A Tale of Two Monsters and Four Elements: Variations of Carl Schmitt and the current global crisis

Introduction

This essay is divided into two distinct parts.

In the first I shall explore the complex way in which Carl Schmitt’s thought was split three ways: between a Catholic universalism that extends the ‘law of humanity’ to the whole of the globe; a modern defence of the normativity of the absolutely sovereign nation state and finally a stress upon the primacy of a more limited civilisational land-mass, smaller than that of the whole planet but larger than that of the state. In this third case, it is actually ‘empire’ that is covertly to the fore and supremely the Western land-based empire that had once been Christendom.

The third idiom corresponds roughly and for genealogical reasons (which will be indicated) to the Eurasianist ideology of Vladimir Putin which combines both nationalist and imperialist elements

For the first idiom, the ‘enemy’ is simply evil, and the ‘exception’ is our equitable and grace-given resistance to evil. For the second, the enemy is the alien to the nation and the exception is the arbitrary confirmation of formal sovereignty required for the sake of peace, appealing to no substantive normativity. For the third, the enemy is more civilisational and prototypically it is the Muslim in contrast to the Christian. While the third idiom bears traces of the Catholic generosity of the first, it is in the end marred by atavism and thereby more linked to Schmitt’s time of Nazi allegiance than is the second idiom.

I shall contend below that the first idiom is continually suppressed by Schmitt. The second idiom was at first dominant and never entirely abandoned. But increasingly, it was the third idiom that was to the fore: the celebration of the civilisational landmass. Thus, it is defence of the latter that proves marginally more primary in Schmitt’s excoriation of Anglo-Saxon ‘sea empire’ rather than the defence of the landed nation-state, as one might assume.

Already, in the first part of the essay I will imply that the second idiom corresponds roughly to the Westphalian order of independent nation states and its Kantian internationalist, economistic modification (which Schmitt scorned) that today we think of as ‘globalisation’. The attempt to re-assert a more Hobbesian and nationalist basis for this order (at times supported by Schmitt) corresponds roughly to what we describe as ‘populism’ today.

The third idiom corresponds roughly and for genealogical reasons (which will be indicated) to the Eurasianist ideology of Vladimir Putin which combines both nationalist and imperialist elements, both the insistence on absolute sovereignty and a mystique of mingled races and soils. For this ideology the ‘enemy’ is the decadent liberalism of the west and ‘exception’ is justified in the defence of absolute and unmediable civilisational difference.

In the second part of the essay I shall attempt to articulate a development of Schmitt’s neglected first idiom: a universalism of land and spirit. This will nonetheless draw somewhat, albeit in a thoroughly modified manner, upon Schmitt and the Eurasianists’ interests in the elemental and in the relationship of the human spirit to the natural world. It will argue for a more universalising and common-wealth oriented ‘imperialism’ as against either atavistic nationalism or atavistic empire and will reject Schmitt’s dualism of ‘land and sea’.

What I am thereby ultimately hoping to point towards is a reworked ‘nomos of the earth’.

I

The Carl Schmitt of the ‘second idiom’  defended Leviathan, identified as the absolutely sovereign political ‘state’ of a nation in no inherent legal alliance with the exterior.[i] A Hobbesian positivism was re-inserted into its original theologically nominalist and voluntarist undergirding, and both were pitted against liberal naiveté, unable to admit to the Hobbesian truth of Lockean self-deception as to the ultimate bounds of liberalism, where lurks always the arbitrary enemy and the arbitrary exception.

After the advent of Hitler, Schmitt moved away from decisionism to a ‘blood and soil’ perspective which derives normativity from the blend of the ethnic with the terrestrial

But the Schmitt of the first and third idioms had always been rather more respectful of a longer-term Catholic legacy and of its concern with the internationalism of law and order. This Schmitt after all hunted down Leviathan, re-identifying it with the Biblical and Kabbalistic sea-monster of a false, Jewish, Calvinist and Anglo-Saxon maritime and commercial sway.[ii] This was to be contrasted, not just with Schmitt’s usually normative Hobbesian order of periodically suspended and renewed warfare between nation-states, but with a continuous landed terrain of shared legality and even shared imperial rule.

The increasingly dominant and more interesting Schmitt of the third idiom also intensified the double challenge to the consoling and narcissistic epistemological framework of both liberal and Marxist thinking. Does real history plausibly unfold within the parameters of general human and individual impulses that we can readily understand, since they are so basely sordid, as paradigmatically with political economy? It seems increasingly implausible to think that. For since we are natural creatures, we may well be compelled by real natural forces that we scarcely comprehend. And since we are also spiritual creatures, we may well be subject to supernatural as well as natural influences which we comprehend perhaps at once still less and yet rather more.

Thus, Schmitt’s arguably most decisive book, Land und Meer, Land and Sea, seeks to trace a kind of elemental history in which humans move from the dominance of the earth to that of water and then to that of air and finally to apocalyptic fire.[iii] The resonances are mystically esoteric and yet also naturalistic and ecological, in a way that suggests affinities with Russian Eurasianism, for which cultures arise, flourish and decline in response to cosmic influences that may be more or less material and more or less spiritual.[iv] At the same time, what is equally determinative for the later Schmitt are collective and elective human affinities for one element or the other, as the real driving force of history. Compared with the focus of the first Schmitt upon the ultimately amoral logic of decision and association, these parameters are less humanistic and more speculative (like those of the later Heidegger), and yet they are also much more searching and wide-ranging. The framework of the merely political is in effect abandoned.

It is abandoned in favour of the political, economic and ecological notion of the nomos of the earth. In the book of that name, citing Giambattista Vico, Carl Schmitt argues that the first law was the division of the fields that was co-eval with the delineation of burial grounds and the securing of the continuance of the landed names of the dead through rites of legal connubium, guaranteed by a vengeful ‘providence’.[v] In this way, we arrive at a point of extreme conjuncture between the sheerly physical, the culturally continuous, the economic, the legal-political and the theological. Something like a more ethnographically-informed notion of a ius gentium, a law of the peoples, is invoked by Schmitt, with apparent priority after all to the state-law of political exception.

After the advent of Hitler, Schmitt moved away from decisionism to a ‘blood and soil’ perspective which derives normativity from the blend of the ethnic with the terrestrial. Even if the appropriation of land is regarded as an in-itself groundless act, a decisionist ‘cut’, as Carlo Galli puts it, the cutting is nonetheless not the only factor now conferring legitimacy.[vi] Schmitt invokes also, as in the citation of Vico, a sacrally authorised linking of a people to a terrain: an authorising which seems to arise, as it were, from the land itself. Thus the ultimate title to land derives not from seizure (as for Grotius) or labour (as for Locke), but from its ineffable naming.[vii]

This priority would seem also to call into question the modern, post-Westphalian system of partially regulated international anarchy: now, it is shared, if always already divided terrain that assumes priority over ethnic borders. Schmitt is indeed aware that for most of ‘civilised’ history, peoples have acknowledged an authority which extended over most of their known world – ancient China for example, or Medieval Europe.  And he mentions that even between the ancient empires, unwritten legal conventions of diplomacy, safe passage, commerce and inter-marriage were significantly present.[viii]

Only in the wake of the Protestant enterprise was a secularised ‘international anarchy’ fully born

As to what went on within people’s known worlds, this was nothing like a balance of power between states. The European ius gentium was originally, as the Schmitt of the first idiom was aware,  a law of peoples linked to Catholicism and Canon law (with its Roman Stoic background) not one just agreed upon between nations, and thus was a full part of the natural law up until Suarez, who now saw its actual  prohibitions as positive laws set up by contracting sovereign state partners.[ix] In the European Middle Ages there existed no ‘states’, and therefore no wars ‘between states’; many wars were between nobles and bound up with what was seen as the restitution of justice or the remedying of crimes, while wars between kings usually had a dynastic aspect and generally concerned the extension of terrain rather than the defence of boundaries. They were ‘bracketed wars’, in Schmitt’s terminology.[x]

Although it was not supposed at this stage that there could be a ‘just cause’ of war simultaneously on either side, nevertheless Church and chivalric codes together sustained, as Schmitt emphasised, a sense of the justis hostis as distinguished from the criminal or the infidel.[xi] Against the latter there could indeed be a wholly just struggle without quarter, since he had no ius on his side whatsoever, on account of his failure to render any justice towards the true good.

By contrast, the ‘just enemy’ only existed for Christians within the bounds of Christendom itself, since the warring parties both ultimately owed allegiance to higher powers: the Pope, and sometimes the Holy Roman Emperor. The latter’s power was as much deliberately latent as of necessity weak: it was often re-exercised in the case of emergency threats of extreme internal disorder, or Islamic threats to Christendom from without. As Carl Schmitt pointed out, it was taken to exercise the office of katechon mentioned by the apostle Paul, which holds back the reign of the Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2:6).[xii] One can add that the Middle Ages saw the purged, grace-tinged empire, in an Augustinian and Gelasian fashion, as bending the imperial necessary evil of violent coercion deployed against evil violence towards the rule of the true, persuasive ecclesial auctoritas.[xiii]

Political and international warfare in the modern sense only emerged with the rise of sovereign and absolute Christian states, the contested struggle by sea and land for new-world territories, the lapse of the role of the emperor as ultimate guarantor and finally, with the Peace of Westphalia, the lapse of the role of the Pope as international arbitrator – whereas earlier he had divided the New World and the seas between the crowns of Spain and Portugal.

Thus, in The Nomos of The Earth Schmitt celebrates primarily the boundary of continental Europe, and not the boundary of individual countries as the boundary of law, contrasting this with the alien emptiness of everywhere else, from a European perspective. Furthermore, he does not see the territory of the nation state as fully sacral land at all. It is too linked to outright claims for crude possession and expansionary discovery, to attain such authentic ‘naming’.[xiv] In fact, its entire character would appear to be too decisionistic. Its already political economic character is inherently connected to its inherently dubious onlook towards the anarchic space of the sea.

One can also note that this expansion is for Schmitt insufficiently political in the sense that it operates without an enemy, since for him it is of course the friend/foe distinction which defines the political as such. Just as for him the original political and legal space of Europe was the entire continent, so also for him the original and crucial enemy was not the enemy of a state, but of an entire landed civilisation: namely Islam.[xv] It was the latter which the Holy Roman Emperor above all ‘restrained’ until the day of doom. Indeed, the Schmitt of the first idiom had always associated real and fundamental enmity with theological grace and election: a consideration that somewhat separates the friend/foe complex from decisionism, at least in the merely human sense. It would seem to follow (even though Schmitt does not say this explicitly) that in a sense the modern enemy of the state is a rather secularised and so contrived enemy, and that all rivalry between nations is somewhat contaminated by the mere rivalry and confused conflict that pertains between robber-bands and pirates.

Schmitt: ‘An international court of justice, independent in the sense that it is not bound to political institutions but only to the fundamental principles of law, is closer to the idea of justice’

In this context, Schmitt half-celebrates the Spanish conquest of South America as transitional. It is presented as essentially an extension of the landed space of the European nomos under the auspices of the Pope. It is contrasted by him with the later Anglo-Saxon and Protestant conquest of North America, which he sees as operating in terms of the very emptiness of the space upon which it is encroaching, a space at one with the lawless, fluid and fluctuating character of the sea. It is above all this maritime colonial enterprise that will eventually invade and corrupt the authentically nomic space of the European land-mass.

Only in the wake of the Protestant enterprise was a secularised ‘international anarchy’ fully born.[xvi] And this meant that the role of the iustus hostis was either augmented, as for Hobbesian ‘realism’, or completely abolished, as for ‘liberalism’, beginning with Kant.

Already, with Grotius, there is some hesitation between the idea that war can only have a iustus causis on one side and the notion that both sides can wage war justly not only as to means but even as to instigation, if they possess real sovereign authority and have declared hostilities following the proper procedures. After Grotius, ‘just cause’ became more and more formally reduced in this fashion.[xvii]

But with Kant, on the other hand, one has the notion that trading nations will tend to balance out each others’ powers and arrive at a convenient, essentially economic peace, just like trading parties inside a state. And as within the state, so internationally, Kant envisages a body of laws which will pronounce in effect upon property violations at the inter-state level. Yet he envisages no world government, because he believes that the many nations constitute a sort of international equivalent of the division of powers at the state level and a bulwark against tyranny. Since, nonetheless, war can for Kant be adjudicated by a moral law beyond that of sovereign states, this means that there can be no longer be any ‘just enemy’ at all: if your enemy is legitimately your enemy, then he is an international criminal, or as we should say today, a ‘terrorist’.[xviii]

As Carl Schmitt objected in The Nomos of the Earth, this notion of a law not just prior to, but even independent of, any exercise of sovereignty, ignores the fact that a law is an impotent fiction if it remains without explicitly political authorisation and interpretation in the case of its application.[xix]  Thus modern international order depends upon a shifting alternation between mutually agreed-upon pragmatic and essentially economic norms between states and their continuing contestation, sometimes erupting into a supposedly regulated violence.

Yet beyond Schmitt, one can argue that both the realist over-dominance of the notion of the just enemy and its liberal abolition, removes the mediaeval sense that war, while wholly regrettable, is a kind of honourable recognition of the limits of human reason in arriving at a just consensus. For this outlook the enemy may be in the wrong, may even be a violater, yet is not quite in the category of the person seen by all as a common criminal. Baroque realism sustains that view, yet it also trivialises warfare and separates honour from virtue, because the combatants are now involved in a mere game of rivalry that is but a bloody extension of market-place competition which has newly made agon normative. Inversely, Enlightenment liberalism ironically threatens to turn war into an unlimited action against a particularly heinous kind of criminal who is indeed already an enemy of civilisation as such: the international war against terror is therefore already in sight.

It is impossible in this context to overlook Schmitt’s Ostpolitik favouring of the Russian Behemoth, the imperial land-beast

The question nonetheless arises as to whether Schmitt really regarded the modern Hobbesian international situation as normative, or rather, as a Catholic,  in his first idiom, half hankered after the medieval norm of the ius gentium, overseen by the Pope and Emperor within the primary terrain which is that of the European and Christian continent. Did he only think (as he explicitly does) that the Middle Ages could produce no stable unity in the name of an inherently just cosmic order, or did he partially regret the passing of this endeavour and its assumption of an inherent and non-wilful equity?

It would surely seem that he did, because, in his first idiom, he early associated Catholicism with the internationalism of justice, linked not just to the idea of natural law, but also with the representation of the person of Christ. Moreover, he declared that ‘An international court of justice, independent in the sense that it is not bound to political institutions but only to the fundamental principles of law, is closer to the idea of justice’ – that is to say, of justice as such.[xx] If ‘exceptionality’ is involved here, then this would appear to be the exceptionality of inherent equity, not of voluntary will, mediated by responsible personhood and not personal wilfulness.[xxi]

It might seem, in Land and Sea, as if Schmitt thinks of the Calvinist maritime and commercial imperial order as perverting the normativity of land-based internecine conflict between states. And indeed, that is the dominant thrust of both this book and The Nomos of the Earth, which was written partly in order to question the legitimacy of the Nuremberg trials, and what Schmitt saw as their liberal absolutist assumptions of an overruling of ultimate state authority. For him they but put the seal upon a disruption of the modern land-based order that was itself to blame for exorbitant conflict. Thus he blamed the intrusion of the ‘maritime’ order upon Continental Europe for the outbreak of both The Thirty Years War and World Wars One and Two, implausibly exculpating East German Protestantism with its own expansionary drives, in either case.[xxii]

And yet he also suggests that today the balance of powers and quasi-imperial dominance of great powers needs to be given something approaching international legal recognition for the sake of peace. Moreover, he invokes a new overarching international power over air and fire that a greater Germany might deploy to trump the Anglo-Saxon command of the fluid element.[xxiii]

In more world-historical terms, he is after all contrasting an imperium of the earth with an imperium of the sea, as much as he is contrasting landed nation-states with watery empires. And it is just here that his realism of the exception yields priority to a Nazi atavism of the soil, with its links to legitimated territorial seizure in the name of landesraum, or an imperialist swelling of the nation over its immediate bounds. He allows that from the outset there have always been ‘fish-humans’ as in the Pacific, but he grants them no fully human status, because they have inverted the supposedly natural human belonging with native soil, a perversion that will be later repeated on a global scale by the Jews and by the Anglo-Saxons.[xxiv]

It is impossible in this context to overlook Schmitt’s Ostpolitik favouring of the Russian Behemoth, the imperial land-beast, over the English Leviathan, which, after all, like Melville’s white whale, proves to know no sovereign bounds and is rather the infinitely open anti-terrain of marauding sea-rovers. Hitler’s mistake, for Schmitt, was to have broken the pact with Stalin and gone to war with Russia.[xxv] For all the excoriation of the rise of the ideological partisan and modern absolute enmity, it is clear that, nonetheless, the free-trading Anglo-Saxon mercenary, like the Jewish trader, is for him a legitimate absolute enemy because he is the enemy of humanity as such.

The Eurasian theorists, and Vladimir Putin in their wake, reduce Orthodox Christianity to an ethnic folk-outlook

In this way then, Schmitt would appear to favour Eurasianism as an ideology of land, and to be not so far removed from various later Russian theorists such as Gumilev, Panarin and Dugin, who associate the human with an immediate ecological context that co-shapes the behaviour of particular ethnoi in ways that cannot be readily mediated in a universal manner, and who denounce ‘chimeric’ ethnicities like the Jews, Khazaks (who at first converted to Judaism) and various gnostic world-refusing cultures.[xxvi] One can note here that the Eurasian theorists, and Vladimir Putin in their wake, reduce Orthodox Christianity to an ethnic folk-outlook, and regard the fusion of religion and politics within Islam as more acceptably Russian than their separation, either in the case of Judaism or of Latin Catholicism.

There is little sign of any Catholic universalising personalism at work in either case, and the Russians, like Schmitt, implicitly gives rise to questions, unsolvable in Schmitt’s own terms, as to just how the various ethnicities are to be linked within an overall greater ethnic imperial order and to what extent there will be pluralism (or liberal choice at a group level) or else one domineering ethnos, one master race, be this either Germanic or Russian, or both.[xxvii] Russian imperialism, supposedly pluralistic, often tends in reality to disguise an expansive Russian nationalism.[xxviii]

More generally, one can question the notion of the innocence of the earth and the guilt of water, which, after all, is supposed to be sacramentally cleansing. The seamless continuity of territorial proximity is no salve against violence, despite Schmitt’s attempted praise of supposedly limited national wars, and Gumilev and Dugin’s downplaying of the inter-ethnic struggles and domineering behaviour of the ethnic Russians in the Russian past.[xxix] In many ways, the rather accidental rise of the Russian empire, through political consolidation of commercial interests, was not so unlike the emergence of the British empire in India, albeit across the far reach of oceans.[xxx]

It may nonetheless be fair to note that a thinker like Karl Polanyi, on the Left, also linked the lack of maritime limits and internal dispropriation of the peasantry to the rise of capitalism, but at the same time (as he realised) the release of open space – aesthetically, politically, cosmically — can be also the freeing of an arena for a freer and more consciously shared relational encounter between persons and peoples, rather than one of abstract control at a distance.[xxxi] Indeed in the earliest ages, it was the impenetrable forests that divided and the sea that was the readier medium of linkage and orderly cultural exchange. Later in history, maritime empires, like the British and the French, have sustained at times mutually beneficial encounters between more extremely different cultures than in the case of landed ones. Conversely, the latter have by no means always been innocent of the direct pressures of hegemony opened up by contiguity and continuity.

Above all, it is the case, as with the unwritten law of hospitality, that generosity tends paradoxically to be exercised mainly amongst friends and yet to be also our only recourse when dealing with complete cultural strangers. The commercial waters of indifference flow somewhere between these two poles, in the region of eventually murderous politeness. But that region can fall across the street as much as lie between oceans.

Russian imperialism, supposedly pluralistic, often tends in reality to disguise an expansive Russian nationalism

In the end, one is struck by the failure, in the case of both Schmitt and the Russian theorists, to consider the possibility that we might all be united in charity under a transcendent carapace that exceeds the contrast of either an empty and posthuman universalism, or a confinement to the soil that after all sinks us back into a kind of pre-humanity.

It is to this possibility that I now want to turn.

II

For all the ultimately sinister character of their thought, it seems impossible to ignore the new, in effect postmodern and postsecular attempts of Schmitt and the Eurasianists to take into more account the albeit ineffable influences of nature and spirit upon human cohesion and transformation.[xxxii] We have today arrived at a point of global crisis which is perceived as a matter of politics, science, ecology and economics. But in reality it is a spiritual crisis. This does not mean that we should retire from the political to the cultural sphere, or retreat further into ourselves. Instead, it means that we need a new, spiritual politics.

One aspect of this crisis clearly concerns our relationship to the natural world. But we tend to think of this aspect as self-enclosed, rather than being inherently linked to the problem of political division that we are confronting at the same time, between liberal democracy and authoritarianism, populist or otherwise.

To the contrary, our modern idea of politics is inherently linked, ever since Hobbes and others, to a certain stance towards nature. We consider the natural world to be ‘over against’ us, as a threatening all-encompassing power that can also be tamed and exploited as an inexhaustible resource. At the same time, we acknowledge that we ourselves, as embodied animals, belong to this world. Yet insofar as we know this, we also suppose that this belonging is largely negative: a source of our indigency, fearfulness and ignorance. Additionally, our shared animal nature is thought to entail a doubling of all these supposed natural tendencies by a factor of mutual human rivalry.

The only way out appears to be through artifice. An alien world is to be known through the joint application of reason and experiment. What goes for science, goes also for politics, now thought of as essentially a social technology. To ensure both certainty and security, all political power is supposed to be derived from one source of monopolised violence. How this ‘sovereignty’ is to be constitutionally achieved and sustained can be conceived in variously more authoritarian, oligarchic or democratic ways. But from one perspective those differences are irrelevant. What matters is that we think of politics, political economy and public technology as a pragmatic control of meaningless nature, including the meaninglessness of our own bodies and instincts.

In the end, one is struck by the failure, in the case of both Schmitt and the Russian theorists, to consider the possibility that we might all be united in charity under a transcendent carapace

It is unsurprising that this outlook should have eventually generated what looks rather like a final, apocalyptic crisis: the time of fire. Nature is ravaged and our own bodies are increasingly diseased, distorted, bloated, abused and barbarically tattooed – as if we were all tribespeople without a tribe, but in contradictorily individualist search of one.

In the face of ecological disaster, liberal democrats variously propose an evolution to a global Leviathan, a sovereign world government that will rule in the name of a qualified and more cautious scientific domination: a yet more monstrous sea-creature who will hopefully keep at bay the Chinese Behemoth, who is curiously similar, perhaps because the whale is after all a breathing mammal and not a genuine fish (as Schmitt noted, with symbolic resonance). They are increasingly opposed by authoritarian populists who remain attached to the nation state, or localised sovereignty, and tend to evade the seriousness of the collapse of the physical world itself. Populists also seem to favour a cultural or ethnicist nationalism (or national-imperialism) based upon the ultimacy of the friend/foe distinction. Their atavism is rightly deplored by liberals, and yet their fears of a an ever more extreme social engineering, in the face of natural crisis, exercised either by a single or, still worse, by rival global powers, appear not at all displaced.[xxxiii]

In either case, however, a modern duality of spirit and matter, of artifice and nature, has by no means been left behind; it has only mutated. Either our neglect of nature, that is seen as a self-sustaining whole to which we must instrumentally adapt, is deplored, or else the militant triumph of the human spirit in always particular idioms is newly celebrated, sometimes in religious guise.

The alternative to this is for Christianity, in alliance with other authentic faith traditions, to insist that it is this very duality that is the problem, and the politics based upon it.

Ironically, we abuse nature just because we do not see the primacy of spirit over nature in the deepest sense. The underlying impulses within nature herself are spiritual: creative powers mysteriously inclined to adopt certain consistent forms, as the basically Augustinian tradition of ‘French Spiritualism’ (from Maine de Biran to Henri Bergson and Maurice Blondel) has always taught.[xxxiv] We are superficially related to these powers by our external ability to manipulate them, but we are more profoundly and immediately related to them by our own internal powers of feeling and imagination: an insight shared by the Spiritualists with the seemingly quite different post-Puritan tradition of American Transcendentalism (inaugurated by Ralph Waldo Emerson).[xxxv]

For these traditions, the question posed to us by nature, of which we are part, is not mainly how she may be tamed and exploited, but how she may be fulfilled as beautiful, and therefore as also true and good, by human spirits in consociation with each other and with their surroundings. It is just the teleological goal of an ‘integral ecology’ which Pope Francis today demands. Unless we repent, ‘turn around’ and pursue this goal, we are surely lost. For there is nothing accidental about the ecological mess that we find ourselves within. It derives directly from our mode of economics as appropriation of natural and human resources, exploitation of land as rent and of human bodies for profit. It derives equally from our mode of politics as methodical control without final purpose. And it derives perhaps most of all from our false assumption that a ‘science’ pursuing only superficial description, abstraction and regular manipulation, provides the deepest truth about nature. It is on account of this assumption that we are now prepared to try to dissolve the essences even of gender and of humanity itself, under the contradictory imperative of a still human but anarchic individual and nominalist will to alteration in the interests of power.[xxxvi]

A modern duality of spirit and matter, of artifice and nature, has by no means been left behind; it has only mutated

The standard liberal democratic proposals merely to consolidate and tweak these theoretical- -cum-practical idioms of our culture can only solve the ecological problem at the cost of tyranny. Moreover, if a more tempered approach to our physical environment is adopted purely as an expedient, to be abandoned when economic profit or political control collapses, then further down the line of history it will only generate further environmental crisis. This is the element of truth in the instinctive populist suspicion, supported by Giorgio Agamben, that successively terrorism, financial crisis, Covid pandemic and shortages of food and energy are exploited as Schmittian emergencies in order for Leviathan or Behemoth to exercise yet further domination over a subordinated population through the ever-intensified deployment of surveillance, robotics and digitalisation.

One does not have to give any credence to conspiracy theories to allow this. For, from the outset, the modern notion of single sovereign power over against a mass of isolated individuals who only accidentally coagulate, was predicated on the notion of natural emergency which re-impinges in the face of the breakdown of cultural unity (as in the wake of the European Reformation). The threat of such has to be sustained, if sovereignty itself is to be sustained. And where sovereignty is threatened, then emergency may be artificially produced, or real emergency exaggerated.

But the hysterical half-grasp of this reality by populism is not the answer, any more than is its retreat to the sovereign nation-state that cannot handle a weakening of nature which knows no boundaries, nor the unrestricted flows of finance, capital and people which today thwart any attempt to realise social justice in one country. Nor can individual states respond adequately to the mutation of capitalism into a neo-feudalism that extracts profits from rents on drained lands, from ‘vectoral’ control of information, and from financial speculation rather than from production, which is now in that continuous crisis of profitability anticipated by Marx.[xxxvii] All this engenders an increasingly pacified, homeless and workless people (the middle besides the working classes), confined to the soft tyranny of sad leisure and tedious pleasure under the ultimate control of the super-rich and their professional lackeys, including most university academics.

We have already seen why the outdated materialism (however much it claims to be ‘new’) of liberals and of most of the Left cannot provide the answer either. Our entire natural-political crisis is rooted in the double denial of spirit to nature and of the ultimate spiritual rule of nature by human spirits, as opposed to her cruel oppression by the human understanding, uninformed by wisdom. We need, instead, a political return to a natural order, as Catholic Social Teaching has consistently taught.

All single sovereignty of the state must be demolished. Instead, from the village to the planet, we need to recreate the complex network of gift-exchanging communities and corporations, which naturally and traditionally pursue intrinsic good purpose and virtue, out of which a true and relatively more peaceful order can be distilled.

That requires dispersed democratic assent and various coordination by single individuals. But it also requires the rule of spirit rather than of the technicians of matter, as René Guenon once rightly declared: to this extent we should say that Alexander Dugin is right.[xxxviii] The wisest, who most discern spiritual ends and can direct both nature and culture teleologically towards those ends (in the name of a more equitable and personalist understanding of the ‘exception’) have to be given a certain sort of crucial and privileged role. Their counsel must be proffered to the people and then the politically wise and virtuous, as genuine warrior-ruler ‘representatives’, must instigate the working-through of such accepted counsel in a practice within which all can participate.

There is nothing accidental about the ecological mess that we find ourselves within. It derives directly from our mode of economics as appropriation of natural and human resources, exploitation of land as rent and of human bodies for profit

Without such a ‘clerisy’, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed it, and an integral directing of the secular towards the religious, what we get instead is the rule of the charlatans, the egoists and the profiteers, to the infinite distress of nature herself and the attempted exhaustion of her powers. That is impossible, but they can only be newly realised to human benefit if we recognise that they are both instigated and fulfilled in spiritual creativity, conviviality and contemplation.

To this extent again, Guénon and Dugin would seem to be right: the abolition of traditional ‘estates’ since the French Revolution, in favour of a ‘state’ standing over against isolated individuals has proved a sham, since in reality (as Auguste Comte foresaw and advocated) we have a pseudo-Brahmin class of scientific technocrats directing the work of a pseudo-Kshatriya class of politicians without honour, who utterly subordinate everyone else who is now altogether removed from the inspiration of the soil (or the waters!) and the fulfilment of creative labour.

Only a spiritual revolution will save us now. But that means also a real, social, economic and political transformation, striving towards something like a more democratic version of a society of estates, with greater respect and reward for every function: contemplative, ruling or working, besides a greater fluidity between them and greater echoing of all three at every level. As to financing and mercantile operations, their role must be minimised and re-embedded in genuinely teleological tasks.

We need additionally a sense of balance, of ‘mutualist protection’ in the global interflow of goods and people (in contrast to both the liberal globalists and the nationalists), thereby allowing that we have always been fishes as well as squirrels, steppe-nomads as well as forest-dwellers, in ways that the theorists of Eurasian integration have to hypocritically overlook.

This is the exact opposite to the illusions currently pursued by the United Kingdom (at least up till yesterday after Liz Truss’s overkill in this direction) of a retreat to the piratical sea of totally unregulated liberal commerce. But it is also the exact opposite to the illusions currently pursued by Germany: of an expansion of a post-democratic legal-commercial landmass for sheerly pragmatic reasons, under the Habermasian conviction that we now live in ‘post heroic’ times when military struggle is unthinkable: tell that to the Ukrainians! Such smugly pretended pacifism, as we now know, proves to be but the continuation of an older Teutonic military dominance by other, economic means, and a potential capitulation to tyranny and actual military blackmail.

We should also guard against a tendency to lose sight of the qualitative difference between the Holocaust (and to a degree the Gulags and Japanese wartime atrocities) and all the other many horrors of human history. This can tend to arise if the Nazi phenomenon is regarded as mainly as mainly an inland and domestic extension of European overseas colonialism, when in reality the Nazis regarded the liberal humanitarianism associated with especially with the later-arriving German African empire (however we may now assess its credentials) with disdain.[xxxix] In this way the post-colonialist Left can fall ironically prey to the Schmittian view that ‘sea-empire’ is somehow an unnatural empire and responsible for contaminating the land.[xl]

The standard liberal democratic proposals merely to consolidate and tweak these theoretical- -cum-practical idioms of our culture can only solve the ecological problem at the cost of tyranny

More generally, we need to be aware that if we inaccurately think of empire as an interruptive anomaly and the nation state as normative, then this is also a perspective shared by Schmitt in his more decisionistic and statist aspect, which equally retains far-right connotations, if not, in this case, specifically Nazi ones.

However much we may rightly deplore the violations of capitalistic colonisation, there is no conceivable counter-history in which the more technologically advanced empires and states were not going to interact with less technologically advanced tribal societies for both good and ill, which means that a ‘relational’ political ontology – neither statist not overarchingly internationalist — would always of necessity have exerted a primary pressure. The collectively liberal assertion of independent national autonomy and liberation is, by contrast, an anti-imperial reaction that is itself fully a product of empire and tends to sustain and even worsen the more nakedly economic aspect of western imperial exploitation, which continues unabated.[xli]

It is then, by no means clear, and is rather all too Schmittian and disguisedly Right-wing, to suppose that empire corrupts the purity of the state and of the state’s free-trading. Just to the contrary, one could argue that empire becomes most horrific, whether by land or by sea, and yet in the most notable instances by land, when it is most fused with the virus of nationalism and ethnic atavism, as with the Nazis, or with Putin’s current invasion of Ukraine.

The point then is not the decision either for the earth or the water. Instead, in the future, we need, all of us, to try to dwell within all four elements, sustaining both spatial distance and spatial communion, united not by the chattering airways or the hovering fire of eventual destruction, but by the Biblical upper sea of the heavenly and its aerial illuminations.

***************************************************************

Text by prof. Milbank comes from the Creatio Continua V con

ference organized by the Global Catholic Movement for the Environment and the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow

[i] Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, trans. George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2008).

[ii] Of course, one notes the supreme overlooked irony of the Biblical unease about the ocean.

[iii] Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, trans. |Samuel Garrrett Zeitlin (Candor NY: Telos, 2015).

[iv] Leo [Lev] Gumilev, Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere, trans. Vadim Novikov (Moscow; Progess, 1990); Alexander Dugin, The Theory of a Multipolar World, trans. Michael Millerman (London: Arktos, 2021); Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012); Mark Bastin, The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2016); Mark Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP, 2016). For the importance of Nietzsche in developing this outlook from the 1930’s onwards, see 122-30. There was much Marxist-Nietzschean fusion, which helps to understand the emergence of Putinism. The Nietzschean legacy helps to make the latter receptive to the thinking of Schmitt.

[v] Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum trans G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2003), 47.

[vi] Carlo Galli, Genealogia della Politica: Carl Schmitt e la crisi del pensiero politico moderno (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996); Orlando Bentancour, ‘Franciso de Vitoria, Carl Schmitt and Original Technicity’ in Politica Commune Volume 5, 2014, online at https://doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0005.002

[vii]  Mika Ojakangas, ‘Carl Schmitt and the Sacred Origins of Law’ in Telos 147 (Summer, 2009), 34-54.

[viii] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 50-5.

[ix] Francisco Suarez, Laws and God the Lawgiver, Book 2. 19 translated by the editors in O. and J.L. O’Donovan eds From Irenaeus to Grotius: a Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought  (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 728

[x] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 58.

[xi] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 50-67

[xii] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth,  59-62; Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: a Commentary on the Letter to the Romans trans Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford UP 2005) 108-112

[xiii] See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 382-443

[xiv] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 66, 80-3.

[xv] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 87.

[xvi] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 126.

[xvii] Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 159-62

[xviii] Carl Schmitt, Theory of the Partisan, trans. G.L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2007).

[xix] Kant, ‘On Perpetual Peace’; Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 168-72.

[xx] Carl Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport CN: Greenwood, 1996)  30; The Necessity of Politics: An Essay on the Representative Idea in the Church and Modern Europe (London: Sheed and Ward, 1931),  67.

[xxi] One can argue that Schmitt’s voluntarism was qualified at times by the influence of the personalism of his friends Erich Przywara and Erich Peterson.

[xxii] For the arguably sinister link of Luther and Prussia, see James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany (London: Old Street, 2018).  

[xxiii] Schmitt, Land and Sea, 89-94.

[xxiv] Schmitt, Land and Sea, 8.

[xxv] See Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, ‘Propaganda and Critique: An Introduction to Land and Sea’, in Schmitt, Land and Sea, xxxi-lxix.

[xxvi] See Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique, 75-7.

[xxvii] See Alexander Dugin, The Great Awakening vs The Great Reset (London: Arktos, 2021).

[xxviii] See Mark Galeotti, A Short History of Russia: How to Understand the World’s Most Complex Nation (London: Penguin, 2022).

[xxix] Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique, 81-114; Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism, 95-106.

[xxx] Galeotti, A Short History of Russia, 95-113.

[xxxi] Karl Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 77-142.

[xxxii] One has the same sense of a deeper Russian probing of causality in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

[xxxiii] See Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann, Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future (London: Verso, 2022).

[xxxiv] See Jean-Louis Viellard-Baron, Le Supplement d’âme our le renouveau du spiritualisme (Paris: Hermann, 2016).

[xxxv] See especially, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Nature’ in Nature and Selected Essays (London: Penguin, 2003), 35-82.

[xxxvi] See Dugin, The Great Awakening.

[xxxvii] See Javier Zacarés, ‘Euphoria of the Rentier? Late Capitalism’ in New Left Review, 129, May/June 2021, 47-67.

[xxxviii] Dugin, The Great Awakening, 80-6.

[xxxix] The argument is that German barbarities in Africa foreshadowed their barbarities against the Jews and other groups in Europe. Yet despite some breakdowns of order perhaps wrongly classified as ‘genocide’, the German record in Africa was a relatively good one. The roots of Nazi racism lie not at all here but rather with the old and land-based Prussian and Lutheran hatred towards Slavs, Jews and Catholics in Europe. See Bruce Gilley, In Defence of German Colonialism: And how its critics empowered nazis, communists and the enemies of the West (Washington DC: Regnery: 2022); James Hawes, The Shortest History of Germany.

[xl] See also Pankaj Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia (London: Penguin, 2013). Mishra tends to relativise inter-Western conflicts between liberals and totalitarians in the face of what he sees as a more basic conflict between the West and the rest. In the course of doing this he would seem to invite a reversely racist perspective which indeed at times seems to find Nazi, Soviet and mid-century Japanese politico-economic approaches to be more congenial for the global south than the usual liberal or social democratic approaches, with the Japanese half-regarded as already fighting in World War Two for southern liberation. All this seems beyond ominous in the face of the preparedness of Iran, India, China and part of Islam to support Putin and oppose any legitimacy of the state of Israel.

[xli] This is vividly depicted in Giles Foden’s novel Freight Dogs (London Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2021), concerning the wars of the Great Lakes, whereas his obeisance to the dictum that current anarchy and criminality is simply a reiteration of the imperialist exploitation of the past (however appalling it often was) is surely unconvincing: ‘they capture all these places in an area where the merciless dance of imperial commerce, trading under the name of civilisation, went on for over a century. Raiding banks, breaking into warehouses, prising open shipping containers, the officers fill their coffers, just as their colonial forefathers did’ (240). Well perhaps not quite ‘just as’, any more than the ‘civilising’, misguided or not, was entirely reducible to a mask for  trade. This rather trite invocation of a supposed continuity cannot really suppress the novel’s vivid and searching depiction of a horrendously and indecipherably complex confusion of state and tribal aims, delivering constant rape, torture and massacre alongside a now much more nakedly economic imperialism of western agents, running guns and drugs and extracting minerals, while remaining essentially indifferent to the savagery they are both witnessing and instigating. Despite himself, Foden repeats the Conradian sense of a darkness at once arriving from across the sea and yet also emergent from an ancient continental interior. Africa surely requires in the future a post-statist pan-African solution with a different, more political and generous European involvement.