The Physics and Politics of Peace: Trump’s Triumph in the Middle East › American Greatness
Roger Kimball
Peace in the Middle East was impossible—until it wasn’t. Donald Trump started to traverse that impassable domain in his first term with the Abraham Accords. Then, just a few days ago, he managed another impossible passage when he brokered peace between the irreconcilable forces of Israel and Hamas. Almost as impressive, Trump solicited and received the support of Muslim countries from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and Egypt. Amazing.
How did he do it? Well, in part, it was “the art of the deal” in practice. But stepping back, Trump’s forceful yet patient endeavor on behalf of peace reminded me of Walter Bagehot’s insights in his neglected masterpiece, Physics and Politics. First published in 1872, this curious book is partly a contribution to political history and partly an exploration of the often forgotten truism that not all things are possible at all times and in all places. If political liberty is a precious possession, Bagehot saw, it is forged in a long development of civilization, much of which is distinctly, and necessarily, illiberal.
The notion that human beings—and, by analogy, advanced human societies—had developed out of more primitive forms had been in the air for decades by the time Bagehot began Physics and Politics. Evolution—often called “descent with modification” or simply “development” in the early nineteenth century—was an Enlightenment idea par excellence. Darwin’s theories about the place of natural selection in biological evolution, published in 1859 in On the Origin of Species, gave the idea of evolution new scientific authority. But the basic idea of evolution—minus the explanatory motor of natural selection, which Darwin adopted from Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population (first published in 1798)—was part of the mental furniture of the age. Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, published in 1844, was one of several books on the subject that influenced Bagehot. The crudities of “Social Darwinism,” put forward most famously in the writings and speeches of Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley, were a natural outgrowth of these ideas.
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