HUM 302: Nationalism vs. Globalism Course Home
The World Must be Many or One
HUM 302: Which Way Western Man? Nationalism vs. Globalism
In this course we will examine and evaluate what is at stake in whether one supports nationalism or globalism. MCC stands for the promotion of noble deeds, the understanding of nature, and the defense of the nation-state. Thus, while we will be as sympathetic as we can to arguments which point toward the world community becoming one, we will ultimately try to show why these arguments are unsound. Thinkers that will be covered include: Kenneth Waltz, Curtis Yarvin, Carl Schmitt, Immanuel Kant, Erich Remarque, Ernst Junger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojeve, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Jean Larteguy, Leon Trotsky, Pierre Manent, Alexander Dugin, and Michael Anton. This course does not claim to be comprehensive. But, each thinker will help illuminate what is presupposed by being a nationalist or globalist; or how various ways of acting and thinking logically point toward the world being broken up into distinct parts or becoming one. Links to lectures are below along with brief introductions. As we will see, there is an incredibly diverse set of pathways by which one might become a nationalist of sorts.
The first four lectures are available below. New material will be added starting on March, 20th 2022 beginning with a lecture on a portion of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. If you would like to join the discussion group for the course, please reach out at theblueowl@tutanota.com or DM me @MTClassical on Twitter. The discussion sessions will be invite only, audio only, and will not be recorded.
Session One: Universal Human Rights and National Sovereignty
Listen to the lecture here.
Readings:
Curtis Yarvin, "Globalism RIP/Missionary Virus”
Alexandra Hudson, "What Does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Mean Today?"
Kenneth Waltz, "The Anarchic Structure of World Politics"
There is no middle way on this question. Either you think it is good for the world to be broken up into separate and potentially competitive entities, OR you think it is good for the world to be ruled by one monolithic sovereign and idea. The world must be one or many. All actions or thoughts presuppose or point to the world needing to be one way or the other. As is so often the case, many people, including intelligent observers, think that there is little or no difficulty in having both universal rights AND sovereignty. We will examine how these competing views of justice conflict.
Session Two: Perpetual Peace vs. The Political
Listen to the lecture here.
Readings:
Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political
Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace
Kant argues that perpetual peace is both desirable and inevitable. It is desirable so that human beings will no longer be in a position where they have to choose between doing what is ethically right and what is politically necessary. It is inevitable because Nature and History have quietly conspired to bring humans together despite or even precisely because of their neediness and dangerous competitiveness. Conversely, Schmitt's provocative volume suggests that the fundamental political fact is that there are friends and enemies. He sees advocates of liberalism as those who wish to extinguish the political from the world. Schmitt responds in two ways: 1) It is more likely that liberals will merely force the political to go subterranean or to be concealed by new ideological language that attempts to deny the existence of the political (by for example, speaking of "police actions" in international relations). And 2) without the world broken up into groups of friends and enemies, life will be drained of its seriousness and will be reduced to vulgar hedonic entertainment.
Session Three: The Nation vs. Humanity
Listen to the lecture here.
Readings:
Ernst Junger's The Storm of Steel
Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front
Remarque's famous novel is widely taught to middle school and high school aged students; Junger's memoir is not. When one realizes that Remarque's novel acts as a sermon for sustaining a progressive liberal order and increasingly moving toward a homogenous one world state, that it is taught to students just hitting puberty is not surprising. To the contrary, Junger argues that war can reveal to a man who he really is; will he risk his life to defend his family and his people? Or is that devotion merely a linguistic fiction? This is not to say that Junger advocates wanton bellicosity. Rather, he accepts that the potentiality of war is necessarily coeval with a world worth living in.
Session Four: Peoples and Fatherlands
Listen to the lecture here.
Reading:
Parts Seven and Eight of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche offers powerful reflections that re-shape the debate. Rather than staying within the framework of nations vs. rights, he looks toward a future within which entirely new configurations might come to pass; namely, a future in which we could see a European planetary aristocracy come to rule. Nietzsche expands and deepens the vision of our moral imagination. Nietzsche eschews petty nationalism and calls for Europe to become one. He does so because of homogenization undergone by European man because of Christianity and democracy. Germans are less German than they are European by this account. One might think that this puts Nietzsche in between nationalists and globalists, but when looks to the goals and purposes he sets out for his political project, he comes to sight as closer to nationalism than to globalism.
Session Five: Philosophy vs. Tyranny
Listen to the lecture here.
Readings:
Leo Strauss' On Tyranny
Focus on: Alexander Kojeve's "Tyranny and Wisdom" (in On Tyranny)
And: Strauss' "Restatement" (in On Tyranny)
Kojeve argues that, at bottom, philosophy as a way of life is impossible. He claims that human beings are forever mired in "subjective certainty" and that genuine mental liberation from one's time and place is impossible. He is concerned with pushing the world toward an egalitarian "end of history" in which wisdom is attained by many, and not few. However, the character of this "wisdom" is attuned to a lower standard than classical philosophers had sought for the few. In contradistinction to Kojeve, Strauss argues that a homogenous world state will be nothing less than a tyranny that is perpetual and universal. Such a state would deprive political men from finding their fulfillment through noble sacrifice; and, more importantly for Strauss, such a state would seek to forever squelch the highest human possibility of philosophy.
Session Six: The Imperialism of the Enlightenment
Listen to the lecture here.
Reading:
Rousseau’s Letter to D’Alembert
In this letter, Rousseau is in his most reactionary mood. He uses D’Alembert’s article that purports to describe Geneva, but which quietly puts forward an argument for a theater to be added to the city, as an occasion to launch a searing attack on the Enlightenment. Rousseau suggests that this innovation of a theater may seem innocuous, but that it may lead to severe deleterious consequences. He shows the difficult to see moral price that has to be paid for many so-called Enlightenment advances. He brings out the imperial nature of the Enlightenment, as it wishes to see its ideals rule the minds of men in every nook and cranny of the planet.
Session Seven: Communism vs. Vitalistic Nationalism
Readings:
Jean Larteguy's The Centurions
Leon Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (chapter 7 and chapter 8)
Trotsky, contrary to Marx, argued that individual nations do not need to pass through a series of successive stages that Marx had outlined in order to be prepared for a communistic revolution. Through this argument, Trotsky was able to influence international communism's turn to the third world, where capitalism had not yet spread, though, in Trotsky's view, the deleterious effects of capitalism were still felt. The implementation of Trotsky's ideas is more or less the world that Larteguy's characters find themselves in. Larteguy's novel presents French soldiers in difficult situations in both Vietnam and Algeria. Therein we see explicit arguments for and against communism, as well as the deeds and aesthetics of both alternatives. Larteguy's main characters each stand out as distinct individuals, whereas their foes come to sight as part of an indistinct hive. Some of the characters grope toward a position beyond capitalistic liberalism and communism, as they watch the West lose its confidence and vitality, and therefore lose its appreciation of heroism. The world Marx and Trotsky envision and hope for will have no room for heroism.
Session Eight: Can We Move Beyond Politics?
Reading:
Pierre Manent’s A World Beyond Politics?
Manent asks a question similar to Schmitt; but, Manent also has an older view or more ancient idea of the political in mind as well. He shows that many tendencies of modern thought, both in liberalism and communism, point away from the idea of politics as ruling and being ruled in turn, and away from deliberation about the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, and the noble and the base, and towards questions that are quantifiable that can be handed over to technocratic experts.
Session Nine: Progress or Return?
Readings:
Alexander Dugin's The Fourth Political Theory
Leo Strauss' "Progress or Return?"
Dugin sees three ideologies dominating the modern mind: liberalism, communism, and fascism. He criticizes each in turn on his way to trying to establish a genuinely new fourth way that retains the best dimensions of each of the other three. But, this turns out to be an exercise that prepares us to consider radically different options as well, as Dugin searches high and low for old and new ideas. He, via Heidegger, thinks we have to concern ourselves more self-consciously with Being. Similarly, Strauss sees the West as facing a crisis of confidence, and with the crisis, serious individuals feel a longing to return to the Bible or Greek philosophy. Strauss claims that while the Bible and philosophy are both concerned with morality, there is a fundamental antagonism between them concerning the source of wisdom and morality. Strauss sees the re-animation of this fundamental problem as a potential source of vitality for the West, and one that is superior to any Heideggerian alternative. Those who are concerned with God (Bible) or nature (philosophy) might be best positioned to direct political life and restore confidence in the West.
Session Ten: What is at Stake for the United States?
Listen to the lecture here.
Reading:
Michael Anton’s The Stakes
Anton is highly sensitive to the problems and questions we have raised throughout this course. We turn to his book in order to bring the questions of the German, French, and Russian thinkers back to the United States.