Law, politics and diplomacy won't save us

We Americans now have another commission to advise on Iraq, but this one is also beside the point. The Iraq War is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. This "iceberg" is the nature of humankind.

Our species contains deeply within itself the sources of its own disappearance through war, terror and genocide. "The horror, the horror," mumbles the Marlon Brando character in "Apocalypse Now." How thin, he reflects correctly, is the veneer of our planetary civilization.

Consider not just Iraq but also Sudan. Recall Rwanda. Remember Cambodia. Crimes Against Humanity — those crimes that formed a major portion of the post-Holocaust indictment at Nuremberg — are not remediable through law, politics or diplomacy. They can be stopped only by a prior understanding of certain universal individual human needs and expectations.

Crimes Against Humanity stem from the unbearable loneliness of individual human beings. Normally unable to find meaning and security outside of groups, many individuals will often stop at nothing to acquire membership in a crowd. It is this frantic search to overcome loneliness that best defines what we smugly call "history."

Real history is little more than the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption. Expressions of the desperate human search for redemption in groups can be found in the legal ideas of sovereignty and self-determination. But the "self" in this legal principle refers always to entire peoples, never to individuals. The result is often a measureless orgy of mass killing.

Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost 200 of which are now called states, we human beings routinely find it easy to slay "others." Empathy is reserved almost exclusively for those within our own tribe. It would seem that an expansion of empathy to include all outsiders is a basic condition of authentic peace and that without such expansion our species will remain ruthlessly dedicated to war, terror and genocide.

But how shall we proceed? What must be done to encourage empathy, to foster deeply caring feelings between as well as within tribes?

Sadly, the essential expansion of empathy for the many would be dreadful, improving human community but only at the expense of private sanity. We humans are designed with particular boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion toward others would bring about our total emotional collapse. Humankind must therefore confront a very strange understanding: A widening circle of human compassion is both indispensable to civilizational survival and a potential source of private anguish.

Truth emerges through paradox. According to ancient Jewish tradition, the world rests upon 36 just men: the Lamed-Vov. For them, the spectacle of the world is insufferable.

There are many meanings to this tradition, but one meaning is special. A whole world of just men (and women) is impossible. It is because ordinary individuals cannot bear the torments of others beyond a narrow circle that God has created the Lamed-Vov. Empathy on a grand scale, however necessary, is at the same time a prescription for individual despair.

What is to be done? How shall human society now deal with a requirement for global civilization that is both essential and unbearable? Newly informed that empathy for the many is a precondition of a decent world order, what can create such empathy without producing intolerable emotional pain? How can we deal with the ongoing expressions of war, terrorism and genocide?

The answer cannot be found in commissions of experts. It lies only in a detachment of individuals from tribes and other collective "selves." This, in turn, will depend upon prior affirmations of true self, upon an acceptance of the sacredness of individuals. And any expansion of empathy without crippling personal consequences will even require an end to individual hopes of conquering death by belonging to groups. Immortality is the ultimate form of power on this perilous planet and thus represents the ultimate human longing.

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Individual human beings see in their respective tribes a vital path to immortality. This view creates an explosive linkage between violence and the sacred. Only by changing this view can we ever hope to achieve the sort of empathy needed for species survival. Louis Rene Beres GS '71 was a politics major and Ph.D. student, and now lectures and publishes on international relations and law. He may be reached at beres@polsci.purdue.edu.