During the 1960s, the author spent four years studying international law at Princeton. At that time, the intellectual influence of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein was palpable on campus. Much of the earliest conceptual thought about nuclear weapons and nuclear war originated at Princeton. Here, Professor Beres examines what we can learn from these two atomic physicists, not about “The Bomb” or its technical/operational aspects, but variously correlative obligations to forge global unity.[1] Though such obligations will be dismissed out-of-hand by “realists,” nothing could be more utopian than staying the precarious course of belligerent nationalism. From its jurisprudential beginnings at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, this species-defiling course (i.e., an “everyone for himself” system of world politics) has spawned war,[2] terrorism and genocide.[3]
“The visionary is the only realist.”
Federico Fellini
To begin, certain core questions have to be asked. Why do we humans cling tenaciously to a persistently discredited dynamic of international relations? Why has this conspicuously failed dynamic managed to remain the determinative order of “Westphalian” diplomacy?[4] Until our leaders can finally answer this basic question satisfactorily, there will be no durable respite from the unceasing horrors of belligerent world politics.[5]
Additional questions should also be raised. Scholars will need to inquire: Why are there still no tangible movements to build upon the human unity that lies latent in us all?[6] Why has there been so little evident dissatisfaction with worldwide anarchy[7] and a steadily-encroaching global chaos.[8] Are we humans a self-destroying “mass,”[9] an inert species destined for recurrent bloodshed and inevitable extinction? Or do we harbor a residual capacity for civilizational growth and survival?[10]
Regarding such core questions, there seems little cause for optimism. Though few people on earth can reasonably expect their leaders to resemble Plato’s “philosopher king,”[11] others ought at least be able to choose from among capable politicians who would offer more than incessant delusion. This means, inter alia, national leaders who can meaningfully apprehend the interrelated benefits of philosophy, culture, literature, law and science.
The Lasting Debilities of “America First”
From the beginning of his first administration, President Donald Trump’s rancorous ideology of “America First”—the reductio ad absurdum of belligerent nationalisms—was both refractory and perilous. The notion that such an exploitative and self-centered American philosophy could somehow propel the United States in tangibly gainful directions was erroneous on its face.[12] The Natural Rights premises of the US Declaration of Independence and US Constitution emphasize equality and cooperation as universal human values.[13] Such emphases are indispensable to species survival, and ought never to be minimized.
Assorted particularities are now worth noting. In the words of 17th century jurist Samuel Pufendorf, whose legal philosophy was well-known to Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers: “One of the common duties of the Natural Law is that no one who has not acquired a peculiar right arrogate more to himself than the rest may have, but permit others to enjoy the same rights as himself.”[14] No American president (or any other national leader) can claim such a right.
There is more. As an expression of Donald J. Trump’s “personal brand” of belligerent nationalism, “America First” is reprehensible on moral grounds alone. Inter alia, this assessment can be made evident in broadly philosophic terms. To wit, the ethical derelictions of Donald Trump’s acrimonious foreign policies violate timeless principles concerning decent and dignified human behavior. Most notable among these axiomatic principles are cooperation,[15] “oneness”[16] and community.[17]
“There is no longer a virtuous nation,” laments Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candle light.” Now, in the midst of a second Trump administration, Americans have many things to consider. Under this president, policies that were once “merely” wrong have become openly murderous.[18] Ipso facto, there can be no reasonable justification for such derelictions.
There is more. As we have seen before during COVID, biological “plague” can reinforce the self-inflicted “pathologies” of governance. Now, during summer 2026, longstanding perils of anarchic world politics are being reinforced by new threats of pandemic, notably Ebola and Hantavirus.
Logically, such grievous threats mandate not a conspicuously self-defeating orientation to world politics, but far-reaching acknowledgments of global singularity and human “oneness.” Though fiercely retrograde Trump foreign policies are still being widely accepted and even lauded, American thinkers have continued to ignore the most deeply underlying survival problem of all: No foreign policy prescriptions founded on law-violating postures of belligerent nationalism can succeed long-term.[19]
While the charge may first sound like exaggeration, Donald Trump’s bombastic inclinations are never “just” a matter of rhetoric. They threaten a destabilizing pattern of tangible harms, a virulent geometry with potentially unprecedented lethal consequences. The absurdist Trump vision of “America First” is leading the United States in cumulatively mistaken directions, not toward national or international advantage, but to endlessly Darwinian “struggles for existence.”
Such a retrograde vision ought never to be embraced by a “civilized nation,”[20] especially at moments of renewed pandemic peril. More precisely, the law-related obligation of civilized states and peoples to finally accept worldwide interdependence or “oneness” has never been greater.
There is more. Amid crudely fierce competitions between single states that would prove injurious to all, Americans should expect more stubbornly recalcitrant military conflicts. Derivatively, the futile Trump standard of “everyone for himself” would only produce expansive levels of human suffering. What else should be expected from a president who prides himself on a carefully-cultivated legal and historical illiteracy?[21] This is a president, after all, who earlier urged (1) ingestion of household disinfectant to protect against Covid19; (2) consideration of nuclear weapons use against hurricanes and (3) further explorations of the Moon “because the Moon is part of Mars.”
In Trump I, things got even worse. In a flagrant reduction to absurdity, the president remarked that during the 18th century Revolutionary War, “The patriot army managed to gain and keep control of all national airports.” How could such a manifestly impossible remark not have immediately ended Trump’s acceptability? Credo quia absurdum, said Roman philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”
The Primacy of “Mind”
“Intellect rots the brain” said Joseph Goebbels at a Nuremberg Germany rally in 1935.
“I love the poorly educated,” said then presidential candidate Donald Trump at a 2016 election rally.
Where should America go now on law-based matters of global cooperation and global unity or “oneness”? The basic problem is too deep for resolution by periodic elections. Though it is certainly time for thinking citizens to distance themselves from Trump’s multiple law-violating policies, such efforts would still represent just the “tip” of essential changes. Over time, only a suitable expansion of human empathy could rescue this country and the planet as a whole. This suggests, among other things, that any such expansion by the United States would represent not a heroic act of charity – that is, a mistakenly one-sided species of characteristic American benevolence – but a properly law-based expression of national policy.
There is a conceptual bottom line. US national interests can no longer be served in any serious manner at the deliberate expense of other states, especially in times of “plague.” Always, these American interests must be served together with the presumed interests of other states and nations, sometimes when international legal relations have already become chillingly adversarial.
In the end, only truth can be exculpatory. But what is the truth in such matters? At every crucial level – military, economic and biological – American security is linked with the wider “human condition.” Among other things, what Americans witness hour by hour, minute by minute, during the intellectually-defiling Trump era is the dismantling of law-based world power. At a moment when new disease pandemic should make human solidarity more necessary than ever, America and the nations are moving toward more perilous kinds of fragmentation.
During this relentless Trump-era decline, Americans can no longer afford promises of national “greatness.” At best, Trump-inscribed red hats represent a hideous self-parody. At worst, they point toward a glaringly obvious and widening path to “apocalypse.”[22] For the foreseeable future, and in direct consequence of still-ongoing Trump-era derelictions, America’s national policy expectations will need to be more expressly-based on reason,[23] law and serious thought.[24]
Such conclusions are anything but reassuring. Nonetheless, truth is always the final arbiter, not just in matters of law[25] and policy, but also in any critical judgments of ethics. Today’s American national and geopolitical truth remains grim and sobering. To be sure, there are no credible correctives waiting to be uncovered in the Trump administration’s seat-of-the-pants policy prescriptions.[26]
Empathy as a Double-Edged Sword
Especially ominous about Donald Trump’s indifference to primal human interconnections and codified human rights[27] is his willful destruction of human caring. For Americans, the palpable consequences of such destructive orientations ought by now to be obvious. The monstrous global consequences of “Germany First”—a direct ideological antecedent of “America First”—should have exhibited enduring historical resonance.
Any gainful expansions of empathy to become law-based policy imperatives require a president and citizenry who are at least minimally versed in world history.[28] During the Trump years, however, America displays no such learning. Going forward, it is essential that America begin an intentional return to Reason, Law, Rationality and “Mind.”
There exist other and deeper global roots to the problems of empathy and cooperation. Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost two hundred of which are called “nation-states,” too many human beings find it pleasing to slay certain “others.” As for any remediating considerations of compassionate human feeling, that sentiment is typically reserved for those who already live within one’s own “tribe.”
Expansions of empathy to include “outsiders” remain a basic condition of authentic peace, global union and “oneness.” Without such expansions, our entire species will remain dedicated to its own continuous debasement. Significantly, in an age of converging nuclear and biological hazards, such dedication would represent more than a regrettable obligation. It would be intentionally murderous.
What fixes, if any, are still available? What must Americans do in order to encourage far wider patterns of empathy, thereby fostering more caring feelings between as well as within “tribes”? In essence the question is this: How can a U.S. president work to meaningfully improve the state of a still-crumbling world legal order?[29]
These are not easy questions, but they need to be asked. They comprise precisely the same queries that should be addressed more openly by Americans. So—what next?
Ironically, we must acknowledge, the essential expansion of empathy for the many could become “dreadful,” improving human community, but at some indecipherable cost of private sanity. This prospectively insufferable consequence is rooted in the way we humans were “designed;” that is, as more-or-less “hard wired” beings, ones with distinctly recognizable and largely “impermeable” boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, prima facie, an extended range of compassion toward too many others could bring about a single individual’s emotional collapse.
This key point should be easy to understand. As an example, one must consider how difficult it would be if all were to experience the same pangs of sympathy and compassion for those outside primary attachment spheres that are felt for family and friends who have been located “inside” these spheres.
For dedicated thinkers, all this presents a challenging intellectual paradox. It was already examined in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a Talmudic tradition that certain scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the world is said to rest upon 36 Just Men, the Lamed-Vov. These long-suffering figures are otherwise indistinguishable from ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were removed, the resultant tribulations of humankind would become staggering. So much so that they would even poison the souls of the newly-born.[30]
This Talmud-elucidated paradox holds potentially useful meanings for the United States. But it is an inherently paradoxical meaning. In essence, a widening circle of human compassion is both indispensable to civilizational survival and a lamentable source of private anguish.
Subsidiary questions arise. Going forward, how shall American leaders deal capably with any requirement for global civilization that is simultaneously necessary and unbearable? Newly informed that empathy for the many is a precondition of any decent and functioning world society, what can create such empathy without producing intolerable pain? Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, “high-thinkers” should promptly inquire: How can we be released from the misconceived ideology of “America First,” a zero-sum posture that has been increasing the prospects not only of war, terrorism and genocide, but also of uncontrollable disease pandemics?[31]
Understanding the World as System
The world is a system. “The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature,” says the Jesuit philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “no matter whom…Each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others….”
Americans should finally understand that the state of their national union can never be better than the state of the wider and interrelated world. This key truth obtains not “only” in reference to the usual issues of war, peace and international law,[32] but also to renewable expectations of pandemic.
For the imperiled United States, the overarching presidential objective should be to protect the sacred dignity of each individual human “soul.”[33] More precisely, this is the high-minded and ancient goal that should now offer theory-based policy direction[34] to a US President.[35] In all such survival matters, nothing could be more practical than good theory.
It will be easy to dismiss such seemingly lofty recommendations as silly, ethereal or “academic.” In reality, however, there could be no greater presidential naiveté than to champion the false extremity of “everyone for himself.” Not only is this Trump Era extremity illogical and self-destructive, it is contrary to this nation’s founding principles of Natural Law – principles expressed most famously by German jurist Samuel Pufendorf, Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius and Swiss thinker Emmerich de Vattel.[36] All such principles exhibit core elements of human “oneness.”[37]
Without a suitable expansion of empathy, we will remain at the mercy not just of other predatory human beings, but also of variously virulent pathogens. Whether suddenly or in increments, the harmful synergies created by such unwelcome combinations would become palpably unbearable. That point could represent planet Earth’s eleventh-hour.
The cumulative lesson here should be clear. Only by placing “Humanity First” could an American president make “America First.” The latter, which now includes an obligation to combat disease pandemics as well as war, terrorism and genocide,[38] is not possible without the former. First, however, there must be suitable and widespread “conviction.”[39]
America and the wider world could learn from Rabbi Avraham Kook[40] that global unity is not something “outside.” It exists “inside,” within all of us. The first task therefore must be to acknowledge this benevolent in-dwelling of jurisprudential judgment and serious philosophy. The second is to adapt this judgment and philosophy as a guiding source of world policy transformations.[41] Unless we can all move more strenuously beyond the belligerent nationalism that holds sway during the law-violating Trump Era, there will be no residual places of safety or sanctuary.
Microcosm, Macrocosm and Human “Oneness”
One last “linkage” needs to be acknowledged. This references the indissoluble nexus between “macrocosm” and “microcosm,” a link between world legal processes and Kierkegaard’s “Singular One.”[42] Everything on this planet will ultimately depend on the dignity, courage[43] and “emancipation” of each individual human being. This includes a viable system of international law.
In his seminal essay Who is Man? (1965), philosopher Abraham J. Heschel laments: “The emancipated man is yet to emerge.” The remedy? Heschel asks all human beings to raise the following elemental questions with themselves: “What is expected of men (sic, people)?” “What is demanded of me?”[44]
An obligation to resist mass (Nietzsche would prefer the term “herd,” Freud “horde,” or Kierkegaard “crowd”) is taken by Heschel as prerequisite to a decent and peaceful “macrocosm.”[45] Thinking, like Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Jung, Ortega y Gasset and others (i.e., that camouflage and concealment in the mass should finally give way to “being-challenged-in-the-world”), Heschel’s thought can help clarify America’s current obligation to “get beyond” belligerent nationalism. It’s high time to demand of our national leaders a more consistently abiding respect for law and logic, not to turn away from obvious truth because of narrowly egoistic presumptions of interest.
All this reveals a clarifying irony. For Americans who tolerate or still celebrate Donald Trump’s flagrant legal derelictions—including his de facto support of Russian aggressions against Ukraine—the cumulative costs of this attitude will be overwhelming. Accordingly, even if it might first seem naïve, Emersonian “high-thinking” could produce various law-advancing correctives. In this connection we may recall Italian film director Federico Fellini’s bold assertion: “The visionary is the only realist.”
Notes
[1] The history of western philosophy and jurisprudence includes illustrious advocates of global unity or “oneness.” Notable among them are Voltaire and Goethe. More precisely, we may recall Voltaire’s biting satire in the early chapters of Candide and Goethe’s oft-repeated comment linking belligerent nationalism to declining stages of civilization. We may also note Samuel Johnson’s conviction that patriotism “is the last refuge of a scoundrel;” William Lloyd Garrison’s observation that “We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government…Our country is the world, our countryman is all mankind;” and Thorsten Veblen’s comment that “The patriotic spirit is at cross-purposes with modern life.” Similar sentiments are discoverable in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, all too Human. Scholars may also recall Santayana’s coalescing remark in Reason and Society: “A man’s feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.” The unifying point of all such remarks is that narrow-minded patriotism is not “merely” injurious, it is also “unpatriotic.” Though proclaimed with robotic fanfare, such patriotism can never serve the tangible interests of any state’s citizens or subjects.
[2] Under international law, the question of whether or not a formal “state of war” exists between states is generally ambiguous. Traditionally, it was held that a declaration of war was necessary before any true state of war could be said to exist. Hugo Grotius divided wars into declared wars, which were legal, and undeclared wars, which were not. (See Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, Bk. III, Chapters. III, IV, and XI.) By the start of the twentieth century, the position that war obtains only after a conclusive declaration of war by one of the parties was codified by Hague Convention III. This treaty stipulated that hostilities must never commence without a “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. (See Hague Convention III Relative to the Opening of Hostilities, 1907, 3 NRGT, 3 series, 437, article 1.) Currently, declarations of war may be tantamount to admissions of international criminality, because of the express criminalization of aggression by authoritative international law, and it could therefore represent a clear jurisprudential absurdity to tie any true state of war to formal and prior declarations of belligerency. It follows that a state of war may now exist without any formal declarations, but only if there exists an actual armed conflict between two or more states and/or at least one of these states considers itself “at war.”
[3] The legal and historical origins of this war-oriented dynamic lie in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a treaty which brought into being the extant state-system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Taken together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[4] Since the Peace of Westphalia, the idea of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is a current variant – has never been more than a facile metaphor. In essence, treaty language notwithstanding, it has never had anything to do with ascertaining or maintaining a “true and just equilibrium” of power. As such a balance must ultimately be a matter of individual subjective perceptions, adversarial states can never be reasonably confident that strategic circumstances of the moment are “balanced” in their favor. As each side must perpetually fear it will be “left behind,” any corresponding search for balance can produce only ever-widening patterns of instability and disequilibrium.
[5] Ironically, international law, which remains an integral part of the legal system of all states, assumes a general and reciprocal obligation of each state to supply benefits to other states and to avoid war whenever possible. This core assumption of jurisprudential solidarity is known formally as a “peremptory” or jus cogens expectation, that is, one that is not ever subject to question. It can be found in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis, Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[6] Twentieth century writer and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse would still likely respond: “The world as it is now, wants to die, wants to perish and it will.” (See Steppenwolf, 1927).
[7] Such anarchy stands in stark contrast to the formal legal assumption of solidarity between states. This idealized assumption concerns a presumptively common struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known correctly in law as a jus cogens assumption, was already mentioned in Justinian, Grotius, and Vattel (supra). All three – Justinian, Grotius and Vattel – were familiar to Founding Fathers of the United States.
[8] Though composed in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan may still describe a permanent vision of chaos in world politics. During such chaos, which is a “time of War,” says the English philosopher in Chapter XIII (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery.”): “… every man is Enemy to every man… and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Still, at the actual time of writing Leviathan, Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition among individual human beings. This is because of what he had called the “dreadful equality” of individual men in nature concerning the ability to kill others. Plainly, this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappeared with the continuing manufacture and spread of nuclear weapons.
[9] In the generic clarification of Swiss psychologist and philosopher Carl G. Jung: “The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.” (See, The Undiscovered Self, 1957).
[10] One should be reminded here of Bertrand Russell’s trenchant observation in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916): “Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”
[11] See, by this author, at Oxford University Press, Louis René Beres: https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/
[12] For philosophical background of Realpolitik, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order, Lexington Books, 1984; and Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy, Lexington Books, 1983. Regarding this background in law or jurisprudence: “Right is the interest of the stronger,” says Thrasymachus in Bk. I, Sec. 338 of Plato, THE REPUBLIC (B. Jowett tr., 1875). “Justice is a contract neither to do nor to suffer wrong,” says Glaucon id., Bk. II, Sec. 359. See also, Philus in Bk III, Sec. 5 of Cicero, DE REPUBLICA.
[13] See Edward S. Corwin, The “Higher Law” Background of American Constitutional Law (1955); and Alexander P. d’ Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction to Legal Philosophy (1951).
[14] See Pufendorf’s On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law (1673); Chapter “On Recognition of the Natural Equality of Men.” In this section, Pufendord continues: “The same equality shows how a man should conduct himself, when he must assign their various rights to others, viz., that he must treat them as equals, and not indulge the one as against the other, except on the merits of the case.” Pufendorf was familiar to the American Founding Fathers.
[15] Neither international law nor US law specifically advises any particular penalties or sanctions for states that choose not to prevent or punish genocide committed by others. Nonetheless, all states, most notably the “major powers” belonging to the UN Security Council, are bound, among other things, by the peremptory obligation (defined at Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) known as pacta sunt servanda, to act in continuous “good faith.” In turn, this pacta sunt servanda obligation is itself derived from an even more basic norm of world law. Commonly known as “mutual assistance,” this civilizing norm was most famously identified within the classical interstices of international jurisprudence, most notably by the eighteenth-century legal scholar, Emmerich de Vattel in The Law of Nations (1758).
[16] About such “oneness,” we may learn from ancient Greek Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, “You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE, and with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality” or interconnectedness. By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking upon Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world correctly considered as a part rather than a whole. Said Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today, the idea of human oneness can be fully justified/explained in more purely secular terms of understanding.
[17] Martin Buber identifies the essence of every living community as “meeting.” True community, says Buber, is an authentic “binding,” not merely a “bundling together.” Furthermore, in true community, each one commits his whole being in “God’s dialogue with the world,” and each stands firm and resolute throughout this dialogue.
[18] On the crime of genocide, see, by this author: Louis René Beres: gwhttps://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://search.yahoo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1151&context=ilr
[19] “What is the good of passing from one untenable position to another,” warns playwright Samuel Beckett in Endgame, “of seeking justification always on the same plane?”
[20] Inter alia, this term is used in formal international law and diplomacy at Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: https://www.icj-cij.org/en/statute
[21] Still the best treatments of America’s long-term disinterest in anything intellectual are Richard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); and Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1959).
[22] The idea here of apocalypse seems to have been born in ancient Iran (Persia), specifically, with the Manichaeism of the Zoroastrians. Interestingly, however, at least one of these documents, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, found in a Qumran cave, is a comprehensive description of Jewish military tactics and regulations at the end of the Second Commonwealth. In essence, the “Sons of Light” were expected to prevail in battle against the “Sons of Darkness” before the “end of days,” and the later fight at Masada was widely interpreted as an apocalyptic struggle between a saintly few and the wicked many.
[23] As we may learn from Karl Jaspers’ Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time: (1952): “Reason is confronted again and again with the fact of a mass of believers who have lost all ability to listen, who can absorb no argument and who hold unshakably fast to the Absurd as an unassailable presupposition – and really do appear to believe.” Could any words better describe the American “mass-man” (and “mass-woman”) who preferred Donald Trump’s Covid19 medical judgments to those of Dr. Anthony Fauci?
[24] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…. It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[25] These matters include expectations of Natural Law, which represent the original and core legal foundations of the United States. Natural Law is based upon the acceptance of certain principles of right and justice that prevail because of their own intrinsic merit. Eternal and immutable, they are external to all acts of human will and interpenetrate all human reason. This dynamic idea and its attendant tradition of human civility runs continuously from Mosaic Law and the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present day. For a comprehensive and far-reaching assessment of the natural law origins of international law, see Louis René Beres, “Justice and Realpolitik: International Law and the Prevention of Genocide,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 33, 1988, pp. 123-159. This article was adapted from Professor Beres’ earlier presentation at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 1982.
[26] “Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight,” asks Honore de Balzac, “withered hearts, or empty skulls?”
[27] Because such indifference impacted legal standards that are fundamental and “permit no derogation,” it represented a violation of “peremptory norms.” According to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: “…a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See: Supra; Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M. 679 (1969).
[28] In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarked prophetically, in his justly celebrated Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…. It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further from Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge. Much of this effort was founded upon familiar (to Spinoza) certain Jewish sources.
[29] The term “world order” has its contemporary origins in a scholarly movement begun at the Yale Law School in the mid- and late 1960s, and later “adopted” by the Politics Department at Princeton University in 1967-68. The present author was an early member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project, and authored several early books and articles in this once-emergent academic genre.
[30] Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to “soul.” Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and material accomplishment would occasion sweeping psychological misery.
[31] The most ominous synergies would link pandemic effects with growing risks of a nuclear war. On irrational nuclear decision-making by this author, see Louis René Beres, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: https://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/ See also, by Professor Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/ (Pentagon). For authoritative early accounts by Professor Beres of nuclear war expected effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
[32] International law is part of US domestic law. In the precise words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[33] “The loftier the soul,” wrote Rabbi Avraham Kook, “the more it feels the unity that there is in us all.”
[34] “Theories are nets,” reminds Karl Popper, citing to the German poet Novalis, “only he who casts, will catch.” See Popper’s epigraph to his classic, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Ironically, Novalis’ fellow German poet, Goethe, declared, in his early Faust fragment (Urfaust): “All theory, dear friend, is grey. But the golden tree of life is green.”
[35] In Jewish tradition, empathy, justice and individual human dignity can together bring forth a vast and indispensable healing. Such key traits, commented Rabbi Avraham Kook, a thinker who was not a part of the classical stream of Jewish philosophy, must “flow directly from the holy depth of the wisdom of the Divine soul.” Rabbi Kook’s thinking does not stand in any stark or self-conscious opposition to rational and scientific investigation, nor does it intend to oppose pure feelings to raw intellect. It identifies instead a potentially useful creative tension, one between a too-abstract and too-formal intellectualism and a promisingly practical form of reason. Influenced and informed by Buddhism, Rabbi Kook envisioned humankind as possessing a natural evolutionary inclination toward collective advancement and self-perfection. Moreover, he surmised, the course of this human evolution must be directed toward a progressively increased spirituality. In the final analysis, Kook understood Torah as a tangible and incontrovertible manifestation of Divine Will on earth.
[36] See, for example, Grotius The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[37] “The dust from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world (Talmud). This Talmudic axiom closely parallels the presumptions of Natural Law, presumptions central to fashioning the core documents of the United States. For a time, American law and legal policy, founded of course upon the learned jurisprudence of Sir William Blackstone, had acknowledged the ubiquitous obligation of all states to help one another. According to Blackstone, each state is always expected “to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon offenses against that universal law….” See: 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4, “Of Public Wrongs.” Lest anyone ask about the significance of Blackstone for now-current US national security policies, one need only point out that Commentaries were an original and core foundation of the laws of the United States. It goes without saying that this fact remains unknown to US President Donald Trump or his determined acolytes. To wit, Trump policies of “America First” represent the diametric opposite of what Blackstone would have had urged or expected.
[38] Professor Louis René Beres is the author of several books and law journal articles on genocide-like crimes. See, for example, Louis René Beres, “Genocide and Genocide-Like Crimes,” in M. Cherif Bassiouni., ed., International Criminal Law: Crimes (New York, Transnational Publishers, 1986), pp. 271-279.
[39] “The best lack all conviction,” reminds poet William Butler Yeats in The Second Coming, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
[40] According to Rabbi Kook, a final Divine redemption must be undertaken by and through the Jewish People. A core part of any such redemption must be the palpably greater awareness of human unity, or human oneness. In turn, proceeds this dialectic, awareness will ultimately give rise to the spreading light of loving kindness and forgiveness, even amid the eternally bitter rancor of world politics.
[41] We learn from 20th century German philosopher Karl Jaspers (Man in the Modern Age, 1951): “Everyone knows that the world situation in which we live is not a final one.”
[42] The writings of Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard focus very explicitly on the true individual or “Single One.” For Kierkegaard, the most ruinous human evasion of all is to hide oneself within a “crowd.” The crowd, says Kierkegaard famously, is “untruth. Intellectually, it resembles what Germans philosopher Martin Heidegger later lamented as “das Man” or “The They.”
[43] See, by this author. Professor Louis René Beres, at Yale Global (Yale University) https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/call-intellect-and-courage
[44] Jewish visionary Abraham J. Heschel complements the foundational insights of Francis Bacon, Galileo and Isaac Newton and more recently Lewis Mumford: “Civilization,” says Heschel in Who Is Man? “is the never ending process of creating one world and one humanity.”
[45] “Is it an end that draws near,” inquired Karl Jaspers, “or a beginning?” The answer will depend, in large part, on what another major post-war German philosopher had to say about the Jungian or Freudian “mass.” In his own classic study, Being and Time (1953), Martin Heidegger laments what he calls, in German, das Mann, or “The They.” Drawing fruitfully upon earlier core insights of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jung and Freud, Heidegger’s “The They” represent the ever-present herd, crowd, horde or mass, an “untruth” (the term favored by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard) that can all-too-quickly suffocate personal growth and identity.
LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D. Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with literature, art, philosophy and international relations. Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, he was born in Zürich at the end of World War II. Dr. Beres’ twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018)). His writings can be found in The New York Times; The Atlantic; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; The Hudson Review; JURIST; Modern Diplomacy; American Journal of International Law; US News & World Report; Princeton Political Review; World Politics (Princeton); Yale Global; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); Horasis (Zurich); Oxford University Press; Cambridge University Press; The War Room (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (West Point); Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); BESA (Israel); Israel Defense and more than a dozen national and international law journals. An earlier advisory editor for Oxford University Press on its annual Yearbook on Jurisprudence and International Law, Professor Beres is a seven-times contributor to this benchmark legal publication.
