It all goes back to the cave. Plato stated the problematic most clearly; we all reside in a metaphorical cave with minimal light. In this murky world, reality is purely form, most of what we are able to discern are shadows cast by truth—we do not live our lives by facts, but an interpreted and extrapolated fiction. Our perceptions are borne more of naive hopes and sinister passions than the moorings of what is truly transpiring. And, why not? Dreams of a glorious future are much more pleasing than an accurate assessment of the present. We live in a world of cavemen, so enchanted with the shadows that they are beginning to effectively reshape reality to better reflect their delusion. In the social sciences, and more to the point of this venture, the field of international politics, the tension is between the world as it is versus how we would like it to be. This dichotomy is conventionally portrayed as a grand debate between Realism and Idealism. The naked brutalities of Realism, that the powerful do as they will while the weak suffer repeated injustices, have informed views from time immemorial. But so, too, has Idealism, the belief that our ideas about the world are a critical element in forging what ultimately and meaningfully constitutes reality. A central premise of this undertaking is that which has been revealed comparing and contrasting multiple perspectives and the multiple realities in which they are embedded. In the social sciences this method is often called "triangulation," but its origins and practice are common throughout the humanities and arts. For example, the distorted figures found in Picasso's Cubist paintings and the manifold narratives in Kurosawa's Rashômon. Here the task is to debunk myths and where possible make the science that explains their demise intelligible. Why must we re-imagine Plato's cave? Why now? Can't I live a fantasy, if not just for a while longer? Of course you can, indeed, the powers that be are counting on it. Call me a nut, but while I harbor no illusion that the world will be saved by an enumeration of how doomed we are, I want to appreciate the apocalypse in its many forms. If you are going to witness the end of civilization as we know it, catalog its rainbow-like splendor with the most vivid crayons at your disposal. Furthermore, the palette offered by a vast majority of the news-media, the infotainment industry, is an absurd insult. Mark Twain’s biting assessment of foolish citizenry coupled with manipulative media—“If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed”—has never been more true. But to the point at hand, the bliss of denial in international politics is increasingly shattering, ever more intruding into the bubble narcissism that has invariably defined our parochial interests; the common fate that awaits us is the spawn of our own demon-seed. There are fewer and fewer places to hide in this world; the Enlightenment, Western imperialism, and economic interdependence, and cultural globalization have irreversibly bonded humanity into one system, for better, and more likely, for worse. As a result, we all have a stake in international politics. You may not care what's happening to estuaries in Chile, child-soldiers in Uganda, or cargo containers in China, but it has something to do with you. Thus, here the project at hand is to sharpen sensitivities to, connect the dots of, and point fingers in international politics. I am still naive enough to believe that knowledge is power—ideas matter; there are values people are willing to kill and die for. While my own critical articulation of the world could easily be hushed by brute force, ideas cannot be silenced so readily. A world of words is an imprecise filter, often subject to manipulation, both subtle and gross. We must keep in mind that the world of words is not the world, but a world—one of many. A more powerful fulcrum in the larger, aggregated world are people, people who live and die by ideas about the world. And that's why it comes back to the cave and to Plato: to know the distortion of the cave and to fathom the nature of cavemen is to know the world today, to be an informed and, therefore, a responsible global citizen. In exploring the darkest of caves we will see things that sparkle mighty prettily but we will also be subject to the molds and spores of billions of political sins that infect a universe of cavemen. |
