The Long View

The Mark of the Civilizationist Perspective

What good is a civilizationist perspective? Many people live long and useful lives without addressing that question. Walter Russell Mead is no slacker in this respect, however, as we see in these comments on the future of Cuba, Castrodaemmerung: The Twilight of the Bros:

Something worth considering: for all his shortcomings, Castro in the last analysis is a man of the west, on the side of the Enlightenment against superstition. His view that Marxism is the acme of enlightened thought and the culmination of western intellectual advance was a great and costly mistake; nevertheless he cannot think that he has more in common with adulteress-stoning bigots in Iran than with the bourgeois West. I think he may actually view Chavez’ Iranian connection as both a political blunder and a moral misstep and, all things being equal, he would prefer to keep Cuba out of that particular dead end.

The gist of the piece is that Castro hopes for a Chinese future, a state with a party-capitalist economic system. We may note in this connection that this sort of model may be able to work only with a mercantilist trade strategy, since it distorts internal prices too much for a system based on internal consumption. Mercantilism as a growth strategy assumes global conditions that no longer exist, however. Not even the Chinese have a Chinese future in this regard.

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The study of torts is one of those types of learning that transform the world: the whole world becomes a warehouse of accidents waiting to happen, each with a compensatory price sticker attached. The study of millennialism has much the same effect. It turns ordinary news stories into omens of the endtime; or for the meta-minded, into the performance of some trope that is likely to appear as a sign of the end to people who don't use words like "trope." Here the Telegraph blogger Damian Thompson, who got a doctorate in the latter sort of study, uses its insights to spot an impending brand catastrophe:

I can’t help wondering if Google CEO Eric Schmidt has gone completely nuts by publicly acknowledging the possibility of a “Google implant” under the skin – even though he adds that such a development lies on the other side of a “creepy line” that his company would “probably” not cross. He must know that, for years, millions of fundamentalist Christians have predicted that the Mark of the Beast will take the form of an implanted microchip. As the Book of Revelation says, in Chapter 13 verses 16-17....I have just two words of warning for him: Procter and Gamble.

A quick keyword search finds more hits for people concerned that endtimers will be troubled by the Google Chip than expressions of trouble by any actual endtimers. This is also characteristic of Millennial Studies; endtimers for the most part are imperturbable folk who, with good reason, are no longer much surprised by anything.

In any case, I had a fair amount to do with Millennial Studies in the years before and just after 2000. You can find some of the papers I wrote for the conferences at Boston University on my website. In retrospect, the millennial anticipation of those years had a certain artificial quality, like a holiday invented by the Hallmark Company for the sole purpose of selling greeting cards. I remember remarking once or twice even at the conferences that 2012 seemed to attract more spontaneous popular interest than did the year 2000, and maybe in that I was right.

Incidentally, the Thompson posting includes a drawing of the Mark of the Beast, suitable for framing, by no less a person than Andy Warhol.

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There are civilizationist perspectives, and then there are civilizationist perspectives, as we see in this Gloomy Gus cover story by Time Magazine:

On a blistering evening in Phoenix recently, a group of prominent civic leaders met to talk about America. It didn't take long for the conversation to get around to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. That's what happens when smart Americans get to talking about politics these days. Topic A is the growing sense that our best days as a nation are behind us, that our kids won't live as well as we did, that China is in the driver's seat.

The Ottoman Empire? In Phoenix?

Like the stolid endtimers, we should not be surprised. Everything is perfectly on track in every respect.

By the way, if you are interested in the Ottoman Empire, whether its rise or decline, you could do worse than to read Lord Kinross's The Ottoman Centuries.