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.
"Do you not believe in Science?" So my aunt breathlessly asked me, or rather inquired upon me, after I made it clear I had no intention of taking Pfizer's miraculous 'vaccine.' We still get along, but that moment is etched in my mind. (Also I'm 32, relatively healthy, and scientifically literate.) She and the rest of my family still worship the Scientific State and obey its priestly class of Experts---no matter how often I gently bring up examples of those Experts fudging data, flip-flopping on actual science, and occasionally outright lying. I didn't even bother asking over Christmas how many times they've gotten boosted. No words of mine can penetrate their faith.
Putting aside this religious talk though, and getting back to Schmitt's most relevant political insight, I have to wonder: how did the conservative Tweeter featured at the top of this essay not realize until May 2022 that it's "friend/enemy all the way down"? How did he not grok it a year before, when the public health authorities illegalizing mass gatherings made an *exception* for Floyd protesters? "Systemic racism is a public health crisis too, don'tch'ya know!" is what they said. I knew it then. I saw the political distinction.
And while I do admire Ernst Junger, I must lament: prayer is worthless in this conflict.
There is probably more than one explanation for people's reluctance to change their minds. While it's probably the case that some of the bureaucrats have been operating from malevolent motives, I suspect for most people it's just hard for them to admit they've been had. So they just don't admit it. It's less painful for them to keep masking than to self-identify as a rube.
The George Floyd protests were, for me, the moment when everything crystallized and I knew that the health care apparatus was not actually prioritizing physical health and well-being. Everything about how I viewed things changed as the cities burned and the bureaucrats offered justifications for their abdication.
I confess I'm more sympathetic with the idea of prayer than the position you have expressed here. I'm skeptical that the mass delusion we're witnessing can be explained in purely naturalistic terms. For unrelated reasons, I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis' space trilogy over the last few days, which were written during the buildup to, and prosecution of, WWII. Lewis clearly perceived that there was more than met the eye behind the events of those years. However, I do think engaging in prayer is not a substitute for active resistance and disobedience. I think we have to pray while also continually and actively resisting the evil we see. Modern christians, especially, need to quit being such soft thinkers regarding their faith and come to see their christian lives as something rather more than the spiritualized, therapeutic self-regard that seems to characterize so much of the modern christian mind.
IMO, we need to be uncompromising truth tellers (much as you seem to have been doing) while at the same time praying fervently that the delusions blinding people will be lifted.
Why do we have depictions from the past of kings, heroes, and saints praying before going into battle? It's not to ask God to smite the enemy so that they won't have to. It's to ask God to grant them the strength, clarity, and resolve to carry out the difficult but unavoidable task. A link to the transcendent is required to sharpen your mental sword and bolster your emotional armor. It will be required to achieve victory.
When prayer becomes worthless, we then must fight the revolution here, or else all is lost. My own biases upfront (well-educated Catholic who believes in Christ with my whole being), here's what I understand as one of (the most important?) point of this article: if the fight becomes about achieving the temporal goods we're losing, rather than about pursuing the transcendent amidst imperfection, then we have already lost. I mean: if we fight for here, rather than accept the grand order of being and rest in God's Providence, we have already become the demons we see as enemies.
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.
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.
Philosophers who put themselves at the disposal of totalitarianism. I think Schmitt's notion of sovereignty is a resurrection of something in 17th-18th century absolutism that finds its true home in precisely in the emancipation of the state from govt--administration and its apparatus of power from constitutional forms. Both men succumbed to charisma as the ket to a universal homogenous state (isn't Hitler's race-state a version of that too?). Weber didn't appreciate how bureaucratic domination and charismatic domination might actually flow together in a post-liberal context.
I think that for any state, balancing bureaucratic domination and charismatic domination is tricky, and temporary at best. The two are invariably antagonistic. Bureaucrats fear the charismatic leader's ability to bypass them, or completely replace them. They can use the rule of the charismatic leader to establish their power, but their goal is always to nullify the ability of any future leadership to remove them from power, and prevent any charismatic leader from gaining a foothold at all, because the emergent charismatic leader uses the ineptitude of the bureaucracy as a foil to gain support of the populace. This ineptitude is inevitable because the two primary imperatives of a dominant bureaucracy are 1) perpetuate it's own existence, and 2) expand it's power. It's interesting that in the Liberal democracies over the last 70 years, (which are now entirely bureaucratic states) the political leadership are utterly unremarkable, and in some cases even buffoons. This suits the ruling bureaucrats quite well, knowing that these leaders can be easily replaced. A similar phenomenon occurred during the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union over 70 years, going from the cults of Lenin and Stalin, to the completely unremarkable Adropov and Yelsin.
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.
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.
Tucker Carlson, responding to Romney's bs, early 2019, said that big business is more of a problem than big government.
From what I can tell, government and business co-evolved (as a high-social-trust system) over something like 500-1,000 years, so the idea that one part or the other of the corporate-state is worse than the other is probably a little silly.
re: the postmodernist "New Clerisy"
That said, the worst social pathogen at this point in history is postmodern relativism/deconstruction, which denies that reality and evil exist, and it has infested "leftist" and upper-middle class, college educated tending organizational cultures (education, media-tech, govt, NGOs) to a greater extent than business cultures.
But, warning: business is also being infected by the "woke" sickness:
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.
What the twitterfiles document is that the Democrats engaged in abuses of state police powers (same as J. Edgar Hoover), censorship of critics and dissidents and propaganda. All of which are just the most recent examples of the old story of how the collapse of empire/civilization leads to reactionary, ILLIBERAL, anti-rational regression to tribalistic ideology. (Martin Van Creveld on "The Fate of the State")
As the empire disintegrates (because its "sense making" system is fragile to disruption), barbarians sense weakness and crash the gates and walls.
Thus, the "Physicals vs. Virtuals" situation:
Industrial-managerial capitalism is being attacked by global finance and the media-tech oligarchs (represented by the PMC/Brahmins, New Clerisy).
The old system of meaning: an alliance of Enlightenment rationalism and mythic religious moral order that evolved under industrial-managerial capitalism (Physicals).
The new system of meaning: postmodern relativism and "reality is a construct" (Virtuals) with "wokeism" as the Virtual faux religion.
Given that China was never "classically liberal", they appear to be trying to look for other justifications for innoculating themselves against the "western" (liberal) sense making crisis. Or, just looking for better ways to use the western sense making crisis as a weapon against the west to continue their revival under their 5,000 year old tradition of (pre-liberal) state authoritarianism as the solution to warring tribes.
re: western civilization v2?
One post-"woke" solution is to evolve anti-fragility to disruption. That requires the evolution of a value system that transcends the left-vs-right narrative (splitting objectivity and subjectivity, science and spirituality, etc.).
Note: the historical co-emergence of classical liberalism ("openness to new experience" personality traits), democracy, literacy/numeracy, expanding middle class wealth and an expanding river and sea trade market, increased economy and scientific innovation after feudalism/manorialism was dependent on genetic changes resulting from the nuclear family (outbreeding), replacing clannish inbreeding going back over 1,000 years, reinforced by plagues that selected for the survival of liberal, outbred, high-social-trust personality traits and against "clannish" inbred personality.
Since "liberalism" is genetically determined in populations originating in NW Europe, and given that Enlightenment rationalism doesn't provide an adequate replacement for religion (the human need for purpose and meaning), some kind of effective update to the sense making system will be required to avoid further regression to "tribal" authoritarianism and ILLIBERALISM by the globalist "Virtual" elites.
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.
Did he really? His Father willed that he was crucified, and so, he was. But then it's not like Jesus' teachings died with him, so it would definitely seem that Jesus prevailed over YHWH in the end. The resurrection was YHWH seeing reason and apologizing.
Carlos, Carlos...no. God and Jesus are parts of the same person. Jesus chose to be tortured to death because that was the sublime and only way to undo Adam's fall (the same as Satan's - a choice for moral autonomy, "I get to be God and decide what constitutes good and evil"). The God of the Old Testament is Christ. Jesus is not Promethean, but patient and capable of tough love. Fallen humanity took millenia to be prepared for Christ's message because they'd fallen so far. Remember when Jesus made a whip to drive the money-changers from the temple? He's capable of anger and violence. It's a modern, protestant, neutered Jesus that you take to be different from YHWH.
A [PBS] "Jesus Scholars" (Nag Hamaddi text types) show from about 5 years ago re-ran about a month ago, and it presented evidence that Jesus was a cog in a plot to overthrow the Roman Emperor that went bad.
His "teachings" were then subject to "re-interpretation" in order to be used in support of a subsequent new ruling Roman paradigm because the Romans decided that a transcendent God of renunciation-salvation (mythic ritual purity) was better than tribal gods, at least when the empire was being overrun by "unclean" barbarians/pagans who didn't care about spiritual salvation.
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.
"Do you not believe in Science?" So my aunt breathlessly asked me, or rather inquired upon me, after I made it clear I had no intention of taking Pfizer's miraculous 'vaccine.' We still get along, but that moment is etched in my mind. (Also I'm 32, relatively healthy, and scientifically literate.) She and the rest of my family still worship the Scientific State and obey its priestly class of Experts---no matter how often I gently bring up examples of those Experts fudging data, flip-flopping on actual science, and occasionally outright lying. I didn't even bother asking over Christmas how many times they've gotten boosted. No words of mine can penetrate their faith.
Putting aside this religious talk though, and getting back to Schmitt's most relevant political insight, I have to wonder: how did the conservative Tweeter featured at the top of this essay not realize until May 2022 that it's "friend/enemy all the way down"? How did he not grok it a year before, when the public health authorities illegalizing mass gatherings made an *exception* for Floyd protesters? "Systemic racism is a public health crisis too, don'tch'ya know!" is what they said. I knew it then. I saw the political distinction.
And while I do admire Ernst Junger, I must lament: prayer is worthless in this conflict.
There is probably more than one explanation for people's reluctance to change their minds. While it's probably the case that some of the bureaucrats have been operating from malevolent motives, I suspect for most people it's just hard for them to admit they've been had. So they just don't admit it. It's less painful for them to keep masking than to self-identify as a rube.
The George Floyd protests were, for me, the moment when everything crystallized and I knew that the health care apparatus was not actually prioritizing physical health and well-being. Everything about how I viewed things changed as the cities burned and the bureaucrats offered justifications for their abdication.
I confess I'm more sympathetic with the idea of prayer than the position you have expressed here. I'm skeptical that the mass delusion we're witnessing can be explained in purely naturalistic terms. For unrelated reasons, I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis' space trilogy over the last few days, which were written during the buildup to, and prosecution of, WWII. Lewis clearly perceived that there was more than met the eye behind the events of those years. However, I do think engaging in prayer is not a substitute for active resistance and disobedience. I think we have to pray while also continually and actively resisting the evil we see. Modern christians, especially, need to quit being such soft thinkers regarding their faith and come to see their christian lives as something rather more than the spiritualized, therapeutic self-regard that seems to characterize so much of the modern christian mind.
IMO, we need to be uncompromising truth tellers (much as you seem to have been doing) while at the same time praying fervently that the delusions blinding people will be lifted.
Even so, the outcome is still very much in doubt.
Why do we have depictions from the past of kings, heroes, and saints praying before going into battle? It's not to ask God to smite the enemy so that they won't have to. It's to ask God to grant them the strength, clarity, and resolve to carry out the difficult but unavoidable task. A link to the transcendent is required to sharpen your mental sword and bolster your emotional armor. It will be required to achieve victory.
When prayer becomes worthless, we then must fight the revolution here, or else all is lost. My own biases upfront (well-educated Catholic who believes in Christ with my whole being), here's what I understand as one of (the most important?) point of this article: if the fight becomes about achieving the temporal goods we're losing, rather than about pursuing the transcendent amidst imperfection, then we have already lost. I mean: if we fight for here, rather than accept the grand order of being and rest in God's Providence, we have already become the demons we see as enemies.
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.
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.
"... the aspiring court philosopher of the emerging administrative-managerial techno-state ..."
Interesting.
This reminds me of the aspirations of Alexandre Kojève to serve Stalin's universal state.
Both men should have known better.
Philosophers who put themselves at the disposal of totalitarianism. I think Schmitt's notion of sovereignty is a resurrection of something in 17th-18th century absolutism that finds its true home in precisely in the emancipation of the state from govt--administration and its apparatus of power from constitutional forms. Both men succumbed to charisma as the ket to a universal homogenous state (isn't Hitler's race-state a version of that too?). Weber didn't appreciate how bureaucratic domination and charismatic domination might actually flow together in a post-liberal context.
I think that for any state, balancing bureaucratic domination and charismatic domination is tricky, and temporary at best. The two are invariably antagonistic. Bureaucrats fear the charismatic leader's ability to bypass them, or completely replace them. They can use the rule of the charismatic leader to establish their power, but their goal is always to nullify the ability of any future leadership to remove them from power, and prevent any charismatic leader from gaining a foothold at all, because the emergent charismatic leader uses the ineptitude of the bureaucracy as a foil to gain support of the populace. This ineptitude is inevitable because the two primary imperatives of a dominant bureaucracy are 1) perpetuate it's own existence, and 2) expand it's power. It's interesting that in the Liberal democracies over the last 70 years, (which are now entirely bureaucratic states) the political leadership are utterly unremarkable, and in some cases even buffoons. This suits the ruling bureaucrats quite well, knowing that these leaders can be easily replaced. A similar phenomenon occurred during the bureaucratization of the Soviet Union over 70 years, going from the cults of Lenin and Stalin, to the completely unremarkable Adropov and Yelsin.
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.
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."
Interestingly, Arendt and Schmitt corresponded several times after the war. I believe she found him fascinating, despite his anti-Semitism.
That would be a hell of a book. Are their letters collected anywhere?
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.
Tucker Carlson, responding to Romney's bs, early 2019, said that big business is more of a problem than big government.
From what I can tell, government and business co-evolved (as a high-social-trust system) over something like 500-1,000 years, so the idea that one part or the other of the corporate-state is worse than the other is probably a little silly.
re: the postmodernist "New Clerisy"
That said, the worst social pathogen at this point in history is postmodern relativism/deconstruction, which denies that reality and evil exist, and it has infested "leftist" and upper-middle class, college educated tending organizational cultures (education, media-tech, govt, NGOs) to a greater extent than business cultures.
But, warning: business is also being infected by the "woke" sickness:
https://edwest.substack.com/p/the-great-conexit-from-public-life
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.
"But the Twitter Files prove that the Jan-6 PROTESTORS were right about election cheating"
Geez Frank, ya really gotta stop smokin whatever it is that yer smokin ...
What the twitterfiles document is that the Democrats engaged in abuses of state police powers (same as J. Edgar Hoover), censorship of critics and dissidents and propaganda. All of which are just the most recent examples of the old story of how the collapse of empire/civilization leads to reactionary, ILLIBERAL, anti-rational regression to tribalistic ideology. (Martin Van Creveld on "The Fate of the State")
As the empire disintegrates (because its "sense making" system is fragile to disruption), barbarians sense weakness and crash the gates and walls.
Thus, the "Physicals vs. Virtuals" situation:
Industrial-managerial capitalism is being attacked by global finance and the media-tech oligarchs (represented by the PMC/Brahmins, New Clerisy).
The old system of meaning: an alliance of Enlightenment rationalism and mythic religious moral order that evolved under industrial-managerial capitalism (Physicals).
The new system of meaning: postmodern relativism and "reality is a construct" (Virtuals) with "wokeism" as the Virtual faux religion.
Given that China was never "classically liberal", they appear to be trying to look for other justifications for innoculating themselves against the "western" (liberal) sense making crisis. Or, just looking for better ways to use the western sense making crisis as a weapon against the west to continue their revival under their 5,000 year old tradition of (pre-liberal) state authoritarianism as the solution to warring tribes.
re: western civilization v2?
One post-"woke" solution is to evolve anti-fragility to disruption. That requires the evolution of a value system that transcends the left-vs-right narrative (splitting objectivity and subjectivity, science and spirituality, etc.).
Note: the historical co-emergence of classical liberalism ("openness to new experience" personality traits), democracy, literacy/numeracy, expanding middle class wealth and an expanding river and sea trade market, increased economy and scientific innovation after feudalism/manorialism was dependent on genetic changes resulting from the nuclear family (outbreeding), replacing clannish inbreeding going back over 1,000 years, reinforced by plagues that selected for the survival of liberal, outbred, high-social-trust personality traits and against "clannish" inbred personality.
Since "liberalism" is genetically determined in populations originating in NW Europe, and given that Enlightenment rationalism doesn't provide an adequate replacement for religion (the human need for purpose and meaning), some kind of effective update to the sense making system will be required to avoid further regression to "tribal" authoritarianism and ILLIBERALISM by the globalist "Virtual" elites.
Sure MarkS... you keep your head in your vape cloud so you don't have to think too hard.
Showed your whole hand there, mate.
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.
Well, in the terms of this discussion, perhaps Jesus should be seen as the sovereign who determines exceptions to the law?
Did he really? His Father willed that he was crucified, and so, he was. But then it's not like Jesus' teachings died with him, so it would definitely seem that Jesus prevailed over YHWH in the end. The resurrection was YHWH seeing reason and apologizing.
Carlos, Carlos...no. God and Jesus are parts of the same person. Jesus chose to be tortured to death because that was the sublime and only way to undo Adam's fall (the same as Satan's - a choice for moral autonomy, "I get to be God and decide what constitutes good and evil"). The God of the Old Testament is Christ. Jesus is not Promethean, but patient and capable of tough love. Fallen humanity took millenia to be prepared for Christ's message because they'd fallen so far. Remember when Jesus made a whip to drive the money-changers from the temple? He's capable of anger and violence. It's a modern, protestant, neutered Jesus that you take to be different from YHWH.
A [PBS] "Jesus Scholars" (Nag Hamaddi text types) show from about 5 years ago re-ran about a month ago, and it presented evidence that Jesus was a cog in a plot to overthrow the Roman Emperor that went bad.
His "teachings" were then subject to "re-interpretation" in order to be used in support of a subsequent new ruling Roman paradigm because the Romans decided that a transcendent God of renunciation-salvation (mythic ritual purity) was better than tribal gods, at least when the empire was being overrun by "unclean" barbarians/pagans who didn't care about spiritual salvation.
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??? 🤯