Justice in the New World Order: Reduction of Justice to Tolerance in the New Totalitarian World State

Peter A. Redpath
The new world order is a complicated, emerging political disorder with remote historical roots in Cartesian and Enlightenment sophistry and secularized Protestant theology, not in philosophy.1 Because the new world order is complicated, understanding justice in the new world order is also complicated. Proximately, the new world order began as the brainchild of some well-meaning Western intellectuals just after the end of World WarII, as a means to heal what at least one leading Catholic philosopher of the time, Jacques Maritain, described to be a world broken by postwar distress and the weight of rival economic, political, and ideological interests, increasing national antagonisms, and potential popular despair. Maritain thought that the supranational common good required a supranational community of peoples, a United Nations, and an intellectual/cultural organization within the UN, UNESCO, that would provide postWorld WarII political representatives from different nations with advice related to solving several interrelated and historically rooted problems necessary to building an enduring future world peace. These problems included (1)absolute national sovereignty; (2)Machiavellianism; and (3)reconciling wisdom and physical science, especially in modern technology.2
1. For a more detailed treatment of the new world order as a kind of anti-philosophical disorder, see Peter A. Redpath, The New World Disorder: A Crisis of Philosophical Identity, Contemporary Philosophy 16, no.6 (1994): 1924. 2. Jacques Maritain, Allocution du Prsident la premire sance plnire de la deuxime session de la Confrence gnrale de lUnesco, 6 novembre 1947, Son Excellence Jacques Maritain, Chef de la Dlgation franaise, in Clbration du centenaire de la naissance de Jacques Maritain, 18821973 (New York: UNESCO, 1982), pp.933.
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Maritain was convinced that the breach between wisdom and physical science made centuries ago within the teaching of Ren Descartes had become wedded to a Machiavellianism to solidify claims to absolute national sovereignty within nation states, making their international behavior morally and politically unjustifiable. Absolute sovereignty amounted to an attempt at political justification through Machiavellianism (might makes right) that makes appeals to natural moral law or just war theory irrelevant at worst, or, at best, incoherent. How could any modern nation appeal to just war theory based upon natural law, as the Allies did to condemn the behavior of German Nazis, when the modern nation-states essence, its self-definition, presumes that national interests and might trump everything else, including a natural moral law?3 Without a radical change in the Western notion of sovereignty, Maritain thought that the West had no intellectually coherent way, based upon natural moral law, of condemning Nazi behavior or of developing a new and better world order. Maritain also held that we cannot be wrong on a practical or theoretical intellectual level about what being human means and expect to be right in our scientific and political arrangements. We cannot eliminate the notion of might makes right, or absolute sovereignty, without simultaneously getting rid of the Cartesian divorce between physical science and wisdom that is part of the essence of modern thought started by Descartes. And we cannot eliminate this divorce if we do not correctly understand what makes us human beings. Science is a human act: the dignity of science depends upon the dignity of the human person. Maritain argued that to protect and preserve scientific dignity, to turn modern technologys applications to the worlds good, not its destruction, we need to recover a correct understanding of the human person and infuse the power of this understanding, and the disciplines of wisdom that support it, into physical science. To build a new world order, we need to reintegrate into physical science and culture truths from our classical ethical, metaphysical, and religious heritage.4 The discovery of atomic weapons initiated a crucial historical age in which we would have to transcend Machiavellianism and modernitys divorce between modern physical science and wisdom, freedom and scientific reason, or face civilizational extinction and global war.5
3. Ibid., p. 11. 4. Ibid., p. 13. 5. Ibid., pp. 1114.

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Maritain realized that only the right spiritual, moral, and metaphysical climate can produce that power of authentic political justice that can conquer Machiavellianism and enable us to recognize the existence of a natural moral law at work in history.6 Hence, Maritains notion of a new world order included the classical moral virtue of justice as a necessary condition, an essential means, for recognizing the existence of a natural moral law and modifying national claims to political sovereignty. He was convinced that authentic political justice among nation-states demanded international respect for the higher authority of the rule of natural law in international relations. According to Maritain, UNESCO would serve the work of peace by instilling in different nations deeply set convictions about such practical principles of natural law, enlarged by technology and a fraternal love that comes from God that has always shaken human conscience.7 In this way UNESCO could help national consciences prepare in our individual thoughts a willingness to accept an authentic sense of political justice, transcend Machiavellianism, accept a limited sense of political sovereignty, help heal the divorce between modern physical science and wisdom, and promote world peace.8 Hardly a year after Maritain outlined these recommendations, his close friend tienne Gilson wrote his prophetic The Terrors of the Year 2000.9 Gilson prophesied that the postWorld WarII era would yield no lasting peace and would become a time where science, formerly our hope and our joy, would be the source of greatest terror.10 At the close of World War II, Gilson claimed, with the help of Friedrich Nietzsche, we human beings had made our most astounding discovery: the great secret that science has just wrested from matter is the secret of its destruction. To know today is synonymous with to destroy.11 With Nietzsches short sentence They do not know that God is dead, Gilson thought that the transvaluation of Western values had started in earnest. Man wished to make himself divine.
6. Ibid., p. 13. 7. Ibid., pp. 1518. 8. Ibid., p. 11. 9. tienne Gilson, The Terrors of the Year 2000 (Toronto: St. Michaels College, 1949), p. 5. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., pp. 79.

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Gilson considered Nietzsches declaration of Gods death the capital discovery of modern times. We will find no upheaval to compare with this in the extent or in the depth of its cause.12 Nietzsches declaration of Gods death signaled a metaphysical revolution of the highest order that no United Nations, UNESCO, or renewed respect for natural moral law would overcome. For both Maritain and Gilson, the terrors facing the new world order are metaphysical. The chief clash of civilizations involves the centuriesold breach between science and wisdom: a metaphysical clash between the ancient and modern West. From time immemorial, we in the West have based our cultural creed and scientific inspiration, our intellectual and cultural institutions, upon the conviction that gods, or a God, exist. Yet suddenly, God no longer exists, or never existed at all. For Gilson the implication is clear: We shall have to change completely our every thought, word and deed. The entire human order totters on its base.13 Gilson thought that Nietzsches message was a metaphysical bomb more powerful than the atomic weapon dropped on Hiroshima: Everything that was true from the beginning of the human race will suddenly become false. Moreover, mankind alone must create for itself a new self-definition, which will become human destiny, the human project: to destroy.14 For Gilson, the metaphysical project of post-Nietzschean culture involved making war upon traditional truths and values: Before stating what will be true, we will have to say that everything by which man has thus far lived, everything by which he still lives, is deception and trickery. The new world disorder is one in which we are busy preparing the brave new world of tomorrow by first of all annihilating the world of today.15 Gilsons postmodern man is essentially Nietzschean,16 driven by a mad ambition to become totally free of any external moral restraints on moral or political behavior. Yet while we might wish to become absolutely free creators, this wish is an impossible dream. We shall perhaps be great manufacturers, Gilson says. [B]ut creatorsnever. To create in his turn ex nihilo, man must first of all reestablish everywhere the void.17
12. Ibid., pp. 1416. Gilson cites Nietzsches Ecce Homo, especially Why I am a Fatality. 13. Ibid., pp. 1416. 14. Ibid., pp. 1617. 15. Ibid., pp. 1718. 16. Ibid., p. 17. 17. Ibid., pp. 1820.

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Mad ambition, then, has become postmodern mans project: everywhere to reestablish the void, a new world disorder, by wrecking traditional Western values. Clearly, this older Nietzschean project is not Maritains new world order.18 It is the secularized ghost of Renaissance humanism, a continuation of the Enlightenment project to create a utopian new world order in which, against the intellectual and moral traditions of Jews, Christians, and ancient philosophers, the mad dreams of the poetic human imagination and utopian socialists replace reality. The new world disorder is universal surrealism, a total release of creative free spirit from all traditional controls: the spirit of the artist intoxicated with the surrealistic power of destruction. While we have lost the habit of talking about moral principles like divine law, we still hold onto its vestige in our secularized appeals to the voice of conscience. Thinkers in the spirit of Maritain still hope that a return to an understanding of the true nature of natural moral law might help us to bridge the gap between science and wisdom. Yet Gilson thought that such appeals display a catastrophic misunderstanding of the grandiose sophistry of the postmodern project: if we pretend long enough that it does not exist, perhaps it will go away. Unhappily, it will not. Gilson maintained that the father of postmodern mans existential project is Sisyphus, not Prometheus, as many new-age dreamers might believe. Our destiny has become the absurd and truly exhausting task of perpetual self-invention without model, purpose, or rule. Having turned ourselves into gods, we do not know what to do with our divinity.19 Finding ourselves totally free to engage in the perpetual task of endless self-creation, we resemble, according to Gilson, a soldier on a twenty-four hour leave with nothing to do: totally bored in the tragic loneliness of an idle freedom that we cannot use productively.20 The magnitude of the crisis we face is not something that we can solve, as Maritain had hoped, by using the UN, UNESCO, and appeals of conscience to the rulers of nation-states to recognize the existence of a natural moral law. Yet Gilson considered our postmodern story to be really quite old. Like the Jewish people in the time of Samuel, tired of freedom, we desire to put ourselves under the rule of a king.21 Having freed ourselves
18.Ibid., pp. 2021. 19. Ibid., pp. 2125. 20. Ibid., p. 24. 21. Ibid., pp. 2627; Samuel 8:722.

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from divine rule, the necessary political consequence for postmodern man is political enslavement by a totalitarian State. Having refused to serve God, we have no one left to judge the State.22 For Gilson, the explosion of Hiroshima was postmodern mans metaphysical statement that while we no longer want to be Gods image, we can still be Gods caricature. While we cannot create, we now possess the unlimited power to destroy. Empty and alone, postmodern man offers, to anyone willing to take it, the futile freedom he does not know how to use: He is ready for all the dictators, leaders of these human herds who follow them as guides and who are all finally conducted by them to the same placethe abattoir [slaughterhouse].23 Since postmodernitys chief problem is that we have lost our reason because we have lost God, we will not find our reason again until we have first found God again. And we will not find God again without the willingness to receive what still remains of grace today.24 To do that, we must turn our minds again to the world, to have them measured by the being of things, not by our unbridled and unmoored poetic imaginations. To Gilson, we would have to attempt once again to inhabit the universe of St.Thomas, in which the service of God and reason are compatible and produce in us order, beauty, and joynot nauseabecause, in this world, unlike the postmodern world, the necessary condition for the existence of one does not entail the necessary destruction of the other. Since the 1960s, Maritains project has been distorted by socialist intellectuals, and Gilsons admonitions fall on deaf ears. Instead of modifying the notion of national sovereignty in order to eliminate Machiavellianism from global politics, Western intellectuals increasingly have sought to undermine the authority of national constitutions and legal traditions in order to amplify Machiavellianism on a global scale. Through esoteric, tolerant, compassionate readings of national constitutions, they have fabricated newly discovered rights, many of which help to undermine family and social relationships, while subverting trust in classical moral principles and destroying national customs. National populations have become the sort of human herds that socialist dictators need to destroy national identity. Nietzsche has been wedded to the moral teaching of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Rousseau, tolerance is a metaphysical, not a
22.Gilson, The Terrors of the Year 2000, pp. 2628. 23. Ibid., pp. 2829. 24. Ibid., p. 29.

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moral, principle, and for the neo-gnostic Rousseau, metaphysics is a kind of history. It studies the universal spirit that Rousseau calls humanity. Metaphysics is therefore the history of the evolution of human consciousness, the universal human spirit, from backward states of selfishness and primitive religions like Judaism and Catholicism to that of a new political world order dominated by enlightened systematic science and the religion of love of humanity. Tolerance is this mythical historys chief engine of progress, an increasing willingness to incorporate all human differences into a higher state of socialist political consciousness.25 Hence, in the new world order that seeks to bring into being a oneworld socialist government, justice no longer means what it did in classical moral philosophy: being rightly ordered in the way we treat other people. And tolerance no longer means what it classically meant: enduring the existence of some evils for the greater political common good. Instead, proponents of the Nietzschean world order reduce the moral principle of justice to tolerance as compassion. In this new world order, enlightened systematic science and the religion of love of humanity replace classical philosophy, including metaphysics, realist science, and Judaism and Catholicism. Anyone who opposes this utopian socialist dream incurs the hubristic wrath and Pelagian zealotry of its proponents by immediately being labeled intellectually, morally, scientifically, or religiously backward. Crucial to this dream is the vision of some class of victims that socialists can identify as being exploited by adherents of prior, unscientific and religious prejudices. In this new world order, the exploited class is, by definition, innocent. It plays the same role in the new world order as the proletariat plays in the mythology of communism. In this agenda, Catholics, Jews, and Evangelical Christians are, a priori, bigots and essentially unjust, while socialist atheists and the exploited classes are innocent. By definition, history involves class struggles between the exploiters and the exploited. Given the complexity of the nature of the new Nietzschean world order and the disordered understanding of justice that animates it, we can forgive many people for not easily recognizing the sinister and often-masked zealotry that drives and sustains it. Not forgivable, however, is that we do
25. For a more complete consideration of Rousseaus teachings, see Peter A. Redpath, Masquerade of the Dream Walkers: Prophetic Theology from the Cartesians to Hegel (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Editions Rodopi, B. V., 1998), pp. 6799.

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not rightly oppose it once it is unmasked. To recover our philosophical, political, scientific, and theological sanity, we must reject the sophistry and animism that drives this agenda. We must seek to recover a human reason by accepting the reality of a created sense universe in which the being of things measures our intellect, and not the reverse. Otherwise we condemn ourselves and our posterity to the fate of Sisyphus: finding ourselves totally free to engage in the perpetual task of endless self-creation, as Gilsons soldier on a leave with nothing to do, totally bored in the tragic loneliness of an idle freedom that we cannot productively use and waiting for the call to the slaughterhouse. We deserve better, and so does our posterity.