Post #151: Enemies

13 Oct. 2024

“A noble friend is the best gift, and a noble enemy the next best.”

—C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle, ch. 14

     One might be forgiven for getting the impression that a bien-pensant 21st-century life, and one lived under the Buddhist colors especially, should leave little or no room for having enemies. After all, if we are to cultivate loving-kindness in all our dealings, then should we not be friends with everyone, or at least well-meaning neutrals?

     Consider, though, what this would mean: when one is friends with all, does it not devalue friendship as we normally understand it, which requires setting some of our associates above others? Consider also that if animosities were to arise, for whatever reason, such an outlook would not know what to do, since there is no room for enemies in it.

     My Buddhism aims above all at being realistic, and enmity looks like a plain fact of life to me. I also notice a curious twist in how we relate to enemies. We care about them, though negatively, and we are as it were united in a common cause, though on opposite sides. Thus we are never indifferent to real enemies, and they may benefit us not only by identifying our faults (as Ben Franklin observed in Poor Richard’s Almanac), but also by challenging and strengthening us in other ways. Just as a champion chess or tennis player can rise to the top of his game only with another champion, so we may need enemies to grow by, to sharpen our purposes, to measure our strength and skill. An enemy may bring out the worst in you; but also the best.

     Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski did not get along in anything like the ordinary sense. Yet they did their best work together, and Herzog, very much the junior partner, would never have become so prominent if it hadn’t been for his association with the enfant terrible of German postwar cinema. Very fittingly, he (Herzog) entitled his reminiscences “My Best Enemy” (friend and enemy, Freund und Feind, being closer in German, a bit like friend and fiend in English).

     The narcissism of small difference, as Freud called it, which makes enemies of neighbors whom outsiders would find impossible to distinguish, may seem ridiculous, but the rivalries it creates can also be fruitful. What would the Brits have done these past eight decades without the Hun to point to, long after he had vanished? Where would the French be without the Anglosphere to chafe against, where the Canadians without Americans to sneer at, where New Zealanders without Australians?

     A mere game, you may say, not deadly enmity, and you would be half-right. The other half of the story, however, is on display at every showdown between Westtown against Easttown in traditional European football, in England especially. (Soccer, it turns out, is no less a British term—short for Association Football—than its counterpart rugger, which the upper crust used to favor on the dubious assumption that wars could be won on the playing fields of Eton.) The marauding bands of hooligans that used to travel with their clubs in large numbers were more at home in Homer’s time than our own, minus the Odysseus factor, and the forces of law and order have been leaning on them heavily in more recent years; still they remain as much part of the game as our unacknowledged Shadows are part of our daytime selves. Neighboring villagers have sometimes carried on feuds for generations (War of the Buttons tells such a story, in France and Ireland, respectively) without anybody being able to say, definitely, what the fighting is really about. The contention loses nothing in seriousness, and makes for no less cherished memories.

     The most marginal young men often join blood-gangs: for money and girls and respect, certainly, but also because it gives meaning to their lives to have mortal enemies. Hatred creeps into gang warfare for sure, but the contenders are like mirror images of each other. Scratch the surface and beneath the animosity there is a complex but deep bond between them. The most hardened jefe, hearing of his arch-rival across the turf-line being slain in a gunfight, might spend the day rejoicing at the news outwardly, yet find himself secretly lighting a candle at the shrine at night for his fallen brother.

     Am I celebrating village feuds, football riots, gangland mayhem, or war? Heaven forbid! These are often grotesque and tragic wastes of human potential, war especially. What I am saying is that a world altogether without enemies is inconceivable, and that there is a way to get enmity right, more or less, or else terribly wrong.

     Nor do I enjoy making enemies personally. Not at all; I quite dread it. I spent much time agonizing over several of my more political posts, thinking that the offense they might give to the other side was just not worth it. When I was younger, perhaps I relished a good scrap, but not now. What made me go ahead and put these texts up in the end was not the exhilarating rush of going into battle at all; bellyaching is more like it. What made me publish (or be damned) was asking myself what the alternative would be: holding back or even hiding what I have to say, dissembling what I really think, for fear of the repercussions. How would that be right, or good, or truthful? Of course one should not give offense for no good reason; but it is not at all gratuitous to spell out where one stands, and why, in the face of serious and important disagreements. The price of freedom (not just to speak but also to hear what others will only say without pretense) is being disliked (#28, #110). It’s not comfortable for me either, but it is what it is.

     There is a crucial caveat, however, to such musings on the uses and benefits of enmity, namely that having enemies should not mean loathing them. The two may sound very close, but they are not the same at all. Machiavellian thinking is hard-headed to the point of ruthlessness, but adamant on this point: hatred and contempt must be assiduously avoided (a theme throughout the Prince, especially in chapter 19). Some of the greatest champions of making vehement friend-enemy distinctions, Churchill included, were equally strong believers in respecting those whom one opposes (the leader perhaps excepted). Enemies are to be fought, sometimes to the death; but they must not be dishonored, and when defeated, treated with magnanimity.* This not only for the defeated party’s sake, but for the victor’s benefit as well, for his own honor is bound up with that of his adversaries.

     The British House of Commons has a particularly long and distinguished history of cruelty, personal no less than political. What members must listen to, from across the aisle especially, is by most standards intolerable. Paradoxical as it may sound, the routine viciousness is a big part of what makes the chamber such a bastion of civilization: the speakers may aim at each other’s jugulars, but they do listen in turn, rather than shouting each other down or coming to blows. Afterwards, when the blood has barely dried, they may even go for a drink together. I would have neither the ever-ready wit nor the stomach for it, but I can’t deny that it’s impressive. (What the front benches in the Austrian national council have been made to endure in recent years by way of Mr. Kickl’s diatribes makes for fascinating listening, every bit as fierce as the British original, if you can follow German with a southern accent.**)

     Whether we like it or not, conflicts may arise in which the interests or the passions (whether material, historical, or spiritual) become so momentous that they add up to a mutual existential challenge, where two incompatible ways of life are on the line and the feeling therefore prevails that one is caught in a life-and-death struggle. We should do more to prevent such situations from arising and escalating, because if they go beyond a certain point, they may no longer be amenable to remedies at all (#76). Still, however deeply we may regret the fact, even the most fatal enmities cannot be ruled out.

     Does this mean that reciprocal loathing too is unavoidable, not only while the fighting lasts, but also at the end, for the losers at least? Is it conceivable that the defeated will ever not come hate their vanquishers, even if the latter were to act blamelessly (as they commonly will not)? I fear that the sting of defeat will always be felt painfully, as if it were a stain; but surely the shame can be mitigated at least somewhat—if the need for magnanimity is kept ever in mind, even while the thrills of victory make it all-too easy to forget. Fighting may be unavoidable, and defeat, and resentment; perhaps a measure of temporary hatred too; but irreconcilable, deadly loathing in the long run is bound to be the fruit of bad turns, specifically the failure to heed the most important principle of all, namely never to dishonor the other side.

     It may sound obvious, but how loudly human experience proclaims the contrary! Walk willingly into this trap, however, as victors commonly do, past defeating and towards dishonoring your enemies, and they will not rest to avenge themselves, even if it takes all their days and they must trade their very lives for satisfaction. It stokes the fires of cruelty and evil like nothing else, because it makes the suffering of the other side one’s prime objective, not merely their defeat or one’s own safety.

     Let me give a few illustrations—not with any thought of being comprehensive, but merely to make a little clearer what I am talking about. It might seem that when you are willing to trade one of yours for a hundred or a thousand of theirs, they should be pleased with the favorable exchange rate. Not so: you are broadcasting your contempt to the world, pronouncing by actions speaking louder than words that the other side’s humanity barely registers besides your own.

     You likewise dishonor your enemies when, on a date in the other side’s calendar that you know to be of special significance to them, you see fit to let your guard down. You are in effect not showing them respect enough to prepare for an attack! Again, you may think they would be glad to find the unexpected opening in your defenses, but I don’t think so; your very neglect is a mark of contempt that will stoke the hatred and spur them on in their derangement. “What do you take us to be?” they will repeat to themselves with grinding teeth as they rampage through your villages. “Do you expect us to do nothing worth defending against on such a day? How dare you imagine that we are such contemptuous creatures that you could buy us off our dreams of national redemption (to say nothing of triumphant holy war: horror of horrors to the bystander, but hardly unfamiliar to the other side) with a few suitcases of cash!” They must answer for what they have yielded up to evil; but you too have ceded the high ground and fed the beast.

     It is contemptuous, too, to think that you could expand the boundaries of a military alliance founded with an explicit enemy in mind ever closer to that historical foe, until you are planting your flags practically in his front yard. (Unimaginable that you would allow the same to happen to you without taking the most drastic measures—a matter of declared doctrine for two hundred years.) What you are communicating, in effect, is that the rules don’t apply the other way around, because your cause is the better one by definition. In other words, you take yourself to be superior, or at least stronger and therefore set above, hence in a position to hold the other in contempt. This is how you sow hatred even where there may have been only frustration before.

     Sexual violations of the worst kind, not only of civilian populations but of enemy captives as well, have probably traveled in the train of armies for as long as there have been wars. Something about the very helplessness of captives seems to invite such a perverse turn in the human mind. Thus prisons are notorious for it everywhere, often with the complicity or active participation of the jailers. If I am right in my argument, a triumphant army has more reason to shoot such violators on the spot than cowards before the enemy. Cowardice is a failing, not an abomination; humiliating captives in this manner when they no longer pose a threat is an exercise in dishonoring the enemy pure and simple, and it not only discredits the victor, it makes reconciliation nearly impossible.

     Ah, you will say, your examples have exposed your true colors: you cherish the Crescent, you sympathize with the Bear! Nonsense. I harbor no particularly sympathetic feelings for either, and never have. I am not saying what I do out of sentimentality or love for their cause, but because I don’t want crescents at anyone’s throat, nor bears on the loose and mauling everyone in their path after they have broken through all previous restraints. Indeed the beastlier one believes the other side to be, the more one should not only guard the chains, but the more scrupulously one must refrain from goading creatures that will, if provoked enough, stop at nothing—if that is what one believes. Assuming, once again, that one may claim the mantle of humanity only for one’s own side, and dismiss the other as less than human, which I am quite unwilling to do, however great my antipathies may be.

     It should be painfully obvious that the logic of what I am saying applies every bit as much in reverse. To invade a neighbor without the most urgent provocation, especially when one had a part in underwriting his borders, and to commit outrages on the march, is to provoke more than rage; it breeds irreconcilable hatred. So does the deliberate targeting (or the careless exposure to fire) of civilians, or directing one’s rage at blood-banks and hospitals, or churches or synagogues or mosques, or any other sacred and peaceable gathering spots. Such scenes of horror declare your enmity not to a group, but to all mankind; over such cruel and reckless folly have the furies ever beat their wings. “I can protect myself,” you may think. But you would be dead wrong: where loathing becomes more important than life itself, no one is ever safe. How can you bathe others in blood and fire, and not expect to get bled and burned in turn? Live by the sword, die by sword, and if you dipped the blade in poison first, then God help you, because no one else will.

     Is it not bad enough to harm others, as you invariably will when you contend with them in earnest, and to injure their pride by defeating them? It was not from naiveté that Sun Tzu called on us to mourn all wars we were unable to prevent, whatever their outcome (Tao Te Ching, ch. 33); that a master strategist like Sun Tzu called victory a funeral (Art of War II.6); and that the sages of all times have cautioned us to be wary of triumphing over others since it will make new enemies, or embitter old ones. If you go further still, and you mortify others by humiliations that they cannot forget or forgive, how do you expect to escape their wrath? When you have not only sown the dragon’s teeth of violence but thrown salt on the land and poison in the wells, do you mean to escape your own harvest of blood and bitterness by hunting them all down, every last one? For that is what you would need to do—the most barbarous, contemptuous, godforsaken thing of all—since they will otherwise come after you unto the seventh generation, in your very nightmares, if they can get to you no other way. It is a heinous thing to even contemplate, let alone carry out, even if you could. There is a reason why warriors do not talk gladly of what they see in their dreams.

     Lily-livered nonsense, you may say. The world belongs to the strong; let them do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Vae victis! The Gallic chieftain who threw his sword into the scales with these haughty words did not live long: his name is remember not on account of his foolhardy speech, but because of the millions of vacationers’ cars that have invaded Italy from the north in more recent times, on a highway named for him after a particular pass over the Alps. Like Brennus the Gaul, far too many of the supposedly clear-headed, tough-minded sort have discovered only when it was too late the folly of striking at such deadly and hateful bells, imagining that they would keep ringing only for others. I am not naive enough to believe that we will get over our frightful habits any time soon; but neither am I so naive as to think that we can get away with them.

     The so-called realists who like to deride others for their supposedly soft heads and hearts get the first half right: of course we must deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. To do otherwise would be to set ourselves up for disaster: good intentions are important, but they are not sufficient. Alas, the second half, more subtle but just as indispensable for balancing the equation, is too often overlooked by those who take themselves to be so very hard-headed: we do not simply find the world ready-made to a formula, independently of how we act; we also make our world by our actions (and the intentions that lie at their root), and we need to answer for whatever we contribute to making it a prison, or a hell. We get to make our beds in life, and every blood-stained nail we hammer in, we will need to sleep on, perhaps forever.

*Thus Churchill’s epigraph to his history of the Second World War (outdoing the Germans in excessive capitalization, which we can safely dispense with here): “In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; and in peace, good-will.”

**Herbert Kickl’s broadside against the sitting government on 4 July 2024, introducing a no-confidence vote by his party (“Misstrauensantrag gegen Gewesseler,” available from YouTube), is a master-class in polemics. “Never before in this republic has there been a weakling comparable to the current chancellor, and it is no consolation that his hunger for power should be correspondingly insatiable. It would hardly be possible to expose, embarrass, and demean oneself in a worse and more mortifying manner than you are doing today, after your minister has led the president by a ring in his nose through the political circus-arena and made a laughingstock of Austria, etc.” Mr. Kickl did go on, three weeks ago, to win the latest general election; whether he was right to expect that those whom he has been inveighing against in such uncompromising terms would nonetheless be willing to make a political deal with him after the vote, remains to be seen.