Can the West learn to love militarism again? (And should it?)

                                                  We all love a parade...?

Having recently done the Kindle equivalent of bingeing on boxed sets with the complete works of Chesterton, the one thing about them that unsettled me most was the fierceness of some of his writings around the First World War. Work after work denounced the Germans and urged a war to defend civilization against them. I'm not sure what I conclude from that. That contra the 'Oh What a Lovely War!' and Wilfred Owen syndrome, the struggle against the Kaiser's Germany was as much a fight for light as the Second? That there is a danger of the Chestertonian sliding into a sentimental love of fighting? Frankly, I'm still not sure...

It does, however, represent a problem that the modern West -and particularly Christianity- needs to face up to more squarely. Watching the First World War commemoration on Sunday in Edinburgh, I struggled between the pathos of the occasion and the irritation at a dead ritualism. Time after time, the commentators explained in hushed terms the meaning of constructing a drumhead (a heap of drums) and the importance of the military standards (and, most important, on the need to distinguish Ensigns from Standards...) It was the arcane ritual of an armed service clumsily imagined for a  modern TV audience: a construction needing the continual explanation of historical re-enactors. (When, for example, was the last period in which a heap of drums would be found conveniently in the front line of a British battalion on active service?) It jarred on me slightly, in part because I couldn't help wondering what would be the equivalent in an Independent 'progressive' Scotland: a parade of juggling drag queens on tricycles? It was well intentioned I'm sure, but it didn't emerge naturally from modern Scottish culture: it was clearly an artifice of heritage.

How a society strikes a balance between how to defend itself and how to pursue human flourishing is perhaps the central question of both Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. In the former, the question is how to create a military caste whilst preventing them from running the country. In the latter, the question is how to create a process of formation for citizens that imitates the single minded effectiveness of Crete and Sparta without producing military thugs. The modern equivalent of this is perhaps how to finance and morally support an effective fighting force while civilian society continues to embrace a feminist, individualist suspicion of collectively planned and executed violence.

Christians are even in more of a bind. With a growing suspicion at the end of the twentieth century among theologians of both Christendom (the close linking of Christianity with society and the state) and the taking of life, the sort of ready acceptance of the military life found earlier in Western culture has become increasingly difficult.

Now, it is of course possible that all this simply represents progress: that an unwillingness to kill and be killed is the result of a growing moral sensitivity. That might be true whilst it is also true that it renders the West in fact incapable of sustained military action. (Unless you are a consequentialist, there is absolutely no guarantee that an improved morality will produce better -or even survivable- consequences.) It might also be true that there is an alternative model of military effectiveness which does not buy into the sort of Imperial Militarism that military parades in the UK generally try to represent. (I suspect this is what 'progressive' Nationalism would like a Scottish Defence Force to be. Whether such a thing could exist and whether it would ever be capable of projecting force against a long term enemy (say) in the Middle East strikes me as rather less clear.)

The remaining alternative is a return to the sort of acceptance and even celebration of the military that existed until comparatively recently in Western European (certainly British) life. Any child brought up on Walter Scott, for example, would have absolutely no sense of a clash between the military life and the life of a gentleman and Christian. Whilst that attitude certainly does still exist, particularly in families and schools which have a military tradition, it's certainly not one that is common in the media dominated by a 'progressive intelligentsia' let alone a Christianity which has gone a bit hippy over the years. As a result, you tend in Britain at least to get the distancing involved in Sunday's celebrations: the military life as heritage spectacle rather than as a celebration of a living necessity. (But looking at the Bastille Day picture above, I wonder if that is so true of the French?)

Anyway, has the West become militarily ineffectual in its culture? Is that a good thing? (It seems from current events especially in the Middle East that it may be a very painful thing.) And if it isn't, can it be remedied or are the habits which have undermined it too deeply embedded now to be extracted?

The Salmond/Darling debate: Nationalism and nuns with hairy legs

                                 
                                               Spot the (fifth) columnist...

So Darling won the TV debate. Or Salmond did. Or it was a draw.

I can't remember who said that in order to discover how awful the standards of journalism are, it was only necessary to study the reporting of a subject that you really understood well. It's an experiment I've applied several times over the years and it usually confirms the suspicion that much journalism is written out of the depths of extreme ignorance. It is of course not always true -and is less true of serious organs of haute vulgarisation such as The Economist. But the problem -and it is one that can afflict bloggers even more than print journalists- is that modernity abhors silence: there is little space for the claim, 'There is no news today' and even less for the admission, 'There is lots of news today but I have little idea what to make of it.'

Anyway, one notes with distress (usually English) commentators whom one generally respects regularly making fools of themselves with regard to the Scottish independence campaign. It's usually a matter of what one might term Sprachgefuhl: those nuances that give the game away about non-native fluency. So, for example, to see excited comments about Salmond being a nationalist demagogue who's getting his comeuppance just doesn't quite get it right for someone who's sat through two years of Scottish media coverage (or an even longer period of SNP government). It doesn't deal with the fact of his popularity among a wide range of people. It doesn't deal with his relative invisibility during the referendum campaign. It doesn't deal with the reputation for responsible government that won a landslide in the last Holyrood election. It doesn't even get his actual faults right: his nerdish attention to detail; his tendency to sneer. Whilst there are undoubtedly wannabe Chavezes and Perons in Nationalist ranks, it's difficult to imagine Salmond on the barricades and still more difficult to imagine him accompanied by Nicola Sturgeon, John Swinney or Mike Russell.

But I come not to praise or bury Salmond, but simply to note the real problem here which is the lack of depth in Scottish political culture. A head to head leadership debate is a fine thing, but it is a paltry thing: after two years of fairly relentless media discussion, nothing can turn up in such a forum. (What really could have been said in the Tuesday debate which had not been said before? What does it show that either party's delivery of scripted lines was fluffed or not fluffed?) Unlike a party election, the character of either 'leader' is utterly irrelevant: at a general election, to a degree, we are voting for a personality and a character; at the referendum, we are voting for a future that will run beyond my lifetime and the lifetime of my children.

Scottish party politics is pretty much the same as Westminster party politics: people shout at each other; spads run around imitating Malcolm Tucker or Toby Ziegler; two parties glower at each other in PMQs/FMQs. Compared to Westminster, it probably suffers from a little lack of depth in ability (once you get past key figures, there probably isn't a crowd of geniuses waiting to take over in case of unfortunate accident). But the real problem is that the longer term reflection on politics, the discussion of ta politika which goes beyond the Punch and Judy and which bridges that space between the theoretical and the day to day is painfully inadequate. The lack runs from serious journalism to political think tanks. It is expressed in a provincial TV service and an overreliance on a small number of well known figures. Perhaps above all, it is a space that rarely presents a well thought through 'conservative' challenge to the well nigh universal 'progressive' worldview.

And all this matters because Scottish politics is not English politics. When sitting through much of the last general election media coverage, I found myself constantly editing out vast amounts as irrelevant: anything to do with the NHS; anything to do with education; anything to do with immigration; anything to do with the tussle between those two parties and our two parties. At times, it was analogous to trying to follow US politics via coverage from Westphalian local radio. Whether it's the result of devolution or more profound changes in post-modern politics, there is a gulf between politics in RUK and politics in Scotland. And watching a lot of commentary on the Salmond/Darling debate merely confirmed that view, either because the commentary lacked Sprachgefuhl, or because it loaded what was essentially a trivial occasion with apocalyptic import. It was hard not to come away from the debate -and still more the discussion thereafter- with the feeling that Scottish political life at its deeper level just can't go on as it is. Even assuming that the debate had Salmond trounced, its inadequacies reinforced a Nationalist analysis: that the existing political set up can't survive. (And that leaves, I suspect, the situation where most Scots see it now: a difficult decision between the hope of devo-max (an ideal which may be practically unachievable given the nature of the UK) or the reality of independence (which may be achievable but risky).)

How does this affect 18 September? First, that gap between Scottish politics and RUK politics won't go away whatever happens. Of course, if there's a yes vote, Scotland will go its own way. If there's a no vote, then either there's a serious attempt to reflect that difference (not just in devolved Parliamentary powers but in matters such as broadcasting) or the difference will remain a wound which will fester and erupt again. Secondly, whatever happens on 18 September, some of us -and particularly those of a generally conservative bent- had better start building the institutions and intellectual practices within Scotland that can fill the vacuum that is currently populated (to the extent that it is populated at all) almost entirely by Jetsonists.

Kenan Malik and the wisdom of mobs

                                              All a jolly good idea

I've had Kenan Malik's A Quest for a Moral Compass on my Kindle for a while now. My interest in it was provoked by Tom Holland's puff: ‘I can imagine it replacing Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy on many a bookshelf - certainly mine.’ Although I've a great respect for Tom Holland and am quite prepared to believe that a context might add nuance to this remark, as it stands, it's silly. It's a category error. Whatever else might be said about either book, Russell is writing a history of philosophy, not morality (or even moral philosophy). Russell was, again, whatever else might be said, a seminal figure in Anglo-American academic and popular philosophy. His book -clearly barking though it is in places- is a classic of popularization. You might replace Russell with Malik, but it would be in the same way you'd replace a book with a vase of flowers: you'd be replacing one thing with something else and something different. Anyway, it sits there on the Kindle more because I want (eventually) to find out whether it is as ludicrous as the advertising, rather than because I suspect I will find enlightenment in it. (I think I can reasonably claim to have read enough proper books in this area to suspect there'll be little to surprise me. But who knows?)

In the meantime, there's Malik's essay on 'The death of god and the fall of man' (here). This attracted my attention in part because it deals with two philosophers I have learned  much from (MacIntyre and Anscombe) and in part because of the 'odd' claim at the end:

Or, to put it another way, the moral incoherence of the modern world derives perhaps from the inability to think like the mob outside the Bastille.

Now, I think, that Malim regrets this. In essence, his essay appears to argue that the problem of modern morality is that it is trapped either at the pole of believing in an external standard of behaviour that is ineluctable (such as a biological determinism) or at the opposing pole of a radical subjectivity that is contentless and arbitrary:

the consequence of the coincidence of the Death of God and the Fall of Man is that the relationship between what Alasdair MacIntyre called ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ and ‘man-as-he-could-be’ has become obscured, indeed broken. The secular ‘Fall of Man’, the loss of faith in the human capacity to act rationally and morally, and to collectively transform their world, has narrowed the conception of what humans could be, confined our notion of what we are and eroded the link between the two.

And as the link between the two has eroded, so moral thinking has polarized between the belief that morality is nothing more than the immediate product of ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’; and the belief that ‘man-as-he-happens-to-be’ cannot of himself define ‘man-as-he-could-be’, but that this must be defined not by humans as we are but in some objective sense, either through God or through science. On the one hand the idea that morality can be nothing more than personal preference; on the other that for it to be anything more than personal preference, it has to be anchored by some external legislator or in some objective realm.

The solution to this?

The answers to moral questions are neither subjective nor objective but rather rooted in a rationality that emerges out of social need, a rationality that can only emerge through humanity’s collective judgement.

And the model for this collective judgment is the mob storming the Bastille: it is a group that emerges from concrete external circumstances, but is not paralysed by them:

The mob only formed because of wider aims, aims that were social and historical rather than individual and personal. It is, in Sartre’s words, a ‘fused group’, not a ‘seriality’. The mob storming the Bastille was, in other words, an expression of the transformed meaning of telos.

Now there's a lot in Malik's essay that I'm not going to tackle here. In particular, his understanding of MacIntyre as simply thinking of social embeddedness in terms of tradition rather than 'transformation' doesn't do justice to MacIntyre: indeed, MacIntyre's main task in After Virtue and his succeeding work is to recommend a transformation of society by an adoption of (roughly) communitarianism as a way of life and Thomism as a way of thought. But putting aside the question of the accuracy of his analysis of MacIntyre and Anscombe, what of his own solution?

One point to make quickly is that his understanding of Classical philosophy appears quite warped. For example:

Human life was framed by the gods and yet humans could not rely upon them. They had to depend upon their own wit and resources. It was human reason and human morality that imposed order upon an unpredictable world, and carved out dignity and honour within it.

Now, however adequate such a view is of Graeco-Roman popular culture, it is entirely inadequate as an account of Graeco-Roman philosophy, especially that of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Their key idea was that of nature, in particular, human nature: there was an order in the world which human beings had to reflect much more than carve. But that reflection required thought and virtue. For Plato, a revolutionary mob would be not the paradigm of emancipatory action, but a predictable consequence of what happens when power is given to those who are unfitted for serious philosophical thought: they will end up following the whims of a tyrant (see eg Book 8 of the Republic). For the Greeks as much as us, the question of how to move from what we already are to what we could be is a hard one. But unlike Malik, the mainstream Graeco-Roman solution is that the answer is found by hard thinking, not mob action.

And to note that is to note that, once again, we are back with the need to discern what is true and what is good and what is beautiful. A mob doesn't think: at best, it is manipulated by one who does think (the demagogue). But other forms of collectivity do. A choir is immersed in a search for beauty which requires both virtue in the leadership (the choir director) and in the following (the chorus). A research group again requires thought and discussion in its search for the true. A charity likewise requires the exercise of practical wisdom and virtue in its pursuit of the good. Why are none of these better examples than the Bastille mob for Malik? Because they highlight what Malik is seeking to obscure: that collective transformative action can be good and bad. And it becomes good only when it undertakes, more or less explicitly, the sort of conscious rational reflection that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle undertook about human nature. It is not, pace Malik, 'the transformed meaning of telos' but simply the same old search for the same old telos.

The challenge for those such as Malik who want (in some way) to draw a line between modernity and the pre-modern moral world is to explain why the two worlds are so different. For such as me, they aren't -and his failure to explain why a mob should be taken as a paradigm of good collective action is evidence of that. There is a perennial philosophy or at least a perennial search for that philosophy. In essence (as I think Leo Strauss sees most clearly among modern political thinkers) the ancients said all that could be said: the world of the Stoics and Plato and Aristotle is our world. The only thing to be added to that (and this transforms not so much the questions or the search so much as the definiteness and practicality of the solutions) is the Christian revelation.

To return to Malik's claim:


Or, to put it another way, the moral incoherence of the modern world derives perhaps from the inability to think like the mob outside the Bastille.

Against that, weigh MacIntyre's:

We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.

Both transformed society, but one did so with a conscious reflection on human flourishing and the other was a murderous rampage on a whim:

At 4pm, the Marquis de Launay surrendered and let the people enter the Bastille. The guards were violently killed and the Marquis de Launay was beheaded, with his head then put on a stake and carried all over the city as a sign of victory.

There weren't many prisoners in the Bastille at the time of the storming; only 7 people were freed.

That very night, 800 men began to destroy the Bastille.

[Here.]