The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West

by Alexander C. Karp

Niall Ferguson has observed, the principal Western empires that began their ascent in the sixteenth century came to control 74 percent of global economic production by the 1910s. Figure 8 Western Empires: Share of Territory and Global Economic Output The mere recitation of such a fact has become provocative in a way that suggests our current culture’s fundamental unease with truth, as well as perhaps its loss of an ability to disentangle descriptive claims from normative ones. To point out, as an empirical matter, that a certain subset of nations has come to dominate global affairs is not equivalent to the normative claim that such a result is justified. In the West, however, many observers have lost interest in investigating the causes and reasons for this outperformance. We have been taught simply to turn away, to change the subject. The ability to reckon with a descriptive claim acknowledging the overwhelming dominance of the United States and its allies while suspending discussion, even momentarily, of the moral implications of that distribution of power is arguably a form of what the journalist and opinion researcher Nate Silver has called “decoupling.” This capacity for evaluating the truth of a statement while setting aside one’s views about either its implications or one’s opinion “on the identity of the speaker,” as Silver puts it, has withered among far too many. One should be able to decide whether a descriptive claim is true without knowing anything about who i...