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SPEAKING
FREELY
Spengler really
understands
By Joe Nichols
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
Once upon a time, I
enjoyed reading fiction. Among my favorites in this
craft are the works by Vladimir Nabokov, who at the same
time as creating his art dismisses it completely as a
tool for understanding the world; fiction is the
interior world of the writer, he insists, and should be
judged by its artistic merits alone. I want to disagree
with this master, celebrated for his literary criticisms
as much as for his literature itself, while conceding
his major point - fiction is art. The difference of
opinion then consists of our judgment on the
relationship between art and understanding, art and the
truth about the world. In this difference, I believe
Spengler agrees with me: Art and truth can be one and
the same.
Take Moby Dick, which Spengler
has twice trashed as being overwrought and confused.
Apart from its poetic verse, just these qualities are
its art, representing a world that shares these
properties. The underlying theme of the book - the one
that survives the many, apparently distracting but in
fact complementary asides about whales, ships and the
sea - is the signification of a turbulent, menacing
world at our feet and in our hearts, one that threatens
all human pretensions to exhibit a purpose and a meaning
to our existence. Ahab's struggle with the white whale
is man's struggle with his own subterranean nature. From
my encounter with this fictional narrative, I turned to
the world for a comparison, laboring on three
continents, actually handling elephants, reading
histories and the fact-based materials awash in the
world as science, social criticism and news commentary.
What I have found is that the essence of Melville's
representations in Moby Dick agrees with the
world, and Spengler understands this enough that he
avoids saying it, opting instead to highlight a partisan
cause that has no real justification - namely, the
Western claim to moral preeminence.
The bawds,
bards and hawkers of partisan narration in favor of the
home cause will always get a national platform, but the
whole truth has been overwhelmingly rejected as a public
instrumentality of power. In the back alleys of elite
discourse where Spengler resides, however, the general
admission that the world is going to shit is often
discussed openly and agreed upon. Occasionally this
becomes manifest in a theoretically public space, such
as in publications that are understood to be accessed by
a competent, alert minority, whether they are on the
left or the right of general thought. As one important
example, in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1994,
Robert Kaplan explained to his audience that we are fast
approaching a Coming Anarchy characterized by Third World population growth,
failed states, environmental degradation, increasing
poverty, mass migration and lawlessness, leading to an
intensification of resource competition, the undermining
of order and the previously dependable constraints of
political boundaries. This is the flipside of the many
promises of globalization. Kaplan, a member of the
neo-conservative tribe, was called upon to advise the
stick-figure president of the current American
administration soon after his coming to office. He was
then assigned to study and visit the many military
outposts of the US imperium, returning with his critique
to join with David Rothkop (Council on Foreign
Relations) among others to enthusiastically advocate
"cultural imperialism" and a "warrior ethos" as
America's best strategic trajectory into the future.
That Kaplan's advice was taken to heart should
be fairly obvious by now, providing one knows how to
separate and hold apart all of the rhetoric about
democracy, human rights, free trade, and other
beneficent intentions, and appreciates that these glad
tidings are presented to an ignorant public audience in
service to an underlying, but unstated, cause - the
cause shared in the back alleys of power.
Spengler must also be aware of the growing
energy crisis facing industrial civilization as a whole.
For a system built upon dependence of readily available
carbon fuels that are now becoming increasingly
uneconomic to extract and distribute, rising demand for
these fuels (in accordance with the essential factor of
growth in the capitalist mode of production, and the
drive to globalize this system) in nations particularly
needy and capable of industrial growth is discretely
understood by the keenest of decision-makers in the
major centers of power to be an altogether untenable
situation. One need only examine the wonderful
characterization of this problem in a December, 2002
interview for globalpublicmedia.com with Colin Campbell
(http://globalpublicmedia.com/INTERVIEWS/COLIN.CAMPBELL/), a petroleum geologist and founder of the
Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO), to
get the gist of the issue: capitalist economies have no
mechanism for intelligently managing limited stocks of
key natural resources, and democracies have an inbuilt
tendency to avoid planning for the future. In a paper,
Peak Oil: A Turning for
Mankind presented by Campbell in
2001 for the M King Hubbert Center for Petroleum Supply
Studies, he concludes his overall assessment with these
chilling words for a threatened elite: "All of this is
so incredibly obvious, being clearly revealed by even
the simplest analysis of discovery and production
trends. The inexplicable part is our great reluctance to
look reality in the face and at least make some plans
for what promises to be one of the greatest economic and
political discontinuities of all time. Time is of the
essence. It is later than you think."
One would
be wrong, though, to think that strategic planners in
the Bush administration have not considered this
predicament. In fact, it appears to be the core of their
pragmatism, if not of their worldview. Mathew Simmons,
heavyweight investment banker in the petroleum industry,
advisor to the Council on Foreign Relations and editor
of Vice President Dick Cheney's 2001 Energy Taskforce,
largely agrees with Campbell, and he calls for a
Marshall Plan for global energy production and
consumption. Addressing an ASPO
convention at the French
Petroleum Institute in May 2003 and responding to a
proposal for a "more enlightened energy policy" by the
Bush administration, Simmons replies: "That would be
wonderful but I think that it is going to take a while.
There really aren't any good energy solutions for
bridges, to buy some time, from oil and gas to the
alternatives. The only alternative right now is to
shrink our economies. This is a tough question and I
have no answers.
The Bush administration, as in
the Clinton era, might indeed undermine the American
economy, by default and in preference for continuing the
expansion of a concentrated, corporate-owned global
economy, but it too has no answer for the need to shrink
the total economy of the world to respond to an overall
energy crisis descending on industrial civilization -
that just can't happen under capitalism. James Woolsey,
formerly the CIA Director in the Clinton administration
and now himself a chief member of the neo-conservative
tribe, in testimony
given before the Committee on National Security of the
US Congress in 1998, elaborated a nuance of this crisis
for the inner circle. Woolsey, pointing to a 1996
projection in Fortune magazine, warned that by 2020
India and China alone would be consuming 50 million more
barrels of oil per day than the entire world was using
in 1996, and the clear implications of this fact were
drawn out in his closing remarks: either wean ourselves
from oil in the Middle East or radically alter the
nation states possessing the major reserves in the
Middle East to something more to the liking of the US
and its energy needs. Since the first is not possible,
the latter is necessary. Hence, the Bush
administration's adventure to remake the Middle East is
a matter of simple logic, again providing that one
grasps the bigger situation.
The strength of
Melville's allegory of man in competition against
unreasoning nature is again revealed beneath the veil of
Spengler's latest substantive article (Why America is losing the
intelligence war). In it, he
ironically duplicates the "overwrought and confused"
styling of the genuine art in Moby Dick that aims
at the truth, but he does so in order to present the
"facts" in service of a lie. Along with his new champion
at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, Spengler should
try to acknowledge the awkward reality that historically
and currently, accurate intelligence provided by the
agencies of the US government assembled for the purpose
is almost always necessarily ignored by the military's
top brass and policymakers in Washington. This was
nicely demonstrated in a recent article by Gabriel
Kolko, a leading military historian whose point of view
is built upon a growing list of memoirs by US
intelligence analysts, disaffected and often alarmed at
seeing their labors dismissed in deference to a grand
design that wants blind obedience rather than
information. Noting that "the state's intelligence
mechanisms are constrained by a larger structural and
ideological environment which foredooms any effort to
base action on informed insight to a chimera", and that
"The political and ideological imperatives and interests
define the nature of 'relevant' truths," Kolko equates
this tendency with the "US's failed confrontation with
the Islamic world for over half a century" and places
particular emphasis on the morass in Iraq today. His
conclusion: "To expect the US to behave other than as it
has is to cultivate serious illusions and delude
oneself. The system, in a word, is irrational. We saw it
in Vietnam and we are seeing it today in Iraq."
So it is fascinating to watch Spengler try to
describe the current catastrophe and growing crises of
an increasingly competitive humanity as a problem of
religious and cultural differences between the West -
the Judeo-Christian West - and the Islamic world. Behind
his rhetoric and seductive prose is the bitter
realization that humanity is in an unreasonable
struggle, in which there are winners and losers and one
must try to come out on top. Failed states, failed
cultures and peoples, failed systems and modes of
production are to be expected, especially if they are
fundamentally irrational or if one sets out to defeat
them. But for the purpose of steering the mass audience
in the West, there is a need to cast this struggle in
terms of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man to
placate the popular sensibilities in a mass culture,
buttressing and ennobling its material underpinnings to
acquire the fancied appearance of a religious
conviction. There is continuity here - from Plato to
Napoleon, from Goebbels and Leo Strauss to Bill Clinton,
it is recognized as necessary in the halls of power to
tell lies to any mass constituency in pursuit of any
grand design.
To offset the embarrassment of
presenting someone as simple as George Bush to fulfill
this task, Spengler and his type are needed (although we
could do without the likes of Daniel Pipes). He shows
some flair and labors handsomely to create his
illusions, but as Kolko observes, there are consequences
to people actually believing them; my guess is that
Spengler is not one of these. His art serves not the
truth, but the cause of his tribe - the high tribe of
Western civilization. It would be a novelty, however, to
hear from Spengler what he really understands.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you are interested in
contributing.
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