I argue that there are two fundamentally distinct views of civilisation: the developmental and the catastrophic. The developmental is perhaps easier to define and is likely more familiar to moderns. It signifies the bourgeois, whiggish, progressive and linear view of history. A developmental understanding of civilization argues in favour of a developmental model through gradual increases in cooperation, wealth, and rationality. It naively assumes that civilisation is the consequence of the emergence of rationality—or the victory of rationality; an innovative and entrepreneurial human inclination that eventually outdoes other human inclinations. It grows, builds, invents and discovers gradually.
The other view—the one I think is far more accurate—is the catastrophic. This view is slightly more difficult to extrapolate on and not to mention far more illusive to moderns. However, it can be seen as central to the philosophies of three main thinkers. Plato-Hobbes-Schmitt. We could begin with this extract from Plato’s Statesmen:
‘And so we have arrived at the real end of this discourse; for although there might be much to tell of the lower animals, and of the condition out of which they changed and of the causes of the change, about men there is not much, and that little is more to the purpose. Deprived of the care of God, who had possessed and tended them, they were left helpless and defenceless, and were torn in pieces by the beasts, who were naturally fierce and had now grown wild. And in the first ages they were still without skill or resource; the food which once grew spontaneously had failed, and as yet they knew not how to procure it, because they had never felt the pressure of necessity. For all these reasons they were in a great strait; wherefore also the gifts spoken of in the old tradition were imparted to man by the gods, together with so much teaching and education as was indispensable; fire was given to them by Prometheus, the arts by Hephaestus and his fellow-worker, Athene,seeds and plants by others. From these is derived all that has helped to frame human life; since the care of the Gods, as I was saying, had now failed men, and they had to order their course of life for themselves, and were their own masters, just like the universal creature whom they imitate and follow, ever changing, as he changes, and ever living and growing, at one time in one manner, and at another time in another.’
For the developmentalists, politics is a form of sin. It may be necessary, but it marks an obstacle to the forces of developmentalism: science, technology, industry, wealth creation and so on. For developmentalists, politics may be necessary to settle disputes over authority and mediate opposing interests that intensify through development itself, yet, even this moderate and managerial understanding of politics is understood as something which emerged from the rationality of developmental civilisation (think of that theory arguing the Athenians were so intelligent due to their experience with trade). Developmentalists entirely ignore the fact that politics was understood by those clever Athenians as itself something which corresponded directly back to the memory of primordial catastrophe; a moment when the intrusion of scarcity, extinction and conflict intruded upon us.
In the passage in Plato’s Statesmen quoted above, we see a philosophic correspondence with the mythical. This in another central distinction between the developmental and catastrophic theories of the political. The developmentalists see politics as a rational social technology emerging in distinction to the mythical or theological. While the group I refer to as the catastrophists claim that politics is the result of the constant presence of the mythical and theological within worldly human coexistence.
I should provide some more context to the passage above. The moment of catastrophe in question refers to the shift in cosmic authority from the Titans to the Olympians. Cronus (a Titan)—in this interpretation—is not the bringer of terror and horror. In fact, the pre-Olympian order ensures for humans a state of total harmony, security and abundance. (Think of the Rousseau’s state of nature). When the Olympians overthrow the Titans, humans are abandoned. The immediate presence of a divine Shepard fades away. In this state of abandonment, humans are struck—for the first time—with an overwhelming feeling of helplessness. The crafts and capacities of civilised life—here symbolized as gifts from Prometheus, Hephaestus and Athena—are what we could label emergency resources handed down as divine care packages. (The means to grow food, physically defend themselves from predators and shelter themselves from the elements).
The excessively vulnerable state of human life was secondarily caused by Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, who forgot to give humans the natural means to defend themselves. While other animals had large size, high speed, warm fur coats or large claws, humans existed in a state of extreme precarity. Accordingly, their conventions, education, technologies and rituals are compensatory means of ensuring their survival against the zoological misfortune they were designed under.
In Statesmen, we see these crafts and capacities, not in commercial power(the developmental view) but a means to secure and defend themselves.(the catastrophic view). A secondary concern of Plato in the Statesmen is the question of human breeding. Humans—in their unusually precarious zoological state—have to manage a balance between their need for cooperation and assertion; Warlike courage and prudent wisdom. Existence—understood catastrophically—marked human life with these particular qualities. These are not the qualities of bourgeois traits but something quite contra distinct.
We might be tempted to dismiss these observations as particular to the life of antiquity; a mere reflection of something historically particular to the social and material conditions of that time. However, we would then be forced to honestly answer the question pertaining to why the catastrophic assessment of the political remerges, first with Hobbes—and then later with Schmitt and the recognition of states of exceptions (later called states of emergencies by Agamben and Virilio).
Despite my many disagreements with Hobbes, his variation of contractualism has not yet won out over opposing contractualisms (Locke, Mills, John Rawls ect.) who have so far enjoyed more direct influence over the practical arrangement and organization of liberal-democratic society.
These variations of contractualism have been preferable to societies that view the civilising process as intrinsically bound to the more linear development of commercial, scientific and technological forces. What all of these forces have in common is that they tend to offer a form of civilizational development which is not axiomatically political. Men created politics as a by product of their innovative and rational powers—so we are told. This understanding of politics tends to be more favourable to the genres of contractualism that are post-Hobbesian. In contradistinction; Hobbes’ contractualism is primarily political. It reflects upon an eternal capacity to collapse into a dis-unified state of social existence. Even a cursory reading of Hobbes shows that the state of nature is directly linked to a collective state of original sin(fall); a constant threat which only the maintenance of civil society can deter manifesting or repeating. Unity from a catastrophic perspective, garners and secures unity primarily through the political, and only secondarily through other means(economic, technological and so on). This political unity is also more than simply a legal structure. It has a rich history of being understood through theological, mythology and even ontological frames (think of ‘body-politic’).
Evidence of a civilizational tension towards unity (as vulgar as it may often be) can be seen if one thinks of the peculiar consensus of international media outlets or governmental institutions that all seem to ‘know’ what they are supposed to think and say without much need for direct orders. On the other hand, it tends to be states of emergency style events that initiate consensus-cultivation. The Ukraine war and Covid entirely shut up many of the supposedly anti-establishment figures that a few years prior were the leaders for almost global disagreements with the status quo. One can think of Bernie Sanders, for example. Yet, also Trump, who during Covid signalled to the regime that he was not particularly serious about any contest to the order of the establishment. He continues to challenge the style and character or the neo-liberal order but has proven himself to be unthreatening to its sovereign state of existence.
When a society develops a historical consciousness that perceives its scientific and technological progress as primary to its power and superiority (class, racial, national and so on), as the developmentalists do, it tends to forget that its perpetual existence sooner or later comes to a crossroads within the political; the appropriate directions get handed out through emergencies and catastrophic conditions—not through the supposedly ingenious innovation of entrepreneurs and scientists. In fact, the only reason that the scientific has garnered the attention of real thinkers and intellects in recent times, is likely due to its increasingly catastrophic nature. The dull, spiritless simplicity of the scientist only draws the attention of the philosophic and political when its begins to touch upon the primordial nature of sovereignty, ontology and power.
Labs leaks, nuclear weapons and biotechnics all share this new reality in common: their basic essence which garners these midwits such attention (or funding) lies in the catastrophic essence of their inventions. As Virilio points out, there is often a catastrophic substance to innovation: when you invent the car you invent the car crash and so on.
Briefly taking the common motif of friend/enemy coined by Schmitt, we see this fundamental schism between the catastrophists and developmentalists emerging again in the modern world. Developmentalists will dismiss this idea as tribalistic, vulgar and simple. Yet, despite the many potential mis-uses of catastrophic phenomena, it does strike us that some form unity seems be necessitated in some form or another. Other human inclinations and motivations, such as acquisition, prosperity and efficiency often do get put on the back burner, in favour of ensuring fundamentally political needs (for unity, vulgar as I repeat, though it may be).
The most obvious example of the de-prioritizing of the developmental, bourgeois virtues such as wealth creation, innovation and trade that at times are absolved in favour of political demands, could best be seen in the relations between the EU and the US—specifically between the US and Germany. Since the Ukraine war, the Germans have been willing to give up access to the cheap Russian gas that their prosperity has recently relied on. Instead favouring the signalling of loyalty to the US. Are the Germans too stupid to foresee the economic costs of these decisions? Of course, not. Their deficit is not in the capacity for economic calculation but in their loss of a capacity for sovereign decision making(handed over after WW2 to the US). Their supposed stupidity is, in essence, political — and not economic or scientific.
As the world order breaks from its post-war era of global trade, power-monopolization under the US and of exponential consumption, turning instead into a set of relations where unity is more anxiously demanded, we see friend/enemy distinctions forming as primary necessities over other ends and desires. This is not (simply) because of bad decision making or ideology, but because the political—and therefore the catastrophic—is re-emerging into a world that is hardly ready for it, or doesn’t even perceive these phenomena to be of the same nature.
The re-emergence of the catastrophic creates a necessity for unity, not merely because this demand is opportunistically created to coerce conformity and justify extended powers that bypass democratic regulations. The exploitation of states of emergencies work because there really is a need for unity — and because there really is something primordially catastrophic about the political which contradicts the developmentalist dogmas. Those realities are then manipulated to serve short sighted opportunism because they are, in a sense, half-truths. These half truths of emergency states won’t be challenged under the developmental understanding of civilization and politics that continuously remain blind to the true nature of catastrophes, falsely assuming they are external and not innately part of civilization itself.