Self-Evident, Redux?

I enjoyed our discussion about Schmitt, though now that I reflect upon it, I haven't raised my opinion of Schmitt at all. I still think that his points are, for the most part, obvious. His definition of political still strikes me as annoyingly limited, actually. As I said in my first post, "politics" is what happens when two people interact. So I'll start from there.

Politics is what makes us different from atoms, which is what makes social science different from physics. My definition is not exactly a new one, either, but I don't purport it to be. In fact, the phrasing I'm using is reminiscent of Complexity by Waldrop. That book is essentially a brief history of the founding of the Complexity school of thought: that life, economics, evolution, etc., are governed by a simple set of rules that cause them to do some pretty complex things. It's related closely to autocatalytic sets. Anyway, at one point in this whole process, the social scientists are talking with the physicists, and they decide that the main difference between the two is that physicists deal with "dumb" particles. So political science is the study of "smart particles," ones that can remember the past and think about the future. And politics is what happens that's different from a dumb particle's reaction.



And yes, as you interact with people, you decide who are your friends and who are your enemies. So maybe Schmitt's a predecessor to Kojak: Who loves ya, baby? But I find this whole thing to be too obvious to even have been revolutionary in 1929.

So how could Schmitt have become famous? Well, because his IR implications seem to indicate that since killing is the only political thing you can do, you had might as well design your government to kill people really well. So how about that? Hitler. Maybe this is the vital piece of political wisdom that that Federation historian forgot in "Patterns of Force," which I mentioned earlier (note: I'm linking to a wiki, but it's for a piece of recent fiction and it's Memory Alpha, where I trust that there are enough Star Trek geeks like myself to remove the errors present in Wikipedia).

Anyway, back to smart and dumb particles and Carl Schmitt. I'm surprised that we didn't get into the more Nietzschean implications of Schmitt's final warning. Okay, we've got us and them. We're good, they're evil. But now we're at that postmodern point where we can't claim that their evil because we can listen to them. So now it's "We represent humanity" versus "We represent humanity" on the other side. You lose meaning, war starts only making meta-sense, and the next thing you know, crabs on a beach.

Which brings me to my actual point, the nature of postmodern war. Unfortunately, we only just barely touched upon this a couple of times in class. Most obviously, we hit upon it during the Cola Wars discussion - is there a limit to propoganda? Well, the Cola Wars seem to tell us that yes, there is an end to propaganda. In war, you need to be able to villify your enemy, or else there would be no reason to fight against them. How do you do that? Propaganda? But what if you can hear their side too, thanks to the miracle of modern communication? How can you claim that they are the evil other when you can talk to them? The final implication is that a postmodern war is unwinnable. This too is pretty self-evident, considering the empirical evidence of every war after WWII, and how great is it that we haven't actually "declared" war since then, either (I agree with PTJ: this legal distinction is significant)?

We find these implications in Aliens, Ender's Game, and Starship Troopers. How do you have a war against something in the future? Make it impossible to communicate with them. Though this is probably most evident in Aliens, it's also clearly a significant part of the other two's wars. The only way to win a war after the modern era is to somehow make it a modern war. (Modern in the epoch sense, not the "current" sense.)

So can Schmitt still be relevant as anything other than a history lesson in the postmodern era? I think not. And what's the last paragraph about? I think it's a last attempt to rail against liberalism and what turned into postmodernism, because liberalism puts a dishonest face on the reality of his "politics." It turns out that liberalism is another form of politics, but one that trys to deny that it is "political." How rude. How postmodern. Certainly the path to the Last Man, not the Ubermensch.

And back to Nietzsche and Prof PTJ's post. The quote that he pulls from On the Genealogy of Morals reminds me strikingly of Carl Sagan's reason for studying science. It's also his argument against people who claim that science makes people meaningless in the universe:

Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago. We are, as I like to say, starstuff. (The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)

And another of his famous quotes: "We are a way for the universe to know itself." (Cosmos) The study of such things, as Nietzsche's quote indicates, gives meaning to our very existence. Why we seek out new worlds and new civilizations. Why we boldly go where no man has gone before. Or, put more dramatically,

They used to say if man could fly, he'd have wings. But he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn't reached the moon, or that we hadn't gone on to Mars, and then to the nearest star? That's like saying that you wished you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great great great great grandfather used to. I'm in command. I could order this. But I'm not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this. But I must point out that the possibilities, the potential for knowledge and advancement is equally great. Risk... Risk is our business. That's what this starship is all about. That's why we're aboard her. (Kirk, TOS: "Return to Tomorrow")

It's a Kirk speech. (voice breaks) Works every time.

[A word on my title: I did a search of Backyard Rocket's RSS feed and found that I've used the term "self-evident" three times in my blogging. My original, from which I got the title for this post, was "Self-Evident Truths," about Manifest Destiny. The second time I mentioned it was in my scathing review of Weber. And now I've used it again for Schmitt. For Stephanson, I used it to say that I hoped that his points were self-evident but I feared that they were not. In Weber's case, I ended up giving him the benefit of the doubt in my class reflection. But for Schmitt, even after our class, I still claim wholeheartedly that his points are indeed self-evident.]