ABSTRACT
Human beings, Aristotle observed, imagine eudaimonia or dream of contentment in different ways, because they have grown to have somewhat different characters. Growing from little groups to bigger families to polities and eventually commonwealths, human societies are incrementally approaching unity and peace, as some magnanimous humans are approaching apprehension of the unity of mankind by swelling their minds up, as it were, to embrace the macrocosm. After the Second World War, when technological developments and group conflicts had gone even further towards shrinking the world, an organisation for imagining the unity of humankind had been sought in the United Nations. The old dream of contentment in civilisation, similarly, depends upon adding to the post-American Civil War insight, “The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world,” something more contemporary: the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that heals the world.
