The Civilization State
I just learned something deep and fundamental about Western social organization this morning. I was watching a video that gave some historical perspective on the differences and similarities between Turkey and Russia in the context of Erdogan’s recent demand that Russia relinquish claims over Crimea. This affects the price of tea in China and a new tack in my thinking.
The central premise which revives that old notion of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ might best be expressed colloquially in terms I regularly use here at Stoic Observations. I often make references to the cosmopolitans as contrasted to the yokels. These are similar to master statistician Tetlock’s use of the terms fox and hedgehog. The cosmopolitans and foxes are aligned on the side of knowing many things but being expert at none. Whereas the yokels and hedgehogs know one thing very well often at the exclusion of knowing anything else at all. These profiles extend to the realm of openness to experience that I use in the metaphors of monkeys who adventure far beyond the horizon providing new knowledge and trees who stand steadfast providing food and shelter.
I would say that here in the US, we tend to prefer in our society, the rule of the cosmopolitans over the expertise of yokels (which should probably infer geeks). We tend to prefer the secular over the religious. The broad mainstream over the arcane specialities. We have room for all, for we are a big country, but we do have problems reconciling the two, especially during the silly seasons of electoral manipulation. I think that this is the symptom of a bigger problem which is, quite frankly, rooted in the matter of the clash of civilizations and how we actually slice and dice up the world.
At contention between Russia and Turkey, Ukraine and the Crimea are the fate of borders in the context of the international order and the hidebound Treaty of Westphalia. How dare I say hidebound? Well, when I watched the towers fall, the first thing out of my mouth was “This is the end of the nation-state as we know it.” Indeed, it ushered in this, the era of asymmetric warfare and networked alliances that defy borders. In many ways, my cult of geeks are responsible for turning societies on their heads through the many miracles of computer-mediated networked communications and therefore networked relationships. But yeah Foucault figures in this as well as McLuhan. What I wish to stress to you today is the way in which this fundamentally alters our view of the world as compared to the alternative.
The Discrete vs the Holistic
The cosmopolitan is discrete. International borders and thus international laws are discrete. We recognize the individual as sovereign and this sovereignty we expect to be axiomatically defended by a constitutional law which guarantees and defends that discrete individual within the borders of a nation. This is the fundamental characteristic of the citizen in terms of rights and responsibilities under the rule of secular law. This secular law is subject to amendment within a structure of representation in a republic which is the state. Yes? Are you with me?
What about the other side of that? We insist on a separation between Church and State, but that separation is a matter of decentralization of power which is a marvelous and necessary thing. But, we need culture. Culture is not discrete, it is dynamic and unbounded. Culture is holistic. It is many things at once in and out of balance. It is the various smells of our home from week to week and room to room. Culture includes our families and our creeds, our ethnic habits and accents of speech.
The very size and structure of the United States forces us, like empires before us, to deal with the conflicts inherent in the necessity of conformity with the rule of law & the policies of institutions both of which need to be stable and the demands of culture, of the arts, of flavors, of the interchange of families and social traditions which tend to be more encompassing.
Both give a sense of propriety and security, but which must ultimately rule? What do we do when one side subverts the other? To which must we pledge in the end?
Forgive me, but this idea is fresh in my mind - it’s a windshield with many cracks which have suddenly become visible. But I hope I have conveyed the essence of the division.
Civilization
The Civilization State wants to defy discrete borders because it represents a way of life that has continuity across time and space. Law and order doesn’t work that way. Judaism does. The Second Amendment doesn’t work that way. The recipe for pizza and for gunpowder does. Citizenship doesn’t work that way. The English language does.
So what is our civilization? China is more a civilization than a state. Turkey is more a civilization than a state. The former Soviet Union is more a civilization than a state. Europe is more a civilization than a state. This is true for America and is is true of the British Empire, but we are certainly the baby of the bunch. Therefore we need to think a bit more strategically about our ability to see ourselves as something like an empire, a civilization. It is only childish of us to think of ourselves as merely ‘the world’s policeman’. We are not merely a state. Sweden is a state. Argentina is a state. Poland is a state. We have the reserve currency of the planet. We have the territorial integrity that will not crumble until the Rockies do. We have the largest growing population; we have the greatest immigration potential. We have the breadbasket and the shale oil for another 100 years no matter which way the climate goes, and every great power in the multipolar world knows it which is why they want to influence us.
We Americans are Christian, Muslim, Atheist… blah blah you know we are everything. We have appropriately decentralized our powers and we are well-adjusted to working via secular and canon laws. We are still yet uncomfortable with keeping a keen eye on our civilizational role in world affairs, moreover in seeing ourselves appropriately.
So I have come to the preliminary conclusion that our focus on the discrete, cosmopolitan, secular and static republic makes us more provincial than civilizational to the extent that it discounts and dismisses the yokel, dynamic, holistic, religious, and transcendently cultural.
The danger posed by the centralization of power and influence of the cosmopolitan, discrete and secular is that it quite simply defeats the other. So we have to resist the allure of the cosmopolitan fox. We have to accept the strange grubbiness of the yokel hedgehog. This is a balance that I think we understand at a certain level, but we have been subject to authoritarian overproduction. These are contexts that are fairly well understood in the mainstream, but let’s review them.
COVID. We attempted to suppress all yokel sovereignty with ‘the science’. We failed to let people fail of their own accord. We over-centralized without sufficient expertise supported by open inquiry. We attempted to make a particular individual, Fauci, represent the law, the word of the republic, the cosmopolitan hero.
Education. Let’s put it simply. I believe we have come to a point in our history in which the ability of capable parents to educate their own children has become unaffordable. Which is to say homeschooling and moral education of the sort that provides civilizational continuity has become the province of the affluent. That which is afforded to the common man is overly determined by cosmopolitans. That educational system has failed us.
I don’t want to overburden this new perspective of mine, so I’ll leave it at that. Nevertheless, I get a very strong sense that we have created, as cosmopolitans, novel ‘communities’ to which we market without any sense of history or holistic viewpoints. We have become intersectionally discrete. We believe too much in the aggregation of minorities into secular majorities while doing damage to organic traditions. We have sliced and diced generations and even attacked our own understanding of what a woman is, out of fear and ignorant intransigence. I think we’re killing off our hedgehogs because we believe too much in a cosmopolitan, secular, majoritarian sense of law and order in defiance of decentralization of power, local control and leaving weirdos to their own devices.
We are becoming statist and losing our grasp on liberty, and becoming more credulous to utopian temptations. That’s not what a proper civilization does. I believe our greatest leaders, past and present, kept faith in an American empire - a civilization state that looked outward rather than inward. One that could accept its nooks and crannies, oddments and sharp angles. One that could tolerate the temporary, accept the fleeting, embrace the fluidity of human nature without trying to box, package, market, politicize and march onward like robotic soldiers.
When I began writing this, I did so with a vague understanding of my own suggestion that I would make a recommendation to vote for this or that candidate. It turns out that in writing this it has become clearer which candidate is more likely to fit what I want America to consider, and it was an inversion of my previous recommendation which I now admit was a bit short-sighted. I’ll publish that other thing after the election.