The abyss that “small nations” see before them, ready to swallow them up, may be matched by the abyss separating them from “mighty nations,” who find it hard to grasp why the former are so fearful. I wrote The Mortality and Morality of Nations to help us understand this, and Arjun Chowdhury’s thoughtful review shows why it is important that we do. As he points out, it boils down to answering “Why do nations act the way they do?” though I would append it with a preliminary quandary: Why are there nations to begin with?
This book is my complementary answer: Knowing we are bound to die, we seek the “symbolic immortality” of morally meaningful collectives, like nations. But nations sometimes feel mortal, too. The implications are profound. Chowdhury starts with Hans Morgenthau’s famous answer regarding the sources of national conduct—“the struggle for power and peace”—and my book starts with a later Morgenthau realization: “We search for immortality, and the kind of immortality we seek determines the kind of life we lead.”
What kind of life do small nations lead? A moral life, for one. In the book, I argue that “[m]ortality makes morality, and right makes might: the nation’s sense of a looming abyss informs its deliberate and deliberative quest for a high moral ground, which, if reached, can bolster its vitality” (p.vii). Here, Chowdhury provides useful caveats, inviting clarifications.
First, “casting survival as a self-justifying moral project operates to obfuscate discrimination”—which is indeed too often the case. But however critical we may be about these moral arguments, understand them we must if we want to improve; and we cannot understand unless we first tap into people’s own perspectives, unwarranted and unjust as we might deem them.
Second, Chowdhury mentions that I suggest the “distinction between facts and norms is not a meaningful one in small nations.” It is, in fact, very meaningful, evinced by the very case he mentions. The is/ought distinction undermined South African apartheid from within and without: The growing gap between the righteous claim and abhorrent reality, coupled with a viable alternative, pushed Afrikanerdom to commit moral suicide.
Third, Chowdhury protests that “mortality appears to not be a necessary condition for a nation’s search for moral standing, nor for its deployment of might.” I could not agree more. Indeed, as I write in the book, my argument “does not posit heightened mortality as a precondition for national morality. . . . Morality is by no means the only response to mortality; nor is mortality the only driver of morality. However, while every nation seeks immortality and morality, when its sense of collective mortality ascends, it resorts to existential self-legitimation: by the nation, of the nation, and for the nation’s very existence” (pp. 10, 8).
Fourth, somewhat contrary to his previous claim, Chowdhury suggests that while “issues of right and wrong” animate the politics of small nations, “different logics” drive mighty nations. Here, perhaps, I try bridging the abyss between the small and the mighty. I argue: “Small nations are not a breed apart, humans are; not just small but all nations sense their mortality and search for morality. . . . But small nations, by being so existentially anxious about these qualities, amplify their importance. They are the tip of the iceberg” (p. 8).
In the few years since the publication of Mortality and Morality of Nations, the importance of political existentialism has become, if anything, even more apparent and pressing. Not just discrete nations but liberal civilization itself may be teetering over the abyss, and it is the dimming of our moral horizon, the meeting of the earthly is and the heavenly ought, that has made it so. But that is a pursuit for a different book.
