Originally posted on Goodreads.
Prima facie, “politics” and “apocalypse” are two separate and irreconcilable concepts. Politics (or rather, political philosophy) is, in its earliest instantiation, rooted in a philosophic tradition founded on the exercise and development of “reason” and “rationality”. Apocalypse, on the other hand, is a religious concept, grasped and believed in only through faith and revelation. And the conflict between these two forces of Western history is as timeless as human civilization’s inability to adequately synthesize them.
The idea of apocalypse (and indeed, religiosity generally) is viewed by mockingly by modern intelligentsia – a subject which only the unfortunate, uneducated, and uncivilized Bible-thumping inhabitants of middle America are uncouth enough to discuss seriously. Yet in the strange times of 2020, “politics” and “apocalypse” seem to be converging. As of this writing, the global pandemic has shut down the world economy for the better part of the last three months, with no plausible end in sight. While locked away at home, citizens peruse social media outlets inundated with images of nationwide demonstrations by protestors outraged by police brutality, simultaneously frustrated by a seemingly stagnant social order which permits such brutality to occur and enervated by a sense of hopelessness and helplessness.
But “Politics & Apocalypse” was not written in 2020. The book is a collection of articles written by the participants of a conference (mostly professors of theology) that occurred at Stanford University in 2004, planned by Hamerton-Kelly, a Stanford theologian, and Peter Thiel, a prominent technology entrepreneur and investor. For these writers, the impending apocalypse du jour was the clash between Western civilization and Islamic jihadism, whose act of terrorism on 9/11 began the 21st century with a bang. In 2008, it might have applied equally well to the global financial crisis. Perhaps 2020 is a fitting time to crack open this book again…
The text is as much about the conflict between politics and apocalypse as it is about the politics of apocalypse. In the asymptotic end times, the apocalypse is necessarily political. If biblical Good and Evil are truly acting through history, they are necessarily also acting through natural and psychological phenomena – i.e., political history.
It is precisely these phenomena that René Girard identifies. So, the (ostensible) purpose of the conference which produced the book was to discuss Girard’s work, a professor of philosophy at Stanford at the time, though the articles also discussed extensively the thought of Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt, Friedrich Nietzsche, and, to a lesser extent, Eric Voegelin. To this end, though the style and content of the book could be said to be a mix of each of these thinkers, the writers write in a manner that is decidedly Straussian (and in our age of technicity, perhaps that was a wise choice). But besides being unyieldingly abstruse, the writers engage in a fastidious study of historical (Western) thought, beginning with the Greek classics and continuing on to a critique of the Enlightenment liberalism which marked the beginning of modernity as we know it. Importantly, the project of the book is Straussian because each historical author is considered from the vantage point of their own self-understanding, rather than from the supposedly privileged view of a modern commentator, with all the luxuries of being “advanced” and more “rational” when compared to the oafish ancients. From there, the anti-Enlightenment, anti-liberal arguments posed by Schmitt, Strauss, and ultimately, Girard, are considered carefully in light of the macro-historical and geopolitical developments of the age.
Central to the inquiry is the problem of human violence. The Enlightenment rejected the idea that questions of human nature and the Good Life were knowable, or that life had any inherent purpose. Operating under such a paradigm, those thinkers conceived of justice and the role of the state as enabling negative freedoms, where, in the war of all-against-all, we collectively realize the irrationality of such a war, put down our weapons, and draw up the so-called ‘social contract’. Because the possibility of transcendental values had become clearly preposterous, the ultimate ends of human struggle was reduced to a will to power, and no single conception of the Good Life could be plausibly better or worse. Consequently, the role of the social contract – and the goal of liberalism as we have come to know it – is to prevent that struggle from hindering individuals from realizing their own conception of the Good Life. In this way, liberalism has taken the previously theological belief in an apocalyptic future and secularized it into an unshakeable faith in “progress” as a replacement.
Schmitt rejected this reduction of human purpose to a simplistic power struggle. Arguing that division by questions of the essential nature and purpose of human existence is as timeless as our inability to settle them, Schmitt claimed that politics would always be characterized by the battle between friend and enemy. In other words, the wide range of conceptions of the Good Life is bound to conflict with one another at some level or another, and this is the essence of the Political.
According to the authors, the violent risks of such a worldview should go without saying. It would seem that in affirming the place of conflict in human life, Schmitt came to glorify (and indeed, even moralize) it in his work supporting the Third Reich. This explicit fetishization of violence was what Strauss primarily objected to, identifying it as being rooted in liberal (Hobbesian) morality itself. Strauss wrote, in his classically circuitous manner, about the relationship between the philosopher and the (liberal) politician. It could be inferred that, drawing upon his reading of the Greek classics, Strauss believes that, for all its flaws, liberal democracy is actually still the most tolerable regime, because in keeping the peace, it at least affords the possibility of philosophy.
Yet even Strauss saw that liberalism, in its pursuit of equality, was creating a “universal and homogeneous state” that would soon render all esoteric truths obsolete, and therefore obviate the possibility of philosophy entirely.
It is fitting that the text focuses on the thought of Girard, who believed that the secrets of human violence could no longer be kept in check. Indeed, it is liberal democracy itself which is driving the peacemaking mechanisms of antiquity to obsolescence. It could be said that the present crisis of 2020 is one of undifferentiation: somehow, the relentless force of economic and cultural globalization, under the liberal premise that suffering and inequality can be vanquished once and for all for the sake of individual flourishing, has actually become the primary antagonist to individual diversity. The more worldly and cosmopolitan a populace becomes, the more similar they seem to appear to one another, no matter the geography, race, or creed…
A full recapitulation of the text is beyond the scope of my review. Suffice it to say that the attractiveness of Girard’s theory lies precisely in the fact that he is able to describe how the two opposing forces of Athens (politics) and Jerusalem (religious apocalypse) supposedly intersect. Though he undoubtedly wrote from a decidedly Christian perspective, the scapegoat mechanism he describes (and its increasing inefficacy since the time of Jesus Christ) can be read in a purely anthropological light. To that end, the disturbing revelation of the text is that, when you read God out of world history and naturalize the metaphysics of Scripture, an apocalyptic future is not as far-fetched as the Ivy League may have you believe…