Our World-Historical Gamble
By Lee Harris
techcentralstation.com
1: THE PROBLEM
Of the many words written for and against the coming war with Iraq, none has been more perceptive than Paul Johnson's observation in his essay "Leviathan to the Rescue" that such a war "has no precedent in history" and that "in terms of presidential power and national sovereignty, Mr. Bush is walking into unknown territory. By comparison, the Gulf War of the 1990's was a straightforward, conventional case of unprovoked aggression, like Germany's invasion of Belgium in 1914 and Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor."
The implications of this remark - like the implications of the war with Iraq - are profound. The war with Iraq will constitute one of those momentous turning points of history in which one nation under the guidance of a strong-willed, self-confident leader undertakes to alter the fundamental state of the world. It is, to use the language of Hegel, an event that is world-historical in its significance and scope. And it will be world-historical, no matter what the outcome may be.
Such world-historical events, according to Hegel, are inherently sui generis - they break the mold and shatter tradition.
"The war with Iraq will constitute one of those momentous turning points of history."
But this is precisely the problem with trying to grasp such events - they are utterly without precedent, and this means that it is impossible to evaluate them prior to their actual accomplishment in historical actuality. Or, more precisely, it is impossible to evaluate them adequately, because the proper concepts for even describing the new situation have yet to be constructed. Such world-historical innovations transcend the conceptual categories of the old world, call into existence an entirely novel set of categories.
To see the truth of this remark, one need only reflect back to any previous world-historical transformation. How could one hope to explain nineteenth century nationalism to Voltaire? Or the French Revolution to St. Thomas Aquinas? You could try explaining by analogy, but any analogy would be apt to mislead as much, if not more, than to illuminate. But this is no less true in dealing with the world-historical changes that have not yet given birth to the new order of possibilities.
It is this fact that explains why all world-historical undertakings are inherently and irreducibly fraught with risk and uncertainty. Each one of them, by its very nature, is a crossing of the Rubicon, from which there is no turning back, but only a going forward - and a going forward into the unknown.
But it would be a terrible mistake to conclude that such gambles are reckless ventures. In fact, the whole point of a world-historical gamble is that it offers the only possible escape from the kind of historical impasse or deadlock in which the human race presently finds itself. It emerges out of a situation where mankind cannot simply stay put, where the counsels of caution and conservatism are no longer of any value, and where to do nothing at all is in fact to take an even greater risk than that contemplated by the world-historical gamble.
It is because this historical deadlock must be broken that the unavoidable conflict arises between the old order caught up in its impasse and the new order erupting through it. And, as Hegel observes, "It is precisely at this point that we encounter those great collisions between established and acknowledged duties, laws, and right, on the one hand, and new possibilities which conflict with the existing system and violate it or even destroy its very foundations and continued existence, on the other…." This fact explains why the old concepts and categories are of so little use in guiding us to an understanding of such transformative events, because the essence of the world-historical is the disclosure of new and hitherto unsuspected historical possibilities - it is their absolute novelty, their quality as epiphanies, that accounts for their inevitable collision with, and transcendence of, the old categories of understanding.
Today we are in the midst of this collision. It is the central fact of our historical epoch. It is this we must grasp. Unless we are prepared to look seriously at the true stakes involved in the Bush administration's coming world-historical gamble, we will grossly distort the significance of what is occurring by trying to make it fit into our own pre-fabricated and often grotesquely obsolete set of concepts. We will be like children trying to understand the world of adults with our own childish ideas, and we will miss the point of everything we see. This means that we must take a hard look at even our most basic vocabulary - and think twice before we rush to apply words like "empire" or "national self-interest" or "multi-lateralism" or "sovereignty" to a world in which they are no longer relevant. The only rule of thumb that can be unfailingly applied to world-historical transformations is this: None of our currently existing ideas and principles, concepts and categories, will fit the new historical state of affairs that will emerge out of the crisis. We can only be certain of our uncertainty.
2: THE SOURCE OF OUR UNCERTAINTY
This uncertainty underlies much of our current intellectual confusion. Since the events of 9/11 the policy debate in the United States has been primarily focused on a set of problems - radical Islam and the War on Terrorism, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We feel that these are related problems, but we are not quite sure how. Superficially, of course, they are connected by Islam - and yet we are troubled to think that this could be the genuine source of the problems.
What unites all these issues, from our point of view, is that we do not seem able to get a handle on them. They elude us. Will the War on Iraq conflict with our goals in the War on Terror? Or will one help the other? And what about the Palestinians? If they are given a state of their own, will there be peace in the Middle East? Is there a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq? Will an attack on Iraq increase incidents of terror by Islamic radicals? How does it all connect?
The debate takes many different forms and is approached from a variety of perspectives. But, with few exceptions, each side in this debate is working with a set of ethical and political concepts and categories that have been derived from an early historical era. For example, those who oppose action against Iraq often justify their position by an appeal to the Iraqi people's right to self-determination. On the other hand, those who argue that America should try to contain Iraq, or to deter it by sanctions, or even many of those who argue for a limited military intervention, justify their position on the principles of classical Realpolitik.
All of these positions are fatally undercut by the fact that they appeal to the outmoded conceptual categories of an earlier epoch - an epoch in which all the relevant actors in an international conflict were playing by the same basic rules. They were all nation states, each deploying a foreign policy - in both war and peace - that was designed to advance their own interests, where these interests could be easily predicted by the other actors in the conflict. An illuminating metaphor here is a game of chess between two equally skilled players: no matter how bitter the conflict between them, each can understand the rationale and motivation behind the other player's moves - and in fact, if the other player appears to make an irrational move, his opponent will be hesitant to conclude that the move was a mere mistake, and will be far more likely to suspect that it is a trap and act accordingly.
But what happens when you a playing chess with someone who refuses to accept the rules of the game? How do you respond if your opponent begins to jump his knight in all sorts of bizarre zigzag patterns, so that you cannot predict where he will land or what piece he will seize?
In a game of chess the answer is obvious: You stop playing with the madman and go your separate way. But this, unfortunately, is not an option in dealing with genuine conflicts arising in the real world. That is why the supposed realism expressed by the concept of Realpolitik can only be of value in a world comprised exclusively of rational actors.
This is what gives so much of the American public discussion of the present crisis an almost surreal air. For if we in fact lived in a world where concepts like self-determination and Realpolitik could be applied, there would be no crisis, since there would be no Saddam Hussein in Iraq, nor terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, nor conflicts like the Israeli-Palestine conflicts - for in such a world the players would all be limited to making rational calculations and pursuing predictable policies: their undesirable actions could be deterred through the traditional methods of deterrence, and there would be no fear that a player might suddenly undertake risks that any realist would know to avoid. Everyone could be counted on to consult his self-interest in a way that was generally recognized, even by his most bitter opponents, as realistic. For a sense of the realistic, unlike one's taste in music or physical beauty, is not a culturally specific construct, but transcends all such bounds. It embodies, so to speak, the fundamental rules of play between different cultures, even those cultures that, on other counts, may be bitterly opposed in any number of other ways.
But that precisely is the nature of the crisis we are facing. The liberal world system has collapsed internally: there is no longer a set of rules that govern all the players. And here I do not mean ethical rules, for that cannot be expected, but what Kant called maxims of prudence, those regulatory principles that enforce a realistic code of conduct on all the participants in a well-ordered system, and which allows us to know for a near certainty what the other players will not even conceive of doing. Such rules, once again, are trans-cultural, and must be trans-cultural if they are to permit all the players to participate in them. They constitute the precondition of any politically stable system, for without them there is the danger of cognitive anarchy - a situation in which no one can any longer predict with confidence what the others will do. And that is the gateway to disaster. For when you do not know what to expect, it becomes prudent to expect the worst; but when all expect the worst, the worst is bound to happen.
"The liberal world system has collapsed internally: there is no longer a set of rules that govern all the players."
This collapse of the well-ordered liberal system has come about exclusively from the side of the Islamic world. No other party has contributed to it. And the cause of this disruption is the lack of a sense of the realistic on the part of certain elements in the Islamic world. This is not a cultural judgment, but a fact - at least as much a fact as any such judgment can ever be. And this is the common thread that unites Iraq, Al Qaeda, and Palestinian terrorism.
Yet it would be to facile to reduce this lack of a sense of the realistic to some inherent flaw in Islam, either as a culture or a religion, or in Arabs as a race or as an ethnos. It arises from an altogether different source, and in order to understand the source of the problem, we need to go back to the writings of Karl Marx.
3: THE LESSON OF MARX
All previous threats in the history of mankind have had one element in common. They were posed by historical groups that had created by their own activity and with their own hands the weapons - both physical and cultural - that they used to threaten their enemies. In each case, the power that the historical group had at its disposal had been "earned" by them the hard way: they had invented and forged their instruments; they had disciplined and trained their own armies; they had created the social and economic structures that allowed the construction of their armies and navies; they had paid their own way.
In each of these cases, to use Marx's language, the society in question had achieved through their own labor and sacrifice the objective conditions of their military power. Their power to threaten others derived entirely from their own skill and genius. This, of course, is not to deny an amount of borrowing from earlier cultures, but in each case this borrowing was only the foundation upon which the affiliated culture proceeded to build its own unique structure, as evidenced, for example, by Japan's stunningly successful response to the Western challenge at the end of the nineteenth century - another vivid example of how a sense of the realistic can transcend cultural boundaries.
But the threat that currently faces us is radically different. It comes from groups who have utterly failed to create the material and objective conditions within their own societies sufficient to permit them to construct, out of their own resources, the kind of military organization and weaponry that has constituted every previous kind of threat. In the case of Al Qaeda, this is painfully evident, as V.S. Naipaul has observed: the only technical mastery displayed by the terrorists of 9/11 was the ability to hijack and to fly Jumbo airliners into extremely large buildings, neither of which they were capable of constructing themselves. But the same is true in the case of Saddam Hussein's Iraq: the money that funded both the creation of his conventional forces as well as his forays into devising weapons of mass destruction came not from the efforts of the Iraqi people, but from money paid by the West for the purchase of petroleum - natural resources that Iraq had done absolutely nothing to create or even to produce for sale.
Why does this matter? The answer to this question has been provided by Hegel in his Master/Slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Spirit, and was subsequently taken up as a fundamental theme of Marx's own thinking.
When people are forced to create their own material world through their own labor, they are certainly not setting out to achieve a greater insight into the nature of reality - they are merely trying to feed themselves, and to provide their children with clothing and a roof over their heads. And yet, whether they will or no, they are also, at every step of the way, acquiring a keener grasp of the objective nature of world. A man who wishes to build his own home with his own hands must come to grips with the recalcitrant properties of wood and gravity: he must learn to discipline his own activities so that he is in fact able to achieve his end. He will come to see that certain things work and that others don't. He will realize that in order to have A, you must first make sure of B. He will be forced to develop a sense of the realistic - and this, once again, is a cultural constant, measured entirely by the ability of each particular culture to cope successfully with the specific challenge posed by the world it inhabits.
But all of this is lost on the man who simply pays another man to build his home for him. He is free to imagine his dream house, and to indulge in every kind of fantasy. The proper nature of the material need not concern him - gravity doesn't interest him. He makes the plans out of his head and expects them to be fulfilled at his whim.
If we look at the source of the Arab wealth we find it is nothing they created for themselves. It has come to them by magic, much like a story of the Arabian nights, and it allows them to live in a feudal fantasyland.
What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will, and without so much as a Thank You, if the West had been inclined to do so. They were, by one of the bitter paradoxes of history, the pre-eminent beneficiaries of the Western liberalism that they have pledged themselves to destroy. Their power derives entirely from the fact that the West had committed itself, in the aftermath of World War II, to a policy of not robbing other societies of their natural resources simply because it possessed the military might to do so - nor does it matter whether the West followed this policy out of charitable instinct, or out of prudence, or out of a cynical awareness that it was more cost effective to do so. All that really matters is the quite unintended consequence of the West's conduct: the prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their demented agendas unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or costs of their action.
And here we have one of the deepest contradictions of the liberal system of national self-determination. A world has been virtually achieved where each nation state is an inviolable entity, its borders protected by an international consensus, and the benefits of such a system are so obvious that there is no need to enumerate them.
"What Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have in common is that they became rich because the West paid them for natural resources that the West could simply have taken from them at will."
And yet it is precisely here that the problem arises, through what Hegel called a dialectical reversal-a reversal that comes about because it is contained within the liberal world system is an internal contradiction. In this case, it is the contradiction between principle of national self-determination and the reality of weapons of mass destruction (WMD's)-for if the consistent application of this principle permits each and every nation to develop WMD's, then, sooner or later, the liberal world order will literally go up in smoke.
In other words, the principle of national self-determination, like every other ideal, has unintended consequences - and it is to these that we must now turn our attention.
4: THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE LIBERAL WORLD ORDER
If the existence of a nation state is guaranteed by some external authority - whether by the United Nations or the United States - then it means that one of the chief incentives to a realistic policy, both domestic and foreign, has been removed from play.
To see this, think back to the old chaotic world in which the law of the jungle operated: here, if a state pursued a domestic or a foreign policy that was too grossly unrealistic, it would inevitably pay the price for doing so - it would be invaded, or annexed, or partitioned. And this meant that the price of any nation state's survival was the cultivation of a heightened sense of realism.
But this is no longer the case. Indeed, the current international arrangement might be compared to an economic system in which each business enterprise was assured of not going broke by a guarantee of a government subsidy in the face of financial insolvency. Would such a system be inclined to produce hard-nosed realism among the operators of these business enterprises, or would it rather induce them to pay less attention to the complaints of their customers, or the innovations of their competitors? And which kind of company would you prefer to work for? Or buy a product from?
The principle of self-determination in a world of perpetual peace may not in fact be the panacea for mankind's ills, but rather a means for prolonging these ills unnecessarily, by sanctioning a status quo of despotism and tyranny, by virtually underwriting the brutal caprice of petty dictators and by furthering the fantasies of ruthless fanatics. Self-determination at the level of the nation state may entail complete loss of freedom and dignity at the level of the individual - and all in the name of liberalism.
"The principle of self-determination in a world of perpetual peace may not in fact be the panacea for mankind's ills."
Nor can this issue be addressed by any kind of multi-lateral organization such as the United Nations - for it is unlikely that a league of small nation states will act in concert to liquidate a system of which they are the chief beneficiaries. It would be easier to imagine businessmen in our imaginary economic system voting to strip themselves of their subsidies. It will not happen, and it is utopian to think that it will.
And yet the blind trust in the sacred principle of national self-determination seemingly cannot be shaken in certain quarters. In September 2002, Richard Butler, the Chief Arms Inspector of the United Nations, berated the USA for its "double standard" in wishing to oppose the proliferation of nuclear weapons to any nation state that wanted them. What blessing does he believe that the United States is trying to deny to smaller nations? Is he thinking about the citizens of those nations who will have to foot the bill for such fantasy projects? Or those who will likely die if the U.S. decides to abandon its "double standard?" Or the state of the world that would result from such an abandonment?
Can anything make clearer that intelligent men of our time are stuck with grotesquely outmoded concepts and categories?
That, indeed, is a measure of the immensity of the challenge that we are facing today: we simply lack the concepts and categories to make sense of it, and must continually fall back on those that, while once serviceable, have long since ceased to be so, and have all too frequently become sources of confusion, perplexity, and contradiction. |
