Conflict

Conflict has its uses. A form of social interaction, it seems nearly essential to maintaining the structures of society. Georg Simmel writes that “the positive and integrating role of antagonism is shown in structures which stand out by the sharpness and carefully preserved purity of their social divisions and gradations. Thus, the Hindu social system rests not only on the hierarchy, but also directly on the mutual repulsion, of the castes. Hostilities not only prevent boundaries within the group from gradually disappearing, so that these hostilities are often consciously cultivated to guarantee existing conditions” (Conflict, 18)

More generally, conflicts “are of direct sociological fertility: often they provide classes and individuals with reciprocal positions which they would not find, or not find in the same way, if the causes of hostility were not accompanied by the feeling and the expression of hostility” (18). Competition, a form of conflict, “determines the form of the group, the reciprocal positions of its participants, and the distances between them, and . . . does so purely as a formal matrix of tensions” (18).

Simmel is not content to present this as a sociological truth, but extends it to metaphysics: “Just as the universe needs ‘love and hate,’ that is, attractive and repulsive forces, in order to have any form at all, so society, too, in order to attain a determine shapes, needs some quantitative ratio of harmony and disharmony, of association and competition, of favorable and unfavorably tendencies: (15). A pure “unity” is “empirically unreal” and could “show no real life process” (15).

This is not wholly wrong. Unity without difference is indeed stagnant and infertile, formless and immobile. But like many thinkers Simmel quickly slips from difference to conflict, as if there could be no difference that is not violent difference. And this is simply Trinitarian heresy. For Christians worship a God who is eternal love, wholly one without conflict or competition, an eternal infinitely fruitful communion of Father, Son, and Spirit. By ontologizing conflict, Simmel ontologizes sin, and ends up Gnostic.