Mainstream political commentators and empirically minded political scientists have been sounding the alarm about growing social polarization within the liberal-democratic world and between the Global North and the Global South. Radical critics of liberal-democratic capitalism should perhaps be pleased: sharpening social contradictions portend an era of fundamental change. It does feel as if we have entered into a period of severe social crisis, but the dominant political signs point to the right and not the left (as narrowly or broadly as one wants to extend the concept of “left”) capitalizing on the tensions. Far right parties have been elected in Sweden, Italy, and Slovakia, the atavistic populism of Modi rules the world’s largest country, Israel’s Netanyahu has just declared war on Hamas (and by extension, the Palestinian people generally). Impossible as it is to believe, there is a 50 50 chance that Donald Trump wins the US Presidency a second time. First time tragedy, second time farce indeed.
The left does not suffer from a lack of ideas but from a lack of credibility. The far left is too concentrated in academia to have a noticeable effect on global political trends or national policy. The social democratic left, it seems, has burned too many bridges to the working class in Europe to function as an effective counter to the right-wing outrage machine. The right has effectively mobilised anxieties about immigration and economic stagnation while the left too often responds with slogans about open borders and unlimited hospitality towards migrants that sound the right notes and are rooted in the correct life-values, but fail to resonate politically and do not address the real pressures on working class living standards that keep people awake at night.
From a philosophical perspective what worries me is that, in the abstract, the left has the better objective arguments. Migrants suffer from structures and dynamics not of their own choosing; erecting barriers that cause them to drawn in the Mediterranean is inhuman. Yet, time and again, abstract invocations of humanitarian concern fail to carry the day, their force dying out as soon as they run into the brick wall of political expediency. The abiding belief of philosophy is that the truth will out and the better argument will eventually carry the day. But where is this power when it comes to the resolution of long standing political problems. Hamas launched the October attacks on Israel because Israeli policy over seventy years have rendered talk useless. But it does not take a strategic genius to see that Hamas’ strikes will unify what was becoming a deeply divided Israeli society, give carte blanche to settlers to launch even more extreme racist violence against Palestinians, and allow the Israeli defence forces to flatten Gaza and whatever they decide to bomb. Philosophically, in other words, Hamas’s decision was understandable,
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history will not be surprised that the immediate pressures of political decision-making have once again trumped philosophical argument. When push comes to shove, critical voices without armed backing are easily liquidated. Socrates was executed, Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, and Spinoza sent off to Leiden to grind lenses. Christianity is a philosophy of love and Marx proclaimed that the workers of the world had no country. But Christians have loved their enemies by destroying them and the workers of the world are rather too easily mobilised to kill each other for the sake of a flag.
That the same general problems seems to repeat itself for thousands of years must be dismaying to anyone who is committed to the principle that fundamental social problems can be solved by rational argument and without violence. I believe that all philosophies, even those which try to explain the historical necessity of violence, are peace-loving at root. Philosophers talk and write and even if what they talk and write about is the reason why war and violence can never be eliminated from history, still they assert that through the tip of a pen and not the barrel of a gun. Such thinkers thus draw a distinction, at least in practice, between their own commitments to peaceful argument and the historical forces that cause wars. But if it is possible to sit quietly and write about historical causes, to understand them in other words, it should be possible to convince the people who make the decisions to understand those causes too, and then avoid them when the pressure that turn conflict towards mass violence increase.
Should philosophers fold their tent and stop arguing that a better means of social change than organized life-destruction is possible? Perhaps, but that would be to admit that philosophy as such has no role. I am not talking about “philosophy” the academic subject, but philosophy as it has always been: open ended inquiry into the human condition. Since we must live together on this planet, open ended inquiry into the human condition cannot but arrive at problems of how we can at least stay out of each other’s way and at best how we can organize global life such that our different societies and cultures form harmonious communities that dynamically interact in ways that preserve what is valuable in the existing cultures while constantly engendering novel forms of symbolic life.
Let us assume that philosophers (that is, anyone who engages in these sorts of reflections and makes these sorts of inquiries) achieves some level of understanding of the problems involved. Understanding is not an abstract intellectual achievement; by its very nature it has practical and transformative effects. If one understands what poison is, one does not ingest it. If one claims to understand but continues to act in a way contrary to the truth purportedly understood, one has not yet achieved real understanding. So politicians who claim to understand what is good for their own people, or, indeed, the whole of humanity, manifestly do not understand what is good if they mobilise armies to kill for it. All human goods, those that can be realised in time, are experiences or activities. Experiences and activities are functions of living, self-conscious organisms. if human goods are functions of human experience and activity then they are, in general, universal. Different people value different experiences and activities, and, to them, the content matters. However, from a philosophical perspective that tries to understand the good for human beings as such, what matters is the form: all human goods are expressions of our capacity to sense, experience, and interpret the world and to act in it in various ways.
What would be the practical result of understanding this conclusion (assuming that it is true)? No one would be willing to kill– to undermine the conditions of experience and activity, i.e., the basis of all human goods– for the sake of imposing any particular content on other people who have different concrete values. In short, a life-valuable approach to the problem of the good, properly understood, would undercut all justifications for the use of life-destructive violence in the service of particular ends.
Neither national security, nor spiritual truth, nor economic growth is good in and of itself. National security that can only be achieved by making the peoples of the world friends to each other. Pursuing national security by turning others into enemies to be liquidated undermines its aim. As Hamas has just shown, enemies will find ways to strike blows against even the most powerful opponent. Prosyletizing about the one true way to freedom or salvation likewise is self-undermining. People must find their own path to spiritual truth. The fact that there are many spiritual traditions and that atheists find meaning and purpose in their lives is proof enough that there no religion is compulsory for our spiritual health. If, therefore, that which religious believers value in their beliefs is spiritual health, they must agree that if others feel the same way about different traditions, or no religious tradition at all, then all are valid ways of realizing spiritual health. Killing others in the belief that you are saving their souls is therefore a contradiction. Believers who understand this conclusion will let everyone live in peace and allow God to sort out our souls after a full and free life.
Likewise, economic growth has no value in itself but is good only in relation to its contributions to overall human well-being. Economic growth must both be measured and governed by life-valuable standards. Growth is good to the extent that it is used to satisfy fundamental natural and socio-cultural needs and that it does not undermine the life-support capacity of nature and depend upon the exploitation of labour. Economic growth of a life-valuable sort would require democratic cooperation and sharing and not, as at present, zero sum conflicts to commodify the world’s life-sustaining resources.
The struggle to promote this sort of philosophical understanding is therefore far from useless. However, I do not ask the question of whether it was useful or not, but whether it was powerless or not. And on this question the answer is perhaps more troubling. It seems as though philosophers will never be kings because, in so far as they are philosophers they argue, but kings must be willing to use the sword.
But must they? For obvious reasons social critics point to the violent conflicts roiling one part of the globe or another, but perhaps it is worth pointing out that many, many more conflicts and tensions are resolved without warfare. There have been precious few years over the past 5 millennia free of war somewhere, but with only two exceptions, 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the whole world has not been at war simultaneously. (And even then, not all nations were direct parties to the fighting, although some, in North Africa and the South Pacific, were victimized by the great powers fighting there). Why should we not see this fact as a hopeful sign, as proof that argument can resolve differences?
The hope is reinforced when we remind ourselves of another historical fact: no movement, no matter how ruthless, has ever been able to kill all of its opponents. Therefore, ultimately, struggles must terminate in the agreement of the parties. Either one side (or some of that side) are won over to their former opponent’s position, or they at east agree to some sort of modus vivendi. Again, if we actually understand what history teaches (I am not pleading a moral case first of all, but claiming that history teaches the lesson that non-violent conflict resolution is ultimately necessary) different choices can be made as the pressure builds towards war to relieve rather than increase it until armed violence becomes inevitable. The war in Ukraine is a case study in what not to do as tensions increase. .
One must distinguish, I think, mass violence from mass struggle. Philosophical arguments are not spells or incantations that change reality just as soon as they are spoken. If war is politics by other means (von Clausewitz) perhaps we can say that demonstrations, strikes, pickets, boycotts, and the organization of new political movements are argument by other means. Like arguments they attempt to change reality without physically liquidating the opponents. However heroic struggles to the death have been portrayed as in history, the attempt to achieve fundamental social change through violent means never succeeds in fully destroying the enemy and always damages and destroys the democratic values of the movement that chooses the violent path. The historical evidence suggests that people do not normally spontaneously kill other humans, they have to be motivated to do so. The hardening of head and heart which killing requires impairs the subsequent ability to live in democratic peace afterwards.
Understanding is the precondition of our transcending mechanical necessity in history. It is true that conflicts can reach a point where the use of violence becomes necessary. If you know that your opponent is going to strike you must strike first or risk destruction. But if we study the history of past conflicts we can see that there are typically opportunities to defuse tensions that are missed. The US could have sat down with Russia to discuss its security concerns; the Minsk accords could have been enforced. Israel could have allowed for the creation of a territorially integral, fully sovereign Palestinian state. These failures are a tragedy for everyone involved, but they also teach a lesson for the future: one must take the other side’s concerns seriously.
When parties to a conflict start from that principle (not a naive moralistic assumption but fruit of historical inquiry) they can become partners in dialogue. They do not have to love or even care for each other, they just have to respect the fact that the other side has a perspective. Sharing perspectives and finding a compromise is life-preserving: neither side gets everything that they want, but everyone lives to enjoy another day, and as enjoyable days pile up, ancient hatreds fade and new forms of cooperative interaction, new forms of world-creation and life-value become possible.