Being In The World

By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Strategicpipa

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Professor Fred Dallmayr is a peace scholar in the absolute sense. He believes in the value of democracy, but concurrently the utility of what he calls the “dialogic cosmopolitanism.”

The latter may sound like a mouthful, but it is actually a war-cry, if one may leverage exclusively on the passion of this term sans the destructiveness, to our collective redemption. In fact, the first few lines in this book is a quick give away: How do we call ourselves ‘civilized,’ as we often do when nuclear arsenals are the weapons of our self-defense? Weapons, which used, can literally blow the whole city, and civilizations, into smithereens. Obviously, the picture is skewed, if not altogether wrong, when we invoke the concept of civilization, Frank Dallmayr admitted just as much.

But, even as the “illogic” of nuclear weapons and violence continue to proliferate, there is a need to reclaim some of the vocabularies of peace that have been suppressed, censored, lost, or, simply overlooked? In “Civilizations and World Order,” Fred Dallmayr, through the help of numerous authors, sought to correct the anthropocentric nature of humanity at large. Instead of a me-first mentality, Fred Dallmayr argued that it should be “we all”. Everyone has the right and responsibility to use their mental faculties well, to love the other and the neighbors.