Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

by Robert D. Kaplan

Gary Saul Morson,

“When you’re dragged along into something you don’t really believe yourself—because otherwise you are identified with those evil people, and your primary identity is being a ‘good guy’—you will wind up supporting things” that are abhorrent. “And unless there is some moral force that will stop it, the slide will accelerate.”

But the urban mob of today is rarely a physical mob.

its effect is to abolish individual thought itself.

“cancel culture,”

There are few things more destabilizing for geopolitics than for the media in each competing country to give the masses a distorted version of reality on account of groupthink and the fear of facing an unpleasant truth. This is how governments can be influenced by the mob, and, on occasion, drift into unnecessary wars.

Spengler, in The Decline of the West, saw all of this coming, after a fashion. For it was journalists and their profession that may have terrified him the most.

“Unleash the people as reader-mass and it will storm through the streets and hurl itself upon the target indicated….

the press, or the media I should say, is more powerful now than ever in history because of the vividness of words and images as they flash on smartphones or computer screens in the digital-video age:

The point is to see social media and digital-video technology not in isolation, but in combination with other geopolitical forces, such as urbanization and weaponry.

munitions controlled by governments that are besieged by their own social-media-enraged populations:

Ibn Khaldun,

pattern of history

nomads gradually moving into the towns and thus building dynasties of their own, until they, too, become wealthy and soft in their ways and are overtaken by new and different nomads.

Luxury leads to strength initially, with its arts and money and power, but then decadence sets in, and the provincials, sensing weakness, attack the basis of city life and its morals.

Thus, before there was a Spengler there was an Ibn Khaldun.

But people from rural Kansas and such are not moving to New York and taking over with their conservative values.

Indeed, it has been quite common for many decades now for artists and writers

move to places like New York, live out their lives there, and adopt wholeheartedly the values ...

Because America is a democratic union, the assault from the less culturally sophisticated, conservative quarters on the cosmopolitan bastions like New York is occurring in the realm of national politics only, through the media. Thus, in a political sense, the countryside is assailing the city, which has grown effete in the course of many decades of luxury and cultural refinement.

One of the many reasons the West is the West is that its rural hinterlands, increasingly encroached upon by suburbs and exurbs, are nice places to live, where roads, schools, and hospitals are decent, even if the culture lacks the sophistication of the metropole; and even though the towns inhabit the nation-state, while the cities inhabit world civilization.

Inside the world-city, as we know, is the “press,” as Spengler calls it, which embodies, in turn, the tip of the spear in terms of civilizational decline of which the city is the heart.

the press, by leading the masses by the neck in terms of political and cultural values, becomes the foremost incubator of the mob, even as the “folk” rebel against it.

Style, which the elite newspapers and other periodicals are ultimately all about, especially in their glossy magazine sections that often go under the very name, is ultimately the enemy of civilization and the agent of its eventual demise.

appearances are everything and substance consequently nothing.

This, of course, leads to the worship of youth over age,

The triumph of youth over age, rather than leading to hope, as conventional wisdom has it, leads instead to disintegration.

Spengler says that without traditions, which ultimately are rooted in the soil, a nation or civilization loses “form.”[28] The most obvious sign of an advanced civilization losing “form” is its takeover by the money culture in the cities, which has little sense of a past and where it came from, and little concern either.

The money culture of bankers, stockbrokers, real estate entrepreneurs, media moguls, and their like goes hand in hand with the overseas adventures of imperialism, which together signify the end of the West. While empire in historical terms may have been politically stabilizing—the fall of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires gave us Hitler—the process of accumulating imperial possessions leads to decadence and decline, according to Spengler. This is because extreme concentrations of wealth in the cities can be a sign of extraordinary state power, which, in turn, tempts nations and states to go abroad both to extend that power and to protect their interests, which, by virtue of the very existence of their money cultures, are now international.

nobody can deny that the American empire from the close of World War II to the early 21st century has been grand, in terms of preserving a semblance of world order. But as America’s relative share of global wealth has gradually declined, and the world as I’ve described it has become increasingly unmanageable, we may well be on a downward trajectory.

Spengler,

His perspective has perhaps never been equaled. That is because his education, by choice, was horizontal rather than vertical.

Now, obviously, we have gone over to the other extreme, where we inhabit a world populated by specialists with exceedingly stove-piped visions of reality, who are therefore apt to have poorer judgment than the widely read Spengler.

as knowledge accumulates in so many fields, expertise provides the only way forward. We simply cannot avoid it.

That’s why, as messy and unsatisfying as politics can be, there is no escape from being governed by politicians rather than by experts.

Spengler goes on with his thesis of civilizational decline. He writes that the “gleaming autumn of style” signifies a culture just before it begins its long death throes, since an obsession with refined taste, as we’ve said, is the beginning of decadence. And the arts, it also goes without saying, are “urban” and “therefore secular,” because true religious belief is absent in the great world-cities, which have insufficient “soil ties.”

What Spengler obviously misses is that there is a progression beyond European art and culture that is not necessarily decadent. This progression, by being abstract, and by encompassing other traditions, manifests a direction toward a universal aesthetic that is, in turn, evidence of a smaller and more connected world. And that world, precisely by being smaller and connected, is inherently tumultuous and unstable.

Eliot and Spengler were contemporaries, and though one was a poet and the other a philosopher-historian, they were really talking about the same thing: the decline and breakdown of traditional civilizations based on language and geography.

The second stage came after World War II, famously with the existentialist French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Reality, according to the existentialists, can only be what one individual “knows and experiences.”

Whereas Eliot’s poetry was about panoramic political and cultural failure, French existentialism was about the neurosis of personal life: it constituted a drilling-down from civilization and culture to the level of the singular human being. It was, in part, a response to the Holocaust and the wider devastation of World War II, which had worked to erase the individual altogether.

Finally, we have the post–Cold War era mixed with the age of digital and cyber technology,

Because of the way that the cyber and digital age both enrich and intensify individual experience and consciousness, and because of a new technological ability for individuals to network with each other below the threshold of political authority—so that they can challenge prevailing power structures—the current age demonstrates an obsession with self, evinced by anxiety on one hand and identity politics on the other.

From Eliot’s civilizational breakdown to Sartre’s breakdowns of neurotic individuals, mixed with the discovery of individual agency, we now have the chaos of anxiety-ridden individuals, again, obsess...

“Over the next century or two, the world’s urban population is projected to almost triple, peaking at 85 percent of a total global population of between 11 and 12 billion. As many as 8.6 billion of those urbanites will live in the cities of the developing world

In sub-Saharan Africa, 85 percent of the population will eventually live in the cities in a number of countries.

world of intense human striving,

Yet the conditions in these shantytowns can be really bad:

it all depends on the human interactions and what encourages them: if the degree of aggression and intimidation is reasonably low, and opportunities exist for enough of the inhabitants, such shantytowns can be way stations to the working and middle classes,

What unites African slums with the tony cities and suburbs of the West is the perennial struggle to avoid the intimidating pressures of groupthink and giving in to the bullies—physical or intellectual—while at the same time retaining the ability to work together for social and economic betterment. Whether a young tough demands a bribe or an editor or digital mob demands conformist language from you in order for you to keep your job, it may amount to a similar level of evil.