War as political paradigm and its metaphysical logic

There is a metaphysical figure that derives from a certain logic that is a specter haunting politics today.  The question is of its being recognized as an outmoded or at least very limited figure of the political.  This figure is that of opposition, and at least in some forms dialectic.  It is ultimately that of Manichaeanism, or the splitting of Being into good and evil, such that the good is the force that combats evil, which in turn makes evil primary, revealing the Gnostic foundations of every Manichaeanism.  Christianity declared them heretical, but the figures of Gnosticism and Manichaeanism continued to haunt the great religions of faith and empire, Christianity and Islam. 

Parenthetically, one of the most curious things about this is that it perhaps cannot be gotten beyond by just critiquing or opposing it as a mistake. This has happened in the world of psychotherapy, where it is represented by Melanie Klein’s theorization of the ‘splitting’ into good and evil (good and bad infantile ‘objects’ of the mother or breast). Arguably, Klein psychology has a Manichaean critique of Manichaeanism, but then so did Christianity beginning with Augustine. Though there is an argument to be made for a logic and psychology of ambiguity rather than ambivalence. In ambiguity, there is vagueness and uncertainty, while in ambivalence there is a clear-cut opposition and one must choose one of two paths. Crossroads and enigma: both are in Sophocles’s Oedipus the King. “I hate and I love,” the Latin poet Catullus famously wrote, suggesting that he doesn’t know why, but is troubled by this. Yet, we cannot be openly curious about everything; some things we must oppose, and “amore e rabbia,” the title of an Italian omnibus film from 1968, may state not a contradiction but a compelling demand. Who wants to live in a world where nothing is negated, or even where nothing is hated? Those reject nothing who can nothing affirm. Christ himself said he brought a sword, and the Torah and Prophets of the Jews repeatedly posit stark choices of good and evil, of flourishing or perishing, and the work that as choice this calls for. If there is a time for peace and a time for war, actors in a worldly political theater need available not just one mask, claims for authenticity, which tyrants might demand of innocents, notwithstanding. There are right attitudes only in their befitting situations.

The Cold War followed the logic of Manichaeanism.  Ultimately, the best arguments for either liberal capitalism or Marxist-inspired socialism were about the badness of the other system.  In this framework, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  Logically, this is similar to argument by reduction to the absurd, or negation of the negation.  It can be shown that unless a positive potentiality of a situation or matter is revealed as constructible, exhibited perhaps with an example, then it is quite possible that nothing is affirmed as a possibility when something that the desired possibility would negate and exclude, and be negated and excluded by, because it could well be that one thing and its opposite are both refuted while nothing is affirmed, except maybe a common presupposition that they share, and perhaps whatever its negation would imply, if only as a possibility to be explored.  Kant makes a case for this in the Antinomies, which were an inspiration for Hegel in developing his ideas of the dialectic.  

The logic of the way out of this may be complex, but the problem has a simpler form in the case of some political conflicts.  In the case of the Cold War, and some other situations, it might be said that the enemy of my enemy is perhaps just as much an enemy.  No reason why not.  Think of every global conflict where there are really no good guys.  

War as the political paradigm, beyond the question of its utility or lack thereof in particular cases, or as a way of figuring the struggles against existing forms of domination and oppression, is a symptom of the fact that, globally, capitalism is sustaining itself, in the midst of a crisis or set of crises absent anything the certainty that they can be managed, through warfare and forms of policing that tend to become indiscernible from it.  That is, international and domestic wars.  

Russia today as a police state dictatorship on behalf of an oligarchy, and a military aggressor in ways that seem equally predatory, is a ‘symptom’ of a syndrome, globally (for there is a single global system, and at least in peacetime is globally interconnected), of both the nation-state as, in a horribly rapacious and unprincipled way, machine of war, and of what looks like an attempt to undo the great bourgeois traditions that triumphed in the 17th and 18th centuries to give us what remains the sole dominant positive paradigm: the liberal constitutional representatively democratic nation-state.   It as if modern capitalism is threatened from within itself with a dissolution into its feudal antecedents.  

Today there may be said to be a global civil war that appears largely one-sided.  In the old days of decolonization in the decades after World War II, a period that coincided with the differently mapped Cold War in Europe, it was easy for good people to side or sympathize with the various national liberation movements.  Now there seems to be just a rapacious capitalism, nowhere really rejected (not by any major country, anyway), but often involved in local wars.  The legal scholar and critical theorist Bernard Harcourt has written a book, The Counter-revolution, arguing that the American government since 9/11 has been conducting a counter-insurgency war with domestic policing, against a non-existent insurgency.  It certainly has no military foe, and, apart from a “radical” Islamism that is at least as much rightist as leftist, but has almost no domestic basis, notwithstanding the scale and horror of the 9/11 attacks themselves, most political violence is conducted by right-wing loner crazies whose frequent manifestoes or other declarations make clear that their actions are only expressive and not tactical (though as the films of Quentin Tarantino remind us, there are cases that are both), listing complaints but absent any strategy, leaving perhaps only their hopes either of inspiring other right-wing nuts or of provoking a government clampdown, which everyone who has considered the matters knows will mostly just be used against leftists, and almost entirely against people whose political goals or ambitions have nothing to do with any use of violence.  Violent political movements have probably disappeared along with clandestinism, now rendered practically impossible by our communication systems. 

But politics does not have war as its paradigm.  Even if it does have polemical civil conflict (between two opposing sides, as in America with our two-party system) as one of its possibilities.