Maverick Philosopher

Political Polarization: the Radical Cure

Political polarization is deep and wide. We are 'siloed' into our positions and things threaten to go 'thermonuclear.'  The usual cures cannot be dismissed out of hand, but are mostly blather served up by squishy, bien-pensant 'liberals' for their own insipid and clueless ilk. No doubt we should listen to others respectfully, but how many of our political opponents are worth listening to or are worthy of respect? No doubt we should seek common ground. But is they any left to be found?

Go ahead, take a civility pledge, but civility is only for the civil, and how many of our political enemies are civil? Civility is like toleration: it is a good thing but it has limits.

And so it falls to me to point out a cure for polarization that is never mentioned: eliminate one of the poles. The Hamas-Jew polarization, for example, is solved by eliminating Hamas. For here there is and can be no common ground, no mutual respect, no 'conversation' or 'negotiations.' Palliation is out of the question; amputation is the answer. Examples are easily multiplied. The side that is in the right should destroy the side that isn't.  

You say that war is never the answer? It depends on the question. Sometimes you have to give war a chance. 

Robert Kaplan on Henry Kissinger

Robert Kaplan:

Kissinger’s beliefs, which emerge through his writing, are certainly not for the faint-hearted. They are emotionally unsatisfying, yet analytically timeless. They include:

• Disorder is worse than injustice, since injustice merely means the world is imperfect, while disorder tempts anarchy and the Hobbesian nightmare of war and conflict, of all against all.
• It follows, then, that order is more important than freedom, since without order there is no freedom for anybody.
• The fundamental issue in international and domestic affairs is not the control of wickedness, but the limitation of self-righteousness. For it is self-righteousness that often leads to war and the most extreme forms of repression, both at home and abroad.
• The aim of policy is to reconcile what is just with what is possible. Journalists and freedom fighters have it easy in life since they can concern themselves only with what is just. Policymakers, burdened with bureaucratic responsibility in order to advance a nation’s self-interest, have no such luxury.
• Pessimism can often be morally superior to misplaced optimism. Pessimism, therefore, is not necessarily to be disparaged.

It is true that much of the above is derivative of the great philosophers, especially Hobbes. But it is to Kissinger’s credit that he consciously activated it in the daily conduct of foreign policy.

[.  . .]

Kissinger was a “genuine statesman”, to use the German philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler’s definition: that is, he was not a reactionary who thought that history could be reversed, nor was he a militant-idealist, who thought that history marched in a certain direction. Kissinger’s conclusion was more grounded: he believed less in victory than in reconciliations.