Record Global Warming and Carbon Emissions in 2023: Exponential Population Growth and Beholden Governments

I submit that not enough attention is brought to bear on the root of the warming of the planet: the huge increase in human population in the 20^th century. More attention could also be directed to the disconnect between the warming running up against the 1.5 Celsius limit agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement in 2016 and the still increasing amounts of carbon emissions from humans. Finally, the culpability of governments in not being willing to touch economic growth or corporate interests warrants attention. It as if an adult steps on a weight scale and realizes, I’ve never weighed this much in my life, and then eats ice-cream that very night. Unfortunately, the diffusion of responsibility can inhibit governments, industries, and an electorate from having the sort of cognitive dissidence that an individual who has a record weight and then eats ice-cream—not even low-fat!—should have. Such dissidence should trigger changes in conduct. Even so, business and government are comprised ultimately of people and thus have been culpable and are thus blameworthy.  

In 2023, Earth “shattered global annual heat records, flirted with the world’s agreed-upon warming threshold and showed more signs of a feverish planet, the European climate agency,” Coernicus announced on January 9, 2024.[1] The use of the word, shattered, seems hyperbolic, or exaggerated, to draw attention, but sometimes small differences in numbers represent significant change that is difficult for us non-scientists to perceive. “Copernicus calculated that the global average temperature for 2023 was about one-sixth of a degree Celsius (0.3 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the old record set in 2016. While that seems a small amount in global record-keeping, it’s an exceptionally large margin for the new record, Burgess said. Earth’s average temperature for 2023 was 14.98 degrees Celsius (58.96 degrees Fahrenheit).”[2] Very gradual change is the default for the Earth’s climate, which is why a long-term perspective is needed even to assess the impact of carbon emissions on the climate.

“The agency had calculated that 2023 was 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times. “That’s barely below the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that the world hoped to stay within in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord to avoid the most severe effects of warming,” the agency’s deputy director, Samantha Burgess, said.[3] To be sure, not all of the 1.48 Celsius increase from pre-industrial times was due to pollution. “Malte Meinshausen, a University of Melbourne climate scientist, said about 1.3 degrees Celsius of the warming comes from greenhouse gases, with another 0.1 degrees Celsius from El Nino and the rest being smaller causes. . . . Other factors including the natural El Nino — a temporary warming of the central Pacific that alters weather worldwide — other natural oscillations in the Arctic, southern and Indian oceans, increased solar activity and the 2022 eruption of an undersea volcano that sent water vapor into the atmosphere.”[4] Even so, 1.3 accounts for most of the 1.48 degrees, and is thus significant. This can also be inferred by the estimate that “2023 was probably hottest year on Earth in about 125,000 years,” said Woodwell Climate Research Center climate scientist Jennifer Francis. Our species, homo sapiens, has only been around for 300,000.

It looks like hope is running dry on whether economies will push us—or, more accurately, whether we will push ourselves—beyond the 1.5 Celsius limit of global warming agreed to by governments in the Paris Agreement. To be sure, “(f)or the first time, nations meeting for annual United Nations climate talks in December [2023] agreed that the world needs to transition away from the fossil fuels that are causing climate change, but they set no concrete requirements to do so.”[5] However, even though renewable sources of energy had “expanded at record rates, fossil fuels maintained an 82% share of total primary energy consumption” in 2022.[6] Even at the same share, “carbon dioxide emissions from energy rose 0.9% in 2022 to a new high of 34.4 billion metric tons, indicating lack of progress in curbing worldwide carbon output.”[7]  Emissions thus “moved further away from the reductions called for in the Paris Agreement.”[8] Juliet Davenport, president of EI, said, “We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”[9] So even in the midst of shattering records, governments generally were still allowing their respective economies to increase their emissions, or at least enough governments were resisting taking measures that would reflect knowledge of how rapidly the planet was warming overall.

The lack of concrete requirements had rendered the Paris Agreement toothless, and thus no match for the pressures that governments are always under to facilitate and not thwart economic growth and not to stand up to corporate donors to political campaigns in democracies. More abstractly stated, non-binding international treaties are no match for the human urge for instant gratification and the desire for more wealth (i.e., greed). In spite of our great reasoning ability, our species also has expediency “hard-wired” into our biology. A big unanswered question is whether research into means to “capture” carbon in the atmosphere (and oceans) will undo the damage caused by our species’ heedless impulsive refusal to self-regulate itself.

In the movie, “The Matrix,” agent Smith likens our species to a virus because we keep spreading. In 1900, the global population was 1.6 billion; by 2024, 8.1 billion humans were alive on Earth. Clearly, such a enormous increase in just 123 years must be significant for the planet's ecosystems, even a shock. Few of us even realize that, in line with Thomas Malthus’s thesis that human population can outstrip the world’s supply of food—which stirred controversy among Deists who could not accept such a large flaw in God’s design of the Creation—the exponential increase of our species’ population is a, or even the, underlying cause of the rising carbon emissions from cars, trucks, heating, agriculture, and industrial production levels. Simply put, more people means more cars, and thus more exhaust; more people means more widgets, which means more factories as well as more freighters on the seas, more trucking and more freight-train hauls; and more people means more dwellings, which means more heating and air-conditioning, and thus more demand for heating oil and on coal plants for more electricity. These relationships are really quite simple at the macro level of aggregation, though admittedly I am putting to the side the shift from coal and oil to renewables. We are all organisms, and thus we cannot but consume and use resources; the more organisms, the more food, for instance, is needed. Malthus, an Anglican priest and political economist, was right in his Essay on Population, published in 1798, when the global population of humans stood at 1 billion (1900, a century later, being just 650 million more). If an intelligent design of Creation can indeed be inferred—an inference challenged by Malthus’ theory of over-population wherein geometrical population growth can outstrip arithmetic expansion in resources—self-regulation would presumably be crucial in our species and yet the laggard responses to the Paris Agreement would suggest that we suffer a want of self-discipline on a collective (and individual) level.

From the susceptibility of elected representatives to being beholden to big business, and the insatiable greed etched into the very raison d’etre and being of a company and the manager function, we can infer the very weakness of the human urge to self-limit or voluntarily restrain ourselves relative to an otherwise maximizing, or schizogenic, inbred and culturally-encouraged tendency to resist or ignore soft limits (i.e., those not subject to enforcement). Fortunately, the jury is still out on whether the technological advancements that human reason is capable of (e.g., carbon capture) will rescue our species from its own intractable instinctual urges that are felt so strongly in the moment that our species would even allow itself to deconstruct in the long-term as if this were pre-determined without free-will.   

1. Seth Borenstein, “Earth Shattered Global Heat Record in 2023,” The Huffington Post, January 9, 2024.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Robert Rapier, “Why the World Keeps Setting Global Carbon Emission Records,” Forbes, August 1, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.

On Israel’s Public Relations Campaign against the Charge of Genocide

In theory, state media is more vulnerable to doing the bidding of its sponsoring government than are privately owned media companies. In practice, governments are able to pressure even private news outlets to sway public opinion for political purposes. Even allied governments can pressure the government of a country in which a private news company resides in terms of what stories to air and when to air them, in order to sway that country’s public opinion, and even global public opinion. The sudden appearances in print, online, and on television news networks of former Israeli hostages being interviewed just after the International Court of Justice had announced on December 29, 2023 that Israel would be tried on charges of genocide in Gaza. Not coincidentally, I submit, emotionally-charged hyperbole was used to pull emotional “heart-strings” in order to convince the world, including the justices at international court, that the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 had been so bad that even Israel’s extremely disproportionate military attacks in Gaza were justified and thus should not be considered to be genocidal. Besides the logic being flawed, for the infliction of such disproportional harm was not justified, and even a justified genocide would violate the Convention on Genocide, which Israel had agreed to be bound. In short, I suspect that much was happening behind the scenes not only in Israel, but also in the U.S. Government and even private media companies in the U.S. immediately following the Court’s announcement.

On December 29, 2023, the International Court of Justice announced that South Africa had filed papers accusing Israel of being “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” because “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group.”[1] On January 2, 2024, a spokesperson for the Israeli government “announced that representatives of the country would appear very soon before the court to defend Israel’s position.”[2] Being a signatory to the Genocide Convention, which had been adopted by the UN’s General Assembly in 1948, Israel was not only subject to the court’s jurisdiction on genocides, but also obligated to send representatives to the Court when a defendant. In anticipation, Israel unleased a public relations offensive, which included not only Israeli media outlets, but also American ones too, perhaps from pressure from Washington, an ally of Israel. Not having proof of the complicity, I am basing my hypothesis on the very convenient timing involved, as well as the fact that multiple interviews were published and aired within days of the Court’s announcement.

Admittedly, the first casualty in war is truth, but even subjectivity goes only so far before it becomes hyperbolic or otherwise excessively manipulative (i.e., used as a weapon of sorts) by twisting the meaning of words beyond recognition. In fact, the 20^th century philosophical phenomenologists, including Jaspers, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre overrated human subjectivity in using it to anchor their respective philosophies. Those philosophers and others like them may have been unduly pessimistic on the potential of human reason because the horrors in the Nazi Holocaust had followed the optimism in the Enlightenment in the 18^th century. As Nietzsche wrote, a philosopher is not a person of one’s day. This means that a philosopher worth one’s salt thinks outside the box, as it were, and so one’s philosophy is not unduly delimited by one’s immediate context. In short, the decadence in the bloodiest century so far had swallowed the philosophical phenomenologists. Meanwhile, analytic philosophers allowed themselves to become reductionists in obsessing on language.

Israel’s government responded to being charged with genocide by exploiting the worst of the 20^th century to stir the world’s emotions against South Africa’s accusation of genocide. In particular, the Israeli government spokesman announcing that Israel would send representatives to the court described South Africa’s accusation as “a blood libel” against what The Times of Israel labeled as “the Jewish state,” as if the South African ministers were antisemitic.[3] The intended allusion was to the Jewish origins of the state due to the blood of the Holocaust, and an implicit claim may have been that the heirs of victims cannot become victimizers, which is not so. Indeed, vengeance against current adversaries can be intensified by resentment of the unspent justice against past aggressors. Such disproportionate vengeance is not fair to the contemporary enemies unless they were also the past aggressors. The Israeli government spokesperson suggested such a link in labeling the South African government as an heir of the Nazis.[4]  In being aided by South Africa, the Palestinians in Gaza too could be vicariously linked to an old enemy. I would not be surprised to find press reports of the Israeli government ministers referring to Hamas as Nazis so as to justify expending even the unrequited vengeance in the previous century following the collapse of Nazi Germany.

Of course, the Israeli spokesman’s “heirs of the Nazis” comment was wildly off the mark. Real heirs would not have waited to see Israel’s wholesale destruction and killing in Gaza before attempting a genocide against not only Israelis, but Jews anywhere. Also, filing an accusation in an international court pales in comparison with what heirs would have done, and is not even close to what the Nazis actually did to Jews in Europe. In actuality, the South African government had pointed to the obligation of any signatory to the Genocide Convention to report possible genocides to the court. With more than 1.8 million Palestinians displaced from their homes and Gaza residents facing the “highest levels of food insecurity ever recorded,” according to the UN’s emergency chief, Martin Griffiths[5], the natural human sentiment of disapprobation—a visceral emotional reaction of revulsion—had more than enough stimulus to be activated worldwide, including in South Africa. Hume refers to such an activation to be what ethical judgment is, underneath—a visceral emotional reaction rather than a Kantian contradiction of reason. In heeding an ethical obligation, the officials in the South African government were hardly heirs to the Nazis.

Another allusion to the Nazis occurred just three days after the court had announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide. Jake Tapper of CNN headlined a former Israeli hostage, Mia Schem, who had been held in Gaza for a harsh 55 days at the home of a Palestinian family (hence thankfully rape was not committed). Schem, a young, beautiful woman who obviously deserves much sympathy for her ordeal as a hostage, nonetheless shamelessly described her ordeal as incorrectly as “a Holocaust.” 

The deliberate misappropriation of such an emotionally-tinged word—and that an Israeli of all people would use the word opportunistically and inaccurately beyond recognition—suggests an underlying motive to manipulate public opinion. Ironically, survivors of the real holocaust would probably bristle at the attempted comparison. What you experienced for 55 days is nothing like what we experienced in Nazi Germany, the retort might insist. The implication that the Palestinians in occupied Gaza—a “ghetto” so called by Israel’s Finance Minister Smotrich (who also said on the day after the court’s announcement that “Israel must reduce” the Palestinian population there to 100,000-200,000 from 2.3 million[6])—are like Nazis conveniently denies the decades of oppression exacted by Israel on the residents of Gaza and the obvious difference between the attack by Hamas of October 7, 2023, including the taking and holding of hostages, and Nazi Germany’s many atrocities over more than a decade.

Besides exaggerating in furnishing a label for her ordeal as a hostage, Schem extrapolated in generalizing concerning the entire population of Palestinians in Gaza. Interviewed on Israeli television on the day the court announced that Israel had been accused of committing genocide, she accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being a terrorist. “Everyone there are(sic) terrorists . . . there are no innocent civilians, not one,” she said.[7] She based her empirical claim on the acquiescence of the wife and child of the man who had held Schem in his home. No auditor would make such a projection to a population of numbers based on such a small sample size. After Hamas’ attack of October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed and 240 were taken hostage, Israeli President Herzog had claimed, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” as Israel was ordering 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza to evacuate their homes.[8]  The implication to be drawn from both statements is that retribution against every Palestinian there would be justified. Indeed, reports from the UN suggest that precisely that was occurring.

Gemma Connell, Gaza team leader for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), referred to conditions in even north Gaza as, “No food, no water, very little medical supplies.”[9] By January 4, 2024, many people in southern Gaza had been “displaced not once, not twice, but six or seven times,” according to Connell. With 2.2 million people in Gaza “in desperate need of help,”[10] South Africa was on firm ground empirically as well as ethically, whereas Schem’s attempt to justify the wholesale annihilation of the Palestinians living in Gaza was empirically and ethically spurious. In outlining plans for Gaza after the Israeli military attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yaov Gallant said on January 5, 2024 that the Palestinian “entity controlling the territory” would “build on the capabilities” of “local non-hostile actors” already present in Gaza.[11] Clearly, not every Palestinian in Gaza was a terrorist, and did not deserve the onslaught of Israeli “collective justice” as if they were.

I contend that Schem’s interviews were part of a coordinated PR offensive by Israel that reached as far as CNN in America. CNN interviewed another former hostage, Doran Asher, days after the Court had announced the accusation of genocide. She was more accurate in labeling the infliction of “psychological warfare” on her during her 50 days of captivity in Gaza.[12] CNN claimed in its headline, "This is what she wants you to know." My question is, who else wanted the world to know?  Who would have had the motive and political power to see it it that you hear or read her story?

That she wanted to tell her story would not have been sufficient to get her on CNN, which would surely not have been acting solely on her behalf. 

It can also be asked what did not make it onto CNN. For instance, the American media had been practically silent in putting the Hamas attack in the wider context of decades of harsh Israeli occupation of Gaza, maintaining it as a subjugated “ghetto.” Not that enduring such harsh conditions for so long justifies the killing and hostage-taking committed by Hamas on October 7, 2023; rather, the context is explanatory, and could have resulted in a global public opinion less dismissive of Israel’s vastly disproportionate destruction of Gaza. The omission of proper context can point back to CNN’s bias or the media company’s role as part of a broader PR campaign possibly being pushed by the Israeli government to set public opinion against the accusation of genocide in Gaza in spite of the facts on the ground there.

In conclusion, Israel’s attempt to manipulate global public opinion (and even the justices at the International Court of Justice) may have eventuated into the following narrative: The entire population of Gaza committed a holocaust by killing 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 240 more.  Every civilian in Gaza is culpable, and thus is a legitimate military target and deserves to be homeless and starving. Furthermore, any serious effort to hold Israel back from its extremely disproportionate “collective justice,” which is an inherently flawed ethical theory because even people living in the same geographical area do not all have the same beliefs, values, and ideology, is to be discredited as “blood libel.” Unfortunately for Israel’s credibility in its PR offensive, much more blood had flowed in Gaza than in Israel, and this alone, rather than any antisemitism, had brought South Africa to the International Court of Justice. While it is easy to throw public-relations “bombs” such as Holocaust, Nazi heirs, and terrorists, such irrationality is expedient, and thus may end up working against Israel’s interests. For instance, by inserting Nazi-era terms into the public discourse, calls for a genocide of the Jews could be transformed  from constituting hate speech to being merely countervailing political speech. Additionally, the hyperbole could ultimately undercut Israel’s credibility at the International Court and in the court of world opinion. Viewing an opposing political position on the war as antisemitic even though Israel’s military response had been so very disproportionate could erode Israel’s credibility further. The attack of October 7, 2023 was indeed horrific, as were the ensuing experiences of the Israeli hostages, but so too was the ironic banality of evil in the decades in which Israel occupied Gaza as a “ghetto” subject to the flawed ethical concept of collective justice. To say it has not been a fair fight, even taking the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 into account, is not to be antisemitic. Rather, the charge is political, as were the interviews given by freed Israeli hostages.

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1.. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023; Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
2. Jeremy Sharon, “Israel Confirms It’ll Defend Itself from Gaza Genocide claims in the Hague Next Week,” The Times of Israel, January 2, 2024.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Heather Chen and Eve Brennen, “Famine in Gaza ‘Around the Corner,’ as People Face ‘Highest Levels of Food Insecurity Ever Recorded,’ UN Relief Chief Says,” CNN.com, January 6, 2024.
6. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is a ‘Ghetto’ For Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
7. Amy Spiro and Michael Horovitz, “Freed Hostage Mia Schem: ‘I Experienced Hell. There Are No Innocent Civilians in Gaza,” The Times of Israel, December 29, 2023.
8. Paul Blummenthal, “Israeli President Suggests that Civilians in Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” The Huffington Post, October 13, 2023.
9.  Michael Rios, “’No Food, No Water, Very Little Medical Supplies’: UN Aid Worker on Devastating Conditions in Gaza,” CNN.Com, January 4, 2024.
10. Ibid.
11. Amir Tal, “Israeli Government Divisions Burst into Open as Ministers ‘Fight’ over Post-War Plans,” CNN.com, January 5, 2024.
12. Christian Edwards and Bianna Goldryga, “Freed Israeli Hostage Says She Endured ‘Psychological Warfare’ during 50 Days of Hamas Captivity,” CNN.com, January 4, 2024.

Toothless International Human Rights: Genocide in Gaza

It strains credulity to believe that vengeance against the Palestinian residents of Gaza was not among the motives of the Israeli government’s ministers in retaliating for the Hamas attack against occupation on October 7, 2023. Within days, Israel’s president publicly accused every Palestinian in Gaza of being guilty. Because it cannot be assumed that every resident of Gaza who had voted Hamas into office was in favor of the attack, and the residents who had voted for the PLO could even less be assumed to be supportive of Hamas, the Israeli notion of collective justice is ethically flawed. Deficient as a subterfuge for the very human instinctual urge to inflict disproportionate vengeance, the espoused justification did not hold South Africa off from charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). At the time, both South Africa and Israel were parties to the Genocide Convention. Because the ICJ was at the time the principal judicial body of the United Nations, the UN’s lack of enforcement power—notorious even on resolutions passed by the Security Council—meant that even a conviction could send the message that a national government can get away with even genocide.

In its accusation, South Africa claimed that Israel was “in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention” in that “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”[1] At the time (at the end of 2023), over 21.5 thousand people had been killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, far outstripping the 1,200 Israelis who had been killed by Hamas and the 240 hostages during that period.[2] The disproportionality alone eviscerates claims of retaliation and thus “justice.” That a significant number of the Palestinians killed were innocents, including children, and 85 percent of the 2.3 million Palestinians there had been left homeless[3] and at least as many without sufficient food and medical care supports South Africa’s claim that “there are ongoing reports of international crimes, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes, being committed as well as reports that acts meeting the threshold of genocide or related crimes as defined in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, have been and may still be committed in the context of the ongoing massacres in Gaza.”[4] Also in the final days of 2023, Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich publicly accused the “2 million people” in Gaza of aspiring “to destroy the State of Israel” so only a few hundred thousand should be allowed to remain there.[5] Hence, South Africa’s government stated that it was “gravely concerned with the plight of civilians caught in the present Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip due to the indiscriminate use of force and forcible removal of inhabitants.”[6]

One way to massively decrease population, the use of “indiscriminate bombing” was, according to U.S. President Biden, being used by Israel. Even though the unguided bombs could get at Hamas’ underground tunnels, the use of such bombs, especially in a densely populated urban context, was prohibited by international humanitarian law. American intelligence assessment suggested “that nearly half of the air-to-ground munitions that Israel has used . . . have been unguided.”[7] The Israeli government put out the following statement: “Israel is committed to international law and acts in accordance with it, and directs its military efforts only against the Hamas terrorist organization and the other terrorist organizations cooperating  with Hamas.”[8] Astonishingly, the statement added that Israel had been making “every effort to limit harm to the non-involved and to allow humanitarian aid to enter the Gaza Strip.”[9] This flies in the face of the nearly 2 million residents who had been displaced from their homes and with the extent of starvation. Just weeks before South Africa’s application, thousands of Gaza residents desperate for food had mobbed food-aid trucks in the city of Rafah.[10] Even Israel’s finance minister admitted that Gaza was a ghetto (so decreasing its population was justifiable).[11] Masha Gessen, who won the Hannah Arendt prize for speaking truth to power as Arendt did during the Eichmann trial, wrote that Gaza is “like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”[12] That Gessen was herself Jewish and had lost ancestors in the Holocaust did not stop her from “catching hell” for her statement. The presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT also caught hell for asserting that the context (of the war) could make political speech redressing Israel’s genocide with a corresponding one against Israel protected as free (rather than hate) speech, while Yale caved. Even a Yale alum can tip his hat to Harvard in the hope that Yale might take a lesson rather than fortify its truth, and instead humbly improve.

For its part, the Israeli government was in denial. As South Africa’s charges were made public, the state founded for victims of German atrocities had become a victimizer in striking back with vengeful disproportionality, and yet this was too much for the vengeful to see in their mirrors. The Israeli government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs played the antisemitic card in claiming that South Africa was “calling for the destruction of the State of Israel,” which was blatantly untrue.[13] For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu was saying that the attacks would continue for months.[14] Clearly, the Israeli government would dismiss any adverse ruling by the UN’s court on crimes against humanity leveled this time against Israel. For nothing short of a brick wall can arrest such stubbornness, especially when it is fueled by disproportionate vengeance. Yet the UN has shown itself to be utterly feckless, shirking even from standing up to its own members.

The root of the problem that enables a government to commit even a genocide with impunity, or invade another country unprovoked (e.g., Russia) and intentionally bomb civilians, is the absolutist interpretation of national sovereignty, which had come out of the writings of Jean Bodin (c. 1529-1596) in Six Books of the Commonwealth. Given the Reformation-fueled strife of his day, he “was convinced that peace could be restored only if the sovereign prince was given absolute and indivisible power of the state.”[15] The state’s sovereignty was absolute. A century later, Thomas Hobbes carried this political theory further in Leviathan. To be fully sovereign must include having the last say on theological doctrine and Biblical interpretation. Hence, the monarch in Britain is head of the Church of England. In the turbulent sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, absolute sovereignty was deemed worth the risk of the power being abused in tyrannical rule without any internal check. As for any normative check by other monarchs, none of them would have wanted to see their own absolute sovereignty impinged by an invading prince from another realm.

The norm that a government’s rule is a matter of a country’s internal affairs had survived even into the twenty-first century. The governments of Russia and China had been the most explicit in insisting that this norm be universally accepted. With the advent of human-induced climatic change and modern weapons of mass destruction, however, we might expect the norm to be challenged, but the ongoing impotence of the UN and the want of any serious proposals of reform that would involve national governments giving up some of their sovereignty suggests that the norm still had considerable staying power and would thus require a lot of energy to be dislodged from its privileged status as the status quo default. In other words, even as the harms from unchecked national power have increased tremendously, Bodin’s theory of absolute sovereignty has remained hegemonic.

So the Israeli government could simply enunciate false claims and not really have to worry about anything more than bad public relations from the charges at the International Court of Justice. Even genocide in retaliation for a much lesser, albeit horrific, attack could be protected by the sovereignty of the Israeli government.

The silent culprit may be the diffusion of responsibility globally as the rest of us watch the ongoing dire situation in Gaza (and Ukraine) as if we were paralyzed from demanding that our respective governments cede some authority militarily to the UN or a new international body empowered to enforce its decisions. The governments refusing to go along could be excluded commercially as well as diplomatically from those who have been willing to be held accountable themselves and thus cede some sovereignty in exchange for a voice (and vote) at the global table.

After more than a century of tremendous technological development—my grandfathers, for instance, witnessed the coming of cars, airplanes, radio, television, huge medical advances, and even computers—the retarded condition of political development really stands out—or should stand out—given the increased global interdependence and threats, including the scale of harm that a government can commit by means of military technology. That Nazi Germany could follow the Enlightenment should give us all pause in the trust we place in our governments, including their police and military forces. If we are Kantian rational beings, so too are we capable of tremendous rage that can snuff out what Adam Smith pointed to as the human imagination enabling sympathy for others in a “fellow-feeling.” Both Putin of Russia and Netanyahu of Israel have recourse to tremendous military force and yet arguably little if any sympathy even in the midst of such large-scale, disproportionate suffering. That the two men can get away with continuing to inflict even more suffering as long as they feel like it is reason enough for the defeat of Bodin’s political idea.

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1. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Waffa Shurafa, Bassem Mroue, and Tia Goldenberg, “Israeli Strikes in Central Gaza Kill at Least 35 as Netanyahu Says War Will Continue for Months,” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2023.
4. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
5. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ for Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
6. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. “Chaotic Scenes as People Run after Lorries Carrying Aid in Gaza,” BBC, December 27, 2023.
11. Sanjana Karanth, “Senior Far-Right Israeli Official Admits Gaza Is A ‘Ghetto’ for Palestinians,” The Huffington Post, December 31, 2023.
12. David Mouriquand, “Author Masha Gessen Receives German Prize Despite Comments Comparing Gaza to Nazi-era Ghettos,” Euronews, December 18, 2023.
13. Pierre Meilhan, Bethlehem Feleke, and Tamar Michaelis, “South Africa Files Genocide Case Against Israel at International Court of Justice Over Gaza War,” CNN.com, December 29, 2023.
14. Waffa Shurafa, Bassem Mroue, and Tia Goldenberg, “Israeli Strikes in Central Gaza Kill at Least 35 as Netanyahu Says War Will Continue for Months,” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2023.
15. “Jean Bodin,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.