and death itself are the means to get there.
As poets and authors have known since the time of the ancient Greeks, a world without conflict cannot exist. And, by our lights, accustomed to this world, if it did, it would be a very dull place indeed. For here, outside the Garden, without God available for direct consultation, it is only in the clash of conflicting ideas that truthâfurtively, hesitantlyâemerges, however unwelcome that truth might ultimately be. Oedipusâs search for his fatherâs killer first drives him into the arms of his mother and later, when the truth is revealed, to his own self-blinding and exile.
So the modern American tendency to regard peace as manâs natural state and war as its aberration has it exactly backward. We intuit this about manâs nature, and history validates this insight recurrently andbloodily. To be human is to be Fallen. But to be satanicâthat is to say, to accept uncritically the legitimacy of Critical Theoryâs anti-human argumentâis to have no chance at redemption at all. For how can nihilism be redemptive?
A world at peace, absent the arrival of the Second Coming, would surely be a very dull and unproductive place, perhaps possible only through a universal tyranny. While no one wishes war, sometimes war must come; war is an inevitability, and peace is the outcome of its successful, if temporary, sorting-out. Hobbes was right, although he failed to allow for manâs nature, divine as well as human. Though red in tooth and claw, nature occasionally calls for, and sometimes obtains, a temporary state of balance, out of which the world promptly spins and begins the cycle again. This is not pessimism, this is realism. Free, we differ, argue, fight, and sometimes kill. Enforced peace ends in slavery and the graveâas one of the worldâs major religions promises and, in its Dar al-Islam (house of Islam), tries to practice. Trying, testing, questioning, pushing: These are manâs true natural attributes, and trouble, his natural state.
A world without conflict, or post-conflict, however, is exactly what various all-encompassing political systems have promised. But the path to this utopia has been paved with much misery and death. In our time, the main retailer of such a myth has been socialism, in two forms: German National Socialism and Soviet Marxismâespecially the latter.
The two prime movers of the Frankfurt School, Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, sought to overturn the existing orderâfirst the moral order and then the political orderâlike the the nineteenth-century radicals that they were. (Except for their outsized influence, there is nothing âmodernâ about either thinker.) More akin to anarchists such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Luigi Lucheni (who assassinated the Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898), Gramsci and Lukács had no interest in any compromise that could be the result of the Hegelian formula of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. For them, there were only winners and losersâand in this, we must grudgingly admit they were right. To compromise is to negate the validity of oneâs own position and succumb to the temptation to see reason at work, when the true radical knows that reason is only a tool, put to base uses. In the ur-Kampf , both sides seek a lost Paradise, and it is clear from both cultural and religioustradition whose side each is on. The forces of good seek a kind of Edenic restoration, with man this time taking his place alongside and above the angels at the throne of God, while the vengeful revolutionaries dream of a new, better Paradise that they themselves control, one from which God is entirely absent.
Which raises this important question: Just whose Paradise has been lost? The conventional interpretation of our Genesis-based foundational myth is that it is our paradise, the Garden of Eden, that has been lost. But manâs heroic post-lapsarian