Bush: Insult to Manicheans

Calling Bush's Views Manichean Is an Insult to the Manicheans
By Dan Skinner

Mr. Skinner is an instructor of political theory at Hunter College at the City University of New York. He is a PhD student of Political Theory at the City University of New York Graduate Center, focusing on the relationship between language and politics.
This is an excellent article and well worth following the link to read it all. The .... show where sections are missing.

Since George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech on January 29, 2002, his polarizing politics have often been characterized in terms such as a “Manichean struggle with a single overarching enemy called terrorism” (Washington Post, April 19, 2002). Since September 11 the term “Manichean” has been bandied about carelessly in the media as though it were a mere synonym for “binary” or “polar”—suitable for use in describing any worldview comprised of forces of “Good” and “Evil.” A closer look at the etymology of the term, however, reveals that we might have been better off had we elected an actually Manichean president.

The Manicheans were a syncretic religious sect led by Mani, a Buddhist-influenced ascetic born in Baghdad in the 3rd century AD. Like Bush, the Manicheans carved the spiritual world up into two categories—Good and Evil—but, as orthodox dualists, they believed that the forces of Good and Evil were not engaged in some continuous and messianic struggle, but rather that their contrasting presence was the very basis of the spiritual order. ..................

Bush’s public pronouncements of faith have somewhat successfully hidden from the public the reality of how unchristian his particular form of dualism is. The so-called “Doctors” of Catholic theology—Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm—rejected any such battle between Good and Evil .............

Ironically, if there is any theological tradition that Bush’s politics embody it is that of another ancient Persian religion, Zoroastrianism—but with a twist. .......... The Zoroastrian quest was spiritual, which eliminated force or violence as options for obtaining peace.

It should be noted that Zoroaster was the same man that Friedrich Nietzsche called Zarathustra, from whose ontology Nietzsche challenged enlightenment conceptions of progress, shunned democracy and surmised that the weak were albatrosses around society’s neck. Nietzsche took the peaceful and hopeful philosophy of Zoroastrianism and stripped it of its optimism, leaving behind not the triumph of Good over Evil, but conflict itself. ........

This brief theological excursion is only politically relevant today because modern politicians such as George W. Bush have made it so. In drawing upon a dualistic political framework (“Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”), Bush has positioned himself as the arbiter of good versus evil, a struggle which has come to define the public face of his foreign policy.

The major problem with this mode of thinking is that, aside from Bush’s role as ontological authority, his rigid dualistic politics forces yet another logical distinction: friends and enemies. In Bush’s Zoroastrian world, life is defined not by positive categories that envision a better world, but by a preoccupation with destruction of the Other. ....................

The student of politics will also recognize the more stark historical manifestation of Bush’s ontology. It was the patron philosopher of the Nazi party, Carl Schmitt, who suggested that the state has one essential function: distinguishing friends from enemies. This friend-enemy distinction has two classifying functions: f............................

In today’s political climate the question is often asked, when or how does this end? The honest observer would be forced to acknowledge that an end is unattainable so long as dualisms remain the ontological building blocks of our political understanding. ............................

Manicheans—those great dualists who gave the Catholic theologians such a hard time—at least had the vision necessary to find non-destructive meaning in their distinction between Good and Evil. The permanence of these forces allowed individuals to reconcile themselves with the spiritual world as they found it, and not attempt to do violence to what they saw as the very structure of the world, the opposing forces that “give life meaning.” ..................

Underlying all of this is the question that might follow the construction of any dualism: Did Bush get the categories right? Is he sure who is Good and who is Evil? If not, he is energizing a high-stakes dualistic game based on false distinctions. ......................