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AW made the comment:
Sir, since you have a limited aquaintance with John Reilly‘s writings, I‘m curious to know your opinions of these articles of his (which were immediately brought to mind by this commentary): Since I haven’t read Kennon’s book, I’ll postpone (possibly indefinitely) my review of Reilly’s review. The first and last items, however, I’ll comment on in this article. Reilly’s vision of the future world government is an extremely Spenglerian one (not too surprisingly). There are a couple of non-Spenglerian aspects to the future that we now perceive, that I’ll mention in due course. It should be noted here that Reilly’s articles are several years old ("On the Nature of the Coming World Government" is copyrighted 1998, and "World Constitution" in 1996; the drafting of these articles may be older yet). It is entirely possible that Reilly is well aware of the non-Spenglerian elements in the future, and not updated his articles for any of a variety of reasons. Reilly sees the establishment of a world government sometime in this century. I think that he would agree that the establishment of the formal government will be preceded by a period of informal government – hegemony, if you will, -- possibly by the seed elements of the new world government, possibly by some other short-lived element (as the first universal government in China was established by the short-lived Legalist Ch’in dynasty, which was then rapidly succeeded by a nominally Confucianist Han dynasty). The world government that he envisions is essentially the Roman Empire writ large (or larger). It is a policing and taxing machine, brought into being for the (implicit) purpose of providing peace, and extracting from subordinate governments and from individuals the resources necessary. It is "populist", in the ordinary political senses; as Reilly has written elsewhere, the economic Left wins (with the result that the Empire varies between fascism and state socialism), but the cultural Left loses (with the whole cargo of "alternative" art and life-styles, in the broadest senses of these terms, being suppressed if not destroyed outright). It is at best nominally democratic, but is in theory at least meritocratic; all classes and nationalities are welcomed in the Imperial bureaucracy and armed forces, the more so as its explicit identification with the "Western" world evaporates. Corruption and nepotism exist, of course; indeed, the nepotic element grows with time as Imperial society and politics become frankly dynastic. They never become so pervasive as to threaten the Imperial government, however, until it has taken openly fatal wounds from other sources. Few will like the Empire; many will love and worship its products (peace, order, stability), and in time men will be unable to imagine that they come from any other source, or that there could be other ways of doing things. As Reilly himself says, the Empire will not be the Earthly Paradise, but neither will it be the reign of Antichrist. As the envisioned world government is the Roman Empire writ large, so the suggested world constitution is a formalization of the way in which the Empire was run, with a few clauses (abolition of slavery, lack of coercion in religious matters) thrown in to make it more palatable to current tastes. One revelation of intent is the clause that "This Constitution is unchangeable". This is a constitution for a young, self-confident Empire, not an aging one that views its task as circling the wagons and holding off the Long Night as long as possible. I can see this Constitution (both the ideas in it and the actual writing) become objects of worship; I cannot see its operation for more than a few generations after being proclaimed. The most frankly non-Spenglerian element that I see in the future is that of population compression. Reilly thought that "The world in [the late 21st century] should have from 10 to 12 billion people in it". At this writing, there are about 6.1 billion people on Earth. We know from demographic data that it is unlikely for this population to ever double again; the U.N. (perhaps innocently) and population-controlling NGOs (probably less innocently) have long overestimated population growth and crude birth rates. The world empire is likely to have far fewer subjects than Reilly anticipated, possibly fewer than now live on this planet. With the population compression comes, as an inevitable consequence, the rapidly graying of that population, particularly in the industrialized world. In the U.S., these effects are partially masked by high levels of immigration, particularly illegal immigration; in western Europe and Japan, they are manifest. Associated with this are anticipated problems with the sheaf of government programs that may be summarized, tellingly, as "the safety net". In the U.S., the consensus has long been that these should be a supplement to, but not a replacement for, individual economic endeavor; in Europe, they have been used to mollify a potentially destructive segment of the population, unemployed or underemployed. A graying population can support these only with difficulty. The world Empire may well come into being economically crippled, the task demanded of it being not to create, but to restore, social and economic stability. This population compression is (ideologues aside) not unprecedented in human history. A period of dynamic, competing states allows the population to expand, without economic ruin, to the limits of the supporting technology; the Empire (whether Chinese, Roman, or Ottoman) then preserves both the population and technology in its early stages. Only later, because of a variety of socio-economic forces, some understood and some not, does the population contract as the Empire slides off its plateau of prosperity into the dark ages. The difference now is the population compression is happening even before the formal establishment of Empire, not after it is long established and apparently eternal. The essential non-Spenglerian element is, of course, industrial and post-industrial technology. It is this technology which is responsible both for the dizzying population growth of the last century and the likely population collapse of this one. It is an unfortunate truism that women throughout history have typically borne many children and buried many. Medical technology eased that last burden; the death of a child in the modern West is considered an almost unendurable tragedy, not an unfortunate but routine occurrence. Communications and (broadly speaking) entertainment technologies have eased that first burden; crudely put, people now have other amusements than unprotected sex available to them. Moreover, the "reference group" by which women judge the number and spacing of births has been enlarged from the local village to the gliterati seen on TV (spend an afternoon watching daytime "soap operas" and estimate what the crude birth rate indicated is). The result of these technologies cannot now be estimated. When population and, even more importantly, age cohorts, stabilize in the future (and at present we can say no more than it will not be in the first half of this century), it could be the case that the widespread availability of industrial and post-industrial technology will make that population richer and better educated than before in human history. John "Akatsukami" Braue Monday, May 20, 2002 |
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