Definitions of Terms Political
In general, these definitions are suggestive and mechanistic, meaning that all actors and their actions can be described with respect to a rational choice model and without any necessary appeal to outside or irrational forces.
Political Union
A group of people who recognize an authority or authorities, which can commit internal and external acts of violence on behalf of the group. Internal acts of violence include taxation and enforcement of laws. External acts of violence would be war. When a critical mass of the population no long believes in the legitimacy of those with control over mechanisms of violence, the political union ceases to exist — the strength of a political union can be assessed along the belief in the legitimacy of the mechanisms of violence. This definition recognizes the potentially declining influence of the nation-state, and thus geography does not play any part in this definition.
Government
General term used to refer to the authority entrusted with the mechanisms of violence in a political union, recognizing that there may be multiple parties with differing interests.
Populace
People living in a political union, however the political union chooses to define itself. It is possible that, given the division or overlap in roles requiring violence, that a single person could belong to multiple political unions. For instance, in a “corporate state” one could pay directly for services like protection to one entity, while another demands payment to protect from potential foreign enemies. It is, however, unlikely that such a situation will persist.
Armed Forces
The extension of the government that commits acts of violence against people not a part of the political union.
War
Any coercive means by which a political union attempts to attain desired objectives vis-à-vis another political union when accompanied by a formal statement of intent. This typically but does not necessarily involve death, given that there are many coercive mechanisms (psychological, economic, information infrastructure) currently available to a government which can cause ‘pain’ without causing death.
However, given attempts to steal state secrets, disable infrastructure, and many other potential applications of “information warfare,” including those “waged” by independent actors, it seems that another term is needed to capture these potentially escalating minor conflicts between political unions which do not involve statements of intent.
Additionally, the definition of war provided indicates that “war,” as opposed to simply violent conflict, is a product of political unions at a certain state of development, and even if certain rules can be revoked, necessarily has at its outset a clear sense of “us” and “them,” or pro- and antagonist.
Also, according to this definition war is not a game, as a game must have rules and develop out of a pleasurable ‘play state.’ The means by which war approaches a game, thusly include when pleasurable elements are introduced, including mechanisms for winning prestige through the fighting of war, role-playing, uniforms, and, importantly, explicit or implicit rules for what constitutes proper conduct.
Violence
Coercive action taken to achieve a given objective as articulated by the political union, traditionally including the possibility of physical injury to the receiving party and potentially including death.
Objective
Treated because an objective may be singular or composite, in the latter case potentially including both rational and irrational elements – which is to say that political unions, insofar as they have uniform values, may approach single actors in their desire for what is here described as “karma,” potentially including prestige on the basis of values shared by both parties. Thus, it may be important that a hoplite battle is fought “honorably,” as the party which wins “honorably” will garner greater prestige among peer political unions. In some cases, the ostensible objectives will be superceded by the incidental objectives and accompanying values, leading to a situation where it is preferable to fail in obtaining the primary objective so long as the secondary objectives related to prestige are maintained.
In the case of composite objectives, it may be presumed that all objectives will ultimately be subject to the “existential” objective, which would be the continued existence of the political union, insofar as it is capable of presenting a unified will to continue fighting, as described by Clausewitz. This “existential” objective may be represented differently in different contexts, as political unions by their very nature are composite, and there is often although not always the possibility of dividing or re-forming a political union on a new basis.
Political unions which allow association on a supra-ethnic or basis which does not necessarily exclude a defeated foe, may be better at effecting the submission of their enemies for this reason, whereas other conflicts will be necessarily be mimetic and potentially involve escalation to extremes, in Clausewitz described as “Durch diese Wechselwirkung wieder das Streben nach dem aussersten.”
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A Weak People
| Carl Schmitt quotes Vergil’s Fourth Ecologue at the close of his Der Begriff der Politischen (The Concept of the Political), “Ab integro nascitur ordo.” A new order is born from the renewal.
Schmitt claimed that a world state could not exist, that such an attempt, where legitimacy rested primarily on economic means could and would lead to a dystopian world state — a system in which a people might be legitimately, according to this emerging economic order, be exterminated merely for being unable to pay their debts. |
As Leo Strauss commented in response, Schmitt’s affirmation of the political “is nothing more than the affirmation of the moral” which is necessarily undermined by purely technological culture, such as that provided the anti-narrative mentioned in a previous essay (and also described by Strauss). While Schmitt ultimately falls back on a weak moral category, resistance, Strauss dissolves the possibility of the moral — there is no imperative.
Thus, we witness this dystopia emerging, not only in that the legitimacy of states is articulated by their ability to maximize the participation of their citizens in markets, as with Philip Bobbitt’s work, but where not only the default but also primary evaluative mechanism for the value of any thing, including human relationships, is in reference to personal (or corporate) utility.
Thus, in a world in which numbers, especially when cast as “science” in the field of economics, are the primary evaluative method, the default mechanism for evaluating the value of any relationship must accord with personal utility. The same is true for all functions related to relationships (e.g. sex). Accumulation of partners may not be the goal, but, as specified by economic science, accumulation of ‘good moments’ likely will be, often taking the primacy of ‘fun’ (see our discussion of the fall of Batman).
This means that no-fault, previously the exception, becomes the norm. Every contract should be able to be broken by any party when the exchange of words/fluids leading to any other exchange is not kept. Which is to say, any purely quantitative system tends towards complete fungiblity as a ‘perfect’ state. Descriptions here serve a purely cosmetic function. Any usage of word ‘marriage’ approaches a lie, as its origin and intention are not in keeping with the purely cosmetic function which it now serves. ‘Relationship’ would be closer to the truth, but really, any words are acceptable as the fundamental nature of the transaction and conceptions remains unquestioned.
Thus, each sphere of action becomes little more than a game, one should/must play to win in order to maximize. Is it permissible to use words with purely cosmetic function, allowing the other party to think according to old structures, while one embraces personally the new, the entirely economic? Certainly it does not make sense to be in the middle, embracing both new and old paradigm, neither fully. The probable answer within the means presented is, it does not matter — do what you need to succeed. Thus, not only do relationships and marriage cease to exist in any meaningful way, so also does the concept of a truth and a lie. There is only utility, which is frequently reducible to pleasure.
We will not comment at length on the moral salves available to those who wish to utilize them. Nicholas Kristof compares the estimated 800,000 trafficked each year with the 80,000 at the peak of the American slave trade, but advocates neither starting at home nor fundamentally rethinking, but more overseas initiatives (and lobbying!) for the globally connected. Anthony Daniels looks closer to home:
A hundred yards from where I write this, twelve-year-old prostitutes often stand under streetlamps on the corner at night, waiting for customers. The chief of the local police has said that he will not remove them because he considers that they are sufficiently victimized already, and he is not prepared to victimize them further (his job, apparently, being to empathize rather than to enforce the law). The local health authorities send a van round several times at night to distribute condoms to the girls, the main official concern being to ensure that the sex in which the girls take part is safe, from the bacteriological and virological point of view. It is the authorities’ proud boast that 100 percent of local prostitutes now routinely use condoms, at a cost to the city’s taxpayers of $135,000 a year, soon to be increased by the employment of a further outreach worker, whose main qualification, according to the recent job advertisement in the local press, will be “an ability to work non-judgmentally”—that is, to have no moral qualms about aiding and abetting child prostitution. Meanwhile, local residents (such as my neighbors, a banker, a lawyer, an antiquarian bookseller, and two university professors) who object to the presence of discarded condoms in their gardens and in the street outside their homes have been offered a special instrument with which to pick them up, in lieu of any attempt to prevent them from arriving there in the first place. And at the same time, the overwhelming majority of the work done by the social workers of the city concerns the sexual abuse of children, principally by stepfathers and mothers’ boyfriends who move in after biological fathers move out. (Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses
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In this arena one observes the previously ‘free-range’ people, the American homesteaders, struggling to adapt to their life gravitating in the same direction as the mechanized cattle industry, not realizing that the dictum “do unto others” has always related also to the animals around them. Neither die with or from a surfeit of artificial hormones, they simply cease to live in a meaningful way. Moreover, “resistance” is primarily a function of debates over cosmetics. Given this context, it is surprising they fight for the word or even discuss fighting for ‘marriage,’ a concept they have abandoned in every meaningful sense, just as they fight for “life” for those who, by virtue of physical infirmity or terrible situation will never have a “life” in any sense more than a simple binary assertion.
In fact, whether or not a copy of the Ten Commandments hangs in a courtroom matters not at all. What matters is the concept of jurisprudence applied within that courtroom, the basis of which has been abandoned for multimedia spectacles and megachurchs. Should we be surprised when the spectacle ends and the citizens involved return to speculating on current and afterlife fortunes, rendering all attempts at “change” null and void? Or that the book supposedly at the center of their religious practice is primarily presented as tool to help them achieve this maximization? Or that end times prophesies, the rapture, or the Jewish people are going to help them achieve this mystical jackpot?
While cattle ‘moo’ in their mechanized pens, Schmitt offers us this chilling reminder of the nature of the existential struggle which remains, even if covered in the shadows:
“If a people no longer possess the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.”
As Clausewitz notes, it is the defender of the city who will and must be the first express violence if he wishes to be successful in his defense. The arsonist with the torch can burn down an entire village if he is not first apprehended, and this apprehension will likely require an act of violence. But as Strauss also realizes, it is exceedingly easy to go from to this point to advocacy for “dangerousness” for its own sake.
Thus, the question is not simply what constitutes a weak people, but what constitutes a people, and the failure to ask the question and, perhaps, define what constitutes a people (or race) worth preserving ultimately undermines the strength of the people in question. Consequently, the quest for the definition of the political is necessarily a question of an ideal sense. Thus, we cannot reach it simply at the extremes, and to focus solely on the extreme case is to abandon the search for the political for politics.
Knowledgeable readers will know where this took Schmitt, and, indeed, it is emblematic of the whole struggle. Liberalism, as defined by Schmitt, must be separated from modernity, which is simply the necessary multiplication of loyalties on the basis of multiplicity of communities based on new forms of connectivity provided by technology. Which is to say, it is not necessarily an ideal, it is simply fiberoptic cables lying across the ocean floor and politicians suddenly able to talk on the phone.
Indeed, if merchants pursued this connectivity for its own sake, or for their sake, does this invalidate the connectivity? It is neither a barrier nor a help towards awareness; a multiplication of contingent loyalties is not necessarily an abrogation of a single essential one.
We then affirm the importance of the search for the essence of the political, and find that we must first, in the words of Rosenstock-Huessy, go back to Descartes, hoping that we may find a new order along the way.
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“Black Mass” Book Review
| John Gray is a former professor of philosophy at Oxford and the LSE, and not to be confused with the pop psychology author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. In 2007 he published one of the most thought provoking intellectual works of the past decade. The title derives from the fact that a Satanic Mass takes Christian forms and inverts them – but, like Satan himself, the process takes its substance from Christianity.
Gray’s thesis is that modern life is a Black Mass, and that the roots lie deep within Christianity itself. The latter, right from its origins, was apocalyptic and utopian. Most religions lack a linear sense of history, or indeed any conception of a beginning and end time. Salvation, if perceived at all, is largely seen as as release from an unending worldly round. Christianity injected teleology- history has a purpose and an end time, when its purpose will be fulfilled. This to some extent predates Christianity, with Jewish and Iranian roots, but Christianity is the vehicle by which such thinking was spread to the wider world. |
This is familiar stuff, but Gray’s contribution is to examine at length the pervasiveness of the apocalyptic utopianism. Millenarian movements recurred from time to time in medieval history, but were constrained by the institutions of the Church (notably the Inquisition) and by Augustinian original sin, which precluded or at least limited the belief that life on this earth could be perfected.
In modern times, these constraints were loosened by two developments. The first was Protestantism, which never had as effective a machine to define or constrain “heresy” as the Catholics. Thus it spawned milleniarist movements by the score, who sought to build the City of God upon the Hill – including, tellingly, a key strain in American culture. Europe chose other forms of Christian heresy, secularism (the term has no meaning outside of monotheism, until the City of God was separated from the City of Man). If so far you have thought that this is yet another anti-religious tirade, then Gray is at his most venomous when discussing the secularist heresies. The totalitarianism of the Left, from the Jacobins to Stalin, makes an easy and familiar target, the apocalyptic myth a crude parody of Christianity. Nazism is often seen (notably by Isaiah Berlin, Gray’s erstwhile mentor), with its emphasis on Kultur , as a lineal descendant of the (largely German) Counter Enlightenment. In fact Gray makes a good case that it was another Enlightenment –influenced apocalyptic heresy, if a somewhat bizarre one (salvation only for Germans); certainly Hitler would not have been possible without Lenin.
Gray, however, implicates as well the most benign and successful Enlightenment belief system, liberal democracy. Though apparently tolerant, it still seeks to convert everyone on the planet – at gunpoint if necessary; there follows a lengthy section on the Iraqi tragi-comedy and the “War on Terror”, where ex-Marxist neocons formed an unholy alliance with the American Christian right. The other unexpected target is Islamism. Sayyid Qutb, the Karl Marx of the movement, was well versed in Western philosophy and impressed by Nietzsche it seems – hardly the traditional Muslim by any means. The latter would accede to Allah’s will, not actively seek to build the perfect Caliphate in an all-too-Western mimicry of the Christian reformation. No wonder it all appeals to disaffected educated Muslims in the diaspora, and spoilt rich kids from Saudi construction magnates.
Demolition is easy, but what to do? Turning one’s back on religion is not the answer: Gray believes that it is innate in humans, and if thwarted simply finds unconscious paths, as described above; indeed he feels that Dawkin’s style atheism is distinguished by its intellectual crudity. Christianity and Islam, historically the two most aggressive and intolerant faiths, demand belief – while others are content to stand in awe before mystery, and perhaps to commune mystically with it. Meanwhile, realism rather than idealism can rule the everyday world.
All very sensible, but the objection is: who wants to live in a sensible world? It would be uncreative and rather dull. The Western world (which has now infected the rest) is like a manic depressive, whose creative highs justify the depressive and destructive lows. Fine until the depression verges on suicide: Gray clearly feels that we are near the latter, as the book ends with an environmentalist tirade. Perhaps,or else he is no more immune to apocalyptic religion than others: or else, with no utopias left to believe in, it is time for Western(ised) man to grow up.
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