Theoretical Metric of Civilization: The Case of the International Court of Justice

The usefulness of a theoretical metric for civilization is that it can help to identify the kinds of progress which society can make that is universalized for all humanity. Societal systems perform the functions which provide the values and performance of the society, and wherein societal problems occur. In the concept of the level of “civilization” of a society, four kinds of measures can assess the progress of a society in attaining universalized values: Truth, Good, Beautiful, and Wealth. The value of Truth in our civilization is methodologically investigated by science. The value of Good in our civilization is politically pursued through democracy. The value of Beautiful in our civilization is seen in the preservation of the environment of the Earth. The value of Wealth in our civilization is generated through industrialization of societal production. We apply the theory to the historical case of the International Court of Justice and Yugoslav War Crimes to examine empirical evidence about the validity of a theoretical metric.


Introduction
Overall, is there progress in civilization? Is the cross-cultural concept of "civili- were a lot of willing executioners who got away with it and Milosevic died of a heart attack before the end of his trial." [1] We will continue to look at this case, to provide empirical evidence about a theory of a progressive civilization-a metric of progress in civilized societies.

Background: Concept of "Civilization" and Academic Tradition
To apply the concept of civilization in cross-cultural studies, research needs to indicate the degree of sophistication of a society. Traditionally, the term "civilization" has been used to denote a high "form" of society-sophistication, complexity, effectiveness, and ethics. Here we use the term in this antiquated meaning of a "sophisticated society". The term was derived from the Latin "civilis", meaning "citizen" or "city-state". Much traditional European history had been told from a myopic perspective of a "Western Civilization". In that tradition, modern Europe saw the history of the Roman Empire falling to invading barbaric tribes. Of course, this view of history is outdated and certainly not "universalized".
Writing his dictionary in 1772, Samuel Johnson used the term "civility" as Open Journal of Social Sciences opposed to "rudeness". In 1775, Ast's dictionary used the term "civilization" as the state of being civilized. Adam Smith used the term civilization in his seminal work on economics, The Wealth of Nations. However archaic a term ("civility" or "civilized" or "civilization"), one does need a word to indicate the vision of and the hope for a society to be in a high state-high in ethics, in knowledge, in wisdom, in the institutionalization of an effective and fair societal system.
And in modern academia, the term also has a long tradition in European-American thought. The American political scientist, Samuel Huntington, nicely summarized this: "Human history is the history of civilizations. It is impossible to think of the development of humanity in any other terms. "ethnic cleansing". This is an important question. Why were so many modern societies in the twentieth century "inhuman"-instead of civilized?
These earlier ideological dictatorships empirically demonstrated that good civilized societies don't just happen, despite "science". Bad civilizations can happen even with "science". Governments of the inhumane sort have systematically used terror, brutality, and genocide as official policy. Accordingly, civilized societies must be deliberately constructed and operated-if we wish to live in a "humane society"-a society humane both to people and animals, as well as nature. Although still an antiquated term, it is useful for cross-cultural studies to indicate the conditions of a "high" society, a "humane" society. This is the contemporary cross-cultural problem. Why, so far, have modern societies historically displayed so much civilized technical knowledge and so little civilized wisdom?

Constructing a Metric of Civilization
It would be useful to construct a civilization "metric" with concepts going back into the history of civilizations, so that ideas in ancient societies can be compared to ideas in modern society. And a starting point for this is the concept of the "All" in Plato's philosophy. This is particularly useful, since modern scientif- to continually ask questions of the person posing the argument-to uncover the assumptions being made in their argument. In addition, Plato called the depiction of the basic underlying forms (the assumptions of the universe) as the "All" of the universe. The "All" was composed of three kinds of forms of the "True", the "Good", and the "Beautiful". Thus the basic forms of the universe were those about truth, goodness, and aesthetics. was Socratic-Parmenidean, that reality should be explained in eternal underlying-forms. Basic reality was "permanence of forms" underlying the appearances of reality. Nietzsche later called this Greek philosophic approach as "Being"; and the Being of the universe is the permanence of the underlying forms of existence.
In modern physics, we call such basic permanence in underlying forms as "theory".
For example, the theoretical formula E = mc 2 explains the theory that mass can be converted to energy. It is the underlying theory in nuclear reactions, explaining the power of nuclear explosions (compared to chemical explosions). Parmenidean philosophy is one philosophical tradition in the theme of epistemology (method-of-inquiry) which led to modern scientific methodology-science explains nature by finding the underlying theoretical forms of nature.
However, just prior to Parmenides, another Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, had started a different philosophical tradition. Heraclitus lived in the Greek colony of Ephesus (near the Aegean coast in modern Turkey) from 535-475 BC. Heraclitus argued that reality was always changing "change" as opposed to "permanence". For example, living beings are always changing; a tree grows from a seed to a sapling to a mature tree and then dies, rots and decays. Nietzsche later called this Heraclitian view of totality of "change" as a philosophy of Becoming (as opposed to the Parmenidean philosophy of Being). In Greek history, Heraclitian philosophy jumped past Socrates and Plato and down to Aristotle.
Aristotle was born in Macedonia, north of Greece, and lived from 384-322 BC. He moved to Athens at the age of eighteen and joined Plato's Academy. There he remained until the age of thirty-seven; and then he tutored Alexander the Great in 343 BC. In contrast to Plato's Parmenidean belief in a static universe, Being, Aristotle followed the Heraclitian tradition of Becoming. Aristotle argued that, in a world of change, one could learn about the universe, by observing the universe. Aristotle took an "empirical approach" (observation) to epistemology (method-of-inquiry)-in contrast to Plato's "theoretical approach" (searching for underlying forms). Newton's quantitative model of the solar system, which provided the first scientific paradigm of "mechanism" (or Newtonian physics). In science, theory explains experiments and experiments validate theory-scientific method. By the 1700s, science was launched in Europe as the new scientific disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics.
For example, much later in 1939, the physicist Lise Meitner analyzed the splitting of the uranium nucleus as to the energy released in the fission, using the theoretical equation, E = mc 2 . Experimentally, there was less total mass in the resulting atoms after the fission of the Uranium atom than before the Uranium atom split. Meitner called this the "missing" mass; and she calculated that it was equal to the energy released, according to Einstein's formula of E = mc 2 . The experiment of the fission of the Uranium 235 atom provided empirical evidence for verifying Einstein's theoretical formula. When scientific theory is constructed upon experimental results, it is called "grounded theory"-scientific theory grounded in empirical reality.
Now we use the Platonic ideas for constructing a modern metric for civilization. But from a modern logic approach, we note that Plato's concepts should be now as "four" rather than only three. As a taxonomy for a metric, Plato's trinity of ideas (True, Good, Beautiful) is logically missing a fourth idea.
This is so, because in modern logic, taxonomies are constructed as sets of ideas, pairs-of-ideas, called a "philosophical dichotomy". A philosophical dichotomy is a "pair-of-ideas" which divides an argument into two parts. And in modern logic, the "totality" upon which an argument is based is called a "universe-of-discourse". A dichotomy divides the whole of a universe-of-discourse, into two parts; so that all things in that universe belongs either to a set of "this" or into an opposite set of "that". For example, the pair-of-ideas of "self" and "world" divide the psychological universe-of-discourse into two groups: one's self and the rest of the world (self & world).
What are the two dichotomies, out of which Plato's set of ideas can be constructed as a taxonomy? Logical taxonomies need constructed from a set of dichotomies; so taxonomies should be constructed as 2 n . Two dichotomies construct a four-fold taxonomy, Figure 1.
To find the fourth concept, we next construct a modern taxonomy for the  "Epistemology" is the traditional European philosophical term for the knowledge of method-methodology, which in the modern world is the methodology of science. The methodology of science involves 1) observations and experiments with nature and also 2) the abstraction of principles found in the observations/experiments to be generalized as theory-experiments and theory. Experiment describes nature; and theory explains nature. Developing theory based upon and verified by experiment is the basis of scientific method. Theory developed upon and verified by experiment is called 'empirically-grounded theory. In science, theory which is not grounded and verified, by experiment is called "speculation". Next when we think of the Platonic Good, we can see that it is also about substance (substantial things and events which exist) but it is also about placing     in Louvre Museum in Paris) is really beautiful, Figure 5. Leonardo was not as pretty as Mona Lisa, but he was an artistic genius-aesthetics.
Now finally, we can analyze what should be a fourth idea for Plato's the All.
What is both normative and form? It can be Wealth-a monetary "value" and transactional "form" (in terms of investments, ownership, productivity, etc.).
After the industrialization of the world (1700s-2100s), the societal system of economics has become one of the dominant concepts of our age-wealth, investment, money, property, productivity, profits, capitalism.
Wealth is a functional value to us, which is essentially different from that in Plato's "Greek civilization". Although trade was essential to the Greeks, in our modern "Scientific civilization" it is economic production & trade that is vital.  In the values of civilization between ours and the Greeks, the "True" has become the "Scientific" and the fourth category of "Wealth" has been added. While money has always been important to trade, the industrial revolution changed the means of economic production so completely that modern civilization requires For industrialized societies, a modern economic and financial system is vital and far more important than ever trade was to earlier civilizations, such as the Greek, wherein an economy was nearly all agriculture and a little bit of trade for the aristocracy.

Case History (Continued)-International Court of Justice: Yugoslav War Crimes
To provide empirical evidence about the usefulness and validity of this theory of a civilized metric, we now continue the case of the International Court of Justice and Yugoslav War Crimes. In this case the challenge is whether or not international law can be established in a multi-national world-can these exist universal justice above nations' "balance of power"-wherein, only "might" makes "right". November 1945 in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. Robert Jackson acted as prosecutor. When the trial began, Jackson produced documented evidence about "war crimes". The Allied military had found files of Alfred Rosenberg (47 crates of files) hidden in a castle. They found tons of diplomatic papers hidden in caves in the Hartz mountains. They recovered hundreds of works of art looted from occupied countries in Goring's estate. They found Luftwaffe records stored in a salt mine in Obersalzberg. They found notes made by officials of Nazi government meetings. And they had American movies documenting the liberation of concentration camps at Bergen-Belson, Dachau, and Buchenwald. These movies showed the starving survivors as nearly skeletons. They showed the stacks of naked corpses of victims that had been shoveled into mass graves. They also had the records of the Nazi genocide program, with its minutes of a meeting to plan the program.
As one historian, Robert Shanayerson summarized: "The scale of Hitler's madness was almost beyond imagination. The documents showed that after conquering Poland in 1939, he ordered the expulsion of nearly nine million Poles and Jews from Polish areas... the SS unleashed hundreds of Einsatzgruppen-killer packs assigned to spread terror by looting, shooting and slaughtering without restraint.... these SS action groups murdered and plundered behind the German Army as it advanced eastward." [3] A historically important role of the Nuremberg trials was to acquire and record documentary evidence of the Nazi policies of aggression and genocide.
In January 1946, Jackson began bringing in witnesses. The first was Otto Ohlendorf, former commander of an Einstazgruppe in Russia. Jackson asked questions and Ohlendorf answered: "Q. How many persons were killed under your direction? "A. Ninety thousand people. "Q. Did that include men, women, and children? "A. Yes. "Q. Did you have any scruples about these murders? "A. Yes. "Q. And how is it they were carried out regardless of these scruples? "A. Because to me it is inconceivable that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders by the leaders of the state." [3] This was the ethical issue. Are subordinates ethically responsible for carrying out evil acts under evil policies of their superior officials. This is an ethical connection between the acts of an individual under the governmental policies of a society.
There were a series of trials. In the first trial, twenty-four Nazis were tried and judged. Those involved in the founding of the Nazi Party were charged with conspiring to launch World War II and related atrocities. Others were accused of planning aggressive war. Eighteen were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity (such as genocide).
During the trial, one judge, Donnedieu de Vabres argued that the defendants acted not so much in complicity but in bondage to a "megalomaniac". He restricted the charge of "conspiracy" to be applied only to eight of the defendants who knowingly carried out Hitler's war plans from 1938 onward. Also the Judges ruled that guilt could not be assigned for only belonging to a Nazi organization. Any trial for other participants must be run in evidence of personal responsibility for crimes: "But since the Nuremberg judges ruled them all innocent until proven guilty, relatively few were ever tried-the prosecutorial job was too formidable." [3] The twenty-four Nazis leaders received the following verdicts: • Herman Goring-Commander of the German Air Force-death sentence.
• Karl Donitz-Admiral of the German Navy-prison sentence.
• William Keitel-Head of Hitler's Military Command-death sentence.
• Erich Raeder-Admiral of the Germany Navy before Donitz-death sentence.
• Martin Borman-Nazi Party Secretary and Hitler's chief of staff-death sentence.
• Julius Streicher-Nazi Head of Franconia and publisher of Nazi paper-death sentence.
• Hans Frank-Nazi Governor of occupied Poland-death sentence.
• Wilhelm Frick-Nazi Minister of Interior, author of Nazi Race Laws-death sentence.
• Hans Fritzsche-Deputy Leader of Nazi Propaganda Ministry-death sentence.
• Alfred Rosenberg-Nazi Minister of Occupied Territories-death sentence.
• Fritz Sauckel-Head of Nazi slave labor program-death sentence.
• Julius Streicher-Publisher of Nazi newspaper-death sentence.
• Robert Ley-Head of the German Labor Front-committed suicide before trial.
• Joachim von Ribbentrop-Nazi Ambassador-death sentence. • Gustav Krupp-Major industrialist and Nazi supporter-not tried due to ill health.
In this list, one can see that the first trial focused upon Nazi leaders 1) in the German Military, 2) in the Nazi Party, 3) in the Nazi government, and 4) Nazi industrial supporters. Of twelve sentenced to death, ten were hung. Goring poisoned himself the evening before his scheduled execution. Borman had not been captured and was sentenced in abstentia-but he was already dead, with his remains being discovered a decade later.
Adolf Hitler, Head of the Nazi Party and the German Government, was not  Tim Hume, Tiffany Ap, and Milena Veselinovic wrote: "Radovan Karadzic, nicknamed the "Butcher of Bosnia," was sentenced to 40 years in prison Thursday, after being found guilty of genocide and other crimes against humanity over atrocities that Bosnian Serb forces committed during the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995. A special U.N. court in The Hague, Netherlands, found the 70-year-old guilty of genocide over his responsibility for the Srebrenica massacre, in which more than 7000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were executed by Bosnian Serb forces under his command." [6] Describing the Srebrenica massacre, Hume, Ap and Veselinovic wrote: "In July 1995, tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims had sought refuge in the spa town of Srebrenica-designated a U.N. 'safe area'-as the Bosnian Serb army marched toward them. But with only about 100 lightly equipped Dutch peacekeepers there for protection, the town was overrun by Serb forces. Delivering the verdicts, presiding Judge O-Gon Kwon said the tribunal found that about 30,000 Bosnian Muslim women, children and elderly men had been removed to Muslim-held territory by Bosnia Serb forces acting on Karadzic's orders. Karadzic's forces then detained the Muslim men and boys in a number of locations before taking them to nearby sites, where they were executed by the thousands. The tribunal found that Karadzic was the only person within the Serb Republic with the power to intervene to prevent them being killed, but instead he had personally ordered that detainees be transferred elsewhere to be killed. It found he shared with other Bosnian Serb leaders the intent to kill every able-bodied Bosnian Muslim male from Srebrenica-which amounted 'to the intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica,' the tribunal said." [6] It took years before Karadzic was captured. Hume, Ap and Veselinovic wrote: Radovan Karadzic used a disguise of a beard and glasses while in hiding. Serb officials revealed that Karadzic had been hiding in plain sight-working in a clinic in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, under a false identity as a "healer." He had also managed to publish a book of poetry during his time on the run. He was extradited to The Hague to face charges and pleaded not guilty. He initially tried to represent himself, leading to delays in his trial, but eventually was forced to accept an attorney. Thursday's verdict comes more than a year after the end of his trial in 2014. The 500-day trial included evidence from 586 witnesses and more than 11,000 exhibits. Karadzic's former army chief, Ratko Mladic, who was arrested in 2012, is facing charges of genocide and war crimes committed during the conflict. A judgment in his case is expected in 2017." [6] Earlier Mladić has been sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity." [9] It was twenty years after the Srebrenica massacre that Mladic was brought to international justice, but it was done. He was convicted of ten offences involving extermination, murder and persecution of civilian populations.
Owen Bowocott and Julian Borge wrote: "As he entered the courtroom, Mladić gave a broad smile and thumbs up to the cameras-a gesture that infu-

Conclusion: To Address Problems in Modern Civilization
We have looked at historic progress in the metric of the Good (Justice) to empirically provide evidence that a metric for civilization can the theoretically useful for cross-cultural studies. The usefulness of a theoretical metric is that it can help to identify the kinds of progress which society can make-that is universalized for all humanity. In the taxonomic framework of the totality (the All) of a civilization ( Figure  6), one can see the usefulness at describing the values dominant within a civilized society.
The True and the Wealth are now a grand achievement and hallmarks of our new scientific-technology based civilization. For example, Francis Fukuyama nicely summarized our civilization's achievement of wealth: "Modern global capitalism has proved to be productive and wealth-creating beyond the dreams of anyone living before the year 1800. Later in the period following the oil crises of the 1970s, the size of the world economy almost quadrupled and Asia, based on its openness to trade and investment, saw much of its population join in the developed world." [11] However, this achievement has problems. As Fukuyama trenchantly emphasized: "But global capitalism has not found a way to avoid high levels of volatility, particularly in the financial sector. Global economic growth has been plagued  cessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions. The system's instability is a reflection of what is ultimately a political failure, that is, the failure to provide sufficient regulatory oversight both at a national and an international level." [11] The values of our civilization, as indicated in this Platonic taxonomy, have major problems. In terms of the True, the societal systems of science and technology have been performing well; whereas although wealth has been expanding, wealth generation is not yet stable, nor fairly distributed.
How is our civilization doing on the marks of the Good and the Beautiful? In terms of the Good, the twentieth century was an era of conflict between democracy and brute dictatorships. World War II was fought between Western democracies and fascism. The Cold War was a standoff between Western democracy and Soviet communism. Democracies have been winning, but democratic processes need vast improvement. Still, even in the twenty-first century, terrorism and tyrannical warlords (some under religious banners) have terrorized some countries.
In terms of the Beautiful, modern aesthetics about the Earth have been very poor. We have created one of the most massive destruction of species in the history of the earth, subsequent to the extinctions of the asteroid hits of 65 and 250 million years ago. Also in terms of aesthetics, we have been desiccating the environment and generating global warming, through excessive CO 2 emissions.
It is useful to have this Platonic taxonomy to use as an index about civilization because it can be generalized over all the civilizations for the last several millennia-a long, long time. And time-span is one of the key choices in constructing a cross-cultural history of civilization.
Future research can use the multi-valued metric to analyze the challenges our present scientific civilization faces over this current century, the 21 st , for survival.
In particular, in a next paper, we can examine the 4 E challenges of contemporary civilization: Energy, Environment, Employment, Equity. What progress (in Truth, Good, Beauty, and Wealth) must now be accomplished for civilized survival to the challenges?