Forcing the World to Take Sides: The Metaphysics of Political War

The unfolding struggle over the unity of existence

Like the onset of a terrible hurricane I overwhelmed Elam in its entirety. I cut off the head of Teumann, their king, – the haughty one, who plotted evil. Countless of his warriors I slew. Alive, with my hands, I seized his fighters. With their corpses I filled the plain about Susa... Their blood I let run down the Ulai [River]; its water I dyed red like wool.

-From an Assyrian inscription describing Ashburnipal’s victory over the Elamites

To live in the West in 2024 is to have a keen sense that the society which one inhabits is hurtling down a railway line towards some kind of collision. There is a growing feeling among the people I talk to in my daily life that a confrontation of some kind is coming - the only pertinent questions being who the protagonists will be, when it will take place, what will be its trigger, and what its aftermath will look like. You likely know exactly what I am talking about, because you likely feel it too. Our lizard brains understand it viscerally: soon there will be a fight. We all hope that it remains within the realm of politics, and stays out of the physical world; I am hopeful, but not optimistic. Send lawyers, guns and money - the shit will hit the fan.

This simmering sense of tension is no accident. It is a return to the natural way of things when pre-political loyalties - to church or nation - break down and the most elementary desire of mankind therefore reveals itself. Suddenly, in such circumstances, everything comes up for grabs; not merely physical loot or political power but the capacity to unify everything within one’s own chosen framework of authority. Because the set of givens which unified the previous iteration of society no longer hold, a struggle emerges to force a new set of givens on the whole and thereby unite all afresh. With this comes the promise of doing nothing less than re-imagining creation. All norms - social, economic, cultural, linguistic, biological, spiritual - can be made in a brand new image, and ruthlessly imposed on everyone.

These reflections came into focus for me when reading an article in the most recent Claremont Review of Books (winter 2023/24), written by a man called Brian Patrick Eha, on the subject of Cormac McCarthy’s fiction. In the middle section, Eha reproduces part of a speech given by the Judge, the chief antagonist of McCarthy’s great masterpiece, Blood Meridian:

[W]ar is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

As Eha then elucidates for us, the Judge is here presenting war as a way of forcing the world itself to take sides: war presents two possible futures, and insists that reality itself grant one or the other the victory. This makes its very destructiveness powerfully creative. The winning of the struggle causes the victor’s future to emerge triumphant and write itself on creation.

McCarthy, we are told, had the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus on his mind when writing the novel. In particular, his notes reveal an interest in this fragment:

War is the father of us all and our king. War discloses who is godlike and who is but a man, who is a slave and who is a freeman.

In McCarthy’s hands we come to understand that this is no product of a ‘Boys’ Own’ comic book aesthetic or teenage Nietzscheanism but a metaphysical statement. Because war is a ‘forcing of the unity of existence’ it makes the victor in the image of God. It grants him the power over that unity, and the godlike capacity to remake the conditions of thought itself.

I happen to have been reading this review in the middle of listening to an audiobook version of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest volume, The End of Everything, which gives flesh to this concept in the most visceral way. In it, Hanson describes four episodes from history in which war descended, as he puts it, into ‘annihilation’: the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the Great; the death of Carthage in the Third Punic War; the final end of Byzantine Greek civilisation at the hands of the Turks in 1453; and the terrible carnage unleashed on the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes. Hanson give us a vivid historical account of the circumstances in which humans turn from mere violence to a desire to obliterate every trace of their enemies once and for all.

What has struck me most about Hanson’s account of these episodes from history is the truth of the Judge’s observation. There are moments when war transforms itself into War: something that has a life of its own. And in those circumstances victory turns from something temporal (the conquest of land or the winning of some concession) to something metaphysical. It is not just that Thebes was defeated by Alexander, or that Rome annexed Carthage, or that the Turks took over Constantinople, or that the Conquistadors sacked Tenochtitlan. It was that in those victories entire ways of life - entire modes of being in the world - were irrevocably broken, stamped out, and replaced wholesale by something utterly other. And in those moments truly War bestowed upon the victors a sense of the ‘godlike’ in that they were able to impose a new and alien metaphysics where a different conceptualisation of being had once held sway.

McCarthy obviously had in mind ‘the evening redness in the West’ - the prospect of the bloody and total triumph of the conceptual conditions of the West over those of the native peoples who had once held the vast territory of the ‘American West’ as their own. But the novel has a bigger and more important task: to teach us that we cannot escape War in this grander sense - it is, to draw from another Heraclitus fragment which McCarthy appreciated, ‘the natural state of man’. This is because command over the very conditions of thought, and of being, is in our nature to lust after, and to seek to grasp, when we are not constrained by principle or pre-political agreed norms which we unconsciously and unreflectingly abide by.

At this juncture it helps to return to a subject which I have raised elsewhere: Michel Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz’s maxim, so that ‘politics is the continuation of war by other means’. What Foucault meant by this was that war had been gradually subsumed over the centuries within the practice of politics in the West, but that - by definition - this meant that war was in a sense more integral to human social life than even politics. Before there was the latter, there was the former. This is an anthropological question which is unanswerable. But it does bring into focus the political sphere as being something altogether different to how it is typically imagined - not as a method of finding compromise between competing interests, or a way of managing society, or even a way of improving material conditions, but rather as a way of ‘forcing the unity of existence’ along the lines which McCarthy’s Judge describes. A way of putting two possible modes of being into contention, and forcing reality to pick a winner. In that moment that winner then becomes godlike, because he is able to impose on all of society his future - the norms and values and understandings on which he operates.

This puts our current crisis into a new perspective. Readers will intuitively recognise the face of War in this sense in the predicament we face, wherein the most elementary truths of nature, physics, biology, politics, law and morality are in the process of the most profound problematisation, and two implacably irreconcilable worldviews are being thrust into contention against each other as a result. In this process the world is truly being forced to take sides, so that one or the other can find its total godlike triumph - and, to go back to the Judge, a ‘forcing of the unity of existence’ is thus coming into effect before our eyes.

We cannot predict how long this period of contention will take or what the results will be - my sense is that we are only at the very beginning of the unfolding of that conflict. But understanding its nature, and its origins, helps us at least to grasp what is at stake. And this tells us that we will soon surpass any moment in which political compromise remains viable or satisfactory.

This is a difficult position for conservatives to accept. Conservatives, by their nature, do not go looking for political conflict - and conservatives in Britain in particular tend above all to want to avoid having to think about politics at all. Hobbit-like, they prize consensus and a cozy life in comfortable burrows. And they like the idea that both they and their political opponents are all essentially decent chaps who can swap power back and forth without a great deal of disruption or unpleasantness. The result of this is that British conservatism remains mired in what the online American ‘dissident right’ often refers to as ‘normiecon’ thinking, exhibited for instance by the ilk of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who still finds himself able to say things like the Tories should accept ‘losing with dignity’ and that, since Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are so much alike, ‘Britain’s political centre [is in] rude good health’.

This kind of attitude might preserve the peace and quiet in Hobbiton for a little while longer. But as Tolkien was at pains to point out in the final section of The Return of the King, War would come in the end for the Hobbits as well - because, to return once more to the Judge, when a forcing is underway, it will in the end result in a ‘larger will’ binding everyone whether they wish to participate or not. War is no respecter of conscientious objection. In the final reckoning it will bring all before its tribunal and ‘select’.

The slow realisation is dawning that this is the world we are sliding into as the foundations of our societies - the broad metaphysical consensus on which we have hitherto operated - crack and subside. Political War will bring a binding unification, but the forcing will come first within ruins which we all must hope remain metaphorical rather than literal. This is a prospect which we must all mourn and regret. But a new mode of being will emerge irrespective of how we feel about it. And War cannot be gainsaid once it has begun.