The Last Empire (48 page)

The wealth of the western hemisphere paid for the Renaissance in Europe. The wealth of India fueled the industrial revolution in England. We colonized almost every part of the world, imposing, in the process, our peculiar version of monotheism, one that is crude, savage, and hostile to life. For most of the world, particularly those with older and subtler civilizations, we were an unmitigated curse. But we never suspected that we were anything but good, as we went about stealing and converting others to our primitive ways.

What is human history but the migration of tribes? The so-called Aryans swept down into Europe and Persia and India in about 1500 B.C. They settled and were absorbed. Then came Huns, Mongols, Arabs. They seldom stayed for long, nor did they, by and large, colonize. By the time our race got busy, we had somehow moved ahead in the applied sciences, particularly those relating to warfare. Incas, Mayans, Hindus, Chinese were no match for us.

Now as the twentieth century draws to a close, we seem to have run out of petrol. We still have the power to atomize the globe but then, with a bit of hard work, so can the Pakistanis. We are no longer unique, even in our destructive powers. We have entered a period of uneasy stasis. What are we to do next, if indeed we still are “we” at all, rather than just an element in a rainbow mix as is the case in many parts of the United States and, here and there, in Britain.

At the moment “we” are defensive, even paranoid. Are we to lose what’s left of our identity? Are we to lose our traditional countries to immigrants of different races? There is much moaning in the West.

Since we have our countries, the desire to keep them reasonably homogeneous is reflexive and hardly extraordinary. Yet minor immigration has been the rule ever since native whites discovered that poorly paid other-tinted people would do work that whites find untouchable. But now major population shifts threaten. Everywhere the tribes are on the move. From south and east they converge on Europe; from south and west on North America.

Meanwhile, internal pressures are building up in all the nation states. In fact, a case can be made that the nation state, as redesigned by Bismarck and Lincoln, is obsolete. Certainly no one likes an expensive bureaucratic centralism, indifferent to the needs of the ethnic components that make it up. You cannot, in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor or even the higher capitalism, shove together and try to standardize a number of tribes that do not want to be together. We witness daily the explosions in what were once the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Might it not be wise simply to go
with
the centrifugal forces now at work and not try to oppose them anywhere?

The European aim should be a mosaic of autonomous ethnic groups—each as much on its own as possible, whether it be Basques or Scots or Armenians. This distresses old-fashioned statesmen. They want as many people as possible under their control, not a mere fraction of a multitribal whole. We shall lose, they say, our power in the world if we are fragmented. This was the Bismarckian, the Lincolnian line. Well, they have little to fear in the long run because the newly independent neighbors will come back together again in new, less confining arrangements.

In February 1987 Gorbachev invited to the Kremlin some 700 non-Communist worthies in the arts, sciences and business, to discuss a nonnuclear world. It was the first unveiling of what, he told us, would be a revolution in the Soviet Union. I was called upon to improvise a speech. A Japanese Minister of Trade had just announced that in the next century Japan would still be number one, economically, in the world. “No one can surpass us,” he said. Then, in an expansive mood, he said, “The United States will be our farm and Western Europe will be our boutique.”

Something must be done in order for us to survive economically in what looks to be, irresistibly, an Asian world. I would propose that, as our numbers are so few relative to those of China and India, say, we come together in a northern confederacy of Europe, Russia, Canada, the United States. The fact that the small nation states of Western Europe are having difficulty federalizing their relatively small common market means that federalism, at this stage, is a mistake, while a loose confederation for the general economic good is a more achievable business.

It is also just as easy—or vexing—to include Russia and the heartland states of the old Soviet Union as it is to agree, let us say, about the price of milk at Brussels. In other words, much strain in the short run but, in the long run, the creation of a large prosperous entity based upon geographical latitude and the pale, lonely 13 percent of the world’s population.

It does not matter whether a large goal will ever be achieved. Rather, it is the fact that such a goal exists in order to give shape and symmetry to policies; and meaning, perhaps, to societies that otherwise are adrift. Motivate your football louts, continental skinheads, overwrought white American racists.

I realize that the nation state has accustomed us to the idea of conquest by force. It is hard not to think along those lines. In Germany some critics actually thought that my proposal was a white declaration of war on Asia. It is no such suicidal thing. It is a means of economic survival through union. Without links to us, Russia will break up; Europe will decline; lonely little England will drift off along with Ireland and Greenland and Iceland and Newfoundland and all the other Arctic islands; while the United States will take its place somewhere between hypertense Brazil and lachrymose Argentina.

Alexander Hamilton was by far the cleverest of America’s founding fathers; he was also the most realistic. Instead of going on about the brotherhood of man, he said, in effect, let us take into account man’s essential greed and will to dominate, and let us allow for these traits in our constitution so that self-interest, reasonably harnessed, can become the engine of the state and thus contribute to the common good. So why not extend this insight to our present dilemma, and make new world arrangements?

I regard race as nonsense, but most of the world feels passionately otherwise. In the unlikely event that the human race survives another millennium, there will be no white or black races but combinations of the two, and of every other race as well. But for now, let us use this negative force for a positive end, and create a great northern peaceful economic alliance dedicated
*
—if I may end on a chauvinist American note—to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Sunday Telegraph

10 October 1993

* 
C
HAOS

On November 4, 1994, three days before the election that produced a congressional majority for the duller half of the American single-party system, I addressed the National Press Club in Washington. I do this at least once a year not because writer-journalists are present, wise and fearless as they are, but because cable television carries one’s speech without editing or editorializing. This useful service, known as C-Span, specializes in covering such eccentricities as myself and the British House of Commons.

I reflected upon the confusion that each of us is feeling as this unlamented century and failed millennium draw, simultaneously, to a close, and there is no hint of order in the world—and is
that
such a bad thing? As for my own country, I said that there is now a whiff of Weimar in the air. Three days later, to no one’s surprise, only a third of the electorate bothered to vote. The two-thirds that abstained now realize that there is no longer a government which even pretends to represent them. The great—often international and so unaccountable—cartels that finance our peculiar political system are the only entities represented at Washington. Therefore, in lieu of representative government, we have call-in radio programs, where the unrepresented can feel that, for a minute or two, their voices are heard, if not heeded. In any case, a system like ours cannot last much longer and, quite plainly,
something is about to happen
. I should note that one Rush Limbaugh, a powerful radio demagogue,
greeted November’s Republican landslide as a final victory over what he called the age of Lenin and Gore Vidal. It was not clear whether he meant Moscow’s Lenin or Liverpool’s Lennon. Then, to my amazement,
The Wall Street Journal
, where I lack admirers, took seriously my warning about Weimar, and “
What
is going to happen?” is a question now being asked among that 2 or 3 percent of the population who are interested in politics or indeed in anything other than personal survival in a deteriorating society.

Certainly, I have no idea what is going to happen, but as the ineffable Ross Perot likes to say, it won’t be pretty.

I have now lived through more than two-thirds of the twentieth century, as well as through at least one-third of the life of the American Republic. I can’t say that I am any wiser now than I was when I first began to look about me at the way things are, or rather at the way that things are made to look to be, but I am beginning to detect an odd sort of progression in world affairs. And I have noticed lately that I am not alone.

Recently, the literary critic Harold Bloom, in the somewhat quixotic course of establishing a Western literary canon, divided human history into phases that cyclically repeat. First, there is a theocratic age, next an aristocratic age, followed by a democratic age, which degenerates into chaos and out of which some new idea of divinity will emerge to unite us all in a brand-new theocratic age, and the cycle begins again. Bloom rather dreads the coming theocratic age but as he—and I—will never see it, we can settle comfortably into the current chaos where the meaning of meaning is an endlessly cozy subject, and Heisenberg’s principle is undisputed law of the land, at least from where each of us is situated.

I shall not discuss Bloom’s literary canon, which, like literature itself, is rapidly responding if not to chaos to entropy. But I do have some thoughts on the cyclic nature of the way human society evolves as originally posited by Plato in the eighth book of the
Republic
and further developed by Giovanni Battista Vico in his
Scienza Nuova
.

Professor Bloom skips Plato and goes straight to Vico, an early-eighteenth-century Neapolitan scholar who became interested in the origins of Roman law. The deeper Vico got into the subject, the further back in time he was obliged to go, specifically to Greece. Then he got interested in how it was that the human race was able to create an image of itself for itself. At the beginning there appears to have been an animistic belief in the magic of places and in the personification of the elements as gods. To Vico, these legends, rooted in prehistory, were
innate
wisdom. Plainly, he was something of a Jungian before that cloudy Swiss fact. But then the age of the gods was challenged by the rise of individual men. Suddenly, kings and heroes are on the scene. They in turn give birth to oligarchies, to an aristocratic society where patricians battle for the first place in the state. In time, the always exciting game of who will be king of the castle creates a tyranny that will inspire the people at large to rebel against
the tyrants and establish republics that, thanks to man’s nature, tend to imperial acquisitiveness and so, in due course, these empire-republics meet
their
natural terminus in, let us say, the jungles of Vietnam.

What happens next? Vico calls the next stage Chaos, to be followed by a new Theocratic Age. This process is, of course, pure Hinduism, which was never to stop leaking into Greek thought from Pythagoras to the neo-Platonists and even now into the alert mind of my friend Allen Ginsberg and of numerous California surfers and ceramists. Birth, death, chaos, then rebirth, and so—on and on and on.

But though Vico’s mind was brilliant and intuitive, the history that he had to deal with necessarily left out science—as we know it and he did not—and we must now ponder how chaos may yet organize itself with the use of computers and faxes and the means to control all the people all the time. Will the next god be a computer? In which case, a
tyrant
god for those of us who dwell in computer-challenged darkness.

A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open for those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. In the case of the United States, the acquisition of new citizens from everywhere has always been thought to be a very good thing. But now with so many billions of people on the move, even the great-hearted are becoming edgy.

So, what is going to happen? Well, Norway is large enough and empty enough to take in 40 or 50 million homeless Bengalis. If the Norwegians say that, all in all, they would rather
not
take them in, is this to be considered racism? I think not. It is simply self-preservation, the first law of species. So even those of us usually to be found on the liberal end of the political spectrum are quite aware that the tribes must stay put and be helped to improve wherever it is that they were placed by nature or by our dissolving empires, to which all sorts of odd chickens are presently coming home to roost.

Now, as world climate changes and populations increase, the tribes are on the move, and the racial composition of Europe, say, has changed. As an American, I think that this is not such a bad thing, but there does come a moment when there are simply too many people on the move and not enough space or resources to accommodate them in the old established societies.

As we start the third millennium of what we in our Western section of the globe are amused to call the Christian era, we should be aware, of course, that most of the world’s tribes are, happily for them, not Christian at all. Also, most of us who are classified as Christians and live in nations where this form of monotheism was once all-powerful now live in a secular world. So chaos does have its pleasures. But then as Christian presuppositions do not mean anything to others (recently Buddhists sternly reminded the pope of this in Sri Lanka), so, too, finally, Plato and his perennially interesting worldview don’t make much sense when applied to societies such as ours. I like his conceit of the political progression of societies, and a case can be made for it, as Vico did. But Plato, as political thinker, must be taken with Attic salt, which John Jay Chapman brilliantly supplies in an essay recently discovered in his archives; he died in 1933. Although he was America’s greatest essayist after Emerson
he is almost as little known in his native land as elsewhere. This is a pity, but then these are pitiful times, are they not?