On a scale of one to ten for meaningful questions, this one goes to eleven. What will replace the current order? And by order, I mean the relationship of man to institutions. A citizen to his government, and a people to another. The one thing we know for sure is that the familiar system will no longer exist. There are plenty of wreckers and ruiners insisting on change because they detest the current system of systems, and at any rate, things have a way of changing even when they are supposed to stay the same.
The current international order is less than one-hundred years old. It will be instructive to see if the centenaries of WWI events bring about meaningful introspection amid all the retrospectives. We are the same people that the ancient Greeks were, and the Babylonians before them, so it is no stretch to claim that we confront the exact demons as our forebears did a mere hundred years ago. And they burned the world to the ground.
The current generation of Afghan and Iraq war returnees are experiencing just a taste of what the famed Lost Generation lived, and this group has had it much better off in most ways than veterans of the “forgotten war” in Korea or the “bad war” in Vietnam. Yet the menacing incompletion, indeed sabotage, of our wartime goals in the Middle East are producing a situation unseen in the last hundred years. After the Great War came the sins and mistakes of Versailles, isolation, and appeasement, which paid off in a vengeful, resurgent Germany and a breakout Japan. After the Good War, much was stabilized, although at a terrible price through the Cold War and several smaller engagements, including the Forgotten War, which technically has not ended. These were all clearly nation-state actions, until the Bad War, in which we continued our conventional-war nation-state strategy and tactics while the enemy flowed through us like water through bedrock, unseen, everywhere, unstoppable.
There were good reasons as well as bad for stopping the war in Vietnam short of our goals — not the least of which was unclear goals. But they manner in which it was done left a stain upon the nation and most inappropriately was seen as a mark against the veterans who fought it — which was convenient for the half-educated civilian populace and the scoundrels in government, but which constituted a deeper stain than even the betrayal of our allies. It is one thing to betray a friend — quite another to forsake a brother who has done as you asked.
As our wars had progressed from great to good to forgotten to bad, the nation found itself in a “deep funk”, seemingly unable to win and certainly unwilling to try. The cheery optimism and can-do good-guy-ism of the Reagan administration could barely get a few friendly irregulars funded here and there, and once in a while rescue a tropical island full of coeds. But things had at least been stabilized for better and for worse through the Iranian hostage crisis and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut. Reykjavik was made possible in part by the Mujahideen.
All these irregulars and transnational conflicts, the increasing necessity for, and political difficulty of dealing with MOOTW (military operations other than war, pronounced “mootwah”) should have served as harbingers of something far larger on the horizon. Samuel Huntington wrote of the clash of civilizations, and while it has been trendy for so long that it is perhaps now out of vogue to criticize his unfulfilled predictions, his analysis is sound and not flashy, despite the sweeping title. The old order of arranged wars between nation-states will give way to a new order of emergent wars between peoples. The “western way of war” is between sides, you may answer the question “which side are you on?” in any manner you choose — it is a choice. The older way of war is between identities, and the question “what are you?” is rarely asked and seldom changed. You can be a citizen of two nations, and you may change this almost at will. You can belong to only one civilization, and you cannot meaningfully change this. Wars between nations may be negotiated and resolved as agreed. Germany or Japan could very well rise to lead another terrible war, someday. Nothing prevents it but constant work to avoid it. The clashes between civilizations are themselves more permanent, end only with permanent solutions, and usually require several rounds of total war to resolve once and for all. Neither Carthage nor Cahokia will ever matter again.
Huntington argues that all of the wars with which we are familiar, save a few, are civil wars within western civilization, and even the outliers, such as Korea and Vietnam, are exports of western wars onto Asian peoples. Fair enough — the Marxism and other totalitarian influences upon even the most formidable of Asian adversaries were picked up in the universities of Paris. Huntington borrows Toynbee’s collection of six extant civilizations, and while I haven;t read Toynbee, I quibble with lumping all of western civ into one bucket if Japan is to stand so firmly apart from “confucian” as to warrant its own slot. I would argue that the distinctions between Anglo and Latin western civ are as formidable as any, but fine.
I am throwing a stub finish on here, just to close out the article. I will continue in this vein shortly.
The century to come will not resemble the one which has just passed. Those who frequently find the current situation unsettling, and look for ways to return to some kind of normal, are going to be disappointed. What is gone will not come back. The future is coming and while we struggle over its shape, it is important to recognize that it will not resemble the past. Conservatism must analyze its own principles and separate nostalgia and inertia from a spirited defense of that which we must defend. My style of conservatism is about acknowledging our immense good fortune at the inheritance from those braver and better than ourselves, and the struggle to identify and defend the pillars of that culture. For this reason, much of my style of conservatism focuses on identifying threats to western civilization and refusing to accept that all change is inevitable. Change will come, but we are not without influence about what that change will be, and more pointedly, what it will not be. It is entirely right and good to assert the superiority of western civilization, and to defend it. The next hundred years will require much in the way of defense.
You’re playing my spiritual/cultural/social theme, beloved admin,! Will think on this – and sleep on it – a bit more; but I can say that, for me, retreat to some sort of enclave a la Rod Dreher is a self-indulgent cop-out unless I’m within inches of breathing my last…I couldn’t have said that until very recently. (I guess the Engel Hundchen is finding her bark, bite, and – maybe – her claws.)
Thanks for all the new content, too!
I am still not sure just what I want to say in response to this. But I’m thinking. And waiting. To hear what you have further to say.
As you contemplate what you wish to say next, consider one important fact.
Western Civ is an interesting collection of ideas, mostly ordered to capitalism, but with the countercurrent of Marxism. But America!
America is a different story. It is different than anything else in the world. No where has a nation been formed on the basis that America was. No where was the ideology of liberty so ingrained in the nation that it took pretty much a century of steady and persistent assault by the “educated class” to trash it.
We are not what we once were. We may never BE what we once were. There may never arise another nation like we were. But weren’t we magnificant! Free men going about their business without the interference of the “experts”, every man allowed to make up his own mind about things. This is, of course, hated by the “smart people”. They can’t stand not telling everyone how they should act/live. Still, until the hammer blows of the progressives, beginning in the late 19th century and stretching into the 1940’s, the nation actually believed in individual freedom! They could not envision being told what to do by a government.
Europe has always been a land of lords and serfs. True philosophers of the 17th century developed incredible constructs that led to our formulation, but in Europe their effect was only mild-to-moderate. At no time (except perhaps in Switzerland) did the concept of unfettered freedom take root. Serfs had fewer constraints, lords had more constraints, but the relationship of lords to serfs never changed. Only in America did that whole sense disappear.
Excluding the other areas of the world, it is obvious that we are on our way back to lords and serfs. Perhaps less than Europe, but never-the-less that is where we are going. I am not sure there can be any meaningful revision, short of shooting. And one wonders how long the memory of our past glory of liberty will remain outside of some dusty collection of history no one is interested in.
But it was glorious while it lasted.
LIKE!
In further consideration, I am not sure just how to take your comment about us being the same people as the Greeks and Babylonians. Perhaps you are alluding to the fact we are fast becoming the same people.
But it hardly stands scrutiny that we were the same people. Once again, I must insist on viewing our founding as unique. Perhaps such a unique collection of people cannot again be found. Internationalism has converted many of the young – and all the elite – to something America never really strove to be. Yes, Teddy and his ilk thought being more like Europe was a good thing, but even Teddy felt we ought to be leading the Europeans because of our unique status.
So in many ways your question is interesting only in so far as it begs to contemplate what we will become. Because I fear we clearly will NOT be going back towards anything we once were.
The truth is that while the pols all speak of liberty and freedom and democracy (a mortal wound to any functioning republic), none of them has a real interest in relinquishing their power to return to a time when they didn’t matter so much. Or at all.
Well, perhaps not “at all”. There was always some involvement of America with the world. There was always an effect America exerted on even “Western Civ”. Still, the boggies in Europe, melted in their superiority, didn’t really recognize, or perhaps didn’t WANT, what we had.
And what we had overwhelmed the world. We walked right past ALL the other nations, regardless of what lead they may have either had or thought they had. Freedom and Liberty will do that.
It will unleash the inner being of every man. It will allow people to “be all that they could be” as the slogan goes.
Yet today no one sings that song. No one raises that banner. ?Why would that be.
Because competition is hard. It takes real work to compete against others. It results in smaller returns because the price is always driven down. It results in efficiency, because efficiency produces the least costly product.
Lord, let’s not have that! It’s so much easier to buy a government official and regulate your competition out of the market.