BIPOLARITY AS A CONDITION OF STABILITY

What is wrong with the new world order? It has lost clarity, predictability, balance. It has lost form, making substance virtually incomprehensible. All this because the old world order’s defining principle of bipolarity has been lost with the perceived loss of America’s main adversary, the USSR… Gloating over the imagined “victory” in the cold war, America has unwisely refused to recognize post-Soviet Russia as the successor to the USSR, the no less powerful reincarnation of her unvanquishable main adversary…
There is a thoroughly reassuring stability in the concept of bipolarity, mathematical, physical, philosophical, logical stability. Plus and minus, hot and cold, thesis and antithesis, A and not-A… Every “whole” is in need of a dichotomy, that is, in need of being split in two parts. Otherwise, there is only chaos and confusion… In the beginning of Creation, God created the heaven and the earth (two). Then God divided the light from the darkness (two)… And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas (another two again)… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (two, as each other’s helpers, and as a necessity of biological reproduction in higher species)…

These days America is languishing in a state of confusion. She feels that she needs bipolarity as a stabilizing factor in international relations, yet this vital condition of stability has suddenly become elusive and outright dangerous. Having remained one of the two poles of bipolarity, America has lost the balancing weight on the other end of the seesaw, and seems hurtling down for a crash landing. The old reliable Russia won’t do anymore, or else the phrase “we won the cold war” becomes a joke. The new unreliable China won’t do, as China is America’s biggest creditor, and it may be too financially dangerous to declare her America’s “main adversary”… I guess this may be one of the reasons why the nation is under such great domestic pressure to declare the whole Islamic world America’s main adversary in the twenty-first century. After all, it is kind of unbecoming for a global superpower to have identified Iraq, or Afghanistan, or these days Iran and/or Syria, etc., as her… greatest enemy?! Well, enough of that! Let us spare this great nation such a humiliation, and return to the “old reliable” Tocquevillian dichotomy of America versus Russia.

My new miniseries on the geopolitical principle of bipolarity now proceeds with an excerpt from my article Russia: The Misplaced Key to a Stable World, written in December 2002.

In the game of geopolitical chess, played by America and Russia, the Russian side should not be allowed to impose its rules on others, but neither should their worldview be thoughtlessly and recklessly dismissed. In fact, their position does make sense. The Russian preoccupation with philosophical dichotomy and with the postulate of bipolarity as a basic condition for the world balance, and the resulting rationalization of the two-superpower concept, have resulted in the following formula:

America + Russia = World Balance.

In this context, surprisingly, but effortlessly, we get the key to Hesiod’s rather enigmatic pronouncement, in his classic Works and Days: “They are fools who know not that the half is better than the whole.” It starts making perfect sense as soon as we apply it to today’s New World Order. Only a fool would deny that there is not much glory in being the world’s one and only superpower, as America claims to be. I am sure that the erstwhile days of cold-war two-superpower confrontation, when America was the true leader of the Western world, are sorely missed by all thoughtful patriotic Americans, who look around these days, and do not like what they see.

It may gratify us to be gently reminded that the concept of balance is not Russia’s invention, but a general philosophical principle, which, in this or that form, has existed throughout the ages. Of less ancient origin, but eminently instructive, is the curious political concept invented by the British, and known as “balance of power.” It might go something like this: “If your friend emerges as (the only) superpower, you ought to ally yourself with your enemy, in order to restore the balance of power.” The fact that the British are still good allies of the United States shows only one thing: that they have not given much credence to the rumor of the other superpower’s demise.
But anyway, whether we like it or not, we have to admit that the single-superpower concept can produce no such balancing formula and can offer no effective solution to a world crisis, except a military solution. Nor does it conjure up a mental picture of balance, like the seesaw analogy. It seems rather like a vortex, which definitely lacks stability. What also makes sense in this two-superpower concept is that it does not require us to bend the rules of the geopolitical game, because its basic parameters are already naturally and fully in existence. As we have seen earlier, both America and Russia certainly meet the superpower definition by virtue of their self-awareness of their national destiny, and by virtue of their exceptional military strength, resulting in their unique capacity for mutual and assured destruction.
Their philosophical compatibility is further demonstrated by their mutually complementing international messages. America’s undisputed message is: “I’m the leader of the free world.” Russia’s less obvious claim is as follows: “Freedom is the luxury of the rich. I want to represent the poor, to be the alternative to Pax Americana.”

After this instructive foray into the Pantheon of my unpublished writings, let us take a specific look at the subject of bipolarity first raised here.
(To be continued in my next entry…)

JUSTICE AS... RESPECT

Previously we were talking about the amorality of justice, once we accept the formalistic definition of justice as “obeying the law.” Laws can be good or bad, and their indiscriminate enforcement, or blind obedience to them, makes the issue of morality and virtue irrelevant to the subject of justice. This is however unfair to the concept of justice as a pursuit of the ideal, which is “moral” justice, and therefore, being “just” has become a synonym of righteousness.
Justice as the embodiment of all human virtues is the idea promoted by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher-poet Theognis, much admired by Schopenhauer. “Every virtue is included in the idea of justice," he says, "and every just man is good.” The Bible is of the same opinion, equating the just man with the virtuous man, as is clear from these words of Jesus, in Luke 15:7: “I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.” (Now, let us be fully aware here that the last sentence contains two profound ideas: one, that sincere repentance is by far rarer, and therefore by far more valuable, than ordinary righteousness, and the other, of principal interest to us, that just persons need no repentance.)

This concluding entry of the Justice series deals with probably the most important aspect of ideal justice, so far left undiscussed, which happens to be the heart and soul of the concept of International Justice, sine qua non.
Ironically, the most perfect clue to this elusive concept is found in a rather unexpected place, but first, let us look at several key formulations of justice, in addition to those that we have already quoted and discussed.
The idea of justice as suum cuique  is also attributed to the Greeks, although its most succinct formulation belongs to Cicero: “Justice is giving everyone his due. Justicia suum cuique distribuit.” The same meaning is conveyed by the Institutes of Justinian: “Justice is the earnest and constant will to render to every man his due.
Epicurus says that “Justice is a contract of expediency, entered upon to prevent men from harming or being harmed.” Hobbes rephrases this as “Justice [consists] in taking from no man what is his.”
In St. Thomas Aquinas’ formulation, justice sounds very much like Kantian categorical imperative: “Justice is a certain rectitude of the mind, whereby a man does what he ought to do, in the circumstances confronting him.”
There are many other formulations of justice that are less specific, such as, say, “Justice is the end [meaning the purpose!] of government,” but I am not going to mention them here, because they lack specificity. But, as I promised up front in this entry, here is the formulation, which has impressed me the most, and which is, in my opinion, the most useful of all, in its application to the concept of International Justice. It comes from a rather unexpected source, namely, from the great French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon, and here it is in my abbreviated version:
“Justice is… respect… for human dignity.”
(I will now give the full passage here for the record, although I am tempted to quote it again and again in the superb abbreviated form above: “Justice is spontaneous respect, mutually guaranteed, for human dignity, in whatever person it may be compromised and under whatever circumstances, and to whatever risk its defense may expose us.”)
It looks like in our day and age, respect is the commodity in shortest supply. No wonder that our world is so menacingly besieged with all those seemingly insurmountable problems… (Come to think of it, however, we must not discriminate against our day and age by singling it out. Apparently, M. Proudhon had become an anarchist, in the first place, exactly because the state of justice in his day and age didn’t exactly correspond to his own ideal of justice.
…But anyway, I shall leave it to the reader now to marvel, as I do, at the sheer beauty of that last expression of ideal justice, originating with Proudhon, and at its immense implications for the critically important, albeit so terribly elusive, concept of International Justice.

JUSTICE OF THE RICH AND JUSTICE OF THE POOR

Talking about the concept of International Justice, one cannot be that naïve as to suggest that the time will come one day that all national laws will be effectively abolished to give way to a universal law, one justice for all the world, so to speak. The ideas of justice differ from nation to nation, depending on their cultural background and various other circumstances. By the time I am through with this section, I intend to have proven that the cultural differences may not be quite as incompatible as the other kind, pitching the world nations to the opposite sides of the fence, according to the oldest and most irreconcilable of all divisions of the rich against the poor.
As long as the wealth of the richest nations has not started to be distributed equitably, and with equanimity, by the United Nations (which utopian dream of the poor nations I am by no means advocating here, such a dream being too naïve to possess any practical value), the rich and the poor shall always be divided, not just politically, but, even more importantly, psychologically. They subscribe to two quite different sets of social morality, and not exactly what Nietzsche is calling master and slave morality. As a matter of fact, the rich may possess the traits of slave morality to a much larger extent than the poor, while many poor nations are closer in theirs to Nietzsche’s understanding of master morality.

(This point is discussed at length in several places throughout my book, and for reference I am providing, at the end of this entry, an excerpt from one still unposted, and another in toto, which was posted previously on January 17, 2011 in a cluster of entries under the joint title Survival Of The Fittest. )

Along these lines, the justice of the poor may contain a bias of resentment toward the rich, and the justice of the rich may be too condescending and insensitive toward the poor. The laws of the wealthy are certain to contain many more provisions for the protection of private property, and are always aimed at the stability of their financial institutions. The laws of the poor, on the other hand, tend to be more collective-friendly, but less individual-friendly, and so on.

Considering that justice is an expression of morality, one justice for all appears like a utopian proposition as well, until we are ready to accept the fact that the reality of international justice can amicably coexist with a multitude of national justices, by virtue of the same principle that, say, the state laws in the United States of America coexist with the federal law. If the American North and South were able to coexist for some three quarters of a century, before the Civil War, under the common umbrella of the federal law, it can only mean that the practicality of the idea of International Justice may not be so pathetically far-fetched, as it appears at first sight. So what if the Eskimos, for instance, have nineteen different words for our one word snow? It does not follow that either they have to abandon eighteen of theirs, or that every African nation has to start looking at the snow as the Eskimos do. The principle of basic relevance will decide, in the case of common justice, which of the respectively contradictory laws are relevant to the development of the common ground and which are irrelevant and can be left alone. It is only in the extreme cases of a fundamental contradiction when some radical readjustment will have to be made, but such cases will be few and their resolution on the basis of their exceptionality, provided that there is a common will to overcome the differences, cannot, and must not, become an impassable stumbling block.
Thus, it is actually possible to reconcile the justice of the rich with the justice of the poor without having to integrate one into the other, or something like that. But such a reconciliation can only be possible when our dissimilar systems of justice are prepared for it, an internal fine tuning of sorts has taken place, promising a mutual tolerance.
So, here I go again, returning to the most unfortunate situation with the International Courts at The Hague. Ironically, most poor nations have embraced this product of the rich European fancy, yet one of their own, the United States, has chosen to repudiate it, spelling a severe internal discord, and the inevitability of the ultimate failure.
It is therefore the most natural conclusion that, before any collective attempt at developing an international justice system can be made, the family issue of the ICJ plus ICC, at The Hague, must be settled between the European Democracies and their detractor-in-chief the United States of America.

An Excerpt From My Still Unposted Entry Master And Slave Morality.

...There is a very delicate line of thought followed here, which may be seriously impaired or even misread, if we pursue it out of simplicity and philosophical complacency. On the surface of it, “master morality” ought to be preferable to “slave morality,” as we are psychologically conditioned to assume that a master is higher than a slave. Master morality is thus associated with higher morality, whereas slave morality is a creature of resentment and submission molded into one. Someone like Uriah Heep is thus a perfect example of a slave, whereas, say, Sarastro of Mozart’s Zauberflöte is a perfect example of a master. Next, we quickly come to realize that a master in life can be a slave at heart and vice versa. Those Roman Emperors who were merely pawns of the Praetorian Guard, installed and dismissed at the whim of the latter, must have been base slaves at heart, whereas the real-life slave Spartacus, or all those famous and not so famous Greek slaves employed by their Roman masters to educate and enlighten their children could not possibly be slaves at heart, but had to be something close to a master personality, and therefore in possession of master morality...


Master And Slave As The Chicken And The Egg.
As an afterthought, I would like to keep on going on the subject of Nietzsche’s master and slave moralities, which he discusses first in his Menschliches (45), then in Jenseits (260), and later at length throughout his Genealogie, and elsewhere.
Here is another interesting variation on the master-slave dichotomy. I wonder if Nietzsche ever considered the synchronic versus diachronic question of causal coincidence or precedence of the two moralities? Can ‘slave morality’ be considered just as inborn as ‘master morality,’ boiling down to the distinction between the strong and the weak, both of which are to be seen as synchronously normal forms of human existence? In that case, strong and weak are like tall and strong, or dark and blond, nothing more than two alternative variants of the species, and the difference between their respective moralities, even if it is as pronounced as our friend Nietzsche would like us to believe, is purely coincidental, or even existential, in case morality is seen as an existential mode determined by the congenital qualities of strength or weakness.
Should we however wish to subscribe to the Darwinian survival of the fittest theory, while understanding by the term fittest a natural selection of the strongest members of the human race, the coincidence of weakness could be characterized merely as the least viable byproduct of human civilization, which in such a case will legitimize the enduring persistence of human weakness, but only by presenting weakness as a recurring birth defect, in which case, slave morality is no longer one of the two alternative norms, but a totally derivative type of morality, connoting a mental readjustment of the dominant master morality to a life with that birth defect.
But the argument does not end there. In the animal kingdom, where the most basic type of the survival of the fittest rules, yet where from the outset there are the predators and the prey, the coyotes and the rabbits, the wolves and the lambs, the ones ‘discharging their strength’ and motivated by their aggression, and the others… what? Do rabbits and all those animals who are not carnivores, and have been born to be hunted by other beasts, have some kind of innate instinct of self-preservation, which allows them to stay alive as a species, and not to be eaten in toto off the face of the earth?
Now, if the life purpose of the victims, such as rabbits, is to perpetuate their species as food for the beasts of prey, and in order to fulfill this purpose they have been endowed with a greater than average proclivity for procreation, how is this excessive fertility talent to be justified, or forcibly restrained, under Isaiah 65:25?--- (“The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock… They shall not hurt, nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord.”)
Transposing Isaiah’s vision from the animals to the world of human strengths or weaknesses, as pertinent to our discussion, it is possible to visualize the strong acting “like weak” in the Isaiahan creation. I am curious, however, as to how this act of willpower affects their master morality, that is, whether their “new morality” now becomes something else (I cannot even imagine the “like-weak” by choice to adopt the slave morality of the weak by necessity!). By the same token, how does the new world affect the morality of the weak? It is not possible for the weak to become strong in the new creation as, in that case, the strength or the weakness are only a matter of choice, and slave morality is an instrument of dissimulation, which reduces the morality of the weak to a reprehensible vice, rather than allowing it to perpetuate as an alternative type of acceptable morality. I can compare this to Isaiah’s lamb, who does not turn himself into a lion, nor stops being a lamb, but carries on his old role, this time, however, without the urge to flee from the wolf, that is, without fear.
Here, in this absence of fear, is probably the answer. The lamb has no more fear of the wolf not because of his sudden and independent change of attitude, but as a result of the change in the attitude of the wolf which has been made demonstrable and convincing to the lamb.
Considering that generally speaking, the strong instill fear, while the weak are fear’s victims, the absence of fear changes the equation quite radically and both the master morality of the strong and the slave morality of the weak are to undergo a substantial change, resulting from the removal of the fear factor.
Furthermore, taking into account the fact that the above-described change did not make the strong weaker, nor the weak, stronger, but that the removal of fear was dependent on the actively changing attitude of the strong, and the changing attitude of the weak was in this case demonstrably reactive, we can conclude that slave morality is derivative from master morality, which solves the case of the chicken and the egg… Or is it a case of non sequitur? Let us ask this question out of curiosity, but without a rush to get it answered right away.

JUSTICE WITH AND WITHOUT MERCY

We have seen in the previous entry how Nietzsche sees life “according to nature” as a life without mercy and justice. Does it mean that justice and mercy always go together, or can a society have a condition of justice without mercy, and, conversely, of mercy without justice?
Let us bring in a few short passages from Hobbes’s Leviathan to clarify the Englishman’s conception of justice:
“To this war of every man against every man nothing is unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place. Where there is no common power there is no law; no law, no injustice.” (Leviathan XIII.) “…In this law of nature is the fountain of justice. For, where no covenant has preceded, there has no right been transferred, and every man has right to everything, and, consequently, no action can be unjust. But when a covenant is made, then to break it is unjust, and the (nota bene!) definition of injustice is none other than the non-performance of covenant and what is not unjust is just.” (Leviathan XV.) And lastly: “By a good law I mean not a just law: for no law can be unjust.” (Leviathan XXX.)
Here is a most interesting contradiction to Nietzsche’s life according to nature as a life without mercy and justice, and it is Hobbes’ idea of justice, as Hobbes claims that no law is unjust (in other words, the phrase unjust law is to him oxymoronic), that there can only be good or bad laws. Thus, justice, to Hobbes, means living under the law, good or bad. (Now, isn’t there such a thing as ‘Laws of Nature,’ in which case, living ‘according to nature’ may still mean ‘without mercy,’ but by no means ‘without justice.’)

How does all this affect our general discussion of international justice? Let us consider the situation with capital punishment in Europe and in the United States for instance. According to the laws of Europe, capital punishment is injustice. According to American law, it is justice. Considering that there is a longstanding practice of commuting the sentences of condemned persons, each time an execution takes place anywhere in America, this is justice without mercy. On the other hand, the practice of clemency represents mercy without justice, as it is granted outside the judicial system, essentially overruling the final say of the proper judicial process basically on the “whim” of the executive power. As another example, whenever a country without a death penalty provides asylum to a criminal facing what it sees as a “cruel and unusual punishment” in his own country where executions are lawful, this is also a case of “mercy without justice,” as the said criminal does not fall under the liberal country’s jurisdiction.

Now, how does one reconcile this discrepancy in developing the umbrella of international justice? When two opposite legal opinions, representing the oppositely inclined laws of the nations, standing behind them, clash, the compromise ought to be necessarily worked out on the side of mercy, because the stand of mercy in such cases is uncompromising, whereas the law allowing capital punishment also allows the exercise of leniency, and is therefore extremely pliable and accommodating. In other words, the European law in this case is a strong law, because it is being enforced without contradiction, while the American law is weak, as even the American system of justice itself envisages that this law would be routinely undermined by the mechanism of clemency.
Another argument in favor of justice with mercy, as the stronger protagonist for the system of international justice, is the expected observance by all members of the world community of the Geneva Convention, with regard to the humane treatment of the Prisoners of Wars.

Which leads me to conclude that in a future convergence of mutually contradictory national laws (should it become possible at all!), the law of capital punishment, as well as any such law exhibiting a state of justice without mercy in such civilized countries which are still allowing it, will eventually be abolished.

LIVING "ACCORDING TO NATURE"

So far we have been talking about the consequences of the concept of “natural law,” as long as it is equated with God’s Law, or Ideal Law. The ambiguity of this term, however, reveals itself instantaneously, when this simple and sound equation is pushed back into the shadows, and the key word nature obtains the spotlight.
The most obvious way to demonstrate this ambiguity is by substituting the tidy formal term “natural law” with its virtual synonym “law of nature.” Earlier, I was purposely using these two variants interchangeably so that now I could be pointing out their nuanced dissimilarity. “Nature” as a noun in the second variant is somewhat more prominent than as an adjective in the first, and on hearing the words “law of nature” we are prompted to ask right away, whose nature exactly: "nature’s" nature, God’s nature, or man’s nature?! Only God’s Nature, of the three, is incontrovertibly ideal, even for those who do not believe in God's existence. In the case of man’s nature, most of us, post-Socratics, will consider it evil at worst, and corrupted at best. No ideal here. And as for “nature’s” nature, the very fact that we thus separate it from God’s nature, moves us into the "Darwinian" territory, and the law of that kind of nature, the survival of the fittest, puts the highest premium of all on physical health, muscle, and cunning,--- not exactly the qualities on which genius thrives.
Not surprisingly, Nietzsche jumps onto this ambiguity:
“‘According to nature’ you want to live? Oh you, noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being, like nature, wasteful, indifferent beyond measure, without purpose and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile, desolate, uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power, how could you live according to this indifference?” Jenseits (9).
The bottom line of the point I am making here is that there can be no conception of natural law without an ambiguity, unless it contains within itself the absolute, and the ideal, which cannot be effectively separated from the concept of God. It is therefore equally inconceivable to develop an idealistic concept of international justice without an appeal to absolute morality, in other words, to God’s Law.
Now, what was so wrong with the Stoics? Was it their vanity or their hypocrisy, which ticked Nietzsche off? Or maybe he was offended by the false identification of some of their mediocrities who, throughout the ages have wanted to dress up in the greatness of their general idea? Otherwise, they would not be guilty of misrepresentation. They are, indeed, living “according to nature.” Because nature is not one giant anthill, or a beehive. She has given birth to creatures of both kinds: creators and conformists, men of fiction and men of… well, “facts of life.” These two kinds are in direct opposition to each other, yet both live according to nature, the mother of the great multiplicities of natures, their own nature given them, to each his own, by their common mother nature.
And, finally, isn’t this contradiction properly noted in philosophy by a parallel contradiction, when Hobbes, for instance, uses the word “nature” in two different and incompatible contexts: the man living in a state of nature which is lawlessness and war of every man against every man; and then the great artificial animal his Leviathan, which is created by man, like nature (man included), was created by her Creator, and cheerfully introducing the laws of God and nature to govern the Commonwealth, protecting it from the different kind of nature?
All of this, eventually, boils down to the virtual truism that if living according to nature means according to one’s own unique nature, “suum quique,” then the whole discussion of the “law of nature” also becomes truistic and meaningless. Apparently it is awfully easy to be carried away by the winds of such free-flowing discussion, and step into a quagmire of sheer demagoguery, where our words could mean just about anything, depending on how we spin them... But we do not want to do that.

"DEMOCRACY" AS THE LAW OF NATURE?

As we were just talking about "Natural Law," here is a little interlude on this subject. It boils down to my brief comment on a Hobbes passage, as applicable to our most recent discussion.
There must be no doubt about my partiality to Hobbes in such matters, particularly, in the instances of my criticism of current American  practices. As I have already repeated several times before, the English philosopher Hobbes represents that same branch of European sociopolitical thought, from which sprang its American offshoot, and therefore, there can be no excuse for a potential American detractor to dismiss this passage on the grounds of illi alienum putare.
The question of the ambiguity of the term “natural law” has already been raised in this section, and my next entry, Living According To Nature, will be discussing the subject of natural law much further, but this little commentary ought to stand on its own, and it is thus featured as a separate entry.
The teachers of “Democracy” to the world need to go back to school. Apparently, there is something very wrong with their education, or maybe with their mental capacity (or maybe with both), if they have not been able to commit the following passage from Hobbes’s Elements (9:15:1), to memory:
“…What it is that we call the law of nature is not agreed upon by those that have hitherto written. For the most part, such writers, as have occasion to affirm that anything is against the law of nature, do allege no more than that it is against the consent of all nations or the wisest and most civil of these nations. But it is not agreed upon who shall judge, which nations are the wisest.”
This exceptionally astute and modern observation, capped by the magnificent question, “Who shall judge, which nations are the wisest?” needs a prompt application to our reality, already distorted beyond belief. Generally speaking I suggest that the “law of nature” as such ought not to be sought in the national legal wisdom, even the most brilliant one, of any given nation, but in a consensus of national wisdoms, in general philosophy, and in the timeless Divine laws, as conveyed through the Bible, the Koran, and through other sacred traditions of the world’s major transnational religions.

JUSTICE, MORALITY, AND THE NATURAL LAW

As the reader may have noticed, I am still following the thread of International Justice, although the futility of its pursuit under current international conditions has been rather exhaustively proven already, in the first couple of entries in this series.
I do not intend to turn this entry into a lengthy philosophical tractate, therefore, my treatment of the issues involved here cannot possibly pretend to be exhaustive or even adequate to the “gravitas” of the title. There is little for me to add to the academics on this subject anyway, and this is not even my purpose. This entry is a continuation of me making certain specific points with regard to the concept of international justice as it is shaping up under the new world order, and, certainly, with regard to its prospects for the future.
The direct correlation of law and morality, and their natural synthesis in the concept of ethical justice, have been the centerpiece of legal philosophy throughout the ages. That such a correlation must fundamentally exist had been the starting point of all great philosophers, whenever they applied themselves to the subject of jurisprudence. The concept of natural law, whether derived from Plato’s ideas, or directly and indirectly from God (the latter origin cannot be reasonably distinguished from Plato's), has been the cornerstone of the majority of judicial philosophies, somewhat undermined by the down-to-earth strain of positivism and “sociological jurisprudence,” but never going away for good.
Now, this intrinsically idealistic natural law concept in whichever form it may present itself or be presented, is absolutely essential to the viability of our admittedly idealistic concept of International Justice. Without its idealism, however, we shall be bogged down in the technicalities of manifold national environments and circumstances, discovering, at the end of the day, that they are essential incompatible, and thus, effectively, subscribing to the fact of failure of the whole idea of creating an international justice system, as envisaged in the United Nations Charter.
On the other hand, the potent, and also empowering, idea of natural law holds within itself the danger that a single country can lay a unilateral claim to it, establishing its national right to this universal ideal, as several nations have done in the past, and as these days the United States has been vigorously promulgating. In this latter case, history, curiously, appears to be on the side of the American claim, as implied by the Founding Fathers in the 1776 American Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
I have no dispute whatsoever with the wonderful text of this historic Declaration, except that its claim can forever be misinterpreted by less-enlightened American Governments of later generations as their primordial imprimatur to impose their own versions of Pax Americana on the rest of the world, and we are, certainly, witnessing such an attempt today. What is missing, however, from this latest license issue is the fact that in conjunction with the refusal to recognize the authority of the International Court of Justice, Washington’s claim to the possession of the real thing makes a mockery out of one of the greatest political institutions in history, and, perhaps, even the greatest one to date, which is the American Government system, devised by the genius of this nation’s forefathers, and now being trampled into the dust by their lackluster successors. Sic transit gloria mundi!

The good thing about these bad times, though, is that our world has sunk into such turmoil lately, that the mammoth task of creating a workable system of international justice is yet once again coming to the fore… Unless this, too, is a product of my wishful thinking…