How the James Webb Telescope is rewriting our cosmic origin story —
unveiling the Universe, the Psyche, & Global Law.
By Dr. Mostafa Kamal Russell · Editor-in-Chief
The James Webb Space Telescope's deep-field view, in conversation with the classical canon and the architecture of international law.
— The Russell Civilizations Review · NASA / ESA / CSA composite
From the Editor · The Polymath's View
Three Inquiries, One Question
This issue is, by any honest accounting, three issues at once. The
James Webb Telescope's latest deep field is a fact about the
universe; the philosophical literature on selfhood is a
tradition about the human; the architecture of international
treaty law is a fiction we agree to keep believing.
We propose, modestly, that they are the same problem — the
problem of how a curious species writes a coherent story about itself
while standing inside the events being described. The answer, week by
week, is what this paper is for.
Treaty Architecture · A primer for the lay reader
Category
Source
Impact
Pacta Sunt Servanda
Treaties
Legal Certainty
Opinio Juris
Custom
Global Norms
Jus Cogens
Peremptory Norms
Universal Ethics
— Dr. Mostafa Kamal Russell · Editor-in-Chief & Founder
Opinion · Comment · LettersThe Polymath's View — the editorial pages of The Global Polymath, where the publication argues with itself in print.p. 22 — The Comment Desk
MKR
The Polymath's View · Editor's Column
Dr. Mostafa Kamal Russell
Editor-in-Chief & Founder
This Week's Editorial
Reading Across the Grain — A Defence of the Polymath's Habit
The cover story of this issue is, by an editor's confession, not
one story but three. We have set the James Webb Telescope's deepest
field beside Sartre's Being and Nothingness, and beside the
architecture of Pacta Sunt Servanda. The proximity is not
accidental.
The most consequential problems of our century sit in the seams
between disciplines. We propose, modestly, to keep insisting on it.
The objection writes itself. Are these not three different
questions? They are. But they are three answers to the same
question — the question of what kind of creature can ask its
own origin, and on what authority it expects an answer. The cosmologist,
the philosopher, and the jurist are talking past each other; this paper
has been founded on the conviction that they should not.
A polymath, in the older sense the masthead of this publication
borrows, was not a generalist. She was someone for whom the
disciplines were not yet at war. We mean to recover the habit; the
forty-second issue is one more attempt at it.
The freedom to evade is the only freedom a system without
consciousness cannot exercise. That is, this column suspects, the
most useful sentence anyone has yet written about machine learning.
We have replaced Freud's vocabulary three times in a hundred
years and his question once. The question, on inspection, is the
only thing in the file that has held its value.
Outer-space law was a curiosity in 1967 and a hobby in 2007. The
Webb instrument has, almost as a side effect, made it the most
practical question in the field.
→ p. 24
Special Spotlight · Continued From Vol. 14, No. 41
Delta-Zero 2031: The Roadmap for a Carbon-Neutral Economy
This week, Phase 3 — The Eco-Diplomacy Act. Implementation begins.
