LOGOS IV BENEDICTINE DECONSTRUCTION

VIOLENT VERBAL INTERCOURSE

“Reasonable men may be allowed to differ,” said David Hume’s Pamphilus to Hermippus (Natural Religion), “where no one can reasonably be positive. Opposite sentiments, even without any decision, afford an agreeable amusement; and if the subject be curious and interesting, the book carries us, in a manner, into company; and unites the two greatest and purest pleasures of human life, study and society.”

Alas that so many People of the Book violently disagree on what is reasonable. Even when they are on the same page, some of them would set the whole world at war over their differences. Of course reasonable Muslim academics merely snorted at the Pope’s one-sided reference to hate during his 2006 speech at the University of Regensberg: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” They knew fully well that there is some truth to the insult, truth that applies to Christian soldiers, who do not come in peace but with a sword as well, therefore peaceable Muslim intellectuals would let their tongues be their swords and get even with words the best they can instead of fighting to the bloody death for the hell of it.

Conflicts might be regularly resolved during the process of verbal intercourse through compromises constituting a dynamic consensus moving towards the universal understanding implied by the faculty of speech. At any rate, the Great Conversation itself affords a great deal of satisfaction to those participants who would win one another over to their notions and nostrums. Pope Benedict reminisced that “the coherence within the universe of reason” during the good old days at the University of Bonn, where theologians correlated faith with reason, was not troubled by the allegation that God did not even exist. Why bother, then, one might ask, with verbal intercourse about nothing? Because the social creature would naturally participate, and as long as God is an issue to some people, and the natural law of humankind is its logos, the question must be discussed in a reasonable fashion.

In any event virtual battles are far less destructive and can be more rewarding than the real ones. Ancient Chinese swords served as a medium for writing that they might be read between battles, leading some educated warriors to believe that the magical words inscribed on the blades were more powerful than swords. The magic turtle had taught the man made of mud by genius to divine the future and to inscribe the findings on its shell in the language taught by the impressions birds had left in the mud with their feet, hence the written language is at once divine and natural. The moving language of the spheres writ large about the pole star related the beautiful harmonious order of the cosmos, and the people yearned for correspondence with the regular order instead of floods and famines and wars; wherefore the emperors perambulated the microcosmic temple to capture the heavenly order for earth; and alas if they missed a step, for if things went awry and they were duly deposed.

It was for the love of good order that Mo Ti and his defensive warrior cult concluded that it is best to love people afar to keep one’s own kith and kin safe at home. And is not good order the final cause by which its origin from chaos is understood? Perhaps to understand history we should divine its end in the first place, instead of expecting past facts to reveal the first cause of our present race. “I would sooner regard anatomy as a key to gnothi seauthon (know thyself!) than to seek the art of living and governing in our historical skeletons,” wrote the Magus of the North and Past Master of the Counter-Enlightenment, Johann Goerg Hamann, “as I was taught to do in my youth. The field of history has always seemed to me like that wide field which was full of bones – and behold! They were very dry. No one but a prophet can prophesy of these bones that veins and flesh will grow upon them and that skin will govern them. There will be no breath in them until the prophet prophesies to the wind, and the word of the Lord speaks to the wind.” 

THE EGYPTIAN LOGOS

But we believe the Magi’s reversal, from first to last, to last to first, is moot, for the first and last meet in the present; the alpha and omega of a line extended to infinity meet, and every point along the circle is its beginning and end, and this very circle of unknown diameter was the most significant subject of intercourse among the theosophical dialecticians around the Fire, who knew the first circle as their Logos or meaning of life, and gave it three parts: Will (Father), Wisdom (Mother), Action (Child). In the name of the Father, the Mother, and the Child, as One.

The historians of the First Dynasty of Egypt recognized the prehistoric root of their verbal intercourse as the divine in nature; a doctrine of Logos was accordingly inscribed. The First Dynasty’s capital was Memphis, hence its intellectuals naturally gave its god, Ptah, precedence as the First Principle. Ptah thought of and created by virtue of his speech Atum, the creative god of totality. Wherefore Ptah’s divine powers including the power of speech were transmitted to the other gods – the gods Horus and Thoth personify the divine organs of thought (mind was believed to be in the heart) and speech (tongue). John A. Wilson translated a section of the Memphis theology of creation (ANET) as follows:

“There came into being as the heart and there came into being as the tongue (something) in the form of Atum. The mighty Great One is Ptah, who transmitted (life to all gods), as well as (to) their ka’s, through this heart, by which Horus became Ptah, and through the tongue, by which Thoth became Ptah. (Thus) it happened that the heart and tongue gained control over (ever other) member of the body, by teaching that he (Ptah as heart and tongue) is in every body and in every mouth of all gods, all men, (all) cattle, all creeping things, and (everything) that lives, by thinking and commanding everything that he wishes…. The sight of the eyes, the hearing of the ears, and the smelling of the air by the nose, they report to the heart. It is this which causes every completed (concept) to come forth, and it is the tongue which announces what the heart thinks. Thus all the gods were formed and his Ennead was completed. Indeed, all the divine order really came into being through what the heart thought and the tongue commanded….”

We should point out for Structuralism’s sake that the Ennead is the Heliopolitan pantheon of various assortments of the nine gods who personify the nine related factors or familiar relatives of the creation. Egypt’s legendary Scorpion King was deemed to be an incarnation of Horus, i.e. Helios, associated of course with the sun-god Re and the early creator-god Atum, originally portrayed in manly form; hence Re-Atum. We might associate certain elemental concepts with each god in the following popular Ennead: Re-Atum (Fire); Shu (Air); Tefnut (Water); Geb (Earth); Nut (Heaven); Osiris (Death); Isis (Magic Power); Seth (Violence); Nepthys (Death – Wife to Min, Sister to Isis, Osiris, and Seth, Mistress of the Gods, Nepthys was pushed aside in favor of Isis). Several members of the pantheon are related by pairing; for instance: siblings Shu and Tefnut conceive Geb and Nut; Shu in turn, as Air or Space, upholds Nut (Heaven or Sky); Osiris and Isis conceive Horus; Seth cuts Osiris into pieces, which presents a familial conflict for Isis because Seth is her brother. And there are a pre-Creation set of abstract gods, of which there are six pairs; but only eight of them show in any given listing, hence they are known as the Hermopolitan Ogdoad. The names of those abstractions can be roughly translated into such terms as Darkness, Endlessness, Absence, and so on. Atum (aka Amun etc) is “he who is hidden” – his consort is Ameunet. Atum hailed from Karnak, known there as Min of the stiff phallus; his legs were joined until Isis divided them so he could walk. The last pair in the Ogdoad is Nun and Maunet – the Atum of the Ennead of the Creation emerged from Nun, who represents the fluid of chaos. As for Ptah, when Egypt was united and Memphis became the imperial civic center, Ptah, a divine potter who is said to have made humankind from the mud into which he breathed life, was inserted in the creation schema to take precedence over the older creator-god, Atum, a king of gods to whom Creation was delegated. The evolution of the Egyptian schema is believe by some to be in accord with the Scheme of the One (Logos), and some thinkers have gone so far to say that its hermeneutic is that of a religion superior to Christianity, which also had its numerical aspects, derived no doubt from Egypt via the Hebrews. The nine is one short of ten, and the Cabala informs us that 999 is one shy of perfection. Incidentally, the Chinese word for ten means perfection or heaven in China, and certain mystics hold that the Ten Words of the Hebrew Decalogue elaborated as the Ten Commandments were once ten characters spelling the secret name of the perfect man, the Christ to come.

SPELLING THE END OF WAR

Alphabets provided coin for widespread exchange. The first scribes were bookkeepers; they were more interested in accounting for things economic than in telling stories or rendering accounts of events, but over the centuries they were moved to compose narratives. The abstract magic of numbering is a certain thing; that five things are five things is certain – the things are evident, the recount is redundant, and the tally is the same – the double count was taken on two rolls by Roman contrarotulators, precursors to the modern corporate controller. But tales can be told in many different ways once the mere writer becomes an author or authority and sees his independence in the play of words and proceeds to challenge the oral histories learned by rote and seldom altered – to this day and despite the invention of the means of exact replication, the sages of India consider oral histories to be far more reliable than the ones rendered in writing – at least the personal meaning of the message is conveyed by the master, whereas the written word is impersonal and subject to misinterpretation.

The early intellectuals, once in possession of the magic skill of trapping the spirits of things in a medium where they could be released at any time by a reader, were wont to develop their own variations on ruling themes; they aspired to take the high seats of government themselves, using public discontent for leverage against the current despot and power elite. The public were fooled time and time again, before the usurpers took charge and became tyrants in turn, into thinking that freedom was at hand. Even so all did not seem lost, for leading thinkers thought that if everyone could be made literate and given the same pages to read, all might agree to finally overthrow tyranny once and for all and rule themselves according to the highest principles; then and only then would humankind live in reasonable concord. Yet even after tyranny was seemingly overthrown and higher literacy rates achieved, people seemed to prefer discord on their own account, and were even proud of it, excusing war as the cause of peace and strife as the source of harmony, at times citing Heraclitus as their authority: “War is both father and king of all…. It should be understood that war is the common condition, that strife is justice, and that all things come to pass through the compulsion of strife. Homer was wrong in saying, ‘Would that strife might perish from amongst gods and men. For if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.”

Nevertheless, after giving thanks to the gods of war for the technological progress that makes peace and prosperity for great numbers of people possible, we think there must be an end to the history of war, and that the final peace shall not be the death of humankind ensuing from a war to end all wars – perchance a remnant will survive in the bowels of the earth or in some height of heaven. We believe that our hearts and tongues, although they may vary, may move the world to sing the harmony of the spheres, say, in the spirit of cooperative or conflict. In this world of organized terror and random, gratuitous violence, a world that educates children to competition, and paranoia because everyone is in fact out to get them, we seek harmony in unity, unity in diversity. Our utopian wars are mock wars. Our fights are ritual fights, contact dances where attacker and attacked take turns, as in aikido. The defender or nage sees the outcome in advance, goes with the flow, and she throws the attacker or uke, who takes the expected fall and is unharmed because he saw it coming. The key words here are “loving competition” and “peaceful reconciliation.”  Is not such harmonious concord the future or divine purpose that explains the present and the past? Cannot humankind be persuaded to embrace this truth? In fact we have pockets of peace and paradise here and there. Everyone without such a pocket should find one and help inflate it and conflate with others. And to that end our language is indispensable if not alone sufficient. That something has meaning means it has a purpose.

We imagine that the logos or ultimate message of language is our salvation as communicating creatures. Pope Benedict leads the Catholic world in identifying logos with the messenger or messiah on the margin between god and humanity: Jesus the Christ. We think life at the Vatican is rather peaceful and even more so in the monastery. Intellectuals lead a relatively peaceful in their ivory towers even when they disagree – the pope gave us a good example. Saloons serve spirits of another sort; saloon conversations pleasant until people get drunk and fights break out. Perhaps we might return to the grand feasts of times past, and regularly break wine and bread with one another. We can imagine many of us drinking from the same loving cup, providing we had adequate security. It seems that any religion of love must have an armed guard until the world is won over to the power of love; of course those within the fortress are pacifists! While pacifists wine and dine in dissenting conventicle, the authorities wage war over right and wrong while their scribes count the body bags instead of treasures laid up in heaven. Everyone admits they would do the right thing, but they differ on what that is. They might war in the mere name of the god of love; say, the Logos or Jesus Christ: “Onward Christian soldiers, marching off to war….” If only they could be more reasonable! And more Christian to boot, for good Christians in the first place refused to make war, and for that refusal the killers deemed them antisocial.

“A soldier of the civil authority must be taught not to kill men,” admonished St. Hippolytus, “and to refuse to do so if he is commanded, and to refuse to take an oath; if he is unwilling to comply, he must be rejected. A military commander or civic magistrate that wears the purple must resign or be rejected. If a catechumen or a believer seeks to become a soldier, they must be rejected, for they have despised God.”

Yea, there is no end to the list of wrongs done and to be done on either side. The tallies are extended to settle the score according to the talion principle. Educated people are dying in their homes and in the streets for the want of the highest education, in universal love, the very idea of which is scoffed at for its lack of widespread application, and laughed at in its particulars. A woman who was nearly beaten to death by two rich and powerful Republican husbands in America wants to hear no more of that illusion called love: She despises the L-word more than the F-word, and will not have “love” pronounced in her presence.

SPELLING LOVE

How many times did Cardinal Ratzinger mention love during his lengthy May 1966 address to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith? Not once. He said that a great danger faced the world; to wit, philosophical and theological reasoning not in accord with his brand of orthodoxy. “For this reason,” he says, “vigilance is required so that a Gospel will not be surreptitiously introduced to us – as stone instead of bread – different from the one that the Lord gave us.” And what might that good news be? We hear nary a mention of love in the entirety of his address. In vulgar terms, such an address was called a “mind f—k” in the Sixties.

How many times did Pope Benedict pronounce the word ‘love’ in his infamous September 12, 2006 speech at the University of Regensburg? Not once. Although his first encyclical since he became pope was on the subject of love, although he waxed eloquent in April 2006 on the subject of love as the soul of the Christian mission for the 80^th World Mission Sunday, although he shined up the concept of love in his January 2006 “Cor Unum” address, he seems to drop the ball when thinking of Muslims. It is a good thing that he mentioned Jesus’ name, albeit infrequently, because his arid reasoning gave little cause for loving.

During his protest of the reduction of Jesus the Christ to the historical Jesus, he said that Adolf von Harnack’s “central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message,” but the pontiff did not say what that simple message was. His purpose was to extol the peaceful behavior of the Western university, and to attribute that peace to Western reasoning. He concludes his speech with: “’Not to act reasonably, with logos, is contrary to the nature of god,’ said Manuel II,’ according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it is constantly the great task of the university.” Not once did we hear of love; and it certainly was not very hospitable of the pope to grievously insult a culture before inviting it to partner in a dialogue. Oh, but the insult was not his, points out his apologists; he was just quoting Emperor Manuel II for good effect, they said. The effect was worldwide outrage, the murder of nuns and priests, and the persecution and exile of Iraqi Christians; leading us to wonder: Is not the love seldom spoken of by such Christians hate-based love?

We think that what the university needs to rediscover is not reason but love. Indeed, anyone familiar with the stiff competition at universities knows very well that love of something other than money is sorely needed on campus. Knowledge is not so much wanted as the credentials that will purchase a high paying career. The stiff competition furrows many a student brow and is meant to break the spirit into running the curricular rat-race. The meanness of the average faculty is unexcelled by the massive student body it teaches and really cares little for except that it is a way to make a living in order to do something more important, like write books and do research. “While we teach knowledge,” wrote Erich Fromm in The Art of Loving, “we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development; the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person. In previous epochs of our own culture, or in China and India, the man most highly valued was the person of outstanding spiritual qualities. Even the teacher was not only, or even primarily, a source of information, but his function was to convey certain human attitudes. In contemporary capitalistic society – and the same holds true for Russian Communism – the men suggested for admiration and emulation are anything but bearers if spiritual qualities.”

Ivan Illich, in Deschooling Society and In Lieu of Education, averred that education today is a commodity produced and packaged by an accredited factory whose underlying agenda is to further the prejudice that whatever is learned outside its structure is of lesser worth than the product ground out within. The objective of school and church alike is to render people docile and compliant with the wishes of the authorities who lord it over the existing systematic process. Unaccredited teachers and priests are denigrated as unworthy charlatans, and they are deemed even more worthless if they are unprofessional’ that is, if they give their services away free of charge, or cannot make a living from the market they refuse conformance to. “Education which makes you need the product is included in the price of the product. School is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need society as it is. In such a society marginal value has become constantly self-transcendent. It forces the few largest consumers to compete for the power to deplete the earth, to fill their own swelling bellies, to discipline small consumers, and to deactivate those who still find satisfaction in making do with what they have.”

We notice that necrotic lust for the dead product prevails even in the protest against its deadening effect. The energetic spirit gets short verbal shrift. We might conclude that people unduly habituated to the economic rationalization of everything into standardized units of production and consumption are virtually but not really zombies, for they still feel the want of love in their anxiety. After all is said and done, it is not really the thing itself that is wanted by desperate consumers, for things are endlessly consumed in a trash economy for the power that might be gained from them. So much for the commodity fetish and the worship of idols, for by the time we get to a thing, the Egyptian ka.has fled to the next thing, and we shall never get to the thing-in-itself, at least not that way. With all due respect to the Logos and foreplay, we say we do not want another messenger or messiah or mediator: we want love and we want it now; that is to say, immediately.

POETIC LOVE

What is this love actually wanted? We had best ask a romantic poet: Percy Bysshe Shelley will do, notwithstanding the fact that a professor of the neoconservative faction has recently taken pains to defame him as a rake lest he make a libertine out of disaffected youth – many of our more poetically inclined youth turned to Gothism, a movement that threw the grotesque side of hypocrisy in authority’s face. We are not surprised to know that Shelley was a dreamy and willful boy who had his way early on and did not get along well after arriving at Eton, a school designed to crush republicanism among its young aristocrats according to Andre Maurois in Ariel, The Life of Shelley. Eton’s aim was to make “hard-faced men, all run in the same mould,” of its wards. Anyone who took a deep interest in books was not much appreciated in those days – being a bully boy instead of a literate girl seems to be the thing nowadays. “An unbreakable will, with a lack of necessary physical strength to carry out its decrees, forefated him to rebellion.” He was bullied by the older boys in vain. “His eyes, dreamy when at peace, acquired, under the influence of enthusiasm or indignation, a light that was almost wild; his voice, usually soft and low, became agonized and shrill. His love of books, his contempt for games, his long hair floating in the wind, his collar opened on a girlish throat, everything about him scandalized those self-charged to maintain in the little world of Eton the brutal spirit of which it was so proud.” During the holidays he fell in love with his lovely cousin Harriet Grove. His father sent him up to Oxford in October 1810, where he was enthusiastic about scientific progress inasmuch as it was breaking the mold of tradition. But he was not cut out for its language, that of mathematics. He had already written a romance, and now he had published, under a pseudonym, a pamphlet demonstrating in the form of a geometrical theorem the impossibility of God’s existence. “The title of the pamphlet, the Necessity of Atheism, was the most scandalous imaginable in a mealy-mouthed, theological city like Oxford.” When Shelley was confronted with the pamphlet, he would neither affirm nor deny its authorship – we note that silence under traditional common law implies affirmation. He was expelled for refusing to answer. “The punishment was terrible. It put a stop to his studies; made it impossible for him to enter any other university; deprived him of the peaceful life he so much enjoyed; and drew down on his head his father’s grotesque and inextinguishable anger.”

“I have everywhere sought sympathy and have found only repulse and disappointment,” Shelley confessed in an essay, On Love. “Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards all we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, where we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another’s; if we feel, we would that another’s nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that the lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart’s best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything that exists.”

At the very outset of the essay, Shelley asked and answered the question: “What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? Ask him who adores, what is God?” Frail Shelley is long gone and his poems appreciated by few. God was love, but God was murdered in the West, a West so academically admired by Pope Benedict that he dare not mention the word in his longest addresses, for the very word would make lips of motionless ice smirk. And since love is life, not someone else’s life but your life, as anyone very well knows when she asks herself why she grieves, when God died so did the loving human being that projected him for the sake of society, that all have identity in love. So the humane person died with the personal God made in man’s beloved image: the human being is a cog in the neo-barbarian war machine, and when the day is done s/he is left alone without a true lover to contemplate the vanishing point towards which all life tends. But as long as there is a slight trace of human existence, the nature of love is hard to extinguish; nature may still be loved, even on a deserted desert island, for the useless sands given the wavering heat of the day mirror the desires within, in a mirage, as it were, for existence craves its ideal: the eternal life of power without impedance with nothing to resist its absolute being. God takes the form of a perfect man and is gradually diminished by necessity to the ideal formless form of human form.

“We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were of our entire self,” Shelley scrawled on a dimly lit page, “yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man.” We endeavor to become that circle described by theosophists and called Logos, “a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness; a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overlap.”

O, but doth Love have such all mighty power? Our circular personal mirror is reflects the point of existence. Pray tell, my free friend, for the very word means freedom, what is the difference between the infinitesimal and the infinite? Is the lifeline relative in every point along its course to pointless death? Narcissus gazes at the pool, pays no mind to the nymphs who echo his desires, takes the plunge, and his love is extinguished, just as Shelley drowned in the deep; the husk that remained was burned on the shore by his friends, but his burning heart would not burn, and was pulled from the fire, put in a casket and returned to Mary.

“To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should resemble or correspond to it…. This is the invisible and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that, without the possession of which there is no rest nor respite to the heart over which it rules. Hence in solitude, or in the deserted state when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not with us, we love the flowers, the grass, and the waters, and the sky. In the motion of the very leaves of spring, in the blue air, there is found a secret correspondence with out heart. There is an eloquence in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the rustling of the reeds beside them, which by their inconceivable relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to a dance of breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that, if he were in a desert, he would love some cypress. So soon as this want of power is dead, man becomes the living sepulcher of himself, and what survives is the mere husk of what he once was.”

Only a an extraordinary person of refinement takes such an interest in the works and workings of nature, Shelley notes, yet the solar and religious systems and their constituents are of little consequence compared to the great miracle called life, and life is so familiar that we do not wonder at it. And we further note that, in our day, now that nature and human existence have become more completely under sway of the modern science and technology that Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley marveled at, now that the human being has been dismembered and reassembled to fit the machine, not only is God virtually dead, but so is nature and existence: God is dead; Nature is dead; Existence is dead. Man may be a rational and dignified creature, but his rationality has become the death of his dignity; he is not quite a zombie as of late, but is more or less a discombobulated Frankenstein monster, having at least the vestige of human emotions, but no warm place for his heart, hence he stands enraged on the icy island he has made of his life. So we would find some solace in rationalizing our fate and calling our ratios reasonable, perhaps going so far as Pope Benedict did, to say that the source of our scheming is the Scheme called Logos, but neglecting to point out that this Logos is in point of fact not the work of Grecian reasoning but is rather the son of Love, the very incarnation of Love.

Let the Pope blather on and on without direct reference to his subject. We do not blame him, for we usually do the same. But we should no that our text is insufficient, not the sufficient cause of existence, which remains a mystery. Shelley has identified love with life, but then he asks, “What is life? Thoughts and feelings arise, with or without our will, and we employ words to express them. We are born, and our birth is unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life. How vain it is to think that words can penetrate the mystery of our being! Rightly used they may make evident our ignorance to ourselves, and this is much. For what are we? Whence do we come? and whither do we go? Is birth the commencement, is death the conclusion of our being? What is birth and death? The most refined abstractions of logic conduct to a view of life, which, though startling to the apprehension is, in fact, that which the habitual sense of its repeated combinations has extinguished in us.”

SPEAKING OF IGNORANCE

Rightly used, that is, reasonably used, words acquaint us with our ignorance. Of course Shelley the hapless Romantic has read the Germans and the Greeks, and knows something of the Socratic philosophy of learned ignorance. Johann Goerg Hamann upset the applecart of the Enlightenment as well as the Catholic counter-Enlightenment when he cast Socrates in the role of Reason’s main challenger. Genius made the man, as for as he was concerned; the genius of Socrates was his ignorance, the demonstration of which is the true function of philosophy. The genius of ignorance keeps the door open, keeps us asking questions. “What for a Homer replaces ignorance of the rules of art which an Aristotle devised after him, and what for a Shakespeare replaces the ignorance or transgression of those critical laws? Genius is the unanimous answer,” declared Hamann in Socratic Memorabilia. “Indeed, Socrates could very well afford to be ignorant; he had a tutelary spirit, on whose science he could rely, which he loved and feared as his god, whose peace was more important  to him than all the reason of the Egyptian and Greeks, whose voice he believed, and by means of whose wind (as the experienced quack Doctor Hill has proven to us) the empty understanding of Socrates can become as fruitful as the womb of a pure virgin.”

Doctor Hill maintained in a farce that a woman can conceive a child by means of her wind. The true philosopher has faith in that Nothing, so to speak, which, unclouded by reasoning, gives birth to all; again: “The life and being of a higher knowledge must spring froth newly created from this death, from this nothing…. The empty understanding of Socrates can become fruitful as well as the womb of a pure virgin.” And in a letter to a friend on the Socratic subject: “The final fruit of all philosophy is the noting of human ignorance and weakness. This same function, which is related to our powers of understanding and knowledge, shows how ignorant we are just as the moral shows how evil and shallow is our virtue. This cornerstone at the same time is a millstone which shatters to pieces all the sophistries.” Socrates, then, is not a prophet for the Light of Reason in his maintenance of ignorance, but is rather a prophet of divine Illumination. His ignorance is learned or cultivated to that end: He is an educated fool.

Setting academia aside, what else could a good Lutheran do but follow in the footsteps of Luther and admit to being a fool? “Now, inasmuch as I am not only a fool,” Dr. Martin Luther admitted in his 1520 letter to the Christian nobility, “but also a sworn doctor of the Holy Scriptures, I am glad that I have an opportunity of fulfilling my oath, just in this fool’s way. I beg you to excuse me to the moderately wise: for I know not how to deserve the favor and grace of the supremely wise, which I have so often sought with much labor, but now for the future shall neither have nor regard.”

“Philosophy,” Shelley once averred, “impatient as it may be to build, has much work yet remaining…. It makes one step towards this object; it destroys error, and the roots of error. It leaves, what is too often the duty of the reformed in political and ethical questions to leave, a vacancy. It reduces the mind to that freedom in which it would have acted, but for the misuse of words and signs, the instruments of its own creation…. Almost all familiar objects are signs, standing, not for themselves, but for others, in their capacity of suggesting one thought which shall lead to a train of thoughts. Our whole life is thus an education in error.”

Indeed, as one historian summed up the past: History is a mistake. But let us not be defeatists and abandon talk just when the agonizing and antagonizing factions of our race need to check their weapons at the door and commence talking about what can be done to achieve peace besides killing each other and, collaterally, the whole race besides. The world today is in need of more than reform-as-usual in political house of prostitution, more than mere tinkering with the status quo so that the money machine runs better for the already enriched; it needs radical reform, reform rooted in universal love, not in the hate-based-self-love of gilded individualism and hostile factions that glorify war and unite to crusade against those who repudiate their vicious lifestyle called virtue and exclusive polity called democracy.

FORGED BY ENMITY

Luther did not cotton to papal crusades; he made it known that the Islamists constituted the iron rod of God made to punish Christians for their sins. He reminded the princes not to trust in their might, and to remember that “the children of Benjamin slew forty-thousand Israelites, for this reason, that these trusted to their own strength. That it may not happen to us and to our noble Emperor Charles,” he went on in his flattering letter to the nobility, “we must remember that in this matter we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers of the darkness of this world, who may fill the world with war and bloodshed, but cannot themselves be overcome thereby. We must renounce all confidence in our natural strength, and take the matter in had with humble trust in God; we must seek God’s help with earnest prayer, and have nothing before our eyes but the misery and wretchedness of Christendom, irrespective of what punishment the wickedness may deserve. If we do not act thus, we may being the game with great pomp; but when we are well in it, the spirits of evil will make such confusion, that the whole world be immersed in blood, and yet nothing be done.”

Now it appears that Luther’s love of the people was rooted in his hatred for the Pope, whom he equated with the Anti-Christ, and hatred for the diabolical fathers of the cloth as well, not to mention his father and mother and teachers who beat him several times a day for good measure when he was a child. He certainly had sufficient reason to protest and to become his own father, as did his great admirer and proponent of the fuehrer principle many years hence. When Luther no longer needed the people, namely the peasants who raised the Rainbow Banner of the God’s Covenant, he advised the princes to stab and kill them – fifty-thousand and more had in fact been dispatched by professional soldiers. He preached to the nobility that that the spiritual and secular estates were falsely divided; that the people were one, and that the spiritual should be subject to the punishments of the secular: The division between spiritual and secular, he said, was hypocritical. “All Christians are truly of the Spiritual Estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone.” Furthermore, “The temporal power has been ordained by God for the punishment of the bad, and the protection of the good, therefore we must let it do its duty throughout the whole Christian body, without respect of persons.” The “liberty, life, and property of the clergy” should be no more esteemed than the life, liberty and property of the worldly interest, which was of course identical with the clerical interest. Wherefore from this we can see that there is to be no Kingdom of God on Earth, and that we are to proceed as usual, with eyeballs rolling towards undisclosed Heaven from time to time, praying that our wishes come true in the hereafter. We are eventually left with a feel-good religion to feel good about everything we do in the name of God, and we, like Luther, may excuse our contradictions and hypocrisies as the workings of God’s Mysteries.

Now Luther was professedly against pre-emptive strikes, and opposed to revolutions against rulers as well, no matter how evil they might be, for preemptive war and revolution against the secular power had been contrary to the Christian conception of just war ever since the Roman Church sold the spiritual sword to Caesar and the Empire had became Christian, purportedly because Jesus had ordered the sword that would have been lifted in his defense sheathed, because all he had to do was give the word and his father could vanquish all his foes; but why do that, for God was merciful from time to time. Despite Luther’s declaration that the might-is-right doctrine is dead wrong and despite his professions of Christian peace and pacific disaffection for preemptive war, Luther said he would look the other way if the enemy were the Roman Church and its anointed kings; and he did, and Reformation wed to Enlightenment plunged the world into war that the sins of humankind be baptized in blood. Such are the works of ambivalent and ambiguous genius. And apparently the history of mistakes is still upon us. Can we not turn to universal love, or the Love of loves, regardless of the fact that almost everyone scoffs at universal love privately, saying that he who loves everyone loves nobody, and calls love a cowardly excuse for greed that does not want to work for a living but wants to live off government largesse?

MERELY ACADEMIC LOVE

Since philosophy is the love of wisdom, perchance we might learn something wise about universal love from university professors; let us turn to the highly regarded Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: We find the article on love therein an interminably boring prevarication, an unoriginal beating around the bush and circular citing of Simon-says articles published by the likes of Cornell University Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University, Princeton University Press, University of California Press, MIT Press, University of Chicago Press, John Hopkins University Press, Yale University Press, Kansas University Press, Temple University Press, Stanford University Press, and Harvard University Press. We think one of the most interesting questions put by academe is whether or not we might love our dogs or cats or chocolate or skiing given the right definition of love. We are informed that the meaning of love differs, then, differs from case to case although it is all about me, me, and me, about my identify and what I like, what I find engaging and makes my life worth living, what I value. Right off the bat we are told that the article will focus on the very sort of love that the Chinese philosopher Mo Ti identified as the cause of the world’s problems: personal or partial love.  

Therefore of the three classical notions, eros, agape, and philia, the sort of love called agape gets short intellectual shrift because Simon says it is rationally incomprehensible, having to do with the Christian tradition of love independent of the value of its object, the love of God for persons and persons for God. “Given the focus here on personal love, Christian conceptions of God’s love for persons (and vice versa) will be omitted, and the distinction between eros and philia will be blurred – as it typically is in contemporary accounts. Instead, the focus here will be on these contemporary understandings of love, including romantic love, understood as an attitude we take towards other persons.”

Thus lovers and friends are confused while emphasis is placed on the contemporary attitude, which largely abhors the divine love that transcends particulars, and ignores the fact that if personal love is to be understood, the nature of the person or human being, what we have in common and is our all, must be understood. The philosophy of Christianity is indeed personalism: in effect the Christian person is a universal substance and the universal person is God. However that might be, the unknown, impersonal author of the Stanford article on love, after dismissing agape, talks about the talk about four theories of love: as union, concern, valuing, and emotion. Love as union might posit the being of some sort of “we” besides the lover and beloved, a we that might extend to the mutual interest of the entire community or WE; but that extension is by no means dwelt on since agape might replace our WE with God. Some thinkers have settled on the “federation model” or “federation of selves” as a way to understand how lovers can have and eat their cake of unity. Or lovers might have their unity in some overlapping interests, while others are exclusive, and so on. There are several logical ways to skin a cat if not love it.

Thinking for ourselves, we could elaborate ad infinitum in our own ways on how something plural becomes singular by mutual attraction; such absurdities reiterated over and over using different terms keep the ball rolling, at least until it comes to rest in absurd dogma, say in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Amen. But a real organic unity is apparent in the Egyptian triad of Father, Mother, and Child, as One; and the purity was ensured inasmuch as Father and Mother were brother and sister at the original, royal level of society – incest was elsewhere avoided –  to get the family started, Mother might conceive Father, and he, in turn, provides her with Children. Unity in diversity can certainly be intuited without creating a ghost or saying a system is greater than its parts. The spouse who wants a divorce simply because s/he wants to have his or her own identity should first consider the fact that there is no identity without relationship.

The Stanford dissection leaves us wanting our eviscerated organs back. The bleached bones on the wayside are impediments unto us – where is the Pope who can act as Magus and cloth them with flesh and breath life into them? Cannot language better bring us together? Shall this gap forever sever our hearts thus? One doctor even cut out his own heart to find the healing answer, but he was left with nothing. To whom might we turn? To the pontiff of the catholic form of Christianity, which locates its unity in his heading? But he did not pronounce the word ‘love’ in his Regensburg speech: he spoke of violence and expected it to be resolved through Christian reasoning of the Greek kind. While a cardinal he pointed out the obvious in Guadalajara, that the totalitarian community or WE without God but scientifically arranged according to the dictates of reason had deplorably failed: “The failure of the only scientifically based system for solving problems could only justify nihilism or, in any case, total relativism.” Yet, notwithstanding the fact that Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” has collapsed – for want of an enemy  to inspire hate-based love G.W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” has taken its place – Marxist reasoning and the intense moral sincerity of Lenin have not been forgotten. The pope from Bavaria, following in the footsteps of illustrious German philosophers during the Enlightenment, would somehow marry his faith to reason so the Church might tag along with progress, knowing well that reasoning itself is based on faith, hence is all too often a dog tied behind the cart. If only he could teach us a reasonable art of love so we could make up for the lack. Cannot love be rationally practiced without gutting it of its essential motive? We might examine our own hearts for the healing answer but we are not relativistic phenomenologists or existentialists.

THE UNIVERSAL LOVE OF MO TI

In contrast to the partial sorts of love emphasized by the Stanford University article on love, Mo Ti set forth the doctrine of universal love. Mo Ti was born about the time Confucius died, during the chaotic Warring States Period. Like Confucius, Mo Ti had a mission, to talk some sense into the heads of the warring factions that peace might be obtained; and like Confucius he traveled about the land to that end. The philosophical approach of the two philosophers was different, although they both lived exemplary lives. In brief, Confucius, an aristocrat, emphasized ritualistic if not loving compliance with the traditionally defined roles of the members of the nuclear family, the foundation of society, and the inner development of the gentleman who complies with traditional norms. Mo Ti, whose origins were humble, was more concerned with dispassionate concern for humanity on the whole. By way of illustration, the question was put in ancient times as to whether one would leave one’s family in the charge of Confucius or Mo Ti when away, to which it was answered that Confucius would give precedence to his own family before that of his charges, hence Mo Ti would be the better caretaker. As for self-cultivation, Mo Ti did not approve of bad manners, yet useless rituals and refined culture were of little use to him when people were starving to death and making war on one another. He was a pragmatist who thought in terms of measurable material benefits, and not in terms of psychological happiness.

Given the experience of the Catholic Church in China, no doubt Pope Benedict, himself an advocate of reasonable universal love, albeit a more personal hence passionate love than that of Mo Ti, is familiar with his teachings, and must therefore know, despite his expressed affection for Western reasoning, that reasoning in ancient China was just as reasonable as that in ancient Greece, although it differs somewhat in its logic. Secular leaders, especially those political leaders of the United States who think virtue is in loyalty to rich friends and otherwise powerful favorites regardless of their foolish conduct, would do well to examine Mo Ti’s common-sense doctrines at length.

In sum, leaders should observe heaven’s intention; elevate only worthy people to high office; identify with superior causes; care for people impartially; oppose aggressive warfare; be economical in expenditures, and disavow fatalism.

“Heaven” (tian) is not a loving, personal god but a ruling force that presents an objective, constant, measurable, and reliable model for righteous conduct.  Western visitors to China during Europe’s early modern period were impressed by the high order of civilization there, much higher, they thought, than back home; they especially admired the Chinese under empire for the apparent absence of warfare and China’s repudiation of expansionist policies. Some scholars speculated that this order was due to the worship of Tian, which they prejudicially identified with YHWY, the ineffable Hebrew deity that would eventually bring everyone together in peace regardless of their religions, condemning none for not converting. Other scholars more familiar with the astronomical etymology of the term tian thought otherwise, and the bigots among them deemed Chinese intellectuals atheists due to an absence of a personal god.

Mo Ti’s heavenly order flowed from superior unity over lower multiplicity. The regular motion of the heavenly bodies around the pole star demonstrates that harmonious activity endures, providing all members of the cosmos with the mutual benefit of their relative positions and courses about the center. As it is seen in heaven, so should it be on earth. A regular order is obviously beneficial in comparison to chaotic disorders such as devastating floods. The regular order of seasons, when abided by and rightly cultivated, provides predictable sustenance for the people. Thus natural law is favorable to humankind, that they may increase in number and prosperity, and those who keep that order are righteous; if people want the success they see above, they will have to work for it, from the bottom right on up to the ruling authority, for people are not personally fated are chosen or selected by some imagined arbitrary high power to succeed or fail:

“Now how do we know fatalism is the way of the wicked?” Mo Ti posed the question. “In the past, wretched people indulged in drinking and eating and were lazy in their work. Thereupon their food and clothing became insufficient, and the danger of hunger and cold was approaching. They did not acknowledge: ‘I was stupid and insolent and was not diligent at work.’ But they would say: ‘It is but my lot to be poor.’”

The tree is known by its fruits. The worst calamities are the fault of the superior authority who fails to obey the mandate of heaven to keep good order, and destroys it instead, favoring the wealthy, exploiting the poor, and invading weaker countries. Mo Ti believed that humans are naturally inclined to imitate good deeds; that bad behavior is due to bad examples; and that bad behavior should be effectively punished. A superior standard must be set in the form of an excellent example for the people to follow.  It is the duty of the ruler to mete out punishments and rewards in such a way as to keep the productive peace. In that way the ruler’s behavior accords with heavenly or universal love, which is not the passionate love for particulars, not the lust for mates and greed for gold, but is the serene love of the superior power; a detached, universal love for all the particulars, that they might prosper providing that they are righteous in turn. Those who stray from the way for long are doomed to dismal failure.

Loyalty to friends because of their riches and power, and regardless of their failures, is the greatest virtue as far as the established elite are concerned, but it is vicious for everyone concerned, and particularly injurious to the poor.  

“Now, all the rulers desire their provinces to be wealthy, their people to be numerous, and their jurisdiction to secure order,” Mo Ti observed. “But what they obtain is not wealth but poverty, not multitude but scarcity, not order but chaos – this is to lose what they desire and obtain what they would avert. Why is this? This is because the rulers have failed to promote the talented and to employ the capable in their government. When the talented are numerous in the state, order will be stable; when the talented are scarce, order will be unstable. Therefore the task of the leader lies nowhere but in increasing the numbers of the talented. When the honorable and wise run the government, the ignorant and humble remain orderly; but when the ignorant and humble run the government, the honorable and wise become rebellious. Therefore we know exaltation of the talented is the foundation of government. The wise rulers in the past greatly emphasized the promotion of the talented and the employment of the capable. Without special consideration for relatives, for the rich and honored, or for the good-looking, they exalted and promoted the talented, enriched and honored them, and made them governors and leaders. The vicious they kept back and banished, dispossessed and degraded, and made them laborers and servants. Thereupon people were all encouraged by rewards and threatened by punishments and strove with each other after virtue. Thus the talented multiplied and the vicious diminished in number. Such is promotion of the virtuous. Then the wise rulers of the past listened to their words and observed their conduct, found out their capabilities, and carefully assigned them their offices. Such is employment of the capable. When rulers cannot make a coat they will employ able tailors. When they cannot kill an ox or a sheep they will employ able butchers. In these two instances they do know they should promote the talented and employ the capable for business. But when it comes to the disorder of the country and danger of the state, they do not know they should promote the talented and employ the capable for government. Rather, they would employ their relatives; they would employ the rich without merit, and the good-looking. But as to the employment of the rich without merit and the good-looking – will these necessarily prove themselves wise and intelligent? To let these rule the country is to let the unwise and unintelligent rule the country. And disorder can then be predicted.”

The only logical course to take to belay illogical anarchy is the way of universal love. Universal love is reasonable love. It is a dispassionate, impartial concern for the welfare of others, a concern that consequently safeguards one’s own welfare. Hence it is a rational love in its intellectual consideration for the ratio between regard for others and self-regard. Mo Ti was the first Chinese philosopher keenly concerned with the development of logical arguments, that people might correctly distinguish “the right from the wrong, the good from bad governments, similarity from difference, name from actuality, and certainty from uncertainty.” If people fully understand an argument, they will naturally take the better side. Three tests of a worthy proposition: precedence (tradition), evidence (common sense) and utility (results).

“Some standard of judgment must be established. To expound a doctrine without regard to the standard is similar to determining the directions of sunrise and sunset on a revolving potter's wheel. By such a means, the distinction of right and wrong, benefit and harm, cannot be known. Therefore there must be three tests: its basis, its verifiability, and its applicability. How is it to be based? It should be based on the deeds of the wise rulers of the past. How is it to be verified? It is to be verified by the senses of hearing and sight of the common people. How is it to be applied? It is to be applied by adopting it in government and observing its benefits to the country and the people.

Needless to say, those who would govern their conduct reasonably should be familiar with humankind’s great conversation or dialectic; that is, he should be well versed in grammar in the widest sense of the term – of the best that has been said on his subjects of interest – until he comprehends their essentials or leading principles. To that end he does not despise intellectuals; he listens to sages and reads good books: It is recounted that Mo Ti brought numerous books along in his wagon when he ventured on his journey south as envoy to Wei. Hsien T’angtse expressed surprise when he saw the books. "Sir, you have instructed Kung Shang Kuo just to consider the right and wrong of any case, and do no more. Now you, sir, bring very many books along. What can be the use for them?" Mo Ti answered: “In the past, Duke Tan of Chou read one hundred pages every morning and received seventy scholars every evening. Therefore his achievements as minister to the emperor have lasted till this day. I have no superior above me to serve, nor any farm below to attend to. How dare I neglect these books? I have heard that different ways may lead to the same end but they are not presented without deviations from one another. And the common people do not know how to place proper importance in what they hear. Hence the large number of books. When one has reviewed the ideas and has thought deeply on them, then he understands the essentials which lead to the same end. Then he no longer needs to be instructed by books. Why should you be so surprised?”

 Mo Ti’s refrain of the deplorable state of affairs during his time of troubles should sound familiar to our ears. He held that, “The purpose of humane people is to procuring benefits for the world and eliminating its calamities.” He listed “mutual attacks among states, mutual usurpation among houses, mutual injuries among individuals; the lack of grace and loyalty between ruler and ruled, the lack of affection and filial piety between father and son, the lack of harmony between elder and younger brothers – these are the major calamities in the world.” The calamities “arise out of want of universal love. At present, feudal lords have learned only to love their own states and not those of others. Therefore they do not scruple about attacking other states. The heads of houses have learned only to love their own houses and not those of others. Therefore they do not scruple about usurping other houses. And individuals have learned only to love themselves and not others. Therefore they do not scruple about injuring others. When feudal lords do not love one another there will be war on the fields. When heads of houses do not love one another they will usurp one another's power. When individuals do not love one another they will injure one another. When ruler and ruled do not love one another, they will not be gracious and loyal. When father and son do not love each other they will not be affectionate and filial. When elder and younger brothers do not love each other they will not be harmonious. When nobody in the world loves any other, naturally the strong will overpower the weak, the many will oppress the few, the wealthy will mock the poor, those honored will disdain the humble, the cunning will deceive the simple. Therefore all the calamities, strife, complaints, and hatred in the world have arisen out of want of universal love. Therefore humane people disapprove of this want.”

The demand for universal love can be met: “Esteem other countries as much as one's own, the houses of others as much as one's own, the persons of others as much as one's self. When feudal lords love one another there will be no more war; when heads of houses love one another there will be no more mutual usurpation; when individuals love one another there will be no more mutual injury. When ruler and ruled love each other they will be gracious and loyal; when father and son love each other they will be affectionate and filial; when elder and younger brothers love each other they will be harmonious. When all the people in the world love one another, then the strong will not overpower the weak, the many will not oppress the few, the wealthy will not mock the poor, the honored will not disdain the humble, and the cunning will not deceive the simple. And it is all due to universal love that calamities, strife, complaints, and hatred are prevented from arising.”

Of course people who are accustomed to hatred and strife but who wish for love and peace instead may believe that their wish is impossible to fulfill given the nature of human kind. At the very least, universal love “is only a difficult and distant ideal,” say they. To which Mo Ti replied: “This is simply because the worldly people do not recognize what is to the benefit of the world, or understand what is calamitous to it. Now, to besiege a city, to fight in the fields, or to achieve a name at the cost of death—these are what men find difficult. Yet when the ruler encourages them, the multitude can do them. In comparison, universal love and mutual aid is quite different from these. Whoever loves others is loved by others; whoever benefits others is benefited by others; whoever hates others is hated by others; whoever injures others is injured by others. Then, what difficulty is there with universal love? Only that the ruler fails to embody it in his government and the ordinary man in his conduct.”

As even youngsters know only too well from the present example in Iraq, the worst man-made calamity is war, and its consequences are especially egregious when a great superpower or powers gang up on a weaker state, in the belief that victory will be easily had, and the war shall be enormously profitable for the war merchants and profiteers. Mo Ti abhorred war, but he was not pacifist. He was accompanied on his peace mission by a troop of hundreds of devoted warriors trained in defensive warfare and eager to defend smaller states from aggression by larger states. The fact that most of them were artisans and engineers from the working class enhanced the technological proficiency of their military endeavors, so despite their limited number, they constituted formidable opposition to aggressors.

 As far as Mo Ti was concerned, war in itself is illogical. Murder and mayhem, the theft and laying waste of people’s supporting assets is condemned as crimes on a small scale at home, yet extolled as the most honorable conduct on a massive scale on other human beings. How absurd.

“The murder of one person is called wicked and incurs one death penalty. Following this argument, the murder of ten persons will be ten times as wicked and there should be ten death penalties; the murder of a hundred persons will be a hundred times as wicked and there should be a hundred death penalties. All the people of the world know that they should condemn these things, calling them wicked. But when it comes to the great wickedness of attacking other states, they do not know that they should condemn it. On the contrary, they applaud it, calling it honorable. And they are really ignorant of its being wicked. And they have written down their judgment in this matter for posterity. If they did know that it is wicked, then why would they record a false judgment to bequeath to posterity? Now, if there were a man who, upon seeing a little blackness, should say it is black, but, upon seeing much, should say it is white, then we would think he could not tell the difference between black and white.”

Mo Ti saw the Grand Lord of Ch'i and said, “Suppose here is a sword. When it is tried on a man's neck it severs it swiftly. Can it be said to be sharp?” The Grand Lord said it would be sharp. Mo Ti said, “When it is tried on several men's necks, it severs them swiftly. Can it be said to be sharp?” The Grand Lord said it would be sharp. Mo Ti said, “Of course, the sword is sharp, but who will take the curse of the deed upon him?” The Grand Lord said that the sword reaped the benefit but he who tried it would be visited by the curse for the act. Mo Ti continued: “Now to capture a state, ruin an army, and destroy the people – who will be visited by the curse for this act? The Grand Lord looked down and up and deliberated, saying: "I shall be visited with the curse for this act." Some accursed leaders have enough honor left to fall on their own swords.

The main problem with war is not with its horrors and immorality. It might be argued that war is a good thing because it improves the morality of peoples by subjecting them to the threat of immediate death, thereby bringing manly virtue to the fore to fight desperately for its life; it is even claimed that the destruction of the most valuable assets is creative, that emergencies foster innovation, and that the reconstruction of destroyed assets is highly productive because of the increased incentive to produce or die from want and disease. Ideology like theology gives us an excuse to do what we wanted to do in the first place: draw lines and fight over them. But the excuses do not justify the fact that war is unprofitable on the whole.

 People fight because they embrace different ideas of what is right, and are so busy warring over those ideas that they do not come to an agreement over just what is right in the first place. The right thing to do is to bring people to an understanding of the common good and place that good ahead of conflicting interests. To that end the self-cultivation of inner worth, feelings of self-esteem, the personal salvation of feel-good religion and the like are of little avail because the subjectivity of the self cannot be objectively measured. Deeds, not words, count, and deeds are evaluated according to their measurable consequences. The virtue of a philosophy is not in the philosophy pronounced but is rather in the life of the person who applies it. Again, if a superior example is constantly put forward, people will naturally follow it. The superior person is not passive, nor is he a pacifist, for he will defend the weak from strong aggressors. Peace is plainly superior to aggressive warfare.

In fine, intolerant partiality is an evil whereas universal love is good because it brings material benefits to all people. Intolerant partiality produces strife. Even people of equal status or of the same class struggle for power over one another and battle over differences of opinion: Do they murder and main and poison one another because they love others and want to benefit them? No, they do not. Evil begets evil, and goodness attracts goods. Righteousness is measured by the good that it does: “If righteousness ceased to prevail, chaos would reign over the world.” We assume that people can be induced to return benefits proportionately, that some supreme order be it divine or natural rewards and punishes, and that people are rational and will behave rationally rather than react according to their irrational inclinations. Our biggest reservation is not with those assumptions but with the punitive imposition of a particular universal order pursuant to the “common sense” of a ruling or ruled majority as to the nature of universal love.