The ideological clash between communism and capitalism gave way to a broader but no less entrenched confrontation. Manichean binaries are fostered, represented as a battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. In his State of the Union address in March 2022, US president Joe Biden neatly divided the world into two camps: ‘In the battle between democracy and autocracy, democracies are rising to the moment, and the world is clearly choosing the side of peace and security.’ Later that year, in a speech in Warsaw, Biden declared:

This was a resounding statement of the liberal view of international affairs, dividing the world into progressive and regressive camps. It was also an implicit condemnation of the purported ethical nihilism of realist approaches, in which the focus is more on outcomes rather than the purity of intentions. Underlying the renewed dichotomous approach to international affairs is a profound ‘epistemic’ clash between contrasting visions of security, development and peace. The struggle is one between distinctive representations of universalism, the foundations of the good life within societies and the appropriate relations between states. The Political West advances democratic internationalism, the view that all societies must ultimately conform to a certain model of modernity generated in the West, whereas Russia, China and many other states defend the Charter principle of sovereign internationalism – that the destiny of each state should be its own affair, as long as it remains broadly in conformity with Charter principles. Ultimately all states, including those in the democratic internationalist camp, insist on the right to defend their interests and therefore selectively apply Charter principles in the rough and tumble of international politics. This chapter explores the key developments and actors that shape the culture and politics of Cold War II.

Interior -- BOBST LIBRARY NYU – DAY

It is a Sunday in April 2024. MJ ROBINSON, a 50-somethingish woman, slight build, shortish silver hair with a “reverse Sontag” stripe of chestnut, sits surrounded by undergraduates, as she has been her entire professional career … aka practically since she was one herself. THE STUDENTS are working, sometimes assiduously, sometimes half-assedly, on their computers. Some are texting or scrolling social media. MJ sees a reflection of a Tik Tok video in the glasses of the student who sits across from her, noting his furtive glance. “What is she doing here? She could be my mother!” MJ imagines him thinking.

MJ turns to the sheaf of papers in front of her and a notebook open and overflowing with scribbles of the past year, since she agreed to contribute to a collection about “lifelong engagements with a work of art.” The essay is overdue. She is still struggling with it. She opens the last abandoned draft on her laptop and begins to type. We hear a helicopter …

INT. -- GENERAL CINEMA THEATRE 3 MARINA DEL REY, CA – NIGHT

September 14, 1990. A fourth-year film student sits in rapt attention and expectation as the film begins.

CUT TO:

The screen—a helicopter flies into frame and deposits RAOUL, in military dress, carrying a silver briefcase. The camera tracks with him across a busy outdoor market area, then holds on the doors of a bus. MARIE JENNINGS (played by Suzanne Vale, played by Meryl Streep) steps out of the bus along with TWO FRIENDS. We follow them to passport control, where Marie is pulled out of line and brought into a small office separate from her friends.

Raoul soundlessly slaps Marie who falls to the ground, then struggles back up to confront Raoul, bleeding slightly from the slap, chewing what the informed viewer guesses is a Kryolan blood capsule.

Early in graduate school, I audited a survey of Renaissance drama taught by Alfred Harbage, then near the close of his career. About a dozen undergraduates were enrolled, and about 15 graduate students sat at the back of the room listening with fascination to a splendid lecturer. At the time I knew virtually nothing about the subject: I had read only a couple of plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries in college. So, when I encountered Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, it was a surprise. Here was a play that glorified war and celebrated a conquering warrior capable of great cruelty. At the time, the catastrophe of Vietnam had not yet entirely poisoned the body politic of America, and I had few qualms about identifying with military might. Only later did the subject matter of Marlowe's play begin to pall. Initially, I was an enthusiastic reader of what has been called an epic biography, the story of a brutal figure whom Elizabethan culture would have almost certainly called heroic. Few of us would apply that term without reservation today.

Years later, I found myself teaching Tamburlaine and sensed that at least some of the students were not engaged by our discussion. I paused and addressed a woman in the front row who looked especially dyspeptic: “You’re not engaged by this play, are you?” With disgust, she answered, “Naah.” Why? I asked. She replied, “because it's about all that male stuff.” This exchange clarified a growing feeling: the play suffered not only from doubts about military action that has proved singularly self-destructive in our national life (think of Afghanistan and Iraq) but also from a sense that drama no longer speaks to us unless it spotlights women characters and their issues. Admittedly, Marlowe's play brings onstage Zenocrate, the title character's wife, and her speeches express romantic attraction: “As looks the sun through Nilus’ flowing stream, / Or when the morning holds him in her arms, / So looks my lordly love, fair Tamburlaine” (3.2.47–9). Yet it's also true that she figures in few scenes; she's secondary to the play's principal business—confrontation. I began to realize that, despite the appeal of Marlowe's poetry, students would no longer warm to the play.

This topic was earlier slated for a later appearance and was going to saunter in as Chapter 9 in this book. However, seeing a natural fit with Chapter 5, I decided to focus this chapter on respect instead. Respect is a virtue that seems to be increasingly waning in this world of ours. People seem to be experiencing a lot of incivility at work and elsewhere, and a lack of respect seems to be getting to being endemic across societies. That does not auger well for the future of our overall civilization, as respect is the grease that helps propel the wheels of civilization. Cooperation and coworking go a long way further if respect is along for the ride. This absolutely applies in the workplace as well as in personal life. Leaders who are respectful find that their followers are respectful too, and sometimes, this works vice versa as well.

In this chapter, I will focus my explanation and discussion on how one can be respectful, and how one can command respect. You need both for optimal mileage—while it is important to be respectful to others, it is equally important for you to be able to command respect as well. Just like kindness, there is no point in being sublimely respectful in the midst of appalling disrespect. Limitless respect like limitless kindness in the face of disrespect or unkindness has no benefit for any individual, be it a leader or a non-leader.

Dogs absolutely fill in these two dimensions of respect really well. For instance, there are some dog breeds that inspire respect. When someone looks at certain breeds, they will automatically give those dogs respect. The appearance and history of those breeds dictate that respect is a given, when interacting with these dogs. The old chestnut about “Size Matters” actually does weigh in here considerably. And then, there are dogs that are respectful to the hilt—the polite lot, who are simply stunningly respectful in all their interactions. Sometimes, you have breeds that fit both descriptions, but of course, but for the purposes of this chapter, I’m going to focus on adhering to a demarcation of the two.

As Western society has developed over the last several hundred years, it is clear that we have become increasingly uneasy about violence. Visible public executions are no longer seen. Governments now go out of their way to justify wars and violent interstate actions. Spanking children, even by their parents, is now being questioned. Ironically, while violence is becoming less acceptable in real life, our society is obsessed with a cult of violence in its entertainment industry. Still, when governments justify real violence—as opposed to the virtual violence of TV, movies and video games—violence is advocated now as the lesser of two evils, as a last resort and is undertaken reluctantly. This standpoint is a change from, say, the way the Allies looked at the conduct of World War I. Then, violence was seen as a cleansing of society, a positive good.

The fact that the understanding of violence has, and is, changing raises the important question: how do we form a moral sense about violence—what makes violence right or wrong? The answer is complex, and an adequate answer will need to take into account a multidisciplinary approach from history, sociology, psychology and political science. A partial answer has come from moral philosophers. Moral philosophy considers those aspects of human self-understanding that include the way we make decisions and what is important in making those decisions. In my forthcoming book, Love as a Guide to Morals [published 2012], I suggest that moral sense is formed by the complex interaction of feelings, thoughts and choices. I call it the Triad of the affective, the reflective and the elective. My suggestion is that in the formation of moral sense, the ways we feel, think and choose are equally important. The three form the legs of a stool. Without any of the three the stool is imbalanced and will inevitably fall over. So, a morality based in thinking without feeling will be remote, lack compassion and will often promote gross injustice. A morality rooted in feeling with no deep thought will be wooly, unclear and inexact where exactitude is needed. Either without choice will be ineffective, mere words with no moral bite. In this chapter, I will concentrate on the relationship of reason and sentiment.

To invoke Shakespeare's dedication in the Sonnets, my friend and colleague Dan O’Hara has been “the onlie begetter” of this collection, and then—continuing the Shakespeare reference—he stepped offstage and asked me if I would take over as editor. But it was Dan who first shared with me T. S. Eliot's description of the function of great art: “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. […] There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, […] which can never be forgotten, but […] is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience.”

What would happen, Dan and I speculated, if we asked scholars, writers, and artists to recall a particular work of art that has stayed with them for a lifetime (Eliot's “larger whole of experience”)? More important, why has it stayed? Or grown in importance? Or changed with them over the years? Now, in his new role as consultant, Dan cited other writers who have echoed Eliot's definition: Matthew Arnold called such moments “touchstones,” Joyce “epiphanies,” and Woolf “moments of being.” Dan added, “Even Heidegger called them moments of being, seeing not just literature but existence itself as full of possible moments of being. Such moments, like love affairs, punctuate and shape our lives.”

The purpose of this collection is to complement studies of literature, many of which, understandably, approach a work as a document for the age—its philosophy, history, politics, with the work serving as a commentary on life but aesthetically distinguished, by definition, from reality. If the study reflects the life of the writer, her or his personal feelings, this is to the good, but still the work's “purpose” is to reflect the real world beyond its covers, or beyond the stage. If the purpose of the criticism is the work itself, as a self-contained aesthetic unit, the critic might be charged with practicing art for art's sake. Of course, given the need to make such studies more “practical” or “useful” in the curriculum, there is a drive to make the humanities relevant and needed.

After 1989, NATO became a politico-military organisation and ultimately transformed the Political West in its image. Neo-realists assumed that having completed its primary task, the containment of the Soviet Union, NATO would disband. Instead, it launched various expeditionary wars while remaining the cornerstone of the collective defence of Western Europe. It thereby became an obstacle to the transformation of the European security order. A collective defence body is very different from a system of collective security. It applies a logic of inclusion and exclusion and imposes hierarchy into alliance relationships. Russia was stuck on the outside of an expanding system centred on Washington. Transatlantic ties took priority over a re-envisioning of European continentalism. From this failure stemmed incalculable consequences. Instead of indivisible security on a continental scale, Washington enlarged NATO to bring the former Soviet and some other states under its defence umbrella. This was the free choice of the countries concerned, but their choice was structured by the options on offer.

It is not hard to imagine an alternative pan-European security structure encompassing all states in some sort of continental security confederation. In the early 1990s, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was touted as the framework for such an entity, while NATO's Partnership for Peace programme was welcomed by Moscow. The idea of some sort of OSCE security council, analogous to the UN Security Council, was also advanced as a way of regulating great power relations in the region. A major security role for the EU was also proposed. In the end, the paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation at the end of Cold War I is striking. NATO enlargement became the only game in town. Any short-term gain was balanced by the long-term degradation of the European security environment, as well as the profound internal transformation of the Political West itself. In the absence of a security order that included Moscow, the security dilemma intensified. European security became defined against Russia, rather than with Russia. In May 2024, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov noted that an acute foreign policy confrontation between Russia and the West was ‘in full swing’, with the Western powers seeking to impose a ‘strategic defeat’ on Russia and the very existence of the country under threat.

Postcommunism as a condition is not restricted to the former communist states but affects the rest of the world. The long after-life of the revolutionary socialist challenge continues to shape Western polities. Even after the dissolution of the communist order and the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989–91, the instruments and practices devised to counter the communist and Soviet threat not only survived but radicalised. The Political West, formed in and shaped by cold war, lives on in the form of NATO and the entirety of the cold war security arrangements, as well as the ideological apparatus and the military–industrial complex of the Trumanite state. Nevertheless, the collapse of communism unravelled the consensus focused on Cold War imperatives and opened up the terrain to new forms of contestation. Class politics gave way to culture wars and technocratic ‘third way’ depoliticised governance practices. In international affairs, the cold peace lasted a bare 25 years before full-scale cold war was reignited with Russia in 2014 (over Ukraine) and with China in 2018 (trade war). The notion of cold war is misleading if it simply suggests a rehash of the earlier conflict, but my argument is that cold war entails a certain style of international politics in the nuclear age, a distinctive culture, based on an enduring pattern of hostility between consistently aligned groups of protagonists, contesting not only militarily but also through economic and ideational antagonisms. This in turn has profound domestic effects, reproducing patterns of control, information management and imposed consensus on the key issues of the day. Cold war binaries are restored, in which one side claims to be on the right side of history and to speak the truth while the adversary is historically anachronistic and spews only falsehoods and ‘disinformation’.

Wars of Reality

Cold War II is more amorphous but no less dangerous and pervasive than the first. The regimes of truth established by classical concepts of liberalism and socialism, ‘based on a belief in the limitless power and normative value of the mind’, have dissolved. In the absence of clearcut ideological divisions and the erosion of the civic culture of high modernity, the distinction between truth and falsehood breaks down. Mediatised narratives and the culture of the spectacle themselves became the terrain of contestation.

Writers on pacifism and nonviolence share an implicit assumption that to become nonviolent, as societies, groups or individuals, is actually possible. However, the dominant narrative of human history has focused on violent actions—what historian Francisco A. Muñoz termed “violentology” (Gay 2016 ). This dominant historical narrative is unremittingly deterministic. In other words, that humanity might choose a pacifistic or nonviolent future is unlikely based on human history. As with all deterministic ideologies—whether religious, biological, sociological or historical—free will, the ability to make choices that might result in differing future outcomes that are not predetermined, is a chimera. If the narrative is true, and if it can be demonstrated that the human animal is, in fact, determined for violence rather than nonviolence or pacifism, then the work of nonviolent philosophy and activism is futile.

Historical determinism has been buttressed by biological positivistic frameworks that have suggested that the human animal is, in fact, hardwired for aggression and violence and no amount of wishful thinking will change that fact of nature (Wilson 1975, 2015; Dawkins 1989). I will offer, below, a more hopeful prognosis. I suggest that the possibility of becoming nonviolent is a warranted assumption based on recent studies in the psychology of peace (Christie et al. 2001, MacNair 2003), that humanity has the potentiality and resourcefulness for empathy and nonviolence (Midgely 1995; Rifkin 2009; Pinker 2011; Krznaric 2014) and that a spiritual practice of the habituation of nonviolence suggests a realistic hope for a nonviolent future (Simpkins and Simpkins 2011, 2012). This is, however, not a deterministic viewpoint, and the future remains open. I will not suggest that a nonviolent future is inevitable—humanity may yet destroy itself, and much of the planet with it—but rather, and more modestly, that humanity has the potentiality for nonviolence that is often obscured by the dominant violentological narratives.

However, before that I look briefly at the sometimes conflicted findings of sociobiology, and the more recent field of neurophilosophy, that have presented the most serious challenge to the assumption that humanity might choose nonviolence over violence.

In this chapter, I take a fresh look at that way of being pacifist called nonresistance. I suggest that those of us committed to nonviolence would do well to revisit some of the emphases of this earlier, and now often maligned, movement.

Pacifist Types

First, I need to clarify different ways of being “pacifist.” In the literature, “pacifist” is used in two ways. In older literature, pacifist stood for any ideology or theory that is in some way related to peace. The English word “pacifist” is a transliteration of the Latin pacifici meaning peacemaker (Hershberger 1944 , 172). In more recent literature, it is more common to narrowly define pacifism as an opposition to war. On occasion, though pacifist has meant opposition to war, it has not been an opposition to all forms of violence. For example, war may be opposed, but personal self-defense accepted, as might the violence of the criminal justice system and police violence. At other times, pacifist has stood for opposition to all forms of violence, of which war is only one kind. Pacifism has also been modified, as in “nuclear pacifism.” Here, pacifism is not opposition to “conventional” war, but to war that involves the use of nuclear—and often biological and chemical—warfare. In other words, nuclear pacifism is opposition to war when WMDs would be threatened or used. When people embrace pacifism or oppose pacifism (as in Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology), it is not always clear what way of being pacifist is included.

In any discussion of pacifism, clarity is needed as to the use of the word. In this chapter, for analytical purposes, I suggest four ideal types of pacifism. I am using “types” in the particular and technical sense favored by Max Weber. He suggested that ideal types are mental constructs used to under-stand complex social institutions and to provide for comparative analyses (1949, 89–95). An ideal type is a term applied to an agglomeration of characteristics to which social institutions may be compared. Unlike the Platonic forms, ideal types are rooted in empirical phenomena as observed in human history and social development.

Why Is It Essential to Learn about Leadership?

Unless someone has been rendered comatose and marooned on a deserted tropical island for the better part of two decades, most individuals have a fairly good idea about the importance of leadership. Once our marooned individual finally gets rescued and resuscitated, I would imagine that he or she will immediately grasp the importance of leadership too. On the other hand, you, my gentle reader, probably already know the importance of leadership, especially how essential it is for a person to learn about leadership, and indeed practice effective leadership himself or herself. Why else would you be clutching a copy of this book (or a Kindle unit for the eBook aficionados out there)? Well, it could also probably be due to the Fido factor, but more on that after this early introduction.

Therefore, if for some reason, you need a refresher on the importance of leadership, then this introduction to the book (and indeed the entire book) will serve as one. Leadership is perhaps one of the most valued traits/positions throughout the world, and has invited a lot of attention to it across contexts and disciplines. Books, monographs, and articles on leadership are ubiquitous—a Google, a DuckDuckGo, or a Bing search will reveal millions of results on the topic of leadership. There are hundreds of institutes and universities worldwide that have programs or courses on leadership. Some journals exist primarily to showcase scholarly articles on leadership (e.g., Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Leadership Studies, Leadership, etc.). And of course, there is no real or artificial shortage of leadership book titles either. Many books on leadership exist, and this current volume is one in that number. I myself have written one of those books (that book uses a Harry Potter context to explain leadership). However, there is one aspect that is unique to this book—I allude of course to the canine context, which I have juxtaposed with the leadership context.

Hmm[…] it is also likely that you are a dog lover, as many folks around the globe tend to be. Perhaps, the title of the book caught your attention, and why wouldn't it, after all?

Sometime before war became permanent and before political violence became overtly intertwined with recovering national greatness, joining the US Coast Guard seemed like a reasonable idea. It seemed reasonable partly to extend a life at sea without having to do what we Westies called “humping creates.” From what I saw as a kid from those round-the-clock shifts going on at the port, a longshoreman's existence loading woodchips, cement, rice, and fertilizer, bound for China and Japan, always seemed as exotic as it was forbidding. Better stick with construction on terra ferma and closer to home. If swinging a hammer for living meant rising in the predawn hours and suffering the summer heat, and even with its share of heavy lifting, at least you could go home at night.

Weekends could also be your own. My weekends meant working just a half-day on Friday to make the bus out of the valley to the coast before the evening fog set in. It felt generous of the boss to understand because this kind of work was hardly work at all. A deckhand on a salmon boat in the Pacific Northwest enjoyed remarkable scenery, cool temperatures, salty breezes, innumerable cross-species encounters, and characters galore. Exhaustion never felt as satisfying as it did on the dock after who knows how many hours riding swells. You could fish, trolling for hours, and not catch, but still walk away with some money in your pocket as well as some good stories to tell. If the bite was on and the wholesale price was right, a good weekend's haul could bring in enough to cover a year of state college tuition. And that promised work of still a different kind. The boat meant for me the last bastion of unalienated labor, which is eventually how I thought about professing English once my tuition was paid.

But, as deck hand, I had no need for college; and what's more curious still, no one in my family had ever spoken of college and respectable employment in the same breath. College was at best conceived as a momentary escape from the inevitable grind of people who actually work. Those two terms—college and work—were as alienated from each other as was the idea, once I got toward the end of my first degree, that I’d go on for two more.

This topic was slated for an earlier placement in the book, but then while writing the book, I figured that a previous chapter made more sense to be moved up, so it became prudent to move trust down to this chapter instead. Trust is another quality that is integrally tied to effective leadership. The whole point of leadership is to be able to influence followers, and in optimal cases, be able to influence them without coercion. You have to get them to follow you despite any rewards or punishments—the key to doing that is Trust. When followers trust their leaders, they are more willing to stick up for and support their leader's plans and visions. And ditto for leaders—if they trust their followers, they are more likely to listen to their followers and more likely to practice an empowering style of leadership with them as opposed to the dreary and dread-inducing micromanagement style of leading. which needless to say signals a lack of trust on the leader's behalf, and also ensures that the followers never trust their leader either.

In this chapter, I will focus on the concept of trust, and discuss how important and essential it is in establishing effective leadership. Without trust, one may as well take one's ball home and call it a day. Trust is integral in helping people follow and adhere to a vision set by the leader. There is a plethora of ways by which leaders can help their followers trust them, and I will discuss some of those behaviors in this particular chapter. When it comes to followers, it is important for leaders to trust them as well. It is absolutely suboptimal to have situations or conditions where only followers trust their leaders, but the leaders don't reciprocate the trust back.

Dogs are synonymous with trust—after all, the old saying about a person's best friend being his or her dog exists for a reason. Another human being may betray your trust over trivial or nontrivial matters, but a dog will never do that. Humans trust their dogs for a reason, and dogs too trust their humans (although sadly, in some cases, the trust is misplaced, and many of those humans aren't worthy of that level of trust). But if the humans in question are indeed worthy of that loyalty, then it's pure perfection.