[Nettime-bold] The Last Totalitarians

["R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>]

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Status:  U
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 16:31:54 -0400
To: dcsb@ai.mit.edu, Digital Bearer Settlement List <dbs@philodox.com>
From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah@shipwright.com>
Subject: The Last Totalitarians
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http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lindsayprint092801.html




The Last Totalitarians
It's not a completely new war.

By Brink Lindsey, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of the
upcoming book Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global
Capitalism . This article is adapted from the book.
September 28, 2001 1:00 p.m.



That President Bush has called the first war of the 21st century has much
in common with the great wars of the century just past. Now, as then, the
root cause of the carnage lies in radical discontent with modern industrial
society - a hydra-headed historical phenomenon that is well described as
the Industrial Counterrevolution.

At first glance, shadowy Islamist terrorists look very different from any
enemy we have ever faced. And indeed, the tactics they employ are novel, as
are the tactics that must be used to defeat them. But the fundamental
nature of our present adversaries, once seen plainly, is all too familiar.
The evil we confront today is the evil of totalitarianism: Osama bin Laden,
al Qaeda, and their coconspirators are the modern-day successors of Lenin
and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot.

The atrocities of today's terrorists are the last shudder of a historical
convulsion of unprecedented fury and destructive power. It was spawned by
the spiritual confusion that accompanied the coming of the modern age, and
consists of a profound hostility toward the disciplines and opportunities
of human freedom. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire we thought we were
done with totalitarianism. But it lives still, and lives to do harm. As we
prepare once more to face this old and dangerous adversary, we need to
reacquaint ourselves with its origins and nature.

To understand what gave rise to the totalitarian plague, you have to
appreciate the radical historical discontinuity represented by the
technological dynamism of the past 150 years. In the second half of the
19th century, various strands of economic development - new energy sources,
new production techniques, breakthroughs in transportation and
communication - were woven into new organizational forms to produce a
wealth-creating capacity of unprecedented scale, complexity, and power. It
was during this great confluence that the scientific method was first
systematically integrated into economic life; technological and
organizational innovation became normal, routine, and ubiquitous. Nobel
prize-winning economist Douglass North refers to the "wedding of science
and technology" as the "Second Economic Revolution" - the first being the
advent of agriculture ten millennia ago.

The Industrial Revolution was the economic expression of a much more
general transformation, a radical new form of social order whose defining
feature was the embrace of open-ended discovery: open-endedness in the
pursuit of knowledge (provisional and refutable hypotheses supplanting
revelation and authority), open-endedness in economic life (innovation and
free-floating market transactions in place of tradition and the "just
price"), open-endedness in politics (power emerging from the people rather
than the divine right of kings and hereditary aristocracies), and
open-endedness in life paths (following your dreams instead of knowing your
place). In short, industrialization both advanced and reflected a larger
dynamic of liberalization - a dramatic and qualitative shift in the
dimensions of social freedom.

The emergence of this new liberal order in the North Atlantic world came as
a series of jolting shocks. Kings were knocked from their thrones or else
made subservient to parliaments; nobles were stripped of rank and power.
Science displaced the earth from the center of the Universe, dragged
humanity into the animal kingdom, and cast a pall of doubt over the most
cherished religious beliefs. As if these assaults on age-old verities were
not enough, the coup de grace was then applied with the eruption of
mechanized, urbanized society. The natural, easy rhythms of country life
gave way to the clanging, clock-driven tempo of the city and the factory,
and new technologies of miraculous power and demonic destructiveness burst
forth. Vast riches were heaped up in the midst of brutal hardship and want;
new social classes erupted and struggled for position.

In countries outside of the North Atlantic world, the experience of
modernization was, if anything, even more vertiginous. Social changes were
often accelerated by the confrontation, all at once, with Western
innovations that had taken decades or centuries to develop originally.
Moreover, these changes were experienced not as homegrown developments, but
as real or figurative conquests by foreign powers. Modernity thus came as a
humiliation - a shocking realization that the local culture was hopelessly
backward compared with that of the new foreign masters.

It is unsurprising that, in all the wrenching social tumult, many people
felt lost - adrift in a surging flux without landmarks or firm ground. The
deepest thinkers of the 19th century identified this anomie as the
spiritual crisis of the age: Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of
God, while Max Weber wrote of society's "disenchantment." But it was Karl
Marx who traced most clearly the connection between this spiritual crisis
and the economic upheavals of his day. As he and Friedrich Engels wrote in
this breathtaking passage from the Communist Manifesto:


Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the
bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profanedŠ.


Thus did industrialization beget a massive backlash - a reaction against
the dizzying plenitude of open-endedness, a lurch toward some antidote to
the jarring, jangling uncertainty of a world where "all that is solid melts
into air." The Industrial Counterrevolution was protean and, in its many
guises, captured minds of almost every persuasion. But in all its forms, it
held out this promise: that political power, whether at the national or
global level, could recreate the simplicity, certainty, and solidarity of
preindustrial life. The appeal of that promise powered a disastrous century
of collectivist experimentation.

The promise of redemption through politics - of reintegration into some
larger whole - was present even in the milder incarnations of the
collectivist impulse. As against the "chaos" and "anarchy" of the market
order, a central state with expanded fiscal and regulatory powers offered
the reassurance that somebody was "in charge." In particular, the
nationalization or regulation of previously autonomous private enterprises
reasserted the primacy of the group, which had always held sway in earlier
times. In all the various permutations of incremental collectivism - social
democracy, the welfare and regulatory state, Keynesian "fine tuning,"
development planning - the emotional appeal of group cohesion buttressed
the intellectual arguments for greater government involvement in economic
life.

But it was in the radical centralizing movements of totalitarianism that
the rebellion against open-endedness overwhelmed all other considerations.
Robert Nisbet, in his seminal Quest for Community, identified the rise of
totalitarianism in modern times as an effort to recreate, through the
state, the lost sense of community that had obtained in the premodern
world. "The greatest appeal of the totalitarian party, Marxist or other,"
wrote Nisbet, "lies in its capacity to provide a sense of moral coherence
and communal membership to those who have become, to one degree or another,
victims of the sense of exclusion from the ordinary channels of belonging
in society."

And in his great but too little remembered 1936 book, The Good Society,
Walter Lippmann diagnosed the totalitarian threat as a "collectivist
counter-revolution" against industrial society's complex division of labor.
"[T]he industrial revolution," he wrote, "has instituted a way of life
organized on a very large scale, with men and communities no longer
autonomous but elaborately interdependent, with change no longer so gradual
as to be imperceptible, but highly dynamic within the span of each man's
experience. No more profound or pervasive transformation of habits and
values and ideas was ever imposed so suddenly on the great mass of
mankind." Opposition to that transformation, he continued, had hatched the
monstrous tyrannies that at that time menaced the world:


[A]s the revolutionary transformation proceeds, it must evoke resistance
and rebellion at every stage. It evokes resistance and rebellion on the
right and on the left - that is to say, among those who possess power and
wealth, and among those who do notŠ. Though these two movements wage a
desperate class struggle, they are, with reference to the great industrial
revolution of the modern age, two forms of reaction and counter-revolution.
For, in the last analysis, these two collectivist movements are efforts to
resist, by various kinds of coercion, the consequences of the increasing
division of labor.


The misbegotten secular religions of totalitarianism won their devoted and
ruthless followings by offering an escape from the stresses of modernity -
specifically, from the agoraphobic panic that liberal open-endedness
roused. They aspired to "re-enchant" the world with grand dreams of class
or racial destiny - dreams that integrated their adherents into communities
of true believers, and elevated them from lost souls to agents of great and
inexorable forces. With their insidiously appealing lies, the false faiths
of communism and fascism launched their mad rebellion against the liberal
rigors of questioning and self-doubt - and so against tolerance and
pluralism and peaceable persuasion. They inflicted upon a century their
awful, evil perversion of modernity: the instrumentalities of mass
production and mass prosperity twisted into engines of mass destruction and
mass murder.

The liberal revolution survived the reactionary challenge. Fascism was put
to rout, at horrible cost, in the great struggle of World War II; Communism
was contained and waited out until it imploded, just a decade ago. And
coincident with Communism's demise has come a global rediscovery of liberal
ideas and institutions. Free markets and democracy have registered
impressive gains around the world. However, the dead hand of the
collectivist past still exerts a powerful influence: The inertia of old
mindsets and vested interests blocks progress at every turn, and so our new
era of globalization is a messy and sometimes volatile one. But it is an
era of hope, and of possibility.

As the horrible events of September 11 made clear, we are not yet finished
with the totalitarian threat. In the tragic, broken societies of the
Islamic world - where free markets have gained little foothold, and
democracy even less - radical hostility to modernity still festers on a
large scale. And it has given rise to a distinctive form of
totalitarianism: one that uses a perverted form of religious faith, rather
than any purely secular ideology, as its reactionary mythos. For the past
quarter-century, radical Islamist fundamentalism has roiled the nations in
which it arose. Now it has reached out to wage a direct, frontal assault on
its antithesis - its "Great Satan": the United States.

Despite the trappings of religious fervor, Islamist totalitarianism is
strikingly similar to its defunct, secular cousins. It is an expression,
not of spirituality, but of anomie: in particular, a seething resentment of
Western prosperity and strength. Consider the origins of the Muslim
Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 to resist the British presence in Egypt, the
Brotherhood was the original radical Islamist terror network. As detailed
in David Pryce-Jones' powerful The Closed Circle, the official account of
its formation records this statement at the group's initial meeting: "We
know not the practical way to reach the glory of Islam and serve the
welfare of Muslims. We are weary of this life of humiliation and
restriction. Lo, we see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and
dignity."

And - just like its Communist and fascist predecessors - Islamist
totalitarianism seeks redemption through politics. It is animated by the
pursuit of temporal power: the destruction of the "decadent" (i.e.,
liberal) West and creation of a pan-Islamic utopian state featuring
unrestrained centralization of authority. Whether the utopian blueprint
calls for mullahs, commissars, or Gauleiters to wield absolute power is of
secondary importance: It is the utopian idea itself - the millennial
fantasy of a totalitarian state - that unites all the radical movements of
the Industrial Counterrevolution.

The point bears emphasis. Radical Islamist fundamentalism not does content
itself with mere rejection of the West's alleged vices. If that were all
there was to it, its program might be simply to stage a retreat from
modernity's wickedness - to do, in other words, what the Amish have done.
But Islamist totalitarianism, though it claims otherworldly inspiration, is
obsessed with worldly power and influence. It does not merely reject the
West; it wants to beat the West at its own game of worldly success. Osama
bin Laden is constantly claiming that the United States is weak and can be
defeated; he and his colleagues lust for power and believe they can attain
it. And so, although it attempts to appropriate a particular religious
tradition, Islamist totalitarianism is not, at bottom, a religious
movement. It is a political movement - a quest for political power.

Indeed, Islamist fundamentalism shares with other totalitarian movements a
commitment to centralization not just of political power, but of economic
control as well. Consider Iran, where the first and greatest victory for
Islamist totalitarianism was won. As Shaul Bakhash describes in his Reign
of the Ayatollahs:


[T]he government took over large sectors of the economy through
nationalization and expropriation, including banking, insurance, major
industry, large-scale agriculture and construction, and an important part
of foreign trade. It also involved itself in the domestic distribution of
goods. As a result, the economic role of the state was greatly swollen and
that of the private sector greatly diminished by the revolution.


Today, the sectaries of radical Islamism continue to uphold various
collectivist strains of "Islamic economics" - trumpeted as righteous
alternatives to the secular and individualist corruption of "Eurocentric"
globalization.

Before the September 11 attacks, it appeared that Islamist totalitarianism
was a movement in decline. In the decades since the Iranian revolution,
formidable Islamist opposition movements have built up around the Islamic
world, but totalitarian regimes have come to power only in the Sudan and
Afghanistan - backwaters even by regional standards. Elsewhere,
insurgencies have been crushed (in Syria) or at least brutally repressed
(in Algeria, Egypt, and Chechnya). In Iran, revolutionary fervor steadily
gave way to disillusionment and cynicism; the reformist government of
Mohammed Khatami has moved gingerly toward a more moderate course.

In the wake of September 11, it is unclear whether the U.S. military
response will precipitate a new wave of radicalization in the Islamic world
- one which might topple existing regimes and bring totalitarians to power.
It is unclear whether terrorists will be able to outmaneuver the escalation
of security and intelligence activity now underway, and bring off further
successful attacks in the United States or elsewhere. It is, in short,
unclear what further horrors must be endured, at home and around the world,
because of Islamist totalitarianism.

But this much is clear: The United States is now at war with the
totalitarians of radical Islamism. And in prior conflicts with the
totalitarian impulse of the Industrial Counterrevolution, the United States
has been undefeated. Americans triumphed first over fascism, then over
Communism - movements with ideologies of potentially global appeal, and
with political bases in militarily formidable great powers. Americans will
rise again to this latest challenge. Unlike its predecessors, radical
Islamism speaks only to the disaffected minority of a particular region,
and none of the governments of that region holds any hope of prevailing
against the resolute exercise of U.S. power. However long the present war
must last, and however costly it must be, the final outcome cannot be
doubted: interment of Islamist totalitarianism in what President Bush so
stirringly referred to as "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'


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