[Sixstrings]

The Great Unraveling

It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?

It was a time of beheadings.

With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were broken.

Terror is theater. Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.

It was a time of aggression.

The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated.

He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were left to rot in the sun for days.

He denied any part in the violence, like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection to his.

He invoked the law the better to trample on it.

He invoked history the better to turn it into farce.

He reminded humankind that the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason.

It was a time of breakup.

The most successful union in history, forged on an island in the North Sea in 1707, headed toward possible dissolution — not because it had failed (refugees from across the seas still clamored to get into it), nor even because of new hatreds between its peoples.

The northernmost citizens were bored.

...

It was a time of weakness.

The most powerful nation on earth was tired of far-flung wars, its will and treasury depleted by absence of victory.

An ungrateful world could damn well police itself.

The nation had bridges to build and education systems to fix. Civil wars between Arabs could fester. Enemies might even kill other enemies, a low-cost gain. Middle Eastern borders could fade; they were artificial colonial lines on a map. Shiite could battle Sunni, and Sunni Shiite, there was no stopping them.

Like Europe’s decades-long religious wars, these wars had to run their course. The nation’s leader mockingly derided his own “wan, diffident, professorial” approach to the world, implying he was none of these things, even if he gave that appearance.

He set objectives for which he had no plan. He made commitments he did not keep.

In the way of the world these things were noticed. Enemies probed.

Allies were neglected, until they were needed to face the decapitators who talked of a Caliphate and called themselves a state. Words like “strength” and “resolve” returned to the leader’s vocabulary.

But the world was already adrift, unmoored by the retreat of its ordering power.

The rule book had been ripped up.

...

It was a time of fever. People in West Africa bled from the eyes.

It was a time of disorientation. Nobody connected the dots or read Kipling on life’s few certainties: “The Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire / And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.”

Until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had wrought.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/opinion/roger-cohen-the-great-unraveling.html

[PrestonSturges]

We construct fantasy worlds where we care about something besides oil.

[Ibon]

A 21st century commentary. As we will see more and more such commentaries unfold about the loss and unraveling of a common held sense of order there will be more and more exploration of the underlying cause.

The greatest ideals of man sit on top of a foundation that is invisible when intact and becomes increasingly visible when undermined.

That foundation is what is unraveling.

We are too many people and we have caused great harm to our planet.

[Sixstrings]

A 21st century commentary. ... That foundation is what is unraveling.

He didn't mention climate change or peak oil or inequality, but yep I thought it was a nice piece and he got the spirit of the times right. A time of unraveling.

Don't usually see such doomer stuff in New York Times.

He's definitely spot on about the geopolitcs. Everyone has their own opinions around here, but he is right in that there used to be a global order and the world has become unmoored from that -- the United States.

Apparently something doesn't add up with globalism anymore, corporations are global now, but we don't tax corporations much and they horde cash and don't employ anyone here. And we don't tax our rich. So how can we pay for providing world order, even if we want to keep doing that, even if the world wanted us to? An "ungrateful world," he's right about that. Only a downed Dutch airliner started to turn that around.

China is ready to eclipse us. Was the end unavoidable, this is just the sun setting on pax Americana?

To the anti-US crowd, I'd ask you what makes you think China will be a climate change garden of eden and leader for the world.

And what happens to democracy, and human rights. Sun's setting on those too?

[Keith_McClary]

Scotland on the Euphrates
The Obsolescence of the Nation-State
by URI AVNERY

TWO COUNTRIES competed this week for first place in news programs all over the world: Scotland and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

There could not be a greater difference than between these two countries. Scotland is damp and cold, Iraq is hot and dry. Scotland is called after its whisky (or the other way round), while for ISIS fighters, drinking alcohol is the mark of unbelievers, who should lose their head (literally).

However, there is one common denominator of both crises: they mark the approaching demise of the nation-state.

MODERN NATIONALISM, like any great idea in history, was born out of a new set of circumstances: economic, military, spiritual and others, which made older forms obsolete.

By the end of the 17th century, existing states could no longer cope with new demands. Small states were doomed. The economy demanded a safe domestic market large enough for the development of modern industries. New mass armies needed a base strong enough to provide soldiers and pay for modern arms. New ideologies created new identities.

Britanny and Corsica could not exist as independent entities. They had to give up much of their separate identity and join the large and powerful French state to survive. The United Kingdom, the union of the British isles under a Scottish king, became a world power. Others followed, each at its own pace. Zionism was a late effort to imitate this.

The process reached its peak at the end of World War I, when empires like the Ottoman Caliphate and Austria-Hungary broke up. Kemal Atatürk, who exchanged the Islamic caliphate for a Turkish national state, was perhaps the last great ideologue of the national idea.

But by that time, this idea was already growing old. The realities which had created it were changing rapidly. If I am not mistaken, it was Gustave Le Bon, the French psychologist, who asserted a hundred years ago that every new idea is already obsolete by the time it is adopted by the masses.

The process works like this: somebody conceives the idea. It takes a generation for it to become accepted by the intellectuals. It takes another generation for the intellectuals to teach the masses. By the time it attains power, the circumstances that gave it birth have already changed, and a new idea is required.

Reality changes much more quickly than the human mind.

Take the idea of the European nation-state. When it reached its final victory, after the Great War, the world had already changed. European armies, which had mown each other down with machine guns, were facing tanks and warplanes. The economy became world-wide. Air travel abolished distances. Modern communication created a “world village”.
...
THE OBSOLESCENCE of the nation-state has given birth to a paradoxical by-product: the breakup of the state into smaller and smaller units.

While the world trend towards larger and larger political and economic units gathers strength, nation-states fall apart. All over the world, small peoples are demanding independence.

This is not quite as ridiculous as it looks. The nation-state came into being because realities needed societies of at least a certain size and strength. But by now, all the major functions of the states are moving towards much larger regional unions. So why does Corsica need France? Why do the Basques need Spain? Why does Quebec need Canada? Why not live in a smaller state with people like you, who speak your natural language?

Czechoslovakia has broken up, peacefully. So has Yugoslavia, not so peacefully. So have Cyprus, Serbia, Sudan – and the Soviet Union, of course.
...
The modern Arab nations were invented by European colonialists. Lately, it has become a fashion to mention Mark Sykes and Georges Picot, two mediocre bureaucrats, one British, one French, who drew up a secret agreement for the division of the Ottoman Empire. They and their successors created the states of Syria, Iraq, (Trans)Jordan, Palestine etc.

These “nation-states” were quite artificial. The European planners had generally very little understanding for local circumstances, traditions, identities and culture. Neither did they care very much. Iraq, with its different components, was created to accommodate British interests. The strange eastern borders of Jordan were shaped for a British oil pipeline from Mosul to Haifa.
...
First there were efforts to unify the Arabs under the umbrella of nationalism. The Ba’ath party strove (in theory, at least) to create one, single pan-Arab state, and the creed was taken up by the hero of the masses, the Egyptian Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, a secular military dictator.
...
THE HUGE attraction of the movement now called “Islamic State” is that it proposes a simple idea: do away with all these crazy borders drawn up by Western imperialists for their own purposes and re-create the classic pan-Muslim state: the Caliphate.

This seems like the opposite of the breakup of European states, but it means the same: the total rejection of the nation-state.
...
However, while clinging to the past, the Islamic State movement (former ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham) is very modern. With one swipe it clears the table of the nation-state and its derivatives. It carries a clear, simple idea, easily understood by Muslims everywhere. It seems to be vastly convincing.

THE WESTERN response is almost comically inadequate.

People like Barack Obama and John Kerry, and their equivalents all over Europe, are quite unable to understand what it is all about. With the traditional European contempt for the “natives”, they see nothing but head-cutting terrorists. They really seem to believe that they can vanquish a revolutionary new idea by forming a coalition with Arab dictators and corrupt politicians, bombing the rebels and finishing the job by employing local mercenaries.

That is a ludicrous misreading of the new reality. By now, IS, with just a handful of fanatical and cruel militants, has conquered huge territories.

WHAT IS the answer?

Frankly, I don’t know. But the first step for Westerners, as well as for Israelis, is to discard their arrogance and try to understand the new phenomenon they are facing.

They are not facing “terrorists” – the magic word that seems to solve all problems without the need to strain the brain. They are facing a new phenomenon.

History is in the making.

[evilgenius]

I see the roots of the current malaise in the latter Twentieth Century efforts of Christian end-times preachers attempting to bring Christ back on their own. Their efforts coincided with a time in Western thought which had gone through all of the iterations concerning what was seemingly important on its face and found them wanting. In this time of ill defined absolutes the end-timers ran amok, filling people's heads with the meme of a serious unraveling. Even though those preachers fell away eventually their meme continues in the culture today.

Politically we had recognized that royals weren't anything special. Gone were the days when we had to stop when they came around and bow down to them as they passed. Now, if they get in our way, unless they have the right of way they have to wait.

Artistically we had reached beyond the single artwork, which may contain some glory in itself, and embraced art as representative of idea. Art was no longer something we could look at and obviously see as having merit. Now it took an explanation to see the merit in it.

Pop music still holds sway, with power over entire generations, but there are few other art forms in which obsolescence is so built in. If your music is not "classic" then no matter how good it is it will fade away after the initial round of success, probably seldom to ever be heard again.

The once dominant art form of the novel has been replaced by that of film. Film itself no longer holds sway like it once did. It is so available as to be free. People don't go communally to participate with it like they once did. The greatest film from any year now suffers the same fate as the most popular music, fading away into obscurity. We are kind of post-film, but not quite able to find another dominant art form. Maybe the next thing is targeted internet TV, maybe it isn't.

Along with these things there has been a rise in the popularity of democracy. Not just democracy as political answer, but as cultural answer as well.

I think people feel empty without their former icons. I think they miss things that they can look at and judge as having merit within themselves. I think they like falling into that kind of order and actually seek to make it happen wherever they are because it comes so easily to us. But that kind of thinking does not mesh with who we are today.

As I alluded, when I talked about right of way above, new things are dominant in today's world. To find answers we have to look to an order of things that is logical, yet cannot be understood by the acquiescer's logic. Those who want to see value in things won't understand it. Those who want to see value in the whole will because that is where we are now, in the time of wholeness. Everyone answers to everyone else. The rules that govern how we get along are more about whose turn it is rather than who is more regal. They are about the moment, and the collapse we have knowing that all moments pass. In that loss we think we lose ourselves. Thinking we are losing ourselves we flail. We identify with things from the past. We try to find meaning. We do not seem prepared to find meaning in nothingness.

[Kylon]

What you seem to be describing is the rise of tribalism based around religion and ethnicity vs. nationalism and statism.

In general that's the default position of people to be in, is to want to associate and support others who are genetically related to them, and have a similar culture or outlook on life.

Statism was effective in suppressing this I think because of the capacity for indoctrination via public education systems, and the relatively large control over the media. However now days it's almost impossible to control information, even if one country or government wanted to shut down the internet, people would find ways to bypass it or create their own internet.

With information no longer being suppressed, and with peoples becoming more connected with those who think like they do and who are more related to them, people are simply returning to the natural state of things before nation states.

The solution for nations I think would be to utilize people's tendency towards tribalism, to harness rather than suppress it. Trying to suppress it creates a situation like Iraq or Afghanistan. It's rather like playing a bad game of whack-a-mole. People are always trying to resist and find new ways of expressing their tribalistic tendencies.

If I were the State I would create interethnic competition in service to the state, and whichever ethnic group serves the state best gets the most privileges/power. This in turn would harness the tribalistic tendencies to compete. Part of that service would be to suppress tribes/psuedotribes/groups that happen to attempt to acquire power, without providing service of some kind. Without contributing in a military, financial, technological, or some other service that benefits the state.

This way you create the means to suppress violent ethnic competition(such as race riots) because you
A) provide a means to increase your ethnic groups power/wealth/position in a constructive and productive means and
B) part of the services provided includes either payment to or service in military operations suppressing violent intertribal warfare.

This system I think could work, so long as there was a constructive, not extremely cost prohibitive way of improving a particular tribes power via productive means.

You should Google "the fourth turning". It's a multigenerational theory created by two historians that have studied generational cycles all the way back into the 1500s.

The unraveling that we are experiencing has been experienced before at other times, by other generations. The last time it was experienced was by the GI generation in the 1940s. Before that there was the generation that lived through the American Civil War, in the 1860s. Each generation is classed about around 20 years give or take a few years, and four generations make a complete cycle.

[Keith_McClary]

If I were the State I would create interethnic competition in service to the state, and whichever ethnic group serves the state best gets the most privileges/power. This in turn would harness the tribalistic tendencies to compete. Part of that service would be to suppress tribes/psuedotribes/groups that happen to attempt to acquire power, without providing service of some kind. Without contributing in a military, financial, technological, or some other service that benefits the state.

This way you create the means to suppress violent ethnic competition(such as race riots) because you
A) provide a means to increase your ethnic groups power/wealth/position in a constructive and productive means and
B) part of the services provided includes either payment to or service in military operations suppressing violent intertribal warfare.

This system I think could work, so long as there was a constructive, not extremely cost prohibitive way of improving a particular tribes power via productive means.

The examples that come to mind are the Jewish tribe in Palestine and the Shiite tribe in Iraq.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you - the dominant tribe always seems to suppress others and increase it's dominance.

[Kylon]

From the State's position, the difference between the competition that exist now, and what I'm proposing is that the competitive spirit, the aggression that people have, would be harnessed, into creating some sort of wealth for society or the state. Instead of the groups violently attacking each other (and destroying forms of capital in the process), the State would direct their competition and aggression into producing real wealth of some kind, or real service. Part of that service would be in suppressing tribes who try to cheat. Tribes who try and gain power via destructive means versus constructive means.

Basically if the state enforced constructive competition and suppressed destructive competition, then you could have multiple tribes living together, in a way where they don't destroy each other, and rather make the system as a whole stronger rather than weaker. This could make for a higher quality of life rather than a lower quality of life.