PicoBlog

I admit to being unschooled in academic international relations theory, but from what I can tell, there are as many different versions of Realism as there are people who purport to understand Clausewitz or took an undergraduate political science class. I’d like to offer my own idiosyncratic version of Realism, one grounded not in the canon current among today’s international relations scholastics but rather my own reading of history (I am a historian by training, after all), philosophy, and perhaps even a little theology. Indeed, I’ve often joked that A. E. Housman’s line “malt does more than Milton can/To justify God’s ways to man” should be altered to read “malt does more than Mearsheimer can/To justify God’s ways to man,” when in truth it should read, “Milton does more than Mearsheimer can…”

Realism boils down to a rejection of or at least skepticism toward Enlightenment optimism. Voltaire’s Candide of course once famously defined optimism as “the madness of insisting that all is well when it is not.” Voltaire was poking fun of a broad range of teleologies of progress that undergird the Enlightenment and the Western liberal project. American national identity is shot through with Enlightenment optimism. So is the Enlightenment project known as “international law,” and that specifically Kantian project known as the United Nations. We are all reasonable people who believe in justice and reason and thus expect human society, haltingly, perhaps, but steadily, to learn to govern itself and the rest of the world accordingly, yielding “Perpetual Peace.” Think Star Trek, which of course is what a Realist thinks of these teleogies: nice, but science fiction.

Realism is about letting go of “shoulds” in favor of what “is.” It is informed by a belief that human nature is either unchanging or simply changing too slowly to bet on people doing the right thing or even simply being reasonable. Realists believe that often what drives relations among humans are instincts more fundamental than reason. Realism means having a healthy respect for hard power and violence, and not being disappointed when states act out of their own interests, sometimes narrowly defined, rather than in a manner consistent with higher ideals. It is “realistic” to recognize the existence and sometimes importance of base hatred, for example. Racism. Antisemitism. Sometimes there is no talking things out to find equitable political solutions. Sometimes one has to kill or be killed. Some conflicts can only be resolved through violence, and ultimately the victory of one side.

This is not to say that humans are intrinsically bad. Skepticism vis-à-vis the Enlightenment should not give way to the dark Romanticism of someone like Joseph de Maistre or any number of Fascists, whose illiberalism encouraged a cult of violence. This is why, in all seriousness, Milton provides an important lesson: Milton wrote an epic poem about Man’s fall from grace, but he ended it with the promise of redemption. He believed good could prevail, but it was intertwined with evil, leaving humans to sort it out. To do that, they needed to resist succumbing to kitschy visions of a world without evil, i.e. an unrealistic world (one is reminded of Milan Kundera’s definition of kitsch as the “absolute denial of shit”), but rather to take it all in, the good and the bad. Realism is not a license to be bad or to yield to despair. It is a mandate to be smart.

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