Thoughts on empire:1. All political power us ambivalent. Vertical violence of ‘the state’ tends to limit horizontal power between people and between tribes. There is new oppression, but also a measure of new peace and unity.
2. ALL political formations are ambiguous like this: a strong family conquers weaker ones to make a tribe; strong tribe weaker ones to make a kingdom. Then strong kingdom weaker ones to make empires etc.
3. Not only is this vertical violence nonetheless the deliverer of a certain if not fully real peace (Augustine) but it is also linked to the quest for universal truth in China, India, Greece and Rome.
4. Thus the history of civilisations is mainly the history of empires.
5. Nation states are not nec more virtuous than empires. They too are the result of conquest. And by monopolising sovereignty in the centre and focussing on ethnic identity they are less subsidiarist and less pluralistic.
6. The best example is the Holy Roman Empire compared with the Prussian State that later conquered Germany in effect. German militarism and racism is to do with nationalism and not classic imperialism, contra Hazony.
7. As to European overseas empires one needs to do a counter factual thought experiment. Could they not have happened. Answer is surely no. Why?
8. For them not to have happened this would have needed at least the sense that tribal cultures are often equally sophisticated to ‘civilised’ ones. But no civilisation realised this before 20thC ethnography came to this correct conclusion.
9. But even supposing early modern Europeans had come to see the equal validity of tribes (and even Las Casas did not quite get there) they would have had to be protected from all the freebooters and traders by the political powers. That would have involved ‘empire’.
10. Indeed to a considerable extent, alongside appalling use of it, this kind of reining back of private exploitation, this semi-inhibition of capitalism, WAS part of the (very complex, various and contradictory) process by which the overseas empires were formed.
11. Thus too much of the ‘apologise for empire’ movement points towards an ‘the past should not have happened’ movement on the illusion that everyone everywhere at all times could have naturally seen the pure truth. That academics should support this is frightening.
12. Surely even Rousseau did not quite think this! Ethical insight builds only slowly and is also a constant story of regression and uncertainty as well as progress. We build on what our ancestors got right and we also forget some of what they got right.
13. These things are as true as the admitted need constantly to reject what we think our ancestors got wrong. But to imagine we now have automatic natural and ahistorical insight into what is right is to fall into the same illusion that they do often fell into.
14. Instead we need to recover the sense that dialectical debate which takes time and is never fully resolved goes along with the historical process.Our actions are also a constant debate and search for the the truth; our debates are linked to limited perspectives of our actions
15. I mean dialectics in the Platonic sense. But despite their deluded logicist belief in the automatic power of the negative (not in Plato), Hegel and Marx were right to link dialectics and history. It’s partly why Marx did not simplistically condemn empire.
16. This the woke left is very far from being an Hegelian or a Marxist, much less a Nietzschean or Foucauldian (still more historicist) left. It is merely an ultra liberal left. And it is mostly not really socialist.
17. In case some Catholics think I am being too historicist-relativist here, it is clear that for Aquinas the natural law or participation in the eternal law is always imperfectly mediated by historically situated law of nations and civil law. See my Church Life Journal articles
