"Return of the Tribes" by Ralph Peters.
Right at the very beginning Mr. Peters writes:
If globalization represents a liberal worldview, renewed localism is a manifestation of reactionary fears, resurgent faiths, and the iron grip of tradition.
Is he really a neutral observer? Even with reporting of "facts," there is bound to be interpretation because facts without causal analysis makes for rather boring reading. So the question is, do any of his 'intellectual' commitments interfere with his causal analysis or, in the normative realm, slant his evaluation of events and trends?
I did a search for more information about him, and of course one of the first things I found was the wikipedia
entry. According to wikipedia:
His view of the role of capitalist globalisation and the US-army he made crystal clear in the remarkable article 'Constant Conflict', US-Army War Collage Quartely 'Parameters', Summer 1997:
* "The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing".
If this is accurate, do we need to know much more about Mr. Peters's ideological commitments?
Here is how he would redraw the map of the Middle East; according to
wikipedia, it is included in his latest book Never Quit the Fight (2006).
I had seen this map before, thanks to Range--it was posted in an online forum for Muslims, I believe. One I first saw it I did not know if it was drawn up by a Muslim or not, though some of it seemed to make sense and even just. Now that I know who the author is, I wonder if I should read his book and see what sort of recommendations he makes and the justifications for those recommendations
This is what he writes in a different
article:
The hallmark of our age is the failure of belief systems and a subsequent flight back to primitive fundamentalism--and the phenomenon isn't limited to the Middle East. Faith revived is running roughshod over science and civilization. Secular societies appear increasingly fragmented, if not fragile. The angry gods are back. And they will not be defeated with cruise missiles or computer codes.
'Nuff said? I think so.
By tribes, what Mr. Peters is really talking about are those who are locally-minded, localists who refuse to join the globalist wave. (He would probably dismiss them as being "provincially-minded," refusing to join the new order.)
A generation ago, it was unacceptable to use the word tribes. Yet, the tribes themselves won through, insisting on their own identity--whether Xhosa or Zulu, Tikriti or Barzani, or, writ large, French or German.
Is this the quality of thinking and writing over at
Weekly Standard? To fail to recognize the major sociological, cultural, and political [indeed, 'constitutional' as Aristotle would use the term] differences between a real tribe and a nation that has become a nation-state is a big failure indeed.
Oversimplification leads to bad causal analysis; one need to reflect well upon complex data, even if that means one has to delay writing or judging. Otherwise, producing a poorly thought-out analysis is a waste of resources and the results will mislead the uneducated.
Are we witnessing in certain European countries vestiges of an attachment to the nationalism which was tied to the rise of the nation-state? Does public opinion oscillate between nationalism and pan-Europeanism? Is there a genuine movement towards "localism"? Or is it merely a reaction against perceived defects of the EU or dangers of formally joining the EU? Favoring the nation-state against the EU is not necessarily support of true localism, nor is it anti-liberal to do so. As far as I can tell, there is no necessary connection between liberalism and a push towards larger political unities. (However if there is a presupposition that a government is competent and effective regardless of the size of the community governed, than one who supports centralization and the nation-state as a political unities would have no problems with a larger political unity, at least with respect to size.) Why then, would Mr. Peters favor the EU over political independence? In this article he does not present his views of the EU; he is merely "reporting" the reasons for the rejection. But are those rejecting the EU constitution also advocates of, say, Welsh independence? Or are there some who hold a "middle" position?
Andrew Cusack
may have high hopes for
Philippe de Villiers and la Mouvement pour la France, but I do not know enough about either (except that de Villiers was influential in getting the EU Constitution rejected). Mr. Cusack says the MPF is both conservative and traditionalist.
James Howard Kunstler and the commentors over at
CFN point out that Europe is more prepared to deal with peak oil than the United States, having better arrangements with public transportation, urban planning, and so on. Still, is the MPF aware of this crticial issue? Does it push for local self-sufficiency and authentic subsidiarity? The British National Party seems to be
agrarian and traditionalist plus also aware of
peak oil, but it also has a reputation for being nativist (or racist). (I don't know if such criticisms are valid. The chairman of the BNP has his own
blog.)
Elsewhere, the devolution of identity from the state to the clan or cult is more radical, more anxious, and more volatile. In Iraq, religious, ethnic, and tribal identities dictate the composition of the struggling national government--as they do in Lebanon, Canada, Nigeria, and dozens of other countries (we shall not soon see a Baptist prime minister of Israel--or a Muslim Bundeskanzler, despite those who warn of Eurabia). Even in the United States, with our integrative genius, racial, religious, and ethnic identity politics continue to prosper; we are fortunate that we have no single dominant tribe (minorities might disagree).
Now in how many of these places was there a "strong national identity" to begin with, as opposed to one that was imposed by colonial powers or a strong central government (as in the case of Iraq)? No single dominant tribe? The Indians were suppressed rather violently, and those who advocated states' rights... do we need to go over that again? For most ethnic groups assimilation has been mostly successful--while there is an emphasis on "difference" it is usually not backed up by anything deep, whether it be culture or religion, with a few exceptions--most immigrants become Americans in practice, if not completely liberals in thought, working for what a normal American wants, accepting American notions of the "happy life" and living accordingly. (The problem of the contemporary Chicano movements and the like, I'll ignore for now.)
Still, the success of the United States in breaking down ancient loyalties is remarkable--and anomalous. While the current American bugbear is Hispanic immigration, most Latinos establish worthy lives in the American grain, just as the Irish and Italians, Slavs and Jews, did before them. American Indians may still think in tribal terms (especially when casino profits are involved), and there is no apparent end to the splinter identities Americans pursue in their social and religious lives, but not even Rome came remotely so close to forging a genuinely new, inclusive identity.
An inclusive identity based upon what? A common ideology and conception of the good life? Is that all?
The uneven ability to digest the feast of information suddenly available even in the globe's backwaters doesn't bring humanity together (even if Saudi clerics and American bureaucrats visit the same online porn sites). Rather, it disorients those whose lives previously had been ordered, and creates a sense simultaneously of being cheated of previously unimagined possibilities while having one's essential verities challenged. Feeling helpless and besieged, the victim of globalization turns to the comfort of explanatory, fundamentalist religion or a xenophobia that assures him that, for all his material wants, he is nonetheless superior to others.
Ordered? In what way? What is to say that the attachment to one's culture, religion, or local community wasn't already there to begin with, and when threatened by an outside force, one reacts accordingly? The "information" revolution, what an Enlightenment/pseudo-psychological crock--as if the problem with these people is that they are unable to become enlightened fast enough, and so they become discombobulated and even violent. Well, Mr. Peters doesn't say just say this--he also says that the other factor is envy. It's also because they envy others that they do what they do. He embraces both a crass view of human nature and an Enlightenement view both at once--who else but a confused modern do this?
The confident may welcome freedom, but the rest want rules.
Freedom? Since when is freedom just the power to acquire and consume?
Even the most powerful attempts to unite humanity failed: the monotheist campaigns to impose one god.
Impose God? What sort of Christianity is he familiar with?
Monotheism replaced Rome's law codes with the law of God. The first near-success of globalization was the bewildering survival and spread of Christianity, the transitional faith between the exclusive tribal monotheism of Judaism and the universal aspirations of Islam. Beginning as a cult uncertain of the legitimacy of proselytizing among those of different inheritances, Christianity quickly developed a taste for salesmanship, adapting its message from one of local destiny to one of universal possibility.
What sort of history of the early Church has he read? Cult uncertain of the legitimacy of proselytizing? What does he think of St. Peter and St. Paul and the Council of Jerusalem? That happened rather soon--note that he does not give an explanation of the change in evangelization efforts. Christians would say that the Apostles did not fully understand the universal mission of Christ, but had to be reminded of the fact. Does he really want to say that it became universal once those in authority realized they could gain power, etc. etc.? Is he really an anti-Christian?
Furthermore, its message to the poor (a constituency contemporary globalization ignores) had as exemplary an appeal among the less-fortunate of the bygone Mediterranean world as it does today in sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity was an outsider's religion co-opted by rulers, while Islam meant to rule--and include--all social classes from the years of its foundation.
Another version of Constantinianism.
Those Christian and Muslim visions continue to experience drastic mutations in the battle for new and local loyalties, having now reached every habitable continent. Their success has blinded us to their weakness: Neither religion has been able to subdue their old antiglobalist nemesis: magic.
...
Quite simply, Big Religion and local cults are inherently different commodities. From Brazil to Borneo, local Christians don't see imported and traditional belief systems as mutually exclusive, any more than a kitchen fortunate enough to have a refrigerator should therefore be denied a stove.
Christians have been unable to fully evangelize many around the world. Hence Christ's admonition that we pray for more workers in the vineyard. So what? Calling Islam and Christianity examples of globalism weakens his argument, as it obscures what he means by globalization.
There's an enormous difference between Big Religions--Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and the others--and the local cults that endure long beyond their predicted disappearance. This distinction is critical, not only in itself, but also because it is emblematic of the obstacles that local identities present to globalization as we imagine it. Big Religion interests itself in a world beyond this world, while the emphasis of local faiths has always been on magic (bending aspects of the natural world to the will of the practitioner of hermetic knowledge). Magic affects daily life in the here and now, and its force and appeal can be far more potent than our rationalist worldview accepts: What we cannot explain, we mock. (An advantage Christianity enjoys among the poor of the developing world is the image of Jesus the Conjure-Man, turning water into wine and walking on water--he's a more-promising shaman than Muhammad.)
What Peters sees as the practical value of magic, we would see as the condition of fallen man, entrapped in superstition. So a culture or a population has not been fully converted--it happens. Are we talking about competing worldviews and ways of life? Yes. Secondly, Christianity, though universal, is not necessary anti-local. This Peters fails to realize. There is a difference between legitimate inculturation and illegitimate; just as Christianity is not bound to a particular political order, though it favors subsidiarity.
Another aspect of identity that we, the inheritors of proselytizing world religions, fail to grasp is that local cults are exclusive. They not only do not seek new members, but can't imagine integrating outsiders (the politicized tribal beliefs of the Asante in Ghana are a limited exception, since they were devised to confirm the subjugation of neighboring tribes). Cult beliefs are bound to the local soil, the trees, the waters. Tribal religions are about place and person, an identity bound to a specific environment. While slaves did take voodoo practices with them to the new world, the rituals immediately began to mutate under the stress of transplantation. Tribal religions form an invisible defensive wall, as local practices do today, from the Andes to the Caucasus.
Are they really that exclusive? Come on, even the earliest missionaries understood how much religious practices could be tied to culture and identity. Would these cults be so quick to reject the outsider? Yes, if he remained an outsider, most probably. But what if he became one of them, adopting their ways and beliefs?
While both Big Religions and local belief systems proffer creation myths, universal faiths are far more concerned with an end-of-times apocalypse (in the Hindu faith, with recurring apocalypses), while local cults rarely see beyond the next harvest. The great faiths lift the native's heart on one day of the week, while local beliefs guide him through the other six.
Again, another statement that makes me wonder how familiar he is with true Christianity. Who is slipping into making differences out of hay while ignoring the similarities or parallels (see below)? He needs to read up on rogation days and the like.
The attitude of missionaries, Christian or Muslim, is that such beliefs and practices are a combination of bad habits, naive superstitions, and general ignorance. But the conviction has grown in me as I travel that the missionaries themselves are--willfully--ignorant of systems they cannot respect and so refuse to understand. Religions are like businesses in the sense that they must provide products that work with sufficient regularity to keep customers coming back. Results matter. The psychological comfort and beyond-the-grave promises of Christian ity and Islam function transcendently, but leave immediate needs unanswered.
So is he unfamiliar with the great Franciscan and Jesuit missions as well? Bringing civilization has usually been a great help for efforts at evangelization.
Enough of that article.
From
"Euro-Losers":
Thanks to globalization, hundreds of millions of human beings have jobs that lift them upward economically. Those jobs may not be great ones by French standards, but, from China to Chile, people line up and compete for a chance to work. And they're willing to work very hard to improve their lives - those "bad" jobs are far better than none at all.
Globalization isn't an unmixed blessing - all great changes have victims - but the net results are positive.
Are there negative effects of how globalization is being implemented? Mr. Peters says yes. But on the whole he supports globalization because of its supposed benefits. According to what critera are things better? Are other criteria being ignored when such an evaluation is made?
Could anyone write a more inane sentence than this--what would these people be doing if there were no "chances to work" brought about by globalization? Sitting around and starving to death? It's this sort of shallow analysis, ignoring the social and economic changes that allow "globalization" to take place that makes me want to laugh. Why is it that people think that just because they can put a paragraph together to make a point that they have what it takes to analyze well? Or that just because in their imagination, things are currently better than they would otherwise be if their favorite pet system, institution, practice, ideology, or what have you were not in force that this is the case?
An earlier
piece by Mr. Peters in the NY Post, on the same theme.
His op-ed
"The Myths of Globalization":
Among the many myths surrounding globalization, two stand out: The notion that this phenomenon is new and, more dangerously, the claim that globalization will lead to an age of utopian peace. Those who see globalization as unprecedented simply don't know their history. Those who imagine that greater understanding, courtesy of the Internet, will deliver an idyllic peace don't know humanity. The first claim, that globalization is a wondrous child without historical parents, is the easiest to demolish. Greek culture of the age of Alexander influenced India's hairstyles, while eastern silks were sold in Caesar's Rome. Chinese porcelain and coins more than a thousand years old turn up in East Africa. Europeans of the Middle Ages paid a premium for pepper harvested a continent away. The Islamic world brokered trade between the West and the Far East. And it was before the discovery of the Americas.
There are more parallels with the past than differences. When Portuguese warships wrested control of the Indian Ocean from the Ottomans and their clients at the dawn of the 16th century, they provided a model of strategic hegemony that remains in place today. Then, Lisbon's caravels and carracks controlled the spice trade. Today, U.S. Navy carriers guarantee the oil trade. The commodities have changed, but not the strategic geography.
Roots go way back
Globalization today may proceed at a swifter pace, generate greater wealth and touch more lives, but its essence is at least 2,500 years old. Over the centuries, the process has changed international relationships profoundly, but it has never changed human nature.
Let's define terms now, shall we? How do you want to define globalization? Wikipedia offers the following, borrowed from the IMF:
A typical definition can be taken from the International Monetary Fund, which defines globalization as the growing economic interdependence of countries worldwide through increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services, free international capital flows, and more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology. All definitions appear to agree that globalization has economic, political, cultural, and technological aspects that may be closely intertwined.
Of course, historically-informed people will admit that inter-community trade has existed ever since communities made contact with one another, found that they had things they could exchange a way to transport those things over a distances. And sure, there have been transmission of "ideas" and culture as well, and importation of "fashion trends." But who was doing the producing and consuming? How intact were local economies despite trade and communication with other communities? Just because there are similarities does not mean that the differences are not significant enough to demand a different solution or critique. How does the dominance of one national currency affect financial and economic arrangements? Was there as great an extent of the flow of capital and finance in earlier period? What about the shift from merchant companies and in-country transplants creating goods with native labor and sending it home being prominent to producers (really, those who hold the capital for production) and such moving capital overseas in order to cut down on expenses? (The shift from simple inter-community trade to colonialism, etc. to what we have now?)
Is mercantilism outdated? Perhaps it is. But what increases production besides increase in labor or improvements in technology? Besides, it does the community no good to be able to efficiently produce vast quantities of things if no one wishes to buy those things, nor is able to. And how many of those things are really necessary for the good life?
(How much trade could there be between a group of hunter-gathers and an industrialized community?)
Other questions to ask:
Why is there such a differential between national currencies and purchasing power? What
affects comparative advantage? Is comparative advantage a good enough reason for specialization? Should specialization be limited solely to luxuries? Or extended to necessities as well? Can comparatve advantage justify one community's failure to be self-sufficient with respect to necessities, in the pursuit of specialization?
How many of Mr. Peters's presuppositions does Thomas Barnett share? Mr. Barnett's reaction to Mr. Peters's "The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs"
here. His
comments on Peters's op-ed "The Myths of Globalization." I'll post more about Mr. Barnett, but it makes me wonder if I should both to read what he writes.
Kent Bye has posed his Open Source Intelligence
interviews (includes one with Mr. Peters).
Interview of Ralph Peters by Jamie Glazov at FrontPageMag.
Dr. Esolen at Mere Comments
reacts to the "The Return of Tribes."
A gem: short
interview with David Hackworth
PCR:
The Five Morons RevisitedWebsites with liberal and possibly Austrian sympathies:
ChicagoboyzThe Austrian EconomistsCafe HayekMartin Wolf, Why Globalization Works (
reviews)
Sigh, do I really need to waste time on apologists for unreasonable arrangements? I'm getting tired of people who make their living advocating such arrangements. If they did it on their own private time with a blog, by all means, go ahead and spend your leisure in such a way. At least the activity is being paid for indirectly and the number of people who will read the blog will probably be more limited (despite the fact that it's free, unlike a book), so there will be a better measure of damage control.
It's just like
Thomas Friedman's book... unbelievable how such people can make a living contributing virtually nothing beneficial.
