Food, Conspiracy, and the Homo Imperialis: A Theoretical Look at the Political Crises of Modernity
Over the last few months, years, and/or decades of my life, I have seen some interesting things, read some interesting books, and come to some conclusions about the crises of modern political life. In the last few months in particular, these conclusions have been sharpened by discussions, debates, and reading and crystallized into a few relatively simple, albeit very broad and rather tentative, theses.
In Defense of Overly Broad Theoretical Nonsense
I fully recognize that this blog post constitutes in essence a smattering of overly broad theoretical nonsense (see above). However, I would, as a historian, defend the value for history and politics alike of extremely broad theoretical constructions of particular topics, periods, etc. While there is always a great danger that theoretical constructions will overwhelm the actual concrete complexity of different societies, situations, events, persons, etc, in fact this danger is generally less, I think, when the theoretical constructions in question are deliberately broad and explicitly theoretical. No one is likely to mistake a blog post or a Chesterton book about the economic and social problems of humanity en masse for a work of historiography; but they may well mistake an academic-historical theory of life or death or economics or religion or human nature contained in and shaping a history textbook for historiography. Academia is in fact littered with half-baked general theories, littering the footnotes and text of books and articles of esteemed historians and college freshmen alike. I have at least, I hope, had the decency to separate my grand theories out and put them elsewhere to be laughed at.
For the moment, however, I must formally ask you to trust, not only that the below theses are based on many hours and thousands of pages of reading in various historical topics and periods, but that the below theses are not designed to replace such content or such reading, but merely to (hopefully) illuminate it.
These theses, I think, have at least something to say about the disasters unfolding around us, and what to possibly do about them. So here they are.
You Can't Eat Steel: or, The Economic Problem
The more things change, the more they stay the same. I recently read an excellent book on modern "development" and agriculture policy The Hungry World, and was reminded, not only of a number of modern economic thinkers I have read or admired, but also of some of the bases of my own field, the world of the Roman Empire and Late Antiquity. All these concurring sources ultimately point to one basic set of realities that is often obscured, I think, both in discussions of ancient history, and even more in discussions of modern politics.
As Vincent McNabb excellently summarized things, more or less all necessities of human life come from the land, and nowhere else. Which is to say, that human beings need food to survive, as well as shelter and clothing; and these are all at base agricultural commodities.
Most modern economics at heart centers on, and measures, almost exclusively industrial production and commercial exchange; and these are certainly important things. Yet such measurements, whether expressed in GDP or output numbers or unemployment rates or productivity numbers, can, alas, be in practice incredibly obscuring to the most basic, fundamental structures of economic life.
A very, very broad sketch of human civilization and its economic history would consist to a large extent of a basic division between the people engaged in the actual production of basic goods like food--which is to say, in agriculture in a broad sense that includes pastoralism, hunting and gathering, etc--and those who are dependent on these goods but are incapable of producing them. One can call these divisions agriculture and industry, or the peasants and the cities, or indeed many other things in many different societies; but they are fairly visible in most times and places.
Here, then, is the basic problem most societies have to deal with survive: even those who do not engage in producing food need food to survive. Hence, some way must be found to get food from those who produce it to those who do not.
It is only here that there comes in most of what we today would call commerce, industry, and government. Certainly, commerce, labor, and politics takes place within purely agricultural or pastoral communities; but with vastly different basic methods and goals and connotations. This is why most attempts to understand and penetrate purely agricultural societies from without often lead to such puzzlement. Put simplistically, most agricultural communities have economic and political structures that are much more about distribution of goods and social hierarchy than about commerce or politics in our sense.
Commerce in the mass sense, however, is one of a bevy of different ways that non-agriculturalists have to get food from agriculturalists. So is industry and industrialism. So is government or Empire in most historical and modern senses.
This may sound like a rehearsal for some kind of pseudo-Marxist or agrarianist manifesto; but it is not really so. I am not calling for a Return to the Land, at least not in any particularly extreme sense. Most of the things we value in even historical societies--their elite art and culture, their urban ways of life, their vast political and Imperial systems, even much of their religious life--is only made possible by the ability to get food from those who produce it and direct to those who do not. Nor is this necessarily or even often a parasitic arrangement. The idea of subsistence farming as a purely disconnected arrangement of agriculturalists producing merely for themselves and participating in no larger economic or political or religious structures is more or less a myth--originally a progressive myth intended to portray agriculturalists as backwards, but also often transformed into an utopian agrarian myth.
Food is, speaking historically and en masse, a cheap and vastly plentiful good. It is not difficult to produce given basic agricultural or pastoral organization; and naturally produces large surpluses given even small additions of labor. And while all of the basic necessities of life can be produced by agriculturalists, there are a large number of other things--transported foodstuffs, superior forms of textiles, delicacies, agricultural tools, forms of culture and religion and identity, etc--that cannot be. Even more basically, even agriculture itself is vastly improved by basic access to trade networks with other agriculturalists in other places with different soil conditions, weather, etc, commercial networks providing tools and other goods, and military protection provided by governments. I cannot think of a single society in human history where in fact agriculturalists were not deeply tied into broader trade and political and religious networks. No individual farmer is an island; nor, typically, is any individual village or region. Interconnection is natural to agriculture, as a basic outlay of the basic activity of organizing human effort to work with and on a particular piece of land. Connections to non-agricultural life are equally natural, and exist on the micro level even within individual villages, where blacksmiths, say, or priests are not unknown.
Still, the basic fact remains: that most social and economic and political arrangements in history can be analyzed and broken down in terms of different ways to get those who produce the food and basic necessities to give these necessities to those who do not. Commerce, including industry and analogous systems of non-agricultural labor that produce more specialized goods or commodities, is one of the most widespread ways to do this; but so too are forms of force and taxation. The Roman Empire in Egypt created an elaborate and petty system designed to extract every possible grain of grain from its agricultural populace; and so kept its vast urban sprawls and military systems and Imperial networks going.
The crises in modern agriculture chronicled in The Hungry World and in many other works dealing with our so-called "industrialized" and "commercialized" agricultural sector almost all come about from the simple fact of how modern Empires have chosen to solve this age-old problem. Put simply, newly powerful ideological and Imperial governments chose, for both practical and ideological reasons, to bind agriculturalists to themselves more closely than ever before; and their methods were elaborate commercial and financial structures, making ownership of land, access to seed, and basic agricultural productivity for the first time directly dependent on vast financial and bureaucratic and technological and industrial structures. Modern governments and corporations created varieties of food crops designed to only produce anything given massive and expensive and continual "inputs" of industrial fertilizer and hydration systems; and to enable farmers to access these goods, they created elaborate financial structures of credit and ownership and leasing that gave them the power to direct the farmers (almost) as corporate employees. And on the basis of this new arrangement, they created the vastly powerful and compact modern political and corporate systems, which are reliant to a large degree on the increase in commercial exchanges produced by these systems and the vast urban masses of laborers and unemployed "released" from agricultural labor in order to function.
Here, though, is the paradox of this new state of affairs. Farmers in the modern world are reliant as never before--having been deliberately made reliant by concerted government and economic and political policy--on the modern international commercial-financial-corporate-Imperial system for their basic survival and ownership of their land. Yet the problem produced immediately by this new system is, put simply, that this makes producing lots of food bad in an obvious and straightforward way for farmers. The less food produced, the higher the cost of food, and the more farmers and agricultural companies alike are enabled to make money.
Much of US agricultural policy in the last century can be read in the light of this basic crisis. By "industrializing" agriculture, the government and corporate agribusinesses drove people off the land in huge numbers, turning them into dependent "mouths to feed" incapable of producing their own food. To produce sufficient food with a vastly smaller amount of labor and so feed enough of the people driven off the land to keep their systems going, as well as to make farmers more dependent and fold them into their industrial and political systems, the government and corporate agribusinesses poured industrial fertilizer and technology into the farm, and so produced vast surpluses of food; yet these very surpluses threatened the ability for anyone, even agribusinesses, to make any money out of agriculture at all, and also had the side effect of forcing even more people off the land.
Hence the vast "overproduction" problem of the Great Depression and 20th century American farm policy, which led at times to policies by which the government simply bought up huge amounts of agricultural goods and burned or shot them--or shipped them overseas to dependent countries that had no need of them. Meanwhile, in industrial cities, the populations that once worked on the land instead suffered from starvation and malnutrition in huge numbers due to their inability to find sufficient wages to buy the food kept sufficiently expensive by such policies; or, more and more commonly, simply starved due to "unemployment," the inability to provide any labor actually useful enough for the financial and industrial systems to provide them wages to buy food at all. Out of this crisis our modern Empires were born.
As stated above, it is simply a myth to think that most of the history of the world consists of a vast population of "subsistence farmers" untouched by planning or intelligence or commerce or government. Nonetheless, "subsistence agriculture," in the basic sense of the existence of a large population of agriculturalists within society, endured as the bedrock of most societies in human history, not because societies could not alter it (in fact the Roman Empire massively revolutionized its agriculture several times over the course of its history), but because it was when push came to shove an extraordinarily cheap and easy way to support a large (and useful) population and extensive urban networks and military and Imperial infrastructure without much in the way of additional financial or governmental or military planning or outlay. Put simply, in a society where most people are "subsistence farmers," the vast majority of the population labors without direction in an essentially productive way, producing, more or less, the food they need, plus the food they are incentivized to produce by force or commerce, and in so doing support the more specialized efforts of the smaller proportion of non-agriculturalists in the population.
By the modern agricultural-financial-industrial system, however, a few people and companies operating with very little labor but continual, massive expenses and financial debt-traps produce vast surpluses of food that are then artificially disposed of to keep prices high and so render this still vastly plentiful food inaccessible to the large proportion of the population who are both totally "non-productive" of food themselves and also unable to acquire food in sufficient amounts due to their inability to find high enough wages or employment.
As an attempt to solve the basic problem of human economics and society and Empires have been faced with from the beginning--how to feed your population and how to get food from agriculturalists for other sorts of people engaged in other sorts of labor and ways of life--this is obviously not very successful. Yet certainly it supports a vastly greater number of commercial exchanges and industrial output and media production and technological power and military might than any other society in human history. And since this, and not actually feeding people or making them happy, is what we in fact value, it is what we in fact get.
If we want to change any of the above, or even if we do not, it is good to be aware of the basic logic and realities of the situation.
None Dare Call It Conspiracy: or, the Political Problem
A little bit ago on this blog, I asserted that the chief and typical cultural products of modern civilizations were advertising and pornography. In this, I neglected a third variety of cultural product that has only become more and more important over the course of my lifetime: conspiracy theories.
Yet as with advertising and pornography, it is important, I think, to try to understand conspiracy theories in fundamental and structural terms, not merely in the highly-colored political or moralistic terms common in mass media. For instance, while it is beyond the scope of this blog, most conspiracy theories in practice are tied to fundamentally religious forms of institutions and media unimaginable without the legacy of American sectarian Protestantism. On a political level, however, conspiracy theories are so common as a cultural product precisely because "conspiracies" are in fact one of the basic, ubiquitous political forms of modernity; or, put slightly differently, because "conspiracy" is in fact one of the basic means of modern governance as such.
This thesis can be quickly defined. A "conspiracy" in the basic sense is a small group of people engaged in some secretive action, and hence in some form of deception or disinformation towards outsiders. Put in these terms, it should be obvious that most of what modern governments and corporations do qualifies in some basic sense as a conspiracy.
Paradoxically, though, I would argue that what produces this "conspiratorial" nature of government today is in fact the predominance, ideologically and technically, of mass-media communication and "publicity" and its integral importance as a tool of governance.
Put simply, since the rise of mass media, governments have in effect governed to a very great extent through mass media. This is of course not wholly new; ancient governments used coins, statues, and decrees to very similar effect. Indeed, when we understand that governments, like all large-scale human societies, are to a large extent simply networks of communication, we can understand why rhetoric and communication and therefore media in in some sense, is intrinsic to government as such.
Put simply, to accomplish anything, to have any idea, legal or moral or ideological, actually carried out in the real world, rulers must communicate these ideas and intentions to others who will in turn carry them out and/or obey them. A ruler is only a ruler insofar as he is recognized as such by people at large, and so he must successfully communicate to them, at the very least, some basic idea of rulership and of himself. The most basic perception of the Emperor as someone that ruled over them and who they were bound to obey and who could be appealed to came to ancient Romans through interaction with pseudo-cultic statues and/or the images and inscriptions on coins.
Yet the control of information implied by such technologies was not nearly as laborious a task for governments to manage as the task, bequeathed to them by modern technology, of controlling nearly every aspect of how they and their actions are perceived.
An example is, perhaps, in order. Contemporary scholarship has done excellent work in detailing the degree to which ancient Roman Imperial decrees, which we tend to take as merely law in a technical-professional sense, were in fact to a great degree acts of public propaganda, posted and read aloud in public spaces and designed as much to persuade populations to obey rhetorically as to be enacted or enforced on them by force. This may seem paradoxical to us, but it is actually, to a great extent, a much simpler basic mode of government. A law is, after all, in essence a kind of communication from ruler to subject, as well as from central ruler to subordinate enforcers, designed to shape the behavior of all of the above. In writing a law or decree, then, Emperors and their chanceries took careful thought for who they were speaking to and how they could most effectively speak to them, so that their intentions could be carried out to the greatest degree possible.
Modern governments, though, operate according to a radically different basic model. Law is principally a technical domain, largely or principally inaccessible to all save professionalized experts. Even "lawmakers" do not possess the requisite knowledge to actually write a law, let alone read it and understand it. Hence, it is hardly too much to say that most law simply is neither communicated nor received nor obeyed nor even known about by most people most of the time. It is, however, enforced by various punitive and coercive means regardless--at least sometimes, and at least on the poor.
Still, actual legal structures play a remarkably small role in the actual day-to-day interaction of subjects and rulers in the modern world. With a very few notable exceptions, people do not think of laws as something done or communicated to them by any particular ruler; their relationship with rulers comes not through law, or even through statuary, but through mass-media narratives and mass-media actions.
The passing of a law may, but almost certainly will not, cause a backlash against a particular politician; a careless word trumpeted in the media according to a particular narrative and set of ideological associations, certainly will.
Hence, my thesis, simply stated, is that mass media is simply one of the central tools of governance as such in the modern era. The off-the-cuff remarks of a politician to a journalist at a comedy club, or rather what said random journalist communicates to millions of people based on these off-the-cuff remarks, is not merely commentary, not merely color, not merely a side-show attraction: they are governance, in at least one sense even more governance than the laws passed by a legislative body. For if governance is in large part a kind of communication between rulers and ruled, it is normatively media, and not law, that actually acts as the medium for direct communication between rulers and ruled in the modern era.
Here, though, is the catch: that such government by media is, almost by necessity, government by conspiracy. There exists at the heart of every modern governmental system an unbridgeable chasm between the acts and techniques of governance that are carried out through and representable in media, and those that are not. The latter--the non-reported-on, the confidential, the secretive--are as a matter of fact enormously impactful on many people's lives; yet they exist in a kind of "dark zone" of total non-communication. It has been accurately stated that, for most modern people, anything that is not represented in mass media simply does not exist--or, at least, does not and cannot exist politically.
Yet most of the practical acts of governance in fact exist within such a zone--not totally or necessarily or in every instance, yet approaching such a totality inasmuch as governance grows more and more technical and technological and mass-media itself grows more pornographic and advertising-based.
Here, then, is the essential bind out of which modern conspiratorialism emerges. To govern effectively, every ruler must exercise governance in two nearly contradictory ways. On the one hand, he must manage a vast technical apparatus most of whose actions and rules are totally inaccessible and incomprehensible to most people most of the time. On the other hand, he must manage a vast media infrastructure that acts as the sole practical way by which he may actually communicate his rule and his wishes to his subjects and so govern.
The solution to this bind is to act as a conspirator: that is, to spend part of his time dealing with technicians managing systems and carrying out actions that he knows will never be understood by most people he rules, and indeed to a large extent which he deliberately wishes to keep secret from them. For the technical-political, as a kind of technology, is not only frequently obscure, but also by its very nature elitist, accessible and controllable only by technicians, and moreover in basic conception centered on the conception of using force and even violence to imposed a theoretical reality on the world and people at large; hence it is very difficult if not impossible to represent or communicate positively through mass media. After dealing with his fellow conspirators on such terms, however, the ruler must go out and communicates to the world at large a narrative of things and of governance that will actually make him known and received and accepted and obeyed by his subjects. And this narrative, he knows, is false.
If the ruler is extraordinarily honest, these media communications are merely false in the unavoidable sense that they do not and cannot include all or most of the technical details and systems by which he in fact governs. If he is anything short of extraordinarily honest, though, his acts of media governance will be false in a more far-reaching sense. To govern, he must control a vast mass-media apparatus, which he cannot use to communicate most of the actual realities of his governance, which most people could not understand, or at least would have no interest in. Hence, to govern, it is logical for him to communicate in a manner aimed not at truth, but merely at impressing his own power and rightness on the populace as thoroughly and effectively as possible. In this, his governance by media becomes no less purely technical, and even no less violent, than his technical governance.
Here, of course, we have the three basic elements of any conspiracy theory worth its salt: the carrying out of nefarious deeds by a small circle of technicians, the deliberate keeping secret of these deeds, and the the deliberate deception of the public at large.
I am agnostic or actively incredulous about virtually all popular conspiracy theories; yet the truth is, when one looks at the in-depth historiography of the last hundred years of governance, from WW1 to the Cold War to the War on Terror and from Russia to America to China and back again, the number of conspiracies in this basic sense is virtually unlimited, ranging from military technology to military strategies to finance to transportation to farm policy to technical regulation and back again. To take another example from The Hungry World, it is at this point beyond dispute that the vast revolutions in agriculture and government that in the '60s and '70s affected the lives of literally billions of people mostly for the worse were directly caused by the efforts of tiny groups of ideologists and technicians mostly working for a few American foundations; and also undeniable that these people, and many Western politicians who worked for them, deliberately kept many of their goals and efforts secret, and at times deliberately obfuscated and deceived to accomplish their goals. When one adds in the documented efforts of American intelligence agencies, the list grows further.
Such specific instances, however vast in number, could only ever be the tip of the iceberg. Taken en masse and in general, when speaking of actual governance in the modern era, what is done has been technical and coercive; and what has been communicated has been something entirely different, something that was, in effect if not in intention, aimed at secrecy and deception.
To say that government is frequently conspiratorial is not to say that the CIA assassinated JFK, or that the government has been using trained Bigfoot assassins to fight UFOs. Yet it is to say that, as a whole, modern governments have by their basic methods of governance deceived and coerced on a never-before-seen level and so produced a very basic sense of disconnection and distrust in their subjects, which has in turn been (one) cause behind the vast proliferation of conspiratorial discourse in the past few decades. And while these discourses are, generally speaking, silly and harmful, this basic distrust is not unjustified, but points to a broader reality which must be dealt with if the crises of modernity are to be surmounted.
The above account is naturally very high-level and systemic and abstract, and expresses not so much a reality as a theoretical limit. Governance, while increasingly technical, remains on many levels based around public notions such as the justice or the common good, and so capable of being communicated; mass media, while increasingly based on advertising and propaganda, remains capable of communicating truth, even complex truth, and so of serving genuine political ends. Yet these systemic problems have, I believe, very many real world effects, and may yet have many more.
As media approaches pure advertisement, as governance approaches pure technicity, so government approaches pure conspiracy.
Homo Imperialis: or, the Cultural Problem
Both of the above problems in their modern forms relates to what I think is a much more basic, and much more pervasive, problem with governance as such: one that allows the modern crises of the political to be placed in a somewhat more universal perspective.
The political as such emerges fairly naturally out of the existence of any community of virtually any size. A village is a political unit, with political leadership and political conflicts; so too is a parish or even a single household. Philosophically speaking, wherever you have a real unity between persons, you have a real common good which they share in, which must be governed and managed and directed towards justice. Yet most of what we mean by the political in our modern sense has to do with the attempt to construct common goods and unities within much larger groups, groups that extend over very large degrees of space and across very great human and social and interpersonal differences.
The political is, again, in essence based around communication; and so to govern a political unit of this type, what is needed are networks of communication, by which large distances and large differences can be overcome effectually, producing a common good and an effectual and real unity. On the physical level, this may consist of roads, rivers, telegraph lines, radios, telephones, and so on; on the social level, it may consist of trade languages, religions, political institutions, clubs, hierarchies, and so forth.
Yet the creation and maintenance of such large-scale networks, physical and social, require in practice the existence, or creation, of a class or kind of persons who are capable of operating within and through these networks and thus whose identities are to a great degree tied up with these systems. This is what I call, broadly, homo imperialis: the Imperial man.
In every governance system I know of, these people are both conspicuous and integral. No text or law or technology is self-interpreting and self-implementing. However diverse the linguistic groups over which a system operates, homines imperiales speak one language; however diverse the religious or cultural or ideological worlds they encompass, they share, typically, the same religion or culture or ideology. After all, a message may be sent over a vast distance by technical means; but for it to be implemented according to the intentions of the sender, it must be received and put into effect by someone capable of speaking their language, who interprets the message in the same sense as it was conceived because they share the same terms and understanding and goals and worldview. This is, in practice, one of the keys to the functioning of any large-scale system whatsoever.
This basic institution of the homo imperialis can be implemented in a very great variety of ways. In some cases, the homo imperialis may be no more than a member of the ruling ethnic or cultural or linguistic group of a state: the Empire may include many peoples, but one is the ruling people. In most cases, though, the homo imperialis is to some extent detached from any particular ethnos or grouping, and defined by additional qualifications or training. He may belong to a profession or class; he may be religiously initiated or sacrally chosen. In most cases, though, the homo imperialis is to a large degree an artificial being, produced by education.
Here clarity is helpful. "Education" in the basic, universal sense has very little to do with either class or governance as such: it is merely a basic human function performed in every society by parents and others interacting with children. Children need knowledge and training to become adults and know how to live their lives; they need to be integrated into the familial and social structures of their society. And so, they are "educated," generally informally, into all of the above, and so become people roughly like their parents and those around them.
"Education" in the modern sense--the education about which political battles are fought, for which vast funding is earmarked, which is spread throughout the world by NGOs and American tax dollars--has little or nothing to do with this. This education is rather a highly artificial and technical process by which a certain kind of person, with a certain set of technical facilities and a certain ideology and cultural or religious perspective is produced: in other words, a homo imperialis.
These very specific and technical educational systems have existed in most sophisticated political and Imperial systems, beginning with Egyptian scribal training and proceeding through the complex canonical education by which budding Roman elites were taught to memorize and reproduce a small body of Greek and Roman texts to the modern university systems that trained British colonial administrators by means of sport and pederasty and a similar body of texts.
The key development that has both precipitated the extraordinary power of modern states and systems, and in the process created many of the crises of modernity, has been the extraordinary pervasiveness and power of modern educational systems, which has allowed for the artificial creation of extraordinarily large bodies of Imperial persons with extraordinarily little diversity of viewpoint or ideology or action from virtually any material. Modern educational systems have boasted of their ability to take anyone, from any culture, any class, speaking any language and professing any religion, and within a certain number of years produce a virtually identical homo imperialis, speaking the same language and with the same ethical values and the same authorities and sources of information and the same cultural and ideological outlook. And indeed, this is by any standards a remarkable accomplishment, one impossible to that degree for any society or civilization before.
In and of itself, this is not the cause of any particular crisis in modernity. After all, as I have said, such a basic structure is to a degree intrinsic to large-scale political communities as such: and I am, in general, an emphatic supporter of large-scale political communities. I regard the human race as possessing as a whole a true political unity and common good; and see large-scale or universal goods as just as real, and frequently more so, than small-scale or local goods. To take an obvious example, the Catholic Church on earth relies and has always relied for its extraordinary reach and international unity on the presence of a body of clerici, people educated into a common body of Scriptural and theological texts and ordained into a common structure of authority. I have no objection to this state of affairs; in fact, I support it emphatically. And certainly, on a lesser level, I am the product of modern educational structures and institutions, and a homo imperialis in most basic senses.
Still, the crisis of modernity is itself founded on a more basic tension contained within all such systems, one very much brought out by the two theoretical structures I have spoken of so far. The moral purpose and justification of the existence of a smaller grouping of homines imperiales forging networks and exercising power within a much broader and more heterogenous body of people and peoples is that they in fact succeed at achieving some form of true common good with other types of people, and hence actually promote the unity and practical good of the broader society. Hence the quasi-priestly, and at times explicitly priestly, nature of all such classes and groups within most societies: benefiting the diverse peoples and groups associated with them precisely by standing apart and representing and effecting a broader and higher form of unity.
Yet naturally, these goods are by no means assured in earthly historical society. The basic problem with homo imperialis is that they are essentially a means to a well-ordered state, not its center. They exist, like all groups within society, to serve a common good shared by all members of society, and in this play a key role. Yet it is perfectly possible, and in a sense quite easy, for such people to forget this. Absent certain controls, homo imperialis may well cease to see any essential commonality with other people in society; they may see all value in themselves and their Imperial networks and viewpoints, and none in those of others; and hence they may see no reason to actually benefit those who are not homines imperialies. They may not only not understand such people at all, given their lack of the common Imperial language and outlook, but, given their concomitant lack of education in Imperial knowledge and conformity to Imperial values, they may well see them as stupid, immoral and have nothing but contempt for them. In such a situation, homo imperialis wields their quasi-priestly power purely for their own benefit and the benefit of their broader class alone, and so inevitably destroys the broader societies of which they are the host.
This has in fact been the besetting problem with virtually all such structures, political or religious, sacralized or secularized, throughout history. And hence one of the central problems every large-scale society has sought to master has been this very basic one of how to remind Imperial people that other sorts of people exist, how to get them to value such people, and how to get them, blackmail them or cajole them or force them, to actually serve the interests of others and a broader common good.
One primary means to this end has been religious or philosophical systems and values, which have played an indispensable role throughout history in inculcating a spirit of service and a basic shared outlook and moral system and common good with other groups in society. More basically, social and familial networks have connected Imperial elites with common people in practical and personal ways and so prevented them from standing completely apart from the unities they serve. And political structures themselves, democratic or otherwise, have found many ways to practically limit their power or make them obey and serve people not drawn from among their number.
If the modern state is in crisis, it is in large part because all of these classical means have today been either destroyed or weakened to the point of obsolescence. Both by removing these controls and by by perfecting the social techniques of producing such people in greater numbers and proportions than ever before, modern states created a new type and degree of this basic problem and tension, and so produced what I regard as a true crisis, from which many of the characteristic crises of modern life flow.
The limiting factor of most pre-modern states was not so much economic or technological as ultimately social: based on their limited ability to actually fit most people effectively into their Imperial networks. Modern states have achieved their extraordinary power and reach thanks in large part to their ability to manufacture homines imperiales out of any material, at any time, and in greater numbers than ever before. Hence, a much greater proportion of the population can be incorporated in one way or other into Imperial networks, and come to share in the homogenuous culture and traditions and viewpoints of the homo imperialis.
There are of course advantages to this that are obvious, especially in terms of raw manpower and networking and organization. Yet there are also disadvantages; since the outlook of the homo imperialis, while ideal for carrying out of ideas and goals on very broad levels, has always been very non-ideal for the carrying out of most actual practical human and cultural and social and economic tasks of life. A society to a large extent shaped and directed and driven by shared, high-level religious or political ideals and goals is one thing; a society composed only of the single, homogenous sort of person capable of staffing Imperial bureaucracies is quite another. Yet this is what we have created in the modern world; and in the process, we have frequently and drastically undermined many of the most basic systems--such as agriculture and political communication--on which all human societies depend.
As The Hungry World demonstrates quite well, American Imperial elites, it turned out, were not at all adept or skilled at actually dealing with the work agriculture as carried out by most of humanity; they sought, rather, to take over this realm by any means necessary, and to a lesser extent to transform it into the kind of technical and technological task that they could deal with. In the process, they wrecked entire societies and created a kind and degree of urban poverty never before seen in human history. Similarly, when Imperial elites and their concerns came to function, not merely as a means of politics, but as its actual center, they transformed political life from something intrinsically public and common, normatively and naturally shared and communicated from rulers to ruled, to something intrinsically technical and exclusive and incapable of being made public or even communicated to subjects. In the process of course, in both spheres, they operated based on a profound hostility and contempt towards the values and lives and goods of the vast majority of people over whom they exercised power.
Yet the greatest danger of homo imperialis in the modern age is not even that they will wreck systems and treat all others with contempt; it is that they will simply forget that other people exist at all. Given the dominating and central presence of powerful educational and media systems in modern life, many homines imperiales have come to assume that their worldview and way of life and practices are, not only normative for all, but actually universal. In the propaganda of modern life, all people are Imperial people, regardless of the color of their skin or their national origins or their religious beliefs.
It is this which leads and has led and will continue to lead to a kind of violent and totalizing conflict unknown, generally speaking, to the ancient and Medieval worlds. Homines imperiales live their lives assuming that everyone is practically like them; equally cosmopolitan, equally enlightened, equally educated. When they discover that this is not true, they are not humbled: they are enraged. People who do not fit into their class and type of person are not merely inferior; they have no value at all, and barely any existence. They are black holes of values, walking antitheses of all that is enlightened and true and good and beautiful. They can, at best, be "educated"; and at worst, only destroyed.
If this attitude seems at all familiar to you, it should: for it is the attitude found intermittently among elites in every major modern society over the past two centuries: and never more than in America: and hardly ever more than now.
Still, whatever is going on in our own time and place, it is in part merely a reflection of a much more basic tension and problem. How do you create or find the kind of person who can allow political and religious and social groups to operate on large scales and across great differences, and so produce unity and many practical goods, while at the same time forcing this kind of person to actually value and benefit all those numerous types of people within whose societies they operate? How do you make the homo imperialis a good man?
No one has precisely solved this problem, though I will not disguise my belief that the Catholic treatment of the clerical or monastic saint dealt with it in more depth and with more effect than anything else I have encountered. or any of the basic problems discussed above. Yet many societies have at least acknowledged these problems, known about them, and worked at mitigating or solving them with appreciable positive. Hopefully, we can to some measure do the same.
No comments:
Post a Comment