Can democrats criticize the Enlightenment? In Harold Kaplan’s analysis of modern literature, he doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment (late 17th to early 19th century), but he mentions it as a timeframe for a modern state of mind which has been detrimental to western thought.1 He doesn’t criticize the Enlightenment in Democratic Humanism and American Literature either.2 He mentions it rarely, for example when he mentions that Melville’s ‘insights deserted the confident ideas of the Enlightenment’. Kaplan is a democrat. His analysis of Democratic humanism analyzes how well the writers of American classics defended democracy.
(more…)Category: Foundations
Unspoken questions wind their way through the national conversation. Where are we going? What can we expect in the future? Will we survive? How can we prepare? Anxiety is increased by omens in the sky and the weather. In myth and religion we hope to find promises and instructions. We hope to rediscover our foundations. But we also find lamentations. We are not children who deny the possibility of destruction and death. Not now. The worst is already upon us. We’ve seen families swept away in the flood and burned in the fire. Let’s face the future like wise men and women. Let’s sit down together like elders of the tribe. Let’s mourn what is lost and love what remains.
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Religion Must Guide the Political Moment
The religions that are most liable for the current political crisis are Judaism and Christianity. Some may find fault with this statement. They will say religions are irrelevant; today politics are part of a secular world. This is in spite of the fact that the religions of Judaism and Christianity prop up the far Right’s nationalist aspirations. Alternatively, the religious will say that their particular religion is on the side of righteousness. In this view, everyone who disagrees with them, meaning the secular world, is evil.
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Modern Israel is Anti-West
In this article, I hope to correct the way progressives think about modern Israel. I think much of our secular sympathy for Jewish people comes from the fact that the Nazi regime hated them and persecuted them. In retrospect, we had that in common with the Jews: the Nazis hated the West as well. But Israel has more in common with war-time Germany than it does with the West. Modern Israel is anti-West. In short, progressives seem stuck on the political contradictions of Israel. Christians give the Jews an additional benefit of the doubt because Christianity and Judaism are kin, religiously speaking.
The West is Israel’s Biggest Victim
Sometimes this preference for modern Israel takes the form of a belief. We believe that the Israeli government’s atrocities are aberrations from Israel’s ideal nature. I will argue on the contrary that Israel’s behavior is the result of her true nature. To put it plainly, modern Israel does not now and never has possessed an ideal nature separate from its atrocities. Worse, Western countries are not simple bystanders to Israel’s actions. The West may be powerful enablers of Israel’s drama, but The West is also Israel’s biggest victim.
Israel and the West Against Hamas Where Does the Far Right End and Israel Begin?
Where doest the Far Right End and Israel Begin? To the United States, the German far right’s critique of the West, seems completely unique to World War II. But Israel hijacked our thinking. According to Rabbi Simon Jacobson of Chabad, Israel opposes the West as much as Germany ever did. For that matter, Israel opposes the entire world. Why? Modern Israel has a race theory that rivals that of the Nazis. Richard Rothschild calls Chabad’s race theory Modern, ‘Moral,’ Reactionary Jewish Racism. This racism does not admit political causes of the strife in Palestine.
Similar to the Netanyahu government’s dependence on the Old Testament story of Amalek, Rabbi Jacobson argues that the conflict in the Middle East started not with rivalry over the land, but with Jacob and Esau. Israel and Palestine are at war because they are descended from two archetypes. It’s a clash of civilizations.
A Clash of Archetypes/Civilizations
Rebecca, the mother of Jacob and Esau, was told she had two nations within her. Jacob was the father of the jewish people and Esau represented Western Roman Christianity. They remain at odds. Their immediate ancestors, Ishmael and Isaac, were not at peace either. Therefore, it’s not a surprise at all in Jacobson’s telling that their children and grandchildren are still enemies.
Strangely, after explaining how the line of Jacob is superior to the line of Esau, Jacobson then claims to promote peace. For example, he says Christianity’s war against Judaism proves that peace is possible, because Christianity was ‘tamed’. Translation: peace means the acknowledgement of Jewish supremacy.
Self-Serving Interpretations of Scripture
Based on a mix of sources, including the Zohar, Jacobson says ‘one regrets Hagar had Ishmael‘ (Ishmael was Abraham’s son through Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid). He points out that Ishmael was not circumcised until 13 years of age. As a result, God gave Ishmael’s posterity a portion for a period of time in Israel, and decreed that the children of Ishmael will rule the land for that time. But like their circumcision, which was not complete, it will be temporary. And it will be over a period of time when the land will be desolate. Then these people will prevent the children of Israel from returning to their place until the time has come to return the land to the Jewish people.
As a citation for this astonishing conclusion, Jacobson gives the page number: 32-A in the Zohar. I didn’t find his citations helpful, but I include them on the chance that someone else can use them. Then he continues: The children of Ishmael, the Arab nations and the Muslim nations, will cause great wars in the world, and the Children of Esau will gather against them. It’s a war between the West the the Muslim Arab world.
The Defeat of the Christian West
The war will go back and forth where the children of Esau, the Christians, and Romans and so on, will rule over the Ishmaelites. But the Children of Esau will not inhabit the land. The Holy Land will not be given over to them. At that time a nation from the ends of the earth will be aroused against evil Rome, and wage war against it for three months. Nations will gather there and Rome, referring to the Western World, will fall into their hands until all the children of Esau will gather against the nation, against that nation, from all the corners of the world. Then God will be roused against them. (And this is the meaning of the verse, for God is a sacrifice in Butra?). (That’s in Isaiah 3:46?) and afterwards it is written that it may take hold of the ends of the earth in (Job 38:31?) and he will defeat the descendants of Esau from the land and break all the powers of the nations, the nations’ guardian angels.
There will not remain any power of any people on earth except the power of Israel on earth (and this is the meaning God is your shade upon your right hand in the book of Psalms 12:15?), and then he concludes with verses talking about how ultimately we will come to the end of days, where on that day, God shall be one and his name one, and all the people of the nations of the world will recognize the name, and the truth of this one God each in their own way, (and that’s from the Book of Safia 3:9?) and then Blessed is God forever, amen and amen, and that’s how the Zohar ends.
False Humility
From here, he spends some time giving advice on humility and on how God wants harmony. But before peace can happen, there will be the period of these confrontations. What does that mean and translate in our lives he asks? That we all have within ourselves conflicts between our faith and the values that we believe in, and sometimes how do you implement that for example that has not compromised some of your ideals, due to so-called the realities on the ground. The challenge is how do you integrate the two.
Indeed!
Rothschild criticizes this belief system in more detail. For example, it is extremely disturbing that Chabad teaches similar divisions between peoples as the European far right. In this view, peoples of different nationalities belong to different species, with nothing in common. There is no universal man.
Modern Israel considers the West her enemy. And after squandering the West’s support, the Israeli’s believe that they will rule over the West with the approval of a Jewish God. Modern Israel is anti-West.
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Irrationality as a Weapon Against the Enlightenment
I have previously criticized the Enlightenment, but now I think it may have been too easy to find fault. I was asking whether our present reality has benefitted from the Enlightenment’s promises. Now it’s time to compare Enlightenment thought to competing systems. In this article we will consider the Enlightenment from the point of view of the fascists. Probably the most disturbing revelation in Kevin Coogan’s book is the fact that fascists have purposely used irrationality as a weapon against the Enlightenment.
Since 1918, irrationality has been part of an assault on liberal notions of political discourse. This approach began as part of a Weimar intellectual current called the Conservative Revolution. 1 (Coogan p. 76). Today, we are seeing it at work in the United States. I believe this is the meaning of Kellyanne Conway’s ‘alternative facts’. It would also explain the behavior of Supreme Court justices who calmly demonstrate their disregard for legal argument and for the law itself. The fascist attack on the Enlightenment might help to clarify the Enlightenment’s importance to the West. If we want to avoid being overcome by this tactic, it’s necessary to recognize it for what it is.
Francis Parker Yockey’s Attack on American Rationalism
Among Francis Parker Yockey’s criticisms of Americanism was his claim that America’s Founding Fathers practiced a religion of Rationalism. He thought there were two key reasons that this ‘religion’ had been able to dominate America. The first reason was, America lacked tradition.
The second reason that rationality had been able to dominate America was that it had no originating ‘mother soil’ to provide Cultural impulses and Culture-forwarding phenomena. Rationalist religion came to America instead, through England. And it arrived in England by way of France (Coogan pp. 133-134).
Yockey argued that Europe had been able to resist Rationalism, thanks to tradition. Although he acknowledged that European tradition only lasted until the middle of the 19th century, he thought the European resistance had found support in Carlyle and Nietzsche. They proclaimed the coming of an anti-rationalist spirit in the 20th century.
Carl Schmitt
European Revolutionaries like Carl Schmitt shared Yockey’s belief that liberalism, democracy, individualism, and Enlightenment rationalism were the products of a superficial and materialistic capitalist society. The Revolutionaries yearned for the collapse of this order because its collapse would open the way for a new virile man of adventure. This man of adventure would be willing to risk all, due to an almost mystical belief in the state (Coogan p. 76).
In this Context, the Jewish Question is Never Far Away.
Yockey also argued that rationalist and materialist ideology made America vulnerable to domination by the Jewish ‘culture-distorter’. The Enlightenment was responsible, in his opinion, for opening up the West to Jewish influence. Jewish entry into Western public life would have been impossible if not for Western materialism, money-thinking, and liberalism–which he saw as Enlightenment concepts. These influences made America especially vulnerable to ‘Jewish capture’.
Feminism and the Irrational Right
Spengler called liberalism ‘the form of suicide adopted by our sick society‘; Yockey saw it as a sign of gender breakdown. According to Yockey, feminism was a means of feminizing man. In his opinion, man’s focus on his personal economics and relation to society made him a woman. The result in Yockey’s opinion was that American society is static and formal without the possibility of heroism and violence.
Polarity was a central concept for Yockey. Several of his polarities are listed on page 140 of Coogan’s book. He considered feminism and sexual polarity to be opposites. ‘Liberalistic tampering’ with sexual polarity would confuse and distort the souls of individuals.
Polarity, Credit: Designer_things The Right in general considered feminism to be against the natural order. However, the fascists’ definition of the natural order was different from that of the clerical and monarchist right. The old right still saw man as made in God’s image. By contrast, the Conservative Revolutionaries glorified the irrational, the wild, and the violent. At the same time, they were conflicted on this point.
They despised the Enlightenment argument that man was essentially a rational being who had been blinded by centuries of priestly superstition. But their confusion had to do with the irrational, wild and violent aspect of their belief system. They celebrated natural impulses, but the ‘natural’ pursuit of pleasure was in direct opposition to their idea of heroic life. They saw the pursuit of pleasure as weakness and degeneracy.
Rationalism or Polarity? Materialism or the Soul of Culture-Man?
In Imperium, Yockey wrote that the 20th century would bring about the end of Rationalism. Materialism would be no match against ‘the resurgence of the Soul of Culture-Man’. Unfortunately, the triumph of this new religiosity would not necessarily be a peace movement.
Conservative Revolutionary Ernst Jünger wrote in 1930 that modern war and technology were logical outgrowths of scientific progress. And war and technology had begun to undermine another Enlightenment idea–popular faith in reason. For Jünger, the real question was how to live in a new age of ‘myth and titanium‘ that was born in the trenches of Europe.
Jünger was one of the most decorated German soldiers in World War I. He believed that the sheer monumentalism of modern war had buried the idea of ‘individualism’ under a storm of steel. This marked the death of ‘the 19th century’s great popular church’, the cult of progress, individualism, and secular rationalism. In a world where a little man sitting far behind the front lines could push a button and annihilate the fiercest band of warriors, even battlefield heroics were meaningless.
Futurism built its mythology around speed, airplanes, and cars. Bolshevism gloried in an ecstatic vision of huge hydroelectric power plants stretching across the Urals. America saw the birth of the cult of Technocracy that viewed engineers as a new caste of high priests.
Coogan p. 141
In atheist Russia, even Stalin became a human god. Jünger wrote his essay The Worker to herald the coming of the new god-men of technology and total state organization in both the West and the Soviet Union.
Technocracy, Credit: kgtoh Time and Space
However, the far right’s thinking was already in flux before World War I. Coogan says there was a rebirth of mythological politics after the French Revolution (p. 141). This rebirth was brought on by the feeling that bourgeois constitutional democracy and civil society were obsolete. The rebirth of the mythic in the heart of the modern led the historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, to identify a nostalgia for the myth of eternal repetition. He thought he saw the abolition of time in the writings of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. He called this ‘a revolt against historical time’.
In 1934, the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote an essay about the German new right. It was entitled The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian View of the State. Like Eliade, Marcuse noted the right’s devaluation of time in favor of space, the elevation of the static over the dynamic…the rejection of all dialectic, in short, the deprivation of history (as cited by Coogan, pp. 141-142).
Pope Francis, on the other hand, Tells us that Time is Greater than Space
Progressives may not have understood Pope Francis when he told us that time is greater than space. That’s because he wasn’t necessarily talking to us. He was talking to the new right. Aleteia and other Catholic websites have explained it for those of us who didn’t get it the first time. Here I will try to explain the importance of this concept to the right.
Coogan explains the right’s thought process regarding time and space.
The turn to myth was intimately related in the quest for a new kind of post-Christian absolutism, since the new right rejected ‘God’. ‘Blood,’ not faith, was at war with reason, honor fought profit, ‘organic totality’ clashed with ‘individualistic dissolution’, Blutgemeinschaft [the community of blood] struggled against Geistgemeinschaft [the community of mind]. The Conservative Revolutionaries set as their task the creation of a new, virile warrior mythology. Right-wing Sorelians, they hoped that such a mythology would slow, if not reverse, Germany and Europe’s perceived decline.
Coogan p. 142
This phenomenon also called universal truth into question. One of its basic premises was that ‘Man’ did not exist. And if Man did not exist, neither did his universal rights. Only unique cultures existed–Germans, Frenchmen, Japanese, and Russians. What was ‘true’ was each cultures unique inner spiritual truth, and this could not be shared with other cultures. Nor was it subject to rational analysis.
The Left Resisted the Conservative Revolutionaries’ Glorification of Irrationalism
This glorification of irrationalism came under fierce assault from the left. But they had a unique understanding of its threat. The left identified Marxism as the logical heir of Enlightenment ideals. That said, we now know that Steven Pinker, who is not a Marxist, is also a defender of Enlightenment ideals.
Georg Lukács
Georg Lukács was a philosopher, literary critic and Stalinist. He argued that irrationalism begins at the same point of antinomy as dialectical thought. However, irrationalism deliberately ‘absolutizes the problem’. It calls into question the power of reason to ever know. In the absence of reason, faith and myth take center stage.
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse stated the formulation of irrationalist theory: ‘Reality does not admit of knowledge, only of acknowledgment.’ In such an argument, ‘Life’ is the ‘primal given’. It is an existential or ontological state which the mind cannot penetrate. It follows that reason is actually hostile to life.
There are certain irrational givens (‘nature,’ ‘blood and soil,’ ‘folkhood,’ ‘existential facts,’ ‘totality,’ and so forth). These givens take precedence over reason. Reason is then causally, functionally, or organically dependent on those givens. Under such a paradigm, such existential facts became new absolutes. They are outside of time in the same way that myth is outside of time. Now antinomies are beyond the world of discourse and above historical mediation. In such a world, conflict between opposites could only be mediated by the stronger will. Will became to fascism what Reason was to the Enlightenment.
- Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey And the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999. ↩︎
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Divisions in the Postwar Fascist International
Oswald Spengler was inside the Munich Beer Hall on November 8, 1923, when Hitler launched his putsch. Such encounters convinced him that the Nazis were the worst sort of proletarized street rabble. But although he cultivated an aura of political detachment, he was highly political. He wrote Prussianism and Socialism in 1919, in which he took part in the struggle against Russian-style Marxism, German social democracy, and Weimar liberalism. He once transferred funds from a right-wing German politician and former Krupp director named Alfred Hugenberg to one of the Bavarian paramilitary leagues known as the kampfbunde (Coogan pp. 58-59). This was the beginning of divisions in the postwar Fascist International.
The Right-wing versus the Nazis
Spengler was right-wing, but he was not a Nazi. As a political monarchist, he thought real government must be aristocratic, since every nation in history was led by an aristocratic minority. He voted for Hitler in the 1932 elections as part of a broad conservative bloc, but he believed that movements like Nazism were symptoms of Europe’s decline. Hitler’s populist rhetoric, as well as the Nazis’ hooliganism and pandering to the masses, reflected Germany’s problem rather than its solution.
In The Hour of Decision, Spengler attacked the political left for its noisy agitation as a foundation for individual power. But Ernst Roehm’s Stormtroopers were just as bad. Spengler also criticized Italian Fascism.
For Fascism is also a transition. It had its origin in the city mobs and began as a mass party with noise and disturbance and mass oratory; Labor-Socialist tendencies are not unknown to it. But so long as a dictatorship has ‘social service’ ambitions, asserts that it is there for the ‘worker’s’ sake, courts favor in the streets, and is ‘popular,’ so long it remains an interim form. The Caesarism of the future fights solely for power, for empire, and against every description of party (Coogan p. 59).1
Spengler Falls Out With the Nazis
The year Spengler’s book was published, 1933, was also the year the Nazis took power. The Nazis courted him at first, but when his book became an instant bestseller they tried to halt sales. They attacked Spengler’s ‘ice-cold contempt for the people,’ his worship of aristocratic and monarchist society, his pessimism, and his denial of race. (To be clear, Spengler, Francis Parker Yockey and others who argued against the racial basis for anti-Semitism, had no more love for the Jews than the Nazis did. They believed in Jew hatred, but in a more spiritual form.)
It didn’t take long for Hitler’s archivists to discover that Spengler’s great grandfather, Frederick Wilhelm Grantzow, was partly Jewish. In addition, Spengler was too close to Germany’s old ruling classes for comfort. His allies included wealthy business magnates and right-wing nobles like former German chancellor Franz von Papen. Last but not least, Spengler was not an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.
Educated Germany’s Contempt for Judaism, Islam and Christianity
Spengler shared the view of many educated Germans that Judaism was an exhausted belief system that had played out its historic vitality many centuries ago and only survived in Europe’s ghettos like a fossil preserved in amber. And these educated Germans were not any more friendly to Islam and Christianity. Spengler and his ilk even included the Nazi Volk in this group. He believed all of these belief systems were world-denying, escapist, and anti-historical. In his view, Western antipathy was not due to racism at all. It was cultural.
The Fascists Cherry-Pick Spengler’s Ideas
Francis Parker Yockey was completely on board with this view of race. However, unlike Spengler, he believed Hitler was ‘The Hero’, or the new Caesar, not because of but in spite of his ‘plebian racial musings’ (Coogan p 61).
Yockey Learns about Carl Schmitt at Georgetown
Carl Schmitt was Germany’s leading Catholic International and constitutional law theorist and an advisor to Franz von Papen during the Weimar period. He joined the NSDAP May 1933. Yockey became a devotee of Schmitt while studying at Georgetown University.
Yockey plagiarized Schmitt in Imperium. His defense of Machiavelli sounds eerily similar to that of Jacobin. Machiavelli’s book was defensive because Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, and Turks had invaded Italy during his century.
When the French Revolutionary Armies occupied Prussia, and coupled humanitarian sentiments of the rights of Man with brutality and large-scale looting, Hegel and Fichte restored Machiavelli once again to respect as a thinker. He represented a means of defense against a foe armed with a humanitarian ideology. Machiavelli showed the actual role played by verbal sentiments in politics (Yockey, as quoted by Coogan, pp. 74-75)
Carl Schmitt, the Conservative Revolution, the State of Exception, and the Messiah
Spengler inspired a Weimar intellectual current known as the Conservative Revolution. Novelist Ernst Junger and Martin Heidegger were part of it. They believed liberalism, democracy, individualism, and Enlightenment rationalism were part of a superficial and materialistic capitalist society. When the liberal order collapses, a new virile man of adventure will arise–a kind of Western ronin willing to risk all and with a mystical belief in the state.
Schmitt particularly despised Weimar parliamentary democracy. His theory for overcoming constitutional rule was the ‘state of exception, or ‘legal positivism’. This meant suspending the constitution during a crisis. He believed ending the constitutional order opened a path for a new heroic ‘politics of authenticity’.
Like Spengler, Schmitt saw the state as supreme. He believed government proceeded in three dialectic states: from the absolute state of the 17th and 18th centuries; through the neutral state of the liberal 19th century; to the totalitarian state in which state and society are identical.
Father Walsh observed that the final stage of Schmitt’s idea ‘was the monopoly of all power, all authority, all will in the Führer, conceived and accepted as Messiah endowed with unlimited legal prerogatives in a state under perpetual martial law.’
Schmitt Endorsed Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives
Schmitt endorsed Hitler’s bloodletting on The Night of the Long Knives, but the killing cut both ways. Hitler also used the purge to intimidate his potential rivals in the old military and political establishment who had given him political respectability. He even murdered one of Franz von Papen’s closest aides. The following quote is the Nazi challenge to the old guard.
“If we had relied upon those suave cavaliers (the reactionaries), Germany would have been lost. These circles sitting in armchairs in their exclusive clubs, smoking big cigars and discussing how to solve unemployment, are laughable dwarfs, always talking and never acting. If we stamp our feet, they will scurry to their holes like mice. We have the power and we will keep it” (Joseph Goebbels, June 1934, as quoted by Coogan, p. 77).
The Nazi’s Turn Against Schmitt
In 1936, the Nazis turned on Schmitt and began investigating his ‘non-Aryan’ wife. The SS organ Das Schwarze Korps regularly threatened him. According to Coogan, this was simply a power-play by Himmler to seize total police and judicial power.
Schmitt Retreats to Geopolitics with His Grossraum Theory
In response, Schmitt turned to international law. In 1939, he gave a speech to the Institute of Politics and International Law at the University of Kiel about the legitimacy of an extraterritorial order, a ‘great space order.’ His rationale: the nation-state system had broken down. Now the world had the British, Soviet and American empires, as well as Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. These dwarfed older concepts of ‘nation.’ Enormous shifts in state power demanded corresponding shifts in international law. Grossraum was the proper way forward. Grossraum referred to an area dominated by a power. This would not be the result of organic geopolitical expansion but of a ‘political idea’. Schmitt had in mind a German-dominated Central Europe. This was a political idea distinct from its two universalist opponents–the laissez-faire ideology of Anglo-Saxon capital and the equally universalist Communist ideology. It was a German version of the American Monroe Doctrine.
This impressed Hitler. It also influenced Chamberlain’s agreement with Hitler over Eastern Europe’s 1939 Munich Agreement.
Yockey Objects to Schmitt’s Materialism; Haushofer Praises Schmitt; the Nazis Defend the Third Reich’s Racial Justification
Yockey’s criticism of Schmitt focused on Schmitt’s materialism. He said the traditional geopolitics of Schmitt was based on physical facts or geography. Instead, the soul is primary. But at the same time, he believed Schmitt’s researches had permanent value and that large-space thinking was essential.
Yockey praised Haushofer; Haushofer supported Schmitt; and the Nazis disagreed with Haushoffer and Schmitt. Haushofer thought Europe needed a concept like pan-Slavism or pan-Asianism–ideas seeking to manifest themselves in space. Nazi racialists argued that pan-Slavism or pan-Asianism would remove the racist justification from the concept of the German Reich.
Yockey and Newton Jenkins
While Yockey was attending Northwestern’s law school in Chicago, he served as a ‘kind of aide-de-camp’ to a lawyer and important right-wing activist named Newton Jenkins. Jenkins had found his way to fascism from the progressive movement.
Jenkins went to school at Ohio State and Columbia University’s Law School. After serving in World War I, he returned to the Midwest and became legal counsel for many farm groups and agricultural cooperatives. He also began working closely with the Progressive Party and used his radio program to support FDR for President. However, in 1932 he ran for senate in the Republican Party’s primary and was able to win 400,000 votes.
The Yockey-Jenkins connection came to the FBI’s attention through an informant. This informant had seen a March 31,1954 column by Drew Pearson, which attacked Soviet ties to the far right. In his column, Pearson revealed that the FBI was interested in Varange (Yockey’s pen name in Imperium), and he identified Varange as Francis Parker Yockey. As a result, a former acquaintance of Yockey’s from the late 1930s contacted the FBI. According to FBI files, this informant met Yockey in 1938 at the Chicago office of Newton Jenkins. An excerpt from the report follows.
_______recalls that Yockey was an intense, secretive, bitter individual who did not tolerate anyone who would not wholeheartedly agree with his solution to world problems…_______stated that…Yockey was ‘power hungry’ and gave the impression that he would not stop until he became the most powerful individual in the world. _______believes that Yockey will not succeed in this because he creates too may enemies. ________feels that Yockey will go along with any program whether it stemmed from Moscow, Buenos Aires, Yorkville, Tokyo or Washington, D.C., as long as he can be the leader. ________stated that Yockey believed that the world capitalist structure was about to crumble and that fascism was the only solution, but he insisted that it be the Yockey form of fascism and none other…
Coogan pp. 85-86
Jenkins Progressivism
Jenkins was active in promoting the America First Committee the Keep America Out of War Committee, and similar organizations working for the defeat of Russia and Communism. He also maintained ties to the German American Bund. According to George Britt’s 1940 book, The Fifth Column is Here, Jenkins has an extensive record of pro-Hitler comments. Also, Jenkins attempted to unite fascist and Nazi groups into a third political party. This led the Bund to christen him The Leader of the Third Party (cited by Coogan).
Jenkins Makes a Right Turn
Jenkins began his right turn in 1934 when he formed The Third Party under the slogan ‘U.S. Unite?’ Party headquarters was 39 South La Salle Street, the same office where the FBI informant had met Yockey. In his pamphlet, The Third Party, Jenkins portrayed himself as a progressive opposed to big business. He explained that he was founding his new organization because Franklin Roosevelt had backed down on implementing the more radical aspects of the New Deal. He also warned that the British Empire had too much influence over American foreign policy.
Jenkins favored active government intervention in the economy and thought Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany were models for America. To support his efforts, Jenkins began contacting Hitler’s supporters in the ‘Friends of the New Germany‘, which soon became the German-American Bund.
The German-American Bund, the Union Party, and Jenkins’s Ambition to Unite 125 Rightist Groups
In 1936, Jenkins became campaign manager for the Union Party, which turned out to be the most significant third-party challenge to FDR. After the Party’s defeat, Jenkins maintained relations with the Bund. He spoke at the Bund’s 1937 National Convention at Camp Siegrried in New York. He then launched his own paper, American Nationalism, which served as the propaganda arm of yet another Jenkins organization, the American Nationalist Political Action Clubs (ANPAC). This organization aimed to unite over 125 rightist groups into a coordinated movement (Coogan, pp. 87-88).
Yockey Was a Weimar ‘New Right’ Anti-American
Yockey’s attraction to both Spengler and Conservative Revolution theorists like Carl Schmitt made him virtually unique in the American far right. American supporters of Nazi Germany were usually German Americans, crude anti-Semitic nativists, or staunch conservatives who viewed Hitler as a heaven-sent bulwark against Bolshevism. By contrast, Yockey represented a Nazified version of the Weimar “New right” Conservative Revolutionary current.
Yockey devoted over a hundred pages of Imperium to describing an America incapable of ‘destiny thinking’. In this he was heavily dependent on Oswald Spengler, who had the following to say about ‘hundred percent Americanism‘:
A mass existence standardized to a low average level, a primitive pose, or a promise for the future?…America with its ‘intellectually primitive upper class, obsessed as it is by the thought of money, lacked that element of historic tragedy, of great destiny, that has widened and chastened the soul of Western peoples through the centuries. America was little more than a boundless field and a population of trappers, drifting from town to town in the dollar-hunt, unscrupulous and dissolute, for the law is only for those who are not cunning or powerful enough to ignore it (Spengler paraphrased by Coogan p. 132).
Spengler goes on to liken the United States to the Russian form of State socialism or State capitalism. It doesn’t grow organically. It grows through soulless mechanization. (You will recall that the idea of an ‘organic’ state was the first heresy of German geopolitics according to Father Walsh. Here Spengler faults the United States for growing mechanically, rather than organically.)
Yockey was every bit as insulting as Spengler. Coogan sums Yockey’s arguments up this way: ‘A Nation, in short, is a people containing a Cultural Idea. Because America lacks a Cultural Idea, America, by definition, is not a nation.’
Yockey also faults what he called the ‘Rationalist Religion’ of America’s Founding Fathers. He argued that this ‘Religion’ came from England through France. But rationalism did not dominate Europe until the 19th century, thanks to Europe’s tradition. America never had this tradition. Furthermore, America’s rationalist and materialist ideology made her vulnerable to domination by the Jewish ‘culture-distorter’.
Yockey’s racism was intense and visceral (Coogans words). It also had ideological roots. Coogan supports this argument with quotes from Hegel’s The Philosophy of History. Yockey was dealing with his own racism, Hegel’s influence, and Spengler’s description of great cultures (Coogan p. 135). For more of Yockey’s criticism of America see Coogan’s Chapter 14, Empire of the Senseless.
Imperium: a New Kind of Fascism
Coogan says the enthusiasm of rightist leaders for Yockey’s book, Imperium, reflected a need for a new kind of fascism. He cites the call for a united Europe by Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley envisioned ‘a great unity imbued with a sense of high mission, not a market state of jealous battling interests.’
The Right’s Doubts About Yockey
But Mosley turned against Yockey. Mosley not only declined to publish Imperium, he blocked a promised review in the Union Movement paper. This brought much criticism from prominent members of Mosley’s group who wanted more dynamic leadership. Mosley’s biographer Robert Skidelsky explained Mosley’s rationale.
It was part of a process of Mosley’s extrication from the dead hand of pre-war fascism and a rededication to a new, and more moderate crusade. This meant coming to terms with American hegemony over Western Europe. It was this approach that Yockey opposed.
While still in Mosley’s group, Yockey had had discussions about the American question with A. Raven Thomson, one of Mosley’s closest aides. Thomson later wrote in a letter to H. Keith Thompson that Mosley had refused to finance Yockey’s book because it was full of Spenglerian pessimism and unnecessarily offensive to America. After Yockey broke with Mosley’s group, they found him to be ‘so conceited and unstable in personal relations that it is almost impossible to work with him‘ (Coogan, p. 171).
Coogan adds a historical explanation for the break: The political climate in Europe in 1948 had become dangerous, with the Berlin Crisis raising the possibility of war. Suddenly the fascist ‘third way’ was called into question.
Yockey Turns to the East
Eventually, Yockey’s book was financed by Baroness Alice von Pilugl. It was during his association with Pilugl that Yockey began advocating far-right cooperation with the Russian conquest of Europe (Coogan p. 172). And this was not the only attempt to ally the radical right with the USSR.
An anti-Yockey British-German group called NATINFORM (the Nationalist Information Bureau) observed Yockey’s meetings. By 1950, it was clear that Yockey et al were promoting a definite line of policy and seeking collaborators. The main trend of this policy was based on Imperium and Yockey’s concepts. In July of 1950, Guy Chesham, who was acting as a representative of Yockey, outlined a policy of infiltrating into all Nationalist groups with a view to seizing control from within or organizing sabotage.
The political direction of this activity was to be violently anti-American, avoiding all anti-Bolshevist conceptions. No anti-Jewish propaganda was to be permitted [at] first (Coogan pp. 173-174).
Yockey Has Company
Yockey was not acting alone in this effort. The right-radical Socialist Reich Party (SRP) was founded in Germany aroung the time of Imperium’s publication. It called for a pro-Eastern neutralist Germany, which was almost identical to Yockey’s position. Yockey’s organization, The European Liberation Front (ELF) was in some respect the SRP’s British cousin.
Two Russias
In the Russia chapter of Imperium, Yockey argues there are really two Russias: The first Russia, symbolized by Peter the Great, wanted to imitate the high culture of the West. But neither Peter nor his successors could implant ‘Western ideas below the surface of the Russian soul’.
…the true spiritual Russia is primitive and religious. It detests Western Culture, Civilization, nations, arts, State-forms, Ideas, religions, cities, technology. This hatred is natural and organic, for this population lies outside the Western organism, and everything Western is therefore hostile and deadly to the Russian soul.
According to Yockey, the Russian Revolution was a revolt of both Russias, the Marxist Western-oriented intelligentsia, and the anti-Western underclass.
The European Liberation Front and Strasserism
Some denounced Yockey and his European Liberation Front (ELF) for being Strasserists. Arnold Leese of the British far right denounced them in the early 1950s. The American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell would label ‘Yockeyism’ a Strasserist perversion of true National Socialism.
Coogan defines Strasserism historically as the anti-big business northern wing of the Nazi Party. It was led in the mid-1920s by the brothers Gregor an Otto Strasser. They mainly recruited factory workers in the industrial north. The Strassers insisted that the Nazis were socialists who would break up the domination of big capital and the vast landed estates and called for an alliance with Russia and the ‘East’ against England and France. (England and France represented the hated enforcers of the Versailles Treaty.) Hitler was angry about their propaganda and their independent power base. He drew his strength from the more conservative Bavaria.
Otto Strasser created the Black Front after he quit the NSDAP to protest Hitler’s alliance with big business and aristocratic elites like the Krupps and the Papens. The Black Front was ‘Strasserist’. Hitler murdered Gregor in 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives.
Historically Yockey was not a Strasserist, but he was a small-s-strasserist in some ways. He had a national Bolshevist foreign policy, rejected biological determinism and hated capitalism. He also maintained ties with Alfred Franke-Gricksch, a key leader of the postwar German far right and a former member of Otto Strasser’s Black Front.
Yockey, Franke-Gricksch, and the Bruderschaft
Both Yockey and Alfred Franke-Gricksch advocated close cooperation between the far right and the East Bloc. The ELF, was also linked to Franke-Gricksch, who was the leading German advisor to the Union Movement at that time. Through Franke-Gricksch, Yockey established relations with an organization referred to as the Bruderschaft (Brotherhood) in Germany.
The Brotherhood was one of the most important groups in Germany’s postwar fascist elite. They used intelligence and organizational contacts with fascist movements around the world to play a role in the Nazi underground railroad that smuggled war criminals to South America and the Middle East. Franke-Gricksch had joined Major Helmut Beck-Broichsitter soon after he founded the Bruderschaft in a British POW camp in 1945-46. In addition, Franke-Gricksch brought with him a plan to recapture power by slow methodical insinuation into government and party positions.
Franke-Gricksch joined the Strassers’ northern wing of the NSDAP. He also became a founding member of the Black Front. Franke-Gricksch went into exile with Otto Strasser after Hitler took power, but later he deserted the Strassers. He may have been responsible for the destruction of the Black Front after his defection. Shortly after he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS, the Gestapo was able to penetrate and liquidate the underground apparatus of the Black Front.
Franke-Gricksch’s son, Ekkehard, explained his father’s pre-war activity in a letter to Willis Carto’s Institute for Historical Review. He said that Hitler had distanced himself from his original National Socialist goals. After Alfred Franke-Gricksch fled the country, he returned and came to an agreement on this point with Himmler. He secretly joined the Waffen SS under the name Alfred Franke.
Alfred Franke-Gricksch’s and the German Freedom Movement
According to Coogan, Franke-Gricksch’s activity at the end of the war is more of a concern than his activities during the war. In April 1945, Franke-Gricksch was the head of the Personnel Section of Himmler’s RSHA (the Reich Security Main Office). This was Nazi Germany’s CIA. He spent the last days of the war preparing a blueprint for a postwar fascist Europe. This was The German Freedom Movement (Popular Movement). Among other demands…
it demanded a Nazi Party purge to free it ‘from a degenerate party bureaucracy and the…party bosses, from a ruling caste in State, Party, and Party organizations, which has deceived itself and others for years’ (p. 194).
The German Freedom Movement outlined a new pan-European foreign policy program. It included a 12-point ‘European peace settlement’ and a new ‘Sworn European Community’ of peoples. A ‘European arbitration system’ would secure some form of voluntary allegiance to a ‘Germanic Reich.’
One scholar described Franke-Gricksch’s plan as being based on the ‘call of the blood’ but tempered ‘by the introduction of a federal system and excluding any claim to sole leadership by Germany.’
This movement envisioned a post-Hitler Europe freed from the biological exaltation of the German race. SS technocrats had developed a similar concept. Their ranks included SS Brigadier General Franz Alfred Six.
Pan-European Fascism and the Rehabilitation of Carl Schmitt
SS Lieutenant General Werner Best was another advocate of pan-European fascism. He was a former Conservative Revolutionary, a fan of Ernst Jünger, and a counter-intelligence expert with a doctorate in law. He later became a director of Amt II, which supervised administrative, economic, and judicial matters for the RSHA. Franz Alfred Six was his first AMT II assistant.
From 1940 to 1942, Best was in charge of civil administration for all of occupied France. Then, in December 1942, he became Reich Plenipotentiary to Denmark. He used his power to rehabilitate Carl Schmitt inside the SS because he saw that Schmitt’s Grossraumordnung theory could be useful in the legal reconstruction of Europe. This allowed Schmitt to lecture to elite audiences throughout occupied Europe and Spain.
In Schmitt’s testimony at Nuremberg, he explained that Best’s circle wanted to become an intellectual elite and form a kind of German ‘brain trust’. But since a brain trust was a contradiction in Hitlerism, the concept of Grossraum became their touchstone.
The Reinvention of Fascism and Coogan’s Suspicions About Yockey
After Hitler’s suicide, technocrats like Best, Six, and Franke-Gricksch were free to reinvent fascism. This plan went forward in spite of the fact that until the autumn of 1948, Franke-Gricksch was in a POW camp in Colchester, England. He maintained his leadership position inside the Bruderschaft while in prison. After his return to Germany, he became the group’s ideological leader. Franke-Gricksch preached that the mission for the Bruderschaft was to midwife the creation of a new kind of elite rule now that ‘the era of the masses has passed.’
Coogan suspects that Yockey was acting in concert with the Bruderschaft while he was in Wiesbaden. Sometime in 1948, Yockey began publicly arguing in London that Russia was the lesser of two evils. Then, in 1949, after Franke-Gricksch had returned to Germany, Yockey, Guy Chesham, and John Gannon founded the ELF.
Divisions in Italian Fascism
There were also postwar divisions in Italian fascism. The divisions inside the MSI dated back to 1943, when the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini. Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano (or MSI) was the largest and best-organized fascist movement in postwar Europe. After the Nazis freed Mussolini from an Italian jail, he established a new government known as the Salò Republic in the Nazi-held north of Italy. Subsequently, former fascist leaders and veterans of Salò’s National Republican Army founded MSI.
Because Mussolini believed his downfall was the fault of the old Italian elites, he returned to fascism’s radical roots and demanded the nationalization of Italian industry. After the war his Salò Republic supporters continued to represent a kind of northern Strasserist tendency inside Italian fascism. However, a more moderate wing of the party defeated the Salò radicals at the June 1950 convention. By the fall of 1951, the MSI had reversed its earlier opposition to Italian participation in NATO.
The Radical Wing of the MSI Accepts Yockey’s Imperium
Yockey’s Imperium especially appealed to the most radical wing of Italy’s MSI. MSI’s founder Giorgio Almirante praised Imperium after its publication. Almirante spoke for MSI hardliners opposed to turning the group into a purely parliamentary organization. Yockey was a member of this anti-MSI hard right.
Julius Evola
The journal, Imperium, published Evola’s first postwar political statement in 1950, in which Evola argued against all forms of ‘national fascism’ (including the Salò Republic). He demanded instead a new ‘Gemeinscaft Europas’ best symbolized by the Waffen SS. The arrest of Evola in June of 1951 was one example of the complex political situation in Italy in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Political Pragmatism and NATO in Italy
Italy’s Christian Democrat-led government, and its supporters inside both the Vatican and the CIA, needed the far right to help them oppose the Communists. Many MSI members, however, objected to any cooperation with the state. The MSI had only two options: It could continue to maintain a revolutionary ‘anti-bourgeois’ stand while having some parliamentary presence, or it could accept the status quo and become a full parliamentary organization. A second great choice involved foreign policy. Which superpower was Italy’s main enemy–Russia or America?
Advocates of the parliamentary road generally accepted the postwar order, which included Italian support for NATO. Rejectionists insisted on anti-American neutrality, with some even open to a tactical tilt East. The MSI’s founders, supporters of the Salò Republic, held radically anti-bourgeois ‘left’ corporatist fascist views. Almirante, for example, had earlier helped create the Fasci di Azione Rivoluzionaria (FAR) in 1946.
FAR member Mario Tedeschi said that real fascism had been subverted by conservative forces during the ventennio [twenty years] of power. He accused the monarchy and the plutocratic bourgeoisie of conspiring to bring down Mussolini in 1943. FAR violently opposed the Italian Communists, while at the same time hurling bombs at the U.S. embassy in Rome. FAR members claimed they were remaining true to the radical ideals of Salò.
Italy’s Communist Party (the PCI)
However, MSI’s fear of Italy’s Communist Party (the PCI) caused it to form anti-PCI electoral blocs with the Christian Democrats in Rome and other cities. MSI’s biggest electoral base was also in the conservative south, where a more pragmatic and traditional ‘southerner’ Augusto De Marsanich defeated Almirante in January 1950 for the position of MSI general secretary.
One key to Almirante’s downfall was that he had opposed NATO. In the spring of 1949, the MSI had voted against any Italian role in NATO. But after a bitter debate at the party’s congress in June, the group reversed itself and accepted NATO membership. Not long after that, De Marsanich took power. At this point, the Italian Communist Party began to court the MSI’s anti-NATO wing.
Young Radicals Try to Escape the Embrace of the Christian Democrats and the Communists
In the war between the ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of Italian fascism, many young radicals tried to escape the embrace of either the Christian Democrats or the Communists. They considered these parties surrogates for the Americans or the Russians. In the early 1950s, veroniani like Pino Rauti, Clemente Graziani, and mario Gionfrida organized gang-like paramilitary groupings. Believing that democracy was a ‘disease of the soul’, they turned to Baron Evola for inspiration.
Evola Criticises Yockey and Fascist Youth
Evola and Yockey had much in common. They were both admirers of Spengler and held similar views on the question of race. And Evola thought Yockey’s book was important. However, he posed questions for Yockey and a whole generation of fascist youth.
Evola thought Varange (Yockey’s pen name in Imperium) had fundamentally misread Spengler by not taking seriously enough his emphasis on the difference between Kultur and Zivilization. Civilization could only be a time of decline. Yockey insisted on building the Imperium even though the formation of a super-rational and organic united Europe was inconceivable. Furthermore, Yockey had confused the age of Caesarism with the coming of Imperium. His belief that the breakup of the Third Reich made way for the emergence of a pan-European new fascist movement was romantic nonsense in Evola’s view. The NSDAP was a problematic formation in the first place and its breakup could not be transformed into a harbinger of a coming victory.
Dada: Evola’s Long Assault on the Bourgeois Order
Evola first began his assault on the bourgeois order as Italy’s leading exponent of Dada. He collaborated on the Dada journal Revue Blue, and often read his avant-garde poetry in the Cabaret Grotte Dell’Augusteo. He exhibited his Dada paintings in Rome, Milan, Lausanne, and Berlin. Inner Landscape 10:30 A.M. is still displayed at Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna.
Evola discovered Dada in high occultism. There, he learned that it was a dissolution of outdated art forms. In the mid-1920s, he studied magic, alchemy, and Eastern religion as part of Arturo Reghini’s Gruppo di Ur. Reghini claimed to be a representative of the Scuola Italica, a secret order that had supposedly survived the downfall of the Roman Empire. He was a major figure in many Italian theosophical and anthroposophical sects and became a leader of the Italian Rite in Freemasonry. The Italian Rite, created in 1909, was allied with the anti-clerical Plazza del Gesu branch of Masons.
In 1927 Evola published Imperialism pagano, which denounced Catholicism’s influence on Italian culture starting with the alliance between the Church and State begun by the Roman Emperor Constantine. Evola’s denunciation led Father Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI, to attack Imperialism pagano. In the Catholic magazine Studium, Montini used Evola’s writings to show what could happen to those who become too obsessed with a ‘metaphysics of obscurity, of cryptology of expression, of pseudo-mystical preciosity, of cabalistic fascinations magically evaporated by the refined drugs of Oriental erudition.’
Evola and René Guénon
Through Reghini, Evola learned of a French Orientalist named René Guénon. Guénon was an important figure in the European occult underground. Evola completely embraced Guénon’s argument that the modern age’s interest in democracy, mass culture, and materialism are all manifestations of the Kali-Yuga. Guénon taught that the Kali-Yuga had infected thinking to the point where Western philosophy has become ‘purely human in character and therefore pertaining merely to the rational order. This rational order replaced the genuine supra-rational and non-human traditional wisdom (Coogan p. 294).
Evola considered fascism another expression of the Kali-Yuga. In this way, he shared Spengler’s objections to Mussolini and Hitler’s pandering to the masses. However, Evola thought the dissolution that came with fascism would clear the way for a new Golden Age.
Even though Evola borrowed Guénon’s ideas, the two men became rivals in a way. Guénon eventually rejected contemporary spiritualistic and theosophic fads in favor of ancient spiritual traditions (Traditions). Evola, on the other hand, refused to separate man from the Gods.
- Kevin Coogan, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, Brooklyn, New York, 1999. ↩︎
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Realists and the Radical Right
In a previous article I wrote about Professor Wen Yang’s YouTube video in which he argued that the Anglo-Saxons are the worst people ever. He said this was the result of the Anglo-Saxons having missed the Axial Age. Interspersed with Yang’s portion of the video was a speech by Jeffrey Sachs. Both men use similar criteria to condemn the United States. Sachs blamed what he believes is a breakdown in Anglo-Saxon culture on the degeneration of Western Philosophy. I have argued that both arguments are flawed, and I refuted their claims in two articles. Sach’s focus on the influence of Niccolò Machiavelli in Western politics was the subject of one article. The other article was about Professor Yang’s claim that the Anglo-Saxons missed the Axial Age. This study led me to ask why they would make such false claims. I have concluded that the criticism of Anglo-Saxon countries is motivated by ideology. This article and subsequent articles will expand on this idea. This article will cover Realists and the Radical Right.
The Radical Right During and After World War II
Misrepresentation may not have been conscious on the part of Yang and Sachs. Currently, the rise of the radical Right is one of the most important challenges faced by the US government, but it is not mentioned in the field of International Relations. The ideologies of the radical Right have been forced underground since World War II, and sometimes its ideology creeps in unrecognized. Realists have tried to guide the conversation away from it, hoping it will go away. As a result, we are all shocked to discover that the radical Right has made a ‘comeback’.
A paper published in 2021 in Review of International Studies (RIS) 1 provides an explanation for this omission. Authors, Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, explain how and why the discipline of International Relations (IR) eliminated the radical right’s point of view.
This is not a condemnation of realists. It’s hard to argue with the rationale of those who carried out this plan. Social scientists feared the radical Right’s negative influence on the civil rights movement and other campaigns. And they saw anti-liberal ideas as a threat to peace and democracy. This is the context in which International Relations developed.
Today, radical Right ideas have burst into the open, and the realists’ fears have proven to be correct. At this time, it’s important to confront the fact that IR’s origins were framed as a battle between liberalism and realism. The Mearsheimer/Pinker debate, in which Steven Pinker defended liberalism and John Mearsheimer defended realism, is a good example.
The organization of this material
Drolet’s and Williams’ paper is a comprehensive treatment of this problem. It lays out a key part of the history of right-wing ideologies in the United States. It also discusses the people and organizations that fought them. I plan to divide this paper into sections and cover each one in its own article. This article will focus on the men and ideologies of the radical Right, as well as their influence in the United States.
The Failure of International Relations Credit: imaginima The Failure of International Relations
In the past decade, transnational networks of the radical Right have made gains in Europe, North America and beyond. Governments and political parties with conservative foreign policies have increased as a result. These networks and parties routinely use the ideology of the radical Right to contest prevailing visions of the global order. Their aim is to weaken established forms of international governance.
Drolet and Williams argue in their paper that understanding the intellectual history of the discipline of IR will increase our understanding of right-wing thought, as well as the realist tradition. Their account should also help progressives develop a coherent identity and strategy.
Militant Conservative Ideas in Global Postwar Politics
Right-wing influencers were present in the West both during and after World War II. Much of the literature about these individuals focuses on European thinkers after 1948. Americans remain unaware that a similar influence was present in the United States during the same period. Right-wing ideologues were engaged with international security, geopolitics and Cold War strategy. Their ideology tended to be skeptical or hostile to liberal modernity. They insisted on racial hierarchies, cultural foundations, tradition and myth, as the basis of society.
Drolet and Williams focus on four influential conservative voices in American foreign policy and international affairs. They include Robert Strausz-Hupé; James Burnham; Stefan Possony; and Gerhart Niemeyer. These men were not unified theoretically. However, they were aware of each other’s work and knew each other personally. In addition, they often collaborated with each other and supported the same political causes.
All four men were backed by philanthropic foundations and engaged in Journalism and public debate. They wrote bestselling books and influential columns and lectured at US military and training colleges, and set up training programs based on their ideas. In addition to advising political leaders and candidates, they held government positions or consultancies. Surprisingly, they were also involved in the theory of International Relations. All of this activity took place while they held influential academic positions in leading American universities.
Robert Strausz-Hupé
Robert Strausz-Hupé immigrated to the United States from Austria in 1923. Initially, he worked on Wall Street and as editor of Current History Magazine. He joined the University of Pennsylvania’s political science department in 1940. Strausz-Hupé wrote more than a dozen books, including a book on international politics which he co-authored with Stefan Possony. In addition, both Strausz-Hupé and Gerhart Niemeyer were part of a Council on Foreign Relations study group in 1953 on the foundations of IR theory. In 1955, Strausz-Hupé established the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) at the University of Pennsylvania, with the backing of the conservative Richardson Foundation. He also founded its journal, Orbis. The FPRI quickly established ties to the military, causing Senator Fulbright to denounce them as reactionary threats to American Democracy.
Strausz-Hupé was a foreign policy advisor to Barry Goldwater in his 1964 presidential campaign. He also advised Richard Nixon in 1968, and served as US ambassador to NATO, Sri Lanka, Belgium, Sweden and Turkey.
The Influence of German Geopolitik
Strausz-Hupé’ is remembered today, for his geopolitics. His connections to the radical right come to light in this context. Geopolitical ideas and reactionary politics go together, according to Drolet and Williams.
Geopolitics became linked to organic state theories and global social Darwinism through nineteenth century theorists like Friedrich Ratzel or Rudolph Kjellen. Kjellen, a Swedish political scientist, geographer and politician was influenced by Ratzel, a German geographer. Ratzel and Kjellen, along with Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter, laid the foundations for the German Geopolitik. Later their Geopolitik would be espoused by General Karl Haushofer. Haushofer influenced the ideological development of Adolf Hitler.
Haushofer visited Landsberg Prison during the incarceration of Hitler and Rudolf Hess by the Weimar Republic. He was a teacher and mentor to both men. Haushofer coined the political use of the term Lebensraum, which Hitler used to justify crimes against peace and genocide.2
German Geopolitik’s Political and Cultural Turn
German Geopolitik was inseparable from expansionism, racial or societal international hierarchy, and inevitable conflict. It became more political and cultural through radical conservative thinkers like Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruch, and Carl Schmitt. Culture, race and myth developed as its core, and its urgent focus became the fate of the West.
Spengler insisted Western Civilization was in terminal decline, but Moeller was not so pessimistic. Moeller argued that Germany and Russia were young and vibrant cultures that could escape the decadent Anglo-American Civilizations and flourish in a continental partnership that would dominate the future. Similarily, Haushofer held that Eurasian land power was the geographic pivot of history, and viewed the ‘telluric’ Eurasian land powers as inescapably at odds with the ‘thalassocratic’ Anglo-American sea powers.
Geopolitics in a European and German setting was profoundly conservative and often reactionary. Many of its proponents rejected liberal visions of politics and were especially hostile towards the United States and Britain. German Geopolitik advocated a political geographic determinism opposed to the idea of a Euro-Atlantic partnership. They claimed Europe was the true West. Europe was not part of the Atlantic world, but an alternative to it.
Making America Geopolitical
Strausz-Hupé and other European émigrés taught geopolitics in America. Edmund Walsh, founder of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, joined them in this task. These men taught a version of the Cold War that was a geopolitical critique of liberal modernity. They argued that the Cold War was evidence of a deeper civilizational and metaphysical crisis. These statements had the appearance of analytic objectivity, but the appearance was used to justify a blunt form of power politics.
These men purportedly avoided the German formulation of geopolitics. Unfortunately, Strausz-Hupé’s description of German geopolitik was based on his racial categories and assumptions about European colonialism. He argued that there were two distinct versions of geopolitics. In his version, statesmen used geopolitics to achieve a balance of power. In the Nazi version, geopolitik was used to destroy the balance of power and wipe out all commitments to the shared Christian heritage of Western civilization. German geopolitik had been turned into the doctrine of nihilism and the antithesis of the principles of civilized order because it had given up the trappings of Western Civilization.
Strausz-Hupé Borrows Key Concepts from German Geopolitik
Strausz-Hupé himself doomed this right-wing attempt to distinguish between German geopolitik and American geopolitics. First, he endorsed the German neo-Darwinian vision of international relations as an everlasting struggle for world domination. He proposed that regional systems must be established, each one clustered around a hegemonic great power. Finally, geography and technical mastery designated America as the new epicenter of the West. All the races of Europe would use America’s military capabilities to create a stable world order out of the defeat of the Axis Powers. But there was one condition.
Everything depended on the US leading the fight against Communism and creating an order under which a federated Europe could be subordinated within NATO. Anything short of this, including benign interpretations of the USSR’s motives would be disastrous.
In Strausz-Hupé’s view, liberals failed to recognize that periods of peaceful, competitive coexistence were as much a part of the communist war plan against the Free World as periods of aggressive expansion. Liberalism and containment-focused realists were not capable of sharing Strausz-Hupé’s global vision. Instead, Strausz-Hupé suggested abandoning containment and using superior military power to ‘rollback’ and ultimately destroy communism. The United States must develop a military posture and strategic doctrine that maintained nuclear deterrence, but allowed America to fight limited wars and prepare for the possibility of a total nuclear war.
James Burnham
James Burnham agreed with Strausz-Hupé’s anti-Communism, power politics and attacks on liberal decadence. Burnham was a philosophy professor at New York University from 1929 to 1953. He lectured frequently at the Naval War College, the National War College, and the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, and was a co-editor of William F. Buckley’s National Review. Burnham also contributed a weekly foreign policy column to Buckley’s magazine and wrote a number of bestselling books on politics and international relations.
Burnham had started out with the radical left as one of Trotsky’s leading American disciples. But he broke with Marxism. Subsequently, he wrote The Managerial Revolution, predicting that the coming order would be a world-conquering managerial technocracy and run by a New Class of engineers, administrators and educators. These technocrats would wield power through the interpretation of cultural symbols, the manipulation of state-authorized mechanisms of mass organization, and economic redistribution.
Burnham’s Foreign Policy
Similar to Strausz-Hupé, Burnham believed liberalism is incapable of understanding the brutal Machiavellian realities of politics. Also similar to Strausz-Hupé, he borrowed his ideas from Europe. He wrote a book on political theory and practice, entitled The Machiavellians. In this book, he identified a group that had been influential in Europe but almost unknown in the United States. The Machiavellians included Gaetano Mosca, Georges Sorel, Robert Michels and Vilfredo Pareto. Burnham claimed their writings held the truth about politics and the preservation of political liberty.
He argued that all societies are ruled by oligarchs through force and fraud, and that cultural conventions, myth and rationality are all that holds them together. However, a scientific attitude toward society does not permit the sincere belief in the truth of the myths. Democracy itself was a myth designed and propagated by elites to sustain their rule under secular modernity. If the leaders are scientific, they must lie. Liberty requires hierarchical structures, cultural renewal and the primacy of patriotism, all of which were against the liberal consensus.
The Machiavellian World View
Burnham worked on a secret study commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services in 1944 to help prepare the US delegation to the Yalta Conference. In the resulting book, The Struggle for the World, he argued that the Soviet Union had become the first great Heartland power. Therefore, the only alternative to a Communist World Empire was an American Empire. The American Empire would be established through a network of hegemonic alliances and colonial and neocolonial relationships. This was Burham’s response to the revolutionary ideology and continuous expansion of the Soviet Union.
In place of appeasement, he advocated a policy of immediate confrontation. Containing Communism, and overthrowing Soviet client governments in Eastern Europe would be the goal. Intense political warfare, auxiliary military actions, and possibly full-scale war would be the method.
Machiavellianism in Vietnam
This debate extended to the Vietnam War. Burham attacked the ‘Kennan-de Gaulle-Morgenthau-Lippmann approach because it over-emphasized the nationalist dimension of the Cold War at the expense of what he believed was its more fundamental counter-revolutionary character. He said the realists’ analysis seemed plausible, but they failed to grasp the broader geopolitical and metaphysical consequences of a withdrawal–a communist takeover of the Asian continent. He admitted that entering the war may have been a strategic mistake, but it had become America’s ultimate test of will.
Burnham maintained a holistic approach to social theory even though he renounced Marxian theories of universal history. Like Strausz-Hupé, he saw the Cold War as geopolitical and metaphysical. He thought sacrifice was needed for survival, and America’s liberal philosophical and cultural commitments were not up to the task. He expanded on this idea in his book, The Suicide of the West.
Stefan Possony: Race, Intellect, and Global Order
Stefan Possony, also a collaborator of Strausz-Hupé, was also from Austria. He was involved in conservative foreign policy debates in the US for almost 50 years. He held research positions at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, the Psychological Warfare Department at the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Pentagon’s Directorate of Intelligence. In addition he taught strategy and geopolitics at Georgetown. In 1961, he became Senior Fellow and Director of International Studies at the Hoover Institute at Stanford. Also similar to Strausz-Hupé, Possony served as a foreign policy advisor to Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Like Burham, he advocated an ‘offensive forward strategy’ in the Vietnam War. Possony became an advocate for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative in the 1980s.
Possony’s Theory of Racial Hierarchies
Possony was also interested in racial hierarchy. Racial geopolitics was central to his vision of international order. He co-authored Geography of the Intellect with Nathaniel Weyl. In this work, the authors tried to demonstrate the racial hierarchy and geographic distribution of intellectual abilities and their implications for foreign policy. They argued that world power and historic progress depended on racially determined mental capacities and the ability of an elite to influence society’s direction. And they concluded that intelligence is directly connected to the comparative mental abilities of different races. The people with the largest amount of creative intellectual achievement since the Middle Ages are within the Western political orbit. Hence, the West’s geopolitical dominance.
However, Possony and Weyl argued that Western dominance was threatened by technological advancement and demographic dynamics. This process allowed the less able to out-reproduce the elites. They echoed Spengler with this argument.
As societies reach the peaks of civiization and material progress they face the threat of application of a pseudo-egalitarian ideology to political, social and economic life – in the interests of the immediate advantage of the masses who, for political reasons are told that if all men are equal in capacity, all should be equally rewarded. The resources of the society will be thus increasingly dedicated to the provision of pan et circenes (bread and circuses) – either in their Roman or modern form. Simultaneously, excellence is downgraded and mediocrity must fill the resulting gap. As the spiritual and material rewards of the creative element are whittled away, the yeast of the society is removed and stagnation results.
Page 283 – 284Selective Genetic Reproduction
Selective genetic reproduction via artificial insemination was proposed as a partial response. This followed Hermann J. Muller’s ‘positive eugenics’. Possony argued that through artificial insemination, a small minority of the female population could multiply the production of geniuses in the world.
Possony and Weyl also argued that America’s aid policies and support for decolonization were misguided. This was similar to arguments proposed by Burnham and Strausz-Hupé. They reasoned that such policies are based on the incorrect assumption that men, classes and races are equal in capacity, and that human resources can be increased by education. These policies have unleashed the forces of savage race and class warfare in Africa and the Middle East. They also force the emigration and expulsion of the European elite. And the European elite is the only elite.
Treason of the Scholars
In addition to these classic tropes, these men argued that the West’s decline was partly due to the ‘treason of the scholars.’ In other words, treason of liberal intellectuals who are guilty of spreading specious egalitarian ideals. Such ideals sow envy, anxiety, dissent and disloyalty among the masses. The treasonous ‘pseudo-intelligentsia’ must be supplanted by a creative minority.
Gerhart Niemeyer
Gerhart Niemeyer was a native of Essen, Germany. Like Burnham, he began his career on the left as a student of the social democratic lawyer Hermann Heller. He emigrated to the United States in 1937, via Spain, and taught international law at Princeton and elsewhere before joining the State Department in 1950. He spent three years as a specialist on foreign affairs and United Nations policy. After two years as an analyst on the Council of Foreign Relations, he became a Professor of Government at Notre Dame University. He remained there for 40 years.
His 1941 book, Law Without Force, was part of a postwar attempt to relate international law to power politics. It was influenced by Hermann Heller’s conception of state sovereignty and by Niemeyer’s despair over ‘the politically naive legalism of the Weimar left’.
Criticism of International Law
Niemeyer believed modern international law was unrealistic by nature and that it was partly responsible for the unlawfulness of ‘international reality’. He claimed that during the nineteenth century, international law had been transformed by the rise of liberalism into a mere instrument for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie. It now served the ideal of an interdependent global society of profit-seeking individuals. Subsequently, the rise of authoritarianism had made legal norms obsolete. Since international order is established through law, the law must be renovated based on Niemeyer’s criteria.
The Influence of Eric Voegein, Buckley, Goldwater, and Traditionalism
Niemeyer was influenced by Eric Voegelin, and he became a Traditionalist during his time at Notre Dame University. For decades, he was a friend of William F. Buckley. He was considered an expert on Communist thought, Soviet politics, and foreign policy, and was commissioned by Congress to write The Communist Ideology. This work was circulated in 1959-60. Like Strausz-Hupé and Possony, he worked as a foreign policy advisor on the Goldwater campaign. Subsequently, he served as a member of the Republican National Committee’s task force on foreign policy from 1965 to 1968.
Metaphysical Meaning of the Cold War
Niemeyer believed that political modernity is a uniquely ‘ideocratic’ epoch where dominant ideologies strive for new certainties in order to remake the world. Voeglin called this ‘political gnosticism’. The result is a world dominated by ruthlessness, absolutism, and intolerance in which logical murders and logical crimes made the twentieth century one of the worst in human history.
These convictions led him to a radical vision of the Cold War. In his view, the Cold War became an explicitly conservative metaphysical phenomenon. Liberals failed to see that the Soviet Union was not simply a great power adversary but an implacable enemy drivin by gnostic desires of the ‘Communist mind’. He further argued that the Communist mind was a ‘nihilistic and pathological product of modernity’. So, it was natural for people to fear Liberalism as superficial, ignorant of mankind’s demonic possibilities, given to mistaken judgments of historical forces, and untrustworthy in its complacency.
Niemeyer believed the world is at a spiritual dead end. Political orders rest on a matrix of customs, habits, and prejudices underpinned by foundational myths. So, the solution is a mystical awakening that recognizes the importance of mystery and myth in political life.
What They Had in Common
All four of these thinkers were fixated on space, resources, and national power, but they were also tied to a narrative of the ‘crisis of man’. This last item led to a reactionary critique of liberal modernity. By casting the Cold War in metaphysical terms, they could argue that the USSR was an extreme embodiment of the pathologies of political modernity demanding radical responses. If modern liberalism was not up to the task of fighting the Cold War, radical conservatism would have to take over. Otherwise, the West would be destroyed.
Thinkers in the Field of International Relations Response to the Radical Right
These men were not authoritarians, but they expressed misgivings about democracy and liberal modernism. The thinkers in the field of IR were sympathetic to such concerns, but they did not fear liberal idealism as much as they feared militant conservatism’s foreign policy, including its support for military confrontation and nuclear adventurism. Its sympathy for McCarthyism was another concern.
Some of the IR field’s most important early thinkers took up this challenge. They systematically attacked militant conservatism’s ‘Machiavellian’ politics and geopolitical theorizing. They also used conservative insights to develop what they thought was a liberalism capable of withstanding pseudo-conservative attacks. Unfortunately, this resulted in Conservative Liberalism, which became a key part of realism.
The Battle Lines: Cold War America and The National Review Magazine
The National Review was founded in 1955 by radical conservative William F. Buckley. Buckley aimed to create a movement to address the most ‘profound crisis’ of the twentieth century. He argued that this crisis was a conflict between the Social Engineers and the disciples of truth who defend the organic moral order’.
The National Review was a reaction to the advances of organized labour, racial desegregation, women’s emancipation, and the ‘satanic utopianism of communism’. It was also a response to the conformist conservatism of establishment Republicans. Buckley’s magazine was an important platform for the confrontational style of right-wing politics.
- Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, The radical Right, realism, and the politics of
conservatism in postwar international thought, Review of International Studies (2021), 47: 3, 273–293
doi:10.1017/S0260210521000103 ↩︎ - Wikipedia contributors. (2024, March 2). Karl Haushofer. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 04:31, April 8, 2024, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Karl_Haushofer&oldid=1211395859 ↩︎
- Jean-François Drolet and Michael C. Williams, The radical Right, realism, and the politics of
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Harvey on Class Nation and Nationalism
This article presents the views of Professor David Harvey on class, nation and nationalism. Harvey’s recent video, published by Politics in Motion, touches on an important element of the Pinker-Mearsheimer debate about the Enlightenment. I review the relevant points here.
Introduction of the argument with relevant ideas from of the Mearsheimer-Pinker debate
In part two of John Mearsheimer’s case against the effectiveness of Enlightenment, he says that because people are social animals, they belong to tribes. We still belong to tribes. Today tribes are called ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. Their interests, their ways of looking at the world, and their views of justice are affected by this identification. And because people belong to different tribes, they often can’t reach political and moral consensus.
David Harvey’s relation to the argument
Mearsheimer was refuting the position of Steven Pinker, who argued that people are first and foremost individuals. Pinker thinks that because people are individuals, they ought to be able to use reason to reach a consensus. Here, David Harvey focuses on the idea of nations and nationalism in relation to capital. But his arguments have much to say about the social nature of human beings. This offers perspective on individualism versus the collective tendencies of human beings. It also urges caution in the exploration of nationalism. Harvey’s approach also requires us to rethink our understanding of environmentalism.
Nation, nationalism, capitalism, and the nation-state
How we are to understand the concept of the nation and the role of nationalism? Related to this is the question of what nationalism might do to our theoretical descriptions of how capitalism works. For example, what happens when we put the word ‘nation’ in front of the word ‘state’? We normally assume the nation-state has a different character from the bourgeois state.
It is also important to mention that there is some confusion as to what the argument might be about. For example, Marx in the Communist Manifesto, said the nation doesn’t matter when it comes to thinking about terms of class. The workers have no country, therefore, they wage class struggle. Talking about class struggle is different from talking about the nation. This problem was taken up after Marx’s time.
At that time there was an argument about how to understand the nation and the right of self-determination of populations. In 1915, Stalin wrote one of the original treatises on the role of the nation-state in politics. So did Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, and others. The debate continues in Marxist circles. Harvey’s plan in this and subsequent videos is to discuss how and why the nation-state came about and also what its origins might be. He also wants to talk about its consequences.
Origins and consequences of the nation-state
In the early 1920s, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States from 1913 to 1021, said the following.
Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.
This is Wilson’s description of how relations between nations are connected together. Harvey says we need foundation concepts in order to discuss Wilson’s speech and this subject in general. And and these concepts don’t exist in the Marxist literature. Therefore Harvey uses concepts from another domain which has always been historically important. He derives three concepts from his own professional association as a geographer.
- Questions of the environment: We must distinguish between raw nature (untouched and unmodified by human hands) and the modified environment. We need to discuss the relationship between capital circulation and the environment, what capital absorbs from the environment, and what capital does to the environment, for example, building cities and new environments.
- Space and space-time: As he has pointed out previously, capital itself is concerned with production of space and new temporalities. Capital accelerates everything. Marx called this the annihilation of space through time. This is a dynamic place for looking at how spacial temporality is transformed. Once spacial temporality is transformed, we have to adapt to it. Capital is constantly transforming the space-time coordinates of its actions and at the same time reshaping the environment and space-time through its actions.
- Place: Place is not a favorite concept amongst Marxists. However, capital makes places. Capital is born in places and has a certain importance in terms of who we are and what we think about.
Aristotle’s influence on Marx
First, Marx was a classical scholar and a great admirer of Aristotle. Aristotle said human beings are political beings, or social beings. In Marx’s language of capital, we are political animals. This means we are always about forming collectives of some kind. Those collective forms of action are sometimes very extensive. As political animals, we have to think of the way in which capital is politicized and socialized in terms of its forms of circulation. (This aligns with Mearsheimer’s argument.)
Second, when Aristotle talked about the meaning of market exchange and started to analyze the nature of the market, he noticed that it rests on the ideas of equivalence and equality. These ideas are also stressed in Marxism. So the political definition of equality and equivalence becomes fundamental to any society based on commodity exchange. However, Aristotle was not able to develop a labor theory of value. This is due to the fact that in Greek society, all the work was done by slaves. Wage labor was one of the preconditions of Marx’s theory of value.
Finally, there was a concept that Marx did not take up from Aristotle, but which was foundational for how Aristotle thought. This is the concept of place. Aristotle said place is the priority or feature of all things. (Mearsheimer seems to have echoed Aristotle.)
Place, space and the environment: a geographer’s view
Harvey wonders if geography is about place, space and the environment, should we look at those things separately, or as a totality? He answers that he prefers to think back to the totality. A particular place exists in a certain spacial and temporal field, and has certain environmental qualities, both natural and humanly constructed. Therefore, the production of place is as important as the production of space, space-time and environmental transformations.
Since the field of geography is about the relations between space, place and the environment, we have to start to analyze the spacial moment, the environmental moment and the place movement. Since Harvey has previously talked about the environment and spacial temporality, he will concentrate here on the notion of place.
What Aristotle means when he says place is the priority or feature of all things is that all of us have a place of our origin. And that place, where we were born, how we are raised, plays a defining role in who we are. Therefore, we don’t have to start off with the abstractions of space-time and the question of whether or not the environment is human-made. We should start with the concreteness of the fact that we were born into a particular place. We have a certain set of experiences that shape us for much of our lives.
The dialectical view of place
When we say place is the first of all things, we mean that is where we begin upon our search to understand the world. That search will redefine not only who we are particularly, but how the world around us is made. It will also redefine what it is made of and how its transformations come back to transform us further. In other words, we take a dialectical view in which we say we change the world in order to change ourselves. One of the ways in which we change the world is by building different places. The concept of place becomes foundational in this way of thinking.
We see that this concept is very distinctive when we reflect on the nature of what place is about, how place works and all the environmental and cultural elements that are attached to it. Harvey contends for example, that in a place like the United States you could probably look at the postal zone someone comes from and have a pretty good idea of what sort of person they are. He has observed that when American students meet each other in Europe they ask each other where they are from. Place enters into the personality and the understandings of the world. We develop these understandings from our upbringing and other surrounding influences. So when Aristotle says place is the first of all things, he means that where we begin and how we experience that place is very critical.
Born in Gaza
The Documentary Born in Gaza was filmed shortly after the 2014 Gaza War. It examines how violence has transformed the lives of 10 Palestinian children who survived that war. At the time of filming, these children still didn’t understand how or why people did those things to them, or what it meant. It’s likely that those kids became the back bone of Hamas today. ‘That kind of treatment can ‘form the cadre for a different kind of political world’. Harvey says we should take this carefully into account because it is shaping future generations and laying the foundation of many things that will happen later.
So, when we say place is the first of all things, we mean it’s very likely that if you were born in Gaza and experienced these things, you would probably end up joining a political movement. Then the political animal would start to come out and lead to the formation of something like Hamas.
A word of caution
So, place is an important starting point. However, there is a problem with this starting point. This has to do with the fact that Aristotle is stating something very significant.
When Aristotle says place is the first of all things, what he’s doing is stating something that is very significant, but it is taken up in other things…the notion of place played a very important role in a lot of philosophical thinking.
Professor David HarveyOne of the people who took up Aristotle’s notion of place was the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Heidegger was tolerant of Nazism, and he associated himself with it philosophically. This was true even after the end of the second world war. In fact, he never disavowed it. For this reason, Harvey Heidegger is a problematic figure. Heidegger is someone you may not want to listen to, in Harvey’s opinion.
However, he acknowledges Heidegger had a ‘distinctive’ notion of place. For example, Heidegger said that ‘Place is the locale of the truth of being‘. In this, he was close to Aristotle, but he took it deeper. He was saying there is a certain truth that attaches to the notion of place, and that truth is essential to being or becoming.
If you go on to interrogate where Heidegger was coming from, you will find that some of his passages are anti-capitalist. Harvey quotes a rather long passage about how distances in time and space are shrinking. (Marx would phrase it as ‘annihilation of space through time’.)
I’ve decided not to include Heidegger’s passage in this review. I’ve come across certain concepts and beliefs in the course of writing this blog that I consider dangerous. In this case, I take Harvey very seriously when he says we may not want to listen to Heidegger. We can’t be sure where certain harmful influences come from–whether from logical argument or from the general tone and atmosphere. It’s impossible to know which attributes have won people to this way of thinking in the past. So I chose not to include it here. I’m aware that this omission will cause many readers to go directly to the video to find out what he said. Of course they are free to do so, but at least I haven’t had to spend my time typing it.)
Heidegger’s similarities and differences with progressivism
According to Harvey, the passage in question is interesting in the way it talks about logical space and time in a Newtonian way. Also, it seems Heidegger was a great enemy of cosmopolitanism and market exchange. Many of his writings are anti-capitalist. But again, there is that note of caution. ‘There is something different in Heidegger’.
What Heidegger is doing is an ultimate critique. It’s very Marxist in its own way, but Heidegger is a very conservative figure. The theory of place has been dominated by Heideggerian thinking, and includes questions of dwelling, how we appropriate the world and work with the things around us. Due to this influence we do it in such a way as to appropriate the world to the self. We start to internalize much of what we find in the place we are in.
This is the kind of work which is these days coming back into left thinking. This is particularly the case with the effort to better understand indigenous culture and places. ‘There is the sense of feeling, the sensitivity to environmental variation, the closeness of things, which we can appropriate, how we understand them at the same time as those things can be very distant in mere physicality.’
Heidegger’s dwelling vs Lefebvre’s inhabiting
The idea of place is foundational for how we think about how people dwell. Dwelling was one of Heidegger’s main concepts. It was a critical feature for him. He did not use the term alienation, but he suggested that we can be alienated from nature, from space-time, from each other. Marx would understand it as general alienation from commercial culture, market related structures and capital accumulation. He would agree that this world, which is being built by capital, is a world full of alienation. And part of alienation is set up by an attempt to recuperate the realness and sensitivity that comes from dwelling.
But, what Heidegger does is claim that places are sacrosanct, that they are places of memory and encounters. This has been taken up on the left by Lefebvre, who studied Heidegger before his Nazi sympathies became well-known. Lefebvre has changed Heidegger’s term, dwelling into inhabiting. ‘We are who we are by virtue of the kinds of places we inhabit.’ And he is not talking about ‘planting yourself on top of things’, but about trying to wrestle with the reality of environmental conditions, space-time relations, etc., and trying to incorporate them in our collective sense of self. It is that which develops the concept of nation and nationhood.
According to Harvey the result is a form of environmentalism close to what Nazism was about. He thinks it has an ecological feeling, like Nazi youth camps in the forest. This isn’t as strange as it seems. Some writings of that time depicted Germany as one of the first ecological states in the sense of a close assemblage between the natural world and submission of one’s self to the conditions of life in that world.
The significance of Marx in this context
This is rather ‘bothersome’ in Harvey’s view. But he thinks it explains something significant about Marx. Marx understood there were nations and they needed to be talked about. He took up the idea of national self-determination and was particularly concerned with the case of Poland’s fight for independence. In fact, Marx was supportive of it, as he thought it might be a first step to socialism. In other words, Poland’s struggle was progressive.
On the other hand, Marx was not supportive of Czechoslovakian independence. The Polish people fought for independence from Tzarist rule. But in Czechoslovakia, the ruling class was trying to pull the people back into serfdom. This sort of judgement is characteristic of the Marxist approach.
Brexit and Scottish independence: a Marxist illustration
Harvey illustrates his own experience with this type of judgement with two recent events. One was Brexit, which he opposed, and the other was Scottish independence, which he supported.
After Jacques Delors’s term as president of the European Commission, The EU became more right-wing and reactionary. On this basis, Harvey would have supported Brexit. However, it turned out that the people behind the Brexit movement were reactionary right-wingers who were anti-immigrant and anti regulatory. So he didn’t support Brexit.
By contrast, in the case of Scottish independence the people were working against neoliberal governance in London. This government was robbing Scotland of North Sea oil and other depredations. Scottish independence called for a progressive welfare state where Scotland could control its own resources. In addition, it included everyone who lived in Scotland, not only people with Scottish heritage. By comparison, Heidegger would have limited it to those who could prove Scottish heritage.
Conclusion
Probably Harvey’s most important clarification or addition in regard to John Mearsheimer’s debate points is his conclusion that you can’t immediately say whether national identity is good or bad. It depends on whether people use it for positive or negative reasons. The main difficulty for analysis is that there is no real foundation for a theory of place. That is, aside from a better understanding of how places form and what they are about. Therefore, Harvey concludes that a theory of place is crucial. And this theory can’t be divorced from its context in space-time and environmental conditions.
There is a power in place-making
So, we have begun to recognize a certain power in place-making, and how the way places are made has a big impact on how culture forms. We should tale note that the world is made up of places. However, when you are talking about space-time, you are talking about an abstraction. It makes more sense if you talk about space-time in particular. For example the space-time coordinates of places in the world. For example the coordinates which make Lisbon like Lisbon and Barcelona like Barcelona. This would include a consideration of how much the politics of those places really matters. In addition, cases like the Scottish referendum illustrate the use the notion of place as a political lever to engage in certain kinds of action. Harvey provides another example, the experience of the Paris Commune.
The Paris Commune
Surveys were done with the people who had been part of the Paris Commune. Many of them said they were there because they were loyal to Paris. When the painter Courbet was put on trial, he gave as his reason for being in the commune that he loved Paris. Paris was a significant feature of political organization.
It is important to ask what is going on in terms of class struggle and what is going on in terms of national struggle. Can we distinguish between national interests and class interests? What’s the relations and between class and nation? In what sense are class interests and national interests related to each other? What is the national interest about and how does it work? These questions will be addressed in Professor Harvey’s next video.
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Debating the Enlightenment and its Alternatives
This is a summary and critique of a debate hosted by the Institute of Art and Ideas. In the videos linked below, Steven Pinker and John Mearsheimer are debating The Enlightenment and its alternatives. The subtitle is, Which ideals are the best guide to human betterment? In my opinion, this debate is an important addition to questions I have raised about the Enlightenment, and so I’m providing a summary of it here. I apologize for the length, but I think it was necesssary for analysis. My comments are in parentheses, bold type, and italics. Please watch the debate at the IAI website or view it on YouTube in 2 parts. The debate was published December, 2023.
Gresham College Director, Sophie Scott-Brown, was the artist, and she provided the following resolution.
“The Enlightenment advocated reason, science, democracy and universal human rights as a grounding for human morality and social organization. In the quarter millennium since, to what extent have these ideals been realized? Has the Enlightenment in fact been successful in bringing about moral progress, or are there viable alternatives to the Enlightenment vision?”
(Mearsheimer and Pinker address the question of whether society has improved since the Enlightenment. Pinker argues that it has, according to his material criteria. The opposing argument is Mearsheimer’s focus on the effectiveness of Enlightenment values in promoting political and moral progress. He said he chose this focus because Pinker had previously argued in the affirmative on this point.
An additional ‘provocation’ as stated by Sophie Scott-Brown, seems to suggest a slightly different focus. It questions whether the values of universal liberty and justice are harmful or helpful in themselves. I think it can be argued that both Pinker and Mearsheimer would defend universal liberty and justice, but this question was not taken up.)
We associate values such as universal liberty and justice with the Enlightenment. Do they harm or hinder the world or do they help the world?
Sophie Scott-BrownSteven Pinker’s Constructive Speech for Enlightenment Values
Steven Pinker constructs his affirmative position for Enlightenment ideals by arguing that we should use reason to improve human flourishing. He explains that the fruits of reason can be seen in certain institutions, such as liberal democracy, regulated markets and international institutions. By reason, he means we should use open deliberation, science, and history in the evaluation of ideas.
Pinker’s definition of human flourishing is: access to the things that each of us wants for ourselves, and by extension, can’t deny to others. These include life, health, sustenance, prosperity, freedom, safety, knowledge, leisure, and happiness. But they are not to be confused with the notion that we should venerate great men of the 18th century. It’s the ideas that count. Nor should we venerate the West. According to Pinker, the West has always been ‘ambivalent’ to Enlightenment ideals, and many counter-enlightenment themes have had great influence in the West.
(The caution against venerating the West seems to be a deliberate narrowing of the terms of the debate. For one thing, it heads off any inclination to analyze the real effects of the Enlightenment on the American system, which was directly influenced by it. In addition, the caution against venerating ‘great men of the 18th century’ eliminates the possibility of analyzing the motives and biases of the philosophes, not to mention their historical context. Pinker wants to limit the debate to data points for material progress.)
Has the Enlightenment Worked? The Affirmative Position
For Pinker, material progress is evidence that the Enlightenment has worked. According to the statistics provided in the video, there has been impressive improvement. The following data provide a snapshot of what has happened in the last 250 years as it applies to the various dimensions of human flourishing.
Decrease in Poverty, Famine and War; Increase in Life Expectancy, Literacy and Democracy
- First, Pinker cites a drastic increase for life expectancy and large decreases in child mortality. In addition, extreme poverty has gone from about 90 percent globally to less than 9 percent. Famine, which used to occur regularly, is only known in war zones and some autocracies. There has also been a large increase in the literacy rate and the percentage of the global population receiving a basic education.
- War has decreased since the Enlightenment. Pinker limits this criterion to what he calls ‘great power war’, or war between ‘800-pound gorillas’. His argument is that this type of war was constant several hundred years ago, but it no longer happens since the Korean War.
- Thanks to the Enlightenment there has been an increase in democratic countries. Pinker believes this has led to fewer incidences of ‘judicial torture’, slavery, and homicide. By judicial torture he means crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, and disembowelment. During the Enlightenment period there has been ‘a wave’ of abolishment of this type of judicial torture.
- Finally, Pinker argues that countries with Enlightenment ideals, by which he means liberal democracies, are the healthiest, cleanest, safest, happiest, and the most popular destination of immigrants.
As to the question of alternatives to the Enlightenment Pinker lists religion, romantic nationalism and authoritarianism, zero-sum struggle (in which a country or group tries to end the control of an oppressor), and reactionary ideologies.
John Mearsheimer’s Constructs his Argument Against the Effectiveness of Enlightenment Values in Fostering Political and Moral Progress
Mearsheimer begins by explaining that he is not arguing there has been no progress since 1680. Nor is he denying that the Enlightenment contributed to some of it. His question is whether the Enlightenment has led to moral and political progress. As mentioned above, he bases this focus on the argument made by Steven Pinker in the affirmative. In Mearsheimer’s view, moral and political progress have to do with first principles or the ability to reach consensus on the good life. Has the Enlightenment created a situation where wide scale consensus can be reached on first principles, or the good life? If so, this would be evidence of moral progress. His argument has three parts:
The Probems: Unfettered Reason, Radical Individualism, and Security Competition
- The core argument is based on the question of whether unfettered reason will lead individuals to come to an agreement on first principles or truth. Again, this is in contrast to Steven Pinker, who has argued in his book that it will lead to agreement. On the contrary, Mearsheimer believes agreement can’t be achieved by using unfettered reason. When unfettered reason involves many individuals, there will be significant disagreement, and it can actually lead to homicide. This is due to the fact that people cannot agree on first principles, political goods, or justice. For this reason, politics are important. By contrast, Pinker argues that politics are not important. He believes agreement will come in the end.
- People who focus on the Enlightenment focus on radical individualism. However, Mearsheimer argues that people are social animals first, and they carve out room for their individualism. Because they are social animals, they belong to tribes. Today, we call tribes ‘nations’. Because human beings are tribal, their identity is bound up with the tribe or nation. This affects their interests, ways of looking at the world, views of justice, etc. Since individuals are parts of nations, and nations disagree on first principles, it is harder to reach agreement.
- In international relations, people who focus on the Enlightenment believe, like Kant, that by using reason people can create perpetual peace. However, Mearsheimer doesn’t think Enlightenment ideals lead to consensus, or some sort of truth about political factors. He thinks reason leads to competition. This is a problem because the international system is anarchic. In other words, it has no higher authority. Therefore, each state uses reason to think about how to survive. And survival has to be its principle goal. This means that all states will engage in security competition. So, in an anarchical system you have a situation where reason leads not to peace but competition, and sometimes to deadly conflict.
Theme One: Can We Agree on What Progress Looks Like or will we never be able to agree on first principles?
Sophie Scott-Brown asks Steven Pinker if politics is missing from his account. It seemed rather rosy at first, but maybe some political context is missing. She gives the example of how some countries might seem attractive because they are colonial powers. The countries that are not so attractive are not colonial powers and have been put into very difficult economic situations by successful and quite aggressive states which are now liberal democracies. Is there any scope for agreed frameworks and shared decision making that could lead to the kind of collective progress that Enlightenment seems to feel is necessary?
Steven Pinker’s Response to Sophie Scott-Brown and Rebuttal of John Mearsheimer
Absolutely. It’s called democracy. The Enlightenment thinkers were obsessed with how you can have a political organization that is not vested in an absolute monarch with divinely granted powers. And the ideals of free speech and democracy were absolutely predicated on the fact that people do disagree. There is absolutely no presumption that everyone has the same values and the same beliefs. That’s why you need democracy. Given that people are not going to agree, how are we going to govern ourselves? On the other hand, Pinker thinks it’s important not to exaggerate how much disagreement there is compared to say, 250 or 500 years ago, specifically compared to the wars of religion.
The Declaration of Human Rights
The world’s nations did sign the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. You have many countries signing on to it, sometimes in the breach and sometimes hypocritically. But these ideals command wide assent. Not universal assent. There are still religious fanatics and authoritarian despots. And there are still glory-mad expansionist leaders. The ideals of the Enlightenment are not a guarantee that everyone will come around, but they are arguments about which way we ought to be heading.
(The underlying assumption is that the world should be heading to more liberalism. The alternatives are described as religious fanatics, authoritarians, and glory-mad expansionist leaders–in other words, as inferior.)
Individuals are Free to Belong to a Group, and to Leave the Group
Next, Pinker addresses individualism, another point that Mearsheimer mentioned. Among the individual needs are belonging to a group, belonging to family, having friends, belonging to institutions, belonging to organizations. There’s nothing about recognizing the right of individuals that contradicts the idea the we like to belong to groups, as long as they don’t coerce us or as long as we can leave those groups. And that includes nations.
Not everyone agrees with everyone else in a nation. That’s why we have parties and contested elections and people who come and go and disagree with their leaders, unless they are threatened with jail for doing so. It is exactly a precept of the Enlightenment in its commitment to democracy that people within a nation actually disagree with each other. And the fact that a nation has an ideology doesn’t mean that is it right for every last individual to be forced into conforming to it. We know historically and from current events, people don’t.
(Pinker seems to deny that there is any difference between Mearsheimer’s claim that humans are social animals and his own claim that humans are first and foremost individuals. But this is a fundamental difference between the two participants.)
The Rate of War Has Decreased
On Mearsheimer’s claim that competition for security means that we will perpetually be at war, Pinker argues that if that were true, the rate of war should be at a constant level throughout history. And it’s not. It’s gone way down, especially since the end of the second world war. Competition for security does not mean we will be perpetually at war. The rate of war goes up and down depending on nations’ commitment to Enlightenment ideals, or whether its goal is glory or grandeur or preeminence. Countries who have been at each other’s throats for centuries have decided that it’s better to get along. The nature of the international system does not pin us to a constant level of war in every period in history.
(Pinker says the rate of war has decreased since World War II. But is this due to the Enlightenment? To answer that, we will have to examine the structural changes in governance and finance that took place during and after that war, and as a direct result of that war. His claim is that the rate of war goes up and down depending on nations’ commitment to Enlightenment ideals. He seems to imply that a lack of Enlightenment ideals results in a country having a goal of glory, grandeur, or preeminence. Are wars initiated by countries with those goals? Or are wars initiated against countries with those goals?)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal to Steven Pinker
Mearsheimer says that with a careful reading of Pinker’s book, it is clear that he talks about truth, and about allowing truth to prevail. (Pinker adds that he means approaching truth, that we don’t know what truth is.) But Mearsheimer is interested in how you get moral and political progress if you don’t get truth? For example, in the United States we have the red versus blue divide. How do you make progress in that situation? ‘It just seems to me that progress is bound up with the concept of truth’.
He is also aware that Pinker considers progress to be the coming of liberalism. When he says we’re getting smarter, he means we’re becoming more liberal. Mearsheimer concludes that, for Pinker, the truth is synonymous with becoming liberal.
Mearsheimer is not criticizing liberalism per se, but he says there are a lot of people on the planet who don’t like it. Furthermore, liberal democracies have been decreasing since 2006. He asks whether we really want to identify progress as liberalism, and anyone who opposes it as wrong.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal to John Mearsheimer
Pinker argues that he wants to identify progress with human flourishing. He says some values of human flourishing, like freedom, do overlap with liberalism, but he could argue that other values like health, longevity, sustenance, and equality of women (he redefines this as a liberal value in the next sentence), infants not dying, women not dying in childbirth, people not getting stabbed to death in muggings, or getting thrown in jail because they disagree with the king, are universal. Values like equality of women are liberal values, but many of the values listed above are universally agreed upon. There are ‘holdouts’, but there is a significant trend in values such as equality of women.
The Historical Trend is Liberalism
The countries that deny women the vote have been dwindling. According to Pinker, the only one left is the Vatican But the direction is that laws discriminating against women are falling off the books. Also, countries that have laws criminalizing homosexuality are liberalizing that. Overall, he thinks there is a historical trend toward liberal values. And liberal values are the most defensible. Therefore, when people come together, they tend to agree on these values more easily. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an example.
Liberalism as a Universal Value–as Opposed to the Vatican for Example
However, he argues that if the first universal value is that we accept Jesus Christ as our savior, a lot of people will fall by the wayside. Education and freedom of speech are harder to argue against.
(The mention of ‘holdouts’ is interesting. He specifically mentions the Vatican as a holdout. He points out that a religious belief, like the acceptance of Jesus Christ as our savior, can’t lead to consensus or agreement. He’s probably right, and Mearsheimer doesn’t disagree with him on this. Pinker may be more extreme, because he sees liberalism and Enlightenment as superior to Christianity, and not only as a first principle. In his view, Christianity is destined to diminish over time.)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
Mearsheimer’s concern about consensus remains, and he wants to go a step further. He says Pinker believes that in the academy there are huge numbers of people who do not agree with his world view. He says these are people who are not using reason for good ends. It’s not only that Pinker thinks a large number of great thinkers, people who enjoy great esteem in the academy, people like Foucault and Nietzsche, are hindering progress or getting in the way. He argues that anybody who believes in these isms, these ideologies, are asking for trouble. So the question is, how can Pinker argue we are moving in a positive direction?
Mearsheimer does not disagree that these ‘great thinkers’ hinder progress. He believes ideologies are a hindrance to progress on the moral and political front. That is the point he’s been trying to make. Given this panoply of forces that are acting in ways that are contrary to Pinker’s preferences, how can he argue that we’re making progress?
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
There are a number of pathologies in our institutions. The belief that there is progress is not a belief that everything gets better for everyone all the time. Progress is incremental and has setbacks. It has to, because it’s not a force of the universe.
Mearsheimer is right that there was a perception of progress as some mystical force that carries us ever upward. That’s not what Pinker is advocating. Quite the contrary. Pinker says most of the forces of the universe will try to grind us down, but we fight back with reason, with deliberation, with argument, and there’s no guarantee of success. Sometimes brute force wins. Sometimes people are under a spell of delusions or believe in ideologies. But the standard argument of what we ought to do and the descriptive argument of where we are, are separate. Things can go wrong, and things have gone wrong. On average, we’re better off than 100 or 200 years ago, to say nothing of 2,000 years ago.
(Apparently, progress is not something that can be defined in the moment. You can only see it in retrospect. Until then, we struggle against the forces of the universe. It is only on the basis of observable historical change that Pinker can say the world is better off than 100, 200, or 2,000 years ago. His evidence is in the statistics that measure human flourishing. However, in the present, the ‘normative (or standard) argument’ of what we ought to do is all we can depend on. Fortunately, Pinker believes he knows what we ought to do.
Cross Examination
On cross examination, Sophie Scott-Brown asks John Mearsheimer if maybe it’s not always about getting it right and building up a history of that rightness. Maybe it’s understanding more about how you go about getting it right. She asks John, if that is a convincing argument for him.
John Mearsheimer’s Response to Sophie Scott-Brown
He clarifies his point by saying that deliberation and reason in different individuals leads to different conclusions about political or moral goods. In universities, for example, there are huge numbers of smart people who can’t agree on much of anything.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal of John Mearsheimer
Pinker thinks it’s a bit of an exaggeration that they can’t agree on much of anything. [But] there is plenty of disagreement. He says we want to distinguish between the institution of academia and the republic of letters, which includes think tanks, newspapers, bloggers and so on. [But] even within Academia there are not a lot of people who agree with traditional gender roles or think that homosexuality should be criminalized, or that war is heroic and humanity will become decrepit if we ever have peace. Many arguments are obsolete–like the idea that we should have racial segregation, or that we should look to the Bible as a source of history. There is intellectual progress; there are also crazy superstitions and monstrous beliefs.
Cross Examination
John Mearsheimer, are you confident we won’t slip back again or do you see new myths rising to replace the old ones?
Sophie Scott-BrownJohn Mearsheimer’s response to Sophie Scott-Brown
It’s not so much myths. Reason can lead individuals to come up with smart views that the world works in one way, and lead other individuals to think it works in other ways. In international relations, the world I operate in, I have a theory of realism. I argue that realism best explains how the world works. Steve is a very smart guy and he has a different view of international politics, a liberal view. That is my basic point. Smart individuals can use their critical faculties to come up with different world views. When you have different views, how do you have progress? The fact that Steve and I have different views of international relations makes me doubt we can have progress in understanding how the world works.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
If we take the history of science as our guide, we find that at any given time there are controversies. But sometimes enough time passes, enough empirical tests are done, and we find out one of them was right and one of them was wrong. Turn back the clock 80 years and scientists were arguing whether inheritance was carried in protein or DNA. The DNA guys won and the protein guys lost. It may be that in the realm of international relations, let’s say we have a competition and we try to make predictions about what will happen in the next year, 5 years or 10 years. Time passes and we may discover that one of us was wrong and one was right. We use the history of science as our guide…
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
When talking in the moral and political realm, and not the medical realm, it is almost impossible to reach consensus on a widespread scale. There’s always going to be disagreement. Mearsheimer says this is his basic point.
Steven Pinker Introduces a Hypothetical Question
How about the desirability of a Marxist-Leninist command control economy and political system? I think reasonable people would say, yeah we tried that experiment and it didn’t work.
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal of Pinker’s Premise
I think there’s no question that ideas come and go. I think the example of what’s happened with Marxism is basically correct. It had its heyday and it’s no longer a very influential ideology. But the point is, it’s not the new ideologies that have appeared and the old ideologies that have hung on, and we have fought with each other and had some sort of dialectical process that has led to a consensus. My argument is that you need a consensus to get progress. What we’re talking about, the dependent variable, is moral and political progress. (In other words, you need consensus at the beginning of the process in order to go in the right direction. The alternative is to wait for 50 years or a century to see who was right.)
Theme Two: How Do We Define Individualism, and Has it Made the World a Better Place?
Let’s pick back up with the idea of the individual. John, Steve says the individual is not this isolated entity, they are multi-social beings. They don’t abandon their social belonging, they are members of different social groups. It’s that no one predominates. There are also distinctions within nations. Nations are not unified concepts. What do you think about that?
Sophie Scott-BrownJohn Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
When you think about human nature you have to ask yourself certain questions. Do you think we are first and foremost individuals who form social contracts? This is what liberalism is all about. Or do you think that we are first and foremost social individuals who carve out room for our individualism? Almost all Enlightenment thinkers start with the individual. He thinks this is true of Steven Pinker. For Pinker, the focus is on the individual and it is individual reason that really matters. Mearsheimer’s view is that we are first and foremost social animals. We are born and socialized into social tribes, which we now call nations. He says, ‘for folks like Steve, tribes get in the way of rational thinking…Political tribalism is the most insidious form of irrationality today.’ And political tribalism is equated with the nation.
Mearsheimer Does Not Disagree With Pinker on the Problems of Tribalism and Nationalism
However, it’s important to be clear what their differences actually are. Mearsheimer is not disagreeing with Pinker on this point. He acknowledges there are problems with tribalism. Nationalism, identity with a nation, the fact that we live in a world with nation states, makes it difficult to reach progress. But if you do believe that we are social animals, that causes all sorts of problems for Pinker’s argument.
Steve Pinker’s Rebuttal
One of the challenges of the Enlightenment is, how do you have large-scale groupings without the coercion of forcing people to sacrifice their interests for a majority or even for the most powerful? That’s why we have liberal democracy and freedom of speech. It explains why nations have decreasingly identified themselves with some single religion or ethnic group. They have become defined, retrospectively, through something like a social contract.
The Problem with Defining a Nation in Terms of Race or Religion
It’s not historically true that people sat down together and hatched out the details for a country. But in terms of rationalizing what are the defensible arrangements for a country, Pinker thinks it’s really good that the United States is not a Christian nation. It doesn’t define itself as a white nation, or even an Anglo nation. In addition, the other nations that people want to live in are nations that are multicultural, accept difference, and recognize rights of individuals.
Among the rights of individuals are the right to affiliate voluntarily with groups like religions or clubs or whatever they want. But to have the violence that is carried out by a state identified with a particular ethnic group is a terrible idea. Because you’re never going to have the members of one kindred, of one ethnic group, of one religion sharing a territory. Every territory has people from many backgrounds. It’s a bad idea if the wielder of force serves one blood line. He believes in human nature, but he thinks there are some features of human nature that we ought to develop means to control.
(Pinker’s argument depends on individualism. However, he does not admit that this is a fundamental difference with Mearsheimer’s contention that humans are social animals first. Also, in the United States, the wielder of force often favors one bloodline. Is that the result of liberalism, or is it an example of the West’s ambivalence to Enlightenment liberalism?)
The Problem of Tribalism in the United States
Pinker explains why he thinks tribalism leads to irrationality. He gives the example of a healthcare proposal that was first developed by the Republicans. When the Democrats tried to pass it, the Republican opposed it. That’s irrational. Another example is a math problem. If the answer favors a liberal policy proposal, the liberals will overlook mathematical errors and vice versa. Say you give people a logical deduction from certain premises, and it’s consistent with a leftist agenda. The leftists will think it’s highly proper and the right will reject it. Tribalism is an incoherent system for a modern nation state because nation states are heterogenous.
(It seems Pinker has made Mearsheimer’s point. Reason does not lead to consensus. This is important because Pinker previously defended political parties as a liberal remedy for the inability to come to consensus.)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
Mearsheimer says he is happy he lives in a country that is not a Christian country, or of one ethnicity. But there are a lot of his fellow Americans who disagree with him. And if you go outside the boundaries of the United States there are lots of countries who don’t want a multiethnic state. He says this is what underpins his argument that we have not made a lot of progress over time.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
Pinker says part of the argument he is making is normative. It is true that there are a lot of societies that try to limit the population to one race or ethnicity. Many argue that is not viable, that they will be torn by strife. These societies will have significant minorities, and it’s bad to suppress them, ignore them or deny them rights. That’s the standard argument. And then there’s the argument of those who ask, are we winning? It’s not true that we have convinced the entire world.
Then there’s the separate question of what has been the trend? Do you have more societies that recognize minority rights? That give the franchise to minorities? Or do you have more societies that criminalize a religion? It’s not unanimous. It hasn’t swept all over the globe. But that has been the trend. He cites his book Better Angels. The empirical study of how many people are convinced that this is how a society ought to be run is different than how ought a society to be run.
Cross Examination
Can we talk about liberalism as the system that’s best at handling the differences we are talking about? And actually that’s why it’s so successful? John?
Sophie Scott-BrownJohn Mearsheimer’s Affirmative Speech for Liberalism
I agree one hundred percent. Liberalism is predicated on the assumption that individuals can’t agree about first principles. They cannot agree on questions about the good life. And sometimes those disagreements are so intense that people kill each other. So, liberalism deals with that fundamental set of problems by creating civil society, and by giving people room to live life the way they see fit.
Liberalism also privileges individual rights. It says we each have the right to live the way we see fit. Furthermore, liberalism preaches tolerance because, again, individuals can’t agree on first principles. And finally, liberalism enables the creation of a state to make sure no single person is in a position to kill another person. That’s what liberalism is all about. It’s all about dealing with the fact that there is no consensus on political and moral questions of the first order.
So is progress, Steve, just acknowledging that no consensus is possible and we just have to learn to live and manage these differences as best we can? Is that actually an alternative account of progress?
Sophie Scott-Brown(John Mearsheimer interjects that that is not Steve’s definition of progress.)
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
It’s a component, but it’s not the definition of progress. Pinker would define progress as improvements in human flourishing. But yes, the fact of disagreement stemming from the fact that humans are different individually and culturally, and have to come to some working agreement despite that disagreement. But it’s an exaggeration to say we can’t agree on first principles.
The fact is that despite disagreement, some factual opinions are better than others, we don’t know them a priori because the truth has not been given to us by some deity. Instead, we’ve got to blunder along and discover what the truth is. Likewise, we’ve got to experiment and blunder to find the best arrangements for living together. Some of them work better than others in terms of the criteria of enhancing human flourishing.
Pinker’s Redefinition of First Principles
If you look at the UN’s sustainable development goals, every country agreed on which way the world ought to go. Poverty should be reduced, safety should be increased, access to clean water should be increased, etc. There’s an awful lot of agreement. And then we can reframe other arguments in terms of what will get us to the state that many of us can agree on? Again not everyone will agree.
There’s some people who have messianic visions that the world is not going to be a great place until everyone obey’s all of God’s commandments. And if kids die it doesn’t matter. But to the extent that people do agree that kids dying is bad, that changes the argument from disagreements over first principles to disagreements over means to the end.
(Pinker can’t explain why people with different visions still exist, so he discounts them as irrational. In his view, the focus on the importance of keeping kids alive is a remedy for human disagreement because it is something most people can agree on. This agreement then changes the focus of the argument from first principles to means-to-an-end.)
John Mearsheimer’s Refutation
I just don’t think, Steve, there’s any disagreement on issues of safety, health and sustenance. That’s not the issue. We’re talking about moral and political principles here. We’re talking about first principles, what comprises the good life. That’s where the real disagreements are.
Steven Pinker’s Response
He asks if fewer children dying isn’t a moral principle? (This is somewhat dishonest. As I understand him, child and infant mortality was part of his measure of human flourishing, which is part of the means-to-an-end argument rather than a first principles argument.)
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
That is so obvious it’s not interesting. You didn’t need the Enlightenment for that. From time immemorial people have understood that children dying is a bad thing and we should try to keep them alive as long as possible.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
But Pinker says those are first principles everyone agrees on. He then counters that the end of slavery, human sacrifice and genocide are also moral. Likewise, agricultural improvements are a better a way to avert famine than prayer. Agricultural improvements were a moral development in his view.
Finally, he argues that the idea of universal human flourishing is not so obvious. If you go back to ancient codes the idea that every last homo sapien ought to flourish isn’t there. This supports his contention that the concern for human flourishing is due to the Enlightenment.
(I think we need statistics on Pinker’s claim–the belief that every last homo sapien ought to flourish, didn’t exist in ancient codes. As for the morality of agricultural improvements instead of prayer, the ancients knew about crop rotation.)
Theme Three: Are there any really viable alternatives or are we stuck trying to make Enlightenment values work?
John Mearsheimer’s Points of Agreement with Pinker: The First Enlightenment Principle is Unfettered Reason
The first Enlightenment value is unfettered reason. Reason is put up on a pedestal, however, this is another premise Mearsheimer agrees with. And he assumes all three of the participants, as academics, would agree with it too. He argues that the dispute has to do with what unfettered reason leads to in moral and political questions.
The Second Enlightenment Principle is Individualism
The second principle value of the Enlightenment is the focus on the individual. Nor is Mearsheimer against individualism. For academics, individualism really matters. But his basic point is we are all social animals and we have to carve out space for our individuality.
Where we live makes a difference in how we see the world and that makes it more difficult to reach a consensus or truth on social and political values. Therefore, Mearsheimer has a mixed mind about individualism. He does like individualism, but also believes we are social animals first. With regard to international relations. He reiterates that we live in a fundamentally competitive world. States compete with each other often in nasty ways and this has not changed since the beginning of time. And this is not going to change in the future. We haven’t made any progress there.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal: What are the Alternatives to Enlightenment Principles?
Well, the more you try to formulate alternatives to Enlightenment ideals, the better they look. Because what are the alternatives? If you decide to argue against reason, why should we take that seriously? Either it’s reasonable, in which case you signed on to it, or it’s not reasonable, in which case there’s no reason to go along with it.
If you’re against individualism, are you okay with your parents arranging a marriage for you? Are you okay with your parents forcing you to go to church every Sunday? Are you okay being forced to do anything? For the coherence of the group, not expressing your opinion is the rule, because that would introduce dissent, and that would be uncomfortable.
It’s very hard to argue for an alternative for individualism as long as it includes people’s preference to belong to social collectives. Again Pinker would distinguish the normative position of what ought we to persuade others or to argue for from the triumphalist argument that we’ve won and everyone agrees with us. Everyone doesn’t agree with us. We might think they ought to, but he wouldn’t want the dictatorial force to make them agree. Those are two separate arguments. But he thinks the trend has been in the direction of consensus. He would argue that Enlightenment ideals are what we ought to strive for and that that’s the direction we are moving.
John Mearsheimer’s Rebuttal
Mearsheimer thinks there is a large element of triumphalism in Pinker’s book. He said it made him think of ‘Frank’ Fukuyama’s article, The End of History, which was published in 1989. ‘Frank’s’ argument is that we’re making progress. We defeated fascism in the first half of the twentieth century, and Communism in the second half. The future is liberalism. We will have more and more democracy over time. And once you have more democracy, you won’t have fundamental disagreement over political and moral issues. Therefore, since most of the countries of the world will be democracies, there won’t be much political disagreement out there.
‘Frank’s’ argument at the end of his article was that the biggest problem we will face is boredom because there will be no more politics and no more fights. Mearsheimer’s argument is that because of the limits of unfettered reason, what you get are really big fights where people are willing to kill each other. And that’s what makes politics a contact sport. Once politics, which is a contact sport, is at play, you’re not going to make a lot of progress. In fact, you’re going to need a state to keep everybody under control.
Steven Pinker’s Rebuttal
Pinker argues that the end of history was deliberately ambiguous in the two ways he has mentioned in this debate. You could read it either as a goal that political systems are aiming at or ought to aim at, or you could read it as the factual claim that we’ve got there. He says that he read Fukuyama as arguing more for the former than the later. Fukuyama’s book was written before the end of the Cold War and at that time, he was right. Liberal democracies were steadily growing. In the last ten years, there has been a recession of democracy, but Pinker predicts democracy will increase in the future.
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No Christmas for Bethlehem
Learning How to Keep Christmas Now that Gaza as been destroyed and her people are starving and dying of infection and disease, our conversation can’t help but change. We no longer feel we are talking to fellow beings when we address our elected officials. And anyway, there is nothing left of the world we hoped to save. Both physical infrastructure and human life have been destroyed. For survivors in Gaza and their sympathizers, the mental and spiritual wounds will never go away. And now we are hearing that there will be no Christmas for Bethlehem. After everything that has happened, Christmas has been shrouded by the misery of Gaza. My prayer is that this realization will shake our world view. Maybe it will even teach us what it really means to keep Christmas.
I wrote previously that the time has come to prepare for the next life. I said Gaza reminds us that Death comes for everyone. Today, Americans see this possibility more clearly when our own government ignores our cries for mercy. We feel we are kin to the Palestinians more than to the political establishment. But I’ve discovered that we need to clear a theological path so that they can walk beside us.
I became aware of this need by watching this video by Dr. Ali Ataie on religious Zionism. I explained in a previous article that Morris Jastrow was sympathetic to a certain kind of religious Zionism. But there is another version that Jastrow would have considered heretical. In his video, Dr. Ataie explains this second type of religious Zionism. However, the part of the video I want to talk about is near the end. It has to do with his concern about the nature of the Judeo-Christian God. This concern is especially relevant today because of Netanyahu’s use of Old Testament passages to justify the destruction of Gaza.
If I understand him correctly I think he is presenting questions that he can’t avoid asking. He is trying to understand a concept that is necessary to his own faith.
How do Muslims understand the Jewish and Christian God?
The Christians say they believe in the God of Abraham, but then they say that the genocidal God of Deuteronomy 20 is not Christian. He is the Jewish God. This is not satisfactory.
Dr. Ataie mentions the word Perichoresis. According to Cambridge Core,
‘Perichoresis (perichoresis, circumincessio) is a theological term which describes the ‘necessary being-in-one-another or circumincession of the three divine Persons of the Trinity because of the single divine essence, the eternal procession of the Son from the Father and of the Spirit from the Father and (through) the Son, and the fact that the three Persons are distinguished solely by the relations of opposition between them.’
Cambridge CoreI think the Cambridge article attempts to explain away any confusion, but I’m not sure it was successful. According to Dr. Ataie Muslims have a difference of opinion with the anti-Zionist Jews who describe the problem as a mistaken definition. The anti-Zionist Jews claim that the Zionist Jews got the meaning wrong. I think it is understandable if this doesn’t provide much comfort when bombs are falling.
Genesis 1:28 has similar genocidal language. Some try to explain this away by saying that it only applies to the generation of Moses. Others claim it never actually happened. But Ataie argues that current beliefs matter. And they really do matter in Palestine today. All things considered, it’s hard to argue with him.
Concerning the Christian concept of God, Ataie is also aware that the Logos became Jesus of Nazareth. Or is is it more correct to say the Logos is Jesus of Nazareth? I haven’t studied this concept, and I’m not sure it would help if I had.
Logos theology is a theology of presence without division. It is a way of unification, of which the incarnation is the greatest visible example.
1517.orgWhat does Morris Jastrow say?
If someone had asked me these questions a week ago, I would have cited Jastrow. He said the Prophets ushered in a new conception of religion that cut the bond between religion and nationality. As a result, religion became the concern of the individual and not the group. As for the nature of God, the Prophets announced that pleasing Yahweh would now depend on each individual’s obedience to certain principles, as opposed to the group’s obedience. In this way, the national Yahweh was transformed into a universal Jehovah.
Jastrow calls this new religious concept the religion of the Prophets and explains that this process happened in phases. Judaism emerged out of Hebrew nationalism only after the destruction of the Jewish state.
Does this answer Dr. Ataie’s questions? Because now I have some questions of my own.
Where was God in all of this? Or who was God? Unless I’ve missed something, it’s not clear if God himself changed or the Hebrews merely changed their view of God.
These questions don’t shake my sense of the God I pray to, but I’m not being bombed by a crazed tribal deity. And I’m not Arab or Muslim. Does this description of God make more sense to a Western reader than it would to an Arab reader?
Hopefully, theologians can help us deal with these questions. It’s important because unless we can establish a common base of understanding and trust, nothing we say will be helpful.