A Dream Deferred

Tuesday

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There is a quite well-known poem by Langston Hughes titled “Harlem.” Here it is:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Today I was talking to a friend about the anniversary of the June 4 incident, which we Westerners refer to as the Tienanmen massacre, or some similar title. My friend is Chinese, was living in China at the time, and was part of the movement for democracy. To hear about the hopes that the Chinese people had at the time for a democratic China was quite moving, and it immediately reminded me of the Langston Hughes poem, since my friend said to me that everyone who lived through the June 4 incident had their dream destroyed.

For an entire generation of Chinese, democratic governance was and has been a dream deferred. And perhaps more than a generation: one of the consequences of the Tienanmen massacre was that the military and hard-line factions of the Chinese Communist Party consolidated and extended their control, while those elements of Chinese society who were sympathetic to the democracy protesters had their careers destroyed and lost all influence in the Chinese government — more dreams deferred. In other words, the consequences of the June 4 incident were to shift the whole of Chinese society in the direction of hardliners.

In the intervening decades Chinese society has changed dramatically, and the Communist party monopoly on power has allowed, if not encouraged, every kind of change except political change. It is the oft-observed social contract of China that you can do almost anything you like, as long as you don’t question one-party rule in the country. But this so-called “social contract” is a one-sided contract enforced by the Chinese communist party’s stranglehold on power, and it is aided and abetted by the “Princelings” who found themselves all the more firmly entrenched in power as the result of the consequences of 4 June 1989.

The segue from political and military power of the generation that accompanied Mao to power to the next generation of their children, who have exploited their connections to become rich and powerful, points to a China that has made the transition directly from communist dictatorship to crony capitalism, bypassing a democratic stage of development. There have been many articles in recent years about the high life of the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party, and how the Princelings — children of older, influential communist party members — have taken wealth and power for themselves. An article in Foreign Policy called this “The End of the Chinese Dream” — more dreams deferred.

In my post Crony Capitalism: Macro-Parasitism under Industrialization I speculated that crony capitalism may well be the mature form that capitalism takes in industrial-technological civilization. If, unfortunately, I am right in this, the defeat of the dream of a democratic China on 4 June 1989 may mean that China has assumed the politico-economic structure that it will maintain into the foreseeable future — more dreams deferred.

How long can a dream be deferred and still remain viable, that is to say, still retain its power to inspire? When does a dream pass from deferment to destruction?

There is a political scientist — I can’t remember who it is as I am writing this — who has divided up political movements according to when in the future they locate the ideal society (i.e., utopia). Reformists see the ideal society as in the distant future, so there is no reason to do anything radical or drastic: concentrate on incremental reforms in the present, and in the fullness of time, when we are ready for it, we will have a more just and equitable social order. The radical on the contrary, in pursuit of revolution, thinks that the ideal society is just around the corner, and if we will just do x, y, and z right now we can have the ideal society tomorrow.

Talking to my Chinese friend today, and discussing the almost millenarian expectation of a democratic China, I immediate thought of this revolutionary ideal of a new society right around the corner, since my friend said to me that they felt that a democratic China was not merely a possibility, but was so close to being a reality — almost within their grasp. I also thought of the radicalism of the French Revolution, and Wordworth’s famous evocation of this time:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!

The dream of the French Revolution issued in the nightmare of The Terror, and of course many who opposed the protesters for democracy in China did so because this is the path of development they feared: a collapse of civil society followed by years if not decades of chaos and instability. Many former communist officials who participated in the Tienanmen crack down were quite explicit about this (which is something I wrote about in Twenty-one years since Tiananmen).

To invoke yet another western poem to describe the situation in China, Chinese democracy remains the road not taken. We will never know what China and the world would have looked like if democracy had triumphed in China in 1989. We don’t know what kind of lesson China would have given to the world: an example to follow, or a warning of what to avoid. Instead, the leaders of China gave the world a very different lesson, and a very different China.

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Riots in Sweden?

Thursday

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Since when are there riots in Stockholm? Who could even imagine social unrest in Sweden, that classic example of successful welfare state socialism? Sweden the exemplar of progressive social policies? And then there is the old joke that America is the second most Americanized country in the world — after Sweden. What’s going on? What went wrong? Is the dream of the Scandinavian welfare state unraveling?

No one is innocent in this shocking episode, neither Sweden, nor the immigrant communities that have increasingly come to Sweden, taking advantage of its generous social welfare benefits and its open immigration policy.

Sweden’s self-image as a progressive society has led to its opening its doors to increasing numbers of immigrants and refugees, and Swedish society is in the process of being transformed as it attempts to assimilate these immigrants, who increasingly come from a profoundly different social, cultural, and ethnic context.

In the Wikipedia article Demographics of Sweden we read:

“According to Eurostat, in 2010, there were 1.33 million foreign-born residents in Sweden, corresponding to 14.3% of the total population. Of these, 859,000 (9.2%) were born outside the EU and 477,000 (5.1%) were born in another EU Member State.”

In other words, almost ten per cent of Sweden’s population comes from outside Europe. Ten per cent is enough of a population to make a real difference, especially if this ten per cent identifies with a different social, cultural, or ethnic tradition than that of its host country.

And again from Wikipedia:

The fastest growing groups of foreign-born residents in Sweden between 2011 and 2012 were the following nationalities:

Syria (+5,153)
Afghanistan (+3,995)
Somalia (+3,801)
Bosnia and Herzegovina (+2,458)
Iraq (+2,361)
Thailand (+1,941)
Iran (+1,821)
Eritrea (+1,741)
Turkey (+1,176)
China (+1,161)

The issue of Muslim immigration into Europe has been discussed extensively, and usually in a highly politicized context. Muslim immigrants complain of discrimination while doing little to assimilate, while Europeans have expectations of immigrant assimilation while doing little to accommodate the profoundly different culture they have received into their midst.

So, it’s time for some blunt talk. State structures in the Middle East, where many Muslim immigrants originate, have always been weak. The institution of the nation-state has been imposed on the region by the international system, although it resonates but little with the peoples (i.e., the nations) whose interests these nation-state putatively represent. That is one reason (among many) that the region is torn by violence: state regimes in the region lack intrinsic legitimacy, so they cannot enforce an internal security regime.

The lack of a viable state or national identity in the Middle East has been compensated for by a strong sectarian identity. Muslims see themselves as part of the global Ummah, the global community of Muslims, and identify with this community more than their putative political community. When Muslims immigrate to Europe, they continue to identify with the Ummah and not with the nation-state to which they immigrate — just as they did at home.

The Europeans, on the other side, made it easy for immigrant peoples to retain their traditional identities rather than to attempt to assume a new social identity. For my American readers, it may perhaps be worth mentioning that Europe does not assimilate immigrants in the same way that the US does.

For all the US problems with immigration and social identity, it is virtually effortless to become an American. If you arrive in the US from another country, the day you step off the airplane you are a Swedish-American or a Somali-American or an Armenian-American, and so on. All you have to do is to speak English and call yourself a such-and-such-American, and it becomes true as soon as you say it. This is the ultimate political performative language (to borrow a term from J. L. Austin).

It is not so easy to become a European. In fact, it is almost impossible to become a European. If I were to move to Italy tomorrow, and stay there for the next thirty years (if I should live so long), at the end of thirty years I would still be an American living in Italy. I would not be an American-Italian. One cannot simply assume European identity in the way one can seamlessly assume and assert American identity.

We have already seen the results of these European-Muslim immigrant tensions in the riots in Paris and London. Now these tensions have reached as far north as Sweden. The same tensions exist in Sweden despite the efforts of the Swedes and their government to be tolerant, and this is partly the result of pure numbers: neither France nor the UK have an immigrant population of ten per cent from outside Europe, and if they did the problem would be even worse. It is probably more difficult to “become” a Frenchman or an Englishman than to be accepted as a Swede.

In the Financial Times article, Swedish riots spark soul-searching on immigration, we read the following:

The big problem in a suburb such as Husby, where immigrants represent about 80 per cent of the population, is unemployment, particularly among the young. Swedish youth unemployment stands at 25.1 per cent, about triple the level of overall joblessness. And much of that youth unemployment is concentrated among immigrants from countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria. “Sweden isn’t that different to other countries when it comes to problems of integration in larger cities where we have these suburbs with a lot of unemployment,” says Per Adman, an associate professor at Uppsala university. He points out that the media often refers to “unemployed young men” without specifying that they are predominantly immigrants.

It can be interpreted as an attempt to studiously avoid racial profiling to refuse to specify the differences within statistics between native-born Swedes and immigrants, and we often find this in the US media and police reports, in which one has to read between the lines to try to understand what is really going on. This is a strategy of tolerance that probably has limits. In so far as a democratic country relies on public education and accurate media reports for intelligent public policy discussion, even the best intended efforts to avoid the stigmatization of immigrants can result in false information and false public impressions that leads to a failure to engage with the problem as it is.

And it continues. After a fourth night of rioting, the BBC in Stockholm restaurant torched as riots spread reported:

Stockholm police spokesman Kjell Lindgren said the rioters were a “mixture of every kind of people”.

When does promoting the illusion of integration (such as citing a mixture of “every kind of people” involved in a riot in a neighborhood that is eighty per cent immigrant) contribute to the formation of a mendacious society that makes things worse instead of better? And one cannot appeal to a status quo to be restored, maintained, or achieved. Demographics tells us that populations change over time, and either you find a way to manage the change, or you succumb to chaos and social disintegration.

Riots in one of the most stable and tolerant societies on the planet is an unambiguous sign of social disintegration, though in the name of integration it will be called anything but this.

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The Stockholm neighborhoods most affected by rioting.

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Since writing the above yesterday the Swedish Minister for Integration, Erik Ullenhag, has issued an official statement about the rioting in stockholm, Minister for Integration Erik Ullenhag comments on the unrest in some Stockholm suburbs, which is interesting in several respect. The statement in its entirety is copied below.

Society must make it clear that it is never acceptable to burn cars or throw stones at the police. The people of Husby want a society where the rule of law prevails, they want to be able to feel safe and secure. We must remember, the cars that are burning do not belong to people who live in the centre of Stockholm, they belong to people who live in Husby.

In the short term, this is a matter for the police. In the long term, it is a matter of making a change for the better where people live, so that more children and young people can successfully complete school and more people get jobs.

What we are seeing are extreme, unusual events. But we need to be absolutely clear about one thing: we can never accept violence. Violence has a negative impact on social segregation. We know there is discrimination based on where people live, and these events do not improve the image of these residential areas, where there are plenty of positive things going on too. At the end of the day, what this is all about is that we must create a positive belief in the future in areas at risk.

And one positive thing is that civil society has taken to the streets. That adults in the community are helping to calm down the situation in these areas. The Government is not actively involved right now – this is a matter for the law enforcement authorities. But we are taking long-term action, for example by taking measures to increase the visible police presence.

This is a small group of individuals. They are young boys and men who are not representing the 15 percent of foreign born living in Sweden today. Several of them are known by the police and some of them don´t even live in the area where they now burn cars.

Swedish integration policy is now focusing on jobs and education. We can see that school results in some of these areas are bad. But we can also see that we have schools in these areas where the kids are working very hard and doing extremely well.

The minister here asserts that “The people of Husby want a society where the rule of law prevails,” but the problem here is that when the minister speaks of the “rule of law” he means the territorial principle in law which is now nearly universally adopted by nation-states, whereas the Muslim immigrants, is so far as they see their identity in terms of the global Muslim community, the Ummah, does not look to the state as a source of law, but to the traditional law associated with this identity, which is Sharia. In so far as those who understand their political identity in terms of the Ummah, distributed across many different nation-states, and in so far as they look to Sharia as the law of the Ummah, they implicitly understand the “rule of law” as the personal principle in law, i.e., that an individual be judged according to the law of their ethnic or sectarian community, and not in terms of a geographically defined nation-state. So while political representatives can use glittering generalities like “the rule of law” and “civil society,” they do not necessarily mean the same things when they use the same words.

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Life Span of Weapons Systems

Sunday

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The Redoutable at Trafalgar (1805) by Auguste Etienne Francois Mayer (1805-90)

How long does a weapons system last?

Recently I had a comment on my post The End of the Age of the Aircraft Carrier which started me thinking about the life span of weapons system. This is a surprisingly interesting way to think about weapons systems, which contextualizes them within the civilizations that design and build weapons systems.

I have approached this contextualization of weapons systems previously in several posts, as in The Nature of Viking Power Projection and The Byzantine Superweapon. A great many technological innovations and ideological assumptions are built into sophisticated weapons systems, and the most sophisticated among them require an entire civilization to design, build, and field them.

Contextualization can be take diachronically of synchroncially. If we contextualize a weapons system diachronically, we understand it in terms of its historical ancestors and successors, thinking in terms of the evolution of the weapons system in parallel to the socioeconomic system that makes it possible. If we contextualize a weapons system synchronically, we understand it in terms of the infrastructure and institutions (the technological and doctrinal context) that jointly make that weapons system possible, and make it what it is when brought to bear in armed conflict.

The life span of a weapons system is thus a diachronic historical inquiry, but it is only through a synchronic understanding that we see how the elements of a contemporary weapons system stands in relation not only to military function it is supposed to serve, but also in relation to the wider society and designs, builds, and operates the weapons system in question. As in all historical inquiry, the diachronic and synchronic perspectives are bound up in each other. Moreover, there is a parallel synchronic inquiry that would concern itself with the scope of application of a weapons system. This is a crucial and often-overlooked question, which we find we must asked ourselves when a political entity possesses a weapons system that it does not use when engaged in armed conflict. This is another sense of the “lifespan” of a weapons system.

To clarify our terminology we need to indulge in a little informal philosophical logic, since in this context the generality of our assertions will make an important difference. We have to be able to distinguish not only between weapons systems but also the fine gradations in the generations of weapons systems. The F-16 block 60 fighter aircraft operated by the UAE are a more advanced fighter aircraft than the F-16 block 50/52 operated by most USAF squadrons, but we would only distinguish them in a very fine-grained account of weapons systems.

The various “block” upgrades I will count as the “same” weapons systems, even when they have different capabilities, while I will count fourth generation fighter aircraft and fifth generation fighter aircraft as distinct weapons systems. Therefore the F-16 and the F-22 will count as different weapons systems. However, at a higher level of generality, the F-16 and the F-22, as both being supersonic fighter jets are, in a sense, the “same” weapons system. At an even higher level of generality, all fighter aircraft, from the Sopwith Camel to the F-22 are essentially the same weapons system: an aircraft mounting missile weapons to be employed in air-to-air or air-to-ground combat.

All of these distinctions are useful, and we have to keep them in mind so that we avoid comparing apples to oranges and therefore avoid vitiating our point. Furthermore, we need to distinction between what I will call perennial weapons systems, sempiternal weapons systems, and properties of weapons systems.

● perennial weapons systems are weapons systems based on perennial technologies. A knife is a perennial weapons system. There will always be knives, pistols, and rifles. These are now perennial weapons systems. Similarly, there will always be missile weapons of some type, but this is already a move to a higher level of generality, since “missile weapons of some type” include pistols and rifles (and knives, too, when thrown). It is at least arguable that a perennial weapon is not really a weapons system, since perennial weapons in their stark simplicity may be found in isolation from a doctrinal or technological context, but in this case I don’t think that this distinction matters all that much, so I will allow myself the leeway to call perennial weapons “perennial weapons systems.” (Also note that the generalization of a the idea of a weapons system is distinct from the idea of perennial weapons systems.)

● sempiternal weapons systems are weapons systems that in their complexity transcend the simplicity and directness of perennial weapons systems. There is no clear dividing line between perennial weapons systems and sempiternal weapons systems, but I introduce the term “sempiternal” to imply that they are clearly invented at some point in time and, once invented, they are here to stay. It would be difficult to say at what time knives were invented, so knives are clearly perennial weapons systems — it is possible that a knife was the first stone tool produced by human ancestors. I count general categories of weapons systems (the highest level of generality mentioned above, that conflates the Sopwith Camel and the F-22) as sempiternal weapons systems: ships purpose-built for warfare, fixed wing fighter aircraft, helicopters, tanks, and so on. Once the idea of fighting from a flying platform was implemented, it is going to be with us as long as our civilization lasts. That makes such ideas and their implementations (which change radically over time) sempiternal.

● properties of weapons systems are distinct from general kinds of weapons systems, as in sempiternal weapons systems. Under a sufficiently general conception of a weapons system, Hittite chariot archers, Mongol horse archers, main battle tanks, aircraft carriers, and helicopter gunships all count as mobile fire weapons systems. Yet mobile fire is not itself a weapons system, but a property of some weapons system, a property that might be possessed to a greater or a lesser degree. An aircraft carrier is a mobile fire weapons system, but is much less mobile and much less maneuverable than a helicopter gunship. An arrow, a spear, and a knife when thrown are all examples of missile weapons; any of these missile weapons when employed from a mobile platform constitute mobile fire weapons systems, just as an Apache helicopter gunship constitutes a mobile fire weapons system, but all of these weapons systems are profoundly different each from the other.

Given these distinctions, it should be obvious that perennial weapons systems, sempiternal weapons systems, and properties of weapons systems have no life span: once they are introduced, they are with us forever. If some treaty establishes their abolition, we will still have the idea that such a thing is possible, and if it becomes seen as militarily necessary, they will be built regardless of treaties or abolition.

This is not true, however, at lower levels of generality than that contemplated by the bare idea of sempiternal weapons systems. There will always be missile weapons, but this is a highly general concept of a weapons system. In the same way that there will always be missile weapons, there will always be ships and submersibles, and there will always be aircraft. While there will always be fighter aircraft, particular generations of fighter aircraft become obsolete. No one would build a Sopwith Camel today for combat, although they might build one as a project of historical reconstruction (i.e., as an exercise in experimental archaeology).

What applies to generations of fighter aircraft also applies to generations of naval technologies. To take one example, no more ships of the line are built for contemporary navies (except to train cadets). In other words, the ship of the line, with multiple decks and multiple masts, optimized to fire the greatest number of cannon as broadsides against other ships of the line, is obsolete, were it was once the state of the art in naval architecture. The ship of the line had a definite life span, and that life span came to an end more than a century ago.

This post began as a response to my post on The End of the Age of the Aircraft Carrier, in which I speculated on the lifespan of fixed wing aircraft carriers and explicitly stated that no weapons systems will last forever; the aircraft carrier will eventually go the way of the ship of the line, but not until something better comes along. A comment was recently made that aircraft carriers may last another hundred years on the earth’s oceans, and I do not dispute this. Nevertheless, it is still a matter of time.

With the above distinctions in mind, I will revise this a bit, and assert instead that the aircraft carrier simpliciter is a sempiternal weapons system, and I acknowledged this implicitly in my earlier post when I stated that there will be helicopter carriers in the future, which are a kind of aircraft carrier, but once fixed wing hypersonic aircraft become a reality, and it is cheaper and more effective to base fighter aircraft deep within the home territory of a nation-state, given that hypersonic aircraft could show up anywhere in the world in less than an hour, then fixed wing aircraft carriers will become obsolete. But helicopters will continued to be needed on the battlefield, and they cannot be made hypersonic, so there will be a need for helicopter carriers beyond the time when fixed wing aircraft carriers have become obsolete. Also, since I have predicted that helicopter gunships have not yet been fully exploited on the battlefield, the future of helicopter carriers is bright; helicopters will be needed more than ever on the future battlefield.

The fixed wing aircraft carrier is not the only high technology weapons system the obsolescence of which can be projected. It could be argued that the life span of the land-based ICBM is essentially expired, given that precision weapons system and guidance systems have effectively rendered ICBM silos vulnerable. Even if no nation-state has chosen to build nuclear-tipped hypersonic precision-guided cruise missiles with the intent of neutralizing a ground-based ICBM threat, this is nevertheless clearly a weapons system that is within the capability of the advanced industrialized nation-states to build at the present time. (We have the idea of such a weapons system, and the idea cannot be banned or “unthought.”) Effective obsolescence, then, may be distinguished from obsolescence in fact.

On a level of greater generality — greater even than the generalization of all weapons systems — and therefore of even greater potential theoretical interest, it may be that in our own time that symmetrical conflict between peer or near-peer military powers has become obsolete. I don’t assert this with any dogmatic degree of confidence, and the coming century may yet see a peer-to-peer conflict in the Pacific if China is able to tool its industrial plant to the point of producing a rival carrier fleet to that of the US. Nevertheless, it is at least possible that peer-to-peer conflict has disappeared from the world, to be replaced by chronic, low-level insurgency and asymmetrical operations.

If we rigorously limited ourselves to a single level of generality (again, avoiding the comparison and apples and oranges) we could probably calculate for a given weapons system an average lifespan. If we could do this (i.e., if someone took the time to do this in a rigorous way) I will make a prediction about the lifespan of weapons systems:

Prediction: even as perennial weapons systems endure in their usefulness, the lifespan of large, technologically sophisticated weapons systems will gradually shrink in length unless industrial-technological civilization reaches a (near-)permanent plateau of development, spelling the end of the technological innovation that drives weapons systems development.

The ship of the line arguably endured for centuries as a viable weapons system. The ICBM seems to have lasted only about 50 years as a viable weapons system. Some high technology weapons system seem to be obsolete as soon as they are designed and being prepared for actual use. The most notorious examples of this would include the XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer and the M247 Sergeant York self-propelled anti-aircraft gun.

The same forces that drive industrial-technological civilization forward — science creating technology engineered into industries creating new tools for science — also drive industrialized warfare forward, and as technology improves exponentially, weapons systems must also improve exponentially. This means shorter lifespans for the most advanced technological weapons systems, even as perennial weapons systems retain their efficacy in ongoing asymmetrical conflicts in which the full force of industrialized warfare cannot be brought to bear in any meaningful way.

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Chinese Military Posture

Tuesday

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The Ministry of National Defense of the People’s Republic of China has just released a white paper on China’s military posture, which can be read in its entirety online: The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces. This document is remarkable not for its insights into Chinese strategic thinking or its application of Sun Tzu’s philosophy of war or even “strategy with Chinese characteristics” but only for its resemblance to military white papers from western nation-states, which idiom (and acronyms) it has thoroughly adopted.

This use of the idiom of contemporary western military professionalism is doubly interesting, since public statements of the Chinese government often continue to be jargon-laden pieces of communist theory — sometimes to the point of impenetrability. Some time ago in What is Strategic Trust? I mentioned an article in Foreign Policy by Isaac Stone Fish, Hu Jintao on China losing the culture wars, which very effectively poked fun at the irony of the Chinese leader’s formulaic use of communist nostrums in the attempt to urge his fellow Chinese to improve the quality of their cultural production.

It is precisely this absurd communist jargon that is missing from the just released report The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Forces. Instead, the report indulges in the western parallel to this: the absurd jargon of western bureaucratic military jargon and acronyms. There is a pattern here of rigidly formulaic thinking. Of course, such patterns are to be found in the official documents of all nation-states, but the question is whether it is believed by those who use this language, or whether such language is used merely out of a misplaced sense of bureaucratic necessity.

It was interesting to note that the report mentions the “three evil forces” which have been a talking point for the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and I recall when I last wrote about this I remarked on how the press releases of the SCO read like those of any western military exercise. And while the report mentions the three evil forces of “terrorism, separatism and extremism,” Tibet and Xinjiang, where the Chinese are most likely to encounter these forces, are only mentioned peripherally in this report (in relation to rivers and schools in the section titled “Participating in National Development”), as the Diaoyu Islands (which Japan calls the Senkaku Islands) are mentioned only once.

At the same time that the Chinese were releasing their official version of China’s military posture, Focus Taiwan published a short piece, China yet to deploy 094 sub, JL-2 & DF-41 missiles: security head, mostly about China’s failures to fulfill its military ambitions for weapons systems commensurate with the technologically advanced weapons systems of western nation-states. The article was concerned with the trouble China continues to have with their latest submarines and ICBMs.

It is easy to focus on Chinese ambitions to join the club of nation-states operating aircraft carriers or fifth generation fighters, but it is also important to recall that China has had difficulty in tooling its industries to design and build world-class weapons systems. The Chinese have long had difficulty building missile boats (as with the above-noted difficulties with the 094 Jin-Class submarine and the JL-2 ballistic missile), for example.

The Chinese still buy the jet engines for the most sophisticated fighter jets from Russia, which despite its decrepit communist economy was able to create and sustain an industrial plant nearly equal to that of western powers during the Cold War (including supersonic jet turbines and missile boats). This came at a price for the Soviet Union, of course, and it would come at a price for China. So is it the case that the Chinese are unwilling to pay the price for a world-class defense industry, or that they would be willing be to pay the price, but are simply unable, as yet, to design and build the hardware? It would take a China specialist to give a definitive answer to this question, but it is a crucial question, because to answer this question would be to determine whether China’s military posture is voluntary or involuntary.

If China’s present military posture really is voluntary, that means that China’s leadership really does believe in their own “peaceful rise” and in “strategic trust.” If, however, China’s present military posture is involuntary, forced upon it by circumstances beyond the control of China’s leadership, then that means that “peaceful rise” and “strategic trust” really are the formulaic platitudes that they appear to be. We must be prepared to entertain either of these hypotheses, as, at present, they are empirically equivalent theories.

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Why tyranny always fails but democracy does not always prevail

Tuesday

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As Syria continues its slide from insurgency into civil war, and no one any longer expects the ruling Alawite regime of Bashar al-Assad to triumph, it is an appropriate moment in history to reflect upon the fall of tyrants and tyrannical regimes. Not that we haven’t had ample opportunity to do so in recent years. The fall of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century and the fall of a series of Arab dictators in recent years has given us all much material for reflection (chronicled in posts such as Cognitive Dissonance Among the Apologists for Tyranny and Two Thoughts on Libya Nearing Liberation).

I have previously written about Syria in Things fall apart, Open Letter in the FT on Syria, The Structures of Autocratic Rule, and What will Assad do when he goes to Ground? Much more remains to be said, on Syria in particular and on the collapse of tyrants generally.

The obvious problems of governmental succession in Syria are already being discussed ad nauseam in the press. That there is trouble on the horizon is evident to all who carefully follow the developments of the region in which Syria is a central nation-state, bordering no fewer than five nation-states: Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south and Israel to the southwest. This centrality of Syria in a politically unstable region has led the surrounding regional powers to favor the devil they know rather than to chance the devil they know not. The ruling Alawite regime of Syria has been held in place not only by its own brutality, but also by the tacit consent of its neighbors. Now that the fall of the al-Assad dynasty is in sight, there are legitimate worries about the radicalization of the insurgents and the role of Islamist Jihadis in the insurgency. No one knows what will come out of this toxic stew, but it is likely to resemble a failed state even upon its inception.

At this moment in history, Syria is now the bellweather for the fall of tyrants, but Syria is only the current symptom of an ancient problem that goes back to the dawn of state power in human history. Since the earliest emergence of absolute state power in agricultural civilization, for the first time in human history sufficiently wealthy to support a standing army that could be employed by turns to oppress a tyrant’s own people or as an instrument to conquer and oppress other peoples, there has been a tension between the ability of absolute power to effectively exercise this absolute power to maintain itself in power and the ability of rivals or of subject peoples to wrest this power from the hands of absolute rulers and seize it for themselves.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the institutions of tyrannical political rule are not sustainable. Tyrannical rule may be sustainable for the life of a tyrant, or for a few generations of a dynasty established by a tyrant, but history teaches us that tyrannical longevity is the exception and not the rule. The more onerous the rule of the tyrant, the more other factions will risk to overthrow the tyrant. A tyrant who sufficiently modifies his tyranny until it is approximately representative is likely to last much longer in power, and over time approximates non-tyrannical rule. But if a tyrant simply cuts a few others in on the spoils, creating a tyrannical oligarchy, the same considerations apply. In the long term, only popular rule is sustainable.

But what does this mean to say that in the long term only popular rule is sustainable? The learned reader at this point in likely to begin a recitation of the failings of democracy, but I didn’t say that only democratic regimes persist. Unfortunately for most human beings throughout history, the fall of a tyrant has not resulted in democracy. The most vicious tyrannies call forth the most vicious elements in the population as the only agents willing to risk the overthrow of the tyrant, and so one tyrant is likely to be replaced by another. Even if a popular revolt and revulsion helped to topple the previous tyranny, the new tyranny reverts to perennial tyrannical form, and in so doing eventually alienates the popular movement that installed it in place of the previous tyranny.

This is a particular case of what I have called The Failure Cycle, since this pattern can be iterated. Much of human history has consisted of just such an iteration of petty tyrants, one following the other. That nothing is accomplished politically by the churning of tyrannical regimes should be obvious. There is no social evolution, no social growth, no strengthening of institutions that can provide continuity beyond the vagaries of personal rule.

Thus one consequence of the fact that only popular rule is sustainable is the possibility of an endless iteration of popular movements to overthrow serial tyranny, each tyrant in turn having been installed by a popular uprising. This constitutes a perverse kind of “popular” rule, though it is not often recognized as such or called as much.

Tyrannical regimes typically bend every effort in order to suppress, or at very least to delay, social change. The suppression and delay of social change means that societies laboring under tyrannical regimes — and especially those that have labored under a sequence of tyrannical regimes — have little opportunity to allow social change to come to maturity and for old institutions to be allowed to die while new institutions rise to take their place. Cynics will opine that there is no social evolution in human history, but I deny this. Social evolution is possible, if rare, but the conditions that lead to serial tyranny and serial popular uprisings are not conducive to the cultivation of social evolution.

It is the historical exception to interrupt this vicious cycle of serial tyranny and serial popular uprising, but it takes time for informal social institutions to reach the level of maturity that allows a popular uprising to install a genuine democracy instead of a tyrant who claims to be a democrat out of political expediency.

Homo non facit saltus. Man makes no leaps. We cannot skip a stage in our social evolution. We cannot impose democratic institutions, or freedom, or even prosperity. A people must come to it on their own, with the maturation of their native institutions, or not at all.

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Another Source of Stagnation

Friday

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Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, Destruction, 1836

A couple of days ago in The Byzantine Superweapon, and again yesterday in Innovation, Stagnation, and Optimization, I discussed some of the forces that led to the technological stagnation of classical antiquity, which ensured that there would be no industrial revolution in the classical world. Western civilization had to pass through the painful contraction of political and economic collapse in Western Europe, and lose much of what it had struggled so hard to build, before it could get to the point at which the conditions were right (and ripe) for industrialization.

Now, the way that I have worded the above paragraph suggests a kind of historical inevitability, and this is philosophically objectionable. If one is going to make a claim of historical inevitability, one has an intellectual obligation to state this claim, and to defend it. However, I am not making such a claim, although my position could be interpreted as a weak form of historical inevitability.

What do I mean by “weak historical inevitability”? A strong formulation of historical inevitability would simply be a statement of determinism. A weak formulation of historical inevitably need make no metaphysical claims about determinism, but does acknowledge that, given the kind of civilization that characterized classical antiquity — settled, slave-holding, agrarianism — it would have been virtually impossible, or in any event extremely unlikely for technological innovation to escalate to the point of an industrial revolution. Before industrialization could occur, certain social changes must occur. But the “must” in the last sentence is not the “must” of necessity or determinism, but only a weaker “must” of the preponderance of the evidence. Call this a scientific must if you must, because it shares in the inductivism and revisability of all scientific thought.

In the same spirit of a scientific perspective on history, imbued with an empirical and inductive approach (rather than an a priori and deductive approach, in which “had to” and “must” carry connotations of metaphysical determinism, as in Marxism), there is another factor in the stalling and stagnation of ancient Western civilization that bears examination, and this relates to the geophysical structure of the Roman Empire, which represented classical antiquity at its greatest reach and its most robust iteration.

Of course, the study of the geography of political structures is the meat and potatoes of geopolitics, and I have written a good deal on geopolitics and geostrategy. But even though geopolitics represents a “big picture” and “long term” view on political structures, in the field of geophysics geopolitics is the shortest of short term perspectives. Those who take the longer view of human history and civilization in the context of geography — Jared Diamond is probably the most famous contemporary example of this — are frequently charged with “geographical determinism,” and while in some instances this may be true, but, as I noted above, we can adopt a weak sense of geographical inevitably and avoid all metaphysical determinism.

The geographical unity of the Roman Empire was primarily a function of the Mediterranean Sea, which was ringed by ports that connected the cities of the empire with water-borne commerce — at that time in history, the only form of commerce that could move mass quantities of goods. Maps of the Roman Empire show it surrounding the Mediterranean. After the collapse of Roman power in the West, Western civilization moved inland and approximated pure agriculturalism until expanding again across the North Atlantic and new and larger geographical unity based on water-borne commerce.

During its medieval phase, and carried over into continental politics during the modern period, Western civilization gave rise to no durable empire on the scale of the Roman Empire. The European peninsula is too geographically divided by rivers and mountain ranges to posses the kind of geographical unity the Roman Empire had in virtue of the Mediterranean. George Friedman and Strategic Forecasting often argues in this vein, and in this I think he is right. Friedman has also pointed out that, geopolitically, China is an island. Separated from the rest of the world by deserts, mountain ranges, and the ocean, the traditional unity of Chinese civilization derives from this insular geography. The only people who penetrated the fastness of China were the Mongols; the Chinese themselves did not engage in successful power projection, but spent most of the history warring with each other to determine who would rule the geographical unity of China.

The same geographical divisions of Europe that led to a plethora of petty kingdoms, states, statelets, principalities, and city-states led to ideological, political, economic, and even aesthetic diversity by way of the cultural equivalent of allopatric speciation. In other words, civilization speciated rapidly on the European peninsula. Political and ideological diversity meant a history of continuous conflict, which was at times was ruinous, but at other times had the remarkable quality of competitive government, so that a variety of diverse candidates for political leadership contested with each other to demonstrate (usually militarily) who could provide the best rule. The brilliance of the Italian renaissance is sometimes credited — rightly, in my view — to the competition among principalities on the Italian peninsula.

The Roman Empire, possessing the geographical unity of the Mediterranean — similar in a certain sense to the insularity of Chinese civilization and its series of empires — did not benefit from competitive government. It became, in contrast, a political monoculture that iterated itself around the Mediterranean basin and penetrated as far inland was travel by road was practicable. Instead of competition, the Roman Empire bestowed peace — the Pax Romana.

In this context, the Pax Romana could be understood as a cause, if not the cause, of the decline of classical antiquity, for without the continual pressure of war there was no need reason to systematically harness science, technology, and engineering to practical ends, and these pursuits remained an elite preoccupation of a handful of privileged and relatively isolated individuals.

By contrast, the continual (internal) warfare of medieval Europe eventually gave birth to the scientific revolution even before the industrial revolution made the application of science to technology systematic.

Universal empire — as in Rome or China — leaves peoples with a choice between civilization and barbarism, whereas competing political entities offer peoples a choice between different representatives of a particular tradition of civilization.

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Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, Desolation, 1836

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Checks, Balances, and Gridlock

Monday

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It has become one of the most familiar complaints today on the US political scene that the political system of the US is mired in permanent gridlock. Nothing gets done because the people are divided and vote into office individuals with vastly differing agendas; the two-party system ensures that the two parties are always at each others’ throats, vying for money, votes, and influence; the corrupting influence of money in the political process has meant that the wealthy have a disproportionate influence upon public policy; the never ending stream of laws and rules and regulations that issue from the Capitol mean that no business has a stable operating environment, hence tremendous amounts of money are spent by industry in lobbying the government to get the regulations it prefers. Nothing gets done, is the complaint. What this complaint really amounts to it this: the government doesn’t get anything done. But, really, should we count on the government to get anything done? Do we want the government to have to power to efficiently put its plans into practice?

I‘ve got news for the complainers: the US political system was designed for gridlock; it’s supposed to be that way. The checks and balances that constitute the US political system were intended to prevent the government from functioning efficiently. Tyrannies function efficiently, but that isn’t a model for any government to follow. However, tyrannies often can point to dramatic short term achievements — Stalin’s transformation of the Soviet economy in the 1930s when Western countries were mired in depression, and Hitler’s regimentation of Germany after the chaos of the Wiemar Republic — and as a result of these short-term, unsustainable accomplishments there have been many commentators in democratic countries who have looked with envious eyes at the accomplishments of dictators and tyrants (as today they look east with obvious China Envy).

I have written several posts in which I have attempted to frame the US political system in the context from which it derives historically: as an explicit and systematic manifestation of Enlightenment political thought (cf. From American Exceptionalism to American Declensionism), deeply indebted to Montesquieu, Locke, and Hume, and itself a reaction against extreme statist philosophies of the early modern period such as that of Hobbes as well as a reaction against the excesses of the religious wars in Europe following the Reformation (cf. The Nation-State: a Sketch of its Origins). Since much of this historical context has been lost, and Americans are famously unconcerned about history (Henry Ford said “History is bunk”), Americans by and large, including American political leaders, have little idea what their country is about (i.e., what the Framers were trying to do) and many Americans are openly hostile to Enlightenment political ideas and ideals.

Because of the relative absence of Enlightenment ideals in contemporary political discourse, we have instead the vulgar “ideals” that have emerged in the meantime: celebrity, wealth and its conspicuous consumption, temporary political triumphs of the “zero sum” sort, and the ephemeral (but perennially attractive) blandishments of a youth culture that celebrates a Dionysian frenzy of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll (which, these days, is less about rock-n-roll and more about rave, industrial, trance, techno, and the like). Anyone can realistically aspire to these ideals, and many in fact do, but the ideals of contemporary mass consumer society, like any ideals, have their disappointments. In the US today anyone has a great deal of freedom to live as they like, but you cannot have any impact on contemporary events unless you have money, fame, or connections — preferably all three, but a sufficient quantity of any one of these usually translates into the other (which Joseph Fouche of the now-defunct blog Committee of Public Safety characterized as “all power is fungible”).

Being anonymous or poor in a world in which fame and money are the currency of effective action means being denied the possibility of effective action. This is one source among many of the feeling of alienation that is so common in industrialized society — the feeling of being a powerless cog in an enormous and uncaring machine. (I wrote about this in Fear of the Future.) In such a society, the entire life of an anonymous individual is reduced to the liberty of indifference, which is better than no liberty at all, but not the role in which most individuals see themselves.

One way to address the disaffection and alienation of anonymity in industrialized society is to make individuals feel a genuine part of mass social movements. This is the path of totalitarianism, which, like earlier forms of tyranny and dictatorship, is not sustainable. However, at a much attenuated level, there any many people in the US political system who look to the president to “lead” and are frustrated when little effective leadership is forthcoming. I suppose that there are many people who intuitively feel (even if they would not state it in these terms) that the US President represents what Rousseau called the “general will” as opposed to the mere “will of all” and that it is the responsibility of the President to lead in accordance with the general will and for the people to follow in the same spirit.

In recent history, nation-states have in fact been at the vanguard of the greatest undertakings of human beings, not least because nation-states have the resources at their command that make it possible to undertake expensive and difficult enterprises like mass warfare and space travel. If some other political paradigm (other than the nation-state, that is) prevailed in the present, then that institution would have the resources to undertake great enterprises. The important thing to keep in mind here is that there is nothing that is necessary about the predominance of the nation-state in human affairs, or indeed even the predominance of some political institution.

FDR and Keynes, each in their very different ways, contributed to a climate of opinion in which the nation-state is the locus of human action, shifting the perception of the power and agency of the state as something distant and relatively unimportant to being the central fact in the lives of industrialized masses. FDR greater expanded the scope and role of the federal government in the lives of ordinary US citizens, and Keynes formulated the economic doctrine that the state had an obligation to insert itself into the economy, no matter how disastrously many of these interventions turned out to be. These foundational developments, along with a string of recent Supreme Court rulings that have made a mockery of the Bill of Rights, have consolidated the nation-state as the central power in the lives of US citizens, even if no one knows what that nation-state is supposed to represent.

The idea that the initiatives that move history forward will be government initiatives is fundamentally flawed, and, since it is fundamentally flawed, in the fullness of time it will reveal itself as flawed through the bitter disappoints that it delivers to its true believers. In the meantime, however, there is so much momentum behind the idea of the nation-state and its centrality in the life of peoples that its less-than-optimal performance will be sustained by this momentum for quite some time to come. There will be plenty of blame to spread around to a wide variety of targets before people will come to realize that the nation-state, even in its most intrusive nanny state incarnation, is not going to come and hand you a wonderful life on a silver platter.

Individuals will ultimately be the agents that move history forward. We must look to ourselves to become such individuals that are capable of moving history forward despite the best efforts of officials and bureaucrats and functionaries who presume to speak on our behalf. We need only stop believing in their pronouncements in order to begin the process of freeing ourselves from the the grip of statist omnipotence.

It is a good thing that the US government should be systematically stymied in any grand initiatives it might undertake; I don’t think that many people would enjoy living in the world that would result for the efficacious prosecution of the government’s grand plans for our future. The twentieth century provided us to all too many examples of utopian ideals, which, when put into practice, issued in dystopian realities. (cf. Addendum on Unintended Consequences) I remain hopeful in proportion as the government is weakened by its own infighting.

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The Arabian Continent

Tuesday

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The are many places that have been called the “crossroads of the world” but I would think that Arabia deserves this epithet more than most places on the globe. The Arabian peninsula lies near the geographical center of the Old World, where Africa, Asia, and Europe all meet. The cities of the region have long been linked by trade routes — both overland and maritime — and these trade routes have led them to the farthest reaches of the Old World. Many of the peoples of Arabia thus became involved in commerce, and as an inevitable by-product of wide-ranging commerce throughout the Old World, merchants and tradesmen were often the conduit of knowledge, playing a crucial role in idea diffusion between the Orient, the Occident, and Africa. And long before this, the sequential iterations of hominids who came out of Africa almost certainly came through Arabia on their way to Asia and Europe.

This map of the world from 1482 shows Arabia at the center of the world’s known landmasses. In older maps it was customary to place Jerusalem at the center of the world.

In The Scandinavian Continent I pointed out the the Fennoscandia region is geographically almost as large as Western Europe, and it is only convention — that is to say, only an accident of history — that we refer to a “European continent” but we don’t refer to a “Scandinavian continent.” Similar reasoning holds for the Arabian Peninsula. Indeed, Arabia has more right to be called a continent in its own right than Europe. At 3,237,500 square kilometers (according to Wikipedia), Arabia is larger than both Europe and Fennoscandia. If we include within this region the lands roughly bounded by the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Red Sea — pretty much everything traditionally encompassed by the Eurocentric term “Middle East” — then the Arabian continent is quite a big larger than Europe, Central Asia, or the Indian subcontinent.

Traditional tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.

There is an interesting structural similarity between the Scandinavian continent and the Arabian continent: both regions possess little arable land, so that both were marginalized during the apotheosis of agricultural civilization — say, from the end of Viking depredations on the European periphery up to the Industrial Revolution. Both regions hosted (and still host) nomadic pastoralists. In Scandinavia these were the Saami, who followed the reindeer herds, while in Arabia these were the Bedouin, who lived by herding Camel, sheep, and goats. An important structural difference is that many Arabs regard the Bedouin life as the fons et origo of Arabian culture, whereas the Saami have been viewed as marginal to the cultural life of Scandinavia by the settled population.

Here is one formulation of the relation between the Bedouin and Arab culture more generally speaking:

“…the Bedouins are looked upon, not only by the Arab cities, but by the entire Arab world with the exception of its Westernized elements, as images and figures from the past, as living ancestors, as latterday heirs and witnesses to the ancient glory of the heroic age. Hence the importance of the Bedouin ethos, and of the Bedouins’ aristocratic moral code, for the Arab world in general.”

Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976, p. 73

As I have many times emphasized, the relationship between life and landscape is profound, and in the case of the Arabian continent the traditional life of the people of the region continues to be revered even as society has departed to an ever greater extent from the Bedouin way of life, and this in a society in which most pre-Islamic cultural manifestations are marginalized. The ancient way of life of the people, which far pre-dates Islam, is the norm and the measure to which contemporary Islamic society in Arabia conforms itself.

Between the nomadic ways of desert herders and the ultra-modern cities of the Arabian continent, there is an unbridgeable gap, and yet the people of the region must bridge, or attempt to bridge, that chasm between two ideals — the ideal of Bedouin society and the ideal of Islamic society — every day. The origin of the Ummah — the Islamic community — is to be found in Medina, where the Prophet established the first Islamic community, which therefore become normative. Medina began as an oasis settlement, and therefore was the exception of a settled society in a region dominated by nomadic pastoralists. The Ansar — the Helpers of the Prophet — were settled peoples of the Medina oasis. The cities today are oases in the desert, but the land is still a desert suitable only for pastoralism. The ideal of a settled Islamic society and the ideal of a nomadic desert society interpenetrate, and both exist — coexist — in the present. Since both interpenetrating ideals are constitutive of the social fabric in the Arabian continent, Arabian identity is in tension with itself at its very origins.

The continuity and the unity of the people that makes this geographical region a continent — for continents defined in terms of peoples (and the ecology of their way of life) makes as much sense as the arbitrary conventions that have hitherto been accepted as the basis of continents — is a continuity and a unity that constitutes a discontinuous and disunified identity. This is not unique; many identities are famously contested and conflicted. But the particular dialectic represented by the continuing influence of a Nomadic ideal, is found only in a few places in the world, for example, among the Turks, the Mongolians, and some of the native peoples of the plains of North America. In these cases, it is not clear if there is an equally significant thread of a settled ideal as the dialectical other of the nomadic ideal. That an entire continent should be conflicted in this particular way, and be defined by this conflict of identity, is of no small geopolitical interest.

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Mercator’s 1595 map of Arabia.

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The Zero Hour Thesis

Thursday

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What happens after the end of history?

Zero hour arrives…

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If history is defined in terms of ideological struggle, and the ideological struggles that defined the modern period of Western history ended with the end of the Cold War, then we are living today after the end of history.

One of the paradoxes we have witnessed along with the death knell of history is that the only political ideology that supposedly remains in the wake of hundreds of years of bitter ideological conflict — what Fukuyama identified as liberal democracy — has few friends, and fewer yet true believers.

I invite the reader to go out on the street and ask passers-by about their political ideologies, and I suspect that fewer than one in ten will identify themselves as an advocate of liberal democracy (whether explicitly or by any of its familiar code words). You will likely find more professing Marxists and fundamentalists than professing advocates of the liberal democratic nation-state.

There are many reasons for the lackluster image of liberal democracy today. In From American Exceptionalism to American Declensionism I argued that, “the political class of the US does not believe in the Enlightenment ideals that were instrumental in constituting the US political system.” There is also the disconnect between the glittering generalities of democracy and freedom and the actual living conditions of most people; the end of history has not bequeathed to us a planet full of Switzerlands who behave responsibly toward each other and are solicitous of the welfare of their citizens.

The central reason, however, for the lack of enthusiasm for liberal democracy in its moment of ideological triumph is quite simple: the “system” of liberal democracy lacks all legitimacy. Liberal democratic societies in their mature incarnations have not given us more democracy or more freedom, but less. Just as importantly, the liberal democratic world order has not produced a more just world order, and the manifest absence of both distributive and retributive justice has begun to rankle.

Even those who administer the justice system know that it has failed and is beyond reform, since the administrators of justice have turned to de facto exemplary justice through media exposure. This is what is commonly known as the “perp walk.” When a wealthy and influential individual is arrested for a crime, he or she is paraded before television cameras for a public shaming. Why? Because everyone knows that the television cameras will spread the message to the world, but that the legal system will not.

In the case of highly complex political or financial fraud, in which the explanation of the fraud in a court of law is likely to be as sophisticated and detailed as the crime itself, if not more so, it is inevitable that the outcome will be murky. In the most sophisticated forms of crime, there may not even be laws that address the malfeasance. Charges and counter-charges will be made in court, some charges will stick while others will not, but the result will not satisfy anyone’s conception of justice. So the television cameras are called in to do what the courts will not or cannot do.

There is a recognition, in such cases, that there has been some kind of wrongdoing, even if that wrongdoing is extraordinarily difficult to define, to document, or to prove in court. No one, not even the accused, questions that something problematic has occurred, and that many people have been bilked and cheated and lied to, but it is also increasingly beyond question that the guilty party will not be held criminally responsible, or even, for that matter, held responsible in any sense whatsoever.

The political process is as compromised as the legal process, if not more so. In fact, all of the prized procedural rationality that goes into court cases and electioneering and financial deals is a contributing cause of the social and political failure of contemporary liberal democracy, and not the solution to the problem. And this is why increasing the number of rules, regulations, and laws only increases the public’s sense of frustration, because the public knows that the very complexity of the regulatory apparatus will allow the privileged to skip to the front of the line in life, while the rest must queue around the block.

The closer our procedural rationality brings us to a pure democracy, or at least to a pure exemplar of representative institutions based on popular sovereignty, the more we willingly deliver ourselves to celebrity over meritocracy. A corrupt democracy in which votes are bought or are to be had through intimidation is a political system that is partly insulated from the politics of celebrity. The more we improve our political system, the more we contribute to the pervasive “dumbing down” of contemporary culture by making all political decisions on the basis of popularity.

The failure of liberal democracy to deliver a just political order calls the liberal democratic ideology into question. Liberal democracy has not attained the just social order that its advocates have presented as its raison d’être. Even if an ideologically-inspired reconstruction of the social order fails to bring about the imagined ideal social order, it might nevertheless bring about a (marginally) better life for the greater number of people, almost as an afterthought, or even as an unintended consequence. Has this come about? It could be argued that it has, but it could be argued with equally plausibility that the contemporary political order has made the peoples under its rule so poor and miserable in spirit that no luxuries have been worth the exchange.

Today there are still true believers. That means that ideologies retain their attractiveness and at least some of their efficacy. It is only when all ideologies find themselves bereft of believers that our condition can proceed beyond the end of history, i.e., can drop below history degree one to history degree zero.

There are true believers who do not know that they are true believers, because that in which they truly believe has never been called into question — has never, if you like, faced an existential risk. And the true object of belief of the true believers in the political system of our time is not liberal democracy, as I noted in History Degree Zero, but the nation-state system. It is the ideology of the nation-state that is triumphant today; it the political order itself, and not any one particular constituent of that political order (i.e., a nation-state), that has unquestioned sway.

In our post-historical present of metapolitical monoculture, in which stability and continuity are the be-all and end-all of social organization — that is to say, at history degree one — we have seen not the emergence of an “Axis of Evil” but rather a shifting matrix of powers and would-be powers who adventitiously and opportunistically form transient alliances in order to oppose the metapolitical order. Among these powers and would-be powers are the peoples of the world, putatively represented by their nation-states, but in fact unrepresented because they represent no interest group within the metapolitical order.

As long as there is this belief in metapolitical stability, then there will be two factions: those who want to perpetuate the status quo and those who oppose the status quo. Where there are two factions, there are true believers on both sides of the divide, and thus the metapolitical monoculture of liberal democracy, i.e., the nation-state system, continues to produce robust and vigorous ideological struggle even beyond the end of history at history degree one. In other words, there is no more conservative force in the world today than that of anarchism, which holds what influence it does hold in virtue of its struggle with its other — metapolitical stability.

It is only when the world has been so utterly cleansed of political delusion that faction will become impossible because not only is there nothing to believe in, there is also nothing to meaningfully oppose. This is Zero Hour.

Zero Hour is the explicit and conscious recognition of the radical failure of all ideological movements (without qualification or exception) to both:

1. attain their stated ends, and…

2. broadly improve the standard of living

Zero Hour implies that we are returned to a state of nature and its presumed attendant political innocence. At Zero Hour, not only have all known political ideologies failed, but everyone knows that all political ideologies have failed. Zero Hour means that there are no more true believers, because even the true believers have been disabused of their ideals and disillusioned. (To find innocence, we must go by the way of corruption, as Heraclitus might have formulated it.)

Should we fear Zero Hour, or should we welcome it? Will we even know it when it happens — if it happens? Will we be able to recognize Zero Hour for what it is? What signs and wonders would herald forth the coming of Zero Hour?

Some ages of global history dawn suddenly, while others dawn gradually. I have recently noted in Addendum on the Temporal Structures of Civilization that the historical transition between medievalism and modernism was continuous at every point.

Unlike the slow, gradual, and incremental emergence of modernism, or even of the Industrial Age, to which no particular calendar date can be attached, the Atomic Age blazed suddenly and dramatically into existence on 06 August 1945 at Hiroshima, Japan, and flared again three days later on 09 August 1945 at Nagasaki. The age-old human vision of the End of the World became something real and palpable in a way that it had not been before, and now the power to end the world was in human hands.

Will Zero Hour arrive with a bang or a whimper?

The only thing we know is that we do not know.

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Commitment and Counterinsurgency

Friday

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In the film Apocalypse Now the protagonist, Captain Benjamin L. Willard, is sent up the Mekong to Cambodia to kill Colonel Kurtz, who has gone rogue and is leading a group of native combatants who follow him unquestioningly. There is a scene on the boat going upriver when Willard is reading Col. Kurtz’s dossier, including a report that Kurtz is supposed to have written to the Pentagon after an early tour in Vietnam. The report is called “Commitment and Counterinsurgency” and it includes the following:

“As long as our officers and troups (sic) perform tours of duty limited to one year, they will remain dilletantes in war and tourists in Vietnam. As long as cold beer, hot food, rock and roll and all the other amenities remain the expected norm, our conduct of the war will gain only impotence. The wholesale and indiscriminate use of firepower will only increase the effectiveness of the enemy and strengthen their resolve to prove the superiority of an agrarian culture against the world’s greatest technocracy… The central tragedy of our effort in this conflict has been the confusion of a sophisticated technology with human commitment. Our bombs may in time destroy the geography, but they will never win the war… We need fewer men, and better; if they were committed, this war could be won with a fourth of our present force…”

Everyone knows that Apocalypse now was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I think it would probably be better to say that Apocalypse Now was inspired by Heart of Darkness — or we could use more contemporary terminology and say that Apocalypse Now is a re-imagining of Heart of Darkness.

Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, and counterinsurgency have all become eerily relevant again as the US seeks to disengage from Central Asia after a ground war that has stretched over more than a decade with no resolution consistent with original aims seeming to be in sight. I’ve written about counterinsurgency, or COIN, several times recently as a result of these all-too-familiar events.

Despite the firm intentions of both US military and civilian leadership that the US not be involved in another unwinnable counterinsurgency operation in a distant part of the world, this is exactly what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that history repeated itself in this way, despite the conscious efforts of military and civilian leaders to avoid such a repetition, says much more about the international system and the imperatives of contemporary political organization than it says about the US.

I would argue that any global hegemon at the present moment in history — whether that global hegemon happened to be the US, Russia, China, Brazil, or the British Empire — would find itself more or less forced by circumstances to engage in counterinsurgency operations in widely disparate parts of the globe. Such interventions are systemic rather than opportunistic and episodic.

In the past week US and NATO efforts in Afghanistan have come under scrutiny again after the death toll of US soldiers passed 2,000 as widely-reported “insider attacks,” also called “green on blue” attacks, continue to take the lives of US soldiers.

We quantify wars in terms of deaths, injuries, damage, and dollars. It is a dissatisfying measure to all involved — to the families of dead soldiers a single digit in a statistic scarcely captures the loss, to the families of dead civilians, and those whose lives have been disrupted beyond salvaging, similar considerations hold, while for the war planner the commitment in blood and treasure to the fight does not accurately represent the ultimate effort that was made under adverse circumstances.

Nevertheless, there must be some measure, and certainly blood and treasure constitute the fundamental calculus of commitment in war, apart from that intangible commitment that the fictional Col. Kurtz attempted to communicate to his superiors. It may well be that this intangible commitment of — what? — is precisely that unmeasurable element of the equation that results in victory or defeat, but until we have a theory to account for it, and a language in which we can formulate it, we cannot say anything coherent about it.

It is admittedly difficult even to speak coherently of quantifiable measures like blood and treasure because estimates of death in war are always contested, and because they are contested the numbers employed are almost always the result of a political decision. Some will argue for higher numbers and other will argue for lower numbers. In a war like the Second World War, when entire cities were destroyed and millions were buried under the rubble, estimates on casualties may be off by millions, and at very least off by hundreds of thousands.

In long-term counterinsurgencies like the US in Vietnam, the USSR in Afghanistan, or the US in Afghanistan, estimating civilian deaths is difficult not so much for the absolute numbers involved but because in such conflict it will be inherently controversial who is and who is not a civilian, as it will be controversial as to who is blame for atrocities carried out far beyond the reach of investigating authorities, and for which each side blames the other.

Casualty counts, then, are inherently controversial, but estimates are made; each estimate represents a particular methodology, and each methodology embodies certain assumptions. Despite all the hazards involved, I am going to give some numbers comparing three different wars — World War Two, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. In all cases I have picked the high estimates, even when these estimates have been contested. Dates, and rates derived from dates, are also numbers that can be contested. So what follows is very rough, but still indicative of a trend.

The Second World War — not in any sense a counterinsurgency — lasted about six (6) years and resulted in about 25 million military deaths and 52 million civilian deaths. This occurred in a total global population of 2,300 million, so that the war consumed about 3.3 percent of world population. This isn’t much compared to a demographic event like the Black Death when it first swept across Europe in 1348-1349, but it is still a very high number for deaths from war. The military casualties of more than four (4) million per year work out to about 475 per hour for each hour of the war, while civilian casualties of more than eight (8) million per year work out to about 988 per hour for every hour of the war.

The involvement of the US in the Vietnam War, a classic counterinsurgency, lasted about ten (10) years from 1965 to 1975, with 58,220 US military deaths and as many as 2,500,000 civilian deaths spread across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This works out to 5,822 military deaths per year, or 0.055 US military deaths for every hour of the war, and 250,000 civilian deaths per year or 2.3766 civilian deaths every hour for the duration of the US involvement in Vietnam (I am here choosing not to include the ten years of French involvement from 1955-1965, although the civilian casualty numbers include at least part of this period — as I wrote above, I took high numbers, and the numbers themselves are inherently controversial).

The involvement of the US in Afghanistan, another counterinsurgency, has lasted almost eleven (11) years from 2001 to 2012 with 2,000 US military casualties. I found it rather difficult to come by estimates of civilian casualties, which varied widely, but, again, taking the high numbers, I found about 34,008 civilian casualties, or about 3,092 per year, which works out to 0.029 per hour for every hour of the war. US military deaths averaged 182 per year or 0.0017 per hour for every hour of the war.

It is interesting to note that during the Vietnam War global population increased by almost a billion persons from 3,345 million to 4,086 million, and during the Afghan War global population again grew by almost a billion, from roughly 6 billion to 7 billion. With these much higher total global population figures, and the far lower casualty totals, whether military or civilian or both, the war deaths from these protracted conflicts don’t even register as a demographic rounding error.

These “big picture” statistics of course hide a lot of details, but they are still the big picture and they tell us something. They tell us that both military and civilian casualties of war are at historic lows, which is something I wrote about in the early history of this blog in The Lethality Peak. Another way to look at the lethality peak is to understand it as societies investing far less in armed conflict than was the case even in the recent past, i.e., there is a lower level of commitment in terms of blood; a lot more statistical analysis would be required to reveal the relative expenditure of treasure.

Yet another way to interpret these numbers is that the great infringements upon human life and human society in our time do not come about from wars and from outright deaths caused by war, but from what I have called non-atrocites, that is to say, depredations upon human populations and human communities that are maintained below the threshold of atrocity.

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