A Deeper Realism (from 2014)

 

Raymond Cattell's best argument against war, at least for evolutionary ends, is that it is the quality rather than the size of the group that should be the basis for natural selection, whereas in war, size has counted. In another sense of this idea, special forces now prove this point about quality over quantity in the fourth generation warfare we will now be engaged in.

 

This for me underlines the realist position on war and the strategic position of the U.S., which was reiterated by Barry Posen: the U.S. is enormously powerful, geography favors the U.S. due to ocean barriers and relativity weak neighbors, and we will best procure our security with a slow transition back to Realism, and away from the liberal and neoconservative idea of hegemony in the world, trying to maintain unipolar world dominance, which does not take into account identity politics, ethnic, national, and religious, which are most powerfully against a unipolar world.

 

The neoconservatives have taken the Hellenized position of a universal elite who think ideas can transcend tribes, cultures and epics, but this never worked well with America. Like Rome, we were, or used to be, too pragmatic for the idealism of Greek philosophy, we wanted to build roads more than philosophy.

 

Nevertheless, we need to build more than roads, philosophy needs to get back to philosophical naturalism. I believe Western religion also needs to affirm theological materialism. We are realistically evolving to Godhood in the material and supermaterial world, and we need long term realistic strategies to do so, in which war is to be avoided---as mentioned above, it destroys quality and favors quantity. And we need to take into account identity politics, ethnic, national, religious, which are most powerfully against a unipolar world. Ethnic or racial imperialism will eventually give way to ethnopluralism, with regions and states set aside for ethnic cultures and protected by some sort of federalism. Then we can all best get along. That is a deeper realism.