Vol. 14 No. 2 (February 2004)

JUSTICE, HUMANITY AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER, by Ian Ward.  Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003. 192 pp. Cloth $89.95/£51.50  ISBN: 0-7546-2308-4.

Reviewed by Edward Kent, Department of Philosophy, Brooklyn College, CUNY.

Email: ekent@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Ian Ward's plea in this study is that we once again add "sensibility"-i.e. stories, poetry, and mythology-to "sense"-by which he means moral, legal, and political principles-as motivating supports for human rights.  He proposes that we have lost contact with the Romantic world sensibility of the Enlightenment, which bolstered principle with compassion embodied in its poetic vision.  I think he has a valid point here.  My only puzzlement is that he does not for some reason link this division with Hobbes who first proposed the separation of poetic imagination from reasoned analysis in the 17th century.  But this is only a minor flaw in a most useful text, which really functions in format as a sort of extended annotated bibliography.  Ward offers a series of short summaries of the theses of literally hundreds of books and authors from the past and ranging nearly to the date of publication - listed in some 15 pages of bibliography.

Standing back a bit from Ward's text, it is all too clear that the world's major religions, which in their best manifestations, call for humane treatment, particularly of those in special need - see, e.g., all those medical missionary out-stations in African and elsewhere during the late 19th and early 20th century - have now largely been replaced by an array of international organizations and non-governmental aid agencies.   And our religions themselves have been regressing into more primitive and fundamentalist manifestations that are as likely to stir competitive cultural hatreds as compassionate outreach. 

As a Brit (University of New Castle on Tyne), Ward does not quite get the American ethos as the following from his concluding chapter on "a new humanism" reveals:

Millions of Americans, it seems, share McVeigh's concerns.  It was these Americans who secured the presidency of George Bush junior in November 2000.  Indeed, anxious to tap their anxieties, the new president rapidly announced a series of "initiatives" to promote "compassionate conservatism."  The use of the rhetoric of compassion is intriguing.   Unfortunately, however, it is a rather different compassion from that which might have attracted Wordsworth or Whitman.  For Bush's compassion will be a deeply institutionalized compassion, one directed through various religious bodies.  Compassion, it appears, cannot be left to individuals.  It will not be the kind of compassion that draws its strength from liberty and democracy. And whether it will make Americans ever less angry remains doubtful.  The mentally unhinged illiterates will greedily indulge their need for vengeance in the macabre rituals of judicial murder.  This is not the kind of compassion that we need (p.145).

I find Ward a bit overly pessimistic here about the human rights efforts of many nations, agencies, and persons attempting to keep the peace and assist those in need.  And I would point to some of the countering negative forces at work in the world that he neglects - greed conjoined with regressive religions - that can defeat our efforts to keep the peace.  The neocons' and the Bush administration's "preemptive" strike against Iraq is an all too obvious example of this latter phenomenon.  No amount of poetic appeals to Enlightenment ideals would have halted this aggressive assault by otherwise well educated individuals bent on goals of helping a very special category of people - themselves.

But Ward's general thesis is nevertheless well taken.  Particularly our younger generations need more than just moral principles, such as those found in our traditional philosophic and ethical systems - Kant, utilitarianism, virtue, or other ethics - to inspire human concern.  And at least in the U.S. one sees a widespread media assault on sensibility, especially on our small children, that features murder, violence, brutality, cruelty, sexual and other kinds of exploitation, and vengeful responses to same that cannot other than tend to deaden sensibilities.  One is almost driven back to Plato's notion that children be presented only with moral tales and spared evil ones that can pervert their characters.  Humanism-the romanticism of the Enlightenment in Ward's characterization-has not caught up with moving "stories" of its own to fill the void as new stimuli for effective human rights commitments.  Possibly some of our more moving and humane films - what our young now take to heart - will help fill this void?  I do not find many readers anymore among my students.  But they seem to discover caring in other ways.  Perhaps Hume is right after all.  Only some can be moved by the sentiment of altruism, and all the rest of us need a good course of training in justice?

I would add as a footnote here that I am startled by the price of the American edition of this small book and would recommend that one try a web exploration for the British edition published by Ashgate Publishing Limited, which one can access through a Google search.   British editions these days can run as little as half the price of American ones.

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Copyright 2004 by the author, Edward Kent.