The Long View

The Orchids and the Weeds

By far the most interesting take on the significance of the storming of the Gaza relief ships last month was this operatic interlude from David Goldman:

The existential drama off the Gaza coast turns out to be a Turkish farce, the kind of low comedy that in 1782 Wolfgang Mozart set to music in the opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan playing the buffo-villain Osmin and Turkish self-exiled preacher and author Fethullah Gulen as the wise Pasha Selim...Erdogan's Islamists have run a two-year campaign of judicial activism against secular politicians, journalists and army officers, and secular critics long have alleged that Gulen is the clerical power behind the prime minister.

For the secretive Gulen to criticize the Turkish government in the midst of its public rage against Israel is an imam-bites-dog story. Gulen appears to have positioned himself as a mediator with Israel. Turkey does not want to end its longstanding relation-ship with Israel; it wants Israel to become a Turkish vassal-state in emulation of the old Ottoman model.

Imam Gulen lives in Pennsylvania, whither he retreated some years ago when the secularist establishment that used to run Turkey seemed to be on the point of arresting him. On June 4, the Wall Street Journal published an interview with him in which he criticized the tactics used by the pro-Palestinian activists and suggested that the incident could have been prevented through diplomacy. (His own website's account of the interview is more critical of Israel but says much the same thing.) The imam apparently runs an international network of schools of a variety that fit in with a respectable tradition of Islamic modernizers of a Sufic bent (enlivened in this case, apparently, by just a dash of Guenonian Tradition, chiefly by way of the influence of Seyyed Hossein Nasr).

The Ottoman Revival scenario is now being widely discussed; readers of this site may remember that George Friedman had a great deal to say about it in The Next 100 Years. He did not think that, ultimately, this revival would come to much. I am inclined to agree, though maybe not for the same reasons. The ambition is anachronistic, I think. The Ottoman system was tolerable because it was conservative. Gulen's enterprise, whatever its moderation, is not. Still, we may note that Goldman seems to be suggesting that Israel in some form would be allowed to continue to exist as a millet-state in a neo-Ottoman Grossraum. This is rather where Zionism started: discussions with Istanbul about the possibility of a Jewish homeland in the Levant.

In any event, we may note that this kind of opportunistic empire-mongering was posited in the 1990s as what would be the certain sign that the unipolar American world was breaking up. It certainly is true that the transnational world is breaking up, but more on that below.

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Signs of apocalyptic anxiety, or maybe just large holes, are multiplying in China, if we may believe Peter Foster at the Daily Telegraph:

Are there any reasonable explanations for spectacular sinkholes in China? After the spectacular picture of a sinkhole in Guatemala caused by tropical storm Agatha, the Chinese internet has been abuzz with reports of large numbers of the eerily circular formations suddenly appearing across China. And looking at the pictures, I half-share their collective shiver of anticipation that these things are unnatural portents of catastrophe.

On April 27, several sinkholes appeared one after another in Yinbin City . . . The end-of-the-world-is-nigh movie 2012 (was that the worst film ever made?) was a big hit in China, so it’s no surprise that lots of the discussion of these apparitions in the earth make reference to that. Closer and closer to 2012” warned one commenter on the Netease platform. "Will what was the ocean become [land]...and and what is now land become the ocean?," asked another. "Do aliens come out of these holes?," questioned a third.

2012 was popular in China? An ill portent indeed.

The apocalyptic landscape is shifting closer to home too, by the way. The pre-millenarian scenario has been remarkably stable in the West since the late 19th century. The scenario involved the expectation of the restoration of Israel prior to the universal endtime tyranny of a revived Roman Empire. As the historian Paul Boyer noted in When Time Shall Be No More, it persisted in part because its historical pessimism was not invariably misleading. Still, the details of the endtime have always been subject to revision in light of current events. This is still true today, when we learn that Euro-centric prophecy scholars looking to Rome all wrong:

After decades of reading popular prophecy books and even best-selling fiction like the "Left Behind" series, millions of evangelical Christians around the world are dreading the day when a beastly figure known as the Antichrist emerges as a global political and religious dictator. Most expect him to come from a revived Roman Empire, which many have assumed is associated with the Roman Catholic Church and the European Union.

Not so, argues a controversial new book that makes the case that the biblical Antichrist is one and the same as the Quran's Muslim Mahdi.

This revision looks like it was borrowed from the most common interpretation of Nostradamus, which has three antichrists, the last of them Islamic. By and by someone will point out that the Mahdi is not in the Koran.

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Another persistent old theme is The Man Who Sold the Moon model for the colonization of space, which the recent happily successful launching of the Falcon 9 has revived. Here is what I had to say about the matter seven years ago

Burt Rutan says that manned flight could be routine within the next ten years. I have been hearing that since I was eight years old. The difference now seems to be a convergence of private investment and the slow accumulation of off-the-shelf technology. This time, maybe there will be an industrial-technological breakthrough. Manned spaceflight may yet be The Next Big Thing. I would much prefer that to nano-technology, which I dislike almost as much as wireless.

The apparently impending construction of an inflatable private space station is particularly gratifying. Still, I cannot help but note that this sunny optimism shares the defect of Robert Heinlein's story: it's not at all clear how all this high frontiersmanship is supposed to pay for itself. The very enthusiasm is reminiscent of the beginning of the dot-com bubble. A space bubble would no doubt leave the world a better place even after it bursts (assuming that the burst is metaphorical and not one of the inflatable space stations). Before we get the bubble, however, we need a killer app.

But if such an app materializes, then maybe the whole Cold War-NASA period will turn out to have been just an anomalous pause, and history will get back on track. Perhaps in other areas, too?

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Not content with his detractions to date, Mark Steyn continues to characterize President Obama most cruelly:

Many Americans are beginning to pick up the strange vibe that for Barack Obama governing America is "an interesting sociological experiment". . . He would doubtless agree that the United States is "the place on earth that, if I needed one, I would call home. But he doesn't, not really: It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That's not to say he's un-American or anti-American, but merely that he's beyond all that. Way beyond. He's the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he's condescending to the job -- that it's really too small for him and he's just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

It is several decades too early to make this comparison with any exactitude, but permit me to quote from my review of Tom Holland's Rubicon:

And what shall we say of Caesar, that typical product of the late-Republican hot-house of dandies and ironists? No one thinks of him as one of history's great villains. He blew up a 500-year-old political system and depopulated Gaul by an eighth to raise political-campaign money, but he is remembered chiefly for his clemency. His very willingness to pardon his political opponents may itself have been a sign that the Republic was already fading from the mind of his generation. Marius and Sulla took great satisfaction in the defeat and destruction of their enemies; that was the reward for those who played the game. Caesar, one suspects, was part of a growing class of people who found the game merely tedious. They would play for renown and to save their lives, but it could no longer hold their complete attention.

Barack Obama is no Caesar on several levels, but he is in a situation in which anyone would find it difficult to look good. In foreign affairs, I do not see him as a man who is badly informed or maladroit, but as a man who is trying to operate a decrepit system and finding out that most of the controls are no longer connected to anything. Neither states nor publics respond to the same incentives and institutional loyalties as they did 20 years ago, or even 10. That is what the end of unipolarity means. It has little to do with what the Soviets would have called a shift in the correlation of forces.

Be that as it may, Steyn's viciousness knows no bounds:

In recent months, a lot of Americans have said to me that they had no idea the new president would feel so "weird". But, in fact, he's not weird. True, he's not, even in Democrat terms, a political figure – as, say, Clinton or Biden are. Instead, he's the product of the broader culture: There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultura pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. As someone once said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." When you've spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it's bound to be a disappointment.

Those observations may remind really long-term readers of this site of my review of Our Global Neighborhood, the report of the UN Commission on Global Governance issued in 1995:

If global civil society as we know it today is going to play a major historical role, however, it will have to do so in fairly short order. Global civil society, for all its cant about transcending the Eurocentric vision of the world, is in reality the progressive West in its purest form. Perhaps it was only in the antiseptic, concrete-and-glass world of U.N. politics that this exotic flower could have come to maturity. Global civil society, like the society of Palais Royale, probably belongs to that class of exotics which flower dramatically but briefly. Napoleon closed down the Palais Royale only a few years after it had been the political center of the world. Napoleon knew the difference between government and governance.

I think that perhaps a rock, indeed a barrage of rocks, has broken the glass of the global greenhouse, and the exotic varieties are already withering. The future belongs to the sturdy weeds.