The War For A Human Order
Over the months since Putin began Russia’s “Special Operation” in Ukraine we’ve attempted to explicate the major changes in the world order that appear to be headed our way. Those changes are political, economic, and cultural in character, but their interrelatedness isn’t always evident. It’s easy enough to point to the disastrous effect the backfiring Western sanctions are having on the world economy—not least in American and the EU. Surely that’s a sign that the conventional wisdom of the West that Russia is something like a mere gas station with nukes is, and always has been, seriously misguided. The increasingly explicit realignment of Russia with other major parts of the world—China usually, and understandably, figures prominently in such discussions—is also easy to see, but it remains to be seen at how fundamental a level this realignment is taking place. Lastly, the clear conflict between a noisily proclaimed “rules-based order” in the West and Putin’s appeal to international law surely points to basic cultural differences—but exactly what is at the bottom of this is more difficult to enunciate.
For several days I’ve been attempting to come to grips with an article (recommended to me by Friend George) by former British diplomat Alistair Crooke. The article addresses these issues in a comprehensive way:
The problem I’ve had is that the article seems to me to be somewhat diffuse in its organization and lacks—at least from my point of view—historical and philosophical rigor. At least in certain respects. Before I get started unpacking Crooke’s analysis, lets take a look at a few tweets that reflect the crisis we’re seeing around us. The fact of this crisis is, after all, is what sets Crooke off. We’re all talking about inflation, the supply chain chaos, the political chaos in an increasingly divided and even violent America. We’re also seeing similar events unfolding throughout Europe, in ways that are unique to individual countries. But …
Surely, this portrends upheaval and dislocation headed our way:
Just yesterday Tom Luongo warned Bulgaria might be the first domino to fall, even while Boris Johnson is on life support. However, these political events are being driven by growing economic disorder:
Hmmmm. This next is alarming:
BTW, Sikorski’s wife is Anne Applebaum, the fanatical globalist who is sounding increasingly hysterical. For example:
George Soros apologist Anne Applebaum declares war on 7 nations in name of ‘democracy’
In other words, the world is a mess.
Crooke begins with a stab at a broad brush sketch of political-economic history: He asserts that WW1 saw the end of the mercantalist economic order and that the ensuing neoliberal order began sliding toward dissolution at the very moment of its crowning victory—the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the USSR. Without getting into economic history—did mercantalism really end after WW1?—Crooke’s main thrust is that the fog of events have blinded us in the West to the fundamental transformation of our order that has been developing since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
From an American perspective, I would certainly argue that the dissolution of our order began in the 1960s with the questioning of anti-Communism and the rise of the New Left. The critique of anti-Communism was part of a wide ranging critique of all Western ‘values’—specifically religious and more broadly cultural—that has accelerated over the succeeding decades. The effects can be seen in most areas of our public life: politics, the hollowing out of our economy and the war on middle class values. The madness of Wokeism is only the latest symptom. At the core we face a crisis of belief in human nature itself, an inability to fight back against those who madly seek a transition to … whatever. Whatever we want, whatever is the next transgressive craze. Transgression as our way of thumbing our noses at any Creator who would limit us, at any nature that would define us against our Will to Power.
However, here’s how Crooke presents the decline of the neoliberal order:
… Believed by its architects to be universal and everlasting, globalisation transfixed the world for an extended moment, but then started the subsidence from its zenith – precisely at the moment the West was giving vent to its triumphalism at the fall of the Berlin Wall. NATO – as the order’s regulatory system – addressed its attendant ‘identity crisis’ by pushing for eastward expansion toward Russia’s western borders, disregarding the guarantees it had given, and Moscow’s virulent objections.
This radical alienation of Russia triggered its pivot to China. Europe and the U.S. however, declined to consider issues of due ‘balance’ within global structures, and simply glossed over the realities of a world order in momentous metamorphosis: with the steady decline of the U.S. already apparent; with a European faux ‘unity’ that masked its own inherent imbalances; and in the context of a hyper-financialised economic structure which lethally sucked out the juice from the real economy.
The present war in Ukraine … is not its centre. …, the explosive dynamics to today’s disintegration can be seen as blowback from the mismatch from diverse peoples’ looking now to solutions tailored to suit their non-western civilisations, and from the western insistence on its ‘one size fits all’ Order. Ukraine thus is a symptom, but is not per se, the deeper disorder itself.
Again, I’m not sure I agree with all that and, as we will see, it may be that Crooke himself is simply drawing on his past diplomatic life. He may actually see something deeper than he initially states. Thus, after spending quite some time presenting Walter Muenchau’s ruminations of the self defeating sanctions war on Russia, Crooke asks a question which goes to the reason that I included that tweet about Sikorski’s insane notion of providing Ukraine with nukes—there must be more to the collective Western liberal freakout over Putin:
So again, ‘one’ searches for an answer: Why are the Euro-élites so shrill, so passionate in their support for Ukraine? And risk heart-attack from the sheer vehemence of their hatred for Putin? After all, most Europeans and Americans until this year knew next-to-nought about Ukraine.
We know the answer: the deeper fear is that all the landmarks to liberal life – for reasons they do not understand – are about to be forever swept away. And that Putin is doing it. How will ‘we’ navigate life, bereft of landmarks? What will become of us? We thought the liberal way-of-being was ineluctable. Another value-system? Impossible!
And, of course, the reason for the seeming ‘impossibility’ is the refusal of the Western elites—as Putin himself has noted—to recover its historical religious identity. Putin himself, probably not deeply religious in a conventional sense, has sought to anchor Russia in a recovery of Orthodoxy as its civilizational identity. He urges the West to seek to recover its own Christian identity—anathema to the liberal elites.
Crooke presents as illustrative of the liberal desire to will away the spectre of a deeper civilizational crisis, the notion that the crisis can be made to go away by offering Russia a “way out”, an “off ramp.” But that’s the point of the sanctions backfire:
The hope for a negotiated settlement has given way to a more sombre mood in Europe. Putin was uncompromising in the talks with European leaders. The realisation is dawning in Paris and Berlin that a fudged settlement is not something that benefits Putin, nor is one that he can afford. The Russian public mood will not easily accept that its soldiers’ blood was spent in some vain exercise, ending in a ‘dirty’ compromise – only to have the West resuscitate a new Ukraine insurgency against the Donbas again, in a year or two.
The EU leaders must be sensing their predicament: They may have ‘missed the boat’ for getting a political ‘fix’. But they have not ‘missed the boat’ in respect to inflation, economic contraction, and of social crisis at home. These ships are heading in their direction, at full steam.
Here’s where things get interesting. Crooke reaches all the way back to 1993 and an essay by James Fallows in The Atlantic to explain exactly what animates the liberal elites of the West. Fallows sees the neoliberal order as resting on an unholy trinity of figures (Newton, Rousseau/Locke, Smith)—I say “trinity” because neoliberalism, in Fallows’ view, exhibits the signs of being an ideology that has claimed the status of a religion. Bear in mind that there is a long history in Russia of intellectual opposition to Western liberalism (think Dostoevsky for starters, now banned in the West). I make no attempt to get at what Fallows’ motives may have been:
The Anglo-American system of politics and economics, James Fallows a former White House speechwriter has noted, like any system, rests on certain principles and beliefs. “But rather than acting as if these are the best principles, or the ones their societies prefer, Britons and Americans often act as if these were the only possible principles: And that no one, except in error, could choose any others. Political economics becomes an essentially religious question, subject to the standard drawback of any religion—the failure to understand why people outside the faith might act as they do”.
“To make this more specific: Today’s Anglo-American world view rests on the shoulders of three men. One is Isaac Newton, the father of modern science. One is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the father of liberal political theory. (If we want to keep this purely Anglo-American, John Locke can serve in his place.) And one is Adam Smith, the father of laissez-faire economics.
“From these founding titans come the principles by which advanced society, in the Anglo-American view, is supposed to work … And it is supposed to recognize that the most prosperous future for the greatest number of people comes from the free workings of the market.
“In the non-Anglophone world, Adam Smith is merely one of several theorists who had important ideas about organizing economies. The Enlightenment philosophers however were not the only ones to think about how the world should be organized. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Germans were also active—to say nothing of the theorists at work in Tokugawa Japan, late imperial China, czarist Russia, and elsewhere.
“The Germans deserve emphasis—more than the Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians, and so on because many of their philosophies endure. These did not take root in England or America, but they were carefully studied, adapted, and applied in parts of Europe and Asia, notably Japan. In place of Rousseau and Locke the Germans offered Hegel. In place of Adam Smith… they had Friedrich List.”
As an aside, Fallows is curiously unaware of the profound influence of two seminal German thinkers—Kant and Hegel—on American legal and political thinking. I take it, therefore, that Fallows’ critique of Anglo-American thinking is fundamentally aimed at conservatism or neoconservatism in the libertarian vein. Crooke appears to accept that thrust of Fallows’ critique:
The Anglo-American approach is founded on the hypothesis of the sheer unpredictability and unplannability of economics. Technologies change; tastes change; political and human circumstances change. And because life is so fluid, this means that any attempts at central planning are virtually doomed to fail. The best way to “plan” therefore, is to leave the adaptation to the people who have their own money at stake. If each individual does what is best for him or her, the result will be – serendipitously – what is best for the nation as a whole.
Although List did not use this term, the German school was sceptical about serendipity, and more concerned with ‘market failures’. These are the cases in which normal market forces produce a clearly undesirable result. List argued that societies did not automatically move from farming to small crafts to major industries just because millions of small merchants were making decisions for themselves. If every person put his money where the return was greatest, the money might not automatically go where it would do the nation the most good.
For it to do so required a plan, a push, an exercise of central power. List drew heavily on the history of his times—in which the British government deliberately encouraged British manufacturing and the fledgling American government deliberately discouraged foreign competitors.
This is a good point, and one which seems not to have been lost on Trump. Against the doctrinaire Libertarians, Trump advocated for tariffs to encourage a restructuring of the US economy—and, importantly of American society—that had been ravaged by the globalist outsourcing binge by the financial classes.
The Anglo-American approach assumes that the ultimate measure of a society is its level of consumption. In the long run, List argued, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make (i.e. value coming from the real, self-sufficient economy). The German school argued that emphasizing consumption would eventually be self-defeating. It would bias the system away from wealth creation, and ultimately make it impossible to consume as much, or to employ so many.
In the next paragraph Crooke passionately attacks what he calls the “Anglo model”, but which I regard as a doctrinaire Libertarian approach. This has led—paradoxically, if you will—from the ideal of individual self reliance to the transformation of the American economy into one dominated by rent seeking and by large corporations. Individuals below the top 1% or so have been progressively crushed. It has also led to wholesale corruption of our political processes. Moreover, this dominance of the Anglo model is relatively recent, as List would have understood.
List was prescient. He was right. This is the flaw now so clearly exposed in the Anglo model. One aggravated by subsequent massive financialisation that has led to a structure dominated by an ephemeral, derivative super-sphere that drained the West of its wealth-creating real economy, couriering its remains and its supply-lines ‘offshore’. Self-reliance has eroded, and the shrinking base of wealth creation supports an ever-smaller proportion of the population in adequately paid employment.
Now, in this next paragraph, ask yourself: Is this the actual history of the past two centuries, or is it more the Libertarian narrative of the past two centuries—the “Anglo ‘story’”, as Crooke puts it? I would argue, and I think I have Trump on my side, that this is a narrative, rather than actual history. I believe that’s what Crooke is also suggesting:
It is no longer ‘fit for purpose’ and is in crisis. That is widely understood at the upper reaches of the system. To acknowledge this however, would seem to go against the past two centuries of economics, narrated as one long progression toward Anglo-Saxon rationality and good sense. It lies at the root of the Anglo ‘story’.
Now we get to the heart of the crisis of the liberal order—which embraces both Liberals in the accepted American usage (the political ‘Left’) as well as Libertarians. Crooke expands on Fallows’ idea of the three pillars, and how these pillars are co-dependent for establishing the order of liberal democracy:
How so? Well, the liberal order rests on three pillars – on three interlocking, co-constituting pillars: Newton’s ‘laws’ were projected to lend the Anglo economic model its (dubious) claim to being founded in hard empirical laws – as if it were physics. Rousseau, Locke, and their followers elevated individualism as a political principle, and from Smith came the logic-core to the Anglo-American system: If each individual does what is best for him or her, the result will be what is best for the nation as a whole.
The most important thing about these pillars is their moral equivalence, as well as their interlocking connection. Knock out one pillar as invalid, and the whole edifice known as ‘European values’ comes adrift. Only through being locked together does it possess coherency.
Note this well: The European values—the values of the entire Western globalist Rules-Based Order—are emphatically not the values of the traditional conservative culture of the Christian West, which gave rise to international law. Those European values are revolutionary values aimed at the transitioning of the entire world into the WEF vision of a “transhumanist” society. The crisis of the liberal West is now seen to be a crisis of the secularized West, devoid of the spiritual principles of traditional society that Russia (Neo-Orthodoxy) and China (Neo-Confucianism) are attempting to reinstill in their societies. Again we see that the secularization of Western society that was supposed to empower the individual has, instead, deprived individuals of all self value and placed individuals under the heel of the ruling oligarchy, who have strip mined the economy and the national patrimony.
This is the basis for Putin’s rebuke of the globalist elites of the West:
And last week Putin told Scholtz and Macron that the crises (including food shortages) that they faced, stemmed from their own erroneous economic structures and policies. Putin might have quoted List’s amorphism:
The tree which bears the fruit is of greater value than the fruit itself… The prosperity of a nation is not… greater in the proportion in which it has amassed more wealth (i.e., values of exchange), but in the proportion in which it has more developed its powers of production.
Messrs Scholtz and Macron probably did not like the message one bit. They can see the pivot being yanked out from western neoliberal hegemony.
None of this is to lionize current day Russia or China (or India, for that matter, which is on a similar trajectory). The real point is that the West’s war on Russia is a war against tradition and a war to extend the revolutionary ideology “transhumanism” throughout the world. Putin, imperfectly no doubt, is attempting to recover Russia’s spiritual strength, which he sees as the basis for a return to Russian Greatness. That recovery of the spiritual dimension of human nature in its relation to the Creator is precisely what Neoliberalism so fears. It is also what it feared and detested in Trump’s effort to recover true American Greatness, which was not simply the America of the Big Stick but the America that valued the true human dignity that only comes from a right ordering of each individual to God.
https://twitter.com/tleehumphrey/status/1536377134192545792?cxt=HHwWgMCiyaG3p9IqAAAA
There are several different foundations of Western Economic success that are being destroyed.
1. Security of property
2. One system of justice
3. Lack of corruption
4. Education
5. Free trade, not one government creates losers and monopolies.
6. Rule of law
7. Not strangling businesses with excessive regulation and taxes
8. Law and order
9. Nuclear family - an amazingly efficient economic unit.
I’m amazed at how cheaply China has bought our politicians.