Wikidworld (#23)
For Schmitt, political normality requires the constitution of a bounded political identity, alongside a foundational act of violence to purge those whose ideas of normality differ from the sovereign.
I know that in this newsletter, I'm often somewhat flippant in my approach to the subjects that I'm writing about. This is partly calculated, a way to make the material a little bit more friendly, to give readers a modestly ironic perspective on troubling realities, and to give myself more of a voice. But I think I sometimes also do it to ward off my own anxieties.
I’ve been thinking and writing about these themes – the relationship between religion and politics — my entire adult life, so going on 45 years. And I do believe I see clearly — perhaps more clearly than most — what’s barreling down upon us. I am speaking specifically, of course, about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change and ecosystem and biodiversity collapse. What they mean on their own terms, of course, which is disturbing enough. But also the full array of social and political impacts that will, that are already, accompanying them.
All of this is obvious in some sense, although the underlying human forces driving these catastrophic environmental disruptions may be less clear. One of the reasons, probably the main reason, this stuff so unnerves us is that we don’t know what we can do about it. We don’t think there’s really anything we can do about. Think globally, act locally seems laughably insufficient as a strategy. More than one person has admitted to me that they are simply in denial, that they have their head in the sand. Which is entirely understandable.
But this is not a meteor screaming through space toward earth. Climate change and ecosystem and biodiversity collapse are the direct result of human activity. As a somewhat deranged person, who has his entire life felt personally guilty about everything bad that happens in the world, I cannot avoid staring straight into the headlights. I’d like to look away. But I can’t. I harbor no illusions that I can change much, but at a minimum I need to understand and I need to bear witness.
So today I'm going to take a slightly different approach and just give it to you straight down the middle. No spin. This might also be a slightly longer post, which I hope you’ll indulge. I’ll be writing about Carl Schmitt, the mind-melting German jurist and political philosopher.
Schmitt’s political philosophy of “crisis jurisprudence” emerged from the trenches of World War I and took shape during the Weimar period, when he published several dense treatises based on his observations of German constitutional liberalism collapsing into its own contradictions. Schmitt served for three or four years in the Nazi regime, where he became known as the “Crown Jurist” of National Socialism, providing — with “undue enthusiasm” — legal cover for many of its early actions. Following the war, he was briefly detained and interrogated at Nuremberg. Schmitt then lived for another 40 years, stalking the dark corners of the German mind, unrepentant to the end.
Carl Schmitt is unlike any other philosopher you've probably encountered. He was in some ways a full participant in the flowering of continental European philosophy in the first half of the 20th century and a peer of Martin Heidegger’s – who was born a year before Schmitt and who like Schmitt joined the Nazi Party and served the Nazi regime with opportunistic zeal, until he was forbidden from publishing and, ultimately, in 1944, was conscripted at the age of 55 to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine. But Schmitt was also deeply influenced by Thomas Hobbes and Max Weber and in many respects was always closer to leading counter-revolutionary Catholic reactionaries from the century before — Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Juan Donoso Cortes.
In the United States, Schmitt has recently become quite popular among Catholic conservative lawyers, political philosophers, public intellectuals, and media-savvy activists, all of whom find themselves — like 14-year-old boys fantasizing about banging their teacher — simultaneously thrilled by illicit desire to taste the forbidden fruit of unconstrained power and terrified that their dreams of ruling the world might actually come true.
As I've mentioned before, this roster of fanboys include Steve Bannon and Harvard Law School professor Cornelius Adrian Comstock Vermeule. But there are many others who are Schmitt-curious, and their numbers grow by the day. So we need to think a little bit about why Schmitt’s suddenly of interest to so many people and why he and his ideas are not going away anytime soon.
Even more to the point, we need to begin opening ourselves up to the possibility that the holes Schmitt blasts into liberalism are like the proverbial cracks, which are how the light gets in. We might need to break before we can heal. We might need to peer within the wreckage and consider what it might look like to rebuild from scratch.
Carl Schmitt is perhaps best known for his formidable criticisms of liberalism, particularly that form of juridical liberalism canonized in the writings of John Rawls. In a nutshell, he faults the obsession with veils of ignorance and procedural equality characteristic of modern liberalism and the administrative state. Lacking substance and vision, deprived of any illuminating concept of the role of the state in actively promoting — which for self-professed Schmittians such as Adrian Vermeule likely means enforcing — “common goods” aligned with natural law virtues, the liberal administrative state neuters or feminizes itself.
But here is where things get interesting. Liberals believe in the “rule of law.” Schmittians like Adrian Vermeule do not. Weirdly, it would seem, since Vermeule is a professor of constitutional law. But it is not that Schmittians are not interested in the law. It is that they are more interested in the sovereign authority behind the law. In other words, they are less interested in checking power than they are in accumulating power. Which makes sense when you recall that Catholic canon law and the entire edifice of the magisterium is the idea that the One Church lives firmly — very firmly — in this world and the next.
So Schmittians — Carl Schmitt was a very conservative Catholic, of the sort only Germany could produce — believe that state sovereignty must precede the rule of law. They believe that the rule of law means nothing without the authority, not merely to enforce law, but to establish law. With this repositioning of the relation of the sovereign to the law, such that the rule of law is replaced by the rule of the sovereign.
Why must this be the case? Well, the main reason emerges from another instance of the Schmittian sleight of hand. According to Schmitt, liberal legal norms — of the sort found in the Weimar Constitution and Parliament — require predictability, regularity, and the presumption of a general condition of social normality.
The problem is, Schmitt tells us — having flashbacks to the trenches while also anticipating the Black Swan event introduced to us by Nassim Nicholas Taleb — legal norms associated with the rule of law and social normality cannot be applied to a chaos. And states must govern toward chaos, toward those terrible — and for these guys, exciting — moments that we cannot predict but must assume will occur, and perhaps must even do our best to incite (because, why not).
It will surprise no one that “the power to decide on the state of exception is tantamount to the power to decide what should count as a state of exception.” On these foundations, Schmitt created a logical opening for dictatorship, which he justified as the necessary condition for restoration of a political condition of normality.
We return to myth and morality. For Carl Schmitt, normality equals the imagined community of Benedict Anderson, the nation as an identity construct. Normality requires the constitution of a bounded political identity alongside a foundational act of violence to purge this community of those whose conception of normality differs from the sovereign.
You will see where this is heading, and I don’t have the space tonight to elaborate further, but the closing of this Schmittian circle returns us to his own foundational and famous idea, that “the specific political distinction is that between friend and enemy.” The political community requires enemies because it is not fungible in the ways liberals imagine and require it to be. It cannot contain multitudes. To the contrary, it will define itself by every political community outside of its boundaries that is not like it, that is alien to it.
Schmitt titled his first book Political Theology and in the third chapter he elaborates, indicating that a political theory of the state requires a theological foundation, a cosmology that can provide an account of man’s evil and licentious nature and justify the requirement of a strong sovereign state that can do its reaping and sorting on the basis of the friend-enemy distinction.
Schmitt conceded that a secular version of this state might exist, on the order of those imagined by Machiavelli or Hobbes. But the danger of this path is likely (entropic) descent toward a liberal anthropology that dissolves the friend-enemy distinction by introducing the idea that men are malleable and perfectible. And so Schmitt’s vision of the theological foundations of the political state depends on a confession of faith, a cosmic wager that his creed accounts for the world God created and only God can redeem.
He is confident in his strength, resting as it does on the backbone of the Church. And confident as well in the weakness of the liberal cosmopolitan, who shies from political enmity because he believes in nothing.
The reality of what people are calling a post-liberal world is already upon us. Ideas and possibilities and ways of thinking about the world that previously were uninteresting or seemed to be not relevant or were simply beyond our field of vision now are very much relevant and moving rapidly toward the center of our field of vision.
Carl Schmitt probably offers the most cogent, creative, original, and compelling theoretical critique of liberalism since I don't know when, since maybe ever. Procedural liberalism of this sort embraced by Democrats and progressives — those with faith in legislatures and elections — has entirely lost its way. I truly believe that.
And because I also believe that right-wing critics of liberalism in many respects live more realistically within the world that is approaching, a world in which conflict — not cooperation or consensus — is the default, we need to evolve ourselves to take much more seriously ideas that currently appear alien or strange or antithetical to the liberal project. Such an undertaking really means becoming much more comfortable with power and with the kind of substantive vision that for many, many years has been alien to liberal elites.
What I am reading today.
Unearthing the Secret Superpowers of Fungus (NY Times)
Uncertainty and Desperation in Nogales (The Border Chronicle)
Climate change: More studies needed on possibility of human extinction (BBC)
Democrats ask IRS to review Family Research Council’s ‘church’ status (Washington Post)
Supreme Court shrinks separation of church and state in First Amendment (Washington Post)
If you like what I’m doing, please recommend Wikidworld to people you know. I don’t do any social media, so am dependent on the kindnesses of friends (and strangers) to gain more subscribers. Thanks!
Wikidworld. Reimagining Western Civilization.
Season 1: Dark Enlightenment
Episode 5: Political Theology
Part 3: Hate the Sinner, Not the Sin
Issue#: S1-E5-P3
Date: August 3, 2022