Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: post-Pax Americana predictions.
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What’s Next?
“After me, the flood” (“Après moi, le déluge”) said King Louis XV of France.
If, today, the liberal world order/Pax Americana is king, then what is the flood?
Barbarism, says
: “I suspect it’s the source of our own barbarism only now coming more clearly into view. And no, again, it’s not The Orange One. It’s much broader than that — a kind of vanity and vapidity rolled tightly into one.”Sudan.
reports from war-torn Sudan: “The end of the liberal world order is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in … Washington and Brussels. But in al-Ahamdda, this theoretical idea has become reality. The liberal world order has already ended in Sudan, and there isn’t anything to replace it.”Gaza.
writes: “The war in Gaza … is the logical outcome of its actually-existing power structures, directly affected by the donated weapons and munitions of the liberal hegemon. The end-state of all this moralizing rhetoric is the destruction of an entire people in their own land: the moral grandstanding of the liberal hawks now lies buried, rotting with them, in the rubble of Gaza. The rest of the world will hear no more of America’s guiding moral purpose.”Elite Social Control.
, philosopher and State Department policy planner, writes: “And yet, the most important polarity in American politics in the future … will be between two protocol elites: the managerial protocol elite of regulation and the technological protocol elite of computer code.”Class Struggle. Former Reagan speechwriter, Peggy Noonan predicts: “The spectacular costs associated with AI will force a debate on the sharing of its profits. The wealthy and powerful who own the AI companies won’t like that. … This will become one of the great political battles of the late 2020s and beyond.”
“Post-Sovereign Decontainment”
Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State is a jargon-riddled, nigh-unreadable yet still interesting book by professor Gareth Williams.
Williams theorizes about the end of the liberal world order (or, as he calls it, the “neoliberal global order”):
… I have proposed the term “post-sovereign decontainment” in order to indicate that it is no longer a question of an old epoch that is coextensive with a linear temporal transition toward the contours and possibility of a new destiny, of a new epoch of representation. It is simply globalization (which by now cannot even be understood in the same terms as “late modernity” was just thirty years ago) as a perpetual form of hollowing out and ending. It is no longer a question of Prometheus bound or unbound. Promethean thinking is moribund, overcome by a historical and conceptual perishing that is incapable of positing anything new in its place. This an-epochality — the boundless disaster of epochality itself — raises a number of questions, one of which is that of the tendential patterns, if any, which endure in the persistent, limitless turmoil that is the late neoliberal, global order.
Dresden, Revisited
Last week, we wrote: “Essentially, many arguments about Gaza become arguments about whether the firebombing of Dresden was justified.”
This week, Mike Huckabee, US Ambassador to Israel, said:
The Past Is Not Even the Past. “World Unexploded World War II bomb found in Dresden, Germany, prompting thousands to evacuate,” CBS/AFP reported last week.
From the Crowd
Reactions to our two big pieces this week:
’s piece about barbarism and ’s essay about South Park.Truth Matters. Responding to
’s Molotov cocktail of an article, , religion is good for society only because it’s true:
I’m a Christian. I’m cautiously optimistic about a broad-based faith revival. But I worry it may be for the wrong reasons.
There have been plenty of instrumental defenses of religion, especially Christianity, in recent years. A common one is that it promotes Western civilization and values. (First-century Roman aristocrats would not have been amused.)
This puts the cart before the horse. It’s an interesting and valid social-scientific question to think about the effects of religiosity on politics and culture. But embracing religiosity as a strategy to get a “better” politics or culture is self-defeating. If we embrace Christianity because we don't want to be barbarians, we’ll end up barbarians with a Christian veneer.
We’ll only get the civilizational benefits of Christianity if we become Christians for non-civilizational (or at least a-civilizational) reasons. I, too, am very fond of what Christianity has to say about moral anthropology, and therefore human rights. But the only reason to buy it is that you think it is true.
Pamela Anderson v. Marilyn Monroe.
responds to ’s review of the new season of South Park:
This reminds me of something
wrote recently over in his Substack: writing about what makes movies like Airplane and Naked Gun funny, he pointed out:“Pamela Anderson costars in the new Naked Gun, and at this point her ability to do ‘attractive woman who is in on the joke that she reduces men to drooling idiocy’ is … I mean, nobody will ever beat Marilyn Monroe at that game but it’s not an insult to Marilyn to mention Pam in the same sentence. I find this honestly sort of moving, given what being hot has cost Pamela Anderson in terms of indignity, public humiliation, violation of privacy, misunderestimation and so on. Her funniest moments in this film are just extravagantly goofy.”
This kind of self-implicating humor is both brutally honest and deeply generous at the same time: which I’d like to think is why it can succeed at actually being disarming enough to help us see both ourselves and whatever monstrosity it mocks with non-defensive, non-murderous clarity?
It’s All Greek to Me. Finally, Jet helps Damir with his Greek:
Sadly “barbarian” is unrelated to the Latin word for beard, but derives from the Greek term, which originally designated non-Greek speakers, barbaroi vs Hellenes. From the Greek perspective, the Romans were barbaroi, too. The Romans simply adopted the word from the Greeks and decided to take themselves out of the category.
See you next week!
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I am fairly new here, and I have to say I am really enjoying your Substack.
Regarding Dresden (and barbarism, for that matter), I remember a student who sat behind me in a political theory class with an open laptop plastered with stickers. During break, while he was out of the room, I turned around to get a look at them. Among many was an Antifa logo, a trans flag, and a "Remember Dresden!" one where the font was engulfed in high, blazing flames.
He was a smart kid -- incredibly smart. Nerdy, overweight. I imagined how he would fare if civilization crumbled and he got a chance to live out what I imagined was his fantasy of fighting fascists. Some of the soldiers that I know seem to be at least fascist-adjacent. They are conservative, disciplined, former athletes who respond quickly to authority (coaches, superior officers, ...some of them to Trump).
In my musings, I thought he would instantly regret it if there were real violence. Then I remembered Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the other wars where the most powerful militaries were driven out by rag-tag guerrillas. Maybe he wouldn't fare so badly...
In any case, I felt sure that in that young man's heart was violence, just as there is violence in the hearts of so many among us: that stone-faced stranger passing us on the street, that group of outcasts huddled together in the back of class. Mike Huckabee.
Let us pray and believe it, indeed.