Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 6 May 2023

Subversive. War. Collapse. Emotions. Post-Democracy. Escape. Next Book

Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses for seven days of the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:

1. Gratitude. Alex Kaschuta

2. Reading. Shadows of War

3. Governing the Multipolar World. Consequences of Collapse

4. Using History Mindfully. History of Emotions

5. Fragments of the Burning Archive. The Post-Democratic Society

6. What surprised me most. Escaping Reality.

7. Works-in-Progress. My next book is getting close.

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1. Gratitude 

I am thankful for Alex Kaschuta’s wonderful podcast, Subversive. I subscribed to her substack this week. It really is one of the best, most thought-provoking shows.

2. What I am reading 

I am close to the end of Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, read Georges Bataille, Guilty, and also dipped into Céline, Journey to the End of the Night. The shadows of war may lift from my reading next week, I hope.

3. Governing the unruly multipolar world

Simplicius the Thinker shared on his substack this Prophetic interview with Anatoly Sobchak on the traps for European security that were laid by NATO during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Sobchak was a significant figure in the 1990s, including being a Presidential candidate and employer/mentor of Vladimir Putin. It is well worth watching, especially in a week when Ukraine, presumably with at least one American official’s compliance, lanched drones at the Kremlin. It is also worth reading Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union. Sobchak appears in key moments in Collapse, and understanding what really happened in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet States in the 1980s and 1990s is essnetial to govern the unruly multipolar world.

4. Using history to live mindfully in the present. 

On the podcast I discuss how the history of emotions might offer a framework to think mindfully about the past of the last three crazy years of the pandemic and its impact on democracy.

People have compared this history to metaphors of mental illness in social psychology or histories of democratic breakdown in Germany, but I think the history of emotions might create a more nuanced perspective.

In essence the history of emotions shows how our emotions are shaped by our history. Feelings and their expressions are shaped by culture and learnt/acquired in social contexts. What somebody can and may feel, and how they show it, in a given situation, towards certain people or things, depends on social norms and rules. It is thus historically variable and open to change.

And the pandemic was an extraordinary example of how emotional regimes, codes, and lexicons can shape our action and be changed by events and conditions. People bonded with emotional communities when they clapped for the NHS. People conformed with emotional regimes, set by governments and other actors that exploited fears and hatreds. People adopted emotional styles with the new presentation of self on zoom and videos, new forms of greeting, new patterns of social distancing.

It was all a lot more complex than ,mass psychosis’ or science vs misinformation or ‘authoritarianism’. It involved all of us as indidviuals and collectives, not just elites, nut-jobs or sheeple. It was all a lot more embodied and visceral than ideas and systems, democracy and totalitarianism.

I think it provide a better framework for understanding our experience. And I think it is a better framework for recovering from the experience. Martha Nussbaum, political philosopher who has drawn on the history of emotions, has shown how ‘tragic spectatorship’ can provide for the compassionate and cathartic use of emotions within democratic government. Her book The Monarchy of Fear (2018), was a response to the ‘populist backlash’ of 2016, and was concerned about the problems too much fear causes for democratic government. Five years later, we suffer from a lot more fear and loathing.

5. Fragments from the Burning Archive

My fragment from the Burning Archive is a text from the Burning Archive, which I wrote in 2011, as part of my progressing to speaking and writing more openly on the Burning Archive podcast. I read a small section of this text, which responded to the health of democracy after the pandemic. It built on ideas of Colin Crouch, from the 1990s, and of John Dunn, about the inadequacy of ‘democracy’ as an idea to solve our problems of governance today.

I read a part of this text on my podcast this week. The final edited text will appear in my upcoming book of writings on governing, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.

The Post-Democratic Society is Here

We, who live in the mythical states of the West, do cherish our status as democracies. We like to celebrate the freedom and the dignity which that designation of our political institutions grants us as citizens. We like to denigrate the benighted societies ruled by the ‘new breed of autocrats’, Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan, Orban and, in some minds, even Trump, who must surely have been the most impotent autocrat of all time. We are too easily lulled into trances by lazy talk from the ‘Leader of the Free World’, the Pretender President Joe Biden, about ‘inflection points’ in the fate of the world, where we must choose whether our best way forward is ‘autocracy’, or the soul of America, democracy.¹ Democracy is conjugated by Americans as an irregular verb. We are free, and they are slaves.

But when I look at the actual conditions of our political institutions culture, and their actors, especially in the wake of the Great Seclusion of 2020, the response of our governing elites to the SARS-COV-2 pandemic, then I see a different drama. In the great coliseum of the city, there is a theatrical combat of democracy with autocracy, but this performance is stage managed by manipulative politicians and celebrity journalists. Outside the walls of this circus, in the great feral city of our distressed republics, I see a post-democratic society growing wild over the ruins of democracy.

I see political institutions that have become empty husks of their great traditions: parliaments, filled with time-serving hacks who are unable to conduct meaningful debate; political parties, adrift on the social tides, and suborned to empty marketing machines; bureaucracies, ravaged by political mercenaries and consultants, and starved of dignified purpose; universities, converted into student shops, and stripped of humane ideals; courts, conceited with their power to rule, and too timid to defend the most powerful resource of the powerless; the fourth estate or media, dazed by its own dim celebrity, and confused by reading as truth the talking points rolling down the teleprompter; civil society, leashed to government and oligarchical patronage, and no longer enlisting ordinary people in little platoons; the citizenry, free enough to live outside politics, and intimidated enough to live within lies.

This is the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem in this new century. It is not the threat of the ‘new autocrats’ or the ‘new populists’. Putin, Xi Jinping and the others are not autocrats. Such an idea is pure misinformation, a tired reworking of 1950’s American Cold War propaganda. Donald Trump was never an ‘existential threat’ to American democracy. He saw it was dead, and fantasized he could make it great again. Along the way, he called out many of the oligarchs, hoaxers and deep state operatives who prowled around the cadaver. Perhaps the ‘new autocrats’ and ‘new populists’ arrived at a post-democratic society first. At least, they rule without the illusion that America equals global freedom equals democracy equals good government equals the end of history. Perhaps we should see their struggle as akin to ours: how to fashion a decent republic in a post-democratic society? A dangerous thought, but in our conditions we must dare to think dangerously.

Democracy as a concept cannot save us from the difficulties, injustices and failures of this new set of political institutions. We would do well to break the spell of democracy, as the English political theorist, John Dunn, has urged us to do. In Breaking Democracy’s Spell, he asked:

“Why does this word democracy now hold such singular political authority? Where is the power that lurks so strangely within it? What exactly is it that modern populations are consenting to when they subject themselves to democracy’s sway?²”

Dunn’s response was to say that:

“In essence, democracy is above all a formula for imagining subjection to the power and will of others without sacrificing personal dignity or voluntarily jeopardizing individual or family interests.”

Can we say still that this formula of ‘democracy’ still keeps our personal dignity safe? Can we still say that, after more than a year of masks, lockdowns, seclusions, Big Tech censorship, Big Media collusion, oligarchical Great Resets, arrests of dissenters, celebration of some protesters and designation of others as ‘domestic terrorists’ or ‘conspiracy theorists’?

The post-democratic society has arrived. We need to turn away from the old priests and performers who mutter grand concepts of democracy in weakened rites that only initiate another circus performance in the decaying coliseum. We need to find some new way in the feral cities of our distressed republics. There is no easy recourse to live well among friends and strangers in a political community, not when that society of strangers are no longer entranced by democracy. And yet, we have survived through democracy’s fall, and we cannot rule out the prospect that we may tomorrow find our way to some new decent polity. If we do we may discover the path, close to home, in our own dignity, ordinary virtue and decision to live in truth.

11 April 2021

1Remarks by President Biden at the 2021 Virtual Munich Security Conference, 19 February 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov

2John Dunn, Breaking Democracy’s Spell (2014)

6. What surprised me most this week. 

I heard an aphorism from Ayn Rand, and was surprised by its insight.

You can escape from reality, but you cannot escape the consequences of escaping reality.

Beware America. Beware the virtual reality state.

7. Works-in-progress and published content

This week my works-in-progress and published content were:

• on the podcast I published Episode 99. Fear and Loathing After Pandemic Democracy

• On the YouTube Channel I published the video version of the podcast

• I drafted some new material for 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, and am in the final weeks of final editing, proofing and design.

• On Twitter, I shared some quotes from Pessoa and Clausewitz.

Next week…

The podcast will be episode 100. I am proud and grateful I got to episode 100 after two years podcasting.

On Youtube, I will be doing Livestream (May 9, 12.30pm AEST) on the theme of the derangement of the American Mind and the unravelling of the American Empire. I will share what I am reading and writing, and will respond to viewer questions and comments. Indeed, if you would like to send me a comment now ahead of the stream I would love to do so.

And I will keep pushing on completing 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat.

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