Only a Weak People Will Disappear

Only a weak people will disappear

Ferguson’s law and the struggle of life against life

DAVID MCGROGAN

All genuine political theories presuppose man to be evil, i.e., by no means an unproblematic but a dangerous being.

-Carl Schmitt

In trying to analyse what has gone wrong in Britain – rapidly becoming the national sport – it can be easy to overthink things. Ultimately, it really boils down to what Carl Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political, described as the most fundamental anthropological question whose answer informed all political ideas: are human beings by their nature good, or evil?

Schmitt knew where he stood in this matter. He was a thinker in what Michael Oakeshott identified as the tradition of those who deal in ‘darkness’ – including Hobbes, Machiavelli, and, we can infer, Oakeshott himself. In this tradition of political philosophy (let’s call it the tragic, or bleak, tradition) humans are understood to be rivalrous, violent, status-oriented, untrustworthy, conflictual, and self-interested. And politics is a matter of managing the problems that arise from a great number of such individuals having been thrust together and forced into communion. We aren’t likely to all get along, but we occupy the same territory, so ‘What are we going to do about it?’, as John Dunn once put it.

Well, we can all fight each other, or we can find a way to achieve a modus vivendi that does not involve us all agreeing – and this is the basis of what Schmitt (he may have coined the term) called ‘the political’ as such. Schmitt famously declared the friend/enemy distinction to be the essential nature of the political, but one does not have to entirely agree with that extreme assertion (Frank Ankersmit said it was like saying that because marital arguments are inevitable the essence of marriage is conflictual) to see what he was driving at. Politics exists and the political sphere is constituted by the requirement for there to be some means of reconciling our apparently irreconcilable disagreements – our heterogeneity of preferences and the tendency all of us have to behave as though our individual preferences are the most important.

In a lecture delivered in 1929 and later published alongside his famous The Concept of the Political (1932), titled ‘The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations’, Schmitt gave a very thought-provoking elaboration of his central motif. Here, he emphasised what Leo Strauss, in his comments on the lecture, called the ‘seriousness’ of human life, and the consequences of a loss of awareness of that seriousness. We had allowed ourselves – bearing in mind of course that Schmitt was writing during the closing period of the Weimar Republic – to believe that technological progress or ‘technicity’ could produce a ‘magic formula’ allowing us all to get along in peace and harmony. We had come to believe that scientific, statistical and managerial wizardry we could produce a neutral, mechanistic, technocratic mode of governance that would abolish politics for good.

But this, he went on, was a delusion. There is nothing about technological progress that suggests the State can be depoliticised – rather the opposite: technological advancement intensifies politics. And Schmitt summarised the nature of the problem facing twentieth century man in a very interesting way, describing it as the mistake of believing that the only struggle that matters is that of ‘life against death’. This was frivolity, and imagining that the only enemy is death was mere ‘romantic’ delusion:

A life which has only death as its antithesis is no longer life but powerlessness and helplessness. Whoever knows no other enemy than death…is nearer to death than life… For life struggles not with death, spirit not with spiritlessness; spirit struggles with spirit, life with life, and out of the power of an integral understanding of this arises the order of human things.

What does this mean? Simply put, to imagine that ‘the political’ could come to an end and that we could all live alongside one another in harmless friendship is to posit that the only enemy is death – it is to envisage mankind as united against that common foe (which is indeed the only foe there could be). But this is a figment of the imagination: we will always be in conflict, by dint of our fallen nature. Our struggle will never be that of life against death; it will be a struggle between desires, preferences, needs, values – we will always be divided in ‘life against life’. And it is from this that the political sphere, and indeed the State itself – ‘the order of human things’ – arises. The State exists because of the ineluctability of human conflict and the requirement to manage it (internally) and be victorious in it (externally) where necessary.

Read alongside The Concept of the Political itself, this has important implications for international relations and the great problems Schmitt could already foresee in the emerging liberal international order. (Again, it bears repeating that he was writing these words in 1929-1932.) There was a desperately naive idea abroad that it would be possible to unite all the nations of the world in a common project of shared ‘humanity’ – banding together to face off ‘death’ in the form of war, poverty, famine, and so on. But anybody who seriously believed that was a fool, and Schmitt was contemptuous of such fantasies; they were, he thought, rooted in fear rather than high-mindedness. As he put it:

[I]t would be a mistake to believe that a nation could eliminate the distinction of friend and enemy by declaring its friendship for the entire world or by voluntarily disarming itself. The world will not thereby become depoliticised, and it will not be transplanted into a condition of pure morality, pure justice, or pure economics. If a people is afraid of the trials and risks implied by existing in the sphere of politics, then another people will appear which will assume these trials by protecting it against foreign enemies and thereby taking over political rule…

Naive peace-lovers were using morality as a cloak for cowardice, in other words, and would in the fullness of time simply be taken over by more vigorous peoples capable of subjugating them and forcing them into vassal status. (One thinks here of Voltaire’s description of history as being nothing but the sound of silk slippers descending a staircase and hobnailed boots stomping up.) And Schmitt derided those who would advance moral leadership or similar by denying the existence of enemies and renouncing war and conflict:

It would be ludicrous to believe that a defenceless people has nothing but friends, and it would be a deranged calculation to suppose that the enemy could perhaps be touched by the absence of resistance…If a people no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics, the latter will not thereby vanish from the world. Only a weak people will disappear.

While my German is dreadful, the translation here I think has the wrong emphasis – it should probably be something like ‘A weak people will simply disappear’ – but you get the gist.

It should not be forgotten that Schmitt was a committed Nazi at least between 1933-36, and that his ideas were an integral part of the great intellectual foment that was then taking place in the German right and which would culminate in a very dark ending indeed. His phrasing of ‘life against life’ takes on sinister undertones indeed when seen in the light of what was to unfold in the racial politics of the Nazi State. (Schmitt’s own concept of ‘a people’ was rooted in territory rather than race – Hannah Arendt, years later, would scribble a note in the margin of her copy of The Nomos of the Earth observing that Schmitt’s great error was in thinking, when the Nazis said ‘blood and soil’, they only meant ‘soil’ when really they only meant ‘blood’.) But, equally, there is no doubt that the fate of the German project, if we can call it that, during the 1930s and 40s taught precisely the wrong lesson to the Western States.

Seeing what had happened as the Nazis took control of the German State in the name of being a ‘strong people’, the nations of Europe in particular got into their heads that strength was something to be rejected in the name of international brotherhood. If strength meant Nazism, then, they decided, it was better to embrace weakness (although they would not have put it in those terms). It did not occur to them that there may have been value in Schmitt’s critique of liberal internationalism, for all that his ideas provided a foretaste of grotesque future events: since conflict is inevitable, there really is something to the idea of being a strong people rather than a weak one. The trick is being strong without feeling the need dominate a continent and expunge all elements of perceived weakness, and in emphasising territory and citizenship in the definition of ‘people’.

Nowhere was the liberal internationalist vision more fully embraced than in Britain and there are few countries indeed whose intellectual and political classes voice with more deep-throated enthusiasm the concept of humanity being united in a struggle of life against death. And the current government is at the pinnacle of this misguided conceit. Having decided that Britain’s role in the world is to exercise moral leadership in respect of climate change, decolonisation, multilateralism, responsible AI, etc. under the absurd slogan of ‘progressive realism’, it has embarked on a series of ‘deranged calculations’, as Schmitt would have called them: giving the Chagos Islands to Mauritius in the name of vestigial colonial guilt, and paying billions into the bargain, only to see Mauritius immediately enter negotiations with China to sell part of the archipelago for a defence facility; recognising a Palestinian State and in so doing appearing to take the side of a hostile power, Iran, against an erstwhile ally, Israel, while emboldening radical Islamists everywhere; giving EU fishing vessels ‘reciprocal access’ to UK fisheries until 2038 so as to ensure ‘stability’ after Brexit and destroying our native fishing industry as a result; committing to ‘permanently’ ban new onshore oil and gas licences in a bid to show ‘global leadership’ on Net Zero; and so on and so forth.

The underlying rationale here would appear to be that, by ‘declaring friendship for the entire world’ and being the most well-behaved boy in the school, Britain will somehow transplant itself – and, eventually, all of humanity – into a realm of ‘pure morality’. And this will, the implication goes, orient mankind away from petty struggle and self-interest, and towards much loftier, shared goals: justice for all, peace, protection of ‘the planet’, multilateralism, shared values, equality, freedom. We will all be bourgeois liberals, all the time, everywhere, secure in our rights, polite, compassionate, and prosperous – thoroughly depoliticised and neutralised.

Cast in a Schmittian light, however, we can see this nonsense for what it really is: the cowardice of a political class which has found itself at the helm of a country that is in rapid decline.

In a recent paper for the Hoover Institution, the historian Niall Ferguson gives us an interesting way to think about this. In the paper, he proposes what he calls ‘Ferguson’s Law’ (a reference to the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Ferguson rather than an exercise in modesty). This is, simply, that ‘any great power that spends more on debt servicing than it does on defense risks ceasing to be a great power’.

Setting aside the observation that this is not a ‘law’ even in its own terms (it states that a great power spending more on debt servicing than defence only ‘risks’ losing its status – giving the ‘law’ no predictive value), this is, no doubt, a provocative way of making a crucial point: that a State which is spending more on interest payments on its national debt than it is on defence has lost sight of the ‘seriousness’ of human affairs. To put it in Schmitt’s terms, it is a State which has fallen into the trap of thinking that the only struggle is that of life against death, and has as a consequence forgotten that it is actually a struggle of spirit against spirit, and of life against life, that gives force to political organisation.

Ferguson’s paper is largely about the USA, but Britain is in fact a much more apt illustration of his central claim. Currently, Britain spends over £110 billion a year on debt interest payments, a number which is rising both in nominal terms and as a proportion of spending. Yet its defence budget is only £60.2 billion. This, even on the face of it, rings alarm bells. But it has to also be set against the amount of money which the country spends on welfare (another point which Ferguson makes): benefit spending for 2025/2026 is forecast to be almost £327 billion, and is set to apparently grow ever higher. It is perhaps bad enough that a State should be spending almost double its defence budget on debt interest. But what can one say about a State that spends more than five times its defence budget on welfare (not even including the budget for the NHS)?

This is a State, in short, whose concerns are almost entirely those pertaining to the struggle of life against death, and which has fallen prey as a consequence to sheer ‘powerlessness and helplessness’. It is itself ‘nearer to death than to life’. Knowing only the mechanistic managerialism of ‘technicity’ and trusting in depoliticisation to cure its ills, its leaders have come to believe that their purpose is simply to try to make sure that discomfort and struggle are outlawed. If people are just about content with their lot – if things don’t hurt that badly – the ramshackle show can go on. And hence the State, in the imaginings of its leaders, takes on a benign, simpering, grandmotherly cast: making sure everybody is well looked after, insulated from risk, and above all joining in and being well-behaved.

They like to present their banal niceness as being a solemn commitment to morality and justice, but we should not be reticent to use Schmitt’s own word for it: it is really a function of fear. These are people who are aware that Britain’s place in the world is deteriorating, and who have no idea what to do about it. Domestically, they bribe the population with welfare and make vague promises about growth. Internationally, on the other hand, they bleat about leadership and progressivism while their actions signal: ‘Please don’t hurt us’. This is a product of mere insecurity and callowness; it has nothing to do with either actual leadership or genuine benevolence.

The recent scandal about the so-called ‘China Spy Case’, currently dominating the news, throws all of this into stark relief. In this affair the prosecution of two men accused of passing sensitive information to a Chinese intelligence agent collapsed after the Director of Public Prosecutions decided that there was insufficient evidence; the government had failed to classify China as a ‘threat to national security’ and this was apparently necessary in order for the prosecution’s case to have a realistic prospect of success. The suspicion is that the government, seeking to pursue a better economic relationship with China and (inevitably) ‘engage’ with it in respect of climate change, has deliberately pussy-footed around the question of whether China is an enemy or a friend. And the affair has apparently done nothing to persuade the government that allowing China to build a new ‘super-embassy’ in London – complete with suspiciously deep basements and ‘greyed-out’ blueprints – would be rather a bad idea, all things considered.

We have here the issue in a nutshell: a government that has become habituated into imagining that everybody can be friends, and who represent an ‘elite’ (no sniggering, please) which ‘no longer possesses the energy or the will to maintain itself in the sphere of politics’ by clearly identifying who the people’s enemies are, and anticipating conflict. And in this they represent two decades of slow, steady, abandonment of foreign policy or strategic thinking worthy of the name. Schmitt’s prediction here was clear: that in such circumstances ‘another people will appear’ to take on the task of rule. We wait with bated breath to find out if, in the British case, a domestic counter-elite can take power and stave off that fate – or mere vassal status will be thrust upon us.

The contrast with the world around us, meanwhile, could not be more marked. Everywhere we turn, we can see governments growing more attuned to the ‘seriousness’ of the times in which we live. Whether we like it or not – whether we wish that we could unite to ‘save the planet’ or whatever other lofty goals we could name – conflict is on the agenda. We are in a period in which War is not just possible, but plausible. We have enemies – Iran, China, Russia – who wish us ill. And everywhere we see the truth of the observation that it is life against life, and spirit against spirit, which are the struggles defining the fate of human political order. Britain will learn this too, in due course, as it must – a process which we must reluctantly acknowledge will also reveal whether we are indeed a weak people or a strong.

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This article (Only a weak people will disappear) was created and published by News from Uncibal and is republished here under “Fair Use”

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