Knowing the time
The east and the west
the melancholy all one
the autumnal windhigashi nishi / awaresa hitotsu / aki no kaze
Matsuo Basho, Autumn, 1686.
The calendar suggests it is late autumn in Japan, but it feels like proper autumn weather has only recently begun here. Two years ago I wrote a note on ‘polycrisis in autumn’, now a time to return to those themes. Scrambled seasons continue, mirroring the scrambling of politics, markets and minds. It is almost like these phenomena are connected. But lets not jump to conclusions…
At the moment, I am focusing on drafting my book manuscript and preparing something new on polycrisis, but I have also been having some meetings where I have been asked about my take on current conditions. With that in mind, I thought it might be helpful to offer an incomplete sketch of some of my thinking about where we collectively find ourselves. In the 1920s, the German theologian Karl Barth Barth spoke to between-ness of that period. He preached the importance of ‘knowing the time’ and emphasised ‘the task of facing the ethical question only as humans of our time and none other’. What does this demand look like in the contemporary context?
At a moment when the US forces and calls out for attention, it is important to avoid that lure, the world is bigger, what happens there is certainly consequential but increasingly less so. It suffices to recall the line attributed to Maya Angelou: ‘When someone shows you who they are, believe them’. And if a country shows you who they are, believe them too.
History sometimes obliges, with dates and events aligning in ways that reveal and remind. It is fitting that the US election results have dovetailed with the start of COP29 in Azerbaijan. If history repeats first as a tragedy and second as farce, what about for the twenty-ninth time? Back in 2012, I wrote an article that commenced with this contrast:
‘The policy challenge is to act in a serious and sensible way, given the limits of our knowledge.’
‘History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act.’
These two pronouncements from former US President George W. Bush represent contrasting approaches to making policy in situations of uncertainty. The first response is more cautious, emphasizing the lack of definite knowledge and letting this factor guide behaviour. The second is determined more by the threat and the potential consequences of inaction. One of these statements is about climate change; the other is about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Given current scientific knowledge, one would expect the latter to be about global warming, but this is not the case.
The United States chose to chase ghosts and ignore climate. With the ‘unipolar moment’ now unambiguously over, it is evident that the near complete failure to make serious progress on addressing environmental degradation will likely prove to be one of the most significant outcomes of post-Cold War US dominance. Having missed the possibility of cooperating while there was a peace dividend, it looks like we will probably end up with some kind of militarised transition and competitive adaptation in the context of a worsening climate. But on the plus side, we do now have Amazon and Instagram.
Before continuing, a useful rule of thumb: when it comes to considering commentary on the Middle East (or policy more generally), apply the ‘Monopoly rule’: If they supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, then do not listen to them now. As the card states: ‘Go directly to Jail. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200’.
Stepping out to geopolitics, it is important to recognise that the direction of travel is towards further disruption and disorder. This is what the behaviour of most major and medium powers would suggest. In a prior note I considered the US - China dynamic in the following terms:
Internationally, the US continues to have unrivalled destructive capacities, but has been losing its ability to lead; whereas China has unrivalled productive capacities, but has been struggling to convince others about its intentions. Neither country appears capable of offering a forward-facing vision of international order…
Both have the power to build and break, but seem incapable of being able to cooperate. Force is spreading and legitimacy is failing. Israel and Russia are acting as wrecking balls on some of the most basic laws of war. Whatever the ‘rules based order’ was, it is increasingly hollow and fragile. The recently agreed upon UN ‘Pact for the Future’ looks like a polycrisis-adjusted 21st century rendering of the failed Kellogg–Briand Pact in which countries agreed to outlaw war. For all the tortured talk of reforming and updating the United Nations, an honest consideration of the current constellation of forces would suggest that there needs to be a more serious discussion about what it might mean if the organisation becomes effectively defunct.
Entropy in politics echoes and reflects societal entropy shaped and amplified by technology. So much of what we have experienced in recent decades is lowering boundaries, removing limits: technology has been disintegrative and disruptive of economic and social relations. Conditions of disintegration and fragmentation prevail, alongside a refusal to acknowledge the realities of ‘enforced cosmopolitanism’ that mean we are unavoidably part of a ‘shared community of fate’.
Relevant to this discussion is Olivier Roy’s recent book, The Crisis of Culture, in which he identifies and seeks to explain these dynamics:
Roughly, four levels of radical transformation have changed the world since the 1960s: 1) the transformation of values with the individualist and hedonist revolution of the 1960s; 2) the internet revolution; 3) neoliberal financial globalisation; 4) the globalisation of space and the movement of human beings, in other words deterritorialisation.
Roy proposes that:
My argument is that, rather than a mere crisis of culture, what we are now witnessing is the “deculturation of cultures”: a dissolution of the content of the cultural canon, an obliteration of anthropological cultures, and the paradoxical promotion (through globalisation) of “subcultures” that are autonomous from the dominant culture within which they were embedded but are now reduced to codes of communication disconnected from real cultures.
Many of the wider themes that Roy highlights were identified a century earlier by Hermann Broch in his examination of the ‘disintegration of values’ through the decay and collapse of old Vienna. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his time, Broch reflected:
When a political, social, or economic vacuum has set in, its corresponding political, social, or economic revolution is not far away, and the more complete the vacuum, the more the various "partial" revolutions - as they simultaneously sharpen their tendencies - will converge in their struggle to become a single, all-encompassing revolution.
His analysis, complex and convoluted, is masterful and insightful, and captures how decay echoes and mirrors across different spheres. Aesthetic ugliness is a reflection of ethical ugliness and so on. For a more detailed consideration of how Broch speaks to the moment, you’ll need to wait for my book. Here I gesture to his identification of what happens when there is a political and ethical vacuum, it leads ultimately to evil.
The Broch reference is relevant also in terms of thinking with historical parallels. Most attempts to depict the present - especially in relation to geopolitics - work in relation to some historical analogy. The most prevalent one is a suitably post-modern mashup of references to a new ‘Axis’ - invoking WW2 and the spectre of fascism - and of ‘Cold War 2’ - conjuring up the threat of a great communist rival. Both of these invocations offer the comfort of the Hollywood ending in which liberal democracy prevails and progress marches on. I have critiqued different parts of this melange in prior notes (here and here). While it is important to recognise what is distinctive about the present conjuncture, and how it is perhaps different from previous moments, I have been thinking about conditions in reference to the period prior to WW1, and the collapse of the old European system.
By invoking that era, the aim is less to do with the Thucydidean dynamic of a rising power challenging a weakening hegemon. Rather, it is to recognise the similarities with the contradictory and conflictual advances of our globalised conditions. In Slouching Towards Utopia,
has detailed the significance of this earlier period:From 1870 to 1914, we can see global economic history as following a logic that was, if not inevitable, at least probable, or at least explicable after the fact. Luck and probability gave humanity an opening around 1870 in the form of a quintuple breakthrough: the ideology and policy of an open world, new forms of transportation, faster communications, and—most important—the beginnings of the research laboratory and the large corporation, which together would more than double the pace of invention and greatly speed the deployment of new technologies.
Without labouring the point, one can identify parallels with what has unfolded since the 1970s through the potent cocktail of neoliberal globalisation and Silicon Valley capitalism supported by the peace dividend that came with the end of the Cold War. Combined and uneven development on a truly global scale, enabled and amplified through digital technologies, have helped give rise to our vertiginous conditions.
Recent notes have included references from Robert Musil, best known for his unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities (MWQ), which is set in Austro-Hungarian Empire in the period immediately prior to the First World War. From the sketches to what might have been the concluding portion of MWQ:
Overall problem: war.
Pseudorealities lead to war.
From Musil’s notes outlining the second volume of MWQ:
Note the title of the major portion of the first volume: Pseudoreality Prevails. This means that in general today the personal givens of events are definite and delineated, but that what is general about them, or their significance, is indefinite, faded, and equivocal, and repeats itself unintelligibly. The person awakened to awareness of the current situation has the feeling that the same things are happening to him over and over again, without there being a light to guide him out of this disorderly circle.
In parallel and in very different registers, Broch and Musil identified the confusion and disorder of living in a non-age, of having to live and act in the context of a vacuum. They speak to where we now find ourselves, or fail to find ourselves, as the case might be. One of the themes I am exploring through these notes, and pursuing in the book manuscript I am drafting, is how thinking through and with these writers can help with understanding our own non-age, knowing the time means recognising it might be a time between the times.