Part I of this opinion piece can be found here.
Especially injurious and ominous in U.S. President Donald Trump’s indifference to primal human interconnections and codified human rights is his willful destruction of human caring. For Americans especially, the palpable outcomes of such relentless wrongdoing ought by now to be conspicuous and plain.
Any gainful expansions of empathy require a president and citizenry at least minimally versed in world history. America, however, displays no such learning. Going forward, the United States should re-start an indispensable return to reason, rationality and mind. As a strategy of survival, there could be no more compelling triumvirate.
There exist global impediments to the fundamental problems of empathy and cooperation. Divided into thousands of hostile tribes, almost 200 of which are called “nation-states,” too many human beings still find it pleasing to slay certain designable “others.” As for any remediating considerations of compassionate human feeling, that sentiment is typically reserved only for those who live within one’s own delineated “tribe.”
Yet expansions of empathy to include “outsiders” remain a basic condition of authentic peace, global union and “oneness.” Without such expansions, our entire species would remain dedicated to its own continuing debasement. In an age of converging nuclear and biological hazards, such dedication would represent more than “just” inconvenience or defilement. It would be murderous.
What fixes, if any, are still available? What must Americans actually do to encourage wider patterns of empathy, thereby fostering more deeply caring feelings between “tribes”? How can a U.S. president work to more meaningfully improve the state of our crumbling world order?
These are not easy questions, but they do need to be asked. Incontestably, they comprise the same precise queries that will need to be addressed openly. So, quo vadis, what next?
Empathy as a double-edged sword
Ironically, we should acknowledge at the outset, the essential expansion of empathy for the many could quickly become “dreadful,” possibly improving the human community, but only at the cost of private sanity. This prospectively insufferable consequence is rooted in the way we humans were “designed,” that is, as more-or-less “hardwired” beings, persons with distinctly recognizable and largely “impermeable” boundaries of feeling. Were it otherwise, an extended range of compassion towards too many others could bring about every single individual’s emotional collapse.
This conclusion should be easy to recognize and understand. As a ready example, consider how difficult it would be if all were suddenly to feel the same compelling pangs of sympathy and compassion for various others outside our primary spheres of attachment that we already feel for those family and friends we have preferentially located “inside” this sphere.
A challenging intellectual paradox arises: long ago, it was presented in the ancient Jewish legend of the Lamed-Vov, a Talmudic tale that competent scholars trace back to Isaiah. Here, the world is said to rest upon 36 “Just Men,” the Lamed-Vov. These suffering figures are otherwise indistinguishable from ordinary mortals. Still, if just one of their number were ever removed, the resultant tribulations of humankind would be staggering, poisoning the souls of even the newly born.
Such a Talmud-elucidated paradox holds potentially useful contemporary meaning for the United States and Israel. This modernized signification reveals that a widening circle of human compassion is both indispensable to civilizational survival and a potential source of private anguish.
Still more questions should arise: Going forward, how shall an American president begin to deal capably with a requirement for global civilization that is simultaneously essential and unbearable? Newly informed that empathy for the many is a literal precondition of a decent and functioning world society, what could create such caring without also producing intolerable emotional pain?
Recalling Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, “high-thinkers” should duly inquire: How can we be fully 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 potentially unmanageable disease pandemics?
The world as a system
Fundamentally, every conceivable world order is a system. “The existence of system in the world is at once obvious to every observer of nature,” says Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, “no matter whom ... each element of the Cosmos is positively woven from all the others.”
Above all, America must understand that the state of America’s national union can never be any better than the state of the wider and more deeply intersecting world. This key truth obtains not “only” in reference to the more usual issues of war, peace and international law, but also to increasingly critical matters such as disease avoidance.
Always, for both the increasingly imperiled United States and the State of Israel, the overarching objective should be to protect the sacred dignity of each individual. This high-minded and ancient Jewish goal is one that could now give specific policy direction to both countries. Arguably, as long as Donald Trump remains the American president, there can be no credible basis for optimism.
It will be easy to dismiss seemingly lofty recommendations for human dignity as silly, ethereal or “academic.” But there could never be any greater American naiveté than to champion the Trump-era extremity of “everyone for himself.” Not only is this extremity illogical and self-destructive, it also remains contrary to this nation’s founding principles of Natural Law.
Without a suitable expansion of empathy, we will remain at the mercy not just of other predatory human beings, but also of increasingly virulent pathogens. In short order, whether suddenly or in increments, the harmful synergies created by any such markedly unwelcome combinations will become unbearable. What then?
The cumulative lesson here is clear, especially to those with a refined appreciation of Jewish heritage, tradition and education. Only by placing “Humanity First” can an American president ever make “America First.” Reducing inclinations to war, terrorism and genocide is not possible without a comprehensive planetary perspective. But antecedent to such an indispensable perspective is a cultivated and widespread “conviction.”
America and the wider world can learn from Rabbi Avraham Kook that global unity is not something “outside.” It exists “inside,” within all of us. The first task, therefore, should be to acknowledge this benevolent in-dwelling of jurisprudential judgment and Jewish philosophy. The second task is to adapt this judgment and philosophy as a progressively guiding source of world policy transformations. Briefly stated, unless we can all move beyond the belligerent nationalism that holds sway in the “Trump Era,” there will be no sanctuary anywhere on earth.
Microcosm, macrocosm and human ‘oneness’
One last “linkage” needs to be acknowledged and reaffirmed. This is the indissoluble nexus connecting “macrocosm” and “microcosm,” joining world political processes and the singular person, “the single one.” In the end, everything on this planet will depend on the dignity, courage and “emancipation” of the individual human being.
In his seminal essay “Who is Man?” (1965), modern Jewish 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?” “What is demanded of me?”
An obligation to resist mass (Friedrich Nietzsche would prefer “herd,” Sigmund Freud “horde” or Søren Kierkegaard “crowd”) is taken by Heschel as a prerequisite to a more decent and peaceful “macrocosm.”
Thinking, like Nietzsche, Freud, Kierkegaard, Carl Jung, José Ortega y Gasset and others that camouflage and concealment in the mass must give way to “being-challenged-in-the-world,” the Jewish philosopher clarifies America’s own current obligation to “get beyond belligerent nationalism.” It is to demand of our national leaders a consistently more abiding respect for law, logic and reason, not to turn away from truth because of any presumed personal interest.
At a narrowly practical level of national and global policymaking, there would seem to be no purpose to remembering Rabbi Kook’s “loftiness” of “soul.” Still, such “loftiness” is a worthy exemplar of Jewish philosophy and could help assorted policymaking principles to modify or reform belligerent nationalism “in time”; that is, before it produces yet another catastrophic wave of war, terrorism and genocide. Even if it might at first seem naive, invoking Rabbi Kook’s high thinking in such matters could represent a distinct moral opportunity for humanity as a whole.
In the final analysis, the Talmudic “dust gathered in all four corners of the earth” should have a unifying outcome. After all, it is as a matter of human “oneness” that America, Israel and the wider world should plan for survivable global futures. No nation-state that chooses to ignore this clear imperative could meaningfully hope to be “first.”
It is time for properly analytic summations: To make human oneness the operational starting point for human survival, millennia of disciplined Jewish thought should soon be taken into account. Among other things, this inclusion could help show everyone “the way.”
In essence, this means a system of world politics based on the opposite of belligerent nationalism. Though any such suggestion will be widely dismissed as naive or idealistic, nothing could prove less realistic for the United States, Israel and other nation-states than to continuously favor chaos over stability. To make a coherent and just world order more realistic, it would be prudent for Americans, Israelis and others to acknowledge various unifying visions of Jewish philosophy.
