Forecasting Intrastate Conflicts

Forecasting Intrastate Conflicts

            The end of World War II in 1945 was, and continues to be, a major line of demarcation in twentieth-century political studies for more several important categories, perhaps none so important as that of intrastate conflict. In the decades since the end of World War II, geopolitical conflict has shifted dramatically away from major interstate conflicts in favor of an alarming upward trend of intrastate conflicts – also known as “civil wars.” As noted in the study by James Fearon and David Laitin, roughly 25 interstate conflicts – wars between two nations – have been waged between 1945 and 1999 with a death toll of approximately 3.33 million. In the same period there were 127 intrastate wars – civil wars – with more than 16.2 million dead; a ratio of roughly 5:1 in both the numbers of conflicts and loss of life.[1] A related study found that the there is a considerable difference between the duration of interstate and intrastate wars, with the former lasting, on average, 480 days and the latter 1,665 days:  a ratio of 3.46:1.[2] In short, civil wars have become the most deadly form of warfare on planet Earth since the end of World War II. Perhaps worse than all of these statistics is the simple fact that, with regard to the political sciences, the causes of intrastate conflict are not well understood making the potential for forecasting and preventing them very limited. This is, of course, not in any sense for a lack of trying. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, several in-depth – and, at the surface, promising – studies have emerged with the expressed purpose of attempting to root-out the major fundamental factors that contribute to intrastate conflict, build a robust model to account for those factors and, in the end, predict the likelihood of further intrastate conflict in troubled regions of the world. This essay will attempt to analyze the studies completed by the following three teams: Stanford University’s James Fearon and David Laitin, Oxford University’s Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, and Yale University’s Nicholas Sambanis with Ibrahim Elbadawi from the World Bank. While these studies constitute some of the most innovative and rigorous attempts to understand the roots of intrastate conflict, it should become quickly obvious to any reader that these attempts do not bring policy-makers substantially closer to a path of prediction and prevention than they were at the close of the twentieth century.

            While each of the three teams that conducted a study on intrastate conflict has arrived at a very unique statistical model of intrastate conflicts, there are a number of factors on which they all agree. First and foremost among these conclusions, is that contrary to the conventional opinion developed in the late 1990s, the end of the Cold War did not dramatically increase the number of intrastate conflicts in the world.[3] The prevailing opinion with regard to civil wars in the late 1990s was that small, newly independent former Soviet republics with longstanding ethno-religious differences accounted for a vast explosion of intrastate wars along the periphery of Russia. In fact, Collier and Hoeffler are quick to note that out of the seventy-nine intrastate conflicts that began between 1960 and 1999, only eleven of them – an under-representative 13.92% of the total number and almost half of the average by decade - actually started after the Cold War ended.[4]

            All three studies agree, though on different terms and for different reasons, that there is a statistically significant correlation between low per capita income levels (GDP), poor economic opportunity, and the presence of intrastate conflict.[5] The particulars of how per capita income factors into each model will be discussed in subsequent sections, but it should be noted that each of the studies uses GDP as a proxy for a larger characteristic of the state with relation to conflict within their own borders, with different degrees of statistical significance for their respective models. The final statistical factor that each study appears to have some level of consensus on is the effect of ethno-religious fractionalization on the prevalence of conflict: each study appears to confirm that a high degree of ethno-religious fractionalization has no significant effect on intrastate conflict.[6] One other factor that is important to the Fearon-Laitin model, the Collier-Hoeffler model and – to a lesser and indirectly related degree – the Brandt study is the amount of rugged or mountainous terrain within the state. Briefly summing up the consensus: all three of these models agree that the amount of mountainous terrain is positively linked with the opportunity for conflict or, in the Brandt study, its duration.[7] It is beyond these factors, however, that the clear agreements between each study begin to break down.

            The earliest published study of the group is the Elbawadi-Sambanis group and all subsequent studies that are published on this topic appear to be, at some level, a response to it. Published in 2002, this study set out to highlight what they perceived to be a major flaw in overstating the economic impact on civil war prevalence at the expense of studying ethno-religious fractionalization.[8] The study operates on three fundamental hypotheses: a. An increase in economic opportunity within a state will decrease the prevalence of civil war, b. An increase in democratic polity ratings within a state will decrease the prevalence of civil war and, c. The closer that ethnic fragmentation approaches a middle amount, the higher the increase of civil war prevalence will manifest.[9] The first two hypotheses are not particularly unique in political thought, but the third hypothesis does provide a potentially new insight into the forecast. According to the Elbawadi-Sambanis model, a highly fragmented degree of ethnic diversity – as one might find in the United States – and an extremely low degree of ethnic diversity – as one might find, ostensibly, in Uzbekistan or Mongolia – both provide a very low risk of civil war. It appears as though the closer the ethnic diversity ratio between two groups within a state approaches 50% apiece, the higher the risk of civil war manifests, especially in conjunction with a high national population. While the significance of ethnic fragmentation seems to be the heaviest statistical factor weighed by this study, it is not the only factor discussed. In analyzing the polity rating for states with previous civil war data, the study suggests that a low democratic polity rating also implies that the population of the state has a significant lack of options whereby they may peacefully articulate grievances.[10] This political reality, according to the study, is tantamount to inevitable military conflict. It is from this logic-inspired deduction that Elbawadi and Sambanis arrive at the pre-eminence of democratic regimes in preventing political conflict, admittedly in spite of this particular factor having been dismissed by a number of previous – and subsequent - studies.[11] In the end, however, the model affirms that no particular variable should be treated as independently significant, as economic variables may be tied to ethnic fragmentation, highly democratic polity ratings may be the result a powerful economy and all of these factors may be determined by historical intrastate conflict.[12] The subsequent recommendation of the study to policy-makers is threefold: a. it is important to improve the number and quality of democratic regimes in the world, b. it is important to improve the economic opportunity and growth of impoverished nations, by way of increasing a nation’s per capita income, and c. that improving the political conditions for a state is more feasible than attempting to develop advanced and high-yield economic infrastructure in a repressive regime with a low polity ranking.[13] This is the most troubling aspect of their conclusion. The essence of their policy recommendation is that, despite any statistical correlations between a high polity ranking and lack of intrastate conflict, policy-makers should engage in what amounts to the age-old practice of “nation building” in order to decrease the overall risk of civil war. One would be remiss not to mention its apparent ideological link with that of the actions taken by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The two primary efforts to increase economic and democratic values within troubled regions of the world – Afghanistan and Iraq – are still ongoing and, currently, without any substantial exit strategy.

            Continuing in the chronological order by which these studies were published, we arrive at the study conducted by Fearon and Laitin, published in February of 2003. Fearon and Laitin intended to produce a model that tracks the conditions favoring the development of an insurgency within a nation. This approach, according to the study in response to the Elbawadi-Sambanis model, are more effective than those models that focus too directly on ethno-nationalist fractionalization, religious fractionalization, and government regime type.[14] This study, claiming to have considered proxies for ethnic fragmentation and regime type and finding them statistically insignificant, concluded ultimately that per capita income trumps both of those factors.[15] In short, regardless of ethno-religious diversity or antagonism within a state, the higher the per-capita income, the less risk there is within that state for insurgency. It seems that, in the view of Fearon and Laitin, the old colloquial adage that you can simply rub the money “wherever it hurts” holds true. Moreover, Fearon and Laitin are not particularly convinced that those factions that identify themselves as “ethnic” or “nationalist” have any substantial difference from any other form of insurgency.[16] It would be misleading, however, to classify Fearon and Laitin’s views of ethnic diversity as wholly insignificant as they do argue that ethnic diversity can indirectly lead to conditions which provide prime ground for insurgency, even if they don’t influence the insurgency directly.[17] This position on regime type and ethnic fragmentation, then, is a noteworthy shift away from the belief that grievances are the main motivations for intrastate conflict, rather than opportunity. Their model for insurgency is based almost entirely on the premise that wherever there are opportunities for (i.e. a sufficient number of factors favoring) insurgency, regardless of the motivation, an insurgency will emerge to challenge the government. These factors include, but are not limited to: a newly independent state, a politically unstable central government, a substantial national population, a separate territorial base from the central seat of government (such as East Pakistan/Bangladesh), the willingness of foreign governments or diasporas to provide funding and/or weapons to insurgents, the presence of low-weight, high-value natural resources for exploitative use by insurgents to fund activity, and/or the presence of oil.[18] It should be noted, however, that the dismissal of grievances as a significant or driving factor behind civil war are predicated on both a logical and statistical hypothesis that even the most homogenous national populations have differing factions with grievances against the group in power. Perhaps the most statistically significant factor in the Fearon-Laitin model has to do with the strength of central government, proxied by the state’s per capita income.[19] The foundational premise for using per capita income as a proxy for government strength comes is based on the notion that the lower a nation’s GDP is, the less money there is for the government to tax/appropriate for public services, police and infrastructure. Tellingly, the Fearlon-Laitin model shows that a decrease of $1,000 in GDP can result in an increase of 41% in the chance for civil war. Furthermore, Fearon and Laitin argue that weakened economic conditions (including low per capita income) make recruiting easier for insurgent factions.[20] Nearing the conclusion of their study, Fearon and Laitin suggest that these states with low economic production should be classified as their own kind of regime type (regardless of polity rankings) known as “anocracies”, a government whose central authority is either weak or non-existent. These anocracies, because of a lack of government revenue by way of economic production, do not have the resources – outside of foreign aid – to stamp out the insurgency.[21] The only obvious exception to this hypothesis are those states with extensive oil reserves providing the central government with sufficient “easy” money without the need to develop a strong social infrastructure, leaving dispersed populations, in theory, isolated enough to develop an insurgency without the watchful eye of the government.[22] The conclusion and recommendation of the Fearon-Laitin study is: in order to decrease the statistical likelihood of civil war within a country, the central governments in high-risk scenarios must be strengthened, well funded and aided in the development of a socially “intrusive” bureaucracy.[23]

            The final and newest of the three studies being analyzed is a model developed by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler from Oxford University in 2004. Collier and Hoeffler attempt to offer an “econometric” model of predicting civil war, relying on a blend of “motive and opportunity” believing that rebellion, like murder, requires both.[24] Noting that political scientists have long argued that grievances are the reason for civil war, not opportunity or “greed”, the Collier-Hoeffler model attempts to combine the most statistically significant factors of both schools of thought. In the same vein that launched the Fearon-Laitin study, Collier and Hoeffler argue that all countries have factions that have “exaggerated grievances” against the governing power and, therefore, a grievance-only model will not be robust enough to predict intrastate conflict.[25] The model relies on an analysis of over ten “opportunity” factors and four “grievance” factors. While many of the opportunity factors listed are eventually whittled down to measure their statistical significance within a combined model, the final factors that remain in the model are: economic dependence on a primary commodity export, funding for the insurgency provided by foreign diasporas and/or foreign governments, per capita income, male secondary schooling, economic growth rate, and population demographics.[26] The most statistically significant factor of the group is, by far, state dependence on primary commodity exports. According to the published study by Collier and Hoeffler, the “risk of conflict peaks when [primary commodity exports] constitute 33% of GDP”, thus, “primary exports are highly significant.” At “peak danger” of 33% of GDP there is a 22% of civil war, compared to 1% for countries with no primary commodity dependence.[27] The four grievances listed – ethnic or religious “hatred”, political repression, political exclusion and economic inequality – do not seem to provide much staying power to the model as the two most analyzed grievances are quickly dismissed. Ethnic dominance is discarded because “peace episodes” and “war episodes” have the same amount of dominance and economic inequality is only “slightly higher” [emphasis added] prior to conflict episodes than peace episodes.[28] In the end, Collier and Hoeffler appear to end their recommendation on a peace keeping note, urging policy-makers to help maintain peace in those countries that have seen intrastate conflict, since – as they interpret the final factor – by way of a cliché: “time heals.” In other words, the longer the duration since the last intrastate conflict the more chance a state has to recuperate and reinforce those positive forces that discourage civil conflict.[29]

            What is most obvious from an analysis of these studies is that no group is any closer to developing a robust understanding of how civil wars start or, by the same token, how to prevent them. The only certainty that avails policy makers and forecasting experts alike is that the loss of life, infrastructure and opportunity will continue for the foreseeable future. Moreover, as a later study suggests, it is not even clear that developing a model on “statistically significant factors” can produce the kind of predictive power that aids in the overall efforts to reduce conflict.[30] These statistically significant models are unable, according to some accusations, to predict – in any substantial sense – out-of-sample examples and leave more questions in some areas than answers. For instance, would the current violence perpetrated by drug cartels with the Mexican and United States government agencies be considered an insurgency or civil war by any of the models? Native Americans, living on federal land grants and receiving federal aid money, have not petitioned for more autonomy or taken up arms against the surrounding states or agents of the US federal government. Neither have they been subject to internal civil wars despite being poverty stricken, low male secondary schooling and poor economic development opportunities. How would Collier and Hoeffler explain this out-of-sample situation? Can efforts, though not yet violent, in Hawaii for secession from the United States – based on ethno-linguistic grievances with the Federal government and a lower per capita income for local residents – be considered or analyzed under any of the models? Can gang related violence and drug-trafficking in highly populated urban areas of the US be classified as “insurgency” by the Fearon-Laitin model? In the end, perhaps the most important questions remaining are: do the quasi-arbitrary distinctions of national borders stand as the ultimate parameters for studying civil unrest and conflict, and must groups have stated political goals in order to contribute to intrastate conflicts?

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[1] Fearon, James D., and David D. Laitin. "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War." American Political Science Review 97.1 (2003): 75-90. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “FL” in footnotes.)

[2] Brandt, Patrick T., T. D. Mason, Mehmet Gurses, Nicholai Petrovsky, and Dagmar Radin. "When and How the Fighting Stops: Explaining the Duration and Outcome of Civil Wars." Defence and Peace Economics 19.6 (2008): 415-34. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “Brandt” in footnotes.)

[3] Collier, Paul, and Anke Hoeffler. "Greed and grievance in civil war." Oxford Economic Papers 56 (2004): 563-95. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “CH” in footnotes.) FL page 75 and CH page 581.

[4] CH page 569, calculated by dividing the 11 intrastate wars of the 1990s by the total 79 wars over 39 years where each decade should have seen, on average, 20 intrastate wars.

[5] Elbadawi, Ibrahim, and Nicholas Sambanis. "How Much War Will we see?: Explaining the Prevalence of Civil War." Journal of Conflict Resolution 46 (2002): 307-34. Print. (Henceforth referred to as “ES” in footnotes.) FL page 76, CH page 588, ES page 311

[6] FL page 83, CH page 572, ES page 311

[7] FL pages 80, 85, CH page 570, Brandt 421

[8] ES page 308

[9] ES page 311

[10] ES page 310

[11] ES page 325

[12] ES page 326

[13] ES page 331

[14] FL page 88

[15] FL pages 79, 82, 83

[16] FL page 79

[17] FL page 82

[18] FL page 81

[19] FL page 76

[20] FL pages 76, 83, 80

[21] FL page 85

[22] FL page 81

[23] FL page 88

[24] CH page 563

[25] CH page 564

[26] CH pages 567-570

[27] CH pages 565, 574 and 580

[28] CH page 572

[29] CH page 589

[30] Ward, Michael D., Brian D. Greenhill, and Kristin Bakke. "The Perils of Policy by P-Value: Prediciting Civil Conflicts." Proc. of 50th Annual Convention of Interational Studies Association, New York. 2009. Print. (Henceforth referred to as WGB in footnotes.)

The Stones of John Ruskin's Venice

The Stones of John Ruskin’s Venice

            In the middle of the nineteenth century John Ruskin, a renowned art historian, critic and intellectual, wrote a three volume book on Venetian art and architecture entitled The Stones of Venice. Within this highly detailed account of Venetian art history, Ruskin incorporated – via his peculiar rhetorical style – a bold and, at least to modern readers, controversial commentary on a variety of topics including Christian doctrine, social ethics, division of labor and class distinction. Ruskin dedicates a significant portion of The Stones of Venice to an in-depth analysis of Gothic architecture, providing a stark contrast to both previous Romano-Byzantine and later Renaissance styles with impressive familiarity. It is this artistic contrast that behaves as a vehicle not only for his brilliant interpretations, but also his provocative rhetorical extrapolations expressed through the prism of his devout Christian worldview.

            In order to understand Ruskin’s analysis of Romano-Byzantine, Gothic and Renaissance architecture, one must first attempt to understand the philosophical center from which he launches his evaluations. Informed by a deeply religious commitment to his understanding of Christianity, Ruskin’s worldview impresses certain core values and beliefs about humanity onto every criticism and analysis. History, within the worldview he’s constructed, can and should be read as a “progress of corruption” where the values of a more pious past are to be valued well above the attempts at perfection of the present. This reading of history influences The Stones of Venice from the very beginning, where Ruskin makes his first claim that there were, in all of history, three “thrones” over the ocean: one in the ancient commercial city of Tyre, one in the medieval commercial city of Venice and the last in the modern commercial empire of England (139). In writing about Venetian history – via the powerful medium of art and architecture – Ruskin hopes to ward of the same ruinous fate for England that befell the Most Serene Republic. Starting from the belief that Venetian fortunes were tied to the spirit of individual Christian piety, Ruskin can boldly break with historical convention and claim that the initial turning-point for Venice’s declension paradigm began in 1418, a full 100 years earlier than the consensus provided by contemporary scholars (141-142). Out from his Christendom-centric vision of the world, Ruskin draws a particularly interesting interpretation of the collapse of the old Roman Empire at the hands of the “Lombard” in the north and west, and the “Arab” in the south and east. This appears to indicate to Ruskin that God positioned Venice as “the golden clasp of the girdle of the Earth” both artistically and geographically (155). Even more than the central geography of the lagoon, Ruskin claims that the Ducal palace of Venice is “the central building of the world” as it incorporates Romano-Byzantine, Lombard and Arab elements (146).

            As immediately as the reader becomes acquainted with his brilliant rhetorical and interpretive ability, he is also immediately confronted with the ferocity of Ruskin’s writing style. Ruskin, for all of his critical genius, is both overly confident in the veracity of his own claims, often appearing haughty and boastful to his readers and dismissing any potential criticism of his own ideas as unconscionable. Indeed – while they would appear to be on completely opposite ends of the theological spectrum – John Ruskin’s elite rhetorical skill and apparent egomania are remarkably similar to contemporary thinker, Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Nietzsche, Ruskin’s subjective opinions of artistic taste are touted as objective fact and, despite how colorfully interwoven they are, he diverts and digresses into an excessive number of tangents wholly unrelated to the topic-at-hand. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Ruskin imports his deeply religious commitment to Christian metaphysics into his artistic criticism when he claims, “accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of misunderstanding the ends of art… This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws… no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure… [and] imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life” (183-184). These metaphysically imported artistic truths act as the guideposts for all of the claims Ruskin makes with regard to Gothic and Renaissance art.

            While there does not appear to be – in Ruskin’s outlook – a particularly Gothic style per se, there a school of thought and a collection of values that, when seen in architecture, one can identify as Gothic (170). While these stylistic and design elements don’t necessitate Gothic architecture simply on their own, Ruskin argues that in their common employment in architecture, the style is invoked. Ruskin’s style elements are Savageness, Changefulness, Naturalism, Grotesqueness, Rigidity and “Redundance” [sic], and the design elements are pointed arches, buttresses and vaulted roofs, etc. (171). Explaining that the term “Gothic” was initiated as a derogative or pejorative to indicate the “barbaric” and “savage” style that replaced Roman architecture in Europe, Ruskin immediately explains to his reader that it was inspired by a deeply and fundamentally pious adherence to Christianity (172, 175). This Gothic Christianity, as Ruskin understands it, is a religious system that asserts the value of every soul (176). By way of a very drawn-out explanation, Ruskin informs his reader that Gothic art and architecture follows several essential thematic values: a lack of symmetrical or mathematical “perfection”, abundance of ornamentation and decoration and an appreciation for the natural world (particularly organic vegetation). He believed that the Gothic style allowed for individual artistic expression and celebrated, at an unconscious level, the imperfection of human art as homage to the Biblical claim of mortal imperfection (184). This freedom of Gothic-era builders and artisans to produce art as best they could within their own individual expression was “essential” and one of the most powerful representations of Gothic artistic freedom was the quasi-random, asymmetrical and – in some cases – “organic” structure of cathedrals. This asymmetrical, ornamented and naturalistic building style stood, to Ruskin, as a paragon of defiance in the face of servility imposed upon “good and ordinarily intelligent men” by the Renaissance (208).

            In the devout world of John Ruskin, rationalism corrupted everything (149). Calling back to his idea that history is a “progress of corruption,” Ruskin reminds the reader of Venice’s centrality in God’s ordained geography when claims that Venice represents both the paragon of Christian piety and the renegade departure from it (149). In modern times, he laments that the Basilica of San Marco is uninspiring, that no one even stops to notice it or marvel at it, reinforcing his belief that modernity is an increasingly godless product of rationalist Renaissance principles (148, 168). The celebration of classical figures and mathematical precision is, to Ruskin, highly offensive and does not allow for the beautiful imperfection that was so abundant in Gothic architecture (177). Drawing from his post-abolition values of human liberty, Ruskin claims that imposing any requirements of perfection on any man – mathematical or otherwise – is akin to same kind of slavery whose last bastion was overthrown in Christendom (178). Renaissance-era dependence on mathematics and a classically ideal concept of perfection makes, to Ruskin, a cold, calculated and mechanical sort of art unfit for a pious heart (197). In short, his disapproval of Renaissance art stems from a belief that the methodical and mathematical norms of classical and Renaissance art have “silenced the independent language of the operative” (212).

            Methodologically speaking, Ruskin’s genius is not only in studying texts and paintings, but in allowing individual ornaments, tombs and common infrastructure to inform his understanding of history in lieu of written records which do not survive as easily. In the end, his image of Venetian history is one of unfulfilled promise. Early Venice couldn’t fully develop its own Gothic character because of its cultural indebtedness to Byzantine inspiration, but by the time they had developed an entirely independent cultural ethos, the poisonous rationalism of the Renaissance had begun to pervert the artistic minds of Venetians (215). This progress of corruption was evident, to Ruskin, in the city’s Byzantine-era influence being coupled with a “serious, religious, and sincere” character, progressing into a “comparatively deprived” version of Gothic and into a third phase of Renaissance, heralding its “ruin” in the same fashion of the “Cities of the Plain” like Gomorrah (216, 217, 139).

Navigating the Ister

Navigating the Ister

An Exploration of Hölderlinian Poetology

            In his eighteenth century poem, Der Ister, Friedrich Hölderlin explores the river Ister as a representation of the living bond between the light of Greece and the German “land of evening,” in conjunction with ideas of ancient and the modern, and – perhaps most important of all – the mundane and the divine. In this poem, Hölderlin masterfully weaves images of Greek mythology, Christian theology and a profound appreciation for the power and beauty of the earth, offering a holistically integrated vision of humans, gods and nature. Within the framework of this poetic vision, Hölderlin presents the reader with a series of questions on the nature of the divine, man’s relationship to the sacred power of the kosmos and the poet’s responsibility in navigating the limits between them.

            Beginning the poem with the invocation, “Now come, fire! / We are desirous / To look upon Day,” Hölderlin directly conjures up imagery from nature and pagan Greek mythology while faithfully incorporating some of the most powerful themes in the Christian tradition. With only one line of poetry Hölderlin is able to summon a range of ideas for the reader to consider: humanity’s physical and psychological need for the rising sun, the gift of sacred fire from Prometheus, the descending Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the apocalyptic Day of the Lord. It could be inferred that the early inclusion of these ideas subtly frame the theme of the poem as a work supplication. Turning his attention to the river itself, Hölderlin curiously refers to the river by its ancient Greek name: the Ister. In Hölderlin’s time, the late eighteenth century, the river Ister had – in a sense – been separated into two halves: the eastern half retained its ancient Greek name, whereas the western was renamed the Danube by the Romans and subsequent European cultures. By rejecting the name “Danube,” Hölderlin also rejects a separation in the symbolic value of the river, thus overcoming the separation between the west and east and, essentially, restoring an ancient tie between Greece and Germany. Equipped with a belief that the ancient world – ancient Greece specifically – represented a light-filled golden age of divine presence, Hölderlin incorporates a spiritual dimension to the Greek geographical idea of Hesperia (“the land of evening”): the Greek name for all European lands to their west. It may be fair to say that Hölderlin, in viewing ancient Greece as a paragon of communion between humans and gods, wants to poetically emulate Greek mythos as a means to retrieve this sacred communion for Germany.

            In any reading of the poem it would be difficult to overlook the abundant references to the cycle of day and night, as Hölderlin provides a chronological key to the poetic cryptograph of kairos time. Including, in the third stanza of the poem, another indirect reference to the sun, he notes that the river moves from west to east – in contra-flow to the sun: “Yet almost this river seems / to travel backwards and / I think it must come from / the East / Much could / be said about this.”[1] Peering into the natural world through the lenses of Heraclitean philosophy, Hölderlin does not appear to be disturbed by the contradiction between the movement of sun and river. Instead he seems to apply the opposite movements to the idea of a chiasm: an intersection of natural powers where truth may be found. Perhaps it is this exact intersection – this threshold – that Hölderlin believed the human race was approaching when he wrote, “day is due to begin.”[2] With continued allusions to the movement of the sun – a cyclical representation of day and night – Hölderlin’s belief in a cosmic cycle of immanent divinity and absconding divinity begin to gain focus.

The idea of the absconding god – deus absconditus – is another important theme that permeates Der Ister. This idea, that the presence of divinity on earth follows a similar cyclical pattern as the days and seasons, appears in a number of Hölderlin’s poems. One might also say that within this pattern of journey and return Hölderlin attempts to link mortals and gods with physis itself. The obviously natural imagery in his poetry should be integrated, not contrasted, with Hölderlin’s understanding of Christian and Greek mythology. Indeed, one might also suggest that separating Greek mythology from the Christian narrative is, in many ways, unfaithful to his worldview. Hölderlin viewed the gospel narrative as an extension of Greek mythology rather than a departure from it, claiming that Jesus was the last Greek demigod – son of the god Zeus, brother to Dionysus. With the sudden departure of Jesus from the earth,[3] Hölderlin believed that the entire kosmos entered into a spiritual Hesperia, anxiously waiting for that first beam of light to break the horizon on the Day of the Lord: that glorious reappearance of divine presence. This dawning of the Day, an impression of kairos time revealed with the language of chronos time, is announced with the “cries” of physis in the first stanza of the poem: the sights and sounds of life, birthing and rebirthing its own theophany in a series of ever-increasing concentric cycles.[4]

Navigating Der Ister in light of the pattern of deus absconditus and theophany, Hölderlin places himself in limbo between the mundane and the threshold of the divine. From this worldview of Hesperia, Hölderlin sought to concentrate his poetic energies on heralding the return of divine presence on the earth. Perceiving that the poet was a herald to the divine power of physis, it would not appear that Hölderlin claimed for the poet any power to affect its manifestation; the poet had no more power to affect theophany than he did to hasten the rising of the sun. Hölderlin’s vision of the poet, very similar to the prophet of old, simply prepares the people for the return of the divine. As with the gospel narrative, John the Baptist did not cause Jesus to appear, but he did have the responsibility for preparing the way for Jesus. Similarly, Hölderlin writes in the fifth stanza of Der Ister, that the poet is able to “hear the commotion” of daybreak only if “he is contented,” seemingly rejecting any impulse to coerce the theophany itself.[5] Evidently learning from the lesson of Semele in ancient mythology, Hölderlin understood all too well what dangers await the mortal that provokes a premature revelation of divine power.[6]

Retaining a healthy respect for the separation between gods and man did not mean that they were fundamentally separated in their being or activity. The gods, the mortal and, indeed, nature itself all journey away from the “source” and eventually return to it.[7] A student of Sophoclean tragedy, Hölderlin understood that this process was ananke - “that which must be.”[8] This process, like so many others within his poetry, is indicated in the different patterns of physis. By observing this progress of epic time the same way the he understood the progress of a day, Hölderlin believed that ancient Greece represented – as Nietzsche might later put it – “the great noontide” of divine presence. Conversely, modern Germany symbolized the darkest hour before the dawn: almost wholly devoid of divine presence, yet anxiously awaiting its return. Noting the physical connection between southern Germany and northern Greece via the river Ister, Hölderlin undoubtedly interpreted this geographical detail as a symbiotic tether between Hellas and Hesperia, linking not only land, but a common destiny as well. This fundamental anticipation of a new spiritual dawn can, perhaps, be seen best in the fourth stanza of the poem where he writes, “The day is due to begin / in youth, where it begins.”[9]

            The imagery of the river as a threshold should also not be overlooked. At the end of the first stanza Hölderlin writes, “But here we wish to build / For rivers make arable / The land. For when the herbs are growing / and to the same in summer / The animals go to drink / There too will human kind go.”[10] In this vision of the river as both a gathering place and a boundary, Hölderlin shows that all of physis is at the river for cleansing and purification, renewal and rebirth, for sustenance and sanctuary. So, too, does the poem behave as a vehicle for gathering and limiting. Not only does the logos of human poetry call out in longing for a return of the divine, but it also calls out to man and nature alike to gather in preparation for its return. Furthermore, the poem is also meant to draw the anthropos psyche into the heavens to meet the return.[11] Incorporating a vision from his poem Patmos, the poet is also to prepare the high places of this meeting as well; he is to navigate the dangerous heights on “bridges frailly built,” but not to transgress them.[12] In the middle of the fourth stanza of Der Ister, Hölderlin deliberately uses the symbol of the river and the act of poetry itself interchangeably. In tying the poem and river together, Hölderlin may have been suggesting that the poet, himself, is a kind of demigod: giving form and life to the river-poem that both gathers and limits. Perhaps this understanding provides new meaning for the poet’s seemingly Übermensch-like ability to traverse the dangerous heights and straddle the limits of the human and divine spheres.

            Hölderlin’s bold exploration of poetry as a way to link the ancient and modern, the mortal and divine, the east and the west, should not be understated. The poet-as-prophet – observing and heralding the “natural” cycles of absctonditus and theophany – opened many doors in the modern world to a deeper integration of logos and physis, wherein mortals may approach the divine without attempting to breach its perilous mysteries. In suspending himself above the treacherous chasms of divine presence on “bridges frailly built,” the poet occupies a deinos position in physis: neither one to be envied nor pitied, but that which must be.

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[1] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[2] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[3] The Gospel of Jesus Christ According to Luke, chapter twenty-four, verse fifty-one (Luke 24:51)

[4] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 255

[5] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[6] Wie wenn am Feiertage (As on a holiday), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 173

[7] Patmos, Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 231

[8] Antigone, tr. David Greene, Sophocles I, p. 203

[9] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 257

[10] Der Ister (The Ister), Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 255

[11] Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians, chapter four, verse seventeen (1 Th 4:17)

[12] Patmos, Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, p. 231

Pity, Revenge and Eternal Recurrence

Pity, Revenge and Eternal Recurrence:

An Analysis of Thus Spoke Zarathustra

            Late nineteenth-century Germany gave birth to one of the most provocative and incendiary thinkers in European history, Friedrich W. Nietzsche. Widely considered by modern scholars to be one of the most influential philosophers and writers of the last two hundred years, Nietzsche spent the prime of his life attempting to place common European values, rooted in what he viewed as a Platonic-Christian tradition, under erasure. His deeply critical views on Christianity and Platonism have earned him a – perhaps unfounded and inaccurate – reputation as a notorious atheist and anarchist, but a careful analysis of his writings uncovers a much different image. Nietzsche’s better-known philosophical texts like Ecce Homo, The Gay Science and The Will to Power, written in a polemic style, often absorb much of the spotlight in Nietzsche studies at the expense of Nietzsche’s only fictive work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but do so with a terrible detriment to understanding Nietzsche’s philosophy. In this fictional masterpiece, Nietzsche weaves an intricate quasi-fictitious narrative revolving around the character Zarathustra – based on, Zoroaster, the Persian religious figure traditionally dating from the sixth century BCE – and his journey from being the teacher of the Superman to the teacher of Eternal Recurrence. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche employs various figures and characters with both metaphorical and allegorical relationships to dominant personalities within the Western historical tradition, while Zarathustra’s interactions with these characters behave as a platform for Nietzsche to communicate his challenging ideas in a subtler and less confrontational medium than his other aphoristic writings. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is, arguably, a book about the idea of Eternal Recurrence and its potential to replace, albeit nihilistically, the Platonic-Christian traditions as the system by which all Western values are generated. Moreover, it would not be an inappropriate interpretation to say that Nietzsche argues in the novel that the philosophy of Eternal Recurrence provides a more natural and powerful concept of redemption and justice than those traditionally attributed to Jesus and Plato, respectively. Embracing values that depart from the reactionary motivations of pity and revenge, this philosophy of Eternal Recurrence attempts to seek out an actively creative relationship to nature, replacing the old values system with “new, half-written” ones.

            In the first chapter of Zarathustra, Nietzsche elaborates on what he refers to as the three metamorphoses of man: the camel, the lion and the child. The three metamorphoses bear a seemingly analogous relationship to the three stages of nihilism – living under a set of values, actively destroying those existing values, creating new values – and even in this early stage of the novel it is possible to see a foreshadowing of the cyclical nature of Eternal Recurrence in the narrative, which will be explained later. Having its roots in his longstanding contempt for metaphysical ontology, Nietzsche explains the camel as representative of man as a beast of burden. Within this interpretation, men – like the camel – have become docile and subservient, allowing themselves to be saddled down with the foreign weight of a values system based in a “wrong-headed” belief that there is an eternal, metaphysical and absolute “afterworld” that dictates an equally eternal and absolute morality, codified with a rigid understanding of good and evil.[1] In the world of Zarathustra, the man-as-camel is laden down with the weight of the “old law tables”.[2] Where the Christian apologist may be tempted to dismiss Nietzsche’s criticism as part of a largely failed tradition of atheistic critique against Judeo-Christian metaphysics, he/she would be grossly underestimating the uniqueness of Nietzsche’s own interpretation. To Nietzsche, speaking through Zarathustra, the burdensome metaphysical value system provided by Jesus and Plato stands as a life-negating force that, in its core, seeks answers outside of life itself, looking to an afterlife for worth rather than the one we all ostensibly share here on Earth. “It was suffering and impotence that – created all afterworlds… But that ‘other world’, that inhuman, dehumanized world which is a heavenly Nothing is well hidden from men” and it is these sickly men that “have a raging hate for the enlightened man and the youngest of all virtues which is called honesty.”[3] The great sin of metaphysical philosophy, and belief in God, is not simply that it hinders man’s growth but rather that it devalues and undermines human life altogether. For Nietzsche, metaphysical convention is a product of human weakness, a coping mechanism that provides a meaning and purpose for human suffering where there is none. This “Spirit of Gravity” – as it is referred to in Zarathustra – is what creates the man-as-camel along with words and values like “compulsion, dogma, need and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil”, which help cultivate a reactionary spirit within man and rob him of his actively creating will.[4] It appears to be, within this interpretation of the novel, that the highest value of both Platonism and Christianity is selflessness and a love of others over the love of one’s self. Unfortunately for those invested in the current convention, as Zarathustra tells his listeners and followers, valuing others over one’s own self is a prison and a negation of life: it is the root of pity and its indulgence is the origin of revenge and resentment.[5] Moreover, this reactionary value, to pity your fellow man – indeed, even worse to let your pity move you to help him – does not ultimately serve the needs of your neighbor. In an ironic interpretation of human pity and compassion, Nietzsche claims that aiding the afflicted very often reinforces a belief that people require an outside force to act upon them in order to “help” them. Worse, it may lead the healed or helped into a discontent with the way physis “created” them, while also obliging them to the healer and creating a bondage to them which, over time, may create a resentment and a desire for revenge.[6] Just as Nietzsche associates a reactionary pity with the idea of Christian healing and redemption, it is this reactionary revenge that Nietzsche clearly sees as the foundation for Platonic justice.

            “Your killing, you judges, should be a mercy and not a revenge. And since you kill, see to it that you yourselves justify life”, says Zarathustra of the “Pale Criminal.”[7] All throughout Zarathustra Nietzsche writes passionately on the need for man to reconceptualize “justice,” to take it from the realm of “good and evil” and reaction and into a realm of active creation and attuning our minds to physis via a naked and impartial observation of nature. In physis, one can hear him claim, there is no morality, no good and no evil. A distant star, half-the-galaxy away explodes and destroys whole planets. Where is physis’s remorse? Where is her shame in all of that destruction? There is none and this is Nietzsche’s “truth”: death and destruction are a part of life and the beauty of that reality stems from the idea there is no revenge inherent to physis, no cosmic score to settle. Physis does not react, it acts and as such the destruction that is perpetrated within it is necessary and even good. One might even understand this scientifically with the idea that the distribution of matter and energy associated with the death of a star is the birthing grounds for new matter to form, new energy to take shape, new life to begin. From those distant supernovas, to violent Earth-bound hurricanes, to the slow decomposition of a single insect: this is the cooperative – albeit violent, dangerous and deadly – dance that physis is performing every moment of existence. It is the dance that she beckons all life to participate in with her. Indeed, it is her justice: perhaps the only real justice in the world. But Zarathustra, as well as Nietzsche, observes another system – an artificial system – being imposed on man and nature. This artificial convention relies on arbitrary ideas of good and evil and the virtues of our values system is based on rewards and punishments… reaction rather than pro-action, and it has become part of our foundation.[8] Justice, within this understanding, has become all reaction: “revenge, punishment, reward, retribution.”[9] This idea we call justice in the Platonic-Christian tradition is a “cold” justice with “cold steel” (or revenge), but Eternal Recurrence requires a justice that not only “bears all punishment but also all guilt” and devises a justice that acquits everyone but those that sit in judgment.[10] In other words, Eternal Recurrence requires that the “old tables” of morality and reaction be smashed and replaced with “new, half-written” ones. To Nietzsche, what we call goodness and justice, including virtue and moderation, is nothing more than weakness, cowardice and mediocrity.[11] Books One and Two of Zarathustra are used as the platform by which Nietzsche attempts to demonstrate how men hide behind their lofty metaphysics and those associated virtues in order to shield them from the impartial “reality” of life. He does not, however, simply limit his criticism to the idea of justice in the abstract but also extrapolates that criticism onto the modern state and, in particular, the modern, liberal and democratic state. In Zarathustra, the state is called “universal slow suicide” and he claims that it is produced by the same good-evil convention that produced Christian redemption and Platonic justice.[12] In a sense, one might convincingly argue that Nietzsche envisioned the state as the offspring of the parental pairing of Christianity and Platonism. Worse, however, than simply giving life to the state is the peculiar way in which the Christian-Platonic tradition had encouraged the development of the democratic ideology and the powerful framework of “equality” that supports it. In the section titled “Of the Tarantulas” Nietzsche, crying out vicariously through the biting voice of Zarathustra, asserts that it was the revenge of the slaves that gave birth to Christianity – a religion of slaves as Nietzsche referred to it – which, in turn, forced the powerful rulers of the Earth to adopt democracy in order to lower the great into a false equality with the “rabble.”[13] This Christian-Platonic tradition, complete with its imported metaphysical good and evil, its moral codes, its pitiful redemption and vengeful justice, its Church and its State is, to Nietzsche, the first metamorphosis: the heavy laden man-as-camel, driven relentlessly into the desert… into isolation and a life negating environment. And, as Zarathustra explains to us, it is here in this desert that the second metamorphosis happens: the camel meets the lion and is destroyed by it.[14] It would not be inappropriate for the “lion” to be interpreted as a sort of “active nihilism” as Nietzsche would call it. This man-as-lion is described as full of courage and able to destroy those values and “law tables” which burden men and divert his affections to odious “afterworlds” and, as such, may represent an element within man that is able to free himself from the convention to which he is bound. Zarathustra explains, however, that the courage and will to destroy the camel is not enough to create new values. This responsibility lies with the third metamorphosis of the “child” and its actively creative will, its “unlearned” mind – a mind not yet conditioned to the falsities of the Christian-Platonic tradition – and its voiceless and carefree appreciation of the moment and affirmation of life in all forms.

            Many conclusions can and may be drawn on what the ultimate meaning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was intended to be, assuming, of course, that Nietzsche had any hard-and-fast meanings attached to the novel. There can be no doubt that he was a brilliant rhetorician and, as such, it might honor Nietzsche most to conclude that Zarathustra has an infinite number of meanings and, at the same time, a resounding lack of “meaning” as we’ve come to know it. After all, this novel is a “book for all and none.” With all of that being said, however, it would not be inappropriate to surmise that this book is, at its core, a book about Eternal Recurrence. That “heaviest weight” of this idea foreshadows every page of the text, giving clues and glimpses in the fog of Zarathustra’s journey. It waits patiently, voicelessly in the darkness and stillness of Zarathustra’s own mind and soul to be revealed… that ineffable truth which can barely be spoken, let alone categorized, canonized and formed into a doctrine. Eternal Recurrence, Zarathustra’s “mistress” and “abysmal thought,” requires the heart of the third metamorphosis, the man-as-child, in order to come forth.[15] Indeed, Nietzsche seems to argue that the “abyss” of Eternal Recurrence can lead to your demise or kill you outright; trying to comprehend it can drive you mad and trying to live it may undo you altogether.[16] Perhaps one of the most maddening aspects of Eternal Recurrence is that it is so unexplainable. As Nietzsche reminds us, “truth” and “reality” cannot be spoken. Language itself is a convention – perhaps even the progenitor of all convention – bringing a woefully inadequate medium to the task of comprehension, by virtue of language’s own inherent limitations as well as man’s own limited powers of perception on the Universal scale.[17] Among the few interpretations that one might be able to offer with regard to Eternal Recurrence is one that might claim that the moment, Das Augenblick, is in fact a microcosm of Eternal Recurrence. In this interpretation, the concept is offered that the “past” and the “future” are not progressively linear (i.e. Past à Moment à Future) but, rather, that the Augenblick is, as Zarathustra claims, the “gateway” by which all past and all future coalesce into the ever-present “now” (i.e. Past à Moment ß Future).[18] In a sense, then, man is not a goal or a destination but instead, as Zarathustra claims, a bridge or a tightrope suspended over the abyss of Eternal Recurrence, balancing himself in the moment, affirming the moment, dedicated to every moment of life on Earth without reservation.[19] This, however, raises the quintessential question of human life: why, then, are we here? Where is the purpose? Perhaps more pointedly: why should we abandon, indeed destroy, the old Christian-Platonic convention (a values system that provides a compelling – even flattering – identity and purpose for humanity) for this new one? Men, Nietzsche seems to claim, need to create their own values, their own good and evil, their own “law” for themselves. The “good” and the “just” as we know them today make no room for those with their own values, they are – and always have been – set against such people. And who better to invoke as an example of this than Jesus? It was the “good” and the “just” Pharisees that killed Jesus, and, thus, his premature death seems to have perpetuated a values system that negates life.[20] Indeed, the very life of Jesus himself can be interpreted not as the life of a camel but as a lion! His teachings and ministry is marked, albeit incompletely if you were to ask Nietzsche, by a powerful – epoch splitting – “trans-valuation” of the values that supported the world in which he lived. Yet, as Zarathustra would remind his followers in Book Two, Christians don’t appear to be very “redeemed” at all and, as such, they would have to seem to be much more “redeemed” if they were to inspire any great belief in the power of their Redeemer. Men, according to Nietzsche, would do better to find redemption elsewhere, a redemption that is of their own creation and not beholden to a Redeemer, not a reaction to the pity taken on them by a God.[21] Furthermore, one could argue that Nietzsche intends to say that it is the will to create that is the true redemption for man. The metaphysical redemption of Jesus and metaphysical justice of Plato do not seem to be compatible with one another. One might even make a persuasive argument that they are mutually exclusive to one another since it seems that the former moves the metaphysical “Power” to pity and the latter to revenge and punishment, a potentially irreconcilable situation.[22] The creative will, however, is “truly” redemptive because it has evidently unlearned reactionary motivation and defines its relationship with physis actively, engaging it, participating with it, affirming it in its totality. Creation and procreation, then, may be seen as the true act of redemption. A redemption that is not found in humility or in the selfless bloodletting that is, arguably, life negating, but is rather found in creation.[23] Alongside this more naturally attuned redemption is, not surprisingly, a more naturally attuned justice: a justice that restores inequality to men because men, by the virtue of their inherent differences are, not only different, but also unequal. Within this interpretation it is physis itself that requires inequality and the domination of the great over the least. Nature exposes for us the path of strife and contention with one another and this process is called “beautiful” and “natural.”[24] Also, within this interpretation, is a more natural “purpose” for humanity if it is appropriate to call it that. The “purpose” of men and women is war and childbirth: the balancing of contention and creation and it is within the juxtaposition of these activities – which are proactive and not reactive – that the anthropos element within physis finds the “balance” of the moment.[25]

            It would seem to be a very poor reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra if one, by the end, was unable to discern Nietzsche’s distaste for Platonic justice and Christian redemption, along with all of the cultural, moral, political, and religious offspring that they produced. Indeed, that point alone seems to be hardly worth raising. What is not immediately clear is how Nietzsche intended to usurp those two pillars of Western civilization. The philosophy of Eternal Recurrence behaves as an unspoken thread that runs through the course of Zarathustra, uniting it thematically – yet “voicelessly” – in a powerfully nihilistic and “trans-valuating” work of fiction. It might be said that this “book for all and one” stands in human intellectual history as a unique demonstration of the “truth” that the values that move the world are, indeed, ineffable.

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[1] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 211

[2] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 214

[3] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 59-61

[4] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 211, 215

[5] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 87, 113, 255

[6] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 159

[7] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 65

[8] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 117

[9] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 118

[10] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 94

[11] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 189-190

[12] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 76-77

[13] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 123-125

[14] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 177

[15] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 168-169, 178

[16] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 178-179

[17] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 234, 247

[18] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 179

[19] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 44, 104

[20] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 89-90, 98

[21] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 116-117

[22] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 161-162

[23] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 111

[24] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 124-125, 149

[25] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 91, 227