Bobbitt . . . or 'Spengler' on Russia's role in the Caucasus?

Our Contemporary 'Spengler'
"of the boudoir eyes"
(Image from Asia Times)

I had wondered what Philip Bobbitt might have to say about the scenario in Georgia and how it fits his views on the current trajectory of states from nation states to market states. Here, in "Russia's aggression in Georgia is a portent of perils to come," Spectator.co.uk (August 13, 2008), is his take on things in the Caucasus:

[In the wake of the USSR's collapse,] developed states began to move from the constitutional order of nation states, which had fought the Cold War, to market states. In Europe, the EU began to evolve away from a super-nation state toward a more flexible congeries of national enclaves: Scots, Lombards, Catalonians and others found a constitutional umbrella within which they could develop. In America, deregulation of everything from industrial practices to women's reproduction, the replacement of conscription by an all-volunteer force, the substitution of job retraining for unemployment compensation -- were all heralds of this change. In China, the embrace of free trade, private investment and market pricing were similar events. Elsewhere, sovereign wealth funds created further harbingers of this new order. A global system of human rights norms was given martial effect in the former state of Yugoslavia, another event that reflected this dramatic evolution of states.

But not in Russia. There political and economic leaders -- and their Western advisers -- confused the market with the market state, creating a vast criminal enterprise that more resembled the Mafia than the multinational corporation. In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the nation state has come roaring back. It was Vladimir Putin who described the end of the USSR as 'the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century'. He will not be able to reverse the ultimate trend toward market states; this new constitutional order is too formidable an innovation meekly to give way. Indeed the Russian tactic of granting vast numbers of Ossetians Russian citizenship -- which gave it the legal pretext that it used to intervene -- is at bottom a market state manoeuvre which encourages multiple juridical identities. But the hope that the transition away from nation states could be done without bloodshed in Europe has been dashed. The end of the first era of globalised constitutional transformation has come with unpredictable consequences because war, as Clausewitz told us, has its own momentum. I should be surprised if there were no further violence in Georgia.

But this leads us again to the question of Bobbitt's distinction between a nation state and a market state, which I thumbnailed as:

The former promises to protect and increase its citizens' material well-being, whereas the latter promises to guarantee and maximize its citizens' opportunities (cf. Bobbitt, Terror and Consent, pages 11-12)

I was citing Bobbitt's recent Terror and Consent, but he made the same distinction in his earlier tome, The Shield of Achilles, which I haven't read but which some contributor to Wikipedia has, for we find there in the entry on Shield of Achilles a summary of Book 1, Part 3 that provides a more expansive explanation than my brief one:

The constitutional order of the 21st century . . . market state will supersede the 20th century nation state as a consequence of the end of the Long War [i.e., the 'war' lasting from 1914 to 1989]. A constitutional order is distinguished by its unique claim for legitimacy. Give us power, the nation state said, and we will improve your material well-being. But whereas the nation state, with its mass free public education, universal franchise, and social security policies promised to guarantee the welfare of the nation, the market state promises to maximize the opportunity of the people and thus tends to privatize many state activities and to make voting and representative government less influential and more responsive to the market. This does not mean that market states cease to be interested in the well-being of their peoples or that nationalism is any less potent but that the State no longer claims legitimacy on that unique basis.

That's well-put by some anonymous commentor on Bobbitt's Shield of Achilles. Now, bringing us back to Bobbitt's take on the Georgian crisis, we can better see what Bobbitt means in stating that for Vladimir Putin's Russia, "the nation state has come roaring back." Putin, as we know if we've been reading the papers, has reversed some of the market and political freedoms achieved by Russia in the 1990s and has promised more security for Russians in exchange for restrictions on freedom. Bobbitt thinks that this retrograde move by Russia will not be possible in the longer run, and he notes the irony that even "the Russian tactic of granting vast numbers of Ossetians Russian citizenship . . . is at bottom a market state manoeuvre which encourages multiple juridical identities."

But Russians always take a circuitous route toward the future. Last time, they detoured through the 20th century, taking 70 years to reach a future that they'd promised to leap over. This time, they're appealing to the Old Russia from before the Bolshevik Revolution and attempting to restore the old Czarist empire -- but now, as with the Czars, an empire in the interests of the Russian nation. This implies "nation" state in an even stronger sense than Bobbitt means, for we're really talking about an ethnic nationalism in which Russia uses minorities within its empire to further the power of Russians.

For this, they don't have much time.

In one of his many lunacies of great insight, "Americans play Monopoly, Russians chess," Asia Times (August 19, 2008), our current-day 'Spengler' writes:

Russia is fighting for its survival, against a catastrophic decline in population and the likelihood of a Muslim majority by mid-century. The Russian Federation's scarcest resource is people. It cannot ignore the 22 million Russians stranded outside its borders after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, nor, for that matter, small but loyal ethnicities such as the Ossetians. Strategic encirclement, in Russian eyes, prefigures the ethnic disintegration of Russia, which was a political and cultural entity, not an ethnic state, from its first origins.

The Russians, argues Spengler, are inviting loyal ethnic groups to become 'Russian' by joining its declining Russian majority -- not precisely an ethnic state, but an ethnically dominated one. If Spengler is right, then Putin's Russia is engaged in some long-term planning to ensure that ethnic Russians come out on top in the changing demographics of an uncertain future.

Who's right? Spengler or Bobbitt? I'd prefer to think that Bobbitt has his finger on the measured pulse of a rational history, but Spengler reminds us that in history, there will be blood.

Speaking of Spengler...

Franz Rosenzweig

(Image from Asia Times Online)

I had previously -- possibly yesterday -- wondered about the theological debt owed by 'Spengler' to Franz Rosenzweig.

With that wondrous query in mind, I did more scrounging about at Spengler's webpage on the Asia Times website and found an article reviewing a recent German edition -- by Gesine Palmer and Yossef Schwartz -- of Rosenzweig's Der Stern Der Erlosung (The Star of Redemption). Spengler's review article, "Oil on the flames of civilizational war" (December 2, 2003), has some choice quotes from Rosenzweig's book, framed by Spengler's observations:

Most of the German-language material in the Palmer-Schwartz collection can be found easily in Rosenzweig's book The Star of Redemption, available in English translation. Few Americans have the training to read it, for Rosenzweig writes in the extinct dialect of Kantian idealism. What he says about Islam, however, is reasonably straightforward. I translate from the present [Palmer-Schwartz] edition and summarize below.

Judaism began with a people, and then became a congregation, and eventually a religion, Rosenzweig argues. Christianity began with a congregation into which it then selected its people, the "new Israel". Islam, he avers, was concocted as an institutionalized religion to begin with, as a parody of Judaism and Christianity. This, however, had dreadful consequences. "Mohammed took over the notion of Revelation from the outside, which left him stuck with the pagan idea of creation as a matter of course," Rosenzweig wrote.

Allah merely is the apotheosized image of an Oriental despot, emphatically not the Judeo-Christian God of love. Rosenzweig altogether repudiates the notion of Islamic culture. As a caricature, Islam is entirely sterile: "Islam never created an Islamic art, but rather took into its service pre-Islamic art ... The pre-Islamic state, namely the Oriental state in its Byzantine form, made Islam into its state religion; the pre-Islamic spirit of the Koran adopted either pre-Islamic rationalism or mysticism and orthodoxy. In Europe, by contrast, in Christian Europe, there arose something new: Christian art, and a Christian state."

Love requires the Judeo-Christian God to create the world. By contrast, "the God of Mohammed is a creator who well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act arbitrarily. By contrast, it is most characteristic of rabbinic theology that it formulates our concept of the divine power to create in the question as to whether God created the world out of love or out of righteousness."

Allah's creation for Rosenzweig is a mere act of "magic". Muslim theology "presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at every moment. Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending heavenful of gods of polytheism."

By paganism Rosenzweig refers to a specific mindset as well as a political system which crushes individual identity into the whole. In the pagan state, he wrote in the Star, "The individual does not stand in relation to the state in the way that a part stands in relation to the whole. On the contrary, the state is all, and its electricity pulses through the veins of every individual." Unfortunately, Palmer and Schwartz do not include in their edition this and other relevant passages about paganism in general.

Spengler's agreement with Rosenzweig's portrayal of Islam as a type of monistic paganism dressed up as monotheism reminds me of Alain Besançon's query posed as an article, "What kind of religion is Islam?" (Commentary, May 2004, Volume 117, Issue: 5), which I have previously noted and which answers with this:

Christians and Jews ... may well be struck by the religious zeal of the Muslim toward a God whom they recognize as being also their God. But this God is in fact separate and distinct, and so is the relation between Him and the believing Muslim. Christians are accustomed to distinguish the worship of false gods -- that is, idolatry -- from the worship of the true God. To treat Islam suitably, it becomes necessary to forge a new concept altogether, and one that is difficult to grasp -- namely, an idolatry of the God of Israel. To put it another way, Islam may be thought of as the natural religion of the revealed God.

Both Rosenzweig and Besançon as well as Spengler consider Islam a form of pagan belief. Muslims would, clearly, find this label objectionable if not insulting, but an emotional response would be inappropriate to the intellectual critique.

Anyway, this would be neither here nor there if Spengler weren't arguing that Islam's pagan core is responsible for the current wave of jihadist attacks here, there, and everywhere. If one asks Spengler, "But why now -- why is Islam so radical right now if it's always had a pagan core?", then he will respond (cf. "Crisis of Faith in the Muslim World, Part 2: The Islamist response") that Islam's pagan core makes the Islamic world a traditional society that emphasizes not the individual but the 'tribe' and that this communal reality is threatened with annihilation by modern individualism, against which "The Islamists feel that they have nothing to lose, for the fear of cultural extinction surpasses the fear of physical death."

One possible flaw in this argument is that Spengler has also argued that 'pagan' culture does not recognize individual immortality and thus emphasizes the corporate immortality of the tribe. Yet, Islam surely offers immortality to individuals.

Or does it?

Spengler would likely assert that Islamic immortality gives no individual guarantees, aside from the immortality accorded to the martyr -- but even that is left up to the unfathomable, arbitrary will of Allah. What therefore remains, Spengler would emphasize, is the 'pagan' immortality of the tribe.

Sparkling Spengler!

Spengler

"Meet Mr. Spengler"

(Image for Asia Times Online)

His apercus, anyway. Take this one:

So much for the Americans of the left and the right: they do not know, and they cannot learn.

This one surfaces in his article that I linked to a few blog entries back. In that article, Spengler was decrying the lack of theological insight among both the critics and the defenders of Islam among non-Muslims on the right and the left (rather than the right and left generally).

But Spengler is particularly rough with the neoconservatives, perhaps because he feels closer to them:

Irving Kristol, the "godfather of neo-conservatism", once told me that he had wanted to learn German so that he might read Rosenzweig. If Kristol, the best (and perhaps the only really keen) mind among the neo-conservatives, had done so, we all might have been spared a great deal of embarrassment. As things stand, the United States is condemned to trample about the Middle East until sufficient grief and loss wake them up.

As one can infer from this snippet, Spengler doesn't have high hopes for American success in its attempt to democratize Iraq. From Franz Rosenzweig, Spengler seems to have drawn his own theological -- or better, soteriological -- insight about the role of jihad in Islam:

Western policy toward the Muslim world appears stupid and clumsy because its theological foundations are flawed. It is not what it is, nor what it was, but rather what it does that defines a religion: How does a faith address the paramount concern of human mortality, and what action does it require of its adherents? I addressed these issues under the title Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life (September 19), explaining that jihad does for Muslims precisely what Communion does for Christians. It is not a doctrine but a sacrament, that is, a holy act that transforms the actor.

I think that this remark about the sacramental nature of jihad for Muslims makes sense of its significance, and it's similar to a point that I made in some previous posts. Actually, Bin Laden made the point for me:

He [i.e., Muhammad] also said : "a martyr privileges are guaranteed by Allah; forgiveness with the first gush of his blood, he will be shown his seat in paradise, he will be decorated with the jewels of belief (Imaan), married off to the beautiful ones, protected from the test in the grave, assured security in the day of judgement, crowned with the crown of dignity, a ruby of which is better than this whole world (Duniah) and its' entire content, wedded to seventy two of the pure Houries (beautiful ones of Paradise) and his intercession on the behalf of seventy of his relatives will be accepted". Narrated by Ahmad and AtTirmithi (with the correct and trustworthy reference).

I followed that up with another post -- located here, for those who might be interested. The comments to both posts are worth perusing, particularly Erdal's, which are especially instructive due to his expertise on Islam.

Then, there is my post on Abu Yahya al-Libi, who states his view on the 'sacrament' of jihad:

"this form of worship [i.e. jihad] can only exist through the blood of those who sacrifice their souls for [Islam]..."

Why do many (or at least some) Muslims think like this about jihad? Spengler tells us to go to Rosenzweig for the answer:

[We] would do well to take a couple of days off with a copy of Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption.

Spengler (perhaps drawing upon Rosenzweig?) has a lot more to say about human sacrifice and salvation in an earlier article, "Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life":

Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins....

We are too comfortable, too clean, too squeamish, too modern to descend into the terrible space where birth, death and immortality are decided. We forget that we cannot have eternal life unless we are ready to give up this one -- and this the Muslim knows only through what we should call the sacrament of jihad. Through jihad, the Muslim does almost precisely what the Christian does at the Lord's Supper. It is the sacrifice of Jesus that grants immortal life to all Christians, that is, those who become one with Jesus by eating his flesh and drinking his blood so that the sacrifice also is theirs....

Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross to give all men eternal life, on condition that they take part in his sacrifice, either through the physical communion of the Catholic Church or the empathetic Communion of Protestantism. From a Muslim vantage point, the extreme of divine humility embodied in Jesus' sacrifice is beyond reason. Allah, by contrast, deals with those who submit to him after the calculation of an earthly despot. He demands that all Muslims sacrifice themselves by becoming warriors and, if necessary, laying their lives down in the perpetual war against the enemies of Islam.

Pretty uncompromising views on Spengler's part. Spengler elsewhere acknowledges that not all Muslims think this way, but he does believe that Islam itself is essentially this -- and yes, he does believe in essences.

Spengler is sparkling, but is he right?

The Incomplete Spengler: Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address

A Declining, Non-Western Spengler

(Image Viewable at The Asia Times Online)

It's always bracing to read Spengler.

I don't mean that Spengler (bracing though he may be). I mean the other one, the nom-de-plume of a contributor to Asia Times Online.

This other Spengler is sometimes so bracing -- such as when he suggested inviting the Russian military into Fallujah to handle it as they handled Grozny -- that I have to stop reading him for a few months ... until some mysterious inner compulsion drives me back to see what he's written lately.

I felt that compulsion yesterday ... and found this:

There is no Grace in Islam, no miracle, no expiatory sacrifice, no expression of love for mankind such that each Muslim need not be a sacrifice. On the contrary, the concept of jihad, in which the congregation of Islam is also the army, states that every single Muslim must sacrifice himself personally. Jihad is the precise equivalent of the Lord's Supper in Christianity and the Jewish Sabbath, the defining expression of sacrifice that opens the prospect of eternity to the mortal believer. To ask Islam to become moderate, to reform, to become a peaceful religion of personal conscience is the precise equivalent of asking Catholics to abolish Mass.

These words come from Spengler's article of September 19th, "Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and eternal life," which opens with these similarly bracing words:

Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 address in Regensburg, Germany. It promises to be the Vatican's most controversial utterance in living memory.

Love? Well, to quote Tina Turner, "What's love got to do with it?" The Pope's discourse was about not love but reason!

Okay, there's also love, but that wasn't the Pope's main point in the Regensberg address.

Anyway, Spengler argues for jihad as Islam's sole sacrament, the one sacred action that can assure salvation for an individual Muslim. Spengler of course knows that officially, Islam has no sacraments and that jihad is not one of the five pillars of Islam -- though it's sometimes been suggested as a sixth pillar. He's arguing for its status as an unofficial but essential sacrament.

Here's the money quote:

Jihad also is a form of human sacrifice. He who serves Allah so faithfully as to die in the violent propagation of Islam goes straight to paradise, there to enjoy virgins or raisins, depending on the translation.

Even when Spengler's being serious, he's being facetious, but when he's being facetious, he's being his most serious. The raisins refers to the pseudonymous Christoph Luxenberg's suggestion that the heavenly huri, usually interpreted as wide-eyed virgins awaiting Muslim martyrs in Paradise (Qur'an 44:54, 52:20, 55:72, 56:22), actually refers to white grapes because the word is not Arabic but Syriac. Spengler's joke is thus quite serious.

Joking aside, if Spengler were talking about Islamism -- rather than Islam -- I'd readily agree that Islamist have made a sacrificial death cult out of Islam, placing the act of the self-sacrificing (and murderous) jihadist martyr at the sacramental core of its sacred violence.

Though he's one of the more idiosyncratic voices, Spengler's not the only one talking this way. In "Manual for a 'Raid'" (The New York Review of Books, Volume 49, Number 1, January 17, 2002), Hassan Mneimneh and Kanan Makiya wrote an analysis of a document left behind by the 9/11 hijackers that presented them as having enacted a ritual of sacred violence in their manner of killing 'infidels,' and more recently, Hans G. Kippenberg has written in Numen (Volume 52, Number 1, 2005, pp. 29-58) an article, "'Consider that it is a Raid on the Path of God': The Spiritual Manual of the Attackers of 9/11," analyzing the same document and drawing similar conclusions. Also worth looking at (and not just because it footnotes me) is Ivan Strenski's "Sacrifice, Gift and the Social Logic of Muslim 'Human Bombers'" (Terrorism and Political Violence, Volume 15, Number 3, October 2003, pp. 1-34), which interprets suicide bombing as "religious and social ... gifts, martyrdoms and sacrifices" in a reading that draws upon the French sociologists Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss.

But I fear that I'm getting a bit too esoteric now, and rather distant from Mr. Spengler, so I'll stop.