Feb 14, 2023·edited Feb 14, 2023Liked by N.S. Lyons
I'm only about half way through this piece but wanted to note something that stood out to me.
"Schmitt would, over the course of his intellectual career, seek – in all the worst places – for a way to re-enchant that world."
The writer Rod Dreher, who has moved to live in Hungary, is in the middle of writing a book even now on the need to re-enchant our understanding of the world. My point here is not that Dreher is reanimating Schmitt's concerns, only that your intuition about our current moment, and how it is working out in the collective psyche, is probably correct.
I'll observe that my own reaction to the events from 2020 until now has been to conclude that the political class has become the adversary of all those who believe that the state derives its authority rather than being self-legitimizing. Or perhaps I should say it is made legitimate by its own sense of superior expertise. It consciously stands against those who believe it is subject to a higher power. It has become a thing unto itself and has clearly identified "the enemy". Anyone who rejects rule by experts represents a threat to the political class. This includes committed Christians but also parents of all legacy political stripes who can nevertheless perceive the damage being done to their children by medical and education experts. The old left/right political taxonomy is giving way to something else.
Tremendous. I'm reminded, reading how Schmitt ended up, of a section in Scott Alexanders Meditations on Moloch talking about some reactionary looking forward to an AI-enabled future in which [something something something all this liberal nonsense won't be tolerated any more], and I paraphrase: "If you set out on a quest for the Holy Grail, and you go wrong at the first turn from your house, you go to the corner shop, buy a pint of milk and return feeling slightly embarrassed. If you get 99% of the way there and THEN make the wrong turn, you get disembowelled and eaten by the Black Beast of Aargh whose fangs are as spears and whose claws are as scythes."
I do think demonic posession is an underappreciated concept in our Current Year.
The writings of Carl Schmitt have been one the greatest challenges to my own evolving political perspective over the last 60 years. (Please see the American journal "Telos" for some of the most insightful secondary literature on Schmitt--the original editor ofTelos, Paul Piccone, and some of his assistants--all fluent in German, introduced many of the original writings of Schmitt to the West and were largely responsible for the emergence of both left-Schmittians (like Chantal Mouffe) as well as right Schmittians (like Mike Pompeo and some of his assistants in the present State Department)--as well as some of Schmitt's most brilliant critics (Adrian Pabst, John Milbank, Aryeh Botwinick, all on the editorial board of Telos as well as writers like Inna Viriasova--see in particular her: "The Political Totalization of Carl Schmitt: Deciding on "The Absolutely Unpolitical." (Telos Summer 2016).
Viriasova makes the point that Schmitt embraces anthropological pessimism because of his own early political experience (as you point out--the reality of war and civil conflict in Germany). She argues that his definition of the political is based on his decision about the nature of the human.
As Schmitt himself states: "Since the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with anthropological optimism. This would dissolve the possibility of enmity and, thereby, every specific political consequence."
Please continue with your study of this man. His influence on the contemporary political word is immense (as you pointed out about the proliferation of the secondary literature in contemporary China) and will probably continue to increase as the U.S. slides toward potential civil war or succession and a continuing escalation in Ukraine.
As a longtime student of Schmitt who broadly shares your whole take on him, I have to say--brilliant. One of the best things I have read on Schmitt. I see him too as a conservative and Catholic manqué, and in the end, as the aspiring court philosopher of the emerging administrative-managerial techno-state (despite his appearance of resisting the administrative bastard child of liberalism). It is not an accident that Vermeule is so enamored with him. The total state is finally, inevitably, an administrative state, and the heart of an administrative state is a rule by law, as opposed to rule of law (as you put it), free of all constitutional norms, so ruling by a perpetual state of emergency and extra-judicial decision. That perforce is its norm. It uses ideology to galvanize the whole into a "political" unity (the friend-enemy distinction), and that ideology is inevitably going to be finally "humanitarianism"--Mahoney's "humanitarian religion of humanity." Great piece.
It is so wonderful that this author brings to us all this esoteric philosophizing, and makes it digestible. It is a gift.
“As for forms of government let fools contest : whatever’s best administered is best.” Alexander Pope.
The total state is overreach, it always leads to evil: our vanity, our arrogance, always our undoing.
Ok nihilism vs the transcendent, but isn’t that just to say we need respect the limits of our logic, our intelligence and abide by our common sense, our intuition. What of humility and being simpatico with nature? Maybe we are just assholes.
Evil is out of fashion, not a topic for discussion. We ignore it at our own peril.
Thank you. As always, your insights are profoundly helpful. I have lately been reading Rene Girard, currently battling my way through "Battling to the End." Inspired by the recent online video series on Girard by young Johnathan Bi. I got interested in Girard only when I read his obituary a few years ago, via an online post by Robert Barron, and I have struggled slowly since to understand him--I'm not exactly a genius intellectual--he's difficult to read in that, like Chesterton, there is no single work that easily introduces you to his thought--so I was especially grateful to Johnathan Bi for his synopsis. I'm a late-in-life Catholic convert, Catholic now nearly seventeen years, and Girard has certainly influenced my own understanding of Catholic faith, to my undying gratitude. So. It may be simply that I am right now immersed in Girard. But I find myself thinking of Girard as I read this summary of Schmitt's thinking. This understanding of Schmitt--and so many others--of a "fundamental" struggle for power sounds vaguely reminiscent of Girard's basic understanding of mimesis and mimetic rivalry. But it avoids the terribly frightening conclusion that Girard in late life came to accept. I am wondering if I am off on an tangent or if there may be some basis for exploring more deeply and explicating more clearly the anthropological root of our political strivings, a la Girard. And maybe taking another look, also a la Girard, at the implications of Christian faith for facing the truth of the human situation.
Thank you. All this is new to me. His notions of neutralization and depoliticization, at least as you explain them, have something in common with Hannah Arendt's analysis in the Origins of Totalitarianism. If she had used his terms, she might have said assimilated Jews rejected the Friends/Enemies polarity, invested in the notion of mere humanity, and thus simultaneously lost their prior, not inconsiderable power to negotiate their position and also appeared as subversives and infiltrators because they denied their Jewishness in favor of their "humanity."
I am a Benedictine Oblate, a psychologist, an amateur student of the great books, and a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) attendee. It's through the lens of TLM worship that I make this comment: The TLM folks understand this matter of "soulless technology" and the "totalitarian machine-state" intuitively. This is why they participate in timeless ritual subordinated to God's majesty. They generally are suspect of institutions (like parts of the current Vatican hierarchy) that promote an instrumental approach to the common good and liturgy as a shared meal over genuflection before awe-inspiring mystery. Thank you for your outstanding contribution to clearly understanding this battle between good and evil. I'm praying for you.
Government is a necessary evil. It should be as small and limited as possible. Ours is completely out of control and a danger to the country and its citizens.
First, thank you for this fantastic piece. I am not family with Carl Schmitt, but the connections made here are fascinating to me.
"If portions of the American right have today turned to Schmitt as a guide, it may be because they now have plenty of reason to believe the purported procedural neutrality of the liberal technocratic state is nothing but the thinnest of veils covering an existential antagonism; that in truth the crucial political distinction has now already been made for them: they have been identified, in concrete clarity, as the enemies of the state."
My quibble here is how this overlays with the clear acceptance of Jan-6 being labeled a "riot" and probably "insurrection"... with the general tone matching the uniparty media narrative of such a profoundly dangerous and "democracy-destroying" event. But the Twitter Files prove that the Jan-6 PROTESTORS were right about election cheating... at the highest levels of government and private business power. Jan-6 should have been a much bigger protest.
Prior to that day Trump supporters had rallied peacefully. Compared to the Democrat armies of radicals that burned down cities to advance THEIR politics... including cracking Trump supporters over the head... there was never any truth to the uniparty media narrative of danger from Trump supporters.
But it did come to a head on Jan-6. And President Trump did NOT do enough to quell the boiling anger. But today it is clear that the anger was justified. That the Jan-6 protest... the reason for it... was backed by real facts that the deep state, the Democrats, the establishment Republicans, the mainstream media and big tech all colluded to unfairly give the election to Joe Biden and the Democrats.
And then doesn't this get back to the points being made? The question based on this theory by Schmitt that everything becomes political and politics is the filtering of enemy against enemy... who is the actual enemy of the country today? Asked another way, which side of the two enemies has the best interests of the country, and by proxy the best interests of the American people, in mind? There is certainly room to debate ideas, but that isn't the point being made here. The point is that there are two sides and one must win and one must lose.
You know, there is something to that vision of Christ as Promethean rebel. I do feel the relationship of Jesus to his Father is like the relationship of Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader. Really, it is impossible to say the YHVH of the Old Testament is also somehow literally Love. Love flooded the world? Love nuked Sodom and Gomorrah? And lots of other stuff.
And Jesus really was overthrowing the Law, even as he denied he was doing it. There's a reason the Pharisees called him a blasphemer and a demon posessed madman (https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/we-have-never-seen-jesus), and there's a reason Jesus did not try to just be a Pharisee himself: the Law was not enough. And that's not something the Pharisees could handle.
Giving the AI audio a shot - and it’s literally blowing my mind. The content is heavy enough, but listening to what sounds like Edward Herman’s voice reading it? Seriously, what world are we in??? 🤯
I'm only about half way through this piece but wanted to note something that stood out to me.
"Schmitt would, over the course of his intellectual career, seek – in all the worst places – for a way to re-enchant that world."
The writer Rod Dreher, who has moved to live in Hungary, is in the middle of writing a book even now on the need to re-enchant our understanding of the world. My point here is not that Dreher is reanimating Schmitt's concerns, only that your intuition about our current moment, and how it is working out in the collective psyche, is probably correct.
I'll observe that my own reaction to the events from 2020 until now has been to conclude that the political class has become the adversary of all those who believe that the state derives its authority rather than being self-legitimizing. Or perhaps I should say it is made legitimate by its own sense of superior expertise. It consciously stands against those who believe it is subject to a higher power. It has become a thing unto itself and has clearly identified "the enemy". Anyone who rejects rule by experts represents a threat to the political class. This includes committed Christians but also parents of all legacy political stripes who can nevertheless perceive the damage being done to their children by medical and education experts. The old left/right political taxonomy is giving way to something else.
Tremendous. I'm reminded, reading how Schmitt ended up, of a section in Scott Alexanders Meditations on Moloch talking about some reactionary looking forward to an AI-enabled future in which [something something something all this liberal nonsense won't be tolerated any more], and I paraphrase: "If you set out on a quest for the Holy Grail, and you go wrong at the first turn from your house, you go to the corner shop, buy a pint of milk and return feeling slightly embarrassed. If you get 99% of the way there and THEN make the wrong turn, you get disembowelled and eaten by the Black Beast of Aargh whose fangs are as spears and whose claws are as scythes."
I do think demonic posession is an underappreciated concept in our Current Year.
The writings of Carl Schmitt have been one the greatest challenges to my own evolving political perspective over the last 60 years. (Please see the American journal "Telos" for some of the most insightful secondary literature on Schmitt--the original editor ofTelos, Paul Piccone, and some of his assistants--all fluent in German, introduced many of the original writings of Schmitt to the West and were largely responsible for the emergence of both left-Schmittians (like Chantal Mouffe) as well as right Schmittians (like Mike Pompeo and some of his assistants in the present State Department)--as well as some of Schmitt's most brilliant critics (Adrian Pabst, John Milbank, Aryeh Botwinick, all on the editorial board of Telos as well as writers like Inna Viriasova--see in particular her: "The Political Totalization of Carl Schmitt: Deciding on "The Absolutely Unpolitical." (Telos Summer 2016).
Viriasova makes the point that Schmitt embraces anthropological pessimism because of his own early political experience (as you point out--the reality of war and civil conflict in Germany). She argues that his definition of the political is based on his decision about the nature of the human.
As Schmitt himself states: "Since the sphere of the political is in the final analysis determined by the real possibility of enmity, political conceptions and ideas cannot very well start with anthropological optimism. This would dissolve the possibility of enmity and, thereby, every specific political consequence."
Please continue with your study of this man. His influence on the contemporary political word is immense (as you pointed out about the proliferation of the secondary literature in contemporary China) and will probably continue to increase as the U.S. slides toward potential civil war or succession and a continuing escalation in Ukraine.
As a longtime student of Schmitt who broadly shares your whole take on him, I have to say--brilliant. One of the best things I have read on Schmitt. I see him too as a conservative and Catholic manqué, and in the end, as the aspiring court philosopher of the emerging administrative-managerial techno-state (despite his appearance of resisting the administrative bastard child of liberalism). It is not an accident that Vermeule is so enamored with him. The total state is finally, inevitably, an administrative state, and the heart of an administrative state is a rule by law, as opposed to rule of law (as you put it), free of all constitutional norms, so ruling by a perpetual state of emergency and extra-judicial decision. That perforce is its norm. It uses ideology to galvanize the whole into a "political" unity (the friend-enemy distinction), and that ideology is inevitably going to be finally "humanitarianism"--Mahoney's "humanitarian religion of humanity." Great piece.
It is so wonderful that this author brings to us all this esoteric philosophizing, and makes it digestible. It is a gift.
“As for forms of government let fools contest : whatever’s best administered is best.” Alexander Pope.
The total state is overreach, it always leads to evil: our vanity, our arrogance, always our undoing.
Ok nihilism vs the transcendent, but isn’t that just to say we need respect the limits of our logic, our intelligence and abide by our common sense, our intuition. What of humility and being simpatico with nature? Maybe we are just assholes.
Evil is out of fashion, not a topic for discussion. We ignore it at our own peril.
Thank you. As always, your insights are profoundly helpful. I have lately been reading Rene Girard, currently battling my way through "Battling to the End." Inspired by the recent online video series on Girard by young Johnathan Bi. I got interested in Girard only when I read his obituary a few years ago, via an online post by Robert Barron, and I have struggled slowly since to understand him--I'm not exactly a genius intellectual--he's difficult to read in that, like Chesterton, there is no single work that easily introduces you to his thought--so I was especially grateful to Johnathan Bi for his synopsis. I'm a late-in-life Catholic convert, Catholic now nearly seventeen years, and Girard has certainly influenced my own understanding of Catholic faith, to my undying gratitude. So. It may be simply that I am right now immersed in Girard. But I find myself thinking of Girard as I read this summary of Schmitt's thinking. This understanding of Schmitt--and so many others--of a "fundamental" struggle for power sounds vaguely reminiscent of Girard's basic understanding of mimesis and mimetic rivalry. But it avoids the terribly frightening conclusion that Girard in late life came to accept. I am wondering if I am off on an tangent or if there may be some basis for exploring more deeply and explicating more clearly the anthropological root of our political strivings, a la Girard. And maybe taking another look, also a la Girard, at the implications of Christian faith for facing the truth of the human situation.
If I understand you: the natural antidote to secular totalitarianism is limited government and personal faith?
Thank you. All this is new to me. His notions of neutralization and depoliticization, at least as you explain them, have something in common with Hannah Arendt's analysis in the Origins of Totalitarianism. If she had used his terms, she might have said assimilated Jews rejected the Friends/Enemies polarity, invested in the notion of mere humanity, and thus simultaneously lost their prior, not inconsiderable power to negotiate their position and also appeared as subversives and infiltrators because they denied their Jewishness in favor of their "humanity."
I have found this to be your greatest writing sides. Pierce-to-the-core type stuff. Extraordinary and worth every cent of the subscription fee.
I am a Benedictine Oblate, a psychologist, an amateur student of the great books, and a Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) attendee. It's through the lens of TLM worship that I make this comment: The TLM folks understand this matter of "soulless technology" and the "totalitarian machine-state" intuitively. This is why they participate in timeless ritual subordinated to God's majesty. They generally are suspect of institutions (like parts of the current Vatican hierarchy) that promote an instrumental approach to the common good and liturgy as a shared meal over genuflection before awe-inspiring mystery. Thank you for your outstanding contribution to clearly understanding this battle between good and evil. I'm praying for you.
Government is a necessary evil. It should be as small and limited as possible. Ours is completely out of control and a danger to the country and its citizens.
Amazing essay, thanks so much for this
First, thank you for this fantastic piece. I am not family with Carl Schmitt, but the connections made here are fascinating to me.
"If portions of the American right have today turned to Schmitt as a guide, it may be because they now have plenty of reason to believe the purported procedural neutrality of the liberal technocratic state is nothing but the thinnest of veils covering an existential antagonism; that in truth the crucial political distinction has now already been made for them: they have been identified, in concrete clarity, as the enemies of the state."
My quibble here is how this overlays with the clear acceptance of Jan-6 being labeled a "riot" and probably "insurrection"... with the general tone matching the uniparty media narrative of such a profoundly dangerous and "democracy-destroying" event. But the Twitter Files prove that the Jan-6 PROTESTORS were right about election cheating... at the highest levels of government and private business power. Jan-6 should have been a much bigger protest.
Prior to that day Trump supporters had rallied peacefully. Compared to the Democrat armies of radicals that burned down cities to advance THEIR politics... including cracking Trump supporters over the head... there was never any truth to the uniparty media narrative of danger from Trump supporters.
But it did come to a head on Jan-6. And President Trump did NOT do enough to quell the boiling anger. But today it is clear that the anger was justified. That the Jan-6 protest... the reason for it... was backed by real facts that the deep state, the Democrats, the establishment Republicans, the mainstream media and big tech all colluded to unfairly give the election to Joe Biden and the Democrats.
And then doesn't this get back to the points being made? The question based on this theory by Schmitt that everything becomes political and politics is the filtering of enemy against enemy... who is the actual enemy of the country today? Asked another way, which side of the two enemies has the best interests of the country, and by proxy the best interests of the American people, in mind? There is certainly room to debate ideas, but that isn't the point being made here. The point is that there are two sides and one must win and one must lose.
You know, there is something to that vision of Christ as Promethean rebel. I do feel the relationship of Jesus to his Father is like the relationship of Luke Skywalker to Darth Vader. Really, it is impossible to say the YHVH of the Old Testament is also somehow literally Love. Love flooded the world? Love nuked Sodom and Gomorrah? And lots of other stuff.
And Jesus really was overthrowing the Law, even as he denied he was doing it. There's a reason the Pharisees called him a blasphemer and a demon posessed madman (https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/we-have-never-seen-jesus), and there's a reason Jesus did not try to just be a Pharisee himself: the Law was not enough. And that's not something the Pharisees could handle.
Excellent! And great Junger quote, by the way.
Giving the AI audio a shot - and it’s literally blowing my mind. The content is heavy enough, but listening to what sounds like Edward Herman’s voice reading it? Seriously, what world are we in??? 🤯