I suppose the postmodernists belong somewhere in the Counter-Enlightenment fold—although whether on the left or the right, philosophically, is difficult to say. ~Joseph Bottum

It is difficult, perhaps, because they aren’t Counter-Enlightenment people at all, but post-Enlightenment who have nothing in common with the Counter-Enlightenment except perhaps skepticism about the importance of the self and the power of reason.

Even free will, however, is only one more suggestive part of death’s relation to politics. Think of all this in terms of the violence praised by a surprisingly large range of modern political theories. Why does death manifest itself—a sudden, miraculous, culture-forming power—whenever a thinker turns against the Enlightenment? What logic compels political philosophers, from the most radical right to the most radical left, to embrace murder when they renounce the poverty and weightlessness of modern culture? And why does literature show us again and again characters who imagine they can resolve the anxieties of modernity by drenching it in blood? ~Joseph Bottum

In my biased estimation, it occurs to me that a great many people were very enthusiastic about violence and killing and sacrificing human lives for the sake of goals inspired by the thought of the Enlightenment and its derivatives.  Something about “trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” comes to mind.  Mr. Bottum’s question about political philosophers and murder gives the impression that there have been a great many anti-modernist, anti-Enlightenment people openly calling for murder, but he does not give any examples and seems to take a number of things for granted that may not be true at all.  For instance, I suspect that he thinks fascism is opposed to the Enlightenment, when it is one of the latter’s outgrowths; he probably thinks that the liberal belief in the perfectibility of man is significantly different from the fascist and communist efforts to create a “new man.”  I am not sure that he assumes these things, but that is what I would have to guess.  His argument here is unclear, but there seems to be no other way for him to make his claim about philosophers and murder hold up unless he attributes an anti-Enlightenment position to the moral insanity of various sympathisers with what Niemeyer called ‘total critique’. 

You can find Counter-Revolutionary men, such as Maistre, who will give strangely positive evaluations to bloodshed, but then you would also have to take account the problem that Maistre was a firm politically reactionary adherent of the Catholic Church and opposed  Enlightenment liberalism and the Revolution on the grounds that they were contrary and hostile to the Faith.  Mr. Bottum is presumably not going to argue that traditional Catholicism of the 18th and 19th centuries either denied free will or devalued the significance of death.  Indeed, Maistre at his most bloody was seeking to understand how the Revolution was a result of God’s providence and His punishment and cleansing of the French.  In this he was not, I think, partaking of Tibetan Buddhist attempts to escape samsara.

Besides the considerable problems of Mr. Bottum’s death-freedom link, it seems to me that the transition he makes from talking about free will to talking about supposedly bloody-minded opposition to the Enlightenment (whose political legacy is actually smeared with the blood of millions) seems to be based on a deeply mistaken assumption.  It seems that he assumes that affirming free will and affirming political liberalism, like that of Enlightenment liberal philosophers, go hand in hand and he seems to think that denying one entails denying the other.  This is simply not so, as a cursory scan of Western philosophy would confirm.  Perhaps that is not what he is saying, but the juxtaposition of the two claims seems to hint at this.  Update: This is exactly what he is arguing, as he says in the following:

There must exist a strong connection between metaphysical freedom and political liberty, for here is a proposition—that free will logically entails a world with death in it—which promises endless consequences in ethics and politics, to say nothing of natural theology.

Update: The argument becomes more explicit (and more absurd) later:

In the end, however, like de Maistre, Cortés refuses at least the self-conscious recourse to death by a culture. Not until the 1920s does the conservative Counter-Enlightenment, freed from Christianity, fully accept the politics of murder, with Carl Schmitt’s proto-Nazi claim of a nation’s “existential-ontological” need for enemies to kill.

In other words, it is only by ignoring what Counter-Enlightenment conservatives actually urge people to do, ahistorically and pretty much incorrectly connecting Carl Schmitt to the Counter-Enlightenment, and following standard liberal tropes in casting Schmitt as a “proto-Nazi” that one can even get remotely close to a connection between theorising about the importance of death (which Bottum acknowledges as something that is very important) and the summons to political killing by actual opponents of the Enlightenment.  Meanwhile, liberals from 1793 on have been massacring their enemies with wild abandon because they do not take death seriously enough.  The children of the Enlightenment brought us the guillotine, the suppression of the Vendee, the Napoleonic Wars, levee en masse, nationalism and, in the end, total war and the ideological zealotry to fuel such wars.  If death is of no consequence, has no social or cultural meaning and is not a subject for deep thought and reflection for Enlightenment liberals, it would not be surprising if they opted to use death to achieve their political goals.  It could not trouble their consciences overmuch, since they had never spent much time pondering its meaning, its consequences or its significance for the integrity of society.  Unsurprisingly, a philosophical revolt against the social contract of the “those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born” results in widespread political murder.  The folly of disregarding obligations to the dead (tradition) leads to the murder of many in the present generation and so constitutes an attack on posterity.

Later in this essay, I take up what may be the largest piece—the fact that, at a very abstract level of logic, freedom of the will is closely tied to a world with death in it: If nothing really dies, then we have no freedom of choice; if we lack significant freedom of choice, then death will prove unreal. ~Joseph Bottum

Via Ross

This sounds like pretty heady stuff, and at first it gives you the impression that this is a deep and powerful claim about the nature of existence.  Then you realise that it is utterly and in all ways wrong.

There is a very important sense in which death confirms the existence of free will, just as Dostoevsky said that evil and suffering confirm the existence of free will.  Scripture and the Fathers tell us that death entered into the world through sin, which was an exercise of man’s faculty of will for aberrant, autonomous purposes, turning away from God and the Source of life.  In willing separation from the Creator and seeking deification pridefully and hastily, rather than receiving it in communion with God, man departed from immortality into mortality. 

Death is man’s self-inflicted punishment (“In the day wherein ye eat of it, ye shall die”), but it is also permitted as a gift to limit the effects of sin.  Men die because Adam freely chose, but men do not freely choose because they die.  Free will pre-existed death and is not really dependent upon the existence of death.  To the extent that mortality entails corruption, weakness, pain and hunger and all of the effects of the necessities of survival, we can say that death is not simply the privation of life and the separation of soul and body, but the frustration of human freedom as God intended it to be and the subversion of free will here in the fallen world.  Mr. Bottum’s claim suggests that Mr. Bottum either does not understand what death is, or he does not understand what freedom is.  Either way, it is an unfortunate turn in what had started out as an interesting and instructive essay on the social significance of death.

Having more or less stifled internal dissent, Russia is now ready to play a more aggressive role on the international stage. Remember, it was Putin who restored the old Soviet national anthem. And it was he who described the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “national tragedy on an enormous scale.”

It would be a bigger tragedy if he or his successor tried to restore that evil empire. Unfortunately, that is precisely what the Weimar analogy predicts will happen. ~Niall Ferguson

Three points to start.  Putin restored the melody of the old Soviet anthem, but the words have been completely changed.  Call it grotesque, or call it appropriation of different pasts, call it the politicisation of nostalgia, or call it what you will, but he did not simply restore the Soviet anthem as it existed before 1991.  That is a rather misleading statement.  Second, if we understand that Putin is a nationalist and further understand that many Russian people living in the USSR saw the USSR as a Russian project in which Russians were the main actors, it will make a lot more sense that, as a nationalist, Putin will view the collapse of the USSR in terms of a collapse of Russian power and prestige.  Indeed, Russian power and prestige did collapse, and nationalists don’t like it when this happens to their state, but one need not necessarily read anything more into it than that.  None of this is necessarily to praise or defend Putin as such, but simply to understand the political realities of Russia today.  Third, a Weimar analogy does not suggest a revival of the empire that preceded the period of chaos, disillusionment with democratic parliamentarism and hyperinflation, but rather a transformation of the Weimar republican system into something else.  If Ferguson’s claim had been true of the Weimar period, it would have meant that the Hohenzollerns or some family like them would have reconstituted the Kaiserreich, which obviously did not happen.  Instead of a return to pre-1991 Soviet models or the evolution of a hyper-nationalist revisionist regime, we are seeing the development of a quasi-democratic authoritarian nationalist regime.  If there were any interwar comparison that would be more suitable to modern Russia, it would more likely be post-1938 Spain that serves as the model.  For a number of reasons, however, this is an unsatisfying comparison.   Unfortunately, Mr. Ferguson can be very good at understanding the past when he is not actively working on a political project in the present, but here he makes a hash of things.  Since he is part of McCain’s camp, it is no surprise that he would espouse alarmist and Russophobic sentiments.

Historical analogies are indeed inexact and imperfect, especially when they involve Weimar and Nazi Germany.  People find endless points of comparison between their own moment in history and this period, because this is one period they can be fairly sure the History Channel-addled minds  of their readership will be able to comprehend.  These people are also fairly sure that they can conjure up the appropriate reaction of fear and loathing for whatever it is that they are comparing to incipient Nazism.  The analogies are inexact because the arguments are always tendentious.  “Did you realise that Hitler was a vegetarian, and did you know that so-and-so is a vegetarian?  We should fear and hate so-and-so.  I rest my case.”   

These analogies are inexact and imperfect because there has never been and will never be any situation very much like the interwar period of the 20th century.  WWI was in many ways such an epoch-ending, transformational war that we still live in its shadow and feel the reverberations of the explosion that laid waste to so much of Western civilisation.  Yet, for all its force and significance, it had still not “resolved” the problem of a unified Germany, whose unification is arguably the one political event that has most defined the history of most of the world since the French Revolution.  The relative reduction in the size of the Russian “empire,” on the other hand, and Moscow’s attempts to compensate for newfound weakness does not present a “problem” of this kind.  A Russia with fluctuating borders and cycles of waxing and waning power is not something new on the scene.  There has been a Muscovy/Russia of this kind since at least Mikhail I (r. 1613-1645).  We can find analogies that are less ideological and more appropriate to the present situation in the history of Russia itself.  The Time of Troubles in the early 17th century, ending with the establishment of the Romanov dynasty, is almost certainly a better comparison.  Russia’s modern recovery from internal chaos and foreign exploitation, both perceived and real, has a good deal more in common with the building up of the tsar’s power in the 17th century than it does with the hyper-nationalist revisionism of the Third Reich.  Another reasonably good period for comparison might be the reign of Tsar Nikolai I (1825-1855).  The consolidation of power domestically, the definition of Russian identity in relatively more authoritarian, nationalist and religious terms and efforts to make limited gains in the Russian “near-abroad” compare fairly well with what Putin has been trying to do.  The direct comparisons between Nikolai I’s Caucasian wars and Putin’s war in Chechnya are obvious.

More generally, pending death makes us think of honor, patriotism, and in-group solidarity. 

If longer lives move us away from such feelings, yes some immortals would be quite libertarian. ~Tyler Cowen

Wouldn’t that imply that libertarians don’t value honour, patriotism and loyalty very much?

I think that the handwriting is on the wall that we are going in a different direction in the fall, and I expect the president to lead it. ~Sen. Mitch McConnell

It is interesting how so many people routinely use “the handwriting on the wall” as a commonplace phrase for “this is something that has become really obvious, even to someone like Mitch McConnell.”  Few seem to recall or acknowledge the phrase’s origins in the Book of Daniel (my patron saint) or the prophecy of doom for Belshazzar and the Babylonians that goes along with the handwriting.  Consider the relevant verses (Dan. 5:25-29):

And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN.

This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.

TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

PERES; Thy kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. 

I cannot think of a more ominous phrase to use with respect to President Bush and his Iraq policy than to speak about handwriting being on the wall.  (Since the Kurds fancy themselves latter-day Medes, the prophecy matches up with the contemporary Iraqi scene pretty well, if we think of Iraq as Mr. Bush’s “kingdom.”)

“They want to bring down the West, particularly us,” Romney declared. “And they’ve come together as Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda, with that intent.” ~The Boston Globe

The Globe story tries to make the statements cited in it into something rather more sinister and manipulative than I think they actually are.  No doubt, these candidates want to demagogue terrorism and they are trying their best to do that, but the quotes the article cites do not give the impression so much of deliberate obfuscation as simple ignorance and confusion on the part of the speakers. 

McCain would probably love to conflate the fight against Al Qaeda and the war in Iraq even more than he and his ilk have already done, but here he is simply trying to be as frightening and demagogic as possible.  It isn’t bad enough that “they” or “the terrorists” will follow us home, but it has to be Bin Laden himself.  Maybe McCain doesn’t know that Bin Laden is in Pakistan, or perhaps he has forgotten (he is getting up there in years, and he might also be suffering from the memory loss syndrome afflicting so many in the party these days).  Giuliani is not some masterful manipulator when he talks about how “they” have followed us home to Fort Dix (quick, great and amazing terrorism and national security expert, tell us where were the Fort Dix plotters from!)–he simply knows that there were some Muslim plotters, there are Muslims in Iraq and, just like that, it is proven that “they” have come to America.  As I have mentioned before, this language of “following us home” might give someone the impression that Al Qaeda members are like lost puppies, which is hardly very frightening at all.

That brings us to Romney.  You have to stop every once in a while and just marvel at the bold-faced dishonesty and cant that the man embodies with such ease.  I used to think Bill Clinton was a master of deceit, but then I saw this guy work an audience and dodge interviewers’ questions.  The clincher will be when he responds to a question about his religion by saying, “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘faith’ is, doesn’t it?”  With these performances Romney has managed to add ignorance to his list of qualifications.

I have touched on the problems with Romney’s debate and speech statements in the past, so I won’t recapitulate all of that here.  Suffice it to say that a man who rattles off the two major sects of Islam in a list with various other Islamic groups, none of which has anything to do with the other, is profoundly unfit to head the executive branch in time of war with jihadis or indeed at any time.  Someone who can look at the sectarian warfare in Iraq (or, say, Lebanon) and talk about how “they” have all “come together” against “us” is hopelessly confused about the international scene.  Someone who cannot demonstrate even the most basic understanding of the fissures and divisions in the Islamic world and the different political organisations within that world should not even be a party to the debate, much less should he be considered a viable “top-tier” candidate for a major party’s nomination.  Maybe Ron Paul needs to make a reading list for Mitt as well.

Murashev’s views I have come to respect over the past nineteen years. He is very objective. He has seldom been wrong. He tells me that Kasparov has joined with a Marxist who campaigns for the return of Communism. Here is this important pro-democracy figure, Kasparov, who has now joined with his former arch-opponent to get political attention. Murashev says that unfortunately Kasparov has become an almost clownish figure. ~Paul Weyrich

Naturally, these days Mr. Kasparov is allowed plenty of space on the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal, which never ceases to remind us how much it loathes Russia and the preferences of the Russian people.

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said. ~The New York Times

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period with this 83-man unit, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war [bold mine-DL], one they had no ability to stop. ~The New York Times

Now it’s possible that these soldiers who have been living and fighting in Iraq for months have been unduly influenced by U.S. media reports about the war, such that they have embraced the view that there is a civil war in Iraq.  On the other hand, it seems more likely that their characterisation tends to confirm what outside observers had concluded some time ago.