WESTERN MAN SINKING INTO THE QUICKSAND OF HIS DECEIT AND HUBRIS
Is this the end of Western Dominance?
IS THIS END OF
WESTERN DOMINANCE?
“I maintain, then, that scientific psychology (and, it may be added, the
psychology of the same kind that we all unconsciously practice when we try to
"figure to ourselves" the stirrings of our own or others' souls) has,
in its inability to discover or even to approach the essence of the soul,
simply added one more to the symbols that collectively make up the Macrocosm of
the culture-man. Like everything else that is no longer becoming but become, it
has put a mechanism in place of an organism. We miss in its picture that which
fills our feeling of life (and should surely be “soul" if anything is) the
Destiny-quality, the necessary directedness of existence, the possibility that
life in its course actualizes.
I do not believe that the word "Destiny" figures in any psychological
system whatsoever — and we know that nothing in the world could be more remote
from actual life experience and knowledge of men than a system without such
elements. Associations, apperceptions, affections, motives, thought, feeling, will
— all are dead mechanisms, the mere topography of which constitutes the
insignificant total of our "soul-science." One looked for Life and
one found an ornamental pattern of notions. And the soul remained what it was,
something that could neither be thought nor represented, the secret, the
ever-becoming, the pure experience.”
Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936), German historian and
philosopher, The Decline of the West, Volume 1: Form and Actuality,
1918
“Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery
(the media) that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is
required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating
under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that
the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going
enslavement that has ever existed”
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Volume 2: Perspectives of World
History, 1922
CONSTANT
GARDENER THROUGH TIME
One of the ironies of
the times is that the complexions and complexities of the world are changing so
rapidly that we get the feeling that we are truly in a new day. Yet, when
a historian out of the past, in this case, German Oswald Spengler,
is quoted with his assessment of the plight of the West, it reads as if the ink
is not yet dry though written nearly one hundred years ago. Why is
that? Could it be that we never learn from history?
At the height of the
Roman Empire, it stretched from Britain and the Atlantic to North Africa
and Mesopotamia. In the fourth century, it was menaced by Germanic
tribes, principally the Visigoths. The Visigoths chieftain, Alaric, was
in his mid-twenties. In 395 A.D., Emperor Theodosius the Great died, and
the Roman Empire was divided into Eastern and Western divisions. The
Western Roman Empire was moved from Rome to Ravenna, northwest of Rome on
the Aegean Sea, as it was believed to be a more defensible city to ward
off invaders. Ravenna was the capital from 402 until Rome was sacked in
476. A.D., ending the Western Roman Empire.
The Fall of Rome was a process
of decline in the Western Roman Empire in which it failed to enforce the rule
of law, to maintain a vibrant economy at home by keeping its people employed,
engaged in enriching activities, and in good health. Instead, it became
embroiled in politics and incapable of managing, securing, and logistically
supporting its far-flung empire. What had led to Rome’s greatness was now
crushing it through its lack of viable leadership, obvious dysfunction, and
patent neglect.
Rome
lost its knack for innovation, engineering, and decisive action in governance
and military leadership. The Visigoths used heavy horses to trudge
through the Roman flanks as steeled armor tanks would centuries later, while
fertile fields at home lay untilled, as farmers were made soldiers, which
resulted in Rome being unable to feed its army or its people. Rome had
exercised draconian control throughout the empire by having the best army and
governance on the planet with a vibrant and supportive culture back home in
Rome.
The first collapse
was that of the culture. Christianity had become the state religion in
305 A.D. with Emperor Constantine, but Rome had been conditioned for centuries
with other religious practices.
The “idea of Rome”
was fading and with it the efficiency of civil authority, the cohesiveness of
patriotic Roman citizenship throughout the Empire, and the competence of its
Emperors. But the world was changing and Rome refused to acknowledge much
less change with it.
This was evident with
the increasing influx of “barbarians” from the North sullying the Roman culture
with foreign languages, primitive practices, and customs countermining Roman
identity and pride in Roman citizenship.
The collapse of Rome
began in 376 A.D. with a large-scale upsurge of Goths. This disturbance
upset the social integrity and cultural balance of Roman citizenry and led to
clashes of violence.
In 476 A.D., Flavian
Odoacer, an Arian Christian, disposed of the Roman Emperor Romulus and became
emperor, but was not at all effective in distributing the spoils throughout the
empire to his favorites, weakening the empire further, dying in 493. The
die was cast.
Three
hundred years of the West were to be suspended in indifference during the Dark
Middle Ages, or until Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman
Empire in 800.
That said there is a
lesson to be learned in this decline and eventual collapse. The legacy of
the Visigoths and their sacking of Rome led to the modern world that gestated
for 300 years before emerging with Charlemagne. Historians tell us that
without that break with Roman dominance the modern world might never
exist.
DECLINE IN ERA OF FACEBOOK
After WWII, the
United States was the supplier of products and services to a recovering world
from that war. In the seventy years that have followed, the world has
recovered to a considerable degree and has become as some would describe
a “global village.” This has been enhanced by the ubiquitous
Internet in this Information Age, as the population of the world,
continues to swell with the chronic conflict and chaos that
entails.
India, with more than
1.5 billion people, has a middle class of more than 300 million, roughly the
equivalent of the population of The United States. China, a once and
possibly future Super Power has even more impressive numbers,
building new cities as fast as homes were once built.
Japan has had several
booms and busts since 1945, as has South Korea, while Indonesia, a nation of
thousands of islands, is in the midst of a frenetic climate of technological
change and economic expansion.
This illustrates a
data point of the future, but not the subtext. Global society is
out-of-control with democracies breaking out and then perishing as if
overnight.
There
was the “Arab Spring” where democratic uprisings arose
independently and spread across the Arab world in 2011. It all started in
Tunisia in December 2010 and quickly took hold in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen,
Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Jordon, only to fizzle out in many of these nations
returning to even more draconian control.
The “Arab
Spring” started with demonstrations and protests both nonviolent and
violent that led to riots and civil wars in the Arab world that began in
December 2010 in Tunisia and spread throughout the countries of the Arab League
and its surroundings. By mid-2012 the Arab Spring had
cooled considerably to be called the “Arab Winter,” especially
for North Africa and the Middle East.
The most radical
sustained disruption from the Arab Spring was then and
continues to be in Syria where that nation remains engaged in a civil war.
The “Arab
Spring” is often compared to the “Russian Revolution of 1989,” when
the Soviet Union fell, along with several Eastern European and Second World
countries. Formerly part of the Soviet bloc, they won independence, and
became known as the “Autumn of Nations.”
This latter
revolution was not about effective civil disobedience or the organization and
role of the Internet technologies. It saw a narrow window open with the
collapse of the Soviet Union and acted.
Syria’s civil war, to
date, has resulted in more than 100,000 citizens being killed and several
million being displaced from their homes, jobs, schools, and businesses as
nearly every major city in the nation is in some state of ruin from the
constant bombings from Russia, the United States, and Great Britain as well as
the Syrian Air Force.
Russia
and Iran have entered in support of Syrian President Basher al-Assad while The
United States, NATO, and United Nations remain somewhat ambivalent in the
collective support of the many factions of rebels.
Muammar
Gaddafi (1942 – 2011) of Libya came to power in a coup d’état in 1969 but
during the Arab Spring was hunted down
and killed in 2011. Today, the country is in shambles with regions
controlled in part by terrorist factions of ISSI and ISSL with segments
claiming to be an Islamic State.
Meanwhile, the United
States, which has gone from a supporter of the world in recovery along with
being the world’s lone policeman, has taken on the additional role of
nation-building in Afghanistan and Iraq with somewhat embarrassing
outcomes.
No matter in which
direction you examine the activities of the United States, a parallel comes to
mind of the plight of Rome those many centuries before in which it was
embroiled in similar circumstances.
Rome destroyed
Jerusalem, crushed the Jewish center of its religion in 70 A.D., only to adopt
Christianity as its state religion in 305 A.D. As Oswald Spengler opines, the soul is
always in the subtext of events.
TECHNOCRATS TO NETOCRATS
The
power in today’s society where representative democracy is still in place is
the media. Journalists have never had such powerful tools before in
communicating instantly wherever they are with their smartphones while flying
to where the action is across the globe at Mach speed.
We have come full
circle. Clerics once were the only literate class to keep records,
chronicle events, and flatter those in charge to think they were in power – be
they kings or emperors – when they controlled the agenda. Then, we became
a technocratic and bureaucratic society in which “specialists” had the ear of
power, and often moved up to such positions.
Now, we have media
types. They benefit from the netocrats who have
developed all these wondrous “Toys of the Mind.” Like the
primitive Visigoths marching into Rome, netocrats, and their
genius for intrusion, now invade our homes and private spaces at will and are
changing our world forever.
[Alexander Bard and
Jan Soderqvist present this idea in The New Power Elite and Life
after Capitalism (2002). This is covered in NOWHERE MAN IN
NOWHERE LAND – PART FIVE.]
We have journalists
acting as instant historians promoting a gospel that is meant to entertain but
not necessarily to provoke thoughtful and appropriate action. Consider
journalists such as Thomas Freidman
and his The World is Flat (2005). The title is a
metaphor for viewing the world as a level playing field in terms of commerce
where all competitors have an equal opportunity with geographical boundaries
and divisions increasingly irrelevant. This metaphor applies equally to
countries, companies, cultures, societies, and individuals. He may be
prescient but his role is to amuse because it calls for no action.
Journalists and media
types bombard the airwaves with their views, and these are repeated so
frequently that people address each other as if a ventriloquist is
speaking. Oswald Spengler asks
the rhetorical question, “What is truth? For the multitude truth
is that which it continually reads and hears.”
[We also see
how netocrats and the media are puppet masters in the current
campaign run-up to the office of the President of The United States, but that
is for another segment.]
Buried deep in the
subtext of “free trade” is an absurd idea when it comes to the nature of people
and nations. If the world was engaged in actual free trade, would the
United States be approaching a deficit of $20 trillion?
Trade with China has
added considerably to this deficit with manufacturing and jobs of the United
States going to China. The same is true with the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) where we find jobs and manufacturing
going to Mexico. Then, too, many American companies are relocating
headquarter to operate in Canada or Mexico to avoid taxes and/or higher wages
to American workers.
Meanwhile, largely in
the last quarter-century, the American workforce has changed from being
primarily blue-collar to white-collar and professionals, requiring much more
formal education and a completely different skillset on the job.
Ross Perot, the American
businessman who ran for President of the United States in 1992, denigrated
NAFTA during that campaign with the slogan “the sucking sound down south,”
referencing jobs going to Mexico.
Incredibly, you can
find as many economists defending trade with China and NAFTA, as you can find
economists against these practices, and they are supposed to be in the
know.
RISE OF CIVIL RELIGION
Religion is always in
the mix whatever the economic system. Sixteenth-century Europe with
the rise of the Protestant Work Ethic, inspired by the writings of John Calvin and translated into an
economic philosophy by Max Weber is
fading as Oswald Spengler noted in
the early 20th century.
The problem, as Spengler sees it, is that there is no
soul in capitalism. In this secular society of the 21st century without a soul,
capitalism has become the civil religion. It is not only profits over
people, but anything goes that leads to this end.
Money is the central
theme in the campaign debates of these presidential candidates of both
political parties in the current chapter of that quadrennial madness. The
way money remains central to the discourse is that these candidates always talk
about jobs and how they are going to make the American economy robust
again. With Senator Bernie Sanders,
there is no reason to be subtle about this. He promotes the idea of
everyone having a job, free college education, and healthcare with his voodoo
economics. The other candidates of both parties do the same but with more
circumspect rhetoric.
“Socialism,” writes Oswald Spengler, “is nothing
but capitalism of the lower classes.” What Spengler doesn’t say, but
is also true, and that is corporate welfare is nothing but capitalism
for the upper classes. It is a case of choosing your
poison.
The stagflation of
the 1970s found the U.S. President, Congress, and the Federal Reserve
abandoning “Keynesian consensus” of the “golden age of capitalism” by first
blaming American labor and its demands, and then finding ways to export the
best-paying jobs abroad to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Mexico where
workers are paid far less. It is not difficult to substitute
the Decline of the West with this typology:
• After four centuries
for Europe and one century for the United States, we are living in the twilight
zone of Euro-American capitalistic dominance;
• The “Barbarians at the Gate” are not Rome’s
Visigoths, but terrorists, illegal immigrants, and idle American factory
workers, against the rising economic competition from the Far East;
• Luxurious living and
failure to husband the planet’s natural resources has led to global warming,
pollution, displacement, and the closing down of many viable options;
• Restless populations,
ethnic tension, domestic strife, civil unrest at home and abroad, a
deterioration in language and common civility, and social justice find the
Protestant Christian religion and culture no longer dominant.
This has resulted in
inevitable pushback, which Kevin Phillips reduces to a new American
radicalism and decline. His argument is reflected in his book, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical
Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (2006).
Phillips looks back
to the 1970s at what havoc has resulted from that nightmarish ideological
period of fiscal irresponsibility, political corruption, greed, and
shortsightedness which he claims seeded the current crisis.
Coincidentally, I write about the same period in A Look Back to See
Ahead (2007):
The 1970s was a time
when young people were forced to participate in an unpopular war; when political
upheaval was in the air; when corrupt politicians who lied and deceived the
electorate reached a crescendo with Watergate; when drugs were ruining lives;
when morality took a holiday; when new forms of bigotry and hatred were
hatching; when the automotive industry was in sharp decline, while foreign
automakers were eating our lunch; when an energy crisis rocked the land with
OPEC’s oil embargo; when a paranoid president hunkered down and became a law
unto himself; when Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face
them, and left the future up for grabs.
Phillips's
unifying theme of oil and the role oil has played in American and world
politics was heightened when the Evangelicals took control of the Republican
Party and promoted a “debt culture” as the legacy of the 1970s. He argues
that extraneous events in the past have derailed world powers before, such as
the Roman Empire and Great Britain at the peak of their respective dominance,
signaling decline and ultimately falling off into disarray.
THE 1970s AND BEYOND
If America’s capitalistic system is in decline can it be dated with any
confidence? Perhaps the 1970s? Surely, the 1970s provides the mise-en-scene of
that possibility as everything has been unraveling ever since.
There was the oil issue, of course, and the “Silent
Majority” of the American theocracy asserting its will; and the high jinx
of the Watergate scandal with the keystone robbers of The Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), breaking into the
Watergate building in a comedy of high jinx more suitable to a work of fiction.
This was followed by the Watergate hearings, the discovery of the Nixon tapes,
which led to the resignation of President
Nixon, followed by the presidential pardon by President Ford.
In the midst of all this, there was the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam
War for no other reason than to show the president was doing something in that
war to ensure his reelection. Meanwhile, the OPEC embargo resulted in critical shortages of gasoline at the
pumps of American service stations.
President Carter was then elected president
replacing President Ford, finding him
giving a “fireside chat” to the
nation dressed in a cardigan sweater scolding Americans that they had a “crisis in confidence,” as the economy
drifted into double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation. If this was
not enough, there was the Iran Hostage
Crisis of 1979 where sixty-some American diplomatic employees were held
hostage by Iran for 444 days. Americans were not happy campers in the 1970s as
they had lost their moral compass and their way.
This chaos started early in the morning of June 17, 1972, when several burglars
were arrested inside the office of The
Democratic National Committee (DNC), located in the Watergate building in
Washington, D.C. Members of President
Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught attempting to install wiretap
phones in the offices of the DNC as well as to steal secret documents. A
cover-up followed, “hush money” was raised and paid to these burglars for their
silence, and to keep the FBI out of the loop.
To add the absurd to the ridiculous, this madcap performance was the second
break-in, as the first attempt at espionage proved to have resulted in a faulty
wiretap, and they were in the process of installing a new microphone when
caught.
In August 1974, Richard Nixon
resigned, Vice President Gerald Ford
became president, and immediately pardoning Nixon for all crimes he committed
or may have committed while in office. The Watergate scandal changed American
politics forever leading Americans to question their leadership and to think
more critically about the presidency.
Amidst this imbroglio, Arab members of OPEC proclaimed an oil embargo in
October 1973 which ended in March 1974. The price of oil had risen from $3 a
barrel to $12 across the globe, and significantly higher in the United States.
It was later called the “first oil
shock,” but would be repeated again and again over time up to the present.
Author Kevin Phillips uses this canvas to argue his thesis against the rise of The Silent Majority led by the
Pentecostals and how the United States' foreign policy became predicated on
oil, the politics of oil, and the theocratic demands of this new majority.
He writes that the U.S. imports 60 percent of its oil, up from 33 percent in
the early 1970s. As of April 1, 2016, about 78 percent of gross petroleum
imports were crude oil, up from 2015. Americans consume 25 percent of the
world’s daily oil production. Of the 520 million cars in the world, 200 million
are driven by Americans, while the U.S. makes up only 5 percent of the world’s
population.
At this writing, because there is a glut of oil on the market, gasoline at the
pump is just under $2.00 a gallon with the price of oil per barrel of crude at
$40.00, which Phillips sees could easily go back to $100 a barrel or more. With
the newly expanding economies of China and India, this is not inconceivable.
Phillips sees the glory of the 20th century now the burden of the 21st century:
“Oil has soaked deeply – in all likelihood indelibly – into the politics and
power structure of the United States, partly because over two bountiful
centuries it has also seeped, sprouted, and oozed up from so many sections of
so many states. More than fuel, oil became a heritage and also the
basis of a lifestyle.”
The spread of “born-again Christianity”
and oil dependency has influenced foreign affairs and was to become
personalized in the theocratic Presidency
of George W. Bush then corrected
in the Presidency of Barak Obama,
only to be reasserted once again in the 2016 Presidential Campaign.
There is a reason for the American electorate to be suspect of the presidency
in light of the nation’s ambivalence over the past score of years:
• We have had the preemptive war in Iraq and Afghanistan;
• The withdrawal of troops, creating a vacuum for ISSI and ISSL, then trickling
troops back into the fray anticlimactically;
• The drawing of a metaphorical red line threatening action should the Syrian
government use poison gas against its people, then doing nothing when the line
was crossed;
• The stalled economies of the US and Europe is found in the impotence of doing
anything;
• The building and testing of nuclear weapons by North Korea seemingly helpless
to intervene;
• The threat of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists;
• The chronic stagnation of the civil war in Syria, and
• The delayed closing of Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (GTMO).
Against these lingering vacillations, the religious fundamentalists are
eclipsing moderate Protestantism and becoming the driving force to name the
next president. Phillips writes:
“The Presbyterian Church, the Episcopal
Church, the United Church of Christ, the Congregationalists, and the Methodists
lost between 500,000 and 2 million members each, the last being the Methodist
slippage. In the meantime, the Southern Baptist Convention added 6 million, the
Mormons 3.3 million, the Pentecostal Assemblies of God 2 million, and the
Church of God (Tennessee) some 600,000.”
Phillips claims one in four Americans is now affiliated with some
self-described evangelical church, an estimate that does not include the rising
number of Mormons and members of other sects, nor does it include the evolution
of the troubled Roman Catholic Church in America.
This fundamentalism is not new as it flourished in 18th century Europe as
evangelicals established the Protestant
Work Ethic. President Bush’s
strongest support was from evangelicals and practicing Christians generally,
whereas President Obama’s greatest
support was from African Americans, Hispanics, and women. That support has
faded as of February 18, 2014, as the poll indicated that 71 percent regretted
voting for him.
In the presidential election of 2004, of those who attended church more than
once a week, 70 percent said they voted for President Bush; of those who went to church only a few times a
year, 40 percent voted for Bush. Phillips argues that the Republican Party is
becoming the first American religious party in defiance of the separation of
church and state.
Another aspect of the slippage of capitalistic society, according to Phillips,
is the personal debt of most Americans and the national debt of the United
States. He claims it began thirty years ago with the Reagan Administration (1981 – 1989) when the federal government,
American consumers, homeowners, and businesses borrowed at a much faster rate
than their incomes grew.
This led to the total collapse of the American economy in 2008, nearly leading
to a great depression. Recovery was tied to the Federal Government’s
bailout of banks, Wall Street, and the automotive industry. This action was simply
postponing an inevitable future collapse by assuming the escalation of the
nation’s debt now.
America’s level of debt is at its highest during the last hundred years and
climbing. The National Debt in:
• 1988 – end of Reagan Administration:
$2.6 trillion
• 2008 – end of George W. Bush
Administration: $10 trillion
• 2016 – end of Barak Obama
Administration: $19 trillion
Whether it is a Democratic or Republican Administration nothing puts a brake on
spending. While Republicans take pride in fiscal responsibility and
conservative principles, they spend as wildly as do Democrats.
This is a threat to prosperity and could bring the economy to an economic
cataclysmic halt, as neither party demonstrates a willingness to deal with
government programs such as healthcare, social security, unemployment
insurance, or government subsidies for corporate enterprises.
Nowhere Man continues to stir the American economic drink threatening to drive
it permanently into Nowhere Land.
Meanwhile, Euro-American capitalists dance on the edge of the abyss in this
Nowhere Land with The European Economic
Community (EEC) mirroring many of the same problems of the United States
only to a more critical extreme. Consider the insolvency of Greece and the
failure of its austerity program. Then there is the economic tension and close
to the economic collapse of many EEC members with the possible exception of
Germany. Nowhere Man has found a home in Europe as well as the United States.
REBIRTH IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS
We have seen the terrorist group Hamas crush the Fatah Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in democratic
elections in 2006, while the democratic elections in South America in 2005
brought socialists to power in Bolivia, Venezuela and Chile. Most stunning was
the victory for the indigenous people of Venezuela. South American societies
are transitioning from agrarian reform to a belated industrial revolution in
the climate of the Information Age.
Disturbing as this chaos might seem, it is consistent with the broad sweep of
history. The struggle between Persia and the West for control of the Middle
East has been going on since the start of human civilization.
Persia has become Iran and has the religious element of Shia Moslems versus
Western Sunni Moslems elsewhere throughout the region. Then, the last hundred
years are a continuation of 2500 years of war between Persia and the West to
rule the trade routes and control the people and their indigenous cultures.
More directly, we are experiencing the impact of WWI on The Middle East and
Europe as well. The war destroyed the old order and set in motion various
trends and movements that have still not run their full course. The Ottoman Empire was the first victim
of that war. It had allied itself with Germany and Austria against Great
Britain, France, Russia, and ultimately, the United States. The spoils of war
always go to the victors. The WWI Peace
Agreement at Versailles punished Germany and Austria and led to the rise of
Adolf Hitler and WWII.
The Allies essentially divided the Ottoman Empire between themselves. An even
more important role in shaping the region's future was played out by the
implicit forces of modern nationalism, which had been developing among various
groups in the area (see Grolier
Multimedia Encyclopedia).
More than four centuries after Europe imposed its presence and will in the New
World with its explorers and Christian missionaries, we are seeing notable
pushback in South America and the reemergence of its ancient original cultures.
This is consistent with nature in which any form no matter how twisted into
another form will eventually return to its original state. The question
remains: will this continue or will this cultural and political renewal drift
back into Nowhere Land and dependence on the West?
There is precedence for this concern. South Africa ended its policy of buried
apartheid and the draconian separation of the black races by the white
Afrikaner government when The African
National Congress (ANC) came to power and elected Nelson Mandela as its first president in an all-race election in
1994. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, the Reverend
Desmond Tutu, danced with joy as he cast his ballot, calling the change in
government “a religious experience, a
transfiguration experience, a mountaintop experience.”
When the country voted twenty years later in 2014, he said with sorrow, “I didn’t think there would be a
disillusionment so soon. I’m glad that Nelson Mandela is dead. I’m glad that
most of these people are no longer alive to see this.”
The Reverend Desmond Tutu was
referencing the myriad of chronic problems facing the new South Africa:
unemployment, corruption, poverty, crime, murder, illiteracy, mental and
physical illness, including HIV/AIDS, problems that were much less widespread
during apartheid.
South West African Township (SOWETO)
was home to nearly a million Bantu when I lived in Johannesburg in 1968.
Although it was not an ideal place to live, it appears to be far superior to
the hundreds of squatter camps spread throughout South Africa in the 21st
century, places without running water, sanitation, and security.
Yet, despite this assessment, South Africa remains the most advanced country
in Africa with thriving cities that are integrated into a global economy.
Millions of Bantu have been educated and risen out of poverty and hopefully
will establish a foundation upon which to build the future.
The rest of Africa is a battleground, but what would you expect after hundreds
of years under colonial rule? Africa entered the modern era as the possession
of one or more European nations, such colonial powers as Britain, France,
Germany, Belgium, and Portugal. These nations cut up the continent like it was
a cake to exploit its rich resources to build their empires.
The destiny of the 48 sub-Saharan African states continues to be shaped by this
legacy. Countries such as Zimbabwe,
Tanzania, Uganda, the Central African Republic Djibouti, and Gabon still carry the haunting shadow
of their recent colonial past.
This has created a dichotomy within Africa. You have a Western-imposed system
of political governance that follows its economic model, living standards, and
social norms; and then you have standards that are set by Africans that may
emulate Western ideals while retaining African social norms, and an infrastructure
(organization) and wealth distribution consistent with those norms.
The disparity between these two standards has been the foundation for Africa’s
relationship with its former colonial masters and the rest of the world.
Africans are moving in the direction of establishing their own identity and
control.
When you shed the yoke of your codependent benefactor, chaos is likely to be
experienced in both a personal and societal sense. Africa is often viewed as a
dysfunctional continent riddled with institutional corruption, torn apart in
civil war, ethnic conflict and civil strife, deteriorating infrastructure,
endemic poverty, and pandemic disease. It is. This is the norm, but not the
reality.
Underlying this surface turmoil, a professional middle class is emerging that
is engaged in politics, government, business, medicine, science, industry, the
military, and education. One hundred years into the future, Africa is likely to
be pivotal to global power. It may take that long to completely unshackle
Africa from the die the West has cast over this continent for the past 600
years. Africa now has to move out of the shadow of the West to establish its own
identity reacquainting itself with its ancient civilizations.
The United States once a colonial subject fought for and won its independence,
only to treat the American Indians as the Europeans had treated the Incas, Aztecs, and the Mayas. These empires, once regal in
their own right, looked on the invaders as if gods, only to be conquered,
murdered, and displaced, their cultures destroyed, their temples desecrated,
and their civilizations left in ashes.
Isn’t it strange that the narcissism of the West deemed it was being humane to convert these New World societies to Christianity and Western culture at the expense of what they had known and had been for centuries? This echoes the sentiment of one American general, Peter Gregg Arnett (born in 1934), is quoted as saying about the Battle of Bến Tre in Vietnam: "'It became necessary to destroy the town (village) to save it.”
It was European culture that proselytized the New World into the Christian
faith. It was European science that later sought connection with the universe,
and for that endeavor came to question the validity of Christianity and the
role of God and religion in an emerging technological society.
It was European economic philosophy that first invented capitalism, which rose
to prominence in the Industrial
Revolution. However, the excesses of capitalism would give rise to
communism and clashes between the wealth creators and workers over the means
and control of production and the profits generated. This continues to this
day.
And it was the European colonizers who seeded and then cultivated the cultural
programming of Western biases, beliefs, and practices into the natives of this
New World.
The United States, which has been above the fray, taking comfort in the
security of being separated from Europe and Asia by two great oceans changed
overnight when the Japanese bombed Pearl
Harbor on December 7, 1941, immediately declaring war on the Axis Powers of
Japan and Germany entering the Second
World War. That entanglement and war exposed the nation to foreign affairs
to which it has had an ambiguous and ambivalent history.
The world is now in a new day with nations around the globe struggling to
remove the final psychological shackles of Western colonialism. From that
uncertainty, the world is forging into a mainly non-white, non-European, and
non-Western future, which is neither a good nor a bad thing, but only reality.
Western influence in terms of economic and military clout, control of commerce,
and trade is likely to continue for some time. Civilizations characteristically
change with the momentum of the equivalent of tectonic shifts.
This is so because emerging non-Western societies will continue to be imitative
and reflective of the West. It was true of the Romans who couldn’t look past
the influence of the Greeks. Likewise, evolving democracies in South America,
Africa, and the Middle East cannot seem to look past Western democracies even
with their unconcealed contempt.
The low-brow culture of the West is explicitly present in Second and Third
World countries with the “Golden Arches” of McDonald’s fast-food empire, along
with the blazing marquees of Walmart supermarkets everywhere promising fast
service at cheap prices.
Unfortunately, Western utopian optimism is not always a comforting sign.
Nowhere Man is the face behind the mask, yet another American contradiction.
The irony is that The United States continues to survive despite the
out-of-control “cut & control” ax grinder obsession with the idea of progress
that finds it stumbling forward into Nowhere Land.
The question that must be asked: will these emerging nations follow America’s
folly into the tank, or will they emulate America’s energy, industry,
sacrifice, courage, dedication, and struggle that led to its greatness,
fostering the idea of democracy before greed, paranoia, duplicity, and
impatience took hold?
THE AMERICAN LION
The United States rose fractionally and uncertainly until the early nineteenth
century when a general from humble beginnings, poorly educated and considered
mainly uncouth rose out of the wilds of the Carolina-Tennessee valley with
muscular leadership heretofore unseen in America’s brief history.
Andrew Jackson (1767 – 1845) was an
authentic countrified American, who fought the American Indians as a boy and
lived with them as well. His father died before he was born, and his mother
died of cholera when he was fourteen, leaving him an orphan to fend for himself
and his brothers. This found him fighting against the British in the American Revolution (1783 – 1787).
Later, as an American general with restless bravado, he stymied the British
when they attempted to reassert themselves in the American continent in the Battle of New Orleans (1815).
Ten years later, a self-trained lawyer, now a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, was
denied the presidency in 1825 although winning the majority of the popular
vote, but with insufficient electoral votes.
The U.S. House of Representatives
awarded the presidency instead to John
Quincy Adams (1767 – 1848), who acted as president from 1825 to 1829 when
Jackson won the office and was president for two terms (1829 – 1837). In that
time, he changed the Executive Branch of
the U.S. Government forever (see Robert V. Remini’s Three Volume – Andrew
Jackson, 1977 – 1984).
He had cunning, savagery, and a simpatico with Native American Indians. He had no room for the haughty manners,
pomp, and circumstance of European cultivation favored by the Eastern
Establishment. The reality of the times, outside the sequestered East Coast being
obsequiously imitative of European Society, was the quite primitive nature of the
rest of the United States.
Jackson detractors are quick to reference the American Indian removals from
1813 to 1855, which were accelerated during the Jackson Administration (see The Trail of Tears, Gloria Jahoda,
1975). Tribes of Native Americans were forced out of their sacred lands and
homes in the South and mid-South, tribes such as the Cherokees, Seminoles,
Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks and forced to migrate to reservations west of
the Mississippi and as far northwest as Washington and Oregon in the 1820s,
1830s, and 1840s.
People in the Midwest were no strangers to violence or survival of the fittest
being neither intimidated by nor impressed with those with political power and
positions in the U.S. Government in the East.
The feeling in the East for these frontiersmen was mutual. Aristocratic Thomas Jefferson said of Andrew
Jackson, “One might as well make a sailor
a cock, or a soldier a goose as a President of Andrew Jackson. He is a
dangerous man unfit for the presidency.”
Yet, the young nation was ripe for a hinterland to rise out of its fertile soil
with little in common with those in the East who resembled their European
forebears more. Jackson was the genuine article and became the boilerplate of
countrified Americans who were rising as Rome had risen out of a small city
into an empire. Historian Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr. (1917 – 2007) calls this “The Age of Jackson” (see 1945 book of that title).
Strains of primitive aggression have emanated from the American presidency in
subtle or ruthless ways to prevail from Abraham
Lincoln through Theodore Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Harry
S. Truman. These flawed men, no less flawed than Jackson or no less authentic
personalities followed their contradictory ways to eminence, but in the
process displayed the distinctive American character.
Compared to the Founding Fathers of Washington,
Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay,
Franklin, Madison, and Monroe, all
of whom had an elitist aristocratic temperament and style. These other men were edgier, more impulsive,
and intuitive. Lincoln and Truman were Midwesterners, Jackson was of the midsouth, while the Founding
Fathers were all Easterners.
In 1945, one hundred years after the death of Andrew Jackson, the United States reached the apogee of its power
with the victorious conclusion of World War II. Europe was decimated, its
cities in ruin with some 20 million dead, while Russia lost 24 million, more
than half of its civilian population, and likewise was in ruin. The United
States suffered far fewer military casualties and practically no civilian
losses from the war.
As the lone possessor of the atomic bomb in 1945, no nation so dominated the
world since the halcyon days of the Roman Empire. The Union of the Soviet Socialistic Republic (USSR) would change
this dynamic with “a nuclear arms race,” followed by the “Cold War” that Sir Winston Churchill predicted. He
gave a speech in March 1946 as a guest of Westminster
College, Fulton, Missouri, stating that post-war Europe was undergoing an “Iron Curtain” of Soviet rule separating
the West from Russian by this military and ideological barrier. This would end,
as would The Soviet Union, in
November 1989 when the Berlin Wall
was torn down.
Now, in 2016, the West, and mainly the United States, after more than a
quarter-century of dominance shows signs of declining. The world’s wealth and its
political center is shifting as are trade and commerce.
The United States is still the banker of the world, but it is not evident that
it wants to be another Switzerland, which it is increasingly resembling.
Communist China is practicing a new kind of capitalism other than that of Adam Smith. Meanwhile, the wealthy
nations of the world are going from being technocratic to netocratic.
This is producing the clashing of new frontiers that recalls the United States
when Andrew Jackson rose to
prominence:
• Agrarian societies still dominate most of the population of the world. They
are being driven as if by a pitchfork through the 19th century and 20th century
and into the 21st century with callous disregard for their sanity and
wellbeing. Many peoples are living in more archaic circumstances than primitive
feudalism in police states with totalitarian rule.
• The exploding Information Age is
leaving these people behind as it is only common in practice to a handful of
Western and Eastern societies. Yet these societies act as if this technology
has the answers for everyone when some 5 billion souls have more basic needs,
such as electricity to light and fuel their homes, safe places to go to school,
jobs to support their families, wholesome food to put on their dinner tables,
safe water to drink, modern sanitation systems to ward off diseases, hospitals
and clinics to attend to the sick, indoor plumbing, and schools safe for all
children to attend without the threat of terrorists or rogue soldiers.
• People on the fringe fall below the radar as victims of senseless crimes as
the indigent, underemployed and undereducated attack each other as human
combustibles.
This decline is at the doorstep of the West, and no one illustrates this more
poignantly and succinctly than Arundhati Roy in her little book, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2014). She
examines the dark side of democracy in contemporary India, which like China, is
throwing caution to the win to become a 21st-century power. The pollution is so
thick in some of China’s major cities that people have to wear face masks
during certain times of the day.
In India, the problem is poisoned rivers, barren wells, and cleared-out
forests. Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers, people who love the land, but
are unable to escape punishing debt, have committed suicide. China has the same
problem as do people south of the Saharan desert in Africa. Millions of the
impoverished in India and Africa make less than $2 a day.
In India, the 100 richest have assets the equivalent of the GDP of 25 percent
of this country’s 1.2 billion people.
World peace and prosperity are not possible if the wealth of the world is
controlled by twenty percent of the world’s 7.2 billion people. Many Second and
Third World countries have been under Western powers for centuries.
Love, peace, and prosperity are not possible in this neoliberal era of capital
accumulation going to the few. Low wages and investment has limited consumption
and forced workers to borrow beyond their capacity to repay. This is only one
aspect of the casino economy that has ensued since the 1980s across the West in
deregulated labor, goods, and investment markets, signaling, if nothing else,
the decline if not the ultimate demise of capitalism as the West has voted for
going on the cheap.
NEXT – NINE – HAS NOWHERE MAN TAKEN CHARGE?
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