Diplomacy is viewed as a continuation of war by other means by the strategist von Clausewitz. But great tragic drama also held this position at crucial periods of epochal changes in the course of human history. Thus were the series of plays at the time of Shakespeare consciously designed to capture the imagination of the ruling classes. In particular Christopher Marlowe's oeuvre rises to the level of Plato's dialogues as interventionist in the sense of holding forth a kind of scorching mirror to the all too human follies of aborted imperial delusions. This is the mantle that Shakespeare and his collaborators took up thereafter in the wake of Marlowe's apparent assassination.
This Abraham Lincoln seems to have fully grasped in his determination to save the union in the face of headwinds that would have set history on a perversely tragic course if the outcome of civil war was less than victory. We, i.e. humanity s a whole, have been enmired in endless proxy wars since the advent of the "atomic age" for nearly a century since the end of WWII.
Where is our Shakespeare or Schiller in these "latter days?" Can history pivot upon an intervention of that very sort at the latest stage of imperialistic schemes. The worldview of human aims is crucially bifurcated at present. Either a tragedy on the current world stage of events cataclysmic in scope will surely ensue or humanity will enter into a new realm of mutually assured survival to a new era of untold possibilities. The tale of Dr. Faustus was not a myth per se, but rather a glimpse behind the curtain as it were, of the "magicians" moving history behind the thrones of feudal ambitions writ large.
The question remains can we move beyond the era of this worthless impasse of decimations wrought by the very real evil of geopolitics? How can the world at the brink be brought back from deadly posturing of annihilation that currently is drummed into our daily political architecture's rank and hopelessly virulent discourse? What most threatens this nightmare scenario to tweak the higher sensibilities of the common aims of a now viciously divided humanity?
The blatant fallacies about the role and capacity of civilization's scientific prowess regarding the fate of this planet, nay even our solar system and beyond, and our place in that yet unfurled necessary history need desperately to be satisfactorily resolved in the here and now. There are enough signs of mitigation of backward tendencies breaking down. Even the arch neo-Malthusians like Greta Thunberg are pausing to rethink the rationale of their foreboding "end of history" illusions. Nuclear energy. including fusion research, as a resolution of planetary self destruction is coming to the fore seemingly miraculously off stage.
The end of menial labor is envisioned as we enter the robotic age of "occupying" space. No longer relegated to the confines of the false imagination of tendentious and risibly adolescent tales of apocalyptic "science fiction." There is a harrowing yet harmonious resolution awaiting us out of the hellish landscape of equally bad choices for the useless confrontations of resource wars currently nearing their end phase. If we only were able to rise above petty concerns hampering our palpable route to success.
For the consciousness of all human beings, in the end, are the common result of the astronomical ongoing processes of ever greater unfolding development of unified reality that we yet know so little of. What grand and consequential problems will confront our progeny in a post geopolitical universe of our own making. Happiness, in whatever manner it transpires, today, is defined and constituted in safely shepherding those future generations beyond the scenario of an otherwise inglorious and tragic end that need not be otherwise.
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