Books on the topic 'Existential Risk'

The monograph contains the results of research concerning, firstly, new ideas about employees and about human resource management in the context of a reset of the labor market and sanctions restrictions. In the context of these directions, the competition factor is considered as an imperative to reset the supply and demand of labor, the specifics of the modern psyche and existential reality, the role of human capital in the sustainable development of the corporation. Secondly, the actual role of continuing education as a basis for the competitiveness of workers in a period of economic instability, its inclusive scenario and, as a consequence, knowledge, formed, including taking into account the policy of digitalization. Thirdly, issues of well—being, the content of which is a culture of caring and psychological safety of employees, including conditions of crisis economic development, an inclusive environment, family-friendly policy of the organization. Fourth, the problems of managing older workers in the concepts and practice of personnel management: professional success in aging societies, technology for achieving active longevity, training, productivity and remuneration. Fifth, resetting approaches to personnel management: the formation of an organization's culture in the context of the development of information and communication technologies, the development of a system of documentation support for personnel management in order to reduce personnel and legal risks. For students, postgraduates and teachers of economic universities and faculties, as well as a wide range of readers interested in personnel management issues.

Suicide is a uniquely human phenomenon, necessitating a human response. Suicide disproportionately claims the lives of older adults, and men in particular. Effective clinical practice with at-risk older adults requires sensitivity to contributing developmental, intrapersonal, social, and existential factors. Whereas the presence of suicide thoughts and behavior may be conceptualized as potential signs of an incipient mental health emergency, demanding quick and decisive action, working clinically with at-risk older adults nevertheless extends temporally beyond moments of behavioral crisis and conceptually beyond risk assessment and management. The field of later-life suicide prevention is in its relative infancy; however, progress is being made in investigating associated risk and resiliency factors and in developing, testing, and disseminating approaches to assessment and intervention. We provide an overview of the literature and call for a more sensitive, compassionate, and effective approach to suicide prevention among older adults, drawing on individually tailored and humanistic-existential approaches to care.

Increasingly, international legal arrangements imagine future worlds, or create space for experts to articulate how the future can be conceptualized and managed. With the increased specialization of international law, a series of functional regimes and sub-regimes has emerged, each with their own imageries, vocabularies, expert knowledge and rules to translate our hopes and fears for the future into action in the present. At issue in the development of these regimes are not just competing predictions of the future based on what we know about what has happened in the past and what we know is happening in the present. Rather, these regimes seek to deal with futures about which we know very little or nothing at all; futures that are inherently uncertain and even potentially catastrophic; futures for which we need to find ways to identify, conceptualize, manage, and regulate risks the existence of which we can possibly only speculate about. This book explores how the future is imagined, articulated, and managed across various functional fields in international law. It explores how the future is construed in these various functional fields; how the costs of risk, risk regulation, risk assessment, and risk management are distributed in international law; the effect of uncertain futures on the subjects of international law; and the way in which international law operates when faced with catastrophic or existential risk. The contributions in this book will provide readers with a sound basis for making comparisons between the practices developed in different international legal regimes.

Abstract In the “New Normal” central banks set their interest rate to zero and print money through massive quantitative easing, while finance ministries run huge fiscal deficits. Yet inflation remains minimal. This book explains why. It also explains why the New Normal is really the New Abnormal, and why it can’t last. The academic roots of the New Abnormal are traced to a conceptual confusion about the “natural rate of interest,”’ and postmodernism in macroeconomics, exemplified by the DSGE (dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) movement. A theory of “existential risk” is developed, which is concerned with the collapse of political economies such the Bretton Woods system and the New Abnormal. Existential risk expresses itself in the growing gap between the natural rate of interest, measured by the rate of return on capital, and the real rate of interest. Existential risk is also expressed in the development of cryptocurrencies. A theory of “kinetic inflation” based on Keynes’ liquidity trap is developed, which accounts for the absence of inflation in the New Abnormal, and predicts its outbreak when zero interest policy ends. The adverse social consequences of the New Abnormal for fertility, pensions, house prices, economic inequality, and intergenerational equity are explored. A causal link is established from the New Abnormal to Covid-19 mitigation policy, and from the latter to the intensification of the New Abnormal. Finally, the prospects are assessed for ending the New Abnormal, and an orderly return to the Old Normal. The alternative is to crash out of the New Abnormal chaotically.

This chapter considers three counterarguments to the cybersecurity dilemma logic. It shows that even if the cybersecurity threat does not pose an existential risk, it is vitally important and can animate the security dilemma. It shows that regardless of one’s views on attributing cyber attacks—many believe that attribution is difficult or impossible—the cybersecurity dilemma is likely to be a problem. It lastly shows that even though cyber weapons are different from kinetic ones, convergence is likely and the cybersecurity dilemma is still significant, and will likely grow in significance.

Religious coping is the most common source of resilience worldwide among people facing harsh adversities, yet it also can do harm. Three major classes of religious acts pose risks for harm to self or others: group religious life that overshadows personal spirituality; religion that expresses symptoms of mental illness; and spiritual struggle that arises from conflicted meanings, motivations, and actions within religious life. Across religious traditions, personal spirituality sets a standard for relational and ethical living against which the moral worth of religious acts can be judged. When group religious life too strongly dominates personal spirituality, inquiry about existential concerns can re-energize personal spirituality in a corrective rebalancing. Discerning mental illness in the guise of religion requires religious professionals to learn about diagnosis, treatment, and risk factors for relapse of mental illnesses. Psychotherapy or spiritual guidance can resolve intrapsychic, interpersonal, and person-God conflicts for religious persons caught in spiritual struggles.

The ‘law of maritime security’ is an instance of ‘securitization’ applied across various aspects of the law of the sea. The list of activities encompassed by the term is inherently non-exhaustive and lacks any common method of risk assessment. In addition, maritime security law has evolved in response to projected catastrophic or existential threats detached from any meaningful assessment of their probability. The distribution of risk in this area is driven by a combination of a projected future and the securitization of certain real, present concerns. Thus, maritime security and its effects are best understood in the context of what will be called the ‘transnational security State’ and the distortions that such a sState-centred approach imposes. Through is chapter utilises select case studies this chapter o demonstrates the manner in which maritime security has shifted the burden of risk from sStates and onto humans, especially onto people in transnational or liminal spaces.

During winter 1838–1839, the Mormon community faced existential crisis. On 27 October 1838, Missouri Governor Lilburn W. Boggs declared all Mormons to be enemies of the state, and unless they disavowed their religion they would be required to depart Missouri or risk “extermination.” Missouri officials charged Joseph Smith and other church leaders with treason and other crimes and confined them in a county jail. David W. Grua’s chapter, “Joseph Smith’s Missouri Prison Letters and the Latter-day Saint Textual Community,” places Smith’s letters from jail within the historical genre of the prison letter. Grua contends that Smith’s letters sought to make the church’s catastrophe in Missouri comprehensible by connecting suffering with a foundational tenet of the Mormon religion—revelation. Smith’s prison epistles functioned as ligatures that textually bound the scattered Latter-day Saint community together.

Working in palliative care (PC) can be challenging, distressing, and rewarding. This chapter discusses and presents some suggestions to deal with particular challenges in introducing the meaning-centered intervention (MCI) for PC clinicians. Its format and content are founded on the meaning-centered psychotherapy developed for cancer patients. Frankl’s existential therapeutic approach, called logotherapy, serves as the underlying theoretical framework. The chapter describes the intervention, the purpose of which is to create strategies for enhancing meaning at work and for preventing burnout. The chapter provides an understanding of workplace stress, stressors specific to PC, psychosocial risk factors that may lead to burnout, and key ingredients retained for intervention. Elaboration and content of the MCI-PC are described. Quantitative and qualitative studies conducted with PC nurses are presented. Results support the assumption that the MCI-PC can enhance meaning at work by increasing perceived benefits and by linking coherently values and intention, choices and actions.

Dr. Walter Ling begins this chapter by discussing the distinction between the process of detoxification and role relapse prevention. He reviews the post acute withdrawal period, its neurobiological underpinnings, and discusses the role of stress hormones, neuro-circuity, and the importance of relapse prevention. The existential question as to why people take drugs is posed. Complex aspects of the neurobiology of post-acute withdrawal and subsequent treatment ramifications are reviewed. Drug-specific neurochemical changes are explained, including treatment to reduce cortisol and noradrenergic responses pharmacologically. Then the integrative approach to relapse prevention is reviewed by Dr. Munoz. The concept of “relapse prevention plan” is introduced and the roles of exercise, 12-step social support, and the use of novel neuro-diagnostics including Event Related Potentials (ERP) to aid in personalized risk stratification of potential future relapse. The importance and evidence of multidisciplinary approaches and social 12-step-type support are also reviewed and close out the neuroscience of the first 2 sections.

This chapter contends that the problem of evil arises not only for theists but also for atheists. To demonstrate this, focus is placed on ‘the problem of systemic evil’, where this is the problem of accounting for the violent, cruel, and unfair system of natural selection, a system which guarantees pain and suffering for uncountably many sentient beings. Unlike the traditional problem of evil, which concentrates on specific events, the more challenging problem of systemic evil emphasizes that the entire biological system is evil. Despite the systemic nature of evil, both theists and atheists typically uphold ‘existential optimism’, the thesis that the world is overall a good place and that we should be grateful for our existence in it. The combination of systemic evil and existential optimism gives rise to the ‘existential problem of systemic evil’, and this is a problem that theists have greater resources in answering than do atheists.

Chapter 6 discusses the relationship between numbers or frequencies and historical linguistic arguments. Grounded in the principles laid out in Chapter 2, the benefits of using arguments based on quantification are discussed and explicitly connected to the general aims of historical linguistics. The chapter offers an introductory overview of state-of-the art multivariate statistical methods, and discusses why these are preferred over simpler, more commonly used statistical null-hypothesis tests. In particular, the discussion goes into how multivariate techniques are able to handle several potentially explanatory factors simultaneously. An extended case study of the rise of the so-called existential there in Middle English illustrates these points. Using the case of existential there, the chapter shows that simple null-hypothesis tests are insufficient for the complexities of historical linguistic research. Instead, multivariate techniques provide the means to understand the data and assess competing claims from the existing literature.

This article investigates why W. E. B. Du Bois combined existential, racial, and environmental themes in his essay Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. It analyzes how natural beauty gave rise to the combination of anti-racist protest and imported German romanticism in this work and highlights its potential contribution to a better understanding of the intersection of race, romanticism and modernism in the ecocritical tradition. It suggests that Du Bois’s explorations of the double environments of (black) Jim Crow and (white) national parks in the essay foreground practices of segregation across both natural and urban spaces.

Gradually, alternative conceptions of the future emerged, which centered on questions of adaptation and loss and damages. International climate law followed suit, which resulted in the development of different sets of rules and principles. The focus shifted towards the broader causes of climate change and considerations of equity. Yet, these shifts could not do away with dystopian imageries of the future, including fears that climate change presents existential threats to human life as we know it. This has led to the consideration of more radical technologies such as climate engineering, technologies that give rise to new imageries of the future, and calls for their legal regulation.

Abstract: Beginning with Pierre Hadot’s idea of spiritual exercises and Stanley Cavell’s conception of moral perfectionism, this essay argues that improvisation can be understood as a practice of spiritual self-transformation. Focusing on the example of Sonny Rollins, the essay investigates the ways in which Rollins’ improvisations embody a series of philosophical concepts and practices: the care of the self, the Stoic exercise of cosmic consciousness, the problem of moral exemplarity, the ideas, found in the later Foucault, of a limit attitude and an experimental attitude, and so on. The underlying claim of the essay is that improvisation is not only an aesthetic exercise, but also a social and ethical practice that can give rise to existential transformations.

This article surveys and discusses the core points of contact between notions of information structure and notions of presupposition. Section 1 is devoted to the ‘weak’ presuppositional semantics for focus developed by Mats Rooth, describing its properties with regard to verification and accommodation and showing that it can successfully account for a wide range of phenomena. Section 2 examines the stronger thesis that focus–background structures give rise to existential presuppositions, and finds the counterarguments that have been raised to carry considerable weight. Section 3 looks into the relationship between Givenness and run-of-the-mill presuppositions, finding that this relationship is looser than might be expected, mainly because a presupposition may be in need of focus marking instead of givenness marking.

Drawing connections between Freudian psychoanalysis, Virginia Woolf’s criticism and fiction, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, The Ethics of Immediacy recounts the far-reaching consequences of the modern turn towards a new ethics of immediacy. During the first half of the 20th century, a profound transformation – an existential revolution – took place in European culture in how human beings conceived of themselves. Inspired by Freud’s psychoanalysis, a newfound appreciation for the realm of immediate experience in human life emerged. With Freud himself making a signal contribution to this existential revolution, and with Woolf and Merleau-Ponty taking up Freud’s ideas in their own unique ways, all three figures began to regard first-order, spontaneous, direct, unselfconscious, concrete experience of self and world as standing at the heart of what it means to be human. Jeffrey McCurry describes how this new state of affairs stood in contrast to how immediate experience had been historically dismissed, devalued, repressed, and even negated in the fields of psychology, literature, and philosophy. This experience posed dangers to psychological stability, social order, and philosophical certainty. McCurry examines how Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Woolf’s modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life.

Neuroexistentialism is a recent expression of existential anxiety over the nature of persons. Unlike previous existentialisms, neuroexistentialism is not caused by a problem with ecclesiastical authority, as was the existentialism represented by Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, nor by the shock of coming face to face with the moral horror of nation state actors and their citizens, as in the mid-century existentialism of Sartre and Camus. Rather, neuroexistentialism is caused by the rise of the scientific authority of the human sciences and a resultant clash between the scientific and the humanistic image of persons. Flanagan and Caruso explain what neuroexistentialism is and how it is related to two earlier existentialisms and they spell out how neuroexistentialism makes particularly vivid the clash between the humanistic and the scientific image of persons. They conclude by providing a brief summary of the chapters to follow.

In returning to the Civil War, postbellum American writers depended on the literary conventions and mythic structures of meaning by which a vast and violent history could be incorporated into fictional narrative. The result was a struggle between “romantic” and “realist” patterns of meaning that reflected the existential anxieties of American modernity: the sense of epistemological limitation and the dread of ontological purposeleᶊneᶊ. In the former, the war prompts the expreᶊion of nostalgia for a pre-capitalist, premodern, and pre-secular world. In the latter, the war is linked to the rise of complex networks of information, technology, and economics, and seems to embody the disenchanted condition of modernity. The Civil War dead are central to both modes of representation, and yet they resist the systems of mediation by which they are turned into moral exempla, symbolic commodities, and icons of national identity.

Southern writers Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor present the collusion of the American welfare state and a consumer economy as a source of existential alienation. This chapter considers their objections to the social-democratic institutions created during the New Deal era. Percy and O’Connor present versions of Christian existentialism as an alternative to bureaucratic politics. In addition to joining the concert of intellectual challenges to the legacy of reform established during the New Deal, their related responses represent the splintering of American existentialism in the 1960s. The political vocabulary of the New Left represents a competing faction of American politics informed by existentialism. These differing responses share a common valorization of private judgments of value. Both responses are related to another phenomenon, which political scientists call the rise of an “independence regime,” or partisan disaffiliation, in the American electorate.

As business decisions and actions spill over into society in ways that arouse our concern, it is useful to explore how philosophy might offer an alternative perspective to consequentialism. This chapter reviews the conventional approach and the risks of “maximizing.” It submits that the narrowly consequential approach provides us with practical reasons for action but neglects normative or moral reasoning. Reasons for doing might be based on rational choice, but reasons for being (existential reasons) and feeling (sentimental reasons) are guided by moral choice. That these last two may not be “commensurable” does not make them less important. Treating everything as tradable with everything else may be bad for the soul and society. We have moral reasons to feel and to be certain ways, as well as to do certain things. It is time to pay greater heed to Jim March’s long-standing challenge to consequentialist decision theories.

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. Before it emerged in the second century, passage to the afterlife required obedience to God and king. Gnosticism proposed that human beings were manifestations of the divine, unsettling the hierarchical foundations of the ancient world. Subversive and revolutionary, Gnostics taught that prayer and mediation could bring human beings into an ecstatic spiritual union with a transcendent deity. This mystical strain affected not just Christianity but many other religions, and it characterizes our understanding of the purpose and meaning of religion today. In The Gnostic New Age, April D. DeConick recovers this vibrant underground history to prove that Gnosticism was not suppressed or defeated by the Catholic Church long ago, nor was the movement a fabrication to justify the violent repression of alternative forms of Christianity. Gnosticism alleviated human suffering, soothing feelings of existential brokenness and alienation through the promise of renewal as God. DeConick begins in ancient Egypt and follows with the rise of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, the advent of theosophy and other occult movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary New Age spiritual philosophies. As these theories find expression in science-fiction and fantasy films, DeConick sees evidence of Gnosticism’s next incarnation. Her work emphasizes the universal, countercultural appeal of a movement that embodies much more than a simple challenge to religious authority.

One of the Financial Times' Best Economics Books of 2023 Visionary Oxford professor Ian Goldin and The Economist's Tom Lee-Devlin show why the city is where the battles of inequality, social division, pandemics and climate change must be faced. From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities. Globalization and technological change have concentrated wealth into a small number of booming metropolises, leaving many smaller cities and towns behind and feeding populist resentment. Yet even within seemingly thriving cities like London or San Francisco, the gap between the haves and have-nots continues to widen and our retreat into online worlds tears away at our social fabric. Meanwhile, pandemics and climate change pose existential threats to our increasingly urban world. Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin combine the lessons of history with a deep understanding of the challenges confronting our world today to show why cities are at a crossroads – and hold our destinies in the balance.

Abstract In recent decades, as environmental destruction has become more extreme and prevalent around the planet, the way that humans experience the natural world has also changed, giving rise to more frequent and intense experiences of eco-anxiety. Not simply personal or social, eco-anxiety is distributed across the relationships that humans have with the life, land, air, and water of Earth. This anthology presents international and interdisciplinary perspectives on eco-anxiety, with attention to two of the most prominent sources of eco-anxiety today: the COVID pandemic and the climate crisis. From the microscopic scale of viruses to the macroscopic scale of Earth’s atmosphere, instability in natural systems is causing unprecedented forms of psychological distress, including anxiety and related emotional or affective states like grief, anger, guilt, and depression. To tackle crises of such unprecedented scope and impact, we need to expand beyond mainstream behavioral research approaches to include also rigorous methods from the human sciences. This book both builds upon and moves beyond the latest research in environmental psychology, conservation psychology, and clinical psychology. Dominant research paradigms in these areas rely primarily on experimental and observational methodologies that analyze quantitative data. In contrast, this book focuses on sophisticated traditions of social and cultural psychology in dialogue with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The result is a nuanced understanding of the human experience of confronting eco-anxiety, offering critical insights into the subjective worlds of individuals as they grapple with the intertwined existential threats of the climate crisis and pandemics.

Abstract Israel’s citizens have had to cope with the emotional challenges of the threats their country has faced during its first two decades. The book unpacks the history of citizens’ emotions—an analysis of the reports about how they felt and of the emotional regime—the emotional repertoire designed by political leaders and cultural agents wishing to mold the feelings of Israeli citizens. Policy makers—Prime Minister and Defense Minister David Ben-Gurion first and foremost—sought to fortify the spirits of Israelis and to inculcate an emotional regime that would rise to the challenges of the new frontier state. Israel’s emotional regime was meant to mitigate fear, foster preparedness, and instill a shared feeling of purpose, belonging, and solidarity; it served as foundation for the political elite’s ideology and nurtured a model of citizenship. This emotional regime imbued Israelis with a sense of moral rectitude and equipped them with tools to manage their fears and, in extreme cases, despair. Most significantly, it met the human need for existential meaning in times of crisis, meaning that is essential to overcome the fear of impending death. Yet the emotional regime sometimes failed, as in the cases of immigrants unable to acculturate and adopt Israel’s norms and practices and soldiers and citizens unable to withstand the thirst for revenge. The perspective of the history of emotions leads to hitherto untapped and nuanced insights about the weaknesses and strengths of Israelis, and reveals new connections between identity, morality, state-sanctioned violence, politics, and law, along with a new understanding of the motivations behind policy makers’ decisions.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.