly imperfect, there are no other darkly visionary sources of human experience to which we can so safely turn. The total immersion in death; the olfactory stimulation provided by tens of thousands of burning bodies; the overwhelming imagery of unending terror and loss that were the central features of these two atrocities, offer us the clearest human picture of life in a post-apocalypse world.

At the time of their descent into hell, the survivors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, of Treblinka and Nagasaki, reacted to the other-worldly grotesqueness of their conditions with what Yale psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton describes as a profound sense of "death in life." Witnessing, in the one case, the thrusting of newly-delivered babies, alive, into ovens, and in the other, the appearance of long lines of severely burned, literally melting, ghosts, the survivors found themselves--in Bruno Betteiheim's words, an "anonymous mass," or in the Japanese term, muga-muchu, "without self, without a center." Such a total disruption of individual and social order, of one's customary personal and community supports, produced consequences that went far beyond immediate physical and emotional suffering. Indeed, this understanding is incorporated in the Japanese term for atomic bomb survivors, Hibakusha, which delimits four categories of victims, including those who were in utero at the time of the blast.

Of course, in the case of nuclear war, the symbols and images that are needed to interpret the idea of total extinction simply do not exist. The absence of such symbols and images makes it impossible for us, in thinking about such a nuclear war, to follow Martin Buber's injunction to "imagine the real." Nevertheless, even if a global necropolis is not psychologically absorbable at the moment, imaginings of such a world must be encouraged.

In the unsentimental theatre of modern world politics, the time is at hand for a new kind of dramaturgy, a "new naturalism" that touches profoundly the deepest rhythms of human imagination. Our playgoing sensibilities must no longer be confined to the implausible pap of sanitized political discourse. We now require honest passages of down-to-earth exposition, even if the necessary tracts and tirades become endless and unbearable.

The world is full of noise, but it is still possible to listen for real music. In the fashion of Hesse's Steppenwolf, who behind a mixture of the trumpet's chewed rubber discovers the noble outline of divine music, we may "tune out" the eternal babble of global politics and the herd to hear--like an old master beneath a layer of dirt--the majestic structure and full broad bowing of the strings. Caught up in a war of extermination against the individual, the murdered and murderous sounds ooze on and on, but the original spirit of music can never be destroyed. Although life in the herd seeks to strip this music of its sensuous tones, spoiling, scratching and degrading it, for those who learn to listen even the most ghastly of disguises give way to beauty

Only when enough persons have learned to listen can the herds themselves be transformed. Understood in terms of international relations, this means that states themselves can become purposeful communities--communities that sustain individuals who in turn ensure harmonious and dignified foreign policies--but not until civic virtue has yielded to real virtue. When this happens, states themselves will be self-affirmed and inter-state conflict replaced by planetization.

Under current conditions, faith in the herd mythology of Realpolitik can serve only anguish and collapse. Reaffirming our faith in survival we will be justified on only one path, the path to authentic bases of self-worth and personal meaning. Defied again and again by a world politics that will always be inimical to truth, we must once again recognize ourselves as species of mortal individuals.

Professor Beres' newest book is titled Force, Order and Justice: International Law in an Age of Atrocity. His previous books dealing with nuclear strategy and nuclear war include America Outside the World: The Collapse of US Foreign Policy (1987); Security or Armageddon: Israel's Nuclear Strategy (1986); Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984). Forthcoming books include: Earth's Body: Self-Affirmation and World Order, Principles of World Order Design, and International Law and the Prevention of Genocide.

Louis Rene Beres, professor of political science and international law at Purdue University, lectures and publishes widely on matters relating to nuclear war nuclear strategy and terrorism. Born in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1945, he was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs and articles in the field. He also contributes regular guest editorials to such newspapers as the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Jerusalem Post.

COMMENT ON "DEATH, THE HERD AND HUMAN SURVIVAL"

Gordon L. Anderson

Louis Rene Beres has written a very thought provoking essay on the fear of death and the contemporary geopolitical situation. It is the fear of death, he argues, that has led us to sacralize the state as our protector from death. According to Hegel, the state is "the march of God in the world." In the twentieth century, the state has been given a near ultimate power over human life in the guise of protecting that life. It sees the state, not individuals, as the creator of civilization's advance. Not only did the totalitarian and socialist states embrace this sacralization, but in the United States--the nation founded on the sanctity of the individual--Realpolitik has gripped America in its "predatory embrace."

In the logic of American leaders, it is the "national interest" that is the ultimate value. It is in their interest to create an enemy--the "other"--that symbolizes the death of the American way of life. By instilling fear of the loss of our life if we do not support their foreign policy, our current leaders are leading the American herd down the path of ultimate destruction--the path they really wish to avoid. Beres urges people to wake up and not be misled by such false messiahs that would lead them to war and destruction. "By surrendering ourselves to states, we encourage not immortality but extinction." These leaders have run roughshod over the individual rights enshrined in the founding documents of the United States--the Social Contract was "relegated to the ash heap of history." Certainly Jefferson was aware of the desire of governments to deceive and mistreat individuals when he stated in a letter to James Madison that the Bill of Rights was the right that the people have against every government on earth.

Beres' conclusion is that enough people need to be educated to understand this big deception and realize that the sanctity of the individual is the purpose of the state and not the reverse. Such enlightened persons can transform the herds, who will then make their states purposeful communities. "When this happens, states themselves will be self-affirmed and interstate conflict replaced by planetization."

I frilly support Beres' thesis as I have outlined it above. It is essential for individuals in free democratic societies to understand their own sanctity as well as the sanctity of all others and to responsibly pursue one's own happiness while respecting the rights of others. However, I am not sure if I understand or can agree with some of the sub-arguments that Beres has used to reach or explain his thesis. I will highlight a few areas.

First, even though Americans supported the government's stand against the Soviet Union, it does not follow that they did so out of fear of being alone--because they were afraid to oppose the position taken by their government. Most Americans believed that communism was a dead end, Godless, tyrannical, and economically unviable. It is true that they supported their government's anti-Soviet policy out of fear of losing their own way of life. However, rather than wishing that system to remain a perceived evil in the world, they desired to convert the communists--to make them like themselves. This would lead to the long-term elimination of the fear of the death communism represented. The near universal rejoicing over the collapse of the Berlin Wall bears out this conclusion.

Second, it is true that Americans--like most people on earth--seek belonging and the approval of others. However, this herd behavior is not to be found in their support for a belligerent nationalism, but in the "conspicuous consumption" which Beres alludes to as the "cornucopia of 'things'." One only needs to see the lines for newly released movies, the social pressure to wear the right designer labels, and the desire to "keep up with the Joneses," to see that Americans act as a herd and have a burning need for social acceptance. This pursuit of things, however, which I believe reflects current American values, is neither rooted in the fear of death nor the desire for immortality; it is a pursuit of temporal happiness rooted in the ambiguity toward or disbelief in spiritual life.

Third, it is not true that the Soviet Union was essentially a state like the United States. To be sure there were many similarities in structure, foreign policy, rhetoric, and legal documents. However, there is a big difference in the foundation of power in the state. In the United States, politicians' power rests on their promises and abilities to deliver things the voters believe they want, for example, the defense against communism and the life of conspicuous consumption outlined in the above two paragraphs. In the Soviet Union, or in any state in which power is seized and maintained by physical force, the desires of the people are much more secondary (see R.J. Rummel's book, Power Kills, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1997). The fact that the "herd" in the United States has been manipulated by leaders who seek to acquire power is an indication than an enlightened citizenry could still bring about political change. A Tiananmen Square massacre is still highly unlikely in the United States, whereas s uch massacres are quite likely in many parts of the world.

Notwithstanding the comments above, Beres is right to point out that human beings long for immortality. We attach ourselves to families, religions, corporations and states which precede us and we hope will endure well beyond the finitude of our own life. The relative immortality of these institutions compared with the finitude of a single individual enables us to feel a higher purpose in our loyalty to them. The common belief in life after death, endorsed (and manipulated) by many religions, is another way to affirm our immortality Attaching ourselves to these social institutions, if we treat their values as ultimates, is rightly criticized as a basis for war. It is not only sacralization of the modern state, but also religious chauvinism and ethnocentrism that can serve as the basis of war and mass murder.

However, it does not logically fob low that the end of terrible wars and the desacralization of states will result because we accept personal death, as Beres states. It is equally possible that, if we accept God and life after death, we will desacralize the state because it is a mere human institution without transcendent value. Further, the sacralization of the individual Beres advocates, while important, can also be taken to extremes that could cause disregard for communities, or for self-sacrifice on the behalf of others. The worship of any finite object, being, or group, or humanly devised system is considered a violation of the First Commandment in Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. H. Richard Niebuhr dealt with this problem extensively in his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture (NY: Harper, 1957).

It is not clear to me that the belief that death is final would accomplish the goal of peace. It seems equally likely that if people believe there is nothing beyond the physical life, no transcendent value, that they would view happiness a value simply as what they could get from this physical life. This is not to say that education about the true nature of existence, whether life after death exists or not, would not be helpful. We would undoubtedly eventually be coerced by history into higher and higher realizations of the value of cooperation for our own well-being as expressed by Immanuel Kant in Towards Perpetual Peace. However, it is just as likely that the cunning of history will occur if people believe in life after death.

To claim that physical death is final or that God does not exist is a statement of faith on par with the claim that God does exist and that there is an eternal life in the spirit world. There is no irrefutable proof one way or the other on this metaphysical question. It is not the role of academics to advocate a metaphysical position on the basis of a claim of faith. Rather, we should analyze our human history and experience to understand the consequences of various beliefs, behaviors, and political institutions for world peace.

Despite the above concerns, I must congratulate Beres for excavating beneath the surface of geopolitical relations and encouraging us to face death (and life) square in the face, and to educate ourselves so that we are not hoodwinked by charlatans. The deception that goes on in the political realm, however, is only one area of concern. Education is needed to enable people to make good judgements in all areas of life. Just as we should not be taken in by rhetoric that would sacralize the state, so too we should avoid people who would exploit our financial resources, make false claims about healing our bodies, or limit our thoughts with various questionable religious doctrines or ideological theories.

Too often people act as a herd, whether in allegiance to institutions or to other fads and fashions of the day However, a herd without direction is destined for extinction. Education which encourages sound decisions, responsible behavior, and a large viewpoint that sees all people as having equal ontological worth, is certainly a major part of the creation of world peace.