NOMOS OF THE FRACTALS, RENOVATED
RELAUNCHING THE SPATIAL REVOLUTION
In beginning to lay the groundwork for an exploration of the phase of the phenotype wars which I’ve come to call, following Carl Schmitt, the spatial revolution, I reread this post initially put up November 15, 2023. With all the related reading I’ve done since, it still seemed to stand up well. And in fact it does still read like a useful transition from the phenotype wars book to the current spatial revolution project. So, with some editing for context and more recent insights, for newer readers who may have missed it, and older ones who might appreciate a refresher, I’m reposting it.
I’ve turned to reading Carl Schmitt’s later, geo-juridical works. While doing the final draft of my own (must read!) book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, I breezed through the thoroughly breezy Land and Sea.1 In fact, the latter even made a last-minute appearance in the former’s final draft. I also made my way through the more deliberative The Nomos of the Earth.2 I expected he’d have something to say about that historical dynamic I’ve identified as the phenotype wars, and in that I wasn’t disappointed. At the same time, Schmitt’s analysis emphasized to me dimensions of my own book’s analysis that remain yet to be fleshed out.
Briefly, in broad strokes, Schmitt argues that there has been a dramatic change in the nomos of Europe. Very briefly (hopefully not too crudely), by nomos Schmitt is referring to the broad juridical order that founds a particular civilization. This new nomos involves the shift in European civilization that occurred around the time of what is often called the Age of Discovery: when Europeans – especially those from France, Spain, Portugal, England, and the Netherlands – set out in boats to explore the rest of the world. This was a shift from a land-based to a sea-based culture.
Land based culture is more inclined toward tradition, custom, and ritual. The folkways of a people are etched into the land as literal pathways: from the village path, down to the stream; to the migration trails of nomadic peoples; to the later trade routes of mercantile empires. Specific topographic features provide guideposts and ceremonial locations. The memory of a people and their way of life is etched into the physical features of the land that hosts their lives and relations. Eventually the contour lines of farmed fields, of built houses and barns, of villages and public memorials and marketplaces, delineated a people’s traditions and communal order. Their values, institutions, and community are subtly embedded in the places which have hosted and nurtured their ways of life. This is why land-based societies are more traditional societies.
The sea, of course, does not have this quality. Where the sea is distinctive is where the land intrudes into it, such as a shoal, perhaps creating hazardous sailing conditions. Once freed from the land, though, the sea is a vast expanse of open space, a flat horizon in all directions. The sea is a liberation from all the reminders of one’s history; it is a space unconstrained by natural boundaries, or human imposed contours. While the land limits and funnels its people through age-old pathways, and imposes a topography of memory, the sea is an open, borderless space, which liberates from the landed shackles of the past, creates limitless and fluid opportunities for movement and self-invention.
While, again, this is painting in broad strokes, anyone familiar with the themes explored in this Substack over the last couple years, and now rigorously laid out in A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, will recognize this transition described by Schmitt as a manifestation of the transition from a temporalist to a spatialist social hegemony. Now, Schmitt does seem to take the view that the geography or topography is deterministic. Those who have read my most recent book will recognize this attitude in my appropriation of Harold Innis. Innis too leaned toward geographic/technologic determinism. But I’d say the same thing to Schmitt that I said to Innis: but why suddenly now? Why Harold, did the Egyptians suddenly take to using papyrus (see here)? Likewise, Carl, why did the Western Europeans suddenly flood out onto the sea?
The sea had always been there, for centuries before. And if one wants to appeal to new technical discoveries in ship building or navigational instruments, fine, but the same question arises: why now? The principles of nature were always there to be employed in better seafaring technology; why was there sudden attention to, or interest in, problems that enabled long-distance sailing? Again, as readers of my book will know, the answer seems obvious to me: there was a gradual change of the “people.” Dynamics internal to the human condition, which I’ve called the phenotype wars, involved a transition into an era in which different personality types came to increasing influence the society. Spatials were far more likely to be increasingly interested in solving the problems that would allow them to free themselves from the shackles of land-based life, with its terrestrially embodied traditions and memories.
So, it isn’t about what sea-based life did to people, compared to land-based life, but rather which kind of people were more disposed to pursuing sea-based life. After all, Schmitt himself acknowledges that there have been, and as he wrote continued to be, land-based peoples who were terrified of the sea. Temporals should be afraid of the sea and would be if they understood the threat it posed to their traditional societies. That’s enough from Schmitt’s geo-juridical works, for now. However, it struck me in contemplating all this, as mentioned above, it does emphasize dimensions of my own book’s analysis that remain yet to be fleshed out. So, I’ll just say a few words about that.
Those who have read my book might observe: but wait, what do you mean there was some transition from temporalist to spatialist (let’s say, relative) hegemony with the Age of Discovery? Speaking within the U.S. context, you identified the transition gaining traction with the victory of the spatialist/left in the long French Revolution, after WWI, then identified the early 60s as the phase transition from a temporalist to a spatialist society. But that was many centuries after the Age of Discovery. How can both those claims be true? And of course, the answer is that the phenotype wars are waged on many scales of both occasion and place.
Yes, I can understand someone objecting that I should have dealt with this in the book. But really, it’s already over 120,000 words. I had to draw a line somewhere. And this is a topic that leads into a very different domain of analysis. I suppose at some point I will have to do this basic research.3 But, yes, there is still a major work to be done in unpacking the precise history of the phenotype wars, at least as they’ve progressed in Atlantica, since the fall of Rome. The challenge though is that there is not one single line of history to be sketched out and described in such a project. On the contrary, it is best to think of the phenotype wars as a fractal system. Benoît Mandelbrot identified such systems, in which the meta-unit is composed of subunits which appear to be of the same composition, simply at another level.
I don’t know how useful this analogy is, but in case it is, have a look at a broccoli. The different branches of the plant you’ve taken from your garden or grocery store themselves can be separated into what looks like independent, just smaller, broccoli plants. But then if you look more closely, those smaller broccoli plants turn out also to be composed of branches, which can be separated out into yet smaller broccoli plants. So, your broccoli plant is composed of mini-broccoli plants, operating at multiple levels of analysis. (The etymology of “analysis” being rooted in the breaking up of things into their basic units.)
This is I think the most fertile way of understanding the history of the phenotype wars. At a civilizational level, such as in Europe, in broad strokes, we can see movements from spatial to temporal, and back, in (relative) social hegemony: spatialist Roman Empire falls, temporalist Medieval Europe grows, eventually spatialist Europe emerges again with the rise of the Age of Discovery (the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution). However, and this is the key point, there really is no European-wide, definitive resolution of the phenotype wars. We saw, for instance in the work of Mack Walker on the German hometowns that, even in Europe, the pluralist constitution persisted far longer in Germany than it did across much of the western expanse of the continent. Rather than some homogenous history, across a countless complex of locations – in occasion and place – there are numerous phenotype wars being waged.
In some cases, the apparent overall trend is resisted, maybe even reversed, for at least some period. Arguably, the Restorations in Europe, following the defeat of Napoleon constituted such instances. Arguably the creation of the Articles of Confederation in America, following the war of independence, constituted such an instance. The current populist uprisings may prove to entail such an instance. These battles are constantly unfolding. Of course, inevitably, as society becomes increasingly technologically complex, the playing field tilts to the benefit of spatials – for all the reasons clearly laid out in my last book (and summarized here).
But there is usually some resistance by temporals, and occasionally effective resistance. The localized phenotype wars continue, and the outcome of the meta-level phenotype war, with its ebb and flows, successes and setbacks, is ultimately determined by – because composed of – all those endless local phenotype battles. The big broccoli doesn’t exist without all the little broccoli that compose it. Likewise with the phenotype wars. The civilizational level wars are the result of all the local level battles, over empires, states, and societies. Eventually even over villages, churches, and school boards.
This is why it is possible to speak of a spatialization of Europe (or Atlantica, or the West) during the era of the Renaissance-Age of Discovery-Scientific Revolution, while noting that not all the spatialist victories were during this period. Long before this period, spatials enjoyed successes with the revival and adoption of the Roman Law within the medieval universities (as discussed through both the lens of Nisbet, in my most recent book, and through the lens of Grossi, in the posts to this Substack constituting the raw material for the coming book on pluralism).
But likewise in other areas of this civilization, particularly the settler colonies, such as in the Americas: freed from the increasing grip of spatialist institutions and practices back on the home continent, the hegemony of spatial values and imperatives were delayed due to the opportunity to renew temporalist communities. And of course, as Schmitt might have observed, temporalist communities rooted in a renewed terrestrial connection, with a new land.
The consequence of spatial expansionism in the Age of Discovery, even if only briefly in the broad sweep of history, allowed for a new temporalist sensibility to sink its roots into the soil of a new land-based society. Therefore, it too then had to experience, on a local level, its own spatial revolution. Schmitt’s nomos as well as his spatial revolution, then, are themselves manifestations of just such a fractal system: always in play as local struggles are worked out. If a new nomos arises, it only does so because a critical mass of success in local conflicts has gradually given rise to sufficient hegemony to allow for a phase transition into the new order.
By now, hopefully, it is clear how complex and demanding the writing of such a history would be. So maybe you’ll excuse me for not trying to squeeze all this too into the last book. But now that the new book has sketched out the theoretical contours of the phenotype wars as an explanatory model for both history and our present situation, increasingly this is the direction my attention is turning. That’s why I’m reading Schmitt’s geo-juridical works. And in the next post, we’ll turn to a closer reading of Schmitt’s Land and Sea.
So…If this is the kind of thing that interests you, not only should you buy my (must read!) most recent book, but if you haven’t yet, you might want to…
And if you know anyone else interested in these kinds of big theoretical and historical questions, please…
Meanwhile. Be seeing you!
Carl Schmitt, Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation, ed. Russell A. Berman, trans. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin (Candor, NY: Telos Press Publishing, 2015).
Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum, trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2006).
And to some degree, that is exactly what I’ve been undertaking with both the soon approaching new book on the pluralist constitution and the current undertaking to study the history of spatial revolution.