Hi ,

Here is Meditation No. 4 - 2006 from the Capri Philosophical Park.

From duels to World War IV.

Imagine you are a nobleman in Vienna a hundred years ago. You go to a ball in the Habsburg Hofburg. There is also general Burghof, the Supreme Commander. You know him well. Also that he is very fond of young girls. Which is human; it happens even to American and Israeli presidents. But, in this case, you whisper to a friend that a beauty among the Cancan-girls, whom both of you happen to know, has told you that when the Big Man came to her bed he proved to be impotent.

Somebody overheard the whisper and told it to the general. His honour is badly hurt. He walks over and throws his gauntlet in front of you. Next morning both of you have to get up and risk your life in a duel – for a stupid whisper!

Such things happened 150 years ago not only in La traviata but, at about the same time as Verdi composed that lovely opera, for instance also to a famous socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle. In Germanic history “trial by swords” goes back some two thousand years. And now, in a collective form, it has tempted George W Bush.

 

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One of my pet ideas is that man doesn’t have only two, but three truly basic human needs. He desires not only food and sex but also honour, to win, to be an unchallenged Number One.

I don’t really know from where I have got the idea.

Possibly from the Matteus school close to where I live in Stockholm. It was built about a century ago. It is covered with moral exhortations for the young. One says: “Love your

fatherland. Live and die for its honour.”

Possibly from reading Thucydides, the great war-historian who died in 404 before Christ. He said that all wars could, on the deepest level, be explained by fear, self-interest and honour.

Or, possibly, from realizing that during mankind’s first six million years as non-chimpanzees, the average growth of mankind was less than two individuals per year. A fact that easily may have selected the feeling of honour, the will to win, to be Number One, and even Cain’s fratricide as a biological instinct.

Wherever I got it from, I am sure the sense of honour lies very deep in us.

On  September 11th 2006 close to three thousand America flags remembered the almost three thousand individuals who tragically died five years earlier from the insult to Pentagon,  the World Trade Centre and the United States of America.

This, bin Laden’s gauntlet, sent the Western world into a duel with Muslims and Arabs, something equally primitive and far more deadly than the duel that killed Lassalle. Are we now, all of us, to risk death in a Fourth World War to defend the American honour?

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Isn’t this question a bit cynical. Shouldn’t we deeply honour the three thousand who died in that cruel challenge?

The question may, indeed, seem cynical. But shouldn’t we ask: is it really the three thousand human lives that matter, or is it the American honour?

Since 1990 about equally many Americans have died on the roads as by the Al Qaeda horror. And this not only once but every single month!

Had we grieved all the mortal traffic accidents after 1990 we would in 2006 have use for over half a million flags. Had we restricted the sorrow to those who died in traffic only after the 11th of September 2001, we would, instead of 3,000, have needed 180,000 flags.

Why do the 3000 deaths lead us towards a fourth world war, (counting the Cold War as number three,) while the 180,000, outside of the suffering families, are forgotten?

May it be that a sacrifice on the altar of the car industry certainly is tragic, but it does not touch our honour, while an insult by Al Qaeda must result in a global duel?

 

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To find answers to such ugly questions, I believe that we need to combine two types of knowledge.

Francis Fukuyama, one of the world’s best known political scientists, recently published a book on the rule of the “neocons” in Bush’s Washington. It is filled with reports about how the best known names in that kabala have been thinking. But there is not a word, not a thought about Malthus, Darwin, Mendel or about biological instincts to repeat what the German general von Bernhardi once spoke of as “Germany’s right and duty to go to war”, now possibly ruling Washington.

Richard Dawkins, one of the world’s best known biological scientists, recently published a new edition of his thirty years old classic The Selfish Gene. In a companion book celebrating that anniversary, a group of scientists and others said Dawkins was a scientist who “changed the way we think.”

But did he really, on the truly important field? Dawkins and his friends have little or nothing about the Fukuyama problems, about the World Trade Centre, the war in Iraq, the preludes to the North Korean a-bomb or the intellectual kabala in Washington.

In order to overcome the Darwinian tendencies in all of us, that may lead humanity to a final duel with nuclear weapons in which both contestants will die, we should try to unite these two fields of knowledge, political science and biology.

May it not be so that only by understanding, by accepting as an innate fact, and yet by trying to master that aggressive animal human nature which too easily leads us into duels, will mankind stand a chance to survive a few generations yet.

 Capri in October 2006 

 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson

 www.philosophicalpark.org

 adler.karlsson@capri.it

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 





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