MORE WAR

REMINDER TO TEMPORALS OF THE META-AGENDA

Hey there, everyone. Hope you’ve all been keeping well as I toiled away at the book. It’s just about done; with any luck I’ll have it for sale by the end of this month — mid-November at the absolute latest. Fingers crossed. I’m extremely happy with it as a distillation and organization of the ideas explored on this substack over the last couple years. So, watch for it. Meanwhile, I thought I’d post something today, trying to slowly get myself back into the habit of posting here.

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More war? Who saw that coming? (For a general statement of my assessment of managerial liberalism and imperial war, check out this old post.)

This latest business between Israel and Hamas does though seem awfully interesting in its timing. Oh, I know, the conflict is old — I’ve been having to deal with it one way or another my whole (now getting longish) life. But isn’t the current phase impressively dramatic and timely? Look, I don’t claim to know what’s really going on in the backrooms that surround such worldly events. I’m not there. Maybe the whole business of the recent events is spontaneous and sincere. I can’t help noticing though that all this pops up just as it appears that a majority of the U.S. population has grown skeptical about the war in Ukraine. And suddenly getting Ukraine funding through Congress has hit a bit of a snag.

Time to pull out the oldie, but goldie hits. Whoa, forget all that Ukraine stuff, now we really have to support the only democracy in the Middle East, our long time ally (only an antisemite would say otherwise); get American weapons and battleships into the regions. This silly GOP internal conflict has to be pushed aside, get Congress working again so we can send American military might into the Middle East.

Sure, maybe it’s all just rank opportunism, but it would hardly be the first time that the CIA or other duplicitous agencies of the Atlanticist empire facilitated, through financing or human manipulation, the launching or sustaining of convenient military conflict elsewhere in the world. So, who knows? Not I. But it’s worth pondering.

In that light, I thought it might be worth revisiting our old friend, Robert Nisbet, to remind the temporals (and temporals-adjacent) who read this substack what exactly is at stake. The archetypical (probably even prototypical) conflict between temporals and spatials is that between two visions of human social order: war and imperium versus family and kinship. From my favorite Nisbet book, The Social Philosophers:

It is possible, I believe, to see the kinship community and the military community as the two most fundamental archetypes of all the associations and structures that have come to constitute human society. From kinship and its embedded norms have come such groups as castes, village communities, guilds, churches, monasteries, and a host of other types of organizations concerned with religion, hierarchy, tradition, crafts, learning, and the like. I do not mean these groupings have emerged developmentally from kinship, only that universally they have founded themselves for the most part on the norms of kinship, many of them even making heavy use of kinship nomenclature, like the terms brother, sister, father, and mother.

From the military community has come, foremost, the territorial, sovereign, centralized political state…But there have been other organizations, too, that have taken the discipline, the centralized command, the rationalized regimentation, and the barracks collectivism of the military as models. Among them are the kinds of factories that replaced the guilds in postmedieval Europe, the workhouses, prisons, and asylums that began to spring up in increasing numbers, and even the publicly operated schools. So, too, have certain religious and ethnic groups, in the interests of military action, occasionally adopted military principles of organization and action.

As Nisbet observed, discussed in an earlier post here, the core internal social conflict between kinship and military is control over young men.¹ In times of peace their primary allegiance is to the family, their kin, or the clan. In times of war, that bond is severed so that their primary allegiance may become that of the brothers in arms and the chain of command. Through history, Nisbet observes, we see this tug-of-war, between the temporalist values of the kinship community and the spatialist values of the military community.

The definitive victory of the spatials is only finally achieved with the establishment of a permanent standing army. Only then are young men permanently alienated from their kinship bonds. Only then is space bias built right into the social order and norms, permanently subverting the gemeinschaft values of family, kinship, and the intermediary associations that have leaned on and extrapolated those customs and traditional values.

Certainly, such spatials will exploit the language of kinship, with appeals to notions such as “brothers in arms,” or “mother land,” but the triumph of militarism over kinship is always the suppression of gemeinschaft under gesellschaft. It is a further step down the path into the iron cage of rationality. When they appeal to your compassion and human decency on behalf of war, this is the subtext that temporals need to keep front of mind. This is the meta-agenda. My book aspires to provide a deeper insight into what’s fully at stake in such phenotype conflicts, and maybe even suggest more productive paths of response.

So, in the meantime, under the constant barrage of war-mongering, if your values align with those of family, organic community, concrete orders, norms, and institutions of free association, stay vigilant. And stay tuned. The book is coming. Soon.

And if you haven’t yet, and want to be among the first to get the new book, please…

Also, if you know anyone else interested in this kind of an approach to understanding the world, please…

Be seeing you!

1. Though, of course, following the logic of managerial liberalism, now we casually pour our uniformed young women into the charnel house of war. In case you had any doubt about the self-destructiveness of space biased empires.