Cobb: The Challenge Defined

July 06, 2003

The Challenge Defined

If you are one of those folks, like me, who have been thoroughly convinced that the American Empire needs to be, then you need to understand exactly how difficult its creation and maintenance will be. Tim Burke reminds us, without sparing the rod:

You can only make nations slowly, through persuasion and example and investment and the painful unfolding of history. If you want something resembling liberal democracy in Iran, for example, then put your money on Iranians who want it too, not on the US military. The fighting in the Congo will end when the fighters finally decide that they cannot live this way any longer, or their victims successfully fight back, or when a single group of combatants achieve a necessary and structurally solidified monopoly on force sufficient to suppress any opposition. There is no way for outside military powers to impose any of those things on the Congo, not without a force of a million men, decades of work, an intellectual clarity about the nature and origins of liberal democracy and trillions of dollars to match, and maybe, probably, not even then. If China is going to be a free society, it's going to get there the same complex and messy way that Western Europe did, because there are social groups that have meaningful power who want to be free and are willing to pursue their own liberation.

I think that I should further explain how I believe my thinking on this avoids some of these pitfalls while admitting plainly that I am parsing what seems logical and desireable without the benefit of any formal study of the develpment of nations.

Firstly, I think it is important to show that Americans become Americans rather quickly. As a nation of immigrants, we absorb and transform peoples of all sorts. And while we suffer from the excesses of blood and soil nativists on occasion, it does not overwhelm the system. America is, within itself a Diaspora. We have ethnics and classes and devout of all sects plying their trades, hawking their ethics, yet stable and without the kinds of revenge killings we see in nations less fortunate. With the three draws of accumulated abundance, land and liberty, we should continue to be a destination of choice.

As much as we complain, I don't see any evidence that the increase diminishes our democracy or significantly alters our national interests. There is a certain level of responsibility that the elites of this nation hold to the American public despite the fact that they often do not serve us directly. Philip Morris, the tobacco giant, sells far more cigarettes to the Czech Republic than to California. But you are likely to find that the work ethic of Californians more represented in the high offices of PM USA. In other words, as Americans, our expectations of ourselves at work, transcend national boundaries. There are class and ethnic and religious expectations we shed in our daily lives of service to the multinational corporations that employ us. This ethos is a very significant part of our lives, it makes us somewhat ahistorical and flirts with the destruction of other social values, but it makes us, in our work lives interesting kinds of global citizens. Only America could create a Wal-Mart. Our consistent conversion of all manner of people into corporate zombies is a good thing.

Depending on your overall take on the value of globalism, the values propagated and disciplines established by the tasks inherent in gaining global market share are constructive or destructive. I happen to believe that it is the task of the University and not of the corporation to find ways and means of preserving the millions of ways of knowing that are reduced by the establishment of corporate rules and motive. The corporation turns human effort into profit and glorifies profit, not human effort. This works so long as exploitation and slavery are kept in check. They are kept in check for the most part and so the American economy is constructive. That the world depends upon our solvency is not an accursed addiction, it is to our mutual benefit. We are a benevolent engine.

Let us keep in mind that this goal of globally democratic nations is one that is just as reductive of human activity as that of global markets established by corporations. Whereas democracy puts liberty in the hands of the people, so corporate life puts economic affairs in the hands of the people. You vote and you get your slice, you work and you get your slice. They work exceedingly well together and they are both liberal and destructive of memory. They require people to put trust in the future, to delay gratification, to be zombies today in order to prosper freely tomorrow. That means people must have a reasonable amount of stability and so these systems both require the kind of physical security only well-disciplined armies can provide.

In the 90s, it was Albert Murray who said rhetorically against James Baldwin that "The fire next time will be put out by next Wednesday." He was referring to the futility of armed struggle against the United States in the wake of the Los Angeles Riots. America has got a good thing going and a huge amount of wealth and effort will be expended to keep that standard of living intact. So we are bound to defend and project power. Whatever threatens the American order will be met with rage, because all of us have invested in the future of liberal capitalist democracy and our investments have not yet paid off - we have sacrificed our organic lives for it. We cannot be ethnic selves, we cannot be religious selves. Those affinities do not carry very far in the substrate of American life. That's just you in your subdivision; there is no Irish Catholic corporation for you and your ilk. That freedom is for the privacy of your own home and do not carry out into the street.

I believe that this is the fundamental difference between the West, and the developing world. Whereas we enjoy the security of a well-disciplined army and are willing to sacrifice our tribal selves to the zombification of being a home-owning taxpaying middle class American with predictable loyalties and an endless variety of breakfast cereal choices, our fellow humans elsewhere are free in other dimensions. They are free to grow their own food, sew their own clothes, employ their own feet for transportation, sing songs of their own creation and otherwise live off the grid of dependencies that sustains here in the Matrix, er, the West. And because of that fierce independence, they will also pick up their own machetes, torches, AK-47s and other oversupply of the global arms market and fight whatever battles seem appropriate to their disconnected worlds. There, the fire next time is the same fire as their father's time. It continues to burn in Liberia and the Congo.

I should add here the important consideration that these days in some parts of Africa, a 15 year old orphan boy with an automatic rifle is a weapon of mass destruction. It is a weapon too horrific to contemplate, it requires a very specific kind of environment to be produce and sustain such weapons. What could be a more poignant example of the failure to delay the gratifications of liberty and prosperity than the haunting face of a child soldier?

But these are not the only failures in our world and an American Empire cannot be justified on such egregious terms. But our domestic tranquility is of necessity a model for the prospects of other people. Establishment of a spreading order is as much one of evangelism as of conquest and pacification. The success of immigration is our great gospel, and if we are truly our brothers keepers, why shouldn't we keep them as we keep ourselves?

There are great reasons why the rest of the world shouldn't be like America, but that is a matter of arrogance and attitude, not of substance. America is good enough for the rest of the world. Our problem is in sustaining the balances of power within our own system to make American liberty enough for anyone on the planet. When we master that, with stability and without oppression a good portion of the world will beat a path to our door.

But I say that the decentralization of global communications networks means that a culture is arising in the stable areas of the world that foretells the kind of life some of us are already living right here right now. And while I don't want to elaborate on that now, I think it is important to understand the absolute dependence this decentralized culture has on the American nation.

Think of the US and the EU as a global utility for the new networks of city-states. If these city-states are cultivated under the auspices of the same kind of industries American corporations have become, they will have no more need for their own armies than does Philip Morris.

This is the why I think an American superpower which can be globally pre-emptive is a good idea. It may, with the proper cooperation with China, Russia, Japan and the EU, create the kind of dominance and omnicience that obviates the practicality of organic armies. Developing nations will be put on the same terms as American immigrants.

Thus the future of all wars will be terrorist suppression. But we will say farewell to the rebel soldier. Or at least, that's my vision.

Posted by mbowen at July 6, 2003 07:51 PM

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