Does Paul Need an Enemy?
On the possible benefits of hatred (in my life and in the lives of others)
Dear Carlton,
Did you know we almost weren’t friends? Hard to believe, but true. All through college—from the time we hiked through Vermont’s Green Mountains on our freshman outdoor orientation trip to the day we graduated—we seemed inseparable. We were so close and so alike that we were often mistaken for each other.
Why wouldn’t we be? We both hailed from the nation’s frozen hinterlands, both wore the same unnecessarily rustic clothing, both stood about six feet tall with beards and blond hair and un-athletic figures. We enjoyed similar music too. In order to distinguish ourselves, we were reduced to explaining that, no, Phish and the Grateful Dead were very different bands, and the same could be said of those who liked one more than the other.
This was potentially a problem. I can recall driving back from the aforementioned outdoor orientation and feeling obscurely annoyed by you, aggrieved even, not by anything that you had done or said but by you, full stop. I did not think we would be friends.
Happily, I was wrong. On one of our first nights back from camping we bumped into each other in the entryway of our dorm and resolved to attend a big college kegger. Even though I wasn’t sure about you, I was happy to be going to the party together. The first few weeks of college are an uncertain and frankly scary time. What if you make no friends? What if you end up lonely?
From the moment we arrived, however, we both knew we had made a mistake. It was loud and dark and crowded. It stank of cheap beer and salty snacks. Nobody knew who we were, or cared to know. Finally, warm beer sloshing around our flimsy plastic cups, we found someone you recognized, a girl who had gone to your high school, but when we went up to her to say hello—with only the most honorable intentions—she would not give us the time of day.
Then you gave me a look I came to know so well. You tilted your head down and to the side, rolled your eyes over at me, and sighed, as if to say “I am done with this scene.”
We left the party and on the way back to our dorm rooms we heaped cold buckets of scorn on the party, and everyone there, and everyone who could ever like a party like that one. It was decided. We were friends forever. The fact that we had too much in common was ultimately surmounted by the fact that we hated the same things too.
The Good of Enmity
I ponder that evening whenever I consider the nature and purpose of enmity. As I spend too much time on the internet, I have many such opportunities. Whether in the arena of politics, academia, journalism, sports, or entertainment—in short, everywhere in American public life—I find animosity everywhere, people bemoaning the wrongs they have suffered at the hands of villains, and exhorting others to avenge them.
Honestly, I feel a little left out. With the exception of the occasional bad party, I don’t hate anything, or more importantly anyone. This might sound like bragging, Carlton, but it isn’t. Why would everyone have so many enemies if it didn’t, on some level, do them some good?
There are several reasons one might want an enemy. The Greek biographer Plutarch wrote a short improving essay titled “How to Profit by One’s Enemies,” in which he endeavors to discover “the system and the art through which this admirable advantage is to be gained by those who find it impossible to live without an enemy.” After reading his essay, I think I can distill seven potentially profitable lessons.
1. Enemies keep us on our best behavior. Our enemies, Plutarch points out, are always looking for a reason to criticize us. The minutest faux-pas or miscalculation in morals or math—and they will pounce. If so, then “the man who knows that his enemy is his competitor in life and repute is more heedful of himself, and more circumspect about his action, and brings his life into more thorough harmony.”
2. They teach us by example how NOT to act. What is so repulsive as our enemy’s vices? We would never behave that way! So then, in order to avoid their vices, we should deliberately cultivate the opposite virtues: “If you call your enemy uneducated, strive to intensify in yourself the love of learning and industry; if you call him a coward, rouse even more your self-reliance and manliness; if you call him unchaste and licentious, obliterate from your soul whatever trace of devotion to pleasure may be lurking there unperceived.”
3. They tell us hard truths. It is good to know the truth, about ourselves and/or the world, but friends and family too often flatter us or tell us what we wish to hear. The sad fact is that oftentimes “we have to depend upon our enemies to hear the truth.”
4. They build our fortitude and make us more patient with others. If you can endure the slings and arrows of those who hate you, how much easier will it be “to bear up under a wife’s [or husband’s] attack when she rails at you, … the most bitter utterances of a friend or a brother, … blows or missiles at the hands of a father or mother.” Having endured much worse, you will be able to bear it all with silent, stoic dignity.
5. They present a chance to practice magnanimity. It does us little credit to deal generously with our friends (do not even tax dodging billionaires do likewise by setting up family foundations?), but “to forgo taking vengeance on an enemy when he offers a good opportunity is a handsome thing to do.” Magnanimity, for Plutarch and other Greek philosophers, meant greatness of soul. It denoted an unperturbable character, a mind capable of judging prudently and justly in all cases without fear or intemperance because it was unclouded by petty grievances and hatreds. The magnanimous are thus capable of doing an admirable though difficult thing: achieving victory, but extending mercy.
But if we can’t manage magnanimity…
6. They make good targets for our spleen. Who has not been in a terrible mood and said something unkind to a friend or loved one? Or felt an ugly emotion like jealousy or envy? Wouldn’t it be best to vent “those emotions upon [our] enemies, and turning the course of such discharges, so to speak, far away from [our] associates and relatives”? It would!
7. They confirm our superiority. Yes, sometimes the wicked prosper. But the only true riches are in virtue, so “even if our enemies by flattery, knavery, bribery, or hireling service appear to reap their reward in the form of dishonorable and sordid influence at court or in the government, they will not be a source of annoyance but rather of joy to us when we compare our own freedom, the simplicity of our life, and its immunity from scurrilous attack.” No matter how good they have it, we can always feel superior, as our superior virtue is its own reward.
I wish I could say that after reading Plutarch I finally understood why enmity is so prevalent in American life. I think he offers good reasons to cultivate enemies, or at least a tongue-in-cheek way of making the best of them (one never knows how seriously to take this sort of author), but I find little evidence that my fellow Americans are following Plutarch’s advice. In public spats, I see adversaries emulating one another’s vices, rather than eschewing them. Instead of admitting hard truths, nobody ever concedes a point, and people tend to leave these fights surlier than they entered them, more likely to snap at friends and family than ever. As for magnanimity, surely you will agree that it is the rarest of all virtues on the internet. Almost nobody forgives or forgets. I cannot recall a single act of mercy.
Only points 6 and 7 are at all common: combatants do indeed vent their spleens on each other, and both leave convinced of their moral superiority.
So, I have discovered why it might be good to have enemies, but not why so many people today do.
The Proliferation of Enemies in Everyday Life
With its many rivalries, perhaps American public life now resembles sports, with clear sides, rooting interests, and emotional titillation. The sports analogy might suggest another reason to have enemies: it’s fun. Have you not, Carlton, reveled in the victory of your beloved Packers over my Vikings at le champ de Lambeau? And have not I done the same when the Vikings won at whatever our stadium is called these days? As one fanatic put it: to hate like this is to be happy forever.
But is it real hatred? It seems to me more like ritual hatred, in which potentially dangerous civic passions (amor patriae and xenophobia, chiefly) are called up but contained within the space of the arena and the time of the game clock. Crucially, the final buzzer dispels these passions. To be sure, feelings of exhilaration and agony can linger, but we tend to head home peacefully, climb into bed, and forget about it all by next morning. Sports hatred is like theater, serving to exercise and release hazardous feelings in a safe environment.
Of course, the purgation isn’t quite complete in some people, and they do horrible things. But we almost all deplore it and think that the perpetrator is not only morally wrong but, in an important way, fundamentally mistaken. It’s not like the opposing fan is a real enemy. It’s only a game, not a war.
Conflict in American public life generally doesn’t end in bloodshed either, but I am concerned that acting on political hatred, as opposed to sports hatred, may not be a simple mistake. The anger seems more apt.
Rather than saying American politics is becoming more like sports, I agree with those who think that many areas of public life have become politicized. Unfortunately, most discussions of politicization focus on the influence of national politics (democrats and republicans like different food, and so on), whereas I think politicization refers to a phenomenon far broader than partisan squabbling.
The German jurist Carl Schmitt insisted that what defined politics—distinguishing it from other spheres like aesthetics or economics—was the presence of a clear distinction between friend and enemy. The man was a Nazi, Carlton, but unfortunately that did not make his theoretical books like The Concept of the Political any less brilliant. In Schmitt’s view, politics can encompass much more than elections and legislation. He argues that “every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy.” Such conflicts are about much more than zoning issues, or even the top marginal tax rate. Once the friend/enemy antithesis is set, the stakes become existential: the “adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence.”[1]
I regret to say that once I look through Schmitt’s theoretical lens, I see American public life much more clearly. Take a look at every online flame war, academic feud, or even what happened a few years ago in video games—the dust-ups can seem trivial to outsiders, but to the combatants themselves there is nothing less at stake than a way of being in the world. How often have you seen someone saying that their very existence or way of life is threatened by some legislation, social movement, or “a heinous substitution in guacamole”? Set aside whether individual claims are reasonable or not. When we see them popping up everywhere, we are seeing the politicization of more and more areas of American life, with the existential stakes that entails.
In the most extreme cases, says Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction refers “to the real possibility of physical killing.” But even when it doesn’t, it seems to me that drawing the friend/enemy distinction authorizes a whole set of behaviors that one would never allow oneself otherwise. In political combat with an enemy, why be consistent in one’s arguments? Or fair? Or even honest? Why exercise proportionality? Or magnanimity? Why weigh your opponents’ arguments in a disinterested way and seriously consider that you may be wrong? Who can be bothered with any of that high-minded nonsense when the enemy is threatening our way of life? In the presence of an enemy, anything short of taking the villain’s life would surely be justified to neutralize the threat. Winning is all that matters.
This would explain the moralizing bent of so much contemporary scholarship, criticism, and journalism. It is all about placing people, books, and art on one side of the political line or the other: “Whether the form is sharper or milder, explicit or implicit, whether ostracism, expulsion, proscription, or outlawry are provided for in special laws or in explicit or general descriptions, the aim is always the same, namely to declare an enemy.” As terms like ostracism, expulsion, proscription, and outlawry suggest, the ultimate goal, once the friend/enemy distinction has been set, is to run the offender out of the body politic. The offender needn’t die, but he must be beaten soundly enough to never, ever return.
This is what I think is happening in American life: it’s Carl Schmitt’s body politic, we’re all just living in it. But a puzzle remains. Unlike in sports, few of the combatants or bystanders in these conflicts seem to be having much fun. Why is the friend/enemy distinction proliferating in ever more areas of American life when most everybody’s sick of it?
III. Supportive Company
Although I often find Schmitt uncomfortably perceptive, I also think he’s wrong about something important. He insists several times that the enemy is not “the private adversary whom one hates.” Political friends and enemies only exist when “one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.”
But surely a hallmark of conflicts in American life is their relentlessly personal character. Character assassination, guilt by association, and ad hominem arguments are all ubiquitous. To figure out why, I reread Adam Smith.
Though mostly remembered as an economist, Smith was an uncommonly keen moral psychologist, whose main purpose in his great Theory of Moral Sentiments was to explain how/why we form moral and aesthetic judgements, and what they mean for our lives. The crucial human faculty is sympathy—an intuitive fellow-feeling that can strike us whenever we see another’s joy, sorrow, or pain. Although we naturally intuit what others are feeling, and generally feel a bit of it ourselves, our sympathetic feelings are also subject to reflection and rational scrutiny. When someone laughs or cries or howls with rage, we can ask ourselves if the situation giving rise to a person’s chortles, tears, or anger really warranted their emotional reaction.
When we do this, we are exploring the depth of our mutual attunement, which is not just agreement about matters of fact but a deeper sense that we share a view of human life. Do we laugh at the same jokes? Are we in agreement about what is ugly, beautiful, commendable, noble, base, contemptible, ridiculous, graceful, juvenile, and cute? Well then, we should be friends. “Nothing pleases us more,” Smith avers, “than to observe in other men a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast.”[2]
It all sounds very cozy. At the same time, I have always detected a darker current running through Smith, too. It’s fine to disagree about guitarists, but:
…if you have either no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have met with, … or if you have either no indignation at the injuries I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the resentment which transports me, we can no longer converse upon these subjects. We become intolerable to one another. I can neither support your company, nor you mine.
Simmering resentments and indignation, intolerable insults, festering injuries, and outrageous misfortunes—agreement on these matters are non-negotiable. When we take someone on as a friend, we can expect them to affirm our grievances. Smith might as well be cribbing from Plutarch, who said “our very friendships, if nothing else, involve us in enmities.” In turn, our friends can expect us to confirm the righteousness of their anger (yes, she behaved terribly), or at a bare minimum we must hold our tongues while they vent their spleens. Otherwise, the friendship may fall apart. This makes sense on Smith’s terms: if I feel no indignation over what you perceive as an insult, then our attunement has come into question.
When we draw the friend/enemy distinction, then, we are not only defining foes but also—and this point is usually overlooked—recruiting friends. Drawing the line, we place a claim on those who stand on the friendship side and, if only tacitly, we ask them to acknowledge or disavow an appeal for fellowship and succor. It would be hard to rebuke such a nakedly personal claim, Carlton, and once it is accepted, the mutual enmity can become the basis of a fierce and lasting friendship. Such was the lesson we learned on a September night almost 20 years ago: making enemies is a terrific way to make friends.
Or followers. Plenty of people use this fact of our psychology, knowingly or not, for their own ends. Politicians and media figures demonize and vilify each other all the time, and in fact their very willingness and ability to establish clear enemies is probably a major driver of their ascents to prominence. As a bonus, few if any emotions are better motivators than hatred and resentment. Enemies are rocket fuel for ambition and determination. I confess to wondering sometimes, Carlton, if having more enemies would do me the favor of raising my public profile. Alas, as I said, I cannot think of any suitable candidates (though I welcome your nominations).
I used to think that this was the root of the problem. A few firebrands were manipulating our moral psychology, politicizing all and sundry and simultaneously gathering themselves a following and powering their vaulting ambitions. Now I think the problem is deeper, sadder, and more widely distributed across the American populace. To be direct, Americans do not have enough friends. According to one survey, more than half report having three or fewer close friends, and 12% have none. The old sources of friendships, mediating institutions like churches and bowling leagues, have long been in decline, of course, and the pandemic has forced us farther apart from each other than ever.
In this situation, is it any surprise that we leap at a chance to make or declare our friendships through enmity? It is, after all, a way to reach people. It is a way to feel less alone, to feel like we share Smith’s attunement or a Schmittian form of existence with another. I have started to suspect that many who insist on the friend/enemy distinction most loudly are not really opportunistic but terribly lonely. Many times, I have seen someone loudly denounce an enemy group and then immediately receive a dozen pledges of loyalty and protection. It must feel good. No more loneliness. No more vulnerability. Surrounded by a phalanx of friends.
Coda
As I said, Carlton, I see this dynamic often and I regard it as a corrosive force in American life. Still, I have enormous sympathy for anyone caught up in it. After all, it did so much good for me and you.
Paul
[1] As a brief aside, notice how much Schmitt’s conception of politics differs from liberalism. In the latter tradition, culminating with John Rawls, politics belongs to its own special sphere, is mostly if not entirely a realm of reason, and because the reasons we give must be valid reasons to all our fellow citizens, politics excludes anything non-negotiable, like religious beliefs or other broad “comprehensive doctrines” (ie, Schmitt’s “forms of existence”). If Schmitt is right, then liberalism is less a political theory than an avoidance of politics, or perhaps an attempt to suppress any genuine political contest. Schmitt the fascist shares, with radical political theorists on the left, the idea that politics is not a matter of give and take and argument. It is a clash between opposing groups with irreconcilable interests.
[2] Now, friendship does not require complete agreement. On the contrary, it can be fun to disagree about art, philosophical systems, or the relative merits of Trey Anastasio and Jerry Garcia (even if the answer is obvious). In fact, Smith points out that we often save our greatest admiration for those who, like the greatest critics, can convince us to change our judgements and see a piece of art or poetry, or maybe even a person, in a new light. Friends are wonderful because they don’t just confirm our views on life; they open up new vistas.