Some 16 years ago Simon Critchley wrote an essay titled 'Mystical Anarchism'. That was when Obama had just entered the White House and most people believed that the world was predestined to become a kinder gentler place.
He began his essay by quoting the cretin Carl Schmitt.
“All significant concepts in the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts”.
None are. The fact is, 'theological concepts' merely took over political concepts- e.g. if there are Kings and Emperors then God is the King of Kings and Emperor of Emperors. If Society has not progressed to a level where you have Kings, instead you just have Judges, then God is the most powerful Judge of all. If there are no Judges or Kings, but there are crocodiles which might eat you when you go down to the river to get water than God is the biggest and most powerful crocodile.
The fact is, Religion is merely a Service industry. Unless, Missionary activity is subsidized by wealthy foreign countries, it is likely to reflect the Society where it operates. Some varieties of it have 'high income elasticity of demand'. Others are 'Giffen goods'. They flourish most when Income is falling.
This is not just true historically, Schmitt insists, but systematically and conceptually. The omnipotent God of medieval Christianity
didn't exist. You could buy an indulgence or bribe, or threaten, the Pope till he made you a Cardinal or granted you a dispensation so you could marry of your bastard son to your legitimate daughter.
becomes the omnipotent monarch, for example in Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Hobbes had seen that 'Divine Right' did not prevent a King being executed.
Until the late seventeenth century, the general will was a theological term of art that referred to the will of God.
Nonsense! There may be something Spinozan to it- i.e. an equations with 'mens una'- but Spinoza was heterodox.
By 1762, in Rousseau’s Social Contract, the general will had been transformed into the will of the people and the question of sovereignty was transposed from the divine to the civic.
Nope. It merely means stuff everybody wants- i.e. the rule of law. Obviously, in my own case, the law should not apply because I'm a very special snowflake.
Of course, this entails that the will of the people is always virtuous and those who oppose it can be legitimately exterminated as evil.
It doesn't entail anything. Generalizations seldom do. In any case, if it is profitably to exterminate some group of people, then you may spend a bit of money on pretending this is a highly legitimate- indeed, a holy- outcome.
The politicization of theological concepts leads ineluctably to
President Washington offering his people bread and wine and saying 'this is my flesh. This is my blood. Tuck in, already. Mazel tov!'
the attempt to purify virtue through violence, which is the political sequence that begins with French Jacobinism in 1792 and continues through to the dreadful violent excesses of twentieth- century politics that we can summarize with the proper names of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler through to what some might call the “Islamo- Leninism” or “Islamo- Jacobinism” of al- Qaeda and related groups.
This is nonsense. Guys who want power and money may kill those whom they think will prevent them from getting it or keeping it. Still, it is true that when Virgil Sollozzo tried to kill Don Vito Corleone, it was because he was trying to purify virtue through violence. This is because the Turkish poppy fields he owned were very angelic. John the Baptist- the consigliere of the Tattaglia family- had a beatific vision in this connection.
But such an argument does not exonerate so- called liberal democracy.
Arguments made by shitheads can't exonerate shit.
On the contrary, Schmitt views the triumph of the liberal- constitutional state as the triumph of deism, a theological vision that unifies reason and nature by identifying the latter with divinity.
Schmitt viewed the triumph of Hitler & the Nazis in a very positive light. Sadly, they thought he was a stupid, opportunistic, cunt. Just kill Jews already. Don't just talk about it.
As can be seen most obviously in the deism of the Founding Fathers, American democracy is a peculiar confection of Roman republicanism and puritanical providentialism,
Nope. The Revolution was about taxation. George III wanted money. America told him to fuck the fuck off.
enshrined in the John Winthrop sermon about the “Citty (sic) on the Hill”
i.e. visible to all. Winthrop was saying his people must keep to their Puritan covenant. Failure to do so would be easily detected.
(that Sarah Palin ascribed to Ronald Reagan), the building up of the “New England”. At the core of American democracy is
the fucking Tea Party which is about saying no to 'taxation without representation'.
a civil religion that functions as a powerful sustaining myth and buttresses the idea of manifest destiny.
Annexing Canada? Perhaps Critchley is a true prophet.
Barack Obama’s political genius was to
look Black without actually being African American. His Daddy had a Harvard PhD but had returned to Kenya.
have reconnected classical liberal constitutionalism with a motivating civil religion focused around the idea of belief and a faith in change and progress.
Religion is focused on 'the idea of belief'. Faith too is of concern to it. As for progress, who is demanding that we return to the Stone Age?
Schmitt’s problem with liberalism is that it is anti- political.
Killing people is anti-political. Talking to them and getting them to vote for you is political.
What this means is that for the liberal every political decision must be rooted in a norm whose ultimate justification flows from the constitution.
Nonsense! Political decisions should be pragmatic. The Constitution has a broad and capacious doctrine of political question. You don't need a normative justification for a purely positive, self-interested, action. Still, it is true that Obama would consult the Archbishop of Civic Religion before farting. The constitutional norm his farts upheld was that of mens una Deism as the regulative principle underlying, but not always justifying, Manifest Destiny's Shitting on the Hill of Secularized Theological Exceptionalism.
Within liberalism, political decisions are derived from constitutional norms,
No. As David Hume said, the Law is Utilitarian. Justice is a service industry. Taxes are the price we pay for taxation and Americans have always been adamant that there can be no taxation without representation. Judges get paid by the State. They don't get to control fiscal or monetary policy. If they get too big for their boots, they will be ignored, disintermediated or subject to 'bench packing'. True, Biden held back from this. But he was senile. Now we have Vance who openly says that the Executive can defy the Supreme Court. But why would Trump bother? As the most recent episode of South Park shows, he is monopolizing 'Lawfare'. Let us see if the Epstein affair is a bridge too far. My guess is it isn't. So what if some teenage hookers were hookers? Why pretend they could have been anything else?
and higher than the state stands the law and the interpretation of the law.
It has never done so. It is merely a service industry. So is Religion and Witchcraft and whatever worthless shite this silly man teaches.
Th is is why the highest political authority in a liberal state rests with the Supreme Court or its equivalent.
No. If it overreaches itself- as it has done in Pakistan and Bangladesh- it is cut down to size. In America, the Supreme Court does have a special position because of 'Dual Sovereignty'. But, that is a double edged sword.
Political action is subordinated to juridical interpretation.
Unless it isn't- which is what actually happens.
For Schmitt, a truly political decision is what breaks with any norm, frees itself from any normative ties and becomes absolute.
That is called 'Revolution'. But policy of a pragmatic type has this quality and is covered by Executive privilege or 'doctrine of political question'. The Second World War showed that constitutions don't matter. Any country can do anything it needs to survive. Consider the doctrine of 'mutually assured destruction'. Which constitutional principle or juristic norm permits trillions of dollars to be spent on having the ability to blow up the world just in case our enemy gets more of its surface area than we are comfortable with?
This is why the question of the state of exception is of such importance to Schmitt.
All countries have a provision for a 'State of Emergency' which is what the German word 'Ausnahmezustand' means. In 1914, the UK's Defence of the Realm Act went further than anything the Kaiser had because the UK was more unitary. Indeed, in both wars, the UK was better at mobilizing all available resources for 'total war'. But the US, during the Civil War- the first modern, industrial war of attrition, had set the example. The plain fact is, Anglo-Saxon can do rough stuff better than Teutonic pedants.
The state of exception is that moment of radical decision where the operation of the law is suspended.
The Mayor can do so, or if he is on holiday, the City Clerk may issue such a declaration or the Sheriff or even a group of citizens may act on the basis that there is a state of Emergency pro tanto. Some jurisdictions have an explicit 'doctrine of necessity'. Others don't but there is an immunity for otherwise illegal actions done under exigent circumstances.
This is what the Romans call iusticium,
i.e. a suspension of justiciability
and which Giorgio Agamben has written about compellingly.
Stupidly.
What the decision on the state of exception reveals is the true subject of political sovereignty.
No. It is merely a decision about justiciability or jurisdiction. It is not political in itself.
Schmitt famously writes that, “Sovereign is who decides on the state of exception” (Soverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet).
No. The King Emperor played no part in the decision to implement the Defence of the Realm Act. A General may declare martial law and a state of emergency. He is not the sovereign.
That is, the sovereign is the person who is exhibited by the decision on the state of exception.
Nonsense! No one in Britain or Ireland or India who was affected by draconian DORA type laws thought the King Emperor had any hand in the thing. The bigger problem is of extra-judicial killing. This can be done on an industrial scale with a nary a peep out of the Judiciary.
Sovereignty doesn't matter in the slightest. Nothing changed in Pakistan when Iskandar Mirza shopped being the Queen's Governor General and became the President of the Republic. He had already got the Supreme Court to confer supreme authority on him under the 'doctrine of necessity'. His problem was that he needed General Ayub Khan to actually administer martial law. The General decided that he might as well rule in his own name and thus put Mirza on a plane to England where, it is said, he opened a Tandoori restaurant.
The question “Who?” is answered by the decision itself.
No. The Queen was the Sovereign of Pakistan when Ghulam Mohammad dismissed his PM (who had given him the job) and decided to rule the country himself. Mirza who took over from Mohammad went down a similar path before his Army Chief got rid of him.
That is, the decision on the state of exception, the moment of the suspension of the operation of law, brings the subject “Who?” into being.
The guy who stages a successful coup is the guy in charge. But he isn't a sovereign and does not have sovereign immunity unless he crowns himself King.
To put it into a slogan, the subject is the consequence of a decision.
There may be no decision. The issue of sovereignty may be unresolved or contested. Is Taiwan sovereign? The US maintains 'strategic ambiguity' on the issue. Does this matter? No. Ergo, this subject is silly and Schmitt and those who quote him are Schittheads.
The subject that is revealed by the decision on the state of exception is the state
but not the exception?
and the core of Schmitt’s theory of the political is to show that the true subject of political is the state and that the state must always stand higher than the law.
Everything stands higher than the law. It is merely a service industry of a very limited kind. That is why I can't sue the cat for alienating the affections of my wife. It is me should she be stroking and offering tasty treats. On the other hand, she is welcome to scold the cat for not putting the garbage out.
Schmitt makes the fascinating remark that the concept of the state of exception is the jurisprudential analogue to the concept of the miracle in theology.
No. Sometimes a state of Emergency has to be imposed because ... there is a fucking Emergency situation.
Schmitt was a spoiled Catholic. He must have known that both Lutherans and Catholics agree that God is not obliged to perform miracles. They are supererogatory even when performed by Saints.
What is true is that the Weimar Constitution was ab ovo flawed. More importantly, its politicians were playing 'extend and pretend' while doing stupid shit. For evil to triumph, it is enough that peeps do stupid shit.
The triumph of liberalism as the triumph of deism is
eating a piece of bread and thinking you are eating a piece of the flesh of General Washington. It is nonsense, is all it is.
the hegemony of a religious view of the world that tries to banish the miracle,
a religious view of the world doesn't banish miracles. It declares those who perform them, provided they are orthodox enough, to be Saints and Heavenly intercessors.
as that which would break with the legal- constitutional situation, the order of what Badiou calls the event, and which at times he compares with a miracle.
What is truly miraculous is that the cunt can tie his own shoe-laces.
Liberal constitutionalists, such as Locke, Kant or Neo- Kantians like Kelsen seek to eliminate the state of exception and subject everything to the rule of law, which is the rule of the rule itself, namely reason.
Nonsense! Kelsen merely said that a narrow use should be made of emergency powers. Sadly, nobody can say what is broad and what is narrow. Should kite flying have been banned during the Great War? What about the imposition of Daylight Saving Time? Germany had the Schweinmord- the slaughter of the pigs which were deemed to be 'co-eaters'. This turned out to be disastrous for agriculture. Pig manure was needed as fertilizer. Still, if the thing seemed a good idea at the time it is covered under 'political question'. Between 1920 and 1973 there was detention without trial for a lot of Catholics in Northern Ireland. It only ended with the imposition of direct rule by Westminster. Many people felt this was an 'over-broad' use of Emergency powers but it was perfectly legal.
Schmitt criticizes the rationalism of liberalism in the name of what he calls – and here we find echoes of Dilthey in Schmitt that will resound further in the young Heidegger – a philosophy of concrete life.
These stupid cunts knew nothing of concrete life. The fact is, the Law is merely a service industry. Constitutions don't matter. De jure Sovereignty doesn't matter. What matters is who will kick your head in if you look at him sideways.
Such an existential approach embraces the exception and breaks with the rule and the rule of the rule. Schmitt writes, thinking explicitly of Kierkegaard, “In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid through repetition”.
No. As a rule, we try to keep out of the way of dudes who will kick our heads in. That's 'real life'.
Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope, “Democracy is not a house to be built,
which is why it is pointless working as a 'community organizer' in inner City Chicago
it is a conversation to be had”.
with very rich White peeps who will fund your campaign. Don't have a conversation with a nigger trying to jack you. Hand over your watch and say 'Have a nice day'.
At the core of Obama’s liberal civil religion is a resolute defence of the primacy of the constitution, an absolute conviction that all political decisions have to be derived from norms, and that the procedure for decision- making is deliberation.
Sadly, what people wanted was a nigger in the White House who would scare Wall Street straight. What they got who wrote fat checks for billionaires like Trump while working class people who had been foreclosed on were sleeping in their cars. Maybe this was the price for avoiding a Great Depression. Maybe not. What is certain is it had nothing to do with 'Civic Religion'.
It is enough to make Habermas burst into a breakdance.
Coz Habermas is one jive-turkey- sho' nuff!
However, Schmitt would be turning in his grave.
Schmitt
For him, the idea of everlasting conversation is a gruesomely comic fantasy.
He made his comeback through Francoist Spain. Essentially, his views could be assimilated to Corporatist Catholic thought.
If liberals were presented with the question “Christ or Barabas?”, they would move to adjourn the proceedings and establish a commission of investigation or a special committee of inquiry that would report back some time the following year.
Rome had to decide the case of St. Paul because he was a Roman citizen. It appears he was subject to house arrest for a couple of years before being released. It may be that he was executed in the time of Nero some years later. My point is that judicial proceedings can be lengthy no matter the type of regime.
Within liberalism, everything becomes everlasting discussion, the glorious conversation of humankind, the sphere of what Schmitt with a sneer calls “culture”.
Nonsense! Leo Amery's son was hanged as a traitor pretty expeditiously when Atlee was PM. Also, there was little discussion about bombing the fuck out of Germany. The Americans, of course, took it up a notch with Nagasaki and Hiroshima. BTW, it is Germans who gas on about culture. Entertainment is all we seek.
Such a culture floats like foam over the socioeconomic reality of the liberal state,
very true. Trump's America has for Muse Stormy Daniels. The Dems should have backed her, not Kamala.
which Schmitt, following his teacher Weber, compares to a huge industrial plant dominated by capitalism and scientism and incapable of political action.
If by political action you mean doing stupid shit- maybe. But we too start 'forever wars'. The saving grace is we do it against gooks or sand niggers though, if the thing becomes too expensive, we give up.
For Catholic counter- revolutionaries, such as Donoso Cortés,
he was a Liberal. What rattled him was the killing of friars. For some strange reason, Spanish men don't want nuns to be raped and priests to be tortured to death.
faced with the hegemony of a depoliticized liberalism powerless in the face of a capitalist economy, the only solution was dictatorship.
The Portuguese soon got tired of the 'Liberals' after they deposed the monarchy. The Spaniards would take a similar path in the Thirties.
Faced with the toothless liberal constitutionalism of Weimar Germany
Hugo Preuss had written a Constitution which was bound to be subverted because of proportional representation and the clause allowing rule by Presidential ordinance. What he and his party represented was not Liberalism or Constitutionalism. It was stupidity and opportunism. Moreover, German Liberals believed Keynes when he said that either Germany would grab land to its East or it would starve. In other words, the 'guns vs butter' dilemma could only be resolved by using guns to grab butter.
in the 1920s and the fact of economic collapse,
because 'extend and pretend' can't go on forever.
it is not difficult to understand the appeal the argument for dictatorship had for Schmitt with the rise of the National Socialists.
What he liked was the argument for being beastly to Jews. Even a spoiled Catholic can be relied on to be anti-Semitic.
The only way to restore the true subject of the political, namely the state, was the suspension of the constitution and the decision to declare a state of exception.
No need. There was rule by ordinance already. The elected government of Prussia had been dismissed by von Papen. Schmitt had worked on that case. Sadly, the Nazis decided he was as useless as Heidegger.
The political theology of liberalism is the pervasiveness of a weak deistic God.
No. It is about a really nice personal God and Saviour who will wash you in the blood of the lamb if you accidentally jizzed on the dress of your intern or embezzled money from your campaign.
The liberal, like Obama, wants God, but one that is not active in the world.
Rubbish! He wants a God who will cure him of cancer. On the other hand, it's no skin of our nose if God refuses to stay Biden's galloping senility.
He wants a God that permits no enthusiasm and who never contradicts or overrides the rule of reason and law.
Obama wants the God of Dr. Martin Luther King and not merely because that will assure the security and prosperity of the country he loves. As a law Professor in the Coase/Posner 'Law & Econ' tradition, he understands that good will is more important than the 'akreibia' of 'reason & law' which, after all, promote only 'Nash' equilibria. Where there is an element of trust based on an expectation of good faith, you can have much better 'cooperative' solutions. These are 'Aumann' correlated equilibria promoted by public signals. Externalities can be 'internalized' in an ad hoc manner. Non deterministic methods can be superior to 'boiler-plate' algorithms.
Schmitt, mislead by the imbecilic Max Weber- on whom I have commented elsewhere- fundamentally misunderstood the 'concept of the political' which is about keeping your friends close but your enemies closer. In politics, or geopolitics, there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies. There aren't even any 'permanent interests'.
It is said that in Economics, expectations create reality. In Politics, perceptions play the same role. How you are perceived- your reputation- alters outcome. It is often the case that if a particular thing has to be done, it is better if it is done by a person with a reputation for holding that action in abhorrence.
For Schmitt, the political is reducible to the existential distinction between friend and enemy. Yet, the history of his own times showed the opposite was the case. The common enemy of the Nazis and the Communists were the Social Democrats. Yet, they were scarcely friends. Schleicher may be said to have been Hitler's friend. Yet Hitler killed him and later got rid of General Blomberg.For Schmitt, every conception of the political takes a position on human nature.
Schmitt, in Germany- where economists tended to be 'institutionalists' and where people with Doctorates in Law- or even Philosophy- enjoyed higher prestige- may well have subscribed to this view. But the 1930s was also the period when modern 'positive' economics began to find a synoptic mathematical expression. Interestingly, the Cowles Commission in the US was promoting similar types of research in linear programming and other mathematical optimization techniques as the Soviet Union was developing with the aid of Kolomogorov, Kantarovich etc. In other words, there was 'convergence' to what in the Soviet Union had been praised as 'Taylorism'- i.e. a focus on Operations Research and productivity maximization. Moreover, during the Second World War, the US adopted a similar 'material balance planning' to that of GOSPLAN. J.K Galbraith, as 'price tzar' in the US quite naturally believed that modern industry would have to be coordinated in the same way regardless of political ideology. Schumpeter captured the mood of the period when he declared Capitalism to be doomed. One way or another, there would be Socialism. Grey men would have their hands on the levers of industry even if politicians made folksy speeches in praise of free enterprise.
It requires some sort of anthropological commitment: human beings are either naturally good or evil. Schmitt thinks – and I agree – that this leads to the two most pervasive political alternatives to liberalism: authoritarianism and anarchism.
Some countries may only be governable in an authoritarian manner because, traditionally, the way you gain power is by killing lots of people. Put another way, if you live in a District run by the Mafia, you prefer there to be just the one kick-ass Don who will kill his rivals, or potential rivals, before they get any ideas into their heads. Hitler had that quality. He killed his own rivals within his party before he got busy killing Jews, Liberals, Socialists and so forth. The one good thing about Stalin was that nobody was better than him at killing Old Bolsheviks.
Anarchists believe in the essential goodness of the human being.
So do salesmen. They think you will actually buy what they are selling rather than kill and eat them. Commerce thrives where people believe that people want to spend their money on nice shiny stuff rather than rob and kill.
Their progenitor is Rousseau and his belief that wickedness is the historical outcome of the development of society towards greater levels of inequality.
Rousseau was aware that 'tax farmers' could be very rapacious. He gives the example of his knocking at the door of an isolated cottage in a land laid waste by such rapacity. The cottager is suspicious of him. He shows the foreigner that he has absolutely nothing in his house- not even one stick of furniture or a loaf of bread to eat. Then, he discovers that the visitor is not a spy for the tax-man. He is just a traveller. The cottager then opens a trap door to the cellar where there are fat sausages and barrels bursting with wine and olive oil.
The problem with despotic government is that the Prince may sell the right to collect taxes to unscrupulous people who literally 'kill the golden goose'. Hardworking farmers abandon their land and emigrate. Only the scoundrels and the cut-throats remain. As for the tax-farmer, he too may be seen as a fattened calf. Sooner or later, he will be despoiled in the manner he despoiled others.
By contrast, on this view, political legitimacy can be achieved by what Rousseau frequently referred to as “a change in nature”, from wickedness to goodness, of the kind imagined in The Social Contract.
In a Contract, there is passing of consideration. The parties to it gain something in return for giving something up. The limited monarchies of Western Europe had granted Charters to towns and to guilds and created 'Liberties' where the Law Merchant could operate. What threatened the prosperity this created was the despotic actions of a Crown that sought Absolute Power.
Although this is a caricature of Rousseau and he could in no way be described as an anarchist, this view is more accurately developed by Bakunin: namely that if human beings are essentially good, then it is the mechanisms of the state, religion, law and the police that make them bad.
The problem was that, in Russia, if the Cossacks or Kazakhs or some other group rebelled, they might impose a worse Tzardom. Indeed, this is what happened when Lenin and Stalin took power. The land granted to the peasant was soon taken back leading to a terrible famine.
Once these mechanisms have been removed and replaced with autonomous self- governing communes in a federative structure, then we will truly have heaven on earth.
Unless a peasant jacquerie resolves to slaughter everyone with soft hands. After that, they can go back to their traditional occupation of killing each other and stealing any cattle they come across.
We shall come back to this view below, but it is worth noting that arguments for anarchism always turn on the idea that if human beings are allowed to express what comes naturally to them, if the force of life itself is not repressed by the deathly force of the state, then it will be possible to organize society on the basis of mutual aid and cooperation.
This really does depend on the history of the region.
By contrast, authoritarians believe that human nature is essentially wicked. This is why the concept of original sin is so important politically.
Does Islam have such a concept? No. Nor does Buddhism or Taoism. Moreover, some Christian sects which did drone on about it were pacific and commercial in character. Others, who firmly believed that some water splashed on them by a priest had made them immune to damnation, could be very sadistic and rapacious.
For Donoso Cortés and de Maistre,
both started off as Liberals. The fact is they had good personal reasons to turn against the Revolutionaries. The truth is, nice people don't want to see nuns being raped or priests being butchered.
human beings were naturally depraved and essentially vile. There is something essentially defective in human nature that requires a corrective at the political and theological level.
There was a good reason, some went in fear of a peasant jacquerie or an uprising of the lumpen proletariat.
It requires the authority of the state and the church.
If the policeman can't catch the rapist, at least the priest can put the fear of Hell fire into him.
The idea of original sin is not some outdated relic from the religious past.
It is the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. We know, in our heart of hearts, that if we could do anything we liked, we'd end up worse than beasts. Even those who never touch liquor, can be intoxicated by the licence to do what they like.
It is the conceptual expression of a fundamental experience of ontological defectiveness or lack that explains the human propensity towards error, malice, wickedness, violence and extreme cruelty.
No. This is psychological, not ontologically. Absent any sort of restraint or tie of reciprocity, we might do very bad things just because the consequences of so doing appear remote.
Furthermore this defect is not something we can put right, which is why authoritarians think that human beings require the yoke of the state, God, law and the police.
As children, we realize that we need Mummy and Daddy to set boundaries for us. Otherwise, we'd end up eating our own shit.
Politics becomes the means for protecting human beings from themselves, that is, from their worst inclinations towards lust, cruelty and violence.
No. Politics is about solving collective action problems. Law & Order is administrative and judicial. To some extent, it appears spontaneously.
As Hobbes shows, any return to a state of nature is an argument in favour of the war of all against all.
It is likely, that a clan which is better at fighting becomes the nucleus of a tribe which turns into a nation. But there will be a 'Dark Age' interregnum. European savants were very much aware of this.
We can find numerous post- Christian attempts to rethink the concept of original sin. For example, Freud advances the Schopenhauerian thesis that there might simply be a disjunction between eros and civilization, between the aggressive, destructive workings of libidinous desire and the achievements of culture.
He didn't live to see the 'rape of Berlin' or the occupation of Vienna. But he was aware that Austrian culture had hung by a thread after the fall of the Hapsburgs. As for the fate of his own people, it went beyond anything his generation could conceive.
This disjunction is only held in check through the internalized authority of the super- ego.
The 'super-ego' turned out not to be super at all. Economics matters. Incentives matter. Psychology or Ontology don't matter.
Again, Heidegger’s ideas of thrownness, facticity and falling were explicitly elaborated in connection with Luther’s conception of original sin and seek to explain the endless human propensity towards evasion and flight from taking responsibility for oneself.
Heidegger & Schmitt didn't take any such responsibility. Still, there were seen as 'spoiled Catholics' and the Catholic Centre party was a suitable ally for the West during the Cold War. Even Franco had to be rehabilitated. In America, Catholic intellectuals like William Buckley provided leadership for the Political Right though, at the time, this appeared a Quixotic project.
Critchley mentions John Gray- who may have appeared important at one time- before going on to examine the ideas of Norman Cohn in particular his 'hugely influential book, originally published in 1957, The Pursuit of the Millennium.' Few would have predicted, at that time, that the worst example of the implementation of such ideas would be found in Buddhist Cambodia under Pol Pot.
It is Cohn’s analysis of millenarianism that is so important for Gray. This is the idea that salvation is not just a possibility, but a certainty that will correspond to five criteria: salvation is collective, terrestrial, imminent, total and miraculous.
One may certainly describe the Gandhian movement, and its successor 'Bhoodan', in these terms. 'Ramrajya'- the rule of the God King Ram- would come into being if the rich gave their land to the poor. Indeed, the whole village would be collectively owned and administered. The entire state of Bihar was gifted away in this manner. Crowds of villagers would burst into the houses of the affluent hoping to find books with dirty pictures in them which they could burn. Sadly, the thing was entirely useless when it wasn't actively mischievous.
In his later work, Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, Cohn traced the roots of this millenarian faith back to Zoroaster’s break with the view that the world was the reflection of a static cosmic order defined by a cycle of conflict.
Zoroaster broke with the Indian branch of a common religion. He decided that the 'devas' worshipped by the Hindus were actually 'devils'. What was important about the religion he founded was that it created the figure of the 'universal saviour' as the divinely anointed Iranian Emperor. The Jews, grateful for being released from Babylonian captivity, appear to have taken some ideas from the ancient Persians.
It may be that the Iranian plateau was bound, for hydrological reasons, to produce a particular type of State which could expand rapidly. Iran continued to produce new sects- e.g. Manichaeanism, Mazdaism, etc- through the centuries. When I was young, the Bahai religion was spreading rapidly in America. Sadly, after the Ayotallahs came to power, it was persecuted in its country of origin. However, it appears to be thriving in India.
On the Zoroastrian view, some time between 1500 and 1200 BC, the world was moving, through incessant conflict, towards a conflictless state. A time would come when, during a final bloody battle, God and the forces of good would defeat once and for all the armies of evil. Thus, a marvellous consummation is at hand, the moment when good will triumph over evil and the agents of evil will be annihilated. After that time, Cohn writes, “The elect will thereafter live as a collectivity, unanimous and without conflict, on a transformed and purified earth”.
It must be said, the Iranians were considered a pious and abstemious people. Even when Zoroastrians were considered 'najis' (unclean) in Islamic Iran, they retained a reputation for scrupulous honesty and pure personal lives. The 'Parsi' Zoroastrian refugees in India thrived under the British and, though their numbers are declining, continue to do very well today. Interestingly, the dynasty which now owns the Indian National Congress is of Zoroastrian, paternal, descent.
This idea finds expression in certain Jewish sects before finding its most powerful articulation in Christian ideas of the Apocalypse, the Last Days and the Millennium.
These were prefigured in Virgil. It is likely that multi-ethnic Empires with large scale slavery nurtured a dream of a 'jubilee' when people could return to their ancestral lands and live peacefully there.
On the basis of the authority of the Book of Revelation, it was believed that after Christ’s Second Coming, he would establish a kingdom of God on earth and reign over it with his elect, the company of saints, for a thousand years until the Last Judgement and the general resurrection of the dead. Early Christians, like St Paul, believed that the Second Coming was imminent and that they were living in the end times.
This does appear to be what Lord Jesus himself expected. He said ' Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.'
The search for signs of the Second Coming obviously took on enormous importance. Th e key clue to the beginning of the end times – and this is crucial – is the appearance of the Antichrist:
known as 'Dajjal' in Islam. Christian and Muslim beliefs are very similar in matters of eschatology.
the prodigious, evil, arch- enemy of God. Th e Antichrist is what Ernesto Laclau would call a “floating signifier” in millenarian political theology. He is endlessly substitutable: he can be personified as the great Satan, the Pope, the Muslims or the Jews.
or the Christians- more particular the 'Scarlet Woman' who is the 'Whore of Babylon' who is, according to the Rev. Ian Paisley, the Romish Pope.
What is crucial here is the identification of the Antichrist as the incarnation of evil that presages the reappearance of Christ or a similarly messianic figure and leads to a bloody and violent terrestrial combat to build heaven on earth.
It is usual to identity your enemy- or that neighbour of yours who plays loud music- as Hitler, Stalin and Damien from Omen all rolled into one.
This, of course, is the deep logic of the Crusades, which began with Pope Urban II’s plea to the Church Council of 1095 to go to Jerusalem and, in his words, “liberate the Church of God”.
The deeper logic was that there was plenty of money there. Also, Europe had too many soldiers and not enough commerce.
Th is lead directly to the “People’s Crusade” or the “Peasants’ Crusade” in 1096–7
the folk-wanderings of an earlier age had not faded entirely from memory.
and to the formation of a Christian fighting force in Asia Minor that was 50,000–70,000 strong.
Byzantium was rich. Could it be safely plundered? Yes.
It is a compelling and disturbing historical fact that the recruitment of soldiers for the “People’s Crusade” in France, Germany and the Low Countries established a disturbing new and seemingly addictive habit in Western life: pogroms against the Jews.
The Romans started it. It was only after the Muslim conquest that Jews were allowed back into Jerusalem.
It would appear that the idea of the people requires the external identification of an evil enemy who can be legitimately annihilated in the name of God.
It appears that way to people who are in the God business. It doesn't to those who are in the 'pay for slay' business- though, no doubt, getting a free pass to Heaven is an attractive bonus.
Such has arguably always been the justificatory logic of Western military intervention:
No. Either the thing makes a profit or it is not worth it.
it is right to exterminate the enemy because they are the incarnation of evil.
or they have nice real estate and have some rooted objection to enslavement.
Such views have always vindicated crusaders from the eleventh century through to their more recent epigones. From the time of Saladin’s destruction of the Third Crusade in the last years of the twelfth century, the response has always been the same: jihad or war against infidels.
This is misleading. Saladin's main purpose was to eradicate the influence of the Ismaili Fatimids and establish Sunni hegemony. He did cooperate in a limited manner with the Crusaders though his aim was to eliminate them and unify the Arabic speaking world under his own dynasty.
It is perhaps not so surprising that Saddam Hussein sought to depict himself in propaganda alongside Saladin. After all, they were both born in Tikrit, despite the awful irony that Saladin was a Kurd.
He was Arabized and a devout disciple of Gilani. TE Lawrence praised the Tikritis as being the most loyal to the Pan-Arab cause. Saddam's real enemy was the Shias. The Sunni Kurds were potential allies. Arab Iraqis blamed the Shah and sinister Western Intelligence Agencies for fomenting trouble in the Kurdish region. There was also the belief that the Kurds might move in a Communist direction because there had once been a Kurdish Soviet in the region.
What is implied fairly discreetly by Cohn and rather loudly trumpeted by Gray, is that Western civilization might be defined in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking.
This simply isn't true. Western civilization is defined as all civilizations are defined- viz. by fiscal policy. Is there enough tax revenue to pay the soldiers and thus safeguard the borders? No? In that case civilization will disappear. Taxes are the price we pay for it. No taxes means no civilization. In America, the principle was established that Taxation without Representation might be resisted. To avoid Revolution, Europe had to evolved towards constitutional monarchies with increasingly representative Parliaments with power over 'Money Bills'.
What takes root with early Christian belief and massively accelerates in medieval Europe finds its modern expression in
crazy nonsense. Sadly, if the country goes off a fiscal cliff, crazy nutters may take power.
a sequence of bloody utopian political projects, from Jacobinism to Bolshevism, Stalinism, Nazism and different varieties of Marxist–Leninist, anarchist or Situationist ideology.
All had the potential to go crazier and crazier. In Tooting, South London, 'Comrade Bala'- since convicted for enslaving members of his Communist cult- was babbling about JACKIE (an acronym for Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran (Ishvar is the Hindu word for God)) – a type of dangerous, mystical machine that monitored all thought and could control minds. Meanwhile, in North Korea, the Benevolent Leader had introduced the 'hereditary principle' into Marxist-Leninism! That regime still stands.
Much of Gray’s Black Mass attempts to show how the energy of such utopian political projects has drifted from the Left to the Right.
What could be more Right-wing than the notion that the son of the Dictator should inherit his father's office?
The apocalyptic conflict with the axis of evil by the forces of good has been employed by Bush, Blair and others as a means to forge the democratic millennium, a new American century of untrammelled personal freedom and free markets.
No. The idea was that if Gulf War 1 made a profit, why shouldn't Gulf War 2? Iraq has plenty of oil. Once we take Iraq, we can move on to to Iran. North Korea too was on the list. Sadly, so was Syria and Libya. The War on Terror ended up not just losing a shedload of money, it also directly benefitted the enemies of the West. Bush has disappeared completely from the public scene. Blair has a forehead of brass but finds no takers. Once Murdoch turned against him- he suspected him of having an affair with his then wife- he had no political future. Still, he seems to have made a lot of money.
In the past decade, millennial faith has energized the project of what we might call military neo- liberalism, where violence is the means for realizing liberal democratic heaven on Earth.
This simply isn't true. I recall the period quite vividly. The notion was that Challabi in Iraq would make his neo-con pals very very rich. Some of that money would trickle down to us. It didn't. Instead we had the sub-prime crisis. Then, it turned out, China and Putin's Russia and the Ayatollah's in Iran had been the biggest beneficiaries of our sacrifice of blood and treasure. Obama put the blame for Syria & Libya on Cameron & Sarkozy. But, it was Hilary who paid the price. The American 'Tea Party' wasn't 'millenarian'. It was about tax money being pissed against a wall. Trump's big idea is that the rest of the World should pay America for being American. Send us your 'raw earth' and maybe we will do something for you. Money matters. Millenarianism does not.
What is essential to such neo- liberal millenarian thinking is the consolidation of the idea of the good through the identification of evil, where the Antichrist keeps putting on different masks: Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Kim Jong- il, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and so on.
The US did kill the first two.
We saw how Schmitt’s critique of liberalism led him towards an argument for dictatorship
which Weimar already had because the guy who wrote the constitution- Hugo Pruess- was a Professor with shit for brains. Max Weber was a fucking disaster for Germany. Apparently, he never consummated his marriage and his wife, who had a bit of money, built up a cult of him after his death.
Still, the one big change that occurred during the inter-war period was that the German academy went from leading the world to turning into a provincial, pedantic, sewer. True, there were some smart Germans- like Grete Hartmann- but most were as stupid as Hannah's Aunt.
underpinned by a belief in original sin. Where does Gray’s naturalization of the concept of original sin leave us?
It leaves us indifferent not just to him but to Political Philosophy as a discipline. Reading books by shitheads turns your brain to shit.
He powerfully identifies the poison within liberal humanism, but what is the antidote?
Telling 'liberals' to fuck the fuck off. Vote for Trump. He may not make America great again but he will cause liberal academics to weep and gnash their teeth.
Th is is what he calls “political realism”.
It is no such thing. Political realism has to do with money. That's what people care about.
We have to accept that the world is in a state of ceaseless conflict never far from a state of war.
But we needn't get dragged into such wars.
In the face of such conflict, Gray counsels that we have to abandon the belief in Utopia and try to cope with reality. This means accepting the tragic contingencies of life and the fact that there are simply moral and political dilemmas for which there is no solution.
In other words, don't study Poli Sci at Grad Skool. Get a fucking job and a mortgage and find out if you can get rich through crypto or something of that sort.
We have to learn to abandon daydreams such as a world of universal human rights, or that history has a teleological purpose that underwrites human action.
History does follow a law of increasing functional information. There are 'quants' who are good at figuring out who will win elections. Hire them by all means if you want your side to win and give you valuable tax-breaks. Sadly, if other countries work harder and do smarter stuff, they will overtake you. That's not necessarily such a bad thing. Nothing wrong with 'splendid isolation' if your life is comfortable enough.
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