In the final analysis, human fragmentation into separate and competitively hostile states is unnatural. Because it is contrary to intellectual understanding and natural law, such fragmentation always makes it impossible to fashion a just and survivable global order. , it also renders impossible any long-term American future.
What should be done? Suitable transformations are needed, but first there must be determinative visions. In world politics and world law, such transformations must always stem from antecedent ideals and ideas. At the core of needed visions must be the individual human being, or “microcosm.
” As for the larger political, legal and epiphenomenal universe, or “macrocosm,” it will necessarily be a more-or-less direct reflection of accumulated “little worlds.” Macrocosm mirrors microcosm. Taken as a totality, the internal balance of individual human beings inevitably shapes the internal balance of world order.
To create a just and durable global civilization, therefore, humankind will first have to create equilibrium within the microcosm. In the best of all possible worlds, the perfect symmetry of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man” would be replicated by the planet as a whole. There are variously derivative obligations of this comprehensive vision.
American and other world political leaders would be well-advised to acknowledge the inherent survival limitations of a world legal order based on perpetual conflict. The point of such an indispensable ackno.