April 15, 2002

HOW TO SOLVE THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS

By Tom Plate

Just look for an imaginative synthesis of philosophers like Hobbes and Rawls to bring an end to the violence

(C) 2002 Asia Pacific Media Network

LOS ANGELES --- To understand the frightening and tragic turn-for-the-worse in the Middle East, mere reporting is not enough; one needs the wisdom of major figures of political philosophy.

Why do people so hate each other? Why not, answers the gritty English realist Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). His political perspective is absolutely essential for those who can't fathom why so many people in the Middle East (as elsewhere, of course) desire to slit each other's throats, blow up school buses and detonate plastique bombs in the middle of markets mobbed with shoppers. For Hobbes, that's no problem. Political man and woman are essentially horror shows: Left to their own devices, they'd eat each other alive. As Hobbes sees it, the current violence is a consequence of the evil of human nature made more vicious by the corrosive competition of clashing religious ideologies.

In the absence of a Truly Scary Big Brother or a “Leviathan,” as Hobbes called it, people, he wrote, would not live in peace, much less respect each other; they would not live as civilized creatures but predictably would create a kind of human jungle -- a “state of nature” -- with lives that would be, according to Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short.” In other words, a place just like the Middle East today.

Nor would contemporary philosophers have a problem fathoming today's Middle East violence. Take the great American philosopher John Rawls, who understands the inherent instability of political cultures viewed as fundamentally unfair. Rawls believes in the rationality of political man and woman -- as long as all were involved in political processes that produced a sense of justice and fairness. In the Middle East, so many people -- young, rootless, angry, living lives of noisy desperation that are in fact nasty, brutish and short -- feel imprisoned in a culture of poverty and oppression and for which a violent exit is the only way out.

Rawls' philosophy would point the troubled region to a new, all-inclusive political entity -- some kind of Israeli-Palestinian Co-Federation -- that would sharpen the empathy of the haves for the have-nots. (As another well-known philosopher once put it, “When a country is well governed, poverty and a mean condition are something to be ashamed of.” That was Confucius.)

To ensure that came to pass would be a Hobbesian Leviathan, instilling in all a fear of its authority. This might be a new international police force -- perhaps backed by the kind of worldwide coalition that 10 years ago could have brought Saddam Hussein to his knees, had the effort been permitted to proceed to Baghdad.

The Middle East is not just another political problem, subject to standard approaches. While well intentioned, the Saudi peace plan, offered up by Crown Prince Abdullah, is in the end inept because it fails to address the issues of authority and fair process and insists only that all Arab states offer normal diplomatic relations to Israel in return for the latter's retreat to pre-1967 borders. It's a nice idea, and because it's so bland it has a lot of support around the world; but it doesn't get at the root issues.

Philosophy is not just an academic exercise. Rather, great thinkers through the centuries have focused their powerful minds to solve the difficult problems of their time. And, since human nature changes little over time, the problems of our day are similar to those of the past. “Man is by nature a political animal,” wrote Aristotle about 22 centuries ago. He also wrote: “No great genius ever existed without a touch of madness.”

So what the violent Middle East needs most right now is a “crazy” and comprehensive plan that combines the shrewdness of Hobbes with the fairness of Rawls -- to create a well-policed Co-Federation of Equals.

(C) 2002 Asia Pacific Media Network