The Semioethics Interviews III 179MT: There are people with a mission who would feel that it is their responsibility
to have a say.
JD: Right. And they sometimes come out of nowhere. Obama is an interesting
case. He is doing great, I think, but there are people who despise him. At any
rate, he does seem to have a mission.
MT: So, we have got this universal human responsibility – as human beings we
have a certain responsibility, which it would perhaps be inhuman of us not to
acknowledge. And then you talked about the responsibility of a government.
Finally, somewhere in between, we have got people with a mission. But this
still leaves the question of who is responsible unanswered, or left to a power
game, to anyone‘s initiative...
JD: The root of responsibility is what you do with your life. What are you to do
with your life? There are things you can do something about, and there are
things you cannot do something about. A lot of it depends on your
circumstances. It depends upon your training. It depends on the work you
have done to prepare yourself for when circumstances do arise. That is the
first level. But then we create institutions of government. And this is where
the problem starts to get really interesting. Remember the League of
Nations, ahead of World War II? It completely failed. And then the United
Nations was its successor. The United Nations is not working very well, but
still – the situation where we need the United Nations, that type of
institution, is a new state of affairs. You did not need the United Nations in
the 18th century, or in the 17th century.
MT: Did you not?
TO UNDERSTAND THE DOMINO EFFECT
JD: No.
MT: At the high day of colonialism? You do not think there could be any use of
the United Nations in the 1800s?
JD: You did not have the communications that could make it work.
MT: You did not have that many national states. Actually, when the UN was
founded the number of national states was around 50, and today it is around
200.
JD: If you go back down through the history of the human race, you have got to
get beyond tribalism. The nation states where a move away from tribalism.
Most nation states are still very much based on an identity that is not
connected by logics but connected by birth.
MT: But not all nation states have only one nation within them.
JD: No – it becomes more and more diversified – that is what I am saying, that
we are growing out of these small, clan-like, tribal structures and into ever
larger socio-cultural wholes. Though Egypt, for example, or Saudi Arabia, is
still much more clan-based a nation than is, say, France. The very events of