THE DIALOGUE OF EURASIAN CIVILIZATIONS

Earth's Next Fifty Years

by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

December 19, 2004

This relatively fulsome report is required by the importance and urgency of addressing what has been a poorly understood, but now immediately onrushing threat to civilization as a whole. My purpose here is chiefly to correct a menacing lack of general awareness of certain among the most urgent, and potentially deadly of the practical implications at issue in current, probably failed efforts to conduct a needed dialogue of cultures. That need is indicated by the great likelihood that the effort on behalf of that dialogue would turn out to be a catastrophic failure for mankind today, unless certain relevant, wrong, but presently popular assumptions about that dialogue were pinpointed, and some among those errors corrected by aid of some painstaking attention to detail, as I do here.

Our plan of attack in this report, must be to define the origins and nature of the present mortal threat to civilization on this entire planet, and then provide this critical assessment of the errors and options in the currently attempted use of a dialogue of cultures as an optional remedy for the present threat.

However, participation in this dialogue can not be limited to representatives of that largely failed generation which has played an increasing role, in steering the world and its respective nations into the deadly present, cultural mess produced by developments of the recent four decades. We would fail our purpose unless we also said what needs to be said, specifically, to the presently emerging adult generation, especially those of the age-interval 18-25, to whom we are implicitly entrusting the future of mankind. We must tell this young adult generation all that they need to know, and must always say these things to one another in the hearing of that entire generation of young adults into whose hands we are intending to dump the execution of the solution of this problem now looming before us.

It is, unfortunately, now customary, to attempt to conduct a dialogue of cultures with a certain preference for broad generalities and sentimentalities, an agenda which avoids the controversial concreteness of attention to the who, how, what, when, and where of certain current problematic discussions, discussions which some among us might prefer to avoid, rather than resolve. In this case, excessive attention to courtesy unfortunately often avoids not only issues of "personalities" which need to be faced, but, therefore, for reasons of courtesy, also avoids needed precision in defining concrete, substantive remedies for problems which must be frankly addressed if durable progress is to occur. Concrete remedies, even if they are sometimes also controversial, are what the present situation requires, that urgently. Victory sometimes lies in the direction of a strenuous climb up the hill.

I now proceed accordingly.

That said, the immediate crisis dictating the urgency of a dialogue of cultures can, and must be pin-pointed with aid of some concrete and sometimes abrasive observations, in the following exemplary way.

Those products of Harvard University's late Professor William Yandell Elliott's work, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, have concocted schemes, often in concert with a former leader of the United Kingdom's Arab Bureau, Bernard Lewis, aiming to build a fascistic, world-wide, Anglo-American parody of the Roman Empire. These notables, and others, have worked around such designs for "globalization" as Huntington's sequel to the design for what would be, despite his dubious attempted denials of that fact, an international-fascist SS system, his Romanesque The Soldier and the State. His noxious repertoire includes both his The Crisis of Democracy, which assisted in giving birth to the sophistries of "Project Democracy" and the National Endowment for Democracy, and also his recipe for world-wide religious warfare, his The Clash of Civilizations.[1] The relevant publications on strategy, and continuing international practice of Trilateral Commission initiator Brzezinski, are fully consistent, in their aims and disposition for pure evil, with the work of his long-standing crony Huntington.[2]

These present schemes for a somewhat novel, global, neo-feudal form of ultramontane tyranny, are often, wrongly, regarded as peculiar secretions of the U.S.A. Just as the British Arab Bureau was a rib taken out of the British imperial India office, the devilish antics of that pair and their accomplices, are actually offshoots of the continuing tradition of that February 1763 Treaty of Paris which created the British Empire to whose service the Old Fagin of Brzezinski's and Huntington's crew of Artful Dodgers, the Nashville Agrarians' Harvard Professor Elliott, devoted what is fairly regarded as his life's work. That is the Empire against which the American War for Independence was fought, the same Empire which repeatedly attempted the destruction of the U.S.A., chiefly either by force, or by subversion of the type which Professor Elliott and his crew represent today.[3]

The same principle of evil expressed by Brzezinski and Huntington, is found in the work of such as Brzezinski-linked former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and accomplices of hers, such as Richard Holbrooke, in the orchestration of the "new dark age" recipes unleashed in the Balkans wars, during her occupation of that post. Ironically, during that same period, she delivered an address in New York City, in which she, then a U.S. Secretary of State, not only confessed to, but bragged of her own and her father's association with the fascistic British imperial utopianism of U.S. hater Bertrand Russell's confederate H.G. Wells.[4]

The importance I attribute to that cast of characters is not a quibble. Just as it became the life-long intention of Harvard Professor of Government Elliott, and his like, to digest the U.S.A. within the Hobbesian intestine of a future form of a British imperial commonwealth, so the intention of Brzezinski, Huntington, et al., in all their works, has been to destroy the existence of the institution of the nation-state throughout this planet, including that of the U.S.A. itself: all this, and more, they did in favor of a current parody of a kind of world-wide imperial order which had been proposed by Lord Shelburne's lackey Gibbon in his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

That imperial intention is expressed today, as an attempted return to the same type of imperial order as the European medieval ultramontane system rooted in the centuries-long partnership of Venice's ruling financier oligarchy with the Norman chivalry of Crusades' notoriety. It is the kind of world order which had been expressed as the attempted revival of that ultramontane system by the 1492 initiative of that Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada who set the precedent for both Hitler's expulsion of the Jews, and for the launching of religious war throughout Europe, all as parts of an attempt to suffocate the then just newborn modern European sovereign nation-state in its cradle. It is the form of ultramontane imperialism expressed by the drive toward "globalization" today, an anti-U.S.A. doctrine of imperialism, a drive to eradicate the tradition of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia,[5] which is expressed by the current demands from leading circles which ought to have known better, from their memory of their experience of Adolf Hitler's ventures.

As the still relevant writings of Martinist freemasonry's Count Joseph de Maistre, the designer of the predatory Gallican tyrant and Romantic Napoleon Bonaparte,[6] make clear, the model represented by Torquemada is the origin of the emergence of the modern fascism associated with creatures such as the late Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Brzezinski and Huntington march, together with the spirit of their Professor Elliott, in that same tradition.

As a part of the fight against the spread of the evil of religious warfare which Brzezinski, Huntington, and their like purvey today, forces opposed to their schemes, such as Pope John Paul II, have promoted fresh efforts toward that truly agapic, ecumenical fraternity among the world's leading religions, reviving an effort which had been launched, during the Fifteenth Century European Renaissance, by great leaders of the Catholic Church such as Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa.[7] Others have redefined the task as an effort in support of a "dialogue of cultures," but that change in technical terminology introduces nothing actually new to European policy, beyond a more extended reach: since it merely forces the dialogue back into the same categorical form of discussion, if on a broader basis, as Cusa's original Fifteenth-Century proposal for a peace of faith among Christian, Moslem, and Jewish faiths.[8]

The same ecumenical effort launched by leaders of Europe's Fifteenth-Century Renaissance, can be better understood for its relevance to today's conflicts, by emphasizing the bloody-handed opposition by the Grand Inquisitor Torquemada to the ecumenicism of the mid-Fifteenth-Century Christian church of Cusa et al.

Torquemada expressed the reliance on the same ideological weapon of hate-brimming racialism used by Huntington, et al., which had been typical of both the ancient Roman Empire and the medieval ultramontane system of the Venetian financiers and Norman chivalry and their Crusades, as Torquemada unleashed the pattern of religious warfare which is typified by the 1492 expulsion of the Jews from Spain. That latter act of 1492 led into the subsequent unleashing of fratricidal religious warfare against the existence of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance's modern sovereign nation-state: a warfare which dominated the interval 1511-1648, until the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. It is, now, once again, the basis for the intention to uproot and eradicate the legacy of the Westphalian system, an intention which is the mark of what is, in fact, the lust for a fascist world empire-system expressed by the doctrines of Brzezinski and Huntington today. It is the current campaign for so-called "globalization," against the Westphalian system, which is the cultural expression of the present lurch of the planet toward its threatened new dark age.

The Present Situation

There is only one way in which the members of any chosen concert of national cultures could each competently assess its own judgment about the kind of future which that concert's currently proposed choice of impulses would bring into being. That duty would be, to track, and to judge the series of those qualitative changes in the world as a whole, by which that concert's own array of impulses would actually tend to foster the new forms of the deadly conflicts which it is our presumed wish to prevent. The question so posed is: With that included consideration in view, how must we judge, and, therefore, amend, any currently proposed concert of opinion?

The task that question implies, would be, for example: to visualize the physical outcome to be expected during an estimated test-period of not less than two generations ahead: from today's birth of the child to the birth of that child's grandchild. In today's circumstances, it were probable that any attempted ecumenical agreement among nations which existing institutions would probably choose at first hand, would tend to include elements which would lead toward a result which today's descendants would have good reason to curse, two or more generations later.

That kind of ironical outcome has been, for example, the record of the attempt to form a League of Nations, which was thoroughly self-discredited in less than one generation, and which even helped greatly to bring on World War II. A similar outcome is to be seen in the work of the United Nations Organization (UNO), which has been much more useful than the League of Nations, even indispensable at some moments, but which, at the present moment, about two generations after its creation, has now, as the case of Iraq today shows, failed awfully its presumed, primary, categorical objectives of nearly sixty years ago.

As an example of the disappointing performance of the UNO, take the example of the mid- to late-1960s decision by the Anglo-American establishment, and others, to plunge into a "post-industrial" utopian future. That decision, for what was proposed as "ecological ecumenicism," which unfolded over the 1964-1981 interval, is what has been the chief cause, the key cultural paradigm used in bringing about, now most immediately, the presently threatened, self-inflicted doom of both the American and European economies. At this moment, the chain-reaction effects of that latter decision now threaten, in and of themselves, to carry the entire planet into a new dark age.

It should be obvious, that that countercultural impulse is also a deadly threat to any effort to define a "dialogue of cultures," by drowning it in what presently threaten to become its own self-inflicted contradictions. However, that is only an exemplary aspect of the larger obstacles to the success which are already internal to presently attempted dialogues of cultures. The general obstacles are chiefly of two types.

First, in general, the mistake contributed to the discussions by, at a minimum, nearly all among the relevant varieties of utopians participating in such attempts, has been, from the outset, that their characteristic assumption was, that the choice of the best agreement would be a kind of minestrone, the fruit of combining an eclectically formed array of "democratic" forms of proposal from each. It would be an agreement which sought to raise the relatively minimal objections from the pre-existing cultural and related presumptions of the others.

Under that inclination toward sophistry which is sometimes called "democracy,"[9] the crucial functional issues, the issue of the functional quality of lack of competence of some among the customary cultural impulses of the individual nation, and so forth, was not actually challenged in any efficiently scientific way. If matters are continued in that way, this would tend to become the crafting of a pact struck by the kind of competing lawyers who proceed from no common functional principle of what I shall define, below, in my own choice of argument, as natural law. Under a dialogue of cultures so ordered, the more the conflict is apparently resolved by agreement, the more it reappears in new forms in practice. Today, the common mistake is, to attempt to judge science from the vantage-point of tradition per se, rather than the urgent work of judging tradition, and sorting its good from its evils, sorting these out from the standpoint of a competent science.

The most deadly of the fallacies perpetrated in a misguided approach to a dialogue of cultures, is the notion that religion must be counterposed categorically to science. That deadly error of assumption, respecting alleged, and, worse, widely believed conflicts between religion and science, is addressed and corrected as a special feature of emphasis in the appropriate places within this report.

However, sources of mere confusion aside, the element of pure evil harbored, however inadvertently, in these referenced, inherently erring kinds of advocacy of so-called "democracy," is typified by the depravity characteristic of the existentialist irrationalism of the pro-Nazi Allen Dulles's Congress for Cultural Freedom.[10] Merely typical of the pro-fascist quality of that Congress for Cultural Freedom, is the so-called "Frankfurt School" existentialism of the Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and his Jewish Frankfurt School friends Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, et al.,[11] who, together with their fellow existentialists, and their allies among the American Family Foundation and its associates, combined their efforts to justify the fascism of the notorious "rat-line" and other Nazi cronies of Dulles et al., in the guise of professing to combat the cultural evils of Communism![12]

Thus, the effort became an attempt at compromises among cultural groups, which each assumed that a core-set of their current culturally-informed desires was considered self-evidently right. Those so duped into adapting to the Congress's characteristic irrationalism, assumed their respective, conflicting notions of "right" because, in each case, it was presented by them as existing a priori. The worst of the fascist existentialist philosophers, like Nazi Crown Jurist Carl Schmitt's one-time protégé Professor Leo Strauss, and Strauss's followers in today's George W. Bush Administration, adopted the philosophical bestiality of the combined real-life and literary character of Thrasymachus, that the power to rule arbitrarily, is the quality of lawful rightness to be claimed by a usurpatious, tyrannical regime such as Hitler's or President George W. Bush's.[13]

Secondly, we must ask whether the question of whether the proposed result would actually work or not, might have been axiomatically excluded from serious consideration. The exclusion of consideration of this error was made, more or less, on grounds of mutual respect for the other's axiomatic, inherently mutually incoherent sensibilities. It was thus excluded on the ground that such consideration would mean passing judgment "from the outside" upon the relevant value-system of each, or at least some, among the participating parties. The worst aspect of such attempts, was the proposal that the intrinsic incoherence of the principles attributed to the respective cultural-value systems, such as the arbitrary conflict attributed to inhere in the confrontation of European and Asian spiritual values, be treated as a positive principle!

The consequence of such searches for relatively, painlessly unprincipled agreement to disagree on principle, is the result of avoiding the crucial fact, that if something is really a principle, it must be a principle in the same sense we associate the term "principle" with the physical laws of our universe.

In other words, we must understand "principle" in the way the Classical tradition of Plato and of the modern science of Cusa, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann define scientific method: the way in which V.I. Vernadsky's experimental principle of the Noösphere defines a science appropriate for what must become a new, Eurasian culture. To evade a true principle, or to impose a false one such as the mass-murderous, Olympian "ecology cults"[14] of the recent four decades, incurs efficient penalties for all mankind, as this has been shown in the Apocalyptic results of forty years to date of the influence and practice of such deluded beliefs. World Wars I and II are useful illustrations of the lawful consequences of overlooking that connection.[15]

The result of such resort to the kinds of flawed, sentimental, a priori assumptions against which I have just warned here, has been, as in the case of the League of Nations and UNO, a misguided impulse for seeking to prevent past world wars and kindred prior oppressions, by choosing, in fact, whether by witting intent or not, to set the pre-agreed rules of play which might be, at their relative best, contrary to the assessed intentions underlying certain prior conflicts, but, which, actually would do little other than provide a new set of rules of the game under which, wittingly or not, nations would agree to tread a new pathway toward the next, new form of brutal world conflict. That result occurred, and that promptly, at the close of both those so-called "World Wars" of the Twentieth Century. That would be the result now.

Thus, the 1922-1939 run-up to World War II, was the fruit of a Synarchist International financier-oligarchy's fascist scheme,[16] a scheme premised upon the new set of Anglo-Dutch Liberal rules of the financial game, rules which were set into the Versailles Treaty arrangements by a concert of the relevant powers. It was not some right-wing fanatics, such as Mussolini and Hitler, who caused that war. It was those who had created and used both of those fanatics, and others of their like, as crafted instruments by aid of which to create the war which all who actually knew the reality of the policy, had known that the Synarchist International's financier oligarchs, the architects of the Versailles agreements, had intended should occur.

After Versailles, utopian fanatic H.G. Wells' 1928 The Open Conspiracy and his film "The Shape of Things to Come" served as a utopian's ideological dress-rehearsal script for both the plunge into World War II, and also, beyond that, a now immediately threatened global new dark age soon to follow the present Anglo-American Iraq war. This dark age will be the early consequence, unless the quasi-Wellsian, "neo-conservative" assumptions represented by the present pair of U.K. and U.S. governments, are soon replaced.[17] At this moment, unless those replacements are made now, a new world war and its culmination in a planetary new dark age, is already virtually inevitable, as you could have said the words "Adolf Hitler" back during the mid-1930s: however vividly the fact of that very efficient connection might be denied among today's Romantic fools.

This pattern in paradoxes has not been new to modern times. All great tragedies in the history of globally extended European civilization, such as the fall of Athens in the course of its Peloponnesian war, or the modern suffering of continental Europe since the preparations under Britain's Edward VII for what became known as two "world wars" of the past century, illustrate the same principle.[18] The long sweep of the record of the history of Asian cultures, is worse on this account than that for the case of Europe. Europe seems worse to many at first impression, only because modern European culture has been a far more powerful instrument, per capita, than Asian culture, at least up to the present time. Now, with nuclear arsenals irreversibly in the hands of Asian powers, and spreading to others, and with global asymmetric warfare now more fully unleashed, we have the prospect, not of wars between civilizations, but, as we see U.S. Bush Administration policy in action in Iraq today, a common war against the continued existence of civilization itself, a global dance-partners' war, like that on which the already dancing U.S. Bush Administration and Blair government are embarked today. It is well past time to talk about that, rather than degrade ourselves into pretending to believe today's conventional diplomatic generalities.

Those who do not understand history, excuse themselves from their own complicity by blaming a handful of leading individuals, chiefly those who have, in fact, adapted themselves all too well, opportunistically, to a currently popular culture; these excuses overlook the fact, that the source of all such catastrophes was the culture, not just the culture of the leaders, but, far more significantly, that of the people themselves. It had been the people themselves, who had usually, in one way or another, selected that quality of leadership of their leading institutions, a selection made either over objections in favor of any proffered relevant alternatives, or, worse, in the absence of a leadership which would have been an actually available choice of qualified alternative.

Admittedly, it was the combined interventions of, especially, Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi, which showed the way toward freedom of India from foreign tyranny. That experience demonstrates afresh, in an outstanding way, the power of a culture to overthrow a regime inconsistent with the ruled; that experience, and the contrary wont of the underlings to lend credence to tyranny, as in Germany after Göring's Reichstag fire and the U.S.A. after September 11, 2001, is a principled feature of the crucial dualism of known history so far. However, the uglier truth of the matter is, that the more common experience is that evil regimes, such as the rule of the Roman Caesars, are an expression of the culture of the people themselves, as Shakespeare dramatizes that point so elegantly in such places as the opening scenes of his Julius Caesar and Hamlet. In both latter cases, Shakespeare's insightful genius brings the evil of the culture on stage, as the tyrant, or simply the bloodied fool, who is the product of that evil within the people. As Shakespeare brings the character of Julius Caesar and Hamlet on stage in that way, so the culture of a people itself often brings forth the tyrants who come to rule over them.[19]

So, men and women do not think clearly, men and women who, like the Hamlet-like opportunists they are, prefer to follow something chosen from within the boundaries of what is currently acceptable popular opinion, rather than considering the actual consequences which the present imposes upon that future "from which" it was thought that "no traveller returns." Thus, it has been popular, intellectually, spiritually cowardly belief engrained in the culture itself, which has been the source of the disasters that culture has suffered. In this way, societies often create the utopian schemes, as now, whose threatened consequences are assigned, by default, or otherwise, as that which future generations are doomed to suffer.[20]

The Crucial Paradox

It has been possible to discover scientific principles, by aid of which the repeatedly foolish outcomes of utopian schemes might have been willfully avoided. I must emphasize again, that the problem to be overcome, is the usual, sometimes fatal conceit, that the principles of a desired utopia are those principles presumed to lie already at hand, principles expressed as if by a gush of heart-felt warmth, such as a tradition. These forms of moral self-corruption of peoples, are what are to be recognized as what are recklessly assumed to be more or less self-evident opinions, which even otherwise reasonable people might, presumably, adopt on sight.

The great, often fatal error, is to ignore the reality, that the desired solutions exist only, as in physical science, in discovering new principles which rightly, but also often abrasively, overturn most of everything which generally accepted opinion might have presently tended to agree to believe. Usually, unfortunately, the mistaken assumption has been made, that the previous crisis was a product of the violation of some traditional set of values, when, in fact, it was caused by a failure to carry out a needed violation of that set of values, as the case of Benjamin Franklin's Leibnizian American Revolution, like Schiller's treatment of the real-life case of Wallenstein, illustrates that principle. The false assumption is, therefore, that the solution exists within the bounds of that set of assumptions which had generated the crisis. So, the legendary lemmings express their awful tradition, by periodically marching over the edge of the cliff, onto the rocks by the sea below.

The talent of the qualified lifeguard is not to seduce the lady, but to save her life, whether she likes his personality, or not. Such is the nature of the leadership, upon which solutions for a cultural crisis, such as the present world crisis, depend. Such is the actual challenge posed by a dialogue among cultures. It is the lack of development of leaders qualified for making such changes in the accepted array of assumed principles which those cultures represent, which would be the chief source of any tragic failures of such dialogues, now, as in the past.

This crucial point may be restated for clarity, as follows. I must not permit our discussion to escape from repeated emphasis on this following point.

In the last analysis, the great enemy of civilizations, its source of its most deadly vulnerabilities, as of civilization in general, is the worship of popular mediocrity in the name of a quality of "respect for existing traditions," a behavior which mimics that predatory beast, or his prey, neither of which can escape the grip of its inborn bestial "instincts." Man should rely upon his power to behave differently than that. The tendency to suppress, even to crush the voices which threaten the deceptive, false and deadly peace of popular mediocrity, is the most typical expression of that hostile disregard for a principle of truthfulness, which leads ostensibly once-great cultures into their self-inflicted doom.

So, it was the prevalent "anti-voluntarist" culture of Soviet society, which was the single most relevant contributing factor of economy in what might be distinguished as the self-inflicted aspects of the fall of the Soviet Union. So, it was the fact that the vividly "voluntarist" impulse of Soviet military science, had lost its battle against the Soviet system's Plekhanov tradition, which remains the most crucial strategic lesson for the design of Russia's program for recovery from Soviet collapse today.[21]

In the usual case of the failures of past attempts at something like a dialogue of cultures, the crucial issue to be considered is typified by such events as the act of the assassination, imprisonment, or other rejection of such needed leaders when they actually appear. Dissent is the ferment of genius and foolishness alike, but remains, nonetheless, the breeding place where something could emerge, by aid of which a people liberates itself from the deadly grip of misguided customs. This systemic purging of that kind of dissenting voices, is the usual characteristic of that failure to overcome a systemic crisis, which leads a once powerful nation into self-inflicted doom.

So, in each case through known history, the common fault of the leaders was, that appropriate other leaders either were not chosen, or that such happy choices of actually suitable leaders were unavailable, since they had not been bred and developed by those cultures, or, had been culled from the flock as a matter of such precautions as "killing the unwanted legitimate heir, preferably in his, or her cradle," precautions taken usually by order of, or tacit consent by those in power. Such a collective state of affairs has usually, thus, brought the ultimate suffering upon the people themselves in that way. The effect of the pro-Nazi Allen Dulles's Congress for Cultural Freedom, is a prime example of the way the people of nations are deprived of access to development and choice of those qualified leaders who might have led them out of the tragic straits of self-inflicted doom.[22]

In contrast to that, all great leaders who have led a culture to safety, away from the consequences of the culture's own folly, have been, inevitably, exceptions to what that culture would have been likely to recommend, "on the average," so to speak, as acceptable choices.

Such exceptions include the election of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, or Charles de Gaulle as President of the French Fifth Republic. The principle of eliminating such exceptions at crucial moments of history, is shown in the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, or the assassinations of the crucially important Jürgen Ponto and Alfred Herrhausen at respectively critical moments of Germany's history. The happier cases of apparent historical accidents, such as Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, were not really accidents; they were willful choices of role adopted by persons who, because they had been developed, and also self-developed to go against the current culture's accepted habits, were able, under the special conditions of opportunity which a crisis often presents, to lead toward a result which proved an exception to their culture's otherwise fatefully unhappy predilections in a time of critical choices.

So, prospective leaders suspected of harboring such lurking unwanted capabilities within them, are usually eliminated from the scene, in one way or another, as was done to me, by collaborative efforts between, among others, both my U.S. and Soviet adversaries, over the issue of my role in prompting the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposal, over the course of the 1983-1989 interval.[23]

For example, it was the election of the exceptional Franklin Roosevelt which, for that time, saved the U.S.A., and which contributed a critical element to saving the world for the time being. It was the death of that Roosevelt, which, by removing the obstacles to the succeeding reign of intellectual and moral mediocrity typified by the morally, relatively least common denominator of Harry S Truman, led into the greatest catastrophes of our planet's past half-century. It was the pandemic of monstrous intellectual and moral mediocrity unleashed by the launching, by Nazi-friendly Allen Dulles and other authors, of the U.S.-based international Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which set the foundations for the past forty years' plunge of global civilization into cultural decadence, and, thence, into today's immediately threatened "Twilight of the Gods," the presently threatened great, world-wide new dark age.

The greatest folly of known cultures has been the attempt to build the policies and leaderships of nations on a supposed political-cultural consensus, a so-called venerable tradition, as in the case of the continental powers which were leaders in the onset of World War I, when an oncoming crisis would have required reliance upon those kinds of hard truth, contrary to current trends, the kind of truth which exposes the deadly folly represented by an existing culture's currently prevalent cultural norms.

As an animal species is doomed by its genetic heritage, so, like an extinct species, civilizations are doomed by their stubborn clinging to the flaws embedded within relevant kinds of inherited cultural habits. Thus, ironically, often only a revolution in cultural traditions, such as the Benjamin Franklin-led American Revolution of 1776-1789, could have conserved, and did, the most precious of the political and other institutions which the English-speaking world had accumulated up to that time.

So, it has been the failure of continental Europe to free itself, in a revolutionary way, from the legacy of parliamentary habits and so-called "independent" central banking systems, which has been, repeatedly, since July 1789, the source of the great tragedies, and spoiled opportunities, which continental Europe has continued to impose upon itself, repeatedly, up to the present day.

In physical science, great Classical artistry, or political statecraft, it is the application of the needed, principled exception, or otherwise known as "revolutionary" exception, such as that of President Franklin Roosevelt's return to the U.S. Constitution, the exception to the error of the currently accepted habit,[24] which is the mark of a nation's achievement of greatness; and, it is the choice of exceptional leadership from among the most exceptional members of those professions, which makes possible the changes upon which not only greatness, but even survival of a culture depends. The beasts are vulnerable to nature's timely condemnation of their continued existence, because those species have a fixed nature; man is not a beast, except when he attempts to imitate the beasts, by adopting the beliefs, such as today's "radical ecology" dogmas, suited to one of those lower species of a culturally fixed set of genetic-like characteristics.

It is so in religion, too. Those religious beliefs which set the existence of the Creator essentially outside the universe, a universe defined by them as a fixed set of intended rules of a playing-field, thus commit the blasphemous falsehood of denying the Creator Himself the power of creating changes from within His universe. His real universe is that in which He Himself lives. The fool's hubristic effort, to deny the Creator of the universe this power, thus also degrades the fool who accepts that denial, to adopt the likeness of a beast; he denies the existence of the human individual, the existence of that soul which should outlive that mortal body which it occupies for a bare moment of time. By denying the individual the power, and duty, to contribute willfully to improving the universe which shall outlive his momentary mortal incarnation, we would degrade the individual, in his own estimation, to a beast, and he would then behave as a variety of beast, such as Grand Inquisitor Torquemada—as, we might see again, today, is the frequently manifest result.[25]

The discussion in the form of a "dialogue of cultures" is not only important; it is urgent. However, as history should have taught us, the danger is that the participants might go too far, too quickly, too superficially, in their adoption of attempted, and all too cheaply accepted commonplace assumptions. The danger is that the search for a new compromise, would, like the League of Nations before it, produce a quickly compromised result.

Therefore, I emphasize an outlook which I have expressed in various earlier publications. How should we attempt to estimate, beforehand, why and how no less than those two generations ahead should judge the results of our agreement to act in concert now? The implicit basis for competent foreknowledge of the competence of our choices, lies not in the experience of the past, but the competence of our experience of the future.[26] That is the crucial paradox with which this report challenges the sponsors of any dialogue of cultures; there lies the crucial paradox menacing any attempt to shape a functional quality of common agreement from within a dialogue of cultures. The best rule-of-thumb statement of the solution for the latter, crucial paradox, is V.I. Vernadsky's systemic definition of the Noösphere.

- A Future Remedy From the Past-

In this prefatory portion of the report, I limit the focus of the discussion to a broad view of the kind of solution to which that paradox, so stated, must lead us. To this end, I, once again, situate the Vernadsky outline of the Noösphere, as I have done in publications during the past several decades, against Bal Gangadhar Tilak's Orion and Arctic Home in the Vedas. Like the Classical Greek adoption of that science of Sphaerics reflected in the Great Pyramids of Egypt, and as that Classical method of science was echoed by the principal discoveries of Johannes Kepler, let us join Tilak in looking at life on our planet today, and also tomorrow, from a vantage-point thousands and more years ago. So, reading the characteristic features of what that implies from the renewed Classical vantage-point of Vernadsky's definition of the Noösphere, let us define those common values for the future which we might use as a metrical standard for measuring the performance of mankind on this planet a modest two generations ahead.

Given those considerations, how then does some choice of a set of cultural parameters define the way in which today's gravely, immediately imperilled planet, must emerge successfully at a future time, such as two generations ahead? Obviously, allowing a continuation of the simple interaction among today's leading, conventional, existing cultural paradigms would be—under the extremes already represented by today's operating paradigms—not only a colossal failure, but an immediate catastrophe.

Today's problem is not that some leading nations have made mistakes; the problem is that today's global complex of cultural interactions, have produced the sixty-year, post-Franklin Roosevelt, anti-Franklin Roosevelt interplay among nations and cultures, especially that of the past forty-years history. That, in net effect, has landed us in the present state of imminent grave peril for the planet as a whole. As of this moment, while some governments, and other associations, are considering the elements of some useful ideas, individually, and in concert, none so far have taken efficiently into account the actual form of the principal, decades-long cause of the currently threatened onrush of a plunge of the entire planet into a prolonged new dark age of humanity as a whole.

For example: The key to all understanding of the modern world history of more than three centuries to date, is the recognition of the essential, true fact, that the history of the world as a whole, since no later than the February 1763 triumph of Lord Shelburne's British East India Company, has been shaped by the continued, actually globally imperial power of an Anglo-Dutch Liberal system. Yet most of the world today, foolishly, pretends, as if politely, not to notice this plainly visible fact—this veritable elephant standing and trumpeting, unnoticed, in the middle of the honeymoon couple's bed—and its profound practical implications for every part of our world as a whole, still today.

This global power, this Liberal system, is the power which has operated through control of the world's dominant, oligarchical form of monetary-financial system since no later than the establishment of that as an imperial power, in that February 10, 1763 Treaty of Paris which concluded Britain's successful orchestration of that so-called Seven Years War which had brought a common ruin upon the manipulated powers of continental Europe. That treaty thus established an empire of the British East India Company, through, chiefly, that Company's imperial absorption and looting of Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries' India, among many other locations. The present world crisis, is principally an outgrowth of the manipulations of the systemic relations among the world's nations as a whole, chiefly through the control exerted by the mechanisms of Liberalism currently axiomatically hegemonic among the components of that predatory financier-oligarchical imperium which reigns still today.

For example: It is only typical of the delusions of many of those approaching the subject of a dialogue of cultures, that, during the immediately past decades, it is the U.S.A., and virtually it alone, which has been popularly denounced as the willful agent of world domination by a body of opinion as silly as it is widespread. For those who actually know the relevant facts about the decision-making processes, that myth is the fruit of a deadly, implicitly suicidal folly by those who seek to explain matters as simply as that.

Contrary to that popular delusion, as it is met even inside as outside the U.S.A. itself, it has been the post-February 1763 hegemony of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which presently controls the U.S.A. to a significant extent, as it has done increasingly since the death of President Franklin Roosevelt, and especially since the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy which terrified the U.S. population into a state of relative numbness, as the events of September 11, 2001 did, later.

This alien influence is chiefly the Liberal system presently represented abroad by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Liberal-Imperialist Fabian crew, and, notably, by the Margaret Thatcher gang of the same pedigree before it. This is the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system against which the American War of Independence was fought, but which has fastened itself like a parasite upon the foolish neck of the U.S.A. today, as during the regimes of Harry Truman and Richard Nixon earlier. Long before Truman, that imperial mother of the system of global oppression, the Liberal system, was served by such representatives of the Confederacy tradition as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and, after that, by the epidemic of typically Liberal theft under Wall Street creatures such as Coolidge and Hoover.

The failure to acknowledge that set of connections, would be like the honeymooners' denying the presence of the trumpeting elephant in their marital bed. That kind of denial, in and of itself, could be the most likely cause for the assured tragic failure of any attempted global dialogue of cultures.

Under the present world monetary-financial system, what controls a nation's policies, or the policies of a concert of nations, is not pin-point direction of individual choices of decision by a nation, or nations. What controls the way in which the aggregate effect expressed by pin-point decisions is generated, is the equivalent of a set of ruling axiomatic assumptions, such as today's widespread, lunatic quality of axiomatic faith in the dogmatic "free trade" mysticism of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system.[27]

This represents an extremely important, but rarely adequately appreciated problem of method in dealing with the subject of behavior in and among social systems. Consider the historical implications of four, relatively commonplace types of cases of effects of pin-point decisions.

First, there are cases in which an action expresses, in effect, a theorem of an axiomatic assumption of behavior, such that no significant change from that presently operating principle is challenged by that event. If this piece from the practice of intellectual stagnation contributes to making a situation worse, then that worse was nothing more than evidence of what had been already implicit in the previously operating habits of thinking of current "axiomatic" policy-shaping behavior.

Second, there are cases which, without changing the previously reigning axiomatic-like (e.g., systemic) assumptions, touch an extreme point in the trajectory implicitly defined by that axiomatic-like assumption. Because that intersects the vicinity of a boundary-condition of the system, this produces the singular significance of the novelty of effect associated with a crisis-in-fact, but without yet changing the relevant axiomatic-like assumptions on which the society, for example, has been recently operating up to that point.

Third, there are developments which are in axiomatic conflict with what the reigning axiomatic assumptions would have allowed, but the effect of which will probably be absorbed, as a mere flea-bite, a mere perturbation of the sleeping dreamer, with a relative minimum of temporary disturbance upon the system represented by those assumptions.

Then consider a fourth case, in which the effect of the action implicitly overturns, or at least appears to overturn, the relevant, previously reigning sets of axiomatic-like assumptions. In this case, the threat is to prompt some kind of change in the system as a whole, axiomatically. For example: Most of the actually or implicitly violent threats against my person from "the establishment" during the recent thirty-odd-years, have been very plainly prompted by the establishment's perception that my ongoing, or threatened action at that time, constituted what the relevant section of the establishment had considered as a potentially serious threat to the continuity of the perpetuation of its current system.

In all cases, it is not the individual action which is historically determining, but the system, or the interacting systems, or changes in the system itself. Thus, competent long-range economic forecasting, proceeds from viewing economic systems axiomatically, as the competent practice of physical science does, viewing them as systems, and basing the forecast on study of the system as a system, rather than wading through the swamp, and quicksands, of the careless accountant's ultimately, infallibly mistaken, extrapolations by his conventionally brutish and often wild-eyed statistical methods.

That same thing can be said in a slightly different way, by pointing to a relevant case, the related, evil dogma, that central banking systems, which are actually instruments of the collective "slime-mold"-like wills of sets of private financier-oligarchical interests, function under the protection of the systemic assumption that these systems must be free of control by elected governments. This is the peculiar system, the ideology which presently controls most nations, and it is those who control the system itself, which control the policy-shaping of relevant nations. It is such false assumptions of an axiomatic character, such as the belief in independence of central banking systems, which, by becoming the characteristic of the relevant public and popular institutions, become the way the nation functions; these, if only usually, predetermine the kinds of choices which will be made. It is not the individual decision which produces this effect; it is the way in which the evolution of an ideology predetermines the trajectory of the change in effects produced by relevant decision-making.[28]

In all cases, it is the system which determines the significance of the event, rather than, as duped people today believe, the mere statistical aggregation of events, the system. So, as the case of World War I demonstrates, in history so far, the axiomatic aspect of ideology controls the will and fate of nations most of the time, and that more effectively, more ruthlessly than any abundance of military force.

The fools' assumption, that it is the U.S.A. which is the principal source of the present world systemic crisis, would be precisely the kind of mistaken belief which, in and of itself, would ensure an inherently tragic catastrophe, that for a world which accepted such a belief. Only when the U.S.A. is recognized as itself, presently, systemically, a subject (e.g., a victim) of the "free trade" system and ideology of the British East India Company's legacy of global rule by the financier-oligarchical interests of today, can anything but foolish assumptions about essential features of the world of today be presented. Unless that point were understood, any attempt at dialogue of cultures would be doomed to catastrophic outcome from the start.

The mere size of an effect, such as the effect of the activity of the U.S.A. today, is not in itself actual proof that the size of the effect is a cause. It is that controlling influence which has steered that effect, and will steer the next, which is determining. Big footprints are not big feet. It is the system which controls the relevant behavior of the United States, which is the cause. To control that effect, we must control that system which controls the people, as long as the people do not control the system.

It was the perceived urgency that the U.S.A. itself invoke its Constitution, as President Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933, to free the U.S.A. from the yoke of that Anglo-Dutch Liberal system which had controlled the policies of the Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations, which changed the system then. The consequence of that was the intervention into history, led by Franklin Roosevelt, which made possible the U.S.A.'s own escape from the fascism which overran a western and central continental Europe imprisoned within the control of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system.

It was that change in perception which occurred under Franklin Roosevelt, as in the case of President Abraham Lincoln earlier, which defined and generated the U.S.A.'s ability not only to accomplish a great leap forward in economy, but to contribute a decisive margin to bring about the defeat of the fascist monster, and promote the recovery of a war-depleted Europe.

The widespread, contrary, and often fatally erroneous assumption is, that by avoiding conflict with certain existing traditions at the top of society, we might improve society by installing improved rules of the game of cultural interaction within the bounds of the bottom layer of the current world system. These suggested improvements are proposed as applicable to society from the bottom up, without touching the actually, top-down determining considerations such as the toleration for so-called "independent central banking systems" and "free trade" dogmas. Defense of that wrong-headed, sometimes fatally wrong-headed practice might be expressed as the tragic popular delusion: "People are not ready for the big change; you must introduce them to that in small steps," without actually using your legs in any noticeable way. Such ugly displays of self-inflicted psychosexual impotence, make virtual political eunuchs of them all.

Our attention must, therefore, be focussed upon that fact, that the dominant feature of international relations since February 1763, has been the increasing domination of the world, not by any nation, but, rather, a modern guise for the European medieval, ultramontane system of partnership of the Venetian financier-oligarchy and the Norman chivalry: the Anglo-Dutch Liberal system of international finance, especially the post-1971-1972 form of that system. This Liberal system was the international power known during by its adopted names as both the Eighteenth-Century "Venetian Party" and the "French and British Enlightenment" of Voltaire et al. It is this system which rules the world today, and, by present aid of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, holds nations' governments as its herded cattle and lawful prey, unless the nations had freed themselves from that control.

The Strategic Situation Today

Let us now prepare the way for entering the main body of this report, by the following set of summations of the points developed here thus far.

It is the international, primarily, and national, secondarily, institutions of monetary and financial affairs, which control the principal decisions, in all matters, of those nations and peoples which accept the "authority" of the 1971-2004 International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The European Central Bank is currently among the most vicious of these supranational institutions. Foolish governments and people, alike, generally see nothing significant in this arrangement; it is widely assumed among leading opinion-shaping circles, that no foreseeable alternative to the system associated with those institutions presently exists, at least implicitly so: until the point of outbreak of a relevant systemic crisis. For that reason, the ignorant opinion which predominates in the highest ranks of governments generally today, refuses to recognize that the will of governments generally, is presently controlled, not by the power of nations, but by a system of supranational financier-oligarchical interest which is more powerful than any nation which continues to submit to the rules of play associated with that Liberal system: that is the elephant defecating where the honeymooners are helplessly sleeping.

The Liberal system of today, is only a typical expression of a class of influence over the will of nations and peoples which may be called an "ideology." A person who has blindly accepted any belief of axiomatic-like implications for decision-making, is, to that degree, no longer in any relatively greater degree of willful control of his or her own mind, or behavior, than an animal controlled by the conditioning of the instinctive characteristics of its behavior as the member of a species or variety. The essential power of institutions, such as governments, or concerts of governments, today, is rarely actually free will informed by reason, but more often the oxen's yoke of specific forms of ideology.

See the statesman wiggling within that virtual "iron maiden." He threatens to act rationally, but feeling the pressures of his situation, prefers to avoid the pain, and therefore limits his movements accordingly. He is technically capable of reason; but, the like tragic hero, can not yet free himself of the relevant conventions. He is controlled by the system.

In earlier publications and public addresses, I have identified the functional nature of this problem by the term "fishbowl" ideologies. A population accepts certain selected habituated assumptions, some approximately true and others baldly false, as its ideology. Thus, the collective action of any society known so far, is a response to an implicitly imagined physical geometry which differs more or less radically from the real universe. Thus, when, in the course of developments, the pre-established cultural matrices no longer correspond to reality, even within reasonable margins for error, the victims of the ideology tend to react not to the real world, but rather to their belief in a fancied universe which is implied by their habituated ideology. That problem is what I have identified as a "fishbowl mentality": continuing to swim within the accustomed fishbowl, even after the bowl has broken and the water, and the doomed, flopping fish, are pouring onto the furniture.

Such has been recently, until now, the pathetic state of mind of a large portion of the U.S. electorate which, while experiencing the deepest collapse, a sharp collapse, of the physical economy of their region in half a century, voted for the re-election of George W. Bush, out of confidence in the success of a continuing economic recovery which did not exist! The Liberal system is a leading ideology—a "fishbowl" mentality—usually ruling over the mere nations of today.

It is the attempt of parties to define a system of cultural accommodation, as through a dialogue of cultures, producing thus an attempted fusion of inherently, axiomatically conflicting sets of a-prioristic axiomatic assumptions, which leads from a present or past catastrophe, to yet one more set of the types of conflicts leading into new varieties of the processes of mutual self-destruction, such as general warfare without efficient exit strategies, as in the U.S. war in Iraq today.

Therefore, one relevant fact is already quite clear. The attempts to effect reforms such as cultural agreements, among nations today, will fail, assuredly and absolutely, however noble and impassioned the sentiment supporting such proposed reforms, until the pathological factor of the subsuming system, the system of financier-oligarchical imperial Anglo-Dutch Liberalism—the currently reigning "fishbowl mentality"—is excised from the institutions of world power.

These reigning mechanisms of today are, "genetically," the descendants of the mechanisms which orchestrated what was known as that World War I, which then, in turn, created the continental European fascist rule between 1922 and 1945, and which are the ruling forces at play in the world of U.S. veteran oligarch George Shultz's Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and veteran predator Pinochet today. No cultural agreement among the mice of sundry colors will prevail, as long as the Anglo-Dutch financier-oligarchical cat is loose. We must not merely bell the man-eating big cat; we must first cage her.

Ridding the planet of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal tradition which also created the Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco regimes earlier, is an absolute precondition for preserving civilization today; but, there is much more to be settled. Getting rid of Mussolini and Hitler was necessary; but, putting out the noxious rubbish is not, by itself, the production of a good meal. We must build a new edifice, to supersede a sick world of today. Ask, therefore: What, therefore, should be the principles of design for an ecumenical system of cooperation among respectively sovereign nations, which shall deal appropriately with all of the phases of design and construction to be accomplished on this planet during two generations immediately ahead?

The good is never merely the negation of the bad; the good is the Sublime, which, by its own positive nature, working from outside the bounds of existing conventions of behavior, builds, where the conventional destroys by its inhering corruption. A good dramatic treatment of a subject such as Adolf Hitler, does not portray the people as good, when it merely shows how bad Hitler was. Rolling in the mucky details of hideous crime, as the intention of Allen Dulles's pro-existentialist CCF typifies great criminality, does not ennoble the viewer of a drama, but, more likely, like a Bertolt Brecht drama, will have a degrading effect on the audience and players alike. The evil of Hitler must be treated by love of that good which Hitler destroyed, not only the good in Hitler's victims, but the spoiling of the good in those Germans and others, for example, whom Hitler and the system of his Synarchist masters used for their enterprises.

The world does need urgently an image which serves the mission which the proponents of a dialogue of cultures seek to promote; but, we must do it right, such that the desire for something better does not lure us into those kinds of wishful, Romantic fantasies which have so often led toward effects precisely opposite to that which we should have hoped to produce.

Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere defines a point of sublime empirical-conceptual reference, a framework of reference within which all of the valid issues to be considered are included, including differences among cultures, as if axiomatically. What will the Noösphere be, two generations ahead? How should that happen? How does that approach provide the optimal way of both meeting the requirements of national and personal sovereignties, and also producing improvements of an urgent character and quality in the Noösphere during the coming two generations or more?

1. The Vernadsky Remedy

Competent science, or an actually efficient pursuit of a dialogue of cultures, proceeds always by presuming that the totality of present belief of any national culture, of any body of doctrine, contains a large ration of wrongness. Therefore, the first principle of science should be, to consider the problem of the systemic falseness within what may be presently even a proudly defended opinion, scientific or other. This means concentrating special attention upon those special kinds of paradoxes which lie at the boundaries of any existing body of generally accepted belief, such as the boundaries separating the abiotic, living, and human cognitive systems of Vernadsky's Noösphere, in their essential character, and respective distinctions as the universal physical systems of which the known universe as a whole is comprised: that as a Riemannian quality of an integrated system.

The permission to employ this method, must not depend upon definite prior indications of any specific wrongness in currently accepted belief. Good health is not only a matter of lack of evident sicknesses, but also of detecting and preventing the existence of a kind of disease which has not yet been recognized by us as the menace it does in fact represent, as had been the case of human retrovirus disorders. This is the method by means of which we are enabled to uncover the existence of wrongness even within what has been unchallenged as generally accepted belief. It is not a mere repair-kit to be called out only when failed opinions have been detected; it is a way of thinking which must supersede all others, on all occasions.

The method of learning from our experience of the future, which I have identified in the introduction to this report, is not new. It is ancient. Notably, it is implicit, for physical science as such, in the method of Sphaerics which the Pythagoreans and Plato, among other ancient Classical[29] Greeks, adduced from the development of astronomy by Egypt. In fact, all competently Classical currents of European scientific thought since that time, have expressed a return to that method, as a choice of means for avoiding the relevant decadent, contrary method of such as the Eleatics, Sophists, and other philosophical reductionists. This is, for example, the method of Kepler, as reflected in his tasking future mathematics to develop the kind of infinitesimal differential calculus actually developed, with unique originality, by Leibniz.[30]

That discovery, successively, by Kepler, Leibniz-Bernouilli, Gauss, and Riemann, et al., is the demonstration of the method by which mankind achieves its discovered forewarnings, and, in this way, a certain type of experienced knowledge of the yet to be experienced future. This depends upon that Classical Greek notion of powers employed by the Pythagoreans, Plato, his Academy, et al.,[31] the notion of what we may rightly regard as a universal physical principle. Vernadsky's development of the notions of the Biosphere and Noösphere, is an example of application of the same Classical method of powers.[32]

As I shall show in this report, that viewpoint offers the only trustworthy approach to the subject of a dialogue of cultures. The case of Vernadsky's referenced work provides such a needed point of reference for addressing the challenges of modern political-economy, by attacking those subjects from within the higher standpoint, the domain of the Sublime.

It has been usually demonstrated by all those fundamental discoveries of such powers in science, that the greatest concentration of wrongness is usually disguised as assumptions which the misled representatives of a faulty culture have been inclined to adopt as unshakeable qualities of traditional beliefs, including such as a priori assumptions. The empiricists' Cartesian set of a priori definitions, axioms, and postulates, or the Aristotelean scheme in astronomy of the Roman Empire's hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy, is typical of what is often not only an intellectually fatal error, but an outright fraud.[33] Thus, science must always seek a vantage-point of practical existence in the universe which is located outside the frame of reference within which the suspected error of assumption may lurk, a frame of reference outside the range of the investigator's presently customary belief. For this purpose, in dealing with matters bearing upon the nature of the human individual, and mankind in general, Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere is an extraordinarily useful, and currently most relevant point of departure for understanding the problems to be recognized and mastered in the times now immediately before us.

For example: in order that we might more readily overcome the prejudices which have created a corrupt, ideological wall of separation of art from science, let us interrupt this introduction to the subject of applied physical science at this point, to compare the case for Classical irony in English, or other poetry and drama. After all, the subject of a dialogue of cultures, is culture in the broadest scope of the term. What is true in any part of culture as a whole, must also be demonstrably true in any of its divisions.

Bringing Words to Life

Delicious academics' jokes about "grammarians' funerals," or, the same thing, a literate thinker's hostility toward contemporary publisher's style manuals, are clinically significant in calling attention to the axiomatic roots of the currently prevalent inability of popular cultures to define a congruence of notions of truth which might be common to literary and to physical-scientific thought in a systemically coherent way.[34] This defect, the grammarian's folly, in the development of the individual, presents us with a probably crippling impediment in the pathway of conducting a dialogue of cultures, and, therefore, of physical science, too.

Specifically, to conduct a dialogue of cultures, we would be fools to rely upon agreements reached on the dictionary meaning of a grammarian's dead words. We require a living subject, not the dead word upon which anyone might freely impose an arbitrary meaning of their own design. The doctrine of "text," as stated by the notorious U.S. Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, is a conveniently lurid example of such pathological behavior by morally dead minds. To achieve what might be called "intelligent communication," we must bring words to life, that in a mode of reanimation which might rekindle in any mere grammarian that special quality of Holy Terror which also struck Rembrandt's Belshazzar.

That we might better weave the actual connection between a literary or artistic form of culture into the same system as a scientific culture typified by the work of Vernadsky on the Noösphere, consider those principled features of a literary culture which provide a relevant bridge between the idea of culture in general and the referenced work of Vernadsky.

As Shakespeare knew, and as every competent playwright, poet, and philosopher has always understood: As I shall show here, truth exists, contrary to Scalia, only as if between what the poorly educated mind must see as the apparent cracks, called irony or metaphor, of the merely literal meanings previously attributed to the words by those morticians of dead minds we know as grammarians. Truth itself thus lies only between the apparent cracks of what William Empson treated as the principle of irony, as in his notable Seven Types of Ambiguity.[35] Ambiguous as the Classical irony of the great poet, for example, may sometimes appear to be, irony so grasped is the only efficient method by which utterance in a common language can break the shackles of literal meaning, to free man from slavery to dead words, and to convey precise conceptions of actual ideas and of the living words which irony animates. Thus, to the man or woman who can actually think, the grammarian is the perfect type of the functional imbecile one encounters as obstacles over which to stumble in the search for the domain of actual ideas. That is to say, that actually living knowledge can be found only within those transcendental expressions called Classical irony.

The clarification of the point is the crux of the point to be made immediately, here.

Ask yourself: Why does the competent practice of physical science require that we identify the discovery of an experimentally validated universal physical principle by the personal name of the relevant discoverer? Not the personal name associated with some mathematical formulation used to describe an effect of the application of the principle, but the personal name of the discoverer. This question should bestir attention to some crucial examples of the meaning of Classical irony from within us, the challenge of showing the necessity of describing the grammarian's practice as playing with dead words.[36]

By associating an original discovery of a principle with the name of the discoverer, such as Archimedes, for example, we are implicitly obliged to provoke, and thus to re-create the relevant cognitive experience, within our own mind, an experience which had occurred within the mind of an Archimedes, or the mind of Archytas in solving the task of constructing the doubling of a cube. We thus oblige ourselves to relive the inner, cognitive experience of that act of discovery. We seek thus to call into play within our own sovereign mental processes as a living person, a replication of the relevant process which occurred in the mind of that living person while he lived. That action by us defines the named discovery as a living idea, and the words used ironically to point in that direction become living words—words with a living meaning for us, to replace the dead ones. This is the meaning of the generation and transmission of actual ideas, the meaning of the animation of Platonic forms of ideas.

For example: some would commit the blunder of suggesting that discoveries of principle can be demonstrated on the academic blackboard, or by a digital computer, as the addled advocates of "information theory" dogmas propose. Gauss proved the relevant point, in his 1799 exposure of the relevant hoax perpetrated by empiricists such as D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange. Gauss thus demonstrated anew, that the discovery of a principle is not effected through arithmetic or Cartesian modes of formal mathematical constructions. The actual discovery is merely prompted by the formal paradoxes, such as algebraic paradoxes, which might be represented on an academic blackboard; but, the act of discovery of a principle occurs, neither on the blackboard, nor within the bowels of a digital computer; it can be only within the sovereign cognitive processes, the processes of hypothesizing which are the unique power, and distinction from the beasts, of a human mind.

The naming of the original discoverer, is a challenge: to experience in one's own mind the process of discovery as it occurred in that named discoverer's mind. This we can do only by generating his relevant hypothesis within the processes of our own individual mind. The otherwise seemingly, but deliciously paradoxical ontological implications of the immediately foregoing statement by me, will be made clear by appropriate concentration on what I have to report, throughout much of the following sections of this report, respecting Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere.

Already, even at this point in the report, Vernadsky's concept of the Noösphere helps to make clear some aspects of the physical meaning of what I have just said. Our living brain and its accessories bring the act of discovery by, for example, Archimedes, back to life, as it lived within the mind of Archimedes, born again within the functions of our living tissue.[37] That action is of the characteristic form of the activity of hypothesizing which subsumes Plato's collection of Socratic dialogues. The physical character of this act of our present reanimation of the living idea behind the name of Archimedes, today—the living cognitive action, by the then living Archimedes, for example—is an implication which commentators on Vernadsky's work have, so far wrongly, apparently failed to grasp. Both Soviet "materialist" dogma and Liberal empiricist dogma have been among the relevant impediments to consider in treating the evidence of those failures.

To make what is perhaps an indispensable recapitulation of the argument just supplied: the irony of equating the person of the discoverer to a principled discovery, thus obliges our mind to re-create the living experience of that original act of discovery by that mind as a living experience within our own mind. That is a model, so to speak, of the function of Classical irony as the only truthful way of using forms of communication which are literally dead when treated only as in and of themselves (as by mere grammarians), to convey a living experience of truthfulness from one mind to another, even across thousands of intervening years.

Consider Classical tragedy, such as that of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Schiller, as a model, in art, for the same meaning of Classical irony as I have indicated the ironical use of the name of Archimedes, or Kepler, or Gauss, to prompt the mind of the hearer to re-experience the relevant original act of discovery of what is efficiently a universal physical principle. This, in turn, serves to show how we must define those principles which should be adopted, and to warn against those which should not be adopted, in the work of developing a dialogue of cultures.

Why Study Classical Tragedy?

For example: Why must we have Classical actors? Do the typewritten words not speak for themselves? Should not any set of raw amateurs, reciting the text of a drama, be well suited to convey the intent of a playwright such as Shakespeare or Schiller? Perhaps they lack elegance, but does that detract from the capacity to convey the playwright's intended meaning? Similarly, the sophistical pedant would ask: Is not the recitation of Classical poetry a matter of "taste"?

Contrary to such mere opinions, the accomplished company of actors, as in the case of the opening portions of Hamlet or Julius Caesar, must bring the actuality of the mind-set of Shakespeare's Rome of Julius Caesar's and Cicero's time, or Hamlet's legendary Denmark, on stage even before the principal characters of that drama are brought on directly. For reasons which I shall address below, it is almost a rule of principle in the composition of Classical tragedy, that the principal figure must not be brought upon stage until the paradoxical character of the setting in which that character will appear has been established as a species of experience, in its own right, in the mind of the audience, and, therefore, also, through rehearsals and experience of repeated public performances, in the minds of the players on Classical stage.[38]

As I shall work here to make this essential feature of a dialogue of cultures clear, the essence of the drama lies "between the cracks"; it lies beyond the literal. A true such dialogue occurs within the only domain, that of Platonic hypothesizing, where truth lies, in the universal principle of specifically human communication, Classical irony.

For example, in the opening of the two Shakespeare tragedies selected for purposes of illustration here, as the curtain has lifted, the seated audience must quickly sense an eerie feeling to the effect that the universe on stage is a different cultural universe than that in motion in the audience's off-stage world. The behavior among the characters depicted on stage, must not be an expression of the same words as enunciated by persons representing the contemporary culture of the members of the audience, nor must the members of the audience hear that exchange as an event within its own contemporary experience. Otherwise, the attempted performance would be an artistic failure from the outset.

This means that the adducible rules of interpersonal behavior in one culture, are not the same as for another culture. Since the subject-matter of Classical tragedy is the way in which the systemic characteristics of a culture, considered as a whole, brings ruin upon itself, it is what might appear to present observers as those sometimes seemingly very subtle differences of what might, wrongly, seem the same conversation repeated within the audience's own culture. The conversation must be located clearly in that different cultural setting—a different locality in physical space-time, which is the typical expression of the culture which is the subject of the tragedy itself.

We must emphasize, that, essentially, therefore, the characters of a tragedy on stage, taken as a whole, while on stage, act differently, think differently, usually belong to a qualitatively different culture, than those in the audience, or the actors themselves on the street outside. Even if they speak the same words, the meaning is different in some crucial way; after all, they have moved out of one society, their work-a-day world off-stage, into a different world, that of a past period of history, of a different culture, and different general circumstances. It is the requisite genius of an accomplished playwright, or director, to have developed a deep insight into these systemic distinctions, and to adduce those subtleties of the actual cultural matrix which frame the playwright's intended subject.[39]

The valid confrontation with such potentialities is the mark of the great playwright. His intention is to transport the audience's attention from the kind of universe in which the audience lives, as if to a different universe, in which the characteristic features of social interaction are qualitatively different than those of the audience. The actors, for example, must each put themselves, and their interactions with other actors, into that other universe, not the universe which they should have left parked in the street outside.

It is therefore urgent, from the beginning of the play, that the actor not recite lines. The actors there, as in the opening of Julius Caesar, must be Romans of that time. The words spoken in the drama do not have the same meaning as the same words as they might be spoken by a representative of contemporary society. By reacting as a live Roman of the designated station would have reacted, with all the "body language" and shadings of emotional color which that Roman would have shown in that assigned circumstance, we create an eerie sense of the difference between the way those Romans are behaving, and they way we, in our time and place, would deliver the same lines today. The effect on the mind of the audience must be that felt sense of an eerie something "different" lurking there, felt, and knowable, but just out of reach of the corner of the spectator's eye.

For an example of crucial, but seemingly minor points for criticism: how does Casca mouth the name of Cicero, for example? What is his "body language"? How would you have said the same words under today's circumstances? Here, indeed, between the Classical view represented by Cicero, and the circles of the fascist-like Caesar, we have an already highly embittered, pervasive, and tragically determining clash of cultures in that ancient city of Rome itself, as, clearly, Shakespeare understood this connection by the way he wove the richly ironical reality of Cicero's sensed physical presence into the scene. That role of the unseen Cicero is crucial for the performance of the tragedy as a whole. The members of the audience might not know the significance of that reference to Cicero beforehand, but the director and actors must make the audience feel that significance.[40]

The intent of the great playwright, is not to imply that the audience should simply adopt a supposed solution to the paradox of the tragedy on stage. Absolutely not; such folly we leave to the Romantics, who purport to explain all that history whose specificity they defile with their degradation of the issue of the fate of entire peoples and civilizations to the almost soap-opera quality of bedroom view of the attributed failures and triumphs of individual figures of heroes and villains!

Take the case of Schiller's Jeanne d'Arc: Schiller's carefully researched re-creation of the principled features of the actual time and place in history, and the actuality of the role of Jeanne. I have recently compared the effect of Jeanne's conduct in the actual situation of that time and place, as that was the actual effect of her conduct in the situation, through the moment of her death by being burned alive by the Inquisition, to the martyrdom of the Reverend Martin Luther King, as he expressed his personal understanding of that situation, in his own voice and words, up to the morning of his assassination.

Analysis situs! As Leibniz and Riemann understood that distinction. It was her action in that specific situation which Schiller conveys, as the effect of that moment of actual history inspired the process leading to such outcomes as the establishment of the first true sovereign nation-states in all known history, that of Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England. The power of the centuries-old ultramontane system of medieval Europe, the alliance between the Venetian financier oligarchy and the Norman chivalry, was broken by the essentially included effect of the real-life Jeanne as she appears faithfully represented to the intent on what would be a faithful replication of a performance on Schiller's stage. So, we in the U.S.A. today, are being judged, in practice, still today, by what we did not do in response to Martin's death. Martin was not Jeanne; Analysis situs, again! The cultures are different, but the principle of man's existence as an instrument to create the future, is the higher standpoint from which the contrasting specificities of the different contexts is to be understood.

Pause to stress that point just made. It is crucial for the success of a dialogue of cultures.

In real history, the history of living words locates the meaning of the individual human existence in past, future, and present, all at once. It is the transmission of ideas as living words, among past, present, and future, which, like the resonance of an ancient Vedic hymn on the subject of astronomy seen in Central Asia thousands of years earlier, expresses the intrinsic immortality of the individual person. It is only a decadent culture, such as an empiricist's or Sophist's culture, in which the individual is denied this connection, through living words (i.e., actual ideas in the sense of Plato's principle of hypothesis). The "educational" function of Classical drama, music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture, is to evoke a sense of immortality in the individual member of the audience, through the devices of the living word. "Yesterday, my mind spoke with the mind of Archimedes. Our minds were linked by a communication system connecting us across thousands of years." The figure on the Classical stage must not be your neighbor reciting lines, but a long-deceased figure, such as Jeanne, or, our recently departed hero Martin, who is made to come alive on stage through the medium of the living words which bring the actuality of that past into immediate juncture with our present, thus bringing people from various generations together, as Raphael Sanzio portrays himself in the simultaneity of eternity in his The School of Athens.

In this way, the fellow watching from the balcony of the theater experiences a sense of actual immortality through the link to the living words radiated from the stage—on the condition that the director and actors make these words felt by the audience as living words. Here is the true secret of Classical tragedy. If one does not grasp that sense of the living word, he or she has yet to understand anything significant about the tragedies of Shakespeare and Schiller.

So, therefore, in all valid Classical tragedy, as in Schiller's treatments, the historian's strict principle of historical specificity applies. Analysis situs! Meanings can not be freely transported from one specific area of universal space-time to another. Each part of history has its unique—historically specific—characteristics. Hamlet is not Julius Caesar. Hamlet's legendary Denmark is not congruent with the culture of Cicero's Rome, the Cicero whose mere whiff of presence in the play is a critical factor of the play itself, as of the actual history of turning-points which developed in Rome during that region of history.

What is common to all, is the way in which we must develop the ability to understand the laws of the way in which history is changed, which are the proper foundation of the making and interpretation of the laws of government. We do not connect different places in history by specific acts as such; we connect them by means of the universal physical principles which are the only available, real connection with the constantly changing territory of real history. For this, for strategy, we require the specific method which subsumes all specificities. We must read history as a domain of those living words which bind the immortality of all human experience and development into the portrait of a true Classical historian's seamless unfolding of a simultaneity of eternity. Such Classical poets and dramatists are the true historians who should perform that mission.

By comprehending many historic specificities, we must avoid tendencies to "take an average," as Shakespeare's silly Polonius would have done; we need a concept which is independent, and above all attempts for hermetic compartmentalizations of historical specificities. This must become an endeavor in which the work of Vernadsky contributes something essential for our work on the subject of concert among respectively specifically distinct cultures.

In that light, take, for example, the role of the ghost in Hamlet. Now, look at the sensed, but unseen appearance of that silent, unseen ghost in the shadows of the Third Act soliloquy. See the approach to that soliloquy in that of the preceding Second Act. Feel the force of tragic doom permeating the entire culture of that legendary Denmark, as we enter the concluding scene where the motion of Hamlet's corpse off-stage, intersects the display of Fortinbras's folly of that moment, as he prances lewdly before both the horrified audience, and as, at the same time, the bemused friend of the deceased Hamlet, is looking off-stage toward, and speaking, like the character Chorus as if called in for this service, directly to the assembled audience of that theater.

Then, recall the image of the ghost, and the interplay in that early scene. Shakespeare needs the ghost, which must be silent, unseen, but a felt presence in the closing scene, without which Shakespeare could not so simply convey to the audience that uncanny feeling about the characteristic mind, the special kind of superstition, and characteristic modes of interactions, of all ranks of that culture shown on stage. "These guys are all insane!" "This Denmark is a living nightmare!"

Yes, I understand your feeling, but you must be more careful; presenting these characters as simply insane will not do. You must present them adorned with their actual insanity, the lunacy specific to their cultural fishbowl, not in your impulsive, grotesque violation of the root-principle of historical specificity. Without that sense of (thinking in terms of British history) the historically specific, or, to the same effect, specifically legendary quality uncanny in the irrationality of all of the characters of that culture, there, as in Shakespeare's treatments of Macbeth and Lear, the actual intention of the playwright is not competently delivered. It is not sufficient to perform the drama; you must witness it, and its characteristic culture, in its actually historically specific place.

The final scene and drama of Hamlet close with an appeal to the audience to recognize that force of tragedy in the culture of that Denmark as the true subject of the drama, not the figure of Hamlet himself. Hamlet's personal wretchedness is that he is all too much a loony Dane of that legendary sort of historically specific place and time. The sense of the force of doom must be established as a sense of dramatic irony, comparable to the opening lunge of Brahms' First Symphony, in the audience, before the leading character is presented on stage. Thus, by aid of that precaution, he, or she becomes a figure wrestling with the forces of doom which are characteristic of his culture, not yours. Could he have broken the spell of that doom, or will he or she prove to be merely another pitiable member of that self-doomed culture, who could not muster the will to change that culture in ways needed to save the people from the culture of which they are a part?

Yet, in Classical tragedy, as in real history, each case has its own historically specific characteristic. Each moment of history is culturally unique, but, ironically, within a seamlessly continuous, but multiply-connected Riemannian universality of a simultaneity of eternity. Different such moments can not be reduced to a reductionist's formula. Any important subject of Classical drama, requires the playwright and the players to define the subject of each drama as a whole as some unique event which could not have been produced by a formula. They must give a unique quality of life—an ironical sense of the presence of a living word—to the drama in this way. No drama is truly Classical, either in composition or execution, unless the central subject of the drama as a whole is a unique creative act of hypothesizing a solution for a problem which never occurred in history before, and will never be produced in the same way again.

Lately, I have frequently found it convenient to reference the victory of Frederick the Great over the Austrians at Leuthen as an illustration of the principle of the commander in chief in the principal office of leadership of a nation, or a commander assuming personal responsibility for the historical outcome of a war. Those examples express the essence of subject-matter of Classical tragedy. Frederick's innovation, faced with a situation where his forces were greatly outnumbered by a well-trained, and professionally deployed larger Austrian force, was a victorious solution unique to that situation. Shall we attempt to adduce some recipe for an average solution of some sort from that case? To attempt to do so would be a fraud; beyond noting that the eccentric Frederick was also a creative genius, the form of the action there was original and unique to that historical situation. Analysis situs, again.

The lesson to be learned on this account, is that it is the pathetic tendency of the pedants of our culture, and their like, to argue, as the Roman Empire's hoaxster Claudius Ptolemy did, that once God had made Creation, that Creation must be perfect, by a priori assertion. Therefore, the Sophist insists, that if we permitted the idea that God himself might introduce a change to that universe, that would be as if to insist that God Himself had been flawed, and was therefore obliged to repair his earlier mistake. That Sophist has just insulted God! God is right; it is the Sophist's Aristotle, and his follower Ptolemy who were wrong, if they were not being simply stupid.

In dealing with man and society, we are dealing with a creative being who often makes mistakes, but has been designed in the image of a Creator for whom continuing Creation is a way of life. As Heraclitus would have insisted, and the Plato of the Parmenides agree, there is nothing but change in the universe, and such is the ontological nature of the Creator Himself.

That view of creation is the standpoint from which the choice of subject is made by the effective composer of Classical tragedy. It is the creative faculty (of Platonic hypothesizing) of the human individual, which is the essential subject of Classical tragedy; it is the presence, and lack of the intervention by such hypothesizing, on which every Classical tragedy since Plato's dramas, his Socratic dialogues, were composed.

To recapitulate the immediately preceding argument, for the sake of clarity, consider the following:

It is the posing of the need for that act of creative reason and will, which is the only proper subject of Classical drama. This element, which Schiller identifies as the Sublime, whether it occurs within the tragedy, or is the implied creative act which should have, but did not occur, is the subject which the drama must evoke as an experience within the mind of the audience, just as the name of the original discoverer of a valid universal physical principle obliges us to react to his act of hypothesizing as an experience re-enacted within the living processes of our mind. It is that act of hypothesizing, Schiller's Sublime, which is the essence of the successful performance of a Classical tragedy, as this was already true with the work of Shakespeare, whose living word, mediated through the historically specific interventions of Abraham Kästner and Gotthold Lessing on this account, revived the living Shakespeare to participate in the Germany-centered Classical humanist renaissance of the late Eighteenth Century. So, as a result of the work of Kästner, Lessing, et al., Shakespeare lives again today.

This view of Classical tragedy typifies the state of mind which must exist prior to any deliberation on the matters of a dialogue of cultures. The tragedy, if that is the outcome, lies not in the leaders of society, but in what they are not. The essential force of tragedy lies primarily within the culture of which the tragic leader is all too typical for his own good.

So, Plato abhorred the relevant aspects of the Classical Greek tragedies of his time; for Plato, as he himself demonstrates the principle in his dialogues, those tragedies he attacked lack the contrast of what Schiller would define as the Sublime.

For contrast, consider some attempts to deal with contemporary historical themes, by some notables. Among the better famous examples among modern American tragedy include Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. A Classically trained actor like Lee J. Cobb could have put the ironical aspect of the leading character of Salesman across effectively, as typifying the tragic character of not the figure on stage, but then contemporary U.S. popular culture itself. The Iceman Cometh is beautifully composed in service of its obvious intent, but the tendency of the audience is to focus on the audience's projected imputable tragedy of Hickey, rather than the tragedy of the popular culture of which he is a victim. The character Hickey "took the life out of the booze"; but, it was the booze of that culture's specific ideology, not Hickey himself, which is the force of tragedy, as must be argued, similarly, for the case of Death of a Salesman. The danger is, in both examples, that the corruption of our times would prompt the audience to view the drama with the disordered mind of the typical Romantic, locating the essence of the tragedy in the central figure, rather than in the society which dangles that figure before us, like a marionette on the cultural strings of his time and place. The danger is, a lack of the sense of the Sublime which links us, the audience in the present, to ourselves as we experience, within our experience of that drama, the relevant fruitful outcome of the tragedy on stage.

Thus, since the principle of Classical tragedy depends upon that standard subject of reference, which is changes in the culture of an entire nation, it had been better of those modern tragedians to have built the tragedy around a leading figure of that society, that culture, so that we might more readily avoid the treatment of tragedy as an individual's affair, rather than the failure of the leader as an exemplary victim of his submission to the characteristics of his society's culture. The key character need not be a recent President, for example, but it must adequately reflect the fateful decision-making processes of the nation, and the corruption of the American people which permits the relevant travesty. The subject of Classical tragedy, as Plato and Schiller demanded, is the history of mankind; to adduce the living words of the Sublime experience we require an actual historical subject, either from known places in history, or forms of legend which had a kindred significance.

Therefore, the attempted use of little people, rather than major figures, as the pivot of tragedy, as by Miller and O'Neill, was, in that sense, a mistake, although a mistake which they committed by faddish popular demand of the theatrical "industry," and its paying audiences, of their time. They did their best, and I greatly admired the result as being Classical tragedy; but, I also recognized that the deeper merit of those works would tend to be overlooked by the pestilence of Romantics and existentialists hovering like predators among the critics and theater audiences.

The subject of Classical tragedy is needed changes in the culture as a whole. Therefore, the attempt to substitute a local setting within a culture for the appropriate action of change of an entire culture, can obviously be effective if the author and director recognize the problem which I have just posed in some efficient way. The portrayal of Salem witch-trials, in Miller's The Crucible, failed as tragedy, because it falsified the Massachusetts of the Winthrops and the Mathers, for the sake of a knee-jerk reaction to the Truman-McCarthy witch-hunt of the Truman years, and thus created a spectacle from which no truthfully living words could be adduced.[41]

For example:

Nearly a decade ago, I was given a tour of a famous Moscow engineering works, which I knew well by name for its role in Moscow during the perilous period of the siege by the Wehrmacht forces. At that past time, I, like many of my generation, had lived through that siege from afar. Now, in one of the rooms of a part of the plant which I visited, I watched individual men working, men whose obvious age associated them, with a strong impression I felt at that moment, with the workers producing under fire of the war-time siege. Not long after my visit, that plant ceased to exist; I wept silently at that news, thinking of particular faces of the aging men working at those machines which had now been taken away from them, thinking of the period of the siege by the Wehrmacht. Tell me then: Where is the pivotal center of that tragedy? The individual? Or the system? The society? Is not the suffering of the individual, in such cases, the guilt of the society?

Could the one particular worker who most attracted my attention, have been a pivot for a relevant drama respecting post-Soviet Russia's society today? Of course; but, it must be done with that sense of the nature of Classical tragedy, treating the top-down features of that process in the society as a whole which affects that worker's fate, as Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty did.

Think then, of the methods by which great Classical poetry or tragedies are composed. I have identified the intent which should govern such works. What, then, is the method by which that intent is served?

The Living Words

Focus on the case, that the same image, word, or phrase, appears, with a different real-life meaning, in each of several locations in which it appears, as within the same poem. Yet, the contradiction, the adducible formal discontinuity (ambiguity) among clearly distinct sets of imputable meanings of the same term in various locations within the same composition, defines that ambiguity as a distinct, uniquely single, real-life object of the quality of a potential living word, as I have developed that usage of "living word" above. This method of generating such a discontinuity, is the basis for Classical irony, as that notion is illustrated by the argument of Shelley's essay In Defence of Poetry.[42] By assigning the value of a name to the difference represented as such a discontinuity, we, as poet or sentient audience, have used the existing language to add a new concept, a new such term, to our intellectual vocabulary. Dead words thus take on a living meaning.

Such is the character of irony which defines the corresponding used language as a living language, not by its mere form, but by the ironical way in which it is used, by the way in which real living-word meanings, note here especially meanings of universal physical principles, are developed even within the current repertoire of use of a fixed nominal vocabulary. If the meaning of a term, its referent, can be defined by its place in a deductive system, it is not a living word when employed in that sense. There must be a meaningful functional discontinuity in the usage which warrants the mind's sense of the presence of such an object of thought.[43]

However, the corollary is, that a language used in this way thus generates new discontinuities which correspond to newly discovered existing states in the universe represented by that language's use. Functionally, this is the way in which we name distinct astronomical objects, discovered universal physical principles, and other real objects of the mind which are made known through their rigorous definition as defined by their existence as discontinuities. Such was the method, in fact, of Kepler, for example, who originally defined a universal principle of gravitation, or Archytas, earlier, who defined a uniquely specific solution for generating the doubling of the cube by continuing geometric action. This is also the indispensable active principle of Classical modes of artistic composition.

That is the elemental expression of the artistic creativity referenced by Percy Shelley's In Defence of Poetry: the transformation of a language effected by means of periods in the life of a people which are marked by an increase in the power for receiving and imparting profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature.[44] That power is expressed as the communication of a living word.[45]

The communication of the meaning of any statement is to be adduced by the test of the presence of such living words. Only living words qualify as ideas in the strict, technical sense of the meaning of ideas. One actually knows an idea contained within a statement, by the presence or absence of that idea as an adducible living word, whose adduced meaning is the fruit of the same kind of mental process associated with the regenerating of an idea from indications of the specified problem it solves, as by a modern student's reliving Archytas's construction of the doubling of the cube.

For example, the idea of knowing the circumference of the Earth becomes a living word in the mental processes of the user, when the user has relived the experiment through which Eratosthenes measured the great circle of the Earth, circa 200 B.C., by deep well observations from two locations in a North-South alignment within Egypt, and then measured the great-circle distance from Alexandria, Egypt to Rome by the same method. The proof of the so-called "Solar Hypothesis" by Aristarchus of Samos, is a similar case, as to be compared with the known aspects of the work in the same direction by Thales earlier. The accumulation of such re-enactments of discoveries of proof of principle, is the required ordinary basis for the development of what we should aim to evoke as a resulting sense of scientific literacy in the adolescent mind.

For example, the idea at issue in Carl Gauss's 1799 attack on the treatment of algebra by D'Alembert, Euler, and Lagrange, begins to become a living word for the modern student, when the origins of Euler's fallacy are traced by the student, through the work on cubic roots, by Cardano, et al., from the doubling of the cube by Archytas's friend Plato. This leads to an enriched insight into the origins of what Euler's hoax is really attacking: the Leibniz-Bernouilli discovery of what became known as the catenary-based, improved form of the principle of the infinitesimal calculus, Leibniz's principle of universal physical least action. This Leibniz-Gauss connection leads to the generalization of the mathematical-physical principle of the complex domain by Gauss, Riemann, and others.

I choose the former illustration to situate the way of thinking which is needed to address the matter in a way most directly relevant to the conception immediately at hand.

These ideas which exist only "between such cracks," are "living words," in the specific sense which the German anti-Kantian philosopher Herbart assigns a special meaning to his adoption of the term Geistesmasse. This is the meaning, by Herbart, which Bernhard Riemann acknowledges as being the prescience of a concept of physical science, as much as of literature. In fact, in both usages, it is not merely an appropriate technical term of the specialist; that term, although only rarely used with the same meaning today, corresponds to the most essential notion in all Classical philosophy, a term which points toward something which is, at least superficially, akin to psychologist Wolfgang Köhler's cruder notion of a mental function associated with his use of Gestalt. This takes us to a boundary-area of the most essential working-concept in an attempted dialogue of cultures.

As I have emphasized repeatedly in relevant published locations, the human individual's physiological experience of the world around him, is not direct knowledge of the real world he senses, but, rather, his interpretation of the reaction of his sensory apparatus to its encounter with the world which exists beyond that person's senses. Thus, the blind do see. The human experience of that real world beyond, produces potential knowledge of reality on two successively higher levels than sense-perception as such. Such an experience is called Platonic realism. It is the same Platonic realism which underlies the work of Cusa, Leonardo da Vinci, Kepler, Leibniz, Gauss, Riemann, et al. It is the Platonic realism which erupts as expressed by Vernadsky's conception of the Noösphere.

On the first level, we are dealing now with mental processes which Köhler proposes to be shared by apes and man. The stream of sensations impinging upon the infant's sensorium, is "decodified" as a world of nameable sensory objects. These objects are not presented to the child directly, but are the product of the digestion of sense-experience by the implicit totality of the child's human quality of mental-physical powers of conception. An unmanageable stream of sensations is organized, thus, by the infant's healthy mind, into a comprehensible array of playful objects and object-relationships.

On the second level, a similar development occurs on a qualitatively higher order of reaction, a reaction which occurs only in man, not the higher apes: the discovery of a higher order of mental object, corresponding, for example, to the discovery of an experimentally defined universal physical principle.

This higher level is found in Classical art, as Herbart's use of Geistesmasse as a technical term of educational practice, and in science, as Riemann associates this with what he terms "Dirichlet's Principle," named for his teacher and predecessor in his post, Lejeune Dirichlet. This juncture of the two uses of this meaning of Geistesmasse, is the key to a rational approach to a dialogue of cultures. The concept so associated with that usage of the term Geistesmasse, should be recognized as pointing toward the central conception of a science of culture, the science appropriate for approaches to a dialogue of cultures.

This brings us to the physical, rather than merely formally mathematical notion of the complex domain. The argument, as I have made it many times before this present occasion, may be summarized as follows.

Riemann's special reference to his use of the term Geistesmasse appears in his published collection of mathematical works only as a single topic in a series of related, partially only sketchy elements, in his posthumously published works. Nonetheless, the concept he associated with his use of that term in that posthumously published location, is implicitly essential, pedagogically, for better comprehension, as by the student today, from study of such among his principal published works as his habilitation dissertation and on the subject of the implicit physical geometry of Abelian functions. That connotation of his, and implicitly also Herbart's use of the term Geistesmasse, moves our attention immediately into conjunction with our preceding discussion of the subject of the living word. This Riemannian sense of the notion of the living word is essential for a clear insight into the very special relevance of Vernadsky's use of the concept of the Noösphere for defining the immediate, global issues of physical economy and culture.