How The World Works
“To Rule Whatever One Can”
From Melos to Gaza
One of the oddest phenomena of this window in time is the dissonance between world affairs and the globalized US financial markets. As I write, big equity indices (fairly good wisdom-of-crowd measures of investor class macro optimism/pessimism) are at or flirting with all-time highs, and the fear indicator, the VIX, is dropping back down to all-quiet-on-the-risk-front levels.
This against a backdrop of the Doomsday Clock the closest it’s ever been to global catastrophe. The details don’t need repeating, just read the first couple paragraphs of that link if you’ve been in a coma for the last decade or so. (TL;DR: Ukraine, Gaza, Houthis, China, NorK, Jan6.)
The great historians and philosophers of human social nature (see below) wouldn’t be surprised in the least. The missing piece in the American collective worldview is a firm footing in the Master Rule, the title of this piece, quoted from Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue¹:
Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can. This is not a law that we made ourselves, nor were we the first to act upon it when it was made. We found it already in existence, and we shall leave it to exist for ever among those who come after us. We are merely acting in accordance with it, and we know that you or anybody else with the same power as ours would be acting in precisely the same way.
#HowTheWorldWorks (#HtWW)
The global financial system, if it needs spelling out, is at this point a shared commons striped across the ruling stratum of the planet. No one with any power has an interest in crashing the whole thing. Most of the ways in which opponents can be squeezed/sanctioned have been tried. So we play the time honored game of proxy wars, backstopped by the nuclear game of chicken.
Hence the dissonance.
On the Mt. Rushmore … or maybe better, Mt. Rushd … of clear-eyed philosophers of #HtWW I’d put Thucydides, Ibn Khaldun, Machievelli and Nietzsche, not sure in what order. The common thread is that they don’t confuse ethics/morality and power.
The more famous quote from the Melian Dialogue:
[W]hen these matters are discussed by practical people, the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept
Americans, broadly speaking, hate that thought. That’s bully morality. “Might makes right.” Anathema.
Our collective common man philosophy, to the extent we have one, prides itself on what Nietzsche called slave-morality² (in contrast to aristocratic-morality … often translated as master-morality): concepts of evil, justice, fairness, equity and the like … living by the Golden Rule and its variants, required for Liberty, the über preoccupation of slaves.
[I use Nietzsche’s vocab for effect. Americans and our friendlies might better be described these days as operating in a framework of ‘bougie-morality’ … those values in between the aristocratic rulers and the slaves, the middle class with more than a modicum of agency, but no real power per se to determine most of their life outcomes, other than choosing to accept or fight the powers that be … without getting Navalny’ed (RIP), of course.]
We think of those who live by the Master Rule as barbarians. Hitler and Stalin, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Tamerlane and Putin. Ruthless conquerors unbothered by concepts of evil and any justice other than “equality of power to compel”.
That’s what’s on full display in Gaza.
The AlJazeera report from which the image at the top of this piece is taken is a perfect example: the pro-Hamas Arabic news outlet with likely the largest reach into the US body politic versus the pro-Israel American “newspaper of record”, the NY Times. Dueling propaganda, each side trying to present itself as neutral, objective, evidence-based practitioners of ethical standards of journalism.
(For that last part, quelle nostalgie. There might have been a brief window, say, during the Fairness Doctrine, when one could expect mostly objectivity most of the time, but it’s naive and sentimental these days. That’s not so bad, just consume more than one PoV and use your brain. Granted, less time efficient, but better than being a single-source trick.)
What are US purples to make of this mess?
Selfishly, let’s start with the impact to our Union, threats to which are the clearest and most present macro danger we face. Anything that divides us serves the interests of our enemies: Russia, China, Iran and their minions/puppets like North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela and Hungary … not to mention our internal pro-Putin factions, the minority of the minority who have exploited our Constitution’s systemic flaws in essence to hamstring Washington’s ability to act with what Hamilton called energy.
So to my Muslim friends in Michigan: now that you’ve vented your anger on Grandpa Joe, try to think clearly. Do you really believe Donald Trump will come to Gaza’s rescue??? … Spanko Don who moved our embassy to Jerusalem; who wanted to ban Muslims from entering the country; whose beloved apple-of-his-eye daughter converted to Judaism when she married; a Christian Nationalist oligarch from what Jesse Jackson infamously called “Hymietown”; whose largest political donor was Sheldon Adelson, whose widow Miriam is the richest Israeli in the world; etc…???
Wake up.
Wokesters, ditto.
Don’t get me wrong. I wish we lived in the World Order that was naively optimistically envisioned after we won the Cold War. Where the Athenians’ civilized Safe Rule from the Melian Dialogue was ubiquitous:
This is the safe rule — to stand up to one’s equals, to behave with deference towards one’s superiors, and to treat one’s inferiors with moderation.
Montesquieu would certainly approve that last word.
A world where the worst fate suffered by conquered inferiors is akin to that of the defeated Axis powers after World War II (East Germany excepted), rather than, say, the Incas, Yazidis, Armenians, Uyghurs … or Melians.
Of all the places on the planet (that matter) which seem least likely any time soon to sign up for such a World Order, the Levant … the broader Middle-East, for that matter … has to come top. Gaza is to that part of the world what Sarajevo was to Europe: where all the tectonic plates of history in the region grind and clash together.
As we think about this havoc not through a purely selfish America First lens, but rather from the posture of a Great Power that has matching Great Responsibility, what then? How can we balance the championing of bougie-morality values like Human Rights and Laws of War, Freedom, Justice and ‘Democracy’ with clarity about the Master Rule?
Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled Israel off and on for almost thirty years now. His clarity is crystal. He famously views his country and people as being surrounded by mortal enemies, engaged not in a struggle with Zionism but with “modernity”.
It’s true that most of Us moderns would find Tel Aviv to be quite normal, in contrast to Riyadh, Cairo, Damascus or Baghdad, let alone Khan Younis. Secular Israelis are mostly indistinguishable in their outer presentation (fashion, grooming, comportment, cosmopolitan habits, norms, …) from North Americans and Western Europeans.
The Hamas attack on October 7 was so shocking to many of us because the images and sound from the Re’im music festival, various kibbutzim and then subsequently of the hostages and their families were so “us” … could have been Coachella. Everybody was speaking (mostly American) English.
Whether the terrorists committed atrocities like systematic rape and baby beheading or not, pace AlJazeera, is really a nit, from my American perspective. It was an orchestrated sneak attack on civilians, just like 9/11. Surely they knew what response would come.
It wouldn’t be a slave-morality, proportional, infantry grunts handing out chocolate bars to the kids, measured first-do-no-harm-to-civilians limited policing exercise like the one that the US and its NATO allies ran in Afghanistan.
Think Old Testament. YHWH the god of wrath loosing his dog of war Joshua on the Canaanites.
Benzion Netanyahu’s³ son, as the head of government controlling the IDF, one of the most technologically advanced and powerful militaries on the planet, with his master-morality worldview, shared by enough of his fellow citizens to keep him in power for half his adulthood, was bound to get his Scipio Aemilianus on.
Or at least the 2024 equivalent thereof.
As rulers of a supernaturalist culture, believing all the martyrs destined for Paradise, it would be surprising if the leadership of Hamas cared much more for the fate of the suffering Palestinian civilians than do the callous Israeli soldiers peppering social media with their modern war trophy videos. Maximizing the information confrontation (aka propaganda) benefit from that suffering, that Hamas cares about a great deal.
Of course, ditto the Israelis from their civilians’ suffering.
It’s slave/bougie-morality values to wring one’s hands over these reciprocal atrocities, war crimes and genocide attempts, far away in distant lands. (Where are the tears for the 5x Yemeni civilians killed in that Saudi-Iran proxy conflict?)
And yet, as I have argued above, “Our” morality falls right into that bougie band. Our decision makers are very clear about the Master Rule, for which we should be thankful, and yet, with some few exceptions, they practice a foreign policy tilted in favor of slave-morality. We find abhorrent the suffering of innocents, even if that is and always has been, the law of nature.
“Accept what they must.”
So it should be: civilization … progress if you prefer … is very much about the noosphere improving upon the biosphere. Expand and better the cucumber test⁴ level of nature’s fairness encoded in DNA into something like Free World notions of rights, laws, liberty and justice for all, encoded in binding supra-national treaties, with teeth.
Some problems can’t be solved, though, only managed. The USA and Europe have taken on roles and responsibilities for managing the Middle East, at least to contain its potential for triggering global calamities, either crashing the world’s energy foundation or setting off World War III.
Unclear how we could do any better than we are as outsiders. The Islamic powers (say, Turkey, Saudi, Egypt and Iran) could potentially provide a solution, but if they won’t take on that responsibility, We shouldn’t make their problem our problem.
Any moral person should find the images of atrocities from both sides repulsive. There’s no way to do arithmetic on proportionality given the unconventional warfare aspect, however.
Our American imperative is to stay united. As a polity, we’ve been getting played like a fiddle by our enemies for two decades. Let’s keep our eye on that ball.
Outright schism here in the homeland is a much more pressing matter for ourselves, our friends and the planet than the millennia-old master-morality battles between the descendants of the fictional Abraham.
Notes:
[1] If you’re not familiar with the Melian Dialogue (as I was not until recently), it’s a short 4 1/2 page must-read. The upshot is that the conquering, colonizing Athenians swoop down on the little island of Melos in the Aegean Sea and give the latter an offer they can’t refuse: accept our overlordship and start paying tribute, but otherwise keep what you have, or we’ll kill all your military age males and sell everyone else into slavery. The proud Melians, morally offended that the Athenians, so renowned for their wise, just and civilized thought and ways, would play such hardball, stood firm, and got fate (b). With the Athenians then sending in 500 colonists to repopulate the island.
#HtWW
[2] On the Genealogy of Morals:
This “bad” of aristocratic origin and that “evil” out of the cauldron of unsatisfied hatred — the former an imitation, an “extra,” an additional nuance; the latter, on the other hand, the original, the beginning, the essential act in the conception of a slave-morality — these two words “bad” and “evil,” how great a difference do they mark, in spite of the fact that they have an identical contrary in the idea “good.”
[3] The father, Benzion (RIP), thought the river designating the Eastern limit of the YHWH-promised land is the Euphrates, not the Jordan, per Genesis 15:18–21. Never mind that in their own mythos, the patriarch for whom they’re named cheated his elder brother out of the birthright to that land. You can’t really claim to be modern if your legitimacy rests on supernaturalist fables.
[4] As much as I find the cucumber test and the rest of Prof. de Waal’s research profound and relevant to all things Purple Reign, in the spirit of evidence based reasoning, I have to point out at least one critic who rejects the fairness interpretation of the test: https://www.nature.com/articles/428140a. (Leave it to the internet.)
