This collection of essays deals with the central problem of humanity: interpersonal violence; perhaps more accurately, nonviolence as an antidote to that central human conundrum. Few of us have the luxury of beginning at the beginning, and the essays in this book were written after I had been a pacifist for 21 years. They were previously published in various forums between 2004 and 2021, during my time teaching philosophy at the State University of New York, Cortland. The essays are an exploration of the realms of human rela-tionships, ethical considerations and the pursuit of a more compassionate and nonviolent world. I examine various forms of pacifism and discuss the interplay of philosophy, autobiography, ethics, common views of violence, historical perspectives on war and the tension between historical determinism and the possibility of nonviolence. The essays converge on a central theme: the transformative potential of intentional nonviolence. My exploration extends beyond theoretical musings to practical applications, encompassing personal relationships, social structures and our relationship with the Earth. In sum, I invite the reader to consider intentional nonviolence not just as a means to some other end but as an intrinsic good, capable of fostering a better world— one rooted in love, compassion and the pursuit of a shared humanity.

In the opening chapter, I address the question of whether love is inherently nonviolent, challenging assumptions and looking at the complexity of human loves, which often involve elements of violence. In her work, Iris Murdoch emphasizes the need for a moral philosophy centered on the concept of love, a notion often neglected by contemporary philosophers. In the first chapter, I build on Murdoch's idea and propose that a more loving world would be less violent. I explore the connection between love and morality, acknowledging challenges posed by issues of justice, fairness and happiness. I introduce a hypothetical case of a woman driven to violence out of love for God, family and country. I discuss the varied expressions of love, from affection to romantic and altruistic love, acknowledging their intertwining nature. I analyze the tension between transcendent, perfect love and its imperfect, human expressions.

Homer is in a sense the bedrock of Greek culture. Greeks are brought up in the charms of mythical narration, whose resonances are then gradually transformed through the cognitive channel of history, archeological findings, and geographical location. Exposition to the Homeric Epics starts early in the form of brief story-like adaptations in elementary school, modern Greek translations in high school, and study in the original of classical Greek and Latin texts in the Humanities Departments at the university. I still remember with fondness the reading and the analysis of these distant texts by our erudite classics professor in the oak-paneled amphitheatre and my dread when I had to recite extracts from Homer and Virgil as part of the oral exam at the end of the year. Then came my exposition to European literary modernity when I pursued my higher studies and research in contemporary literature and theatre abroad. Inevitably, the earlier tense experience with the classics softened in the course of years, filtered into sweet memory and resting com-fortably—albeit half-forgotten—at the back of my mind.

It was almost by miracle that I rediscovered this hidden treasure some 40 years later. After an exhaustive academic year, protracting well into the summer, we decided to take a week off in mid-September to enjoy the still warm Ionian Sea on the coast of Epirus in western Greece. Among the region's attractions was a visit by boat up the Acheron River to the Oracle of the Dead (Nekromanteion), both well-known sites from antiquity. The prospect of the visit was a real thrill for me because it meant a double journey back in the time machine: the first as a walk down my personal memory lane and the second as a speculative return to practices and experiences of antiquity related to the underworld.

I decided to take the trip as a totally physical experience and leave any intellectual research for later. The boat was of medium size, accommodating a small group of 10–15 passengers of mixed age and origin. We actually boarded at the mouth of Acheron, heading up to its springs.

Basic Matters

It was not a journey that I expected to find myself on. When I first encountered Tamburlaine the Great, at age nineteen, I dismissed Marlowe's poetry as self-conscious and narcissistic. Yet here I sit, many years on, having written the DNB essay on Edward Alleyn, the actor who brought Tamburlaine to life on stage at the Rose Playhouse, and the author of many essays on Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose. All I can think about is how much I missed when I initially encountered Tamburlaine. Then again, it has taken many readings and re-readings, research in ancient books and manuscripts, together with the energy of live productions, to bring me to a different place. It has also taken the realization that texts don't stand still, nor do lines of poetry, whether in production or in our thinking. But then, revisionary thinking is one of the gifts of a life spent teaching and immersed in scholarly pursuit.

Few would quibble with Tucker Brooke's quotation: “the real significance of blank verse began with Tamburlaine.” But really, Morris makes the more important point: “it's dramatic blank verse,” the way poetry works on stage that matters. And this is precisely what I have come to admire about Marlowe's poetry. It is not only the way it has held up over time, but the way it holds up the plays he wrote. In retrospect, Marlowe has never received enough credit for showing his contemporaries how to make verse stage-worthy. It is a more complex issue than shortening lines and liberating them from rhyme. It is different from merely being “dramatic,” a term implying that language does its duty on stage. Fortunately, Morris widened the group of plays under consideration to demonstrate Spenser's influence. All the same, while he identified repetition as a rhetorical tool that Marlowe employs, he stopped short of examining exactly how Marlowe uses this device as part of the scaffolding for his plays, or, more specifically, how repetition creates interactions among characters that an audience will experience, both audially and viscerally.

When I first read Keats's “Ode to a Nightingale,” I took it simply to be a poem written out of admiration for a nightingale's song, a poem celebrating a momentary encounter between bird and poet in an English garden. However, I knew that that did not account for the perplexing effect of the poem, a certain sense of tumult that arises from it. Why these clashing chords of anguish and happiness, weariness and exultation, despair and serenity?

When I reread the poem on a later occasion, I did so much more slowly in the attempt to allow for the rhythm of the work's unfolding, where the ode itself begins with a strange sense of an inexplicable slowing down.

Keats's ode begins with the lyric poet's expression of a simultaneous sense of heartache and drugged numbness. The expression “a drowsy numbness pains” begs the question of how a loss of sensation and loss of awareness can be painful, and it seems that the experience being described is not so much one of drifting into sleep but one of being put to sleep by what the poem calls “some dull opiate,” some drug, and calls also “hemlock’” a poison. With this, the question became for me: does the heartache or piercing sadness attested to derive from an anaesthetizing predicament that cannot be avoided?

In thinking of this sense of undergoing an anaesthetic, I recalled a memory from my childhood when I injured my mouth in a playground accident and was taken to a dentist who decided that to stitch up the injury he would need to “put me to sleep,” as he phrased it. It sounded alarming to me, since I had only heard of animals being put to “sleep,” a euphemism for mercy-killing them. The dentist clamped a chlorophyll gas mask over my nose and mouth, and as I began to lose consciousness, I had the harrowing feeling of fervently wishing I could resist what I could not resist, the helpless imposition of being plunged into oblivion.

I think T. S. Eliot's notion that the “experience of a poem is […] both of a moment and of a lifetime,” from our first encounter, which “is never repeated integrally” to the poem's survival “in a larger whole of experience,” bears a special parallel to the way an actor prepares for a role, progressing from the read-through, to rehearsals, to performance.

For me, Richard's monologue has an immediacy, an exhilarating appeal at the moment of delivery, for both the character in greeting the audience at the start of the play and the actor charged with giving life to an illusion. Theatre is, after all, a medium of the moment, the presence of the actors and their audiences inhabiting the same space and time. Or as one of my actors once observed, “If Godot doesn't show up for the characters onstage, he doesn't show up for us in house either. The joke is on both of us.” But what Robbe-Grillet has called “presence” in the theatre coexists with something not there, or not physically there or of the moment. Harold Pinter speaks of the latter as “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” We go to take out a bottle, a purely mechanical act, but as we approach the cabinet, we know that a weasel is living underneath, unseen but there. I tell my theatre majors this is a good way to imagine subtext, the deep and personal inner dialogue an actor devises to complement, sometimes even enhance the words there in the script. That subtext expands the present moment, the dialogue heard by the audience, the character seen by them, into the character's past, the sources, and the backstory that, while unseen, are there before the character even speaks. “The ‘why’ he says what he says,” as an actor friend calls it. And if the actor builds the character from real-life experiences, consciously, and sometimes not, this visionary moment of the playwright's art coexists with a real-life story.

With the end of Cold War I in 1989, a new paradigm of international politics took shape. This was a world without the challenge of a communist superpower and its associated conception of world order. Instead, the world order associated with the Political West appeared to triumph, but the fruits of that putative victory contained some deadly toxins that would corrupt the triumphant order itself. It remains to be seen just how lethal this will be, but we can already see one of the outcomes in the form of Cold War II. As described in this book, a whole culture is associated with cold war as a form of international politics.

The inter-cold war paradigm, what we can call the postcommunist model, was characterised by a number of key features. First, the interpellation of the Political West, variously presented as the liberal international order, rules-based international order or Atlantic power system, between the Charter International System and the practices of international politics. The Political West effectively usurped the privileges and prerogatives that should properly belong to Charter institutions, above all the UN, its agencies and the whole body of international law that it has spawned. Second, this entailed the displacement of the fundamental Charter principle of sovereign internationalism, where states meet as normative equals and unite in various multilateral formats to resolve problems of mutual concern. Instead, the ideology of democratic internationalism was advanced, which introduces not only sovereign inequality but also an inherently didactic, if not outright interventionist, dynamic into international affairs. The allegedly more advanced societies bring enlightenment, by book or by crook, to the more backward. Third, the absence of a peer competitor encouraged neoconservatives to forge a grand strategy based on permanent US dominance, requiring the imposition of constraints on potential competitors. In the first instance, this applied to Russia and was then extended to China. At the same time, the rise of economic neoliberalism from the 1970s provoked the radical transformation of social orders into market states, with wrenching domestic consequences.

Joie de vivre is a French expression which basically refers to an attitude of exuberant enjoyment of life. Or in other words, to simply delight in life—to not simply pursue happiness but instead to be happy. This is an attitude that very few people seem to possess—look around you, no really, take a look around you. I can bet it’ll be hard to find or spot people who live with an attitude of joie de vivre. The various trials and tribulations of life can certainly beat the joy out of one's life, but it is really so important to strive to retain that joy for life, or else we run the risk of becoming mere hollow versions of ourselves. What's the point of earning money or having material riches, if one doesn't even relish or experience a joyous existence?

Think about the grumpy joyless bosses or leaders or coworkers or any sort of people you may have interacted with in the past (or even have currently)—it isn't much fun to work with individuals like that, is it? Misery begets misery, as the old saying goes. There is some research too that suggests that joyless or unhappy leaders tend to be ineffective leaders—after all, if you have a gloomy joyless Squidward for a boss, you wouldn't necessarily be happy yourself, would you? There is a journal called the Journal of Happiness Studies which focuses on topics like happiness, subjective wellbeing, and other related variables. If you peruse the articles through the various issues of that journal, you will begin to see how very important happiness or joy is for a variety of outcomes, be they personal, organizational, or societal outcomes.

Now dogs are quite definitely the best at exemplifying this undying spirit of joie de vivre. Think about your own pet (if you are fortunate enough to have one), and remember how he or she treats you jubilantly when you get back home from work. And then when you prepare to go out for a walk or a hike with your dog; if your dog is like a majority of dogs out there, then he or she will probably bounce about the house or at least politely wait with eager anticipation.

This essay is dedicated to Renée (1929–2023)

The year is 1934, during the Great Depression, which has plunged many families in Aotearoa/New Zealand into grinding poverty. In a rural, working-class kitchen, there is a palpable air of tension as a family goes about its routine tasks. Mary, a woman in her fifties, irons washing, while Granna, her mother, writes in her notebook and reminisces about the sea journey to Aotearoa when she was a young woman. Mary’s granddaughter Jeannie makes tea, while her grandson Cliff plays his mouth organ. Their mother, Iris, sits still at the table. She snaps at her children, and Mary attempts to calm her. When Iris’s brother-in-law Ted pulls up his van outside, they all freeze. Ted directs Mary and Cliff to carry in a homemade coffin, placing it on two chairs.

This excruciating drama of waiting is the opening scene of the play Wednesday to Come by New Zealand playwright and novelist Renée, first performed at Downstage Theatre, Wellington, in 1984. The coffin, which remains onstage until the end of the play, contains the body of Iris’s husband Ben, who has killed himself at one of the government relief camps set up during the Depression to provide work for unemployed men. During the course of the play, his family discovers that Ben became deeply depressed in his time at the camp. They find a harness among his meager belongings and learn that he was yoked to a plough along with a team of men because men were considered cheaper labor than horses. Although the play’s narrative is fictional, it is based on the real suffering of working-class families during the Depression, including the fact that in 1933 the government decreed that families of unemployed men were only entitled to welfare payments if their men went away to work in the rural relief camps. Historian Tony Simpson writes of the camps:

I want to respond generally to these wonderful contributions by citing a passage from Emerson's “Experience.” This is a passage that I loathe as much as I love. It thereby expresses for me the radical ambivalence possessing me concerning the idea of America as it has traditionally been expressed. Just as Dante possessed T. S. Eliot's idea of art's visionary moment by a unique sublimity, so, too, Emerson's vision of America as a compensatory dream-vision always emerging is for me the manifest destiny, the femme fatale of the revisionary madness haunting and destroying any hope for America's future. Here is the infamous (for me) Emersonian passage:

I’ve never been to prison, but I spent five years in a boys’ boarding school. That's why I understood immediately and at a visceral level the most famous story concerning Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a story retold by Martin Esslin in his book Theatre of the Absurd (a book, by the by, that named the Absurd as an enduring dramatic genre, to the enduring dismay of most play-wrights so labeled).

The story, in case you have never heard it, tells of a landmark production of Godot at the maximum security prison at San Quentin in 1957, directed by Herbert Blau. As Esslin reports it, the recondite drama that had puzzled sophisticates in the theatre centers of the world “was immediately grasped” by the inmates who saw in it a reflection of their petrified existence and who followed the play with mesmerized attention. It is easy to want to treat this miraculous conversion narrative skeptically, especially after having spent a career teaching the play to wary students. As with the college crowd, surely the hard-bitten convicts included a handful who scoffed at Beckett's precious allegory. Nonetheless, it appears many were truly spellbound by the play, a remarkable feat for any drama under much less adverse circumstances, and that it was especially the figure of Lucky, the bound menial of Pozzo whose great discharge of thinking climaxes the first act, who drew their most intense sympathy. Of him more later.

Like the prisoners, we sequestered pupils had tasted the absurd. We had peered into the abyss of absurdity. To us schoolboys, marooned in a brick fortress on a windswept hilltop in provincial Germany, gazing uncomprehendingly at the distant world through the bars of Latin grammar and differential equations, overeducated and overripe with puberty's desires, the repetitive, loquacious immobility of Beckett's figures was our immobility, just as their awkward, testy love for each other was our love, too. From there on, Godot has always been a work that kept on answering questions I didn't know I’d asked, or perhaps posing questions I didn't know were askable.

The end is almost nigh […] well, at least the end of this book is almost near, to be precise. Here, we are finally at the final chapter of this particular volume. It was certainly a lot of fun for me to write this book, as I was able to dive somewhat deep into the world of dogs, which is a world I’ve been an avid fan of since I was a kid. I must have read hundreds of books on dogs and various dog breeds and attended several dog shows in both India as well as the US. And I plan to continue attending some more shows in the days to come, I have also gone on short trips and visits to meet with several dog breeders—it's always fun to go meet a new or unique breed. In short, I really do love dogs—they are such wonderful beings and companions, that life is truly unfathomable without them.

The whole idea behind this book was to write about certain qualities that I believe are qualities leaders ought to have, in order to be exemplary and effective leaders. I attempt to show you how we can learn about those qualities by learning about dogs. I have essentially described various dog breeds and attempted to showcase how they embody the qualities that I consider essential for leaders. Through the various chapters in the book, I have endeavored to introduce you (i.e., the swashbuckling reader) to a variety of dog breeds, some of which you may have already known about, but I bet there are many breeds in here, which you’ve never heard about, and now after reading the book, you have. As I’ve alluded to in several places in the book, many dog breeds actually would have fit into multiple chapters throughout the book, but I intentionally wanted to focus on unique breeds per chapter, instead of using the same breeds throughout. Otherwise, honestly, I could have probably written the whole book with just seven dog breeds, that is, the titular five and maybe a Shepherd or a Retriever to round up a magnificent seven. But I also want this book to help people learn about the many wonderful dog breeds out there in the world—there are loads more that I simply couldn't even begin to cover in the book.

Sanctions undermine the liberal order that they are intended to protect. By challenging the principle of innocent until proven guilty, the Political West erodes its moral standing not only in target countries but across the Global South. Undermining the property and legal rights of individuals and states damages not only economic interdependence but also the very idea of deeply interconnected economies. The trend towards deglobalisation accelerates as states seek to insulate their economies and make them more resilient by short-ening supply chains, increasing localisation and import substitution. The geopolitical effects are also severe. Sanctions on Japan precipitated the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941. Unilateral coercive measures, as sanctions are better called, act as a form of ersatz war, entrenching the growing hostility between Russia and the West, a process that was later repeated vis-à-vis China. In his study of peasant rebellions in Southeast Asia, James C. Scott examined the moral economy of economic activity and relationships. The term is applied here to highlight the morally contentious ground on which sanctions are applied today. Without procedural justice and impartiality, not only the legitimacy of the sanctions but that of the sanctioning states themselves is questioned. No less important, sanctions contribute to the overall deterioration in the geopolitical environment, indefinitely locking states into patterns of hostility.

Sanctions from Hell

The modern era of sanctions was launched by Congress's adoption of the Magnitsky sanctions in December 2012, followed by Obama's expulsion of diplomats in 2016. Putin's ‘cronies’ became an easy although dangerously unspecific target, along with assorted oligarchs and genuine criminals. In July 2017, Congress adopted the landmark legislation, ‘Countering America's Adversaries through Sanctions Act’ (CAATSA). The CAATSA sanctions limited the president's ability to ease or lift earlier ones. Obama's sanctions had been introduced by executive order, but they were now codified in statute and therefore cannot be rescinded by presidential decree. The target was no longer alleged Russian crimes but the Russian corporate economy as a whole. This came on top of the cessation of most military-to-military contacts in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine crisis with the exception of ‘deconfliction’ procedures in Syria. A reluctant Trump had no choice but to sign the measure.