The real wars behind the culture wars
The real wars behind the culture wars
transcending liberal/fascist framings of global crises
Once again in the last few months we have been confronted not just by the horrors of war, but by the horrors of what human beings will do in the name of politics, whether this be the politics of religion, the state, or ethnicity. The endless message streamed to our screens is that these are shocking anomalies, completely the reverse of how we behave in normal, everyday, so-called private life. Normally women and children can feel secure: brutality towards them is an anomalous crime which is only systematised in the circumstances of war or terrorism.
Thus the underlying assumption is that ethics is basic and applies to most ordinary human conduct: in our natural civil state as it were, we are generally decent, as George Orwell put it. Politics on the other hand is exceptional–an area of human life which, though fundamental, is also perpetually problematic.
On one generically liberal account it remains imperfectly moralised, but much further progress can be made in this direction. On another generically realist or Machiavellian account, politics is of its very nature but imperfectly ethical, or even not ethical at all; it is rather about the free survival of the polity in the face of other polities or of empires: sustaining the polity allows both its external liberty and the free participation of at least some of its citizens in this liberty. But sheerly ethical behaviour in the usual sense is a luxury of their private lives.
Were either the liberal or the realist picture true, then we might be left with a certain unease about human social existence altogether.
For the disjunction between the moral and the political immediately invites suspicion, of the kind entertained by Henri Bergson, who suggested that genuine morality was always, as for the Stoics, cosmopolitan–a universal and rootless morality of spiritual beings respecting each other and aiming at everyone’s flourishing and salvation.
The obvious objections to this would be at once Augustine’s and Simone Weil’s.
First, we cannot really love everyone equally and anonymously and all at once: Which stray cat would we feed and which would leave to starve, as Jacques Derrida once put it. Secondly, we only learn to love at all by loving the particular: first of all the places we inhabit and our parents and children and siblings and close friends.
Later and by analogy we can come to see that every place and all humans and even all creatures are in a way our home, our progenitors and offspring and brothers and sisters. We have a duty first to love the near and later to love the further-off. Augustine called this natural law the ordo amoris, the order of love. We have to start somewhere indeed, but if our love of somewhere is ethical, then it has to expand to anywhere and everywhere. Roots are crucial, but they support astonishing growth and efflorescence, as with trees.
However, there are two further dimensions to this picture which are needed if we are to complete it. First of all, human beings have never actually just stayed at home, from the very outset they went on journeys: Indeed, the very first thing that primordial humanity did was to walk right round the earth.
For this reason, a more universalising ethic has never just been a matter of eventual enlightenment and progress: no, it is characteristic of the most supposedly primitive cultures that they obey the law of hospitality and of welcoming the stranger, in part just because the knowledge that you yourself might one day be the stranger has always lurked. The law of hospitality suggests in fact that the far can come near, that the remotest stranger can suddenly be the one closest to you. When we think about it, this is exactly what the parable of the Good Samaritan dramatizes. But we are not talking about a kind of global welfare system engineered by Bill Gates here: rather, we are talking about a kind of welcoming gift-exchange of people from one locality to another.
The second dimension already concerns the political. We know to look after the stray cats in our alley because we know that the kind old lady is looking after the stray cats in her alley near-by. We have the trust that we live in an ordered society where we can expect this to be the case, and we can in principle extend that trust from a national to an inter-national level.
But this begins to imply that the only adequate riposte to the deconstruction of the ethical into a primacy of Machiavellian politics is to accept the primacy of the political not over-against the ethical but as the very site and context of the ethical, as for the Bible and for Plato and Aristotle. For it is not enough to extend love on one’s own or to receive the stranger on one’s own as if virtue were indeed solitary and cloistered, to cite John Milton. For it to be safe to do either one has to be operating in a context of sufficient security for this to be possible and in a context where one’s motives will not be perversely misunderstood. There has to an at least customary, and often also, legal context for normative and admired behaviour. The good has to be supported to some degree by power for its exercise even to be possible.
In this manner then, the ethical is partly in the gift of the political–it is the polity or the society which distributes in justice appropriate roles, and ethics is the well-performing of those roles which always means loving others in the right and varying modes and degrees: King Lear is all about the disaster that follows when this is ignored: Not just the polity goes to wrack and ruin, but the entirety of human relations to humans and to nature breaks down and human sanity itself collapses.
Viewed in this more Classical and Biblical way, it becomes implausible to see the political as inherently sub-ethical or extra-ethical–even if in every sphere of life corruption increases with the stakes of power and influence. It then becomes further implausible to suppose that the degeneration of politics leaves ordinary life unimpaired–and indeed we can see this in Britain and other countries today.
The modern sovereign state assumes isolated individuals torn away from their roots and communities, who can only be bound together by their submission to a monopoly of force and power, perhaps further cemented by some sort of shared ethnic identity. The notion of the isolated individual is a fiction and yet the modern state, like the modern market, augments its power by deliberately engineering this isolation–rendering its false founding assumption eventually more and more actually the case.
The calculation made here is that individuals, despite their natural hostility to each other, will forego that hostility out of fear. Yet increasingly, they tend to make a different calculation: that they can flout the law and get away with it or even seize the reins of power itself to safeguard semi-criminal operations.
The false, globalised version of the cosmopolitanism that we have today is not really an abandonment of the sovereign state as Leviathan–it is rather its monstrous extension into various modes of empire, or of expanding state-market. Thus international corporate power is overwhelmingly undergirded and underwritten by American monopolised control of the flow of information, finance, and energy, even if that is increasingly subject to challenge by the alliances of rival powers.
Prevailing liberal cosmopolitanism therefore amounts to the increasing dominance of a Hobbesian and Machiavellian mode of politics assumed to be indifferent to the ethical, but thereby increasingly subject to anarchic exploitation of its own lack of principle and to a popular non-acceptance of its legitimacy. It is overwhelmingly for this reason that the West is losing the trust and loyalty of vast sections of the world which find its current nihilism far worse than its older imperialism–which at least carried a strong sense of civilisational mission, however frequently deluded.
In the face of the breakdown of the Western system of global order which we see now being played out in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, it can seem plausible to proclaim the return of “realism” after an era of liberal delusion: a return to a supposedly “normal” state of competition between nation-states and of great power rivalry. But realism is not genuine postliberalism: In fact, naked realism is just part of liberalism with respect to its Hobbesian materialist foundations that assumes greedy and fearful individuals and greedy and fearful states as individuals writ large.
But nor is realism actually realistic or historically true. After the break-up of medieval Christendom, international wars first concerned religion, then continuing dynastic struggles that ignored national boundaries and then, after the French Revolution, with Napoleon, struggles that were already ideological, remained so to some degree in the 19th century and became overwhelmingly so in the 20th.
Nor is there any dominance of pure power-struggles between nation-states today. Nation states remain vastly varying entities in size and independence and most cannot on their own defend themselves, or like the USA adopt drastic protectionist measures to shield themselves from the global market: more typically, like Hungary, they have to try for a stronger share of this market through deregulation and fiscal dumping.
Nor are nation-states pure isolated power structures–they are rather ethnic or cultural or civic-norm groupings that define themselves in terms of some sort of refraction of the values and metaphysics of the inherited civilisations to which they belong. In this way the limit of usually Anglo-Saxon realism is always to ignore the reality also of the ideal.
And at the civilisational level, the ideal factor is more in evidence: every single civilisational block in the world today remains with the carapace of the “axial shift” beyond mythology in world history BC, when people became aware at once of the individual and his relation to the universal and so of the relativity of particular cultures which could then become open to question.
Today there is indeed a dimension of the ideal clash of civilisations and not just of nation states to the extent that the Russian East still defends political autocracy, China defends a kind of Confucian-Marxist blend of Eastern social harmony and western technocracy, and Islam tends to defend a theocratic order linked to a rather henotheistic degeneration of its inherited monotheism.
The wars to defend Ukraine and to defend Israel remain wars that are truly to a degree about the relative superiority, despite everything, of a liberal democratic order, ultimately rooted in the Western version of the axial that involves a somewhat more socially engaged and relational version of the individual relation to the universal, as opposed to the individual’s contemplative retreat, that could more leave the Oriental social order as indifferent, traditional or conventional. Were this not the case, were this a pure power-conflict, then we might perhaps be content, as still indeed threatens, just to acquiesce in the extreme Chinese version of the surveillance state-market.
At that point indeed, a naked “realism” threatens to intrude, but in the atrocious mode of a post-civilisational global race war between animalised ethnicities, competing for control over the same technocratic model, with the human middle between nature and artifice squeezed out of existence.
And yet, if this indeed civilisational battle is to be won, and the descent into barbarism prevented, then the West has to recover a much stronger sense of its true axial roots, beyond either liberalism or realism. It can no longer compromise itself by the systematic economic and ecological exploitation of other places. Nor can it any longer compromise itself by huge moral inconsistencies, such as half-justifying Israel’s morally horrendous claim that it is alright to kill civilians behind whom terrorists are hiding, instead of realising that that is exactly what terrorists want you to do–ensuring that as so often the erosion of one’s moral legacy is also the erosion of one’s existential security.
The West must return to a sense that the aim of both politics and morality is human flourishing as a creative, socially participating and contemplative animal beyond mere freedom of choice or hedonistic satisfaction. Only in this way can its legacy once more hope to command global respect and normativity. And this implies also recovering a sense of the order of love and of the notion that politics has primacy over ethics because it is itself both the source and possibility of ethical behaviour in terms of justly distributed roles as opposed to the impossible mediation of rights or the formal regulation of mere self-seeking in the market.
This sort of politics, again in conformity with the order of love, has to be pursued at every level from the village to the planet. It cannot halt at the level of the nation state, at once because such a unit tends often to suppress local autonomy, and because without the wider norms and alliances of the civilisation to which the state belongs, communitarianism will simply lapse back into nationalism, racism, and atavism, as we see everywhere today.
The only alternative to a new repetition of the atrocious dialectic of liberalism and fascism in the contemporary West and across the whole world is for it to recover a sense of its roots in Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, and their later florescence in adding the dignity of labour to the dignity of participation in political rule and the dignity of religious or philosophical contemplation.
For the even more terrible lesson of the last few months has been that once international order starts to break down then its complex and often hysterical ideological divisions (well in excess of any “reality”) invade every street everywhere and even every bedroom. Without political peace and without international peace there is no private peace or morality either. Thus the need to save the Western legacy and to ensure its eventual prevailing is after all the struggle for ordinary, decent humanity itself.
John Milbank is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. Follow him @johnmilbank3
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