Nostalgia is a form of wishful thinking. But there are two different types of nostalgia. One is unreasonable, for something that can no longer be, such as nostalgia for one’s forever lost youth. The other type is a longing for something familiar, because we have already experienced it and appreciated its positive aspects, but even though this something was experienced in the past, it is our familiarity with the events and phenomena in question, which allows us to extract their healthy essence from the past experience and desire to have them in the present, which currently lacks these elements, or strive to infuse them into the future. Such nostalgia is good and healthy, it compels us to learn from history, to analyze the merits and demerits of each event under consideration and to apply our analysis to the new reality at hand.
My nostalgia for the old world order focuses on the current temporary breakdown of bipolarity in international relations, which, I have no doubt, will eventually be restored to the world, as it has never really gone away. In this connection, here is an interesting Nietzschean passage from Menschliches (92), which, I believe, supports and clarifies my point, bringing together the concepts of equality and justice.---
“Justice (fairness) originates among those, who are approximately equally powerful: where a fight would mean inconclusive mutual damage, there the idea originates that one may come to an understanding, and negotiate one’s claims. The initial character of justice is the character of a trade. It has gradually come to appear as if a just action were unegoistic; but the high esteem for it depends on this appearance.”
Nietzsche clarifies his understanding of justice as fairness, which immediately discards any interpretation of justice as blindly following the law (“good or bad, this is the law!”), and sets our mind on the pursuit of the ideal of justice. Remarkably, Nietzsche incorporates into his discussion the uncannily familiar principle of restraint through the threat of “inconclusive mutual damage” (does the old and much vilified term “Mutual and Assured Destruction” still ring a bell?), but he also makes it clear that in order to achieve such a restraint (which is essentially the state of peace, as opposed to the state of [hot] war), the parties have to be “approximately equally powerful.”
The implications here are obvious. Without structural equality in the modern world there can be no stability, no justice, no peace.
In other words, the assumption of a single-superpower hegemony, which of late seems to have been so very much to the taste of the Washington politicians and their ideologically possessed advisers, not only does not promote, but, in fact, undermines the principles of stability, equality, and justice. By definition, hegemony has nothing in common with equality, thus overruling international justice and undermining global stability.
So, here’s the “new world order” to you!
Now, on the other hand, the existence of two superpowers on the international stage corresponds precisely to what Nietzsche calls “approximately equally powerful,” and it is between them that, according to him, justice ought to originate. The newest conception of “multipolarity” in the modern world (as opposed to bipolarity and the utterly phony concept of "unipolarity") looks to me as something slightly artificial and disingenuous, and also distinctly reactive, but at least it reveals a will to justice, which is more than can be said about the “one-nation’s hegemony” principle.
The multipolarity principle actually corresponds to the physical world in a state of flux. There appears to be no order in it, and multitudes of apparently independent forces are running amok. But just give this chaos a chance to settle down, and you will see a familiar pattern of polarization of forces around two major centers of power, positive and negative, and eventually this consistent and certain polarization will reorganize the chaos and will reestablish stability and predictability to the maverick system's order. Whether such course of events is desirable and welcome by all its constituents doesn’t really matter, as there is nothing an individual force can do of itself to prevent the reestablishment of the eventual bipolar stability.
For this reason, nostalgia for the old bipolar world order is not exactly the common kind of nostalgia for the good old times, which have passed away. When the current despicable state of the world becomes a thing of the past, only certain reprehensible characters can be nostalgic about it, but no person of good conscience anywhere in the world, certainly including America, should have a single good thought left about it, as this ‘New American Century’ has brought nothing good to America, but humiliation, isolation, and degradation.
Thus, my current nostalgia is a futuristic nostalgia for the once and future stability of the badly destabilized international system. As a result of the current instability, many thousands have already died and many more are yet to die, none of these deaths for a good cause, but most of them for a tragic nothing. It is ridiculous to infer from this that a bipolar cold-war world is problem-free, but at least the one we used to have, possessed a legitimate thesis and antithesis, and therefore it was a world about something, no matter how imperfect and even ridiculous that something may have turned out to be.
My nostalgia for the old world order focuses on the current temporary breakdown of bipolarity in international relations, which, I have no doubt, will eventually be restored to the world, as it has never really gone away. In this connection, here is an interesting Nietzschean passage from Menschliches (92), which, I believe, supports and clarifies my point, bringing together the concepts of equality and justice.---
“Justice (fairness) originates among those, who are approximately equally powerful: where a fight would mean inconclusive mutual damage, there the idea originates that one may come to an understanding, and negotiate one’s claims. The initial character of justice is the character of a trade. It has gradually come to appear as if a just action were unegoistic; but the high esteem for it depends on this appearance.”
Nietzsche clarifies his understanding of justice as fairness, which immediately discards any interpretation of justice as blindly following the law (“good or bad, this is the law!”), and sets our mind on the pursuit of the ideal of justice. Remarkably, Nietzsche incorporates into his discussion the uncannily familiar principle of restraint through the threat of “inconclusive mutual damage” (does the old and much vilified term “Mutual and Assured Destruction” still ring a bell?), but he also makes it clear that in order to achieve such a restraint (which is essentially the state of peace, as opposed to the state of [hot] war), the parties have to be “approximately equally powerful.”
The implications here are obvious. Without structural equality in the modern world there can be no stability, no justice, no peace.
In other words, the assumption of a single-superpower hegemony, which of late seems to have been so very much to the taste of the Washington politicians and their ideologically possessed advisers, not only does not promote, but, in fact, undermines the principles of stability, equality, and justice. By definition, hegemony has nothing in common with equality, thus overruling international justice and undermining global stability.
So, here’s the “new world order” to you!
Now, on the other hand, the existence of two superpowers on the international stage corresponds precisely to what Nietzsche calls “approximately equally powerful,” and it is between them that, according to him, justice ought to originate. The newest conception of “multipolarity” in the modern world (as opposed to bipolarity and the utterly phony concept of "unipolarity") looks to me as something slightly artificial and disingenuous, and also distinctly reactive, but at least it reveals a will to justice, which is more than can be said about the “one-nation’s hegemony” principle.
The multipolarity principle actually corresponds to the physical world in a state of flux. There appears to be no order in it, and multitudes of apparently independent forces are running amok. But just give this chaos a chance to settle down, and you will see a familiar pattern of polarization of forces around two major centers of power, positive and negative, and eventually this consistent and certain polarization will reorganize the chaos and will reestablish stability and predictability to the maverick system's order. Whether such course of events is desirable and welcome by all its constituents doesn’t really matter, as there is nothing an individual force can do of itself to prevent the reestablishment of the eventual bipolar stability.
For this reason, nostalgia for the old bipolar world order is not exactly the common kind of nostalgia for the good old times, which have passed away. When the current despicable state of the world becomes a thing of the past, only certain reprehensible characters can be nostalgic about it, but no person of good conscience anywhere in the world, certainly including America, should have a single good thought left about it, as this ‘New American Century’ has brought nothing good to America, but humiliation, isolation, and degradation.
Thus, my current nostalgia is a futuristic nostalgia for the once and future stability of the badly destabilized international system. As a result of the current instability, many thousands have already died and many more are yet to die, none of these deaths for a good cause, but most of them for a tragic nothing. It is ridiculous to infer from this that a bipolar cold-war world is problem-free, but at least the one we used to have, possessed a legitimate thesis and antithesis, and therefore it was a world about something, no matter how imperfect and even ridiculous that something may have turned out to be.
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