北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)
北 Beijing 2008 - 2
2
We live in a pre-war, not post-war, world.
2005
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
We live in a pre-war, not post-war, world. Depend on it. It squawks that way.
I am far from alone in saying this. It is a sense that tracks across the cables released by Wikileaks, where an increasingly hectoring and bullying American diplomacy alienates allies who had hoped for a change after George W. Bush. It is belched in bars that serve Baiju. It is felt by a New York Times article, which compares Wikileaks to the “long war” of the 20th century, the first battle between the pyramid and the sphere. It is sensed in another on how the present era of relative peace might be broken by American willingness to fight, and by an article on how the Imperial period of the Pax Americana might suddenly meltdown into a black stone of jade.
There are always prophets of doom because somewhere, the bitter beat of a dark angel's wings is close at hand for someone. However, it is rarer than a grand epoch enters its terminal decline, and a new one greys the east, lit by an invisible sun that greets you.1
Dystopia is one of the twilight lands, that border the lands of the living: precious. It borders the lands of prophecy, specifically the self-unfulfilling prophecy. Consider the novel 1984 whose existence warned the West of what was in store if should slip down the chasm of totalitarianism in unitarian clothes. It was a bleak warning that averted the very crisis that it predicted. Several of the most ridiculed Cassandras have given voice to fear as a medicine. From Silent Spring to the Omega Man, the cri de Coeur warning is one of the most compelling of genres, an iridium of trade. Marx, while he would have hated the idea, is perhaps at the top of the pantheon, by warning of what the agony of modernization could do, he was the figure who gave energy to save capitalism from the capitalists. For the people consider themselves rather as tenants than landlords.2 Drone with oboe black and shiny.
The dystopia is always a simple one: it is the linear or exponential extension of our own “S” curve. An S curve is the natural result of a bell curve class of arrivals, a few early, then a flood as the ordinary arrive, and then a trickle of rites. However, near the point of last inflection, there is a point where whatever fuel is fed into it runs low, there are no more bishops to trade for pawns to get at the king in a surprise. The center has not been held. Bank on it. And everyone is full of conviction that there is no end in sight. “This time, it is different.” So sayeth Reinhart & Rogoff in a barbarian’s voice.3 It is the rule.
The very certainty of the stupid appropriateness that creates the boom, when even your mother buys stocks, creates unease in those who know themselves to be more thoughtful, at least, than the mass, which feeds on its own stampede. From this the backlash of the intellectual elite, and from the contrarians, who might echo each other, but whose discontent springs from different wellsprings. One, the elite, cares not for success but knows that a herd without a leader will find the nearest cliff. The other is the risk-averse contrarian, who believes that if the herd were smart, the contrarian would be rich. Look around at the hazy shade of winter among the trees.4 A bruising of the sores.
There are two dooms that hang over our own age: one feels a doom in global warming and in peak oil. They move in harmony as one house connects to the other. This looks back to the 18th century, which was “eating its own seed corn,” and could not yet perceive the unseen empire that it was standing at the doorstep of, nor to change it. One should always end an epoch with a preposition, the coming age is writ before it is made. In the case of the 18th century, it was sitting upon enough energy to flood the world with engines of commerce and destruction but was too busy fighting over the meager present profits of the patents granted to two different men on the steam engine to exploit it. The Watt-Newcomb engine is so called because each man invented half of it. But it would be almost 80 years before railways would spread like running vines. Where is there when you’ve gone too far?5
The other is that the centripetal forces that will tear apart the present age of complacency, are coming close, and the stupid herds of normal people, who do not see the greatness of those that provide them with freedom. These are quite different from the doom that hung over the time of Wagner and Nietzsche, and which is felt by our own elites. It was and is expressed down the most mediocre intellect attached to the courts of that and this age: it was an age of an empire of will and men, and the realization was that the slightest slip from that grip would lead to a fall of that empire. Of course, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy: to be hard enough launched them into wars that destroyed the will. The colonial empires were given back by bled white core nations that had ripped themselves apart in the long wars. “The Second Thirty Years War” Churchill termed it.
For the elites, hard decisions are those needed to execute the neo-classical play of making the poor pay for the world we live in. Weed out the poor, if need be with soap. The elites think of themselves as “neo-s” Neo-Liberal. Neo-Classical. Neo-Conservative with an arrogant eye.6 All of the answers are in and from the past. In an odd twist, one of the most resonant movies that preached the illusion of the present called its hero “Neo” is an anagram bequeathed of “One.” And then fizzled out as it found no answer to reward its questions. In fact, the elites are posts: Post-World War II, and Post-Cold War. They fear a winding Post-American world, a world that is arriving with every passing moment with the rise of China and its inevitable collision with a shifting America. Soon you are going to know when the bullet hits the bone.7 To lose an elixir sweet against an iron enemy nourished by a syrup grade “B.”
What has been missing from these predictions is the synthesis that ties them to use. It is also altering the shape of politics because there is a difference between the political spectrum of the old order, which has its left and right, its ins and outs, and the opposition between those who cling to the post-world, and those which imagine a pre-world world and relies on it. After all, even totalitarian states have factions, it is not a contradiction to have a left-to-right spectrum of a conservative state to wail and stop. It is all on the screen of a fluttering flag on Iwo Jima.
The old essay was a classical temple, square and filled in, the new essay is organic, a journey without sitting in place. The first step in the mythic journey is to step away from the cozy starting point of the present conflict and explain what the post-world was in a pleasing manner, and why it found itself in a bite of neo-mythology. The last part is a moor of a boat to the bank while ants eat broadleaf plantain with rings on the yokes.
The 20th century self-consciously deconstructed the early 19th century, in an effort to keep control over the legitimacy of the late 19th century's empire and academic rigor but remove the foundations of its extension to power and control. It found in the organic naturalism of the Romantic period an easy enemy, since, first Romanticism had been dead for quite some time as an artistic force, and even more so as a political and social force. It was, however, the wellspring from which many of the tropes, the basic outlines, of the late 19th century, the Victorian, had sprung in order to be mowed with greedy strength. The late 19th century was deconstructed as an epoch, with some help from the Victorians themselves. There was little laziness. What was really a new order, established in a series of wars and revolutions between 1857 and roughly 1873, became the theory of a post-Napoleonic Romantic world with its nose cut off. Toil was its lot with shortness of breath and talking in ones sleep.
1 Reference to Police, “Invisible Sun”
2 More, Utopia
3 Reference to Reinhart & Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
4 The Bangles, “Hazy Shade of Winter”
5 Reference to Golden Earring, “Twilight Zone”
6 Last piece from Suzanne Vega, “The Queen and The Soldier”
7 Golden Earring, “Twilight Zone”