Rearview Mirror

Feeling Stupid

There are few things that make me feel more inadequate than to read the predictions of global trends in Foreign Affairs, or similar media outlets-- my current favorite is Le Grand Continent, steeped as it is in quasi-Schmittian Realpolitik -- and having just finished a bunch of them, I feel more sprachlos than usual. The authors seem so confident that they can summarize the past and offer possible scenarios for the future based on comparative economic stats -- GDP and what we used to call balance of payments with its current account components, investment trends, domestic and foreign debt -- then, too, on the indices of comparative military strength, including the latest hypersonic weapons or perhaps cruise missiles --Tomahawks, Rafaels,, Zvezdas, Iskanders, etc. -- or short and medium range Shaheen, Shahed and Shahab missiles vis-a-vis Patriots. Pershngs, etc. I am not a missile maven and I struggle to keep them straight. And in general I feel ill-equipped to assimilate the onrush of events, to keep my bearings against the headwinds of global change.

Of course, the forecasters hedge their bets, but still, their purpose seems to be either to terrify us with China’s prowess, or to reassure us that the US still holds vital cards -- universities, allies, arsenals, inventive spark -- and that American moxie can still prevail in our lifetimes if not in saecula seculorum. So which is it? Are the Chinese going to clean our clocks? Are we still the indispensable nation? Can we pull up our socks? Will we succumb to the Thucydidean Trap on the way down and strike out at the robust challenger? Will Ferguson’s Law prevail --namely that when a country’s interest burden exceeds its military spending, it’s in a downward geopolitical spiral? In my mind’s ear I hear the last slowly chirping crickets of America’s late waning summer. Or have the Chinese overreached: sunk too many resources into empty concrete apartment towers and scattered Belt and Road installations that will be more a burden than an asset? Or perhaps, just maybe, we can reach an accommodation: share the world between us or at least goose the Europeans to leave their retirement from Weltpolitik and share the burden of defending the West.

I am not impugning the brain power of the commentators, above all since I sense the flagging of my own, which in truth was meant for a quiet rumination on the past and not for calculating odds. I know several personally as close friends and have been privileged to teach with them or at least to listen to their ideas and be treated as a partner. I often wish that I had written their most recent column. But I’m mindful that analogy can run into problems. John Stuart Mill warned us already about them in A System of Logic. “Like,” “analogous,” and “parallel” too often serve as the end of analysis as well as a beginning.

Instant history tempts, and it can be intoxicating: relive the parabolas of empire -- Athenian, Roman, Spanish/Habsburg, French, German, Han and Qing, Dutch, and British -- and recall their melancholy decline. Should we rush to biological metaphors with their life-cycles or perhaps, more plausibly and comprehensively think in terms of entropy and Newton’s Second Law. Or perhaps just insist that history is a record of the unforeseen, of predictions that sooner or later must be falsified or at least amended; similarly an account of policies that inflict collateral damage; of scientific models that are incomplete, and vantage points that are always partial.

So why bother studying history? This is a question I have been asking myself after many years of doing it. For the spectacle? For the psychological equivalent of self-flagellation? But I don’t really believe that. For the satisfaction of participating and observing at the same time -- being inside and outside simultaneously, part of a larger system even as I attempt to understand its encompassing “structures?” Or because it’s there. And because I’ve been privileged or cursed, as the Chinese proverb allegedly had it, to live in interesting time. Human societies -- do we not all sense it? -- are shifting in profound ways. Perhaps they will settle back into familiar frameworks, perhaps not. But for now the ground is trembling underfoot.