This issue of Eruditio contains challenging and possibly controversial themes. Nonetheless, overall, these contributions challenge the frontiers of thinking in different spheres of global relevance.

The issue of global peace and security is one of the most important on the agenda of the World Academy. This is a complex subject in the sense that security is frequently prefixed by the term “national” and thus national security seems to detach itself from global security. In “Security Reflections: A Holistic Approach Without Nuclear Weapons”, Jonathan Granoff has provided us with a short but incisive anecdote to the parochial edge of security discourse. His article brings in a concise and clear manner, the importance of global and collective initiatives in advancing the agenda of global peace and security. In doing this, he is giving great clarity to the emerging notion of collective security with traction.

Garry Jacobs’ contribution “Ways of Knowing: Life Beyond Chaos” was inspired by a WAAS seminar on scientific complexity. His understanding of the problem of uncertainty in cognition generated by scientific complexity underlines the important challenge to the evolution of human consciousness and the techniques of understanding not only the self, but the self in the universe. In doing so he confronts the problems of the limits of reliance exclusively on the mind which has a marked tendency to affirm one perspective to the exclusion of others, to reject what it previously embraced, and not arrive at an all-embracing perspective that can reconcile apparent opposites. In effect, the author calls for efforts to develop more synthetic and integrated ways of knowing which have the capacity to overcome the limitations of reductionism and systems thinking. Ultimately, he is suggesting a profoundly important challenge that requires a major shift of emphasis and perspective in how we think. His approach is sympathetic to intuitive insight and the techniques that we can develop to explore this important way of knowing how to discover solutions to pressing problems that we perceive as uncertainty.

David Krieger’s “Hubris Versus Wisdom” revisits a central theme of the WAAS agenda namely, global security and the abolition of nuclear weapons. He draws out attention to the fact that activism has generated substantial reductions in nuclear warheads around the world. A reduction from 70,000 to just over 17,000 is itself a major accomplishment. The number is still too many, as he notes. He further draws our attention to the importance of understanding the mindset that finds strength and value in nuclear weapons in the concept of hubris and the mindset that seeks to eliminate them from the planet which reflects the wisdom tradition. The mindset vested in retaining nuclear weapons systems captures the hubris of arrogance, an arrogant belief in the supremacy of raw power, and the illusion that these weapons can be controlled by hubris and ensure the safety of humanity. Indeed, a central weakness of hubris is the fragility of its psychological and scientific foundations. It is hubris that may ultimately lead us to self-destruction and it is wisdom that may ultimately save us. The author draws attention to three global wisdom figures, Albert Camus, Mohandas Gandhi, and Albert Einstein. It was Camus who pointed out that our scientific advances here took us to “the greatest level of savagery.” It was Gandhi who noted, when informed of the bomb’s use that non-violence was not simply an ethical mandate but a fundamental moral standard if humanity is to survive the nuclear age. Einstein, a spiritual father of the World Academy, suggested we need new modes of thinking to avert unparalleled catastrophe.

There is an urgent challenge to displace nuclear hubris with the wisdom of human solidarity. Humanity must be mobilized because the movement toward complete abolition is moving at a snail’s pace. He concludes his piece with a poem he composed called “A Few Simple Truths”. Truth is worthy of repetition and I hereby quote those truths:

Life is the universe’s most precious creation.

There is only one place we know of where life exists.

Children, all children, deserve a full and fair chance.

The bomb threatens all life.

War is legitimized murder with collateral damage.

Construction requires more than a hammer.

The rising of the oceans cannot be contained by money.

Love is the only currency that truly matters.

One true human brings beauty to the earth.

In “Being in Superposition: Modern Subjectivity, and the New Collectivity”, Ljudmila Popovich grapples with the classical philosophical person and personality over time problem. Here she adds another dimension, not simply the time artifact, but the space-time artifact. In this case she focuses on the importance of place on feminine identity and the ideal instrument to explore this is the woman in the position of a migrant, meaning that the migrant woman has an identity that is also shaped by special characteristics of exile. The superposition idea is an innovative but highly complex method of observation. It is a set “of the self as a set of positions and relations. Dynamic, relational, multi-positional and diversified individuality.” From this vantage point the observer gets a profoundly more interesting and complex understanding of a multi-dimensional, evolving personality configuration. The author’s essay is provocative and seeks to establish some important insights conditioned by time and space in the nature of human subjectivity.

Richard Hames is a profound social critic. In “To Touch Eternity”, he has given us deep insights on some of the most vital and important questions on science, value and essentially the future of humanity. It is a short paper but insightful enough to be seriously contemplated by the reader.