The cluster of wars in Great Britain and Ireland between 1639 and 1660 are often called “civil wars,” because they were fought by subjects of Charles I in the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. I prefer the more poetical title, Wars of the Three Kingdoms. But I also think of them, though no one else does, as the Dumb Ages.
Why? Because the whole bloody mess was a fight between Catholics and Protestants over what religion the King was allowed to force on his subjects. Out of that quarrel came a toppled monarch, Charles I, executed in 1649; the grim reign of Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector; the Restoration of Charles II; the abdication of James II (or IV, if you’re Scottish); and finally, the import of William and Mary from Holland in 1689 to create the modern arrangement of parliamentary monarchy that rules the United Kingdom to this day.
All of which matters only as background for the book that emerged in the middle of it: Leviathan, published in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes argued for and against many things, but his enduring contribution to political thought comes in a single passage, the one that has been repeated and paraphrased ever since. Life in the natural state, he wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
From that axiom he built the case that society exists to spread the weight of survival across many shoulders, to construct conditions where human beings eat, sleep, shit, and fuck without getting murdered while in the act. Everything else, law, art, trade, democracy, is built on top of that foundation. But even once survival is secured, conflicts emerge. Who gets which land, which resource, which share of dignity? Hobbes thought without a mechanism to mediate those clashes, violence was the default. It is the raw, ever-present basement of human life.
The ideas Hobbes put forth for solving this problem are not particularly timeless, but politics is what people invented instead to rise out of that basement. Politics is negotiation, compromise, procedure. All the slow, tedious processes that make it possible for people to resolve conflicts without killing one another.
The military strategist John Boyd put it differently. The goal of humanity, he said, is to “survive, survive on your own terms, improve our capacity for independent action.” But the competition for resources can drive one side to diminish, deny, or annihilate the other. Politics is the counter: the daily machinery that lets us improve our independent action without destroying others.
The Greeks knew both sides of the problem.
Athens made politics into an art form. In the age of Pericles, they called their constitution a democracy “because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.” Athens was noisy, argumentative, alive. Philosophers quarreled in the agora; dramatists staged plays that mocked the powerful; citizens voted in the assembly.
But Athens was also naive. It tolerated demagogues like Cleon, opportunists like Alcibiades, oligarchs plotting to overthrow democracy. In the end, it collapsed under its own openness. The very tolerance that had made Athens rich in spirit left it unable to defend itself against those within who despised tolerance.
Sparta, by contrast, was nothing but defense. Every male citizen trained from childhood to fight. Sparta had no poets, no orators, no open debates in the square. It lived in permanent vigilance, which gave it longevity, but at the cost of vibrancy. Sparta endured, but it never flourished.
The lasting lesson of Attic civic wisdom is this: A republic cannot afford to be Athens without Sparta, or Sparta without Athens. Politics without defense collapses. Defense without politics calcifies. Both the structure of your civilization and the contract of your society matter.
The Spartan structure demands sacrifice. The Athenian contract demands tolerance. Neither is intrinsically wrong; both are fragile and difficult (not a great combination). Historically, American society has been intrinsically self-sacrificial — immigrant life is costly, Westward expansion is costly, abolition and civil rights are costly, progress is costly. Creating a country from scratch is costly. Once you’ve done that though, the costs shift from creation to maintenance, and maintenance deeply depends on how well the contract woks.
The paradox of the Athenian ideal of tolerance is resolved when seen as a contract which, once broken no longer applies to the side that breaks the contract. Hobbes’ social contract creates the circumstances where survival on your own terms is possible, and that is the minimum space for politics to exist. Politics creates the circumstances where solutions to conflicts within the society where both sides increase their capacity for independent action are possible. When you deny the possibility for these win-win solutions because you will not tolerate that other people can set the terms of their own survival or increase their capacity for independent actions, you have broken the contract. That’s precisely how the oligarchs broke the Athenian contract and eventually Athens returned not to a pre-political state where we are free to be intolerant but still benefit from sharing the weight of survival, but to Hobbes’ life in the natural state, where power is not in the hands of the whole people but in a minority, and the full weight of survival rests entirely upon the shoulders of every person.
If survival is social, breaking the social contract is anti-social. If tolerance is political, intolerance is anti-political.
And anti-politics, because it denies the possibility of win-win solutions in any form, necessarily breaks not only the political contract but the social contract as well. Insistence on setting the terms of social interaction so that only you can win demands that others sacrifice to defend you while you give nothing in return.
Absolutism is selfish. Clothing absolutism in mythos is how anti-politics disguises itself as liberty, turning oppression into something that feels liberating, austerity into something that feels wealthy, scapegoating into something that feels like accountability. Mythical absolutism transforms the refusal of the political contract into something that feels sacred. Sacralizing absolutism is the foundation of supremacist ideology. Anti-politics is a road that leads directly to supremacist rule. It is not a detour. It is not a side street. It is a highway and for win-win solutions to remain a possibility, that route must be stricken from the map.
What does that look like? It looks like the parable of the Nazi bar, told by the writer Michael B. Tager:
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “No. Get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “Hey I’m not doing anything, I’m a paying customer.” and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “Out. Now.” and the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “You didn’t see his vest but it was all Nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And i was like, oh, ok and he continues.
“You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.
And i was like, ‘oh damn.’ and he said “yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
Kicking Nazis out of your bar is violence.
Crushing political dissent is violence.
Throwing off oppression to gain your independence is violence.
Murdering political activists is violence.
Waging war against tyranny is violence.
Rewarding anti-politics is violence.
Violence is a tool, and the martial arts and military sciences are the technology of violence. How you use a tool is morality. And why you use a tool is ethics. Both our social contract and our political contract are clear that moral violence exists. That implies that ethical violence also exists; violence can be justified not only by how it is carried out, but by the purpose it serves.
For Hobbes, his natural state is absolute violence and solidarity shields us from that and lifts us up out of the filth so that we can form society, and in that society, establish politics. This is the violence of being admitted into the community of nations.
For John Boyd, violence is the path to resolve resource contention by asserting the right to independent action and to set the terms of your own survival, but these degrees of survival and victory are only possible because we start, and remain, in Hobbes’ society of solidarity and Pericles’ democracy is spreading the weight of survival across many shoulders. This is the violence of the polity defending themselves and their right to survival and independent action.
Carl von Clausewitz says “War is nothing but a continuation of politics with the admixture of other means.” For Clausewitz, politics precedes war: Politics sets the objectives, and war is the blunt instrument to pursue them when negotiation fails. But here again, war presumes politics exists. It is the clash of sovereign civilizations still locked in a political framework, however brutal. War is the only truly “political violence”.
Anti-politics is different. When one group declares another group must be eradicated, that is anti-politics. When a leader practices stochastic terrorism by publicly suggesting a course of action they themselves can’t pursue, that is anti-politics. When commentators use their media platforms to espouse supremacist ideology, that is anti-politics. When religious authorities proclaim that God blesses absolutism, that is anti-politics. Fascist violence, stochastic terrorism, and organized repression are not politics by other means. They are the destruction of politics itself. Because the people who use them want to set the terms of the national social interaction so that only their in-group can win. Because they want to destroy politics and return to Hobbes’ natural state. Because they don’t think they can win under any other circumstances and because they believe they are going to win a battle for survival by dragging us all back to “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” lives and rebuilding a supremacist civilization by annihilating everyone who doesn’t want that. Because “their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.“
The ethos of anti-politics is the ethos of zero-sum thinking, of supremacist ideology, and of regression towards a mythological nostalgia. If that is the purpose that violence serves, it is unethical. If, on the other hand, violence is required to preserve the opportunity for win-win thinking, solidarity ideology, and progress towards an achievable future, that is a pretty good argument it is ethical.
Protecting the weak from the wicked is always an ethical use of violence.
Defending politics from anti-politics is always an ethical use of violence.
Blocking the road to absolutism is always an ethical use of violence.
Morality can fail. Law can fail. Ethics must not. It demands we fight against the destruction of the contracts whose existence keeps our lives social, rich, pleasant, humane, and long.