In historical analysis, and to a degree in political philosophy, periodisation is everything. It establishes the framework of analysis, and thereby drives towards a certain set of conclusions, to the exclusion of others. In our case the relevant time period is 1945 to 2022. We can now perceive an essential unity to this era, starting with the Allied victory in World War II and the creation of the Charter international system based on the United Nations, and ending with the institutional and normative foundations of that period under threat.
Read MoreAccording to this doctrine, no state would ever -- today or in future -- enjoy any influence beyond its borders except that allowed by the United States. All states would have to change their domestic systems, or at least their domestic policies, in accordance with U.S. wishes. Widely mocked at the time for its megalomania, this doctrine has in effect become the standard operating procedure of all subsequent U.S. administrations …
Read More“World peace does not require that each man love his neighbor,” said Kennedy, unwilling to allow peace to be held hostage to the imperfectability, without the assistance of divine grace, of human nature: “it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.” And yet it is precisely this capacity for tolerance that the modern West has lost: all the world must bear its image. [From Matthew Dal Santo, “Ressourcement, Not Revolution”]
Read More… [W}ere Russians to take more seriously their own philosophical-theological heritage, there is every possibility for Russia to become a positive example of a humane, non-technocratic mode of being in the world. I would be overjoyed to see this someday happen. The alternative appears to be a post-human global technocracy, one from which none of us will be able to escape.
Read More… Rather than single out one phenomenon from the sphere of politics and culture and identify that one thing as the “real” problem, I sought to uncover what seems to me to be a kind of “Ur-gestalt,” if you will, that expresses itself in the various phenomena that we tend to identify with modernity. The capitalist mode of economics (especially in the ultra-abstract form of finance markets) is absolutely one of the most prominent. But this is just the economic expression of an “ethos” that has analogous expressions in other areas: in religion (Protestantism, especially in its “low church” forms), politics (a certain kind of liberal democracy), and culture (technology, social media, and so forth). It occurred to me that the “diabolical” is a provocative way of characterizing the “Ur-gestalt” behind all of these things because of the deep etymological significance of the word, and also of course the rich cultural allusions it conjures up.
Read MoreDel Noce’s genius was to recognize that the root of the political crisis in the West is not itself political, but metaphysical and religious. At its core is the elevation of becoming to primacy over being—in a word, “anti-Platonism.” “Every revolutionary negation of traditional values,” he writes, “depends upon this initial negation.” The primacy of becoming replaces the vertical transcendence of eternity with the horizontal transcendence of futurity.
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