Armageddon

Clash of Civilizations at the End of History

Since the Cold War, two powerful and apparently contradictory theories appeared on the scene of international relations – Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. I say apparently, because later I will show that no such contradiction exists.

The End of History thesis weaves in three themes to come to its conclusion that liberal democracy and free markets will reign supreme at the end of history – the empirical, secular trends towards such a state of affairs in the last two centuries; the “Mechanism” of natural science, which emphasizes the primacy of rationalism and leads to socially optimal arrangements; and liberal democracy as the system best geared towards managing the conflicting thymias of masters and slaves.

It is usually misinterpreted by its detractors to mean that either a) Fukuyama envisaged one happy peaceful world reveling in the joys of capitalism and democracy forever in contradiction to warlike human nature or that b) he was ideologically forcing an imperialistic Western, no Anglo-Saxon, no American, version of liberal democracy on a varied world of different civilizations that would rather pursue their own path of modernization.

These are both wrong. In the former case, he explicitly allowed for temporary reversals (wars, authoritarians, etc); what he was getting at was that liberal democracy is self-sustaining and is accepted as an ideal by all modern societies with the exception of socialist relics like North Korea and a few backwards Islamists. As such, in his view the global victory of liberal democracy is assured in the long term.

As for the latter charge, it will suffice to just quote him:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

As readers will know, I am a fan of the dialectical method (e.g. see Da Russophile’s motto, Green Communism) and I think Fukuyama applied it skilfully to his conception of “universal history”. My major quibble is with the endpoint – that liberal democracy and free markets are the end of history and that the besuited businessman and his office slaves are the last masters and the last slaves, the last men.

This is because the ultimate liberal democratic society invents the concept of moral relativism, which is its own doom, its own contradiction.

There exist people called megalothymiacs, whose “desire for recognition” far surpasses those of the common slaves. These are the masters, the fascists, the wolves, the supermen – they are who they are, forces of nature, and they certainly don’t see the need to apologize or justify themselves. They create their own reality. If the social constraints society place on them dissipate enough under the onslaught of moral relativism, then this will lead to new, Nietzschean “immense wars of the spirit”. In fact, quoting from the chapter of the same name:

In Germany, above all, the war was seen by many as a revolt against the materialism of the commercial world created by France and that archetype of bourgeois societies, Britain…But in reading German justifications for the war, one is struck by a consistent emphasis on the need for a kind of objectless struggle, a struggle that would have purifying moral effects quite independently of whether Germany gained colonies or won freedom of the seas…

Modern thought raises no barriers to a future nihilistic war against liberal democracy on the part of those brought up in its bosom. Relativism – the doctrine that maintains all values are merely relative and which attacks all “priveleged perspectives” – must ultimately end up undermining democratic and tolerant values as well. Relativism is not a weapon that can be fired selectively at the enemies one chooses. It fires indiscriminately, shooting out the legs of not only the “absolutisms”, dogmas and certainties of the Western tradition, but that traditions emphasis on tolerance, diversity and freedom of thought as well.

(The more hardline and resolute applications of postmodernism could be characterized as creating the future to recreate the past, in PoMo-speak. Nazism was a clear example, coming from the grey disillusionment and sleazy decadence of Weimar, appreciative of modern technology and nostalgic for an imagined past of blood, soil and struggle; Islamism is a successor).

Not surprisingly, Fukuyuma dwells little on this – perhaps realizing the Pandora’s Box he risks unleashing – and soon after continues affirming, less convincingly now, that liberal democracy will never be vanquished by internal contradictions.

Can history resume?

Not any time soon, because the texts the matrix that imprisons us is so vast and so transparent that we do not even realize we are slaves. As Jean Baudrillard writes in On Nihilism (which I recommend reading in full – it makes sense after a few rereads):

Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death. Today’s nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it. When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so – the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal. But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.

The nihilism of transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from the last nuances of an apocalypse. There is no longer an apocalypse (only aleatory terrorism still tries to reflect it, but it is certainly no longer political, and it only has one mode of manifestation left that is at the same time a mode of disappearance: the media – now the media are not a stage where something is played, they are a strip, a track, a perforated map of which we are no longer even spectators: receivers). The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don’t think so – all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.

Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished. Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic.

Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking. This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight.

This, only terrorism can do…

The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us. But such a sentiment is Utopian. Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality – as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization. The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.

In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence. (The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.) Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one. And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

This is where seduction begins.

That is the power of the system – far from being damaged by the terrorists and aspiring Caesars of the world, the System assimilates all opposing things into itself, and paradoxically reinforces itself by doing so. As Nietzsche divined, things become truly great when they are totally impervious to the attacks of their enemies.

The Clash of Civilizations maintains that the twenty-first century will be characterized by civilizational struggles between different religious-historical traditions like the West, Sinic civilization, Orthodoxy, Islam and the Hindu sphere. The main issues will be controlling so-called “fault line conflicts” (e.g. Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia) and not interfering in inter-civilizational wars (e.g. China and Taiwan), so that they do not overspill into major global wars involving “core states” (Russia and NATO; China and the US). Countries with “torn” identities like Russia (Orthodoxy, the West) and Islam (Turkey, the West) are going to be especially unpredictable and interesting to observe.

Many commentators believe that a Clash of Civilizations and the End of History are incompatible. Either civilizations will become liberal democracies and live in friendship as dictated by democratic peace theory, or they’ll experience varying degrees of tensions and even war. Right?

Not really, because that assumes that historical progress towards the end of history will confirm rather than undermine the rationalism that is the basis of that progress. As I argued in What Might Be Is, the universe itself is a simulacrum and as such profoundly nihilistic and sublime. From psychology, people need to believe. Supposedly secular Europe is actually pagan. In the Anglo-Saxon world and the Muslim ummah, declining belief in traditional objects of worship leads not to enlightenment – today, it is the youngest Britons who are the most vehement about denying the theories of Darwin – but to more virulent world views like those of evangelical Christianity and radical Islamism. The steady collapse of socialism in Russia led to a mostly superficial revival of Orthodoxy, extremist political movements and above all the vodka bottle.

Similarly drawing the peoples of the world into a global electronic web does not necessarily lead to rationalism. Critical thinking and analytical skills slowly degrade under the pernicious influence of Wikipedia. Although the Web opens up more sources of information, people do not necessarily take advantage of it – most active “netizens” join communities that are already of one mind and limit their reading and contacts to those who share their world views, world views that are justified and correct under the tenets of relativism, no matter how wrongheaded and evil from less advanced perspectives.

Finally, if anything it exacerbates civilizational differences. Susan Richards describes a study of Russian attitudes towards the West:

The findings are stark. When Russian attitudes to democracy and the market place are compared with those of other countries, Russians come out as among the least enthusiastic  in the world, a good deal less keen even than the people of Belarus.

The obvious response to these findings is that attitudes will change over time, as people get richer.  But this study appears not to bear out these hopes. For where you might have expected young Russians to like the West more than their parents, in fact, the opposite is true. The youngest respondents (20-year-olds) showed the same degree of dislike of the US as their grandparents, while the 35-45 year olds were less hostile to the US…

These attitudes contrast markedly to the findings of the first studies of the beliefs of Russians after the fall of communism. Surveys in the early 1990s reflected a people excited by the idea of the market economy. Disillusionment with the market set in sharply after a painful decade of economic chaos and reform. In the early 2000s, when Putin’s government pulled back from the process of democratisation, including reining in the press, Russia’s people  were right behind him. When the government reversed its liberal economic policy in the mid-2000’s, the population backed him.

Many commentators like SWP and the writer herself attribute this to “(a) fallacious post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning (incomes plummeted during the brief period of “democracy” and rose during the restoration of a “power vertical” but there was no real causal connection), and (b) relentless propaganda (note that the attitudes of senior citizens formed in the Soviet days match those of 20 year olds who grew up during the period when Putin began to dominate the information space, especially television)”, as well as deeper historical reasons.

My take is that there is a much simpler explanation that they conveniently overlook. Quoting Nicolai Petro in Russia’s New Cyberwarriors,

…unlike their elders who were uncomfortable dealing with the outside world, today’s young Russians are not about to let insulting stereotypes about their lives and their values pass totally unchallenged. To earn their respect, one has to give it.

Until recently, Russians rarely ever saw what was said about them in the Western media. When they did, language barriers and scarcity of internet access meant they had no way to respond in a timely manner, and to set the record straight.

But now that a quarter of the population has regular internet access, they can read what is being written about their country in real time on Russian translation sites, and they are finding out, as Daniel Thorniley, Senior Vice President of the Economist Group recently put it, that it is “95 percent rubbish” (true, he was talking about business–an area where the coverage is still relatively favorable).

For the first time in history, the global reach of the internet is allowing large numbers of Russians (and others within the former Soviet Union) to talk to the West directly, rather than only through the filter provided by visiting journalists and pundits. This means the free pass given by Russians to those who write about them, something that most of us here have long taken for granted, is rapidly coming to an end. We already see the first signs of the new era in the blistering comments from outraged Russian readers that now appear regularly on the web sites of major British newspapers…

This is the reason that young university-educated Muscovites are according to polls the most disillusioned of all social groups with the West – they have concrete experience of it. They know that most Westerners view them as Mongols with ICBMs and that unilateral concessions will only get them raped in the ass by an old rusty iron dildo. The middle-aged carry a different set of perspectives, a rose-tinted nostalgia carried over from the days of the Cold War when the West was still perceived to stand for nebulous concepts like honesty, happiness and freedom. (To each generation their own kitsch…)

Back then they dismissed Soviet propaganda about the evils of mindless idolization of the West (преклонение перед западом) as drivel; their children increasingly view it as gospel. However, this is not a wholesome rejection of the West but rather of its hypocrisy and universal pretensions (the two are a tautology, and inevitable because Western civilization is the only one that can make a convincing claim to be universal). Those same university-educated young Muscovites are also the most “modern” people in Russia, most familiar with English, computers and free markets, those who have been remade in the West’s image to the greatest extent.

Nor is it an accident that many radical Islamists enjoyed a highly comfortable lifestyle in Western trappings before choosing to embark on their objectless struggle, using the tool of the future (modern weapons, aircraft, etc) to recreate their imagined past, a kitschy past, a wholesome, bucolic, familial past with no shit. This starts with the propaganda of the deed, terrorism, which Baudrillard identifies as the least ineffective way to challenge the system today. And not just any terrorism, but terrorism against the bastion of modern, rational  (universal, hypocritical, etc) civilization, the United States. The barbarians are at the gates, but they yield not, for now – the frustration clearly shows in bin Laden’s Letter to America.

Perhaps an ideal of this global ressentiment against the West is represented by Gustav Graves from the Bond movie Die Another Day (like all ideals, a fiction, of course), a North Korean who studied at Harvard and was meant to be a bridge between the Faustian civilization of the West and the Sinic-Faustian-Juche civilization of North Korea. Instead this suave, post-historical nihilist took to laundering diamonds and using the proceeds to acquire the (Western) technology that would enable North Korea to reunite the motherland, thus recreating an idealized past with ultramodern tools – satellite based laser weaponry in the hands of the homogeneous socialist state. The most poignant and symbolic moment came when he shot his father as a traitor to the Korean nation who quailed at making the resolute, revolutionary steps needed to defeat the West in a showdown and gain recognition for the Korean people. From the father’s perspective, his son was already dead, having been irrevocably corrupted by the West and its striving for the universal and the infinite and the sublime which leads to suicide, the death of old forms and the resurrection of virulent new ones. (PS. I also loved that film’s theme tune by Madonna).

Modern Muscovites, Islamist radicals and Gustav Graves differ from each other profoundly, but they are all the same.

Huntington is not the first civilizational theorist, having a long line of descendants – the likes of Arnold Toynbee, Fernand Braudel, Konstantin Leontiev and the granddaddy of them all, Ibn Khaldun, come to mind. But my favorite is Oswald Spengler, and in particular his Decline of the West (admittedly, also the only one I’ve read).

His is a heavy, semi-mystical but eminently readable style, with sweeping generalizations and grand prophecies. On Russia, he believes that it is a budding civilization that has continuously been repressed in its development, first by Magian (Greek/Arab) Orthodoxy and later by the Western Faustian (Petrine model) civilizations. He notes that the spirit of the Russian soul is communal and vast like a great plane, and that this would translate to a new civilization based on brotherly love – which would presumably be the Soviet Union. Tolstoy was its past and Dostoevsky would be its future. And indeed some writers like Kara-Murza consider it to have been a new, Eurasian civilization, a Soviet civilization, albeit retaining its Faustian (i.e. Marxist) baggage. That said, this idyll only existed in the realm of kitsch and this became increasingly obvious in the 1970’s and 1980’s, if it ever truly was believed in the first place.

Civilizations all have elements of the Appolonian (the rational) and the Dionysian (the sentimental and mystical) to them. China, the West, and particularly the US lean towards the former; the Arabs, Hindus and Russians (and the Germans of yore) lean more towards the latter. Yet both sentiment and rationalism rest, in the final analysis, on Belief.

I believe Russian civilization, however, is unique in being also defined by a third vector, Chaos, that is, a systematic degree of paradox, virtuality and simulation that unlike in the West is clearly visible. The Western matrix is transparent; the Russian one is translucent. It is the least hypocritical of civilizations, for all hypocrisy is so transparently obvious that it is self-refuting. It is elusive and infinite, but a synthetic whole; undefinable and unpartionable. With Eurasia as the focal point, it is in an eternal spiritual struggle against the forces of the sea and commerce and Faustian civilization.

By assimilating its discontents under the cloak of universalism, Western civilization imbibes the poison of the nihilist fifth-columnists (a younger, cruder, more barbaric and less decadent civilization would bind or exterminate them). As long as the material basis of its power remains intact, it will survive and prosper.

Trends are going in other directions, however. Critically, the hydrocarbon energy sources that sustain modern civilization are either going into permanent decline or have spiraling extraction costs as deposits get smaller and more remote. This threatens a collapse of industrial civilization and the rise of authoritarians and warlords. Quoting Spengler (1918),

…..The last century was the winter of the West, the victory of materialism and scepticism, of socialism, parliamentarianism, and money. But in this century blood and instinct will regain their rights against the power of money and intellect. The era of individualism, liberalism and democracy, of humanitarianism and freedom, is nearing its end. The masses will accept with resignation the victory of the Caesars, the strong men, and will obey them…..

….Life will descend to a level of general uniformity, a new kind of primitivism, and the world will be better for it…..

History goes in loops and there is plenty of evidence of life returning to primitivism. Much like their prehistoric ancestors, many modern Europeans, Americans and Russians have unconventional family structures and subscribe to pagan beliefs (although most French, Germans, Russians, etc, are far from religious, the level of belief in things like evil eyes or mystical signs is very high). The belief in money and finance is already collapsing, and belief in liberalism and democracy will probably soon follow. Examples of incipient Caesars include Putin, Chavez and perhaps Obama; although no doubt they will in the future be replaced by much stronger-fisted Leaders.

Meanwhile, computing technology gets ever more advanced and virtuality will increasingly intrude on the real. Thus reality begins to collapse, to deconstruct itself; new realities will be built on the ruins of the real with ever greater ease and abandon.

At the end of history, there will be a clash of civilizations; each of whose essence will be defined by the noosphere’s collective unconscious, for by then the fusion of technology and postmodernism will have enabled all to create their own reality. The megalothymiacs will rise out of their millennial slumber and sow chaos across the world; men will once again know what is good and what is evil. The unwitting slaves of Belief and the nihilist masters of Chaos will wage one final apocalyptic War of the Spirit, Armageddon, which is a synthesis of struggle and suicide, and one of the forms of Sublime Oblivion.

Related posts:

1. Zizek’s Metapolitics
2. The Struggle between Europe and Mankind
3. Russia’s Sisyphean Loop
4. Diasporas and Barbarians
5. Communism is our Road to Redemption