Chapter
5
THE
WORLD AT LARGE
The discussion here should be of vital interest to peoples outside the advanced
economies. Much of the time my discussion
will be from the perspective of someone in an advanced economy, but in fact the
subject is much broader than that. Peoples
everywhere are in the path of the onrushing changes in the world economy that offer
such unbelievable promise at the same time they are profoundly threatening.
A realistic given should
be that it simply won't be possible for the industrialized nations to give more
than token support to the world’s burgeoning billions. The global population is too vast and deep an
ocean for that. Nor would those
billions' self-respect as individuals and in the context of their own cultures
welcome near-total support even if it were possible. (I realize that a certain mental revolution
is needed if one is to grasp the truth of this. It flies in the face of the
morally satisfying but deeply unrealistic feel-good frame of mind of so many
well-intending Americans today who believe that the world’s peoples can be more
than nominally helped by Westerners’ dabbling in a wide variety of Third World
projects. This is a mentality that has
roots that go back centuries; it includes the “Social Gospel” and its many
religious and ideological predecessors.)
The various countries of
the world will find that since "the market" will simultaneously offer
both utopia and displacement – with the latter removing the possibility of
total reliance on the market as we have known it --, political action will be
essential. The market has no way to address the issue of
distribution-in-the-absence-of-work.
Political action will be vital if the benefits of the coming technology
are to be realized by entire peoples, if vast suffering and anti-civilizational
revolutionary chaos are to be prevented, and if (for its own sake and in
support of both these purposes) there is to be assurance that everybody in a
given society will share in the means of life.
And what will this action
call for? In the advanced economies
where innovation and continuing production can be predicated on what already
exists, a "shared market economy" will be a fitting solution. But in a country like
Far from being desirable
in itself, this will pose the dangers that have loomed so large in the thinking
of all opponents of socialism: that, as Lord Acton admonished, “power tends to
corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It will be for everyone (including hopefully
socialists themselves) to ask how the central power can be restrained. The cultures of the world are so diverse that
the answers to that question will likely take many forms. History tells us that
a hopeful solution, avoiding tyranny, is often not attained.
In terms of their own
self interest (in addition to their fellow-feeling for other human beings) the
peoples of the advanced economies will have reason to be concerned about the
well-being of the other peoples of the world.
The needed concern for those peoples will be far removed from the impractical
sentimentality to which I have referred.
Hundreds of millions – in fact, billions – of displaced people will
become bitter and desperate adversaries if displacement becomes their
fundamental reality and if their societies are unable to cope with it. In an age of terrorism and of potential
nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, it will be a disaster for everybody
if hatred looms so large. Still further,
by physical migration those billions will "swamp out" the richer
nations, such as is portrayed in Jean Raspail's haunting novel The Camp of the Saints. (This is a swamping that societies centered
on a broad distribution of income, such as in a “shared market economy,” can
ill-afford and will be disinclined to allow if they value their own continued
existence. This is because resources for
distribution at any given time will be finite, although subject to expansion as
productivity grows; and the influx of “additional mouths to feed” will dilute
the distribution.)
The belief that American
society, or any free society, can only be safe if it remakes the world in the
image of a liberal democracy sounds good, but is unspeakably presumptuous culturally
and extremely dangerous. Any people that attempts such a remaking of the world
is committing itself to endless conflict. (Here again, our “intellectual
odyssey” requires rethinking something that is widely believed today. Neoconservative and liberal internationalism are
each centered on a messianic mission vis
a vis the world. It is likely that
it will take much more bitter experience before such a notion is fully
discredited.)
In contrast to the
messianism, the cultural historian Samuel Huntington came out strongly for a
“live and let live” policy. “Avoidance
of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and
cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global
politics.” He was critical of “western
universalism,” which assumes that Western ways of doing things are obviously
best for all; and points out the differences in perspective: “The non-Wests see
as Western what the West sees as universal.”
The insistence that all nations become Westernized is immoral, he
argued, because this can only be achieved through power. The issue is so important that “Western intervention
in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous
source of instability and potential global conflict….”[1]
Rather than to continue
on such a mission, what we can do is to share something the advanced societies can in fact afford to share: technology and
knowledge, and perhaps some capital. While the advanced economies can't
directly support the other peoples other than in the superficial ways evident in
the great many token efforts underway today, they will nevertheless be able to help
those peoples gain the means to support themselves.
So far as capital
assistance is concerned, there will be a limit on how much aid the advanced
economies will be able to provide (or want to, in light of their own peoples’
needs for a broad distribution). This is particularly true unless the recipient
cultures and their peoples are receptive to the proper maintenance and use of
capital. Such receptivity is seriously
lacking in much of the world, such as in sub-Saharan
The Internet has given
rise to a movement in favor of “open source information.” That should be taken seriously in light of
the need that all peoples will have for advanced scientific and technical
knowledge. The world should perhaps move
away from the patent system, which rewards innovation by granting a temporary
monopoly over new products and inventions, to an alternative system of
incentives. If it does, the incentives
will need to be ample enough to keep the dynamism alive. There is even an “open source” movement for
the free availability of literary work, music and university lectures.
It is likely that the tendency toward a worldwide mixing of cultures and
diminution of national identities will continue. The ever-growing ease of communication,
transportation and travel will push in that direction. At the same time, the
world has seen a significant counter-tendency as ethnicities have embraced
themselves and sought autonomy. The need
for political solutions (by whatever institutions are viable) points in that direction. In today's world the primary institutions are
the nation-states. Despite much hopeful
thinking to the contrary, a "world government" would necessarily be
run at much too high a level to allow genuine “democracy” and would be a
dangerous center of power, given both the civilizational differences among
cultures and the present level of civilization per se in a world where experience has shown that its evolution has
taken it only to the twilight between civilization and barbarism (a theme of my
book Understanding the Modern Predicament).
If the nation-state is to be the main center for addressing the needs of peoples under
the coming circumstances, and if affluence is achievable, a by-product will be
that it should become possible for peoples to retain their respective cultures,
cultivating the local texture of life that adds so much to the richness of
human experience (as well as so much that the outsiders to a given culture may
find repugnant), if they desire to do so.
There is no need to allow the hurricane-like winds of a global market to
dictate otherwise. The global market will no longer be “the tail that wags the
dog,” since the phenomenon of economic displacement will have forced other
things to the fore. Retaining identity will
be especially meaningful for the Islamic countries and for the West, but it
will also be important for any society – Orthodox, Sinic, Hindu, Japanese, or others
– with a culture its people value. With
both non-Western cultures and the West, their future existence is now threatened,
given the trends of the past.
Not only will national
entities be called upon to see to it that their peoples benefit from (as the
alternative to suffering calamity from) the coming age's technology, they will
also be able to create the framework for modes of life that the people may
choose, even though the relentless cost-cutting of the market would not itself
allow them. Factory farms, for example,
may turn out the foodstuffs needed, but millions may choose to live a rural
existence based on something we might call "hobbyist" farming. When scarcity is no longer the central
economic fact and there is a mechanism for assuring everyone's participation in
the output of the economy, there can be a blossoming of freely-chosen ways of
living.
No doubt there will be differences of opinion
about whether it is desirable
for any given culture to survive – and, if so, that will be a flash-point of
conflict. (This may seem strange, since
the right of any people to retain their culture may seem a given; it is,
however, something that is very much at issue in recent decades for
The erosion of European
and American identity has to a large extent come, however, from policies that
have reflected the attitudes of an intellectual subculture that has been
alienated from the main bourgeois culture for almost two centuries. That subculture, in combination with the
global elite, presently has controlling voice in the media and major
institutions, dictates what is "politically correct," and champions
minorities of every kind as against the mainstream population. It is possible, of course, that in a
radically transformed world this alienation, which lies at the heart of the
Left, will cease to exist or may moderate considerably. If that were to happen, the search for
unassimilated and disaffected allies may disappear and the whole internal
"attack upon the West" may evaporate.
It is to be remembered
that the West has been the milieu from which science, technology and the market
economy have sprung. As such, it may play
an indispensable role as the economic and technical underpinning of the world's
immense population that now exists and that is coming into being. Billions of
people have come into life only because of that underpinning, and could well
perish without it. That itself is ample
reason to care for the continuity of the West.
Science, technology and an advanced economy don't just come into being
by themselves, but have civilizational prerequisites.
The threat to the West
deserves emphasis because a major fact of our time is that a convergence of
demographic, intellectual and moral forces is leading to the radical
transformation of European and American civilization from anything like the
form we have known it.
Consider the statement
made by the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, to the heads of
government of twelve African nations in 1997 warning of “the North’s” intention
to “recolonize the South” by globalization.
He advised that “we should migrate North in the millions, legally or
illegally, if we are going to be global citizens. Masses of Asians and Africans should inundate
The West has so long
been under attack from outside, but most significantly from within its own
ranks, that it no longer feels itself able to make a meaningful intellectual or
moral defense against the demographic swamping-out.
ENDNOTES