War making is an ultimate act of ranking or of making distinctions between Peoples because it can only be reasonably predicated upon a ranking arising out of a qualitative ordering or ontological discrimination.

My initial ruminations "On War" prompted many people to email me about the conclusion.  Not surprisingly, most of those who took the time to communicate with me followed the argument until the conclusion. They understood that Peoples and nations are not static things but the confluence of a shared participatory experience in the Whole of human existence which we represent by the Terms of Existence of Self-soul, Society, G-d, and World. This shared participatory experience is lived as a Truth of Existence. The experience of Peoplehood and national existence is not subject to “debate” or a “vote” or some social scientific ratiocination. It is a good of the highest order. It is experienced and lived. A constitutional vote might initiate its formal, legal existence, but the vote itself is but the formal act expressing what exists and only constitutes one small part of the substance and ceremony which binds the People as a Society. Once Peoplehood is reduced to a thing and “studied,” it is reduced to something very different from what it is.

War, as a constitutional and constituting aspect of Peoplehood and national existence, is understood not simply as a means to an end, but as very much a part of the Good of Peoplehood and national existence. As I noted in the earlier essay, “war as a founding experience for a People has profound if not mystic importance beyond merely the capture of a territory. If the act of war and its concomitants — sacrifice and patriotism in the face of danger and death — are elements of the very bonds which create a People, then war would be not a means but very much a part of the good end sought.”

But, the earlier essay noted that science has changed all of this. War in the context of modern weapons of war is not merely potentially destructive of a People or nation, but of human existence simply. This means that War, at least the ultimate war brandishing weapons of mass destruction, becomes a last resort to be utilized only where one’s People face utter and complete destruction. Only then might the destruction of mankind be justified.

This led to the essay’s conclusion and the conceptual problems for many people:

But we, modern men, who have so embraced science and its technological advances as so much a boon to humankind, recognize immediately that in our world the scientific applications in war can mean global destruction. In this case, war loses its virtue in all but one instance. That instance of course is where the destruction of one’s People or national existence is no less an evil than the destruction of the world.

This frightening possibility, made possible by modern science, suggests something quite shocking does it not? And, if one were to contemplate, without recourse to the rather shallow distinction often made between science and scientism, what modern science, meaning modern reason, means for man’s existence simply, we begin to fathom the depth of what should be our shock and dismay.

If indeed it is possible for man to examine and manipulate the world based upon the necessary assumption that everything is reducible to mathematical physics — and that is the necessary assumption of science because without it it simply doesn’t work – then the very Terms of Existence are reduced to the Part. This is what we refer to as the Redirection.

If what I say is true (and it is not my analysis but Robert Loewenberg’s of the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies), then it is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Because if it is true, then Peace as the end of man properly understood, if not absolutely so, is not merely possible, it is desirable. And if you understand these matters well, as for example did Alexander Kojève – a man once described as the Unknown Superior and the great expositor of Hegel – then you understand that Peace is murder and you recognize both Islam and its passive form, Liberalism, as the convergence toward Peace we have spoken of.

In the main, the confusion of most of my correspondents might be expressed in the following question: How in the world does “science” lead to the goal of “Peace” that is understood as “murder?” Given the effort at SANE to date, the explanation is now more accessible.

To begin, if Science (and here we mean Science proper not something called “Scientism” – a false distinction we have debunked here) reduces all of the world to the Part of human existence which is quantifiable, man and the Whole of his existence is “completed” in the Part which is fully material and bound by the physical. Now that all of existence is per science represented by mathematical physics, meaning reduced to proportions of magnitudes, a thing is measured not by its order or ranking, but by its physical complexity. But as one would expect the “complexity” of a thing is no more than the quantifiable number of some aspect of the thing in proportion to another thing. Life is reduced to quantities.

Thus, science views man as a more complex thing than an ape or a rock because it has more of certain things like cerebral synapses or has more bio-chemical or molecular processes giving it the appearance of greater complexity and development. Even language is an exclusively quantifiable complexity having nothing to do with ontological ranking or the quality of Being. Speech is no longer Logos or Reason but the quantity of information transmitted from one entity to another and the effect the information has on the recipient measured by some physical response.

This destruction of Being or ontological existence has of course the secondary effect many conservatives and so-called philosophers or ethicists speak of today. Moral relativism and nihilism. But what this contemporary discussion misses in wholesale fashion is the fact that the destruction of Truth or of Transcendence, of the very Divine ground of Being, is a direct and necessary consequence of science. The reduction of the world and of man’s participatory experience in the Whole to the Part does not merely suggest a wholly material existence devoid of Being; it demands it. If there were any other result, mathematical physics, as a symbolic representation of the world, would not work because it would not capture in any meaningful way what it purports to symbolize.

(For those interested in the specifics of this discussion in the context of Science versus Scientism I recommend this earlier essay on this subject.)

But what does this have to do with war? The answer lies in the elimination of political order. Men, living as a People and as a nation, are no longer ranked by political order. No man can say that his existence or that his nation is of a higher order than another’s, or of the highest order simply. (See, e.g., the essay “On Torture: A Preliminary Discussion.”)

If man’s existence is quantifiable and symbolically represented by mathematical physics, it is no longer possible to rank or order a man’s life or his society relative to another’s in any meaningful way. In such a context, political order (here, again, not meaning “order” in the sense of “law and order” but ranking and, more colloquially, making morally meaningful qualitative distinctions) becomes an act of ultimate irrationality. It is unscientific. In this new world order only quantitative calculations and proportions are valid.

To suggest a ranked order having to do with the purpose or virtue (i.e., telos) of a thing, — such as between inorganic and organic creations, sentient life and human existence – presupposes a Divine ground of Being which grants such ranking as a Truth of Existence. It is this Truth of any given man’s existence that permits the founding, maintenance, and defense of a People at the expense of the “Other” – meaning any other People or person who is not of the People. Existence as and within a political order is to discriminate.

Put differently, there can be no scientific basis for a political order meant to discriminate against some Other based merely on some quantifiable distinction between one’s People and the Other. No Good or Virtue exists in science. A people might be taller, paler, stronger, wealthier, less violent, and even more intelligent than another people, but none of those physically countable distinctions suggest ranking or order. It is in this way that men and their societies become equal. Once the Whole of Existence is completed in the Part, man becomes radically united with every other man, and indeed, every other creation – every other thing. There can be no ranking which does not simply count things; there is no qualitative ordering possible.

At this level of existence — the mere quantification of all of existence — the justification for war is exhausted. How do I defend my children or my neighbor’s children by killing the Other’s children in a war of national existence? What gives me the “right” to rank what is “mine” as of higher value than what belongs to the “Other?” How do I discriminate between Peoples and nations in any meaningful way?

War making is an ultimate act of ranking or of making distinctions between Peoples because it can only be reasonably predicated upon a ranking arising out of what we might term a qualitative ordering or ontological discrimination. When political order is no longer possible given the world bequeathed to man by science, national existence and Peoplehood are no longer the Good or Virtue sought. Rather, Peace — world peace as the absence of war and distinctions – becomes the supreme good because it is predicated upon the view that there can be no ranking, no ordering, only counting.

In this scientific world of universal Peace, man is a thing like all other things. The moral equivalency of the Liberal Elite about which the conservative pundits so often pontificate is now understood not as a “moral” equivalency but as the proper scientific understanding that all of human existence (indeed all of existence) are “things” which stand in proportion to one another because they can be symbolized by mathematical physics. They can be quantified with mathematical symbols.

In this world, the truth of existence, now understood as the reduction of man and his world to symbols, achieves a kind of a priori Peace. Having reduced man to mere physical quantities, science has effectively eliminated the very possibility of murder. Man is no more capable of murder than the beast of the field, or for that matter a rock. Just as a falling rock might kill the man, beast or plant below, so too the rampaging man. All murder is killing in the new world order.

World Peace is now quite achievable. If no particular man or nation is worth killing for, and all murder is killing, Peace is achieved through “sacrifices for peace”¹  and compromise — now understood and justified as just more and different proportions of magnitudes.

Now it is certainly true to say that modern scientific man is not adequately philosophical to understand or even to articulate his existence in these terms. Nevertheless, the evidence of the scientific dominance abounds. One is not pressed to come up with examples. Thus, war is reduced to body counts including the dead of the enemy. We also recall the demands of the world community that Israel fight the Hezbollah and Hamas terrorists “proportionately.” The murder of one Israeli citizen must be measured equally or at least proportionately to the death of a Lebanese citizen. The death of one man is equal to the death of any other man. The life of one equal to the life of any other.

And, the completion of the Whole in the Part, the quantification of all of existence towards world Peace, advances well beyond the philosophy of war.

So it is that abortion is not understood as the ranking of life or even potential life juxtaposed against some artificial legal construct called a “Right to Choose.” Instead, the abortion discussion is about the social science (i.e., “numbers crunching”) of the “cost to society” of unwanted births and dangerous back alley procedures. It is about a “right” to control one’s “physical body” and about the fact that science does not recognize the fetus as a separate thing until birth because science can know nothing of the Divine grant of life or even potential life and therefore the law must take no cognizance of such a thing either.

Heterosexual marriage can no longer be defended on the ground that in the context of our Judeo-Christian civilization homosexuality is an abomination and not to be sanctioned. Rather, the conservatives in defense of traditional marriage must rest their case on empirical calculations about measurements of socioeconomic stability, socially transmitted diseases, divorce, life expectancy, and even quantifiable “contentment” scales.

Even the “right wing” conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Peter Brimelow who wish to defend this country from the assault of Open Borders must fill their treatises with economic and criminal statistics. Without the empirical evidence to show that our civilization is deteriorating along some quantifiable and empirically verifiable index acceptable to the social sciences, the argument to preserve the People and nation because it is Ours and as such different in rank from the Others can only be described as the vilest form of discrimination. It is what we might term Outside the Pale of Political Discourse and dismissed with the “R” word.

And, as a result of science and its claim to mathematical certainty, all of political order has become nothing more than an omnipresent democratic polling station. Truth, purpose, and virtue have been supplanted by voting and methodologies. It no longer matters how a People lives as long as it was voted upon and the process was fair.

In this world of universal Peace, science creates the conditions which no longer permit us to defend national existence without the threat of global destruction. And, as mankind turns toward the truth of existence as established by science, what we have termed the Redirection, man is no longer a man of Soul or of Reason. Soul is reduced to flesh and Reason to calculation. To achieve this end, Science must murder man qua man, which in turn permits any number of “sacrifices for peace” because every single “thing” is identical to every other “thing.” All of life has become one big numbers game.

Endnotes

1. We witnessed this notion of “sacrifices for peace” in the Israeli Peace Process with every newly signed peace accord or agreement and with every territorial concession. Each time a Palestinian terrorist would come into Israel as a day laborer and use a gun (provided by the Israeli government to the Palestinian Authority as part of the “security arrangements”) to kill another Jewish family, Prime Minister Rabin would go on television and tell his people that notwithstanding the latest murder of an innocent Israeli family, the Peace Process would continue. Why? These Israeli citizen deaths were “victims for peace.” The Hebrew he used literally means “sacrifices for peace.”