Thoughts of the Day: Tuesday 15 December 2020

 

The following three quotes are taken from Requiem for Modern Politics by William Ophuls. 

"The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wrecked the societies in which they occur."--Alfred North Whitehead (xv)

Of course, all political paradigms contain inherent contradictions and therefore generate problems that must be solved.The job of the statesman, as opposed to the mere politician, is to preserve the paradigm by dealing effectively with these problems. However, if political wisdom and skill are lacking or if the contradictions are very deep, small problems eventually coalesce into a large problemmatique that challenges the old paradigm. At this point, more reform, however well conceived, no longer suffices and may even make matters worse, so pressure builds up for a fundamental change in regime. (26)

The challenge is to find a way of going beyond a moral individualism without losing the individual along the way. (27)

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.… None can be an impartial or wise observer of human life but from the vantage ground of what we should call voluntary poverty. " [Thoreau]

In short, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”  [Thoreau]

 

An Autobiography

R. G. Collingwood

Natural science as it exists to-day, and has existed for the best part of a century, does not include the idea of purpose among its working categories. 

Breath

James Nestor

Slower, longer exhales, of course, mean higher carbon dioxide levels. With that bonus carbon dioxide, we gain a higher aerobic endurance. This measurement of highest oxygen consumption, called VO2 max, is the best gauge of cardiorespiratory fitness. Training the body to breathe less actually increases VO2 max, which can not only boost athletic stamina but also help us live longer and healthier lives.

Sapiens

Yuval Noah Harari

If you tried to bunch together thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Street, the Vatican or the headquarters of the United Nations, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, Sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places. Together, they create orderly patterns – such as trade networks, mass celebrations and political institutions – that they could never have created in isolation. The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation.

The Revenge of Geography

Robert D. Kaplan

Europe, it appears, offered the perfect degree of environmental difficulty, challenging its inhabitants to rise to greater civilizational heights, even as it still lay in the northern temperate zone, fairly proximate to Africa, the Middle East, the Eurasian steppe, and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and other spheres.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder

In his latest work, Timothy Snyder sets a high bar for himself: he compares his project to that of Thucydides in The Peloponnesian Wars. Snyder justifies the comparison by noting that Thucydides, like him, was writing about the events of his lifetime.

Can history be so contemporary? We think of the Peloponnesian Wars as ancient history . . . . Yet their historian Thucydides was describing events that he experienced. He included discussions of the past insofar as this was necessary to clarify the stakes in the present. This work humbly follows that approach. (12)

Snyder also explains his invocation of Thucydides on two additional grounds. First, with Thucydides, "History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda." Snyder continues,  "Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders' accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions." (10). In the remainder of the book, Snyder endeavors to lift the curtain that seeks to conceal the wizards who are busy pulling levers (or in more contemporary terms, programming content) to beguile the gullible. Second, Thucydides identified "oligarchy" as "rule by the few," and that term has since found its way into contemporary English via the Russian experience of the 1990s. (I, however, prefer the more old-fashioned American term, "plutocrats," but I concede the point.)

So does Snyder justify his audacious comparison in this book? Yes. I don't know that it will go down into history with the same staying power of Thucydides' classic work, but it certainly meets a similar need in our time.

Snyder provides a crucial scheme to give shape to his tale. He distinguishes three varieties of politics: the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity, and their mutual alternative, which he doesn't label until the end of the book, but that I'll label the politics of action. (He doesn't explicitly reference the political thought of Hannah Arendt (although he does quote her), but I perceive that his political thinking is very much influenced by Arendt, so I propose the label the "politics of action" in her honor. N.B. In the next to last paragraph of the book he uses the term "the politics of responsibility," I believe the two terms interchangeable from this perspective.)

What Snyder labels as "the politics of inevitability" arises from the idea that "the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done." (7). He notes that Soviet Communism held these traits before it morphed into the politics of eternity, but he's most concerned that this type of politics marked American and European thinking at the end of the Cold War, at "the end of history." (Snyder, unlike many other writers on this topic, does not stop to slam Francis Fukuyama at this point, which I find refreshing, given that I believe Fukuyama has been at least in some measure unfairly maligned on this topic. Blog post.)

But when the inevitable doesn't arrive as promised, the politics of inevitability will collapse and "like a ghost from a corpse" (15) the politics of eternity will arise. In contrast to the good times promised by the politics of inevitability, the politics of eternity "places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past. . . . Progress gives way to doom." (8). Yet despite their competing accounts of the schema of events, these two modes of politics share specific defining characteristics.

Inevitability and eternity translated facts into narratives. Those ways by inevitability see every fact as a blip that does not alter the overall story of progress; those who shift to eternity classify every new event as just one more instance of a timeless threat. Each masquerades as history; each does away with history. Inevitability politicians teach that the specifics of the past are irrelevant, since anything that happens is just grist for the mill of progress. Eternity politicians leap from one moment to another, over decades or centuries, to build a myth of innocence and danger. . They imagine cycles of threat in the past, creating an imagined pattern that they realize in the present by producing artificial crises and daily drama. (8-9). 

Each of these two visions has its own style of propaganda and creating a "political fiction" (9). It is at this point (and undoubtedly others) that the politics of action pushes back. As Snyder notes:

[W]hatever impression propaganda makes at the time, it is not history's final verdict. There is a difference between memory, the impressions we are given; and history, the connections that we work to make--if we wish. (9)

One final point about the distinction between Snyder's two models of misleading politics. Each, he claims, has "no ideas." This true in some sense, but it misses the point that these competing visions are both marked by one big idea (inevitability or eternity) that spin off the rest of (what passes for) for thought in these two regimes. Snyder spends most of a chapter on Ivan Ilyin, an early 20th-century fascist Russian "thinker" whom Putin and his court adopted to provide a model for the politics of eternity (and whose remains were brought back to Russia for re-internment more than 60 years after his death, with great ceremony). It seems that the politics of eternity does have "ideas," but that it does not entertain any novel ideas that are grounded in historical reality. (Again, we're reminded of Arendt, who emphasized plurality and "beginning" in her work.).

Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man's freedom.

--Hannah Arendt (1951) (p.111) 

Snyder chronicles the descent of the Soviet Union into the politics of eternity, the chaos after the fall of Communist rule, the early Putin years, and then Putin's gradual adoption of the politics of eternity. I found Putin's metamorphosis most interesting: in his first years of rule, he didn't promote the politics of eternity nor excessive hostility toward the West. Snyder suggests (and I have no reason to disagree) that Putin's takedown of the oligarchs as a political threat and resulted in access to their wealth that he took advantage of and that converted his regime into a full-blown kleptocracy (rule by thieves, in essence). In such a scheme, Putin and Russia could not compete with the West, and therefore, drawing upon a long-standing Russian inferiority complex (my term, not Snyder's), he turned to the politics of eternity. Putin and the politics of eternity practice what Snyder labels as "strategic relativism;" in short, if you can't reach up to your rival's level, then pull them down to yours. And this became Putin's operating principle viz. Europe and the U.S.

Snyder also untangles the confusion about the invasion of Ukraine by Russia and all the surrounding issues. As a seasoned historian of Eastern Europe (and knowledgeable in several of those languages), he watched events unfold in real time. He provides a coherent account of events as well as explaining how those events fit his rubric of the politics of eternity. Snyder realizes how vital the project of getting the facts straight is. As he notes, "To end factuality is to begin eternity" (160) and "The ink of political fiction is blood."  For just a moment, ponder the meaning of that quote in light of the character--or lack thereof--of the current American president.

The final section of the book deals with America. As Putin moved Russia moved more deeply into the politics of eternity, his government began to take what they term "active measures" to weaken and confound the United States. There best weapon? "Donald Trump, successful businessman," a fiction that Snyder describes as "the payload of a cyberweapon." I will not repeat the details here, but suffice it to say that if I'd read this a few years ago, I would have thought someone was trying to update "The Manchurian Candidate" (again, but don't bother with that one). So now when I read the paper, even earlier today, I'm not surprised. Snyder is as honest, forthright, and meticulous as the House Intelligence [sic] Committee was duplicitous in its claim that the Russians didn't favor Trump. (Thank you, Senator Burr, for some refreshing honesty and candor.) Of course, we Americans must take responsibility for the policies and developments that allowed so many Americans to be exploited by this Russian adversary (not the nation, the regime). We set ourselves up; they played us.

As Snyder's prologue was a call to question and understand, his epilogue is a call to action, the politics of action (or "responsibility," as he describes it below).

To experience its destruction is to see a world for the first time. Inheritors of an order we did not build, we are now witnesses to a decline we did not foresee.  

To see our moment is to step away from the stories supplied for our stupefaction, myths of inevitability and eternity, progress and doom. Life is elsewhere. Inevitability and eternity are not history but ideas within history, ways of experiencing our time that accelerates its trends while slowing our thoughts. To see, we must set aside the dark glass, and see as we are seen, ideas for what they are, history as what we make. 

. . . .

If we see history as it is, we see our places in it, what we might change, and how we might do better. We halt our thoughtless journey from inevitability to eternity; ad exit the road to unfreedom. We being a politics of responsibility.  

To take part in its creation is to see a world for a second time. Students of the virtues that history reveals, we become the makers of a renewal that no one can foresee. 

This is a brilliant history, meditation, and call to action. I heartily recommend it.  

Flash Points: The Emerging Crisis in Europe by George Friedman

Published in 2015

George Friedman's Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe (2015) provides a brief but cogent history of Europe from (at least what used to be called) The Age of Exploration up to the present. Friedman presents the history as a background for an assessment of current affairs in Europe. This is not just an homage to the idea of history, but instead it provides the necessary foundations to understand contemporary Europe.

The Portuguese, followed by the Spanish, initiated the exploration of the world of the Atlantic Ocean on around to the Indian Ocean and into the Pacific as a result of the monopoly on spice trade held by Venice and the Ottoman Empire. The existence of the Ottoman Empire as a major Muslim civilization pressing (once again) on Europe bears no small resemblance to the problems that Europe faces today. Today, the Muslim world of North Africa and the Levant are not unified as they once were under the Ottomans; instead, they're very disunited. But the resulting social and economic dysfunction are pressing Muslin migrants toward a relatively under-populated but relatively affluent Europe. The conflicts between Christian Europe and neighboring Islam began shortly after the establishment of the Muslim tradition in the 700s, and these conflicts continue today.

In addition to identifying the ongoing Christian-Muslim conflict along the borders of Europe, Friedman notes the development in early modern Europe of commercial adventures, scientific and military knowledge, capitalism, nationalism, and (later) industrialism, that allowed Europe to dominate the modern world. At its apex in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the British Empire included areas around the globe, followed by the French and other European ventures. What Europeans didn't control directly, they greatly influenced. But as Friedman notes, all of this was thrown out the window beginning in 1914 with the horrible destruction of the First World War. The immense destruction of this war was followed by an interregnum of 20 years of relative peace only to break out again in the conflagration of the Second World War that ended in 1945. By 1945, Europe was exhausted. Into that scene stepped the U.S. and the Soviet Union to impose peace and bilateral division of the continent. By the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites, Europe had arrived at the point where believed it could establish a perpetual peace through the integration of nations that eventually became the European Union.

Friedman provides a much more in-depth history than I have summarized here, but it is a speedy one that only obliquely references some deeper issues. Friedman reveals that he was originally a student of political philosophy, specifically of New Left movements in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and in particular, the political philosophy of the Frankfurt School. I sense that Friedman knows a good deal about the intellectual history of Europe, which he only hints at, and which he ignores in his emphasis on geopolitical relations.

After this brief history lesson, Friedman focuses on the problems of contemporary Europe. These are not new problems. He identifies them as often long-standing problems that arise from the fact that Europe is an amalgamation of borderlands that create flashpoints of conflict. Those borders include those between Christians and Muslims; between Romans (and their Romance language-speaking successors) and Germans; between peninsular Europeans and mainland (Russian) Europeans, and so on. Each part of Europe exhibits its own problems of borders. Friedman makes a point of including the Balkans and the Caucasus mountain region as a part of Europe, although the major European nations often want to ignore them. Of course, the Balkans were the tinder that set off the explosion of the First World War, so contemporary Europeans ignore this area at their own peril.

Friedman's analysis focuses on the geopolitical and economic needs of each of these regions of Europe. His analysis is knowledgeable and cogent. His ability to take the long view of these complex makes it especially worthwhile

My only serious criticism of Friedman's analysis is his disinterest in political systems and ideologies. I also have this criticism of the work of Robert Kaplan, who worked with Friedman at STRATFOR, an international political analysis and forecasting venture. Certainly, national leaders, and those who need to understand their decision-making, ignore geopolitical realities at their peril. For instance, U.S. decision-makers often ignored geopolitical motivations when trying to assess the intentions of the Soviet leaders in the period immediately after WWII.  There should be a balance. George Kennan was correct in his contention that certain geopolitical and historical realities that influenced Soviet behavior were carried forward from the Russian Empire. However, neither can ideology and political systems be ignored. To this end, Philip Bobbitt's work, The Shield of Achilles, provides an exemplary counterbalance. Bobbitt recognizes that changes in strategic dynamics entail changes in constitutional regimes. Friedman (and Kaplan) gloss over this important factor in nation-state decision-making, and thereby limit the effectiveness of their analysis. Indeed, with the rise of extreme ideologies in Europe (and in the U.S.), we are experiencing competing ideologies and political systems at play in the foreground. Political systems and ideologies never don’t negate geopolitical realities, but they do add a complexity into the mix that Friedman ignores. This surprises me because of Friedman's background in political philosophy. It's not the regimes necessarily adopt a political philosophy outright—even Marxist regimes never fully went down that path—but they do have an influence that is overlooked in this work.

My criticisms notwithstanding, I came away from this book with a much deeper understanding of European conflicts and attitudes that have been around for a long time and that are likely to create tensions and problems in Europe in the immediate future. Indeed, with the possibility of Britain exiting the EU, with right-wing regimes arising in Hungary and Poland, with renewed Russian aggressiveness, and with a growing tide of Muslim immigration, Europe is likely to be in for a tumultuous period. Friedman is a knowledgeable guide for helping anyone interested in attempting to comprehend this puzzle called Europe.