The idea is as old as the hills, Might Makes Right, but it wasn’t until 1846 that we were given its quintessential expression in English; this from the pen of one Aidin Ballou. Aidin was an American, a New Englander, and a member of that oddball cast of Victorian characters who were Bohemian, Utopian, and crankish all at the same time. He was an abolitionist, of course, and he was in favour of women’s rights—he might have been a friend of Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians. He founded a community, ‘Hopedale,’ along anarcho-Christian lines, and, in his later years, corresponded with Tolstoy. Fundamental to everything he did and believed was his pacifism, strict and unwavering. He called it Christian resistance after Matthew 5:39: “But I say unto you that ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.” This position was absolute. Unlike William Lloyd Garrison, he rejected violence even in the Civil War. I need hardly add that Ballou, beginning as a Baptist, ended as a Unitarian.
Might Makes Right elevates violence and war to the level of a moral imperative. Right—the good—requires might. Might Makes Right is not the Jesuitical justification of ends and means, but their fusion. It was not always so. Anciently, the gods fought on your side, or against you; in The Iliad, both. But this was not a sanctification or any other kind of legitimation. In Simone Weil’s great essay, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force—force is her word for might—she depicts force as “the true hero, the true subject, the center” of the poem. But the Iliad’s might had no interest in right; it’s only end in view is death, or slavery. Force is “the x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.” Force rules pitilessly, objectively, “as cold and hard as the rule of inert matter.” But it has its own logic. “The truth is, nobody really possesses it…Thus it is that those who have force on loan from fate count on it too much and are destroyed. For they do not see that the force in their possession is only a limited quantity; nor do they see their relations with other human beings as a kind of balance between unequal amounts of force…they conclude that destiny has given complete licence to them and none at all to their inferiors. And at this point they exceed the measure of force that is actually at their disposal.” Inevitably, logically, the conqueror is conquered. “This retribution, which has a geometrical rigor, which operates automatically to punish the abuse of force, was the main subject of Greek thought. It is the soul of the epic.” Weil goes on to observe that the Occident has lost the capacity to think like this, “no longer even has a word to express it in any of its languages…We are only geometricians of matter; the Greeks were, first of all, geometricians in their apprenticeship of virtue.”
Christianity wasn’t entirely ignorant of this understanding. Matthew again, 26:52: “Then said Jesus unto him, ‘Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’” But this is the exception to the Christian rule, which was quickly assimilated to the rule of might. ‘Dieu et mon droit’ could be the motto for the entire Christian era. Yet Christianity still separated might and right, the sacred and profane, the Church and State. Might, often to its considerable irritation, had to seek outside itself for right, the deus vult that the Knights bore on their banners in the Crusades. Subtly, this became a determinism. Might, blessed by Providence, the expression of God’s will, made History, which, at any particular moment, expressed the proper relations of power and so must be right. Then right, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became first Reason and finally Progress. “Thanks to progress,” says Simone Weil, might “would soon be a thing of the past” and “the Iliad could appear as an historical document.” But not quite. Not after August, 1914. After the Great War, there could be, in the West, no other right but might. Along with the Tsar, the Kaiser, and the Habsburgs, the whole idea of History as the irresistible march of Reason came crashing down. Subsequent reference to it would only produce hysterical laughter.
Might Makes Right was now triumphant. Its spread between the two great wars of the twentieth century was found in the rise of the ideologies. Might Makes Right not only defined relations between states, but created the definition of civil society within them. Might brooked no limits. Law, which imagined itself as a restraint, became handmaiden to the concentration camps. Science, the great expression of Reason, now provided might with limitless, deadly means: Hiroshima, Nagasaki. The War ended with the victory of the mightiest, the United States, and the Pax Americana, an ersatz democracy wedded to consumerism. Now a particular aspect of might’s triumph became increasingly evident. History had been turned into a fait accompli. If Might Makes Right, thenhistory can only ever have had one outcome—freedom is illusion—and to imagine any future other than the one might creates, moment by moment, is futile. Nicola Chiaromonte—exile from Mussolini’s Italy; flier in Malraux’s squadron during the Spanish Civil War; anti-Stalinist through the Cold War—put it this way: “History, in this context, is synonymous with force and power as well as with truth. Which means that truth is to be found in accomplished facts, and is proved by the facts that are being accomplished. Is this not, when all is said and done, the morality of contemporary man?”
It is. But before considering the situation in which contemporary man finds himself, it’s worth going back to Aidin Ballou and looking more deeply at his famous phrase. It occurs in a passage of Christian Non-Resistance—Aidin’s magnum opus—and reads as follows:
But now, instead of discussion and argument, brute force rises up to the rescue of discomfited error, and crushes truth and right into the dust. ‘Might makes right,’ and hoary folly totters on in her mad career escorted by armies and navies.
This is so clairvoyant that one wonders whether, along with other aspects of his crankishness, Ballou wasn’t some kind of soothsayer or fortune-teller; he seems to have been looking into a crystal ball. ‘Discomfited error’ is a nicely understated way of the describing the West’s failures in the Ukraine, Gaza and Taiwan, while ‘hoary folly totters’ captures Joe Biden perfectly. And of course there is no ‘discussion and argument.’ Listening? Talking? Reasoning? Diplomacy, in the West, has been replaced by threats and sanctions, ‘doing something,’ which always means more might.
But there is one plain difference between then and now.
Ballou, writing in the first year of the Mexican-American War, assumed might’s victory, whereas might is now being defeated everywhere one looks. This defeat is most obviously military, but is equally evident in the economy, politics, the whole of Western culture. And the failure is not only deep, it’s broad. Scholz, Macron, Trudeau, Biden, Stoltenberg, Sunak, Van der Leyden, Borrell, Blinken, Gantz, Netanyahu—the list of fools and knaves, spanning continents, crossing oceans, is endless. Moreover, it is coming at a time when the gulf between this governing class and its subjects has never been wider. ‘Populism’ is the latest dirty word. Every protest is ‘right-wing inspired.’ Millions are demoralized, certainly eating cake but also smoking crack and overdosing on opioids. Others, to their estimable credit, fight back. But as they get into their trucks and onto their tractors, don their gilets jaunes and their MAGA ball caps, the demos only demonstrates how little it has to do with kratos, as the Greeks called might.
Faced with all this, might is at a loss. Defeat has been compounded of ignorance, incompetence, and a vanity that is born of generations of immunity from any kind of accountability. These are people who involved themselves in a war with Russia but neglected to secure an adequate supply of artillery shells. NATO ‘planners,’ having trained Ukrainian troops to ‘NATO standards,’ launched an offensive against positions prepared over months by Stavka trained officers—men whose history includes the destruction of the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in 1943 and 1944—and were surprized at the catastrophe that followed: tens of thousands of men dead, hundreds of Western tanks and infantry fighting vehicles destroyed or abandoned. Apparently they believed those articles in Foreign Affairs about ‘Putin’s miscalculation,’ claims of British ‘intelligence’ that the Russians had run out of missiles and were fighting with shovels, assurances of Victoria Nuland and her husband that the Russian army was badly led and demoralized. But this is all of a piece. For they also believed that their ‘regime of sanctions’ would bring Russia to its knees, thereby proving that their ignorance of the Russian economy was equal to their ignorance of their own. Deindustrialized themselves—believers in such myths as ‘the knowledge economy,’ the ‘green revolution’—they had no comprehension of a truly industrial economy, just as they had no understanding whatsoever of industrial warfare.
But the failure of might has also meant the failure of right. The moral collapse of the elites has been as monumental as their military defeats. Today, the morality of might is the morality of Jeffrey Epstein, or of the Canadian parliament applauding the Nazis. Might Makes Right. Yes, but all the western countries that have supported Ukraine have also been the biggest backers of Israel in Gaza, which is to say, their right has become, plausibly, complicity in genocide. Might has made a right that runs counter to all the moral values that have been developed over the course of Western civilization. There can be no right and wrong in a world that has replaced truth and falsehood with ‘information,’ ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ arranged into ‘narratives.’ Moral collapse and cognitive collapse are intertwined. The marker here is the ‘trans’ movement, the departure into ideology of the biological basis of humanity. The new right—the creation of American hegemony and neo-liberalism—is a morality in which all values are relative, save one, the dollar. That is to say, the Western elites function (and want their societies to function) with the values of the Mafia.
So the world of might and right is failing, and the governing elites are failing with it.
What is happening to our world? Tom Friedman asks. The answer should be obvious even to a professional moron: ‘us’ is losing it. But what can ‘us’ do about it? The elite response has been predictable. They lie, continuously. The ‘narrative’ is ‘flipped.’ They double-down—the ICJ has ruled against them, so they take revenge on UNRWA, to remind the UN who pays the bills. But ultimately the ‘facts on the ground,’ will be impossible to deny. They already are, in Gaza; total defeat looms in the Ukraine. History no longer seems a fait accompli. Different possibilities can now be imagined. Almost all of these are found on the right—Le Pen, the AfD—but their precise ideological orientation is less important than their appeal to the understanding of Western populations that the elites’ interests are totally opposed to theirs; in which understanding they are completely correct. Of course, the elites fight back. Might is turned inward: intimidation, censorship, witch hunts. The main stream media is now a propaganda organ. Democracy is to be saved by outlawing the opposition, or putting it in jail. Even ‘liberals’ have been recruited to the cause; ‘cancelling’ people is not so far from ‘disappearing’ them, and an authoritarian moralism that outlaws various words moves us progressively toward an authoritarian orthodoxy. All this creates a politics only a few steps away from violence, but it may not work anyway. Orwellian newspeak meets reverse English, and the more Trump is attacked, the higher his poll ratings climb.
It can be argued that the defeat of might and right in individual countries has been seen before, but what is happening now is unprecedented for it’s happening all across the West. We have moved into the kind of crisis that Lenin defined as a revolutionary situation—though, he immediately added, “it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution.” Surprisingly, as he defines “the symptoms” of such a situation, it is the upper classes that are crucial. True, the oppressed have a look in—their suffering will have “grown more acute than usual”—but the location of the crisis is above stairs, among their betters. A revolutionary situation occurs “when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes,’ when there is a crisis in the policy of the ruling class.” This leads “to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes bursts forth,” so that they “are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves [Lenin’s emphasis] into independent historical action.”
Such a situation, even if it doesn’t lead to revolution, is very dangerous. The government of might, as Aidin Ballou understood, was “sword sustained” and operates on “the life-taking, injuring-inflicting principle.” It is the state that controls ‘legitimate’ violence. In a revolutionary situation, this principle is bound to become vicious. As might’s legitimation vanishes—as the true meaning of right becomes apparent—might can only mean violence. Violence, arbitrary and mindless, leads to chaos. So it was in the examples given by Lenin of revolutionary situations that did not turn into revolutions; Russia in 1905, Germany in the 1860s. Finally, where can the elites turn? The question is easily answered by another: How many times in history has a ruling elite resorted to war as a distraction from problems at home? This ‘solution’ is now being prepared, indeed executed. Everywhere, at every opportunity, might defines the future in terms of what it knows best:
“UK army chief says citizens should be ready to fight in possible land war.” (CBS News)
“Boris Pistorius, who has frequently called for Germany to become “war ready” since becoming defence minister a year ago and has warned that Vladimir Putin could attack within eight years, said the country needed to be ready to confront the Russian president.” (The Guardian)
“West Must Be Prepared For War With Russia, NATO Official Warns Ahead Of Major Military Drills.” (Radio Free Europe)
“Military chief warns China and Russia are ‘at war with the West’ and Canada is not ready.” (The National Post)
Even at the worst moments of the Cold War, such a frantic beating of the war drums was rarely heard. What makes it so dangerous is precisely the failure of might that has occasioned this deafening tattoo, for we have arrived at Simone Weil’s moment: at this point they exceed the measure of force that is actually at their disposal.The West—deindustrialized, demoralized, catastrophically led, its social cohesion breaking down—couldn’t fight a war against anyone of consequence. Unless that war is nuclear. Here is the ultimate danger. American hegemony has always had a messianic edge; losing it will seem apocalyptic. Might, collapsing, has gone terribly Wrong. Will it accept defeat with a whimper, or insist on a bang?
Nuclear war, we have been told, is ‘unthinkable.’ More exactly, it is moot. What can you say about it? Nothing; you can only shrug your shoulders. So, at the corner of the eye, at the back of the mind, it soon passes out of sight and mind altogether. But that won’t do; not now. Israel and the United States are both nuclear powers ruled by incompetent, stupid, and highly ideological people; Russia has made plain its capacity to defend itself. But the possibility of nuclear war, precisely because it is moot, precisely because it is impossible to estimate its probability, underlines the most crucial aspect of the present situation. You cannot know the future. Nothing marks the hubris of the modern West more than the belief that you can. How many economists has the University of Chicago graduated? Not one foresaw the collapse of 2008, as Her Late Majesty, Elizabeth, so rudely pointed out. Neither Joe Biden nor Vladimir Putin would have expected, in 2022, that the Ukrainian war could have ended up where it is today: and they are actors supposedly shaping events. War is mass, organized violence. War is chaos. War has a logic of its own, but no one can ever be sure where it leads, for it ventures beyond human limits into fate, which only the Gods know, as Homer tells us, and which mocks might pitilessly. The geometry of might that the Greeks understood but which we have forgotten is asserting itself inexorably. One doesn’t have to be a pacifist to agree with Aidin Ballou that the only way to alter this is: stop. But this would require might to admit defeat. And such an admission would destroy the last shreds of its legitimacy, so leading us back to Lenin’s ‘revolutionary situation.’ Here, too, is chaos, a logic whose outcome is not predictable.
All that can be said with certainty is that the collapse of might and right—not climate change; not ‘trans kids’; not AI—is defining the political horizon of the world.
