Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 22 July 2023
Prospects of Global War. Social Fragmentation. Endurance. Raymond Aron. Base Intellectuals. My Readers. Milosz.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses of the multipolar world through my history-tinted glasses. This week, I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. Prospects for Global War
Governing the Multipolar World. Social Fragmentation in Times of War.
Using History Mindfully. Enduring Through the Times of Trouble.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Emmanuel Todd and Raymond Aron.
What surprised me most. Bad Habits of Base Intellectuals.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. My Readers and Supporters.
Reading and Closing Verse. Milosz, A Task.
Have you checked out my books?
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
So, on with the newsletter….
1. The Big Story
There have been some dark signs about the prospects for global international conflict over the next ten years. Without getting into details, the war in Ukraine is not going well for NATO, and there are signs that the leaders of those states are not prepared to eat humble pie in order to make genuine peace. I suspect they do not know how to make peace; the USA certainly has not done so since 1990. But the realisation that things are not going well is beginning to break through. For example, a former British military officer has articulated in The Telegraph the fear that Ukraine and the West face the prospect of humiliating defeat.
However, is this good news? Might it provoke a desperate gamble, an opting decision, by Western leaders to preserve their idea of themselves? I think we have entered a period of global conflict that will last years, and will carry the risk of catastrophic miscalculation. I do not expect the West to win; this is a situation assessment, not a desire. One brief piece of justification comes from the excellent Simplicius the Thinker. In his most recent post, he wrote:
My prediction is the following: there are huge tectonic shifts currently underway for which the Ukrainian war serves only as a surface level symbolic playing field. The true play happening beneath the surface are the major moves that BRICS are making…. Should these things continue to develop down this path, it brings an existential crisis to the U.S. and the entire Western banking hegemony which uses the fiat spell as their last grasp over their vassals of the world. They absolutely cannot allow this, which means that the closer that Russia brings the world towards either de-dollarization or some sort of global currency bifurcation, then the more the U.S./UK deepstate will push the world toward a great reset ‘war’, which will presumably start as a continental European war.
The prospect of a great reset war is alarming, but by no means improbable. Incidentally, Bloomberg has also reported that the dollar system is in trouble, so the prospect I discussed on my podcast of an end of the current US reserve currency seems likely. The US war machine cannot go on without this financial weapon. We are in for a long war. A hard rain is gonna fall. Sorry.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world
A long war will put enormous strain on our societies and our cultural lives. On the podcast this week I discuss the tug of war between social fragmentation, social cohesion, social progress. Over the next decade, as the effects of the international conflicts deepen, governing will need to refocus on these issues. I discuss these issu/es in my latest paid subscriber post, World Crisis - Social Fragmentation: Impact of longevity, family systems and mass higher education.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
The ongoing global conflicts will put strains on society and intelligent dialogue. In these circumstances, narrative will continue to be a poisonous weapon. But history can be an antidote to this poison. Because we all face the prospect of a long global war across many dimensions, including a culture war, we would all do well to turn to the consolations of history; not to seek nostalgia, but to live mindfully in the present.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive.
My podcast discusses Emmanuel Todd, Lineages of Humanity: A History of Humanity from the Stone Age to Homo Americanus (2017; trans 2019). It is a terrific book from the Burning Archive that I recommend. It provides a deep history account of
the paradox of the Anglosphere, a peripheral archipelago surrounding Eurasia, but one whose individualistic dynamism has driven the history of the world since the English political revolutions of the seventeenth century and the industrial revolution of the late eighteenth century. (p. xii)
Interstingly there was an interview with Todd in which he expressed surprise that in today’s intellectual climate he feels like Raymond Aron, the great liberal democratic intellectual who stood against the dominant attitudes of the French Left after World War Two. Aron wrote a book The Opium of the Intellectuals, that twisted Marx’s aphorism that religion was the opium of the people. Marxist ideas and Left sentiment had become the opium of the intellectuals. Aron argued not only against the ideological communists, but the general intellectual crowd, who closed their minds, and who tended to believe that people can “be divided into two camps, one the incarnation of good and the other of evil.” There is an appreciative 2014 essay on Aron’s 1955 book here. Todd said that after mass expansion of higher education and pervasive low-grade media, intellectuals are of lower quality than the 1950s. In this flood of low-grade intellectuals, common in the media, Todd said, Russophobia is the opium of the base intellectuals.
Check the video (in French but YouTube can generate autotranslation) here. The Aron remark is around the 24:00 mark. The whole interview is fascinating, not least due to Todd’s charming disarming of the prior assumptions of his interlocutor.
5. What surprised me most this week.
Victoria made an astonishingly bad decision to cancel the Commonwealth Games. Even so some in the media and a certain class of intellectual (such as Stephanie Dowrick and Virginia Trioli) displayed their habits to comply with the leader. #IstandwithDan trended again, surprise, surprise, on local Twitter. It is another sign of the post-democratic virus that has taken hold in Western societies. It was a reminder to get back to my next major writing project, Life After Western Democracy.
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to all my readers, supporters and subscribers across all platforms. Publishing Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing is quite a turning point for me. I am grateful that I can share this important moment with you all.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 110. Social Progress, Collapse and Fragmentation - 7 changes that define the modern world
On the YouTube Channel I published a new Channel Trailer and shorts on 13 Ways
On Twitter, I largely promoted Thirteen Ways
On SubStack I published my paid-subscriber piece on social fragmentation
I loaded all the course materials and updated the academy and course website for my online course business so I am on track to launch in the next fortnight.
Next week, my Mindful History online course will be completed. More details in next week’s newsletter.
I will be writing the next instalment of my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, Social Fragmentation that looks at elites vs the people tensions, elite competition and the work of Peter Turchin.
On Youtube I will post a video on middle powers to complement my earlier video on how many Superpowers.
On Friday the podcast will look at the trends of ageing, family systems and education, all of which were part of my 33 year career discussed in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I have begun rereading Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. I have an idea about doing a video series on Nobel Prize for Literature winners and how they offer glimpses into the history of the multipolar world on the YouTube channel. What do you think? Would that interest you?
I close the newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. This week I share a brief poem from Czeslaw Milosz, A Task. It is uncannily fitted to our times, although it was written in Berkeley, in voluntary exile, in 1970.
In fear and trembling, I would fulfil my life
Only if I brought myself to make a public confession
Revealing a sham, my own and of my epoch:
We were permitted to shriek in the tongue of dwarfs and demons
But pure and generous words were forbidden
Under so stiff a penalty that whoever dared to pronounce one
Considered himself as a lost man.
You can read the whole poem in his Collected Poems, 1931-1987 (1988)
Until next week, take care, and stay sane. Dare to speak pure and generous words.