Polemos

And from Nietzsche is the word of nations as the coldest beasts.

Yes, and such is the amorality of the will to will for which the good is the most profitable means to an end, a matter of pragmatic cost/benefit analysis, like Eichmann dictating bureaucratic/logistical orders in his government office, or Churchill and Roosevelt calmly signing battered Poland over to Stalin’s wrath. These are the business decisions of state where the strangely popular idea of a ‘national identity’ becomes a collective subject in itself in constant competition with others, and for whom morality is necessarily a matter of national self interest. At least that’s how I see it from Nietzsche/Heidegger’s critical perspective anyway.

I’m interested in interpreting our post WW2 history in terms of Heidegger’s critique of Nietzschean Nazism and its blindly technological setup. But I’m only interested in this history insofar as it sets up the the historical horizon of our present historical situation and its possible futures. One premise of this interpretation is that technology sets up the preconditions for our globalising way of life and that it is these conditions that bring about the global play of will to will as constant historical struggle or polemos. Another premise is that this struggle and its historical setup isn’t something that is controlled by humanity and its leaders let alone a god or gods. Humanity does not order the technological setup of modernity but rather constantly conforms to the ordering demanded by our modern situation which is now well and truly a planetary phenomenon.

From this perspective the history of modernity from the beginnings of the scientific/technological project in Western Europe 500 years ago through to the catastrophe of WW2 and on to our current global war footing is a history of amoral reactive necessity driven by the technological challenge to grow and develop nationally at an exponential rate. The leaders themselves are called forth and conform to this struggle so in a sense they are not an active force and neither are their nations. They simply fill the void and perform the functions made possible and thus necessary by their place in the technological ordering and its world historical struggle.

This accidental history has driven modernity as a way of life to colonise the entire earth, massively increasing its population and technological reach to the point that we are now on the threshold of triggering runaway global warming while in the midst of an accelerating major extinction event brought on by our exponentially growing consumption of finite planetary resources, most especially fossil fuels, and the subsequent biosphere destruction. As if this present context isn’t alarming enough humanity as a whole now faces the geological possibility of an imminent terminal energy decline.

So then, what function must the world’s lone military and economic super power perform within this historical setup? The possible intentions and moral choices of the individual leaders are irrelevant here, the question rather revolves around the possibilities for gain that America’s historical potential opens up in this global context and how these gainful possibilities might drive the leaders and the led towards their future fruition.

Polemos is my theme in Heidegger’s sense of the Auseinandersetzung, but the reciprocal confrontation here is that of the will to will as gainful volition driven not by an individual’s beliefs or morality but by the amoral and pragmatic necessities of one’s historical predicament. From this perspective belief and morality are rationalisations one constantly makes after the fact. So long as we continue to believe history is an effect of our active volition rather than a condition for its possibility we will always already be too late.