End of History

THE rIGHT HATES LIBERALISM BECAUSE IT WORKS:

Global Inequality in Well‐​Being Has Decreased across Many Dimensions (Chelsea Follett and Vincent Geloso, 6/08/23, Cato)

The world has seen dramatic, global human progress across a broad range of indicators in recent decades, but have those gains been widely shared? The Inequality of Human Progress Index (IHPI) measures relative gaps in global development. It surveys international inequality across a greater number of dimensions than any prior index. By analyzing inequality in a multidimensional way, the IHPI takes inequality more seriously than those indexes that focus on income inequality alone. The IHPI considers material well‐​being and seven additional metrics: lifespan, infant mortality, adequate nutrition, environmental safety, access to opportunity (as measured by education), access to information (as measured by internet access), and political freedom. Across all but two of those dimensions, the world has become more equal since 1990. Globalization and market liberalization over the past few decades have not only raised absolute living standards but also reduced overall inequality.

The brutal reality of the End of History is that you aren’t special.

SHOULD HAVE STAYED:

THE COLD WAR COMES TO VERMONT (The Attic)

Solzhenitsyn and his wife considered Canada, but despite “proper winters,” it seemed “boring. . . Like a pillow.” Touring New England, they chose Cavendish for remoteness and its proximity to Dartmouth College where Solzhenitsyn might do research.

In September 1976, “happy to have hoodwinked the KGB,” Solzhenitsyn and his family slipped quietly into Cavendish. Within days, a media circus descended. Hundreds of reporters. Cameras. A helicopter flyover. Citizens of Vermont, suddenly drafted into the Cold War, fought with their best weapon — Yankee silence. Solzhenitsyn had asked for nothing more.

Speaking to town meeting, Solzhenitsyn praised Vermont’s “simple way of life, similar to that of our Russian peasants.” Forgive him, he said, for building a fence around his property. Understand, he begged, that “my life consists of work, and this work demands that it not be interrupted.”

Cavendish was impressed. “He’d always been a fairly enigmatic person,” said Town Manager Richard Svec, “and him making a public appearance to the local townspeople, that went a long way with the folks.”

The “dear neighbors” answered Solzhenitsyn’s plea — they left him alone. He settled in to work, writing long into the night.

On into the 1980s, Cavendish made Solzhenitsyn a secret all over town. At the general store, a sign read: “No Restrooms, No Bare Feet, No Directions to the Solzhenitsyns.” When asked, kids steered strangers on wayward paths. A neighbor drove Solzhenitsyn’s sons to school. The writer’s wife, Natalya, and her mother became Celtics fans. The local postmaster arranged with Boston authorities to screen his mail for bombs or more poison.

Beyond Cavendish, America besieged Solzhenitsyn with letters, telegrams, requests to speak. In 1978, he made a rare appearance, using hIs commencement address at Harvard to denounce Western culture. “The human soul longs for things higher, warmer, and purer than those offered by today’s mass living habits. . . by TV stupor and by intolerable music.”

Acerbic and irascible, Solzhenitsyn remained an exile. “Nothing seems the same in a foreign land; nothing seems yours. You feel a constant anguish in those conditions under which everyone else lives normally — and you are seen as a stranger.”

But in Cavendish, he found a home. For 18 years, until the Cold War ended, Solzhenitsyn lived what he considered the best days of his life. Just before his return to Russia, he strolled through Cavendish, enjoying an “enchanting parade.” Again he spoke to town meeting.

“Lately, while walking on the nearby roads, taking in the surroundings with a farewell glance, I have found every meeting with any neighbor to be warm and friendly. And so today, both to those of you who I have met over these years, and to those who I haven’t met, I say: Thank you and farewell. I wish all the best to Cavendish. God bless you all.”

JUST A SMIDGE:

The Road Away from Serfdom: A new book makes the case for the renewed relevance of F. A. Hayek’s 1944 classic. (Alberto Mingardi, Dec 06 2023, City Journal)

One lesson of political capitalism may be that even a hint of economic liberty, if given after years of economic oppression, can be enough to unleash substantial economic growth. Such growth is the result not of government or the state but of individuals acting to improve their lot. One can also look at demography and see how globalization, by uplifting millions, multiplied opportunities that enabled growth. “Complete” liberty, if such a thing exists, was not necessary to produce growth—human beings are enterprising enough that just a little elbow room goes a long way.

IT IS UNCERTAINTY THAT TERRIFIES THE IDEOLOGUE:

The Cosmic Tragedy of Modernity and the Virtues of Liberalism: Safeguarding personal and social autonomy from the ever changing conditions of modernity (Ábris P. Bendek, Dec 5, 2023, Liberal Currents)

Liberalism is not an organic part of modernity as much as one possible framework of social response to its intrinsic moral vacuum and self-developing informational complexity. This is not to stay that, as a framework of response, liberalism did not contribute to modernity’s substance or accelerate many of its more intrinsic processes, particularly the rise of the state. Rather that some kind of social response was necessary to modernity and its cosmic tragedy, and it is especially in this context of necessity that the virtues of a liberal social organization become apparent.

Of course, such necessities are not acknowledged by Deneen and his creed: they are thrown away in favor of a historicised, yet radically ahistorical, time. The Rousseauian temptation in postliberalism is apparent. Its reactionary psychology does not admit the observation that before bourgeois modernity, the huge majority of people at any rate lacked the mental and material autonomy necessary to reflect on their supposedly flourishing spiritual contexts. Life by any means was “nasty, brutish and short“, and even if a certain amount of people truly found joy and meaning in their culture and communities, as the little Rousseau inside postliberalism suggests, for most it could not be the predominant sensation in life. Once modernity has been unleashed, gains in literacy and wellbeing certainly allowed some, and then quite a many, to long back for a historicised illusion of meaning that people in turn could anxiously project into their modernity-structured political hopes.

But this longing and this projection are ultimately self-defeating. They cannot in fact recover the meaning thought to be once possessed; they only impoverish its symbolic remnants through the use of power. Nietzsche writes: “Attempts to combat nihilism without enacting a change in values only deliver the opposite result, and sharpen the original problem (my translation)”. The remedy becomes poison. Subjected to power, the meaning of God, family and country reformulates into totalitarian nihilism. The anxiety and inner conflict with which modernity is contrasted with meaning translates only to will’s radical claim towards belonging and existential security, ultimately nurturing a totalitarian psyche and a secular religion around the leader, all grounded in the forced march on nihilism in which postliberalism has now partaken.

The other way the totalitarian spirit haunts the reactionary mindset, of course, is the latter’s necessary resort to the state’s power-machinery. To fulfill the mission of discharging from bourgeois modernity—from the historical dynamism of capitalism, reformation, science, Enlightenment and beyond—postliberalism cannot but build an omnipotent state. Either way (or both), reaction renounces itself in flirting with the totalitarian – and inescapably modern – mind.

Totalitarianism’s own way to responding to the cosmic tragedy is not trying to recover meaning; it is to replace it by the immanent (and radical) design of the transcendent. The totalitarian cosmology is rooted in the revolutionary psyche; it is the perpetuation of the Le Bonian moment when Durkheim’s infamous maxim that society is God emerges to absolute immanence, and the crowd’s whims and passions dictate moral and political consciousness. Yet in order to cool down, control and finally direct the crowd’s will, one further step is necessary. One needs to embody that will in the state and the leader; one needs to build a perpetual, deranged magic in which the nation is one and one is the nation. One needs to “reenchant“ the world through the crude essence of state, technology and ideology. One needs to build a Volksgemeinschaft.

The logic of a liberal social organization, needless to say, is radically different from that of reaction or of totalitarianism. Liberalism does not aim to secede from bourgeois modernity, and thereby create its own. It tries to continuously adapt to the evolving problem—and power-configurations—of modernity, so we can protect our personal and social autonomy against its changes, and not be subjugated by the will to power which would deny us this very autonomy. From the logic of adaptation, in turn, it derives that a liberal social organization can only live up to itself if it not only enables, but positively contains both socialist and conservative voices which sufficiently increase the whole paradigm’s responsivity to the corrosive effects of modernity, and to its very own, general need to continuously balance itself along the changes of the latter. Indeed, the emphasis is not on liberalism as an ideology as much as liberalism as a social order, which permits a diversity of viewpoints in the pursuit of autonomy against facing modernisation.

This process necessarily implies a great deal of uncertainty.

Liberalism’s dirty secret is that it is pre-modern.

GLOBALIZATION IS AMERICANIZATION:

America’s undying empire: why the decline of US power has been greatly exaggerated (Tom Stevenson, 30 Nov 2023, The Guardian)

The US has military superiority over all other countries, control of the world’s oceans via critical sea lanes, garrisons on every continent, a network of alliances that covers much of the industrial world, the ability to render individuals to secret prisons in countries from Cuba to Thailand, preponderant influence over the global financial system, about 30% of the world’s wealth and a continental economy not dependent on international trade.

To call this an empire is, if anything, to understate its range. Within the American security establishment, what it amounted to was never in doubt. US power was to be exercised around the world using the “conduits of national power”: economic centrality, military scale, sole possession of a global navy, nuclear superiority and global surveillance architecture that makes use of the dominant American share of the Earth’s orbital infrastructure.

If proponents of the end of the US global order do not assert a decrease in the potency of the instruments of American power, that is because there has been no such decrease. The share of global transactions conducted in dollars has been increasing, not declining. No other state can affect political outcomes in other countries the way the US still does. The reach of the contemporary US is so great that it tends to blend into the background of daily events. In January 2019, the US demanded that Germany ban the Iranian airline Mahan Air from landing on its territory. In September 2020, it sanctioned the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court for refusing to drop investigations into American citizens. In February 2022, at US request, Japan agreed to redirect liquefied fossil gas, which is critical to Japanese industry, to Europe in the event of a conflict with Russia over Ukraine. At the height of that conflict, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, found the time to visit Algiers to negotiate the reopening of a gas pipeline to Spain via Morocco. These were all quotidian events, unremarkable daily instances of humdrum imperial activity. The practical operation of the empire remains poorly understood, not despite its ubiquity, but because of it.

From this perspective, the menial adherence of Britain to the US global project is at least intelligible. Historically, American planners divided their approach to the rest of the world by region. In western Europe and Japan, American interests were usually pursued by cautious political management. In Latin America and the Middle East, constant interventions, coups and invasions were needed. In east Asia and south-east Asia there was military exertion at scale. As long as it lasted, the Soviet Union was cordoned off and contained, against the wishes of the generals in the US Strategic Air Command, who would have preferred to destroy it in a nuclear holocaust. The major US allies were on the right side of this calculus and had less reason to begrudge it.

When dealing with the US, elites in countries on the periphery of the global economy still often behave as though they are dealing with the imperial centre.

It’s not just that other nations aspire to be like America but that the only way to achive that is Americanization. No one can escape the End of History in the long run.

rEALISM IS ABOUT OPPRESSION:

The tragedy behind Kissinger’s realpolitik (ROBERT D. KAPLAN, 11/30/23, UnHerd)

Kissinger’s beliefs, which emerge through his writing, are certainly not for the faint-hearted. They are emotionally unsatisfying, yet analytically timeless. They include: […]

[O]order is more important than freedom, since without order there is no freedom for anybody.

The Realist elevation of “order” above freedom is little more than collaboration with evil.