The Carapace Cracks
All of us who live in Western societies have the sense that our world is unravelling and collapsing around us. This can be seen in almost any area one investigates. In international politics, the idea that the international realm is subject to some kind of law, even of the most minimal kind, may always have been more a pious hope than a reality, but now it has become just a bad joke. Domestically, our political systems lurch between massive immobilism and utterly capricious, wanton acts of institutional destruction. Gone is the idea that they automatically ensure a smooth and orderly transition in power from one group of office-holders to another. It has become difficult, if not impossible, to hold that gradual reform within the system is, as it were, its default position. Most importantly, we seem to be incapable of producing political figures who have even a tenuous ability to look reality in the face or a basic competence in dealing with the world.
This dysfunctionality characterizes not just politics, but the technical, economic, and military domains as well. Our civil infrastructure is falling apart, and the military is no better off: ships and tanks built at great expense malfunction unpredictably. US military forces, on which funds have been lavished for decades, show themselves in a very vivid way to be significantly less irresistible than advertised. The stock market has become a la-la land where prices keep rising despite real economic stagnation. Where is the promised prosperity? Do any parents now still assume that their children’s lives will be qualitatively better than theirs?
What we are experiencing is not just some kind of otherwise undifferentiated “crisis” or series of overlapping “crises,” but something more systemic, a general dissolution of the Western way of doing things. Massive practical failure is revealing that the very carapace of Western civilization is fatally cracked. But what do we mean by “Western civilization”?
The full answer to this would be the specification of a historical complex of practices and institutions, together with characteristic concepts, beliefs, expectations, and theories that are embedded in these forms of living and acting. In what follows I would like to focus on three central ideational components of Western civilization: a commitment to politically unfettered economic activity; a belief in the liberal democratic state; and the endorsement of a budget of purportedly universal laws, principles, and values. Each of these beliefs has passed its sell-by date, and, what is more, most people at some level know this.
Ancient, medieval, “modern”
In his seminal text Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (1857/8), Karl Marx contrasted what he called the view of the “ancients”—he meant, of course, the ancient Greeks and Romans—with that of the modern bourgeoisie. The ancients strictly subordinated economics to ethics, and ethics to politics. For them, the point of economic activity was to produce the necessary conditions for leading a morally good life, and this was its only point. Production and commerce had no value in themselves, and concern for them beyond what was strictly necessary for the minimal reproduction of life was considered to be boorish and worthy of censure, not praise. The preconditions for a good life were thought to be not easy to attain, but strictly limited: enough food and water; minimal shelter from the elements; and a few instruments and utensils for everyday use, such as cups, hoes, and hammers. What counted as a “good life,” in turn, was determined by politics: it was the life of the fully active citizen of an independent city-state, capable of helping to maintain that city-state in good functioning political order. Ethics, as Aristotle argued, is to be considered a subordinate part of the master science of politics, not the other way around.
Two points deserve to be noted here. First, for the ancients, individuals should be active and self-assertive, but the most appropriate forum for that activity is politics, not private life or economic activity; the freedom to engage in politics, and the freedom to be found in political activity, was what was of overwhelming importance to them, not the level of restriction imposed, politically or otherwise, on their private lives. Second, this is an ethics of moderation and self-restraint. We are told that the oracle of Delphi had an inscription over its entrance that read: “Nothing too much,” and this advice is repeated again and again up to the time of Horace, who praises in the highest terms “golden moderation” (aurea mediocritas). Anything that looks like excess, going beyond the established boundaries, is thought to be perilous and is usually condemned. The ancient dramatic genre we call Greek tragedy consisted of plays that were funded by the city itself and performed before all the citizens: Many such tragedies are about individuals who fail to be moderate and to respect the recognized boundaries, and who are destroyed as a result.
In 313 AD, Emperor Constantine began a process which ended by establishing Christianity as the official religion of the empire. Christianity reversed many of the characteristic valuations of ancient civic culture. It vehemently rejected the ancient ideal of the active political life, and was equally negative about the realm of economic activity. This life in all its aspects—as production, as commerce, or as politics—was a vale of tears; individuals should turn away from it and focus their attention on their own relation to a transcendent and omnipotent God, who made unlimited demands on their obedience. God did not simply issue individual commands that had to be obeyed; rather he ordered Christians to conform to a canon of absolutely exceptionless, categorical, and universal laws. Moderation is not a Christian virtue at all. The right relation to God is infinite self-abnegation in the face of his overwhelming majesty and unconditional obedience to his universal laws.
Unfortunately, Christianity, which the Roman emperors had chosen as their ideology because they thought it could help unify a highly diverse empire, turned out to be inherently fissiparous. From the very start, it seemed that wherever there were four or five Christians assembled, there were eight or ten different and incompatible theological positions represented. The stakes for Christians were literally beyond measure: infinite damnation if you held the wrong theological view. Espousing the wrong theology was also a crime against society because others might be infected with your error, with dire consequences for them. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that the use of force came to be nothing out of the ordinary when religious differences became too pronounced and too irreconcilable.
The high point of religious violence in Europe was the wars fought between different sects in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (especially the extremely destructive Thirty Years‘ War). They were a trauma from which European society intellectually never really recovered, and the ever-present memory of them is part of the reason why early liberalism in the West came to be so insistent on the separation between church and state. Practically the only history that continues to exist in the memory of a late-liberal thinker like John Rawls—at least insofar as this is documented in his theoretical writings—is the vague notion that it is a bad idea to mix religion and politics because that leads to violence.
With that let us return to the Grundrisse. Marx thinks that no properly modern person would have anything to do with Christian self-abnegation, but he is equally dismissive of ancient views. They seemed, he writes, to be particularly humane, and particularly sublime, because they put human beings, their basic needs and their moral vocation, at the center, and subordinate everything else (including all economic activity) to this ethical goal of cultivating humanity. What is wrong with this is that the ancient ethical ideal of the good citizen is too narrow—it was open only to adult males who happened to live in a very specific kind of city-state—and the very fact that it is fixed and limited in any way seems to count against it. Here Christianity was on to something with its rejection of ancient moderation and its fascination with the idea of the boundless; it just misinterpreted the place of limitlessness in human life. It got things backwards. The limitlessness which Christianity recognizes is negative: It characterizes the appropriate kind of self-negation and self-abnegation which a human should exhibit toward god. The modern world begins when limitlessness comes to be positively valued, when it comes to be associated with self-affirmation, and when the basic locus of human self-affirmation is taken to be human production. In what Marx calls the “modern world,” production is not to be subject to politics of any kind, but is to be viewed as an end in itself and the final goal of humans (Zweck des Menschen). Whatever limits it has are ones that it imposes on itself.
Autotelic production, the liberal democratic state, and universal rights and values
That, then, is one significant item in the complex of Western civilization: an overall positive ethical attitude toward maximally unfettered economic production. A second component is a commitment to the liberal democratic state as the appropriate form of politics. It is rather unclear, for most of its supporters, whether liberal democracy is supposed to have value in itself—those who think so generally appeal to some notion of human freedom purportedly uniquely realized in liberal democracies—or whether it is valued instead as the political form that will minimally hinder and maximally foster human production, or indeed whether both are thought true. However that might be, it is important to recognize that the term “liberal democratic state,” as it is usually used, is an attempt to combine two things that do not at all naturally fit together.
The original idea of democracy, as it was instantiated in ancient Greece, was that the population as a whole is completely sovereign and nothing could stand in the way of its will once that will had been formulated and expressed. This is actually the exact opposite of liberalism, which from its inception has insisted on strict limitations on the use of any political power. The basic liberal position is that no government may, for instance, legitimately persecute minorities, even if the whole of the rest of society has overwhelmingly and democratically decided that this would be a good idea. The vacillation back and forth between appeals to the democratic will of the people and appeals to liberal views about tolerance, consent, and non-coercion is a permanent feature of the politics of Western societies and one that will admit of no conclusive resolution.
I note in passing that English-language discussion of politics is also vitiated by the constant confusion or conflation of “democracy’” with “republic.” A republic (which is a Roman, rather than a Greek idea) is a political system with a variety of different offices; each of these is filled in a variety of different ways (some by elections, some by co-optation, some by appointment). Each office has its own powers and, what is most important, the whole system is governed by a general set of rules that is something like a constitution. Maybe the populace as a whole can change the rules, but they can do so only by imposing a new set of rules, not by making a one-off decision. So a republic is clearly not a democracy in the Greek sense of the term. Just as not all democracies are liberal, so equally not all republics need be liberal; as long as oppression of minorities is systematic and rule-governed, it is not anti-republican. So calling a state “liberal,” calling it a “democracy,” and calling it a “republic” are three distinct things.
The third component in Western civilization is the belief in the universal validity of a certain set of principles and values. These are familiar to everyone who’s heard a Western politician speak. Many of them are specifically liberal values—these are mostly connected with the central liberal ideas of freedom, toleration, and consent—but some of them are not specifically liberal but much more widely recognized, such as those of non-aggression, reciprocity, and perhaps certain views about justice. Often these Western values are expressed in the language of rights.
People in the West were in fact taught to believe three different and incompatible things about our values, principles, and institutions. First that they were universal—that is, they could be adopted by anyone, and could be adopted immediately, if conditions permitted and if they were properly understood. Second, that they were in some sense uniquely and distinctively ”ours.” And third, that the full realization of these values in the world would ensure that we remained at the top of the civilizational hierarchy. However, there is a very strong tension between the idea of a universal set of values and the idea that some set of values is uniquely characteristic of us. Furthermore, it has become empirically obvious that if we actually were to act on our professed values and principles, that would ensure that we would be supplanted at the top of the hierarchy we have constructed.
Finally, when Westerners speak of “rights,” they do not usually mean the entitlements actually recognized and enforced in given legal systems, but a wholly imaginary kind of “natural” or “human” right which, they think, ought to be recognized. Such human rights are a metaphysical construct which no one has succeeded in explaining clearly without recourse to some highly questionable theological assumptions, namely that God has given these rights to humans and will in some nonempirical way enforce them in a life after death.
Decline and fall
The whole complex ideational structure of Western civilization that I have tried to describe in outline above—the commitment to economic production as an end in itself, to the liberal democratic state, and to universal principles—is now falling apart. By that I do not mean something like what we luridly imagine to have been the situation during the later phases of the Fall of the Roman Empire: nomads stabling their horses in St. Paul’s Cathedral, Schiphol Airport underwater again (as its site was until the mid-nineteenth century), grass growing out of the corniches of the Louvre, or drunken barbarian chiefs carousing around open wood fires on the ruined premises that once housed the headquarters of Microsoft. I mean something much less dramatic, but nevertheless perfectly real and extremely serious.
The appeal to Western civilization used to allow us to congratulate ourselves: “Look how palpably better we are than anyone else! This is because of the Western civilization we represent. We are the top of the heap.” Now any attempt at this kind of thing is misfiring spectacularly. What do Western populations see when they look at themselves and their societies? Increasingly impoverished, indebted, embittered, and demoralized people, and political and social systems that are deeply dysfunctional in various ways, perhaps most notably in that they seem to be incapable of producing a political class that is even minimally competent. They see political elites that are personally corrupt and politically immoral, people who are not merely unable to act in conformity with our own high-sounding and loudly proclaimed ideals of democracy, human freedom, and justice, but who fail to conform to the standards of behavior which even pirates would observe. Whatever one might think of the different political projects of people like Charles de Gaulle, Willy Brandt, and Margaret Thatcher, they did not seem to be personally corrupt, ineffective, or politically clueless. A society can tolerate political, military, and economic failure—in a way that is what all human life is about, after all—and it can certainly accept that the ideals it espouses are never fully realized, but it is hard for a civilization to tolerate the notion that its ideals are systematically self-undermining.
Thus the GDR—the old communist German Democratic Republic—did not fall apart because its population wanted “freedom and democracy.” It fell apart because it preached the classic Marxist doctrine that greater economic productivity was the sign of a superior society, and at a certain point it become impossible to deny that West Germany was more economically productive. At a certain point, a population can no longer avoid looking past the beautiful words used to praise its social arrangements and values, and sees instead their cash-value—that is, what really happens when those values are pursued under existing conditions. In the West we are moving toward a situation in which we recognize that the more we try to realize the underlying ideals of modern Western civilization—the closer we cleave to the thought of Locke, Smith, and Mill—the more we create either inept failures or moral monsters, or both (like Epstein, Trump, and Netanyahu). What happens when a whole society can no longer look into the glass it holds up for itself and see itself as good? This is not a situation that can be remedied by piecemeal social reform or by returning to a philosophically “purified” version of our existing values and ideals, just as the GDR would not have been helped by moderate reform or a return to a more “correct” form of Marxism. In our own case, our problem is that we have internalized and realized the reality of those values all too fully and correctly.
One might maintain that the discrepancy between our vaunted commitment to certain values and the way we actually act in the world has always existed, and that is most likely true. However, in the past this discrepancy could be covered over or suppressed as long as we had no serious economic rivals, and as long as modern electronic media did not exist. Now the gap between our professions and our actions has become too large and too blatant to ignore. In the early twentiethth century, the German genocide of the Hereros and Namas in Namibia took place in a region that was far away from Europe and at a time when communication was slow and uncertain, and knowledge of it was therefore restricted to a relatively small number of people; by contrast, the genocide in Gaza is livestreamed by its perpetrators to the whole world.
The ways of looking at the world, the tricks and skills with which our culture equips its politicians, don’t seem to work anymore. Partly this failure reflects contradictions in our original set of political ideals. In fact, we have now used all the intellectual, moral, and political resources our civilization provided us with, and we have cheated egregiously, visibly violating all the principles and values we used to espouse, all in order to get ahead. It is one thing to have a system that sacrifices morality (however construed) to efficiency and success, but what is one to do when one sacrifices morality—and still fails?
Perhaps, one might say, this is unfair, and the fault is not with Western civilization or its political culture. Perhaps it is not us, but the world that is to blame. It has moved on and become more complex, so that the old skills, beliefs, and values no longer give us an automatic grip on success. That may well, in some sense, be true. But as an excuse it is pathetic. In the 1930s, we in the West might have pointed to our skyscrapers as a sign both of our distinctiveness and our superiority, but what does one do when everyone has skyscrapers, and theirs are better and built more quickly? In any case, the whole point of being a superior civilization is supposed to be that others need to keep up with us, not the other way around. Since part of the point of having civilizations is to give a kind of stability and predictability to human life, one would expect them to be subject to a certain amount of inertia, and some civilizations have cores that seem very resistant to change. This is true even about societies like the US, which (incorrectly) prides itself on its openness and flexibility, but is actually organized around rigid principles, expectations, and values. This is unfortunate because it means that Americans who are disillusioned are unable to adopt what is the obvious remedy: initiating radical change. Endogenous rigidity means that the system basically has to break down completely before anything is done.
Conclusion
One of the least attractive features of ancient Roman civilization was its addiction to “games,” public spectacles in which men (and very occasionally women) fought against other men with lethal weapons in a public arena. One piece of advice given to those about to enter the arena was to take special care always to keep one’s distance from a wounded opponent, because he might still be powerful and enraged, with nothing to lose. In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel invites readers to imagine a man, defeated in a duel to the death, offering to become the slave of the winner if only his life was spared. If this offer is made and accepted—if the victor, instead of delivering the killer blow, puts a slave-collar on the loser—then something very important has happened. Direct violence is replaced by indirect, but durable, coercion, and the victor emerges with increased power. In addition to whatever he can do himself, he now has appropriated the power of the slave who will work for him. This is a model, Hegel thinks, of one of the ways in which we gradually civilize ourselves, always replacing simple, direct forms of action with ones that are indirect and more complex, but potentially more efficacious. Marx thought that the modern worker was essentially also a slave—a wage slave—but it was just that the mechanism by which the capitalist appropriated and controlled the labor-power of his workers was even more subtle, indirect, sophisticated, and efficient than any that was at the disposal of the ancient slaveholder.
In the modern world it is difficult for large civilizational units (or individual countries) to keep one another at a distance—we are forced to interact and even to cooperate with each other—but then it was also the case in ancient Rome that a fighter did not have the option of simply failing to engage with his opponent or leaving the arena before the end of a contest. There is a strong human temptation to imagine that all would be well if only we had more room to avoid our neighbors, that we could leave our problems behind if only we could find virgin soil to settle. The adolescent fantasies of interplanetary colonization (which seem to haunt the imagination of some very powerful tech entrepreneurs) are an instance of succumbing to this human temptation. Unless there is a sudden discovery of a miraculous new source of virtually cost-free, carbon-neutral, highly efficient energy, colonizing the solar system will remain a destructive pipe dream which will waste resources that could be put to better use. (And if such a source of energy were available, why leave Earth?)
We need to put aside the dream of unlimited growth and the fantasy of radical flight (to the moon and beyond). Given that we are all stuck together in this arena, what can we do to prevent our world from becoming a Roman gladiatorial competition or a slave market?
