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The end of the West as we know it?
 | The writer is an intellectual. As Orwell notes, no ordinary person would be this stupid. |
by Anatol Lieven
Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism.
| Which should suggest that western capitalism has certain advantages, but read on, our intellectual proceeds to knock it down. |
For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly destroy our entire system. As the recent British official commission chaired by Sir Nicholas Stern correctly stated, climate change "is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."
| Climate change hasn't even happened yet and it's the greatest challenge? I suggest that in the here and now the greatest challenge to the western model of democracy is handling the threat of Islamism. If we don't handle that properly, it will be the Islamists who will deal with whatever climate change occurs, and they'll handle it in their usual insh'allan way. |
The question now facing us is whether global capitalism and Western democracy can follow the Stern report's recommendations, and make the limited economic adjustments necessary to keep global warming within bounds that will allow us to preserve our system in a recognizable form; or whether our system is so dependent on unlimited consumption that it is by its nature incapable of demanding even small sacrifices from its present elites and populations.
We don't have a system of unlimited consumption: each of us as individuals, and each state as a state, has definite limits. Anyone who's taken an economics course recognizes that; economics is the way we define limits in society and decide the relative worth of each part our daily lives.
Further, the proposals of the elite (the Left, the Euros, and the apparatchiks of the international organizations) aren't 'limited': the goal is to force a new statism on the West. Gone is democracy, replaced with institutions that will do our thinking for us. Gone are free markets, replaced with 'managed' economic models that will decide the relative value of items, and one that becomes increasingly Soviet over time: health care will be 'free', housing will be 'cheap', and we'll get exactly what we deserve. Gone is personal liberty, replaced with a collective order that defines us as groups. It is 'Metropolis' brought to the 21st century. |
If the latter proves the case, and the world suffers radically destructive climate change, then we must recognize that everything that the West now stands for will be rejected by future generations. The entire democratic capitalist system will be seen to have failed utterly as a model for humanity and as a custodian of essential human interests.
| And if the latter doesn't prove the case, the intellectual elites will simply move on to another global threat. The goal here isn't to deal with 'climate change': the goal is find a lever, a wedge, a tool that allows the elites, who after all are smarter than the rest of us, to exert their naturally-derived superiority over the rest of us. We the cattle need to listen to our betters. When global cooling, population explosions, nuclear anniliation and starvation didn't move us to listen, they came up with 'climate change'. They'll keep trying. |
Even the relatively conservative predictions offered by the Stern report, of a drop in annual global gross domestic product of up to 20 percent by the end of this century, imply a crisis on the scale of the Great Depression of the 1930s; and as we know, the effects of that depression were not restricted to economics. In much of Europe, as well as Latin America and Japan, democracies collapsed and were replaced by authoritarian regimes.
The writer doesn't have his facts right: in the 1930s, Japan was not a democracy. Few countries in Latin America were. And the fascist and socialist movements in post-war Europe grew in the prosperous 1920s.
The writer also focuses upon the direst warnings of the Stern review to trump common sense. Yes, God might stick the Earth in His oven and bake us to a crisp. It's not likely, and climate warming models that are more plausible, with a global increase in temperature of about 1 degree Celsius, have far more moderate outcomes on the planet over the next hundred years. Those outcomes aren't scary, however, and the goal of both the Stern review and the author are to scare us into accepting their solution to the claimed problem.
Note the increasing desparation to the Left on climate change: first it was 1 degree. Then it morphed to about 3 degrees. Now you find predictions on the order of 5 to 8 degree increases over the next hundred years. Over the next fifty years. Could happen any day now, yup. Why the alarmism? As the elites see that their previous prediction fails to move us, they up the ante, hoping at some point to scare (or buffalo) us into intellectual and moral surrender. |
As the report makes clear, however, if we continue with "business as usual" when it comes to the emission of greenhouse gases, then we will not have to wait till the end of the century to see disastrous consequences. Long before then, a combination of floods, droughts and famine will have destroyed states in many poorer parts of the earth as has already occurred in recent decades in Somalia.
| There's the scare tactic right there. Let's be serious: anyone see the rest of the world going the way of Somalia because of climate change? More likely it will go the way of Somalia if we allow Islamism to flourish, if we allow tribalism to persist, if we allow thugs and dictators to have their way. What's the solution to that: more western civilization, not less. Sort of blows away the whole thesis of this article. |
If the conservative estimates of the Stern report are correct, then already by 2050 the effects of climate change may be such as to wreck the societies of Pakistan and Bangladesh; and if these states collapse, how can India and other countries possibly insulate themselves?
| Perhaps because India is something that Pakistan and Bangaldesh aren't: India is a capitalist, democratic state that within fairly broad margins is attempting to address its many social and economic problems. The other two countries are backwards states that to a large degree are held hostage by a death-cult that prevents them from recognizing reality, much less dealing with it. |
At that point, not only will today's obsessive concern with terrorism appear insignificant, but all the democratizing efforts of Western states, and of private individuals and bodies like George Soros and his Open Society Institute, will be rendered completely meaningless. So, of course, will every effort directed today toward the reduction of poverty and disease.
| Mr. Soros is already meaningless: he advocates a statist, European approach to problem-solving that almost by definition can't adjust to new information, new technology and new ideas. The statist model wants to fit the 21st century into the comfortable confines of the 19th century philosophies of Hegel and Marx. This is why their approach to 'climate change' is more statism: carbon taxes, emission rules, more government agencies, more international rules, none of which really solve the problem. As Jaques Chirac once astutely noted, what matters to the statists isn't that they solve the problem but that they feel good about trying to solve it. |
And this is only to examine the likely medium-term consequences of climate change. For the further future, the report predicts that if we continue with business as usual, then the rise in average global temperature could well top 5 degrees Celsius. To judge by what we know of the history of the world's climate, this would almost certainly lead to the melting of the polar ice caps, and a rise in sea levels of up to 25 meters.
| It's unfortunate that the author has no sense of history: he'd recognize that 30 years ago the climate change issue of the day was global cooling. There were proposals, apparently serious, of lifting large mirrors into space so as to focus more of the sun's radiant energy on the planet. We've had Malthusian predictions of population explosions, war, famine, pestilence and starvation predicted over the years, all of which would affect the western world and all of which were just around the corner. We're still waiting. |
As pointed out by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth," this would mean the end of many of the world's greatest cities. The resulting human migration could be on such a scale as to bring modern civilization to an end.
Suppose for a moment that something like this began to happen: it's not like a movie; cities won't flood overnight. If New York or Dhaka or the Maldives become uninhabitable over fifty years, the population will indeed shift, but it will happen in ways that are almost inperceptible. Western countries will spend billions of dollars -- which they will have -- to mitigate the effects of flooding, or warming, or drought. The third world will do what it always does when confronted by a situation that causes a region to be unlivable: pick up and move.
And that happens frequently even today. We've seen mass migrations in Africa and Asia in our lifetimes because of climate disasters. We've seen more because of war and political unrest. It's tragic for them; I haven't seen the leftist elites do much about it other than wring their hands.
But the biggest error Lieven makes is his inability to recognize the greatest resource of western civilization: progress combined with adaptability. In trying to peer into the climate crystal ball, he completely discounts how western technology will advance to help solve the problem (to the extent that the problem is real). Need to cut carbon emissions? Need to find ways to generate energy without burning coal? Need to manage a rising ocean? Need to grow more food in changing climates? It's those blasted capitalists who will figure out how to do this. Lieven can't even see the technological changes of the past twenty years, let alone the last hundred. Those changes combined with the ability of markets to marshal resources provide us the ability to adapt, and societies that best permit technology and markets to advance are the ones that survive best in any changing environment. |
If this comes to pass, what will our descendants make of a political and media culture that devotes little attention to this threat when compared with sports, consumer goods, leisure and a threat from terrorism that is puny by comparison? Will they remember us as great paragons of human progress and freedom? They are more likely to spit on our graves.
They might spit on yours. Once again the western world, using the prosperity generated by capitalism, free markets and democracy, will be the best equipped to manage any large scale, substantial climate change. We'll eat Delaware oranges. We'll grow sugar cane in South Dakota. We'll continue to live our lives because, in the end, we have three hundred million people in the U.S. who are empowered to solve problems, not just at a national level but at a personal level.
Read Dickens' Tale of Two Cities and ponder how Paris was fed. That's how we'll manage. |
Underlying Western free-market democracy, and its American form in particular, is the belief that this system is of permanent value to mankind: a "New Order of the Ages," as the motto on the U.S. Great Seal has it. It is not supposed to serve only the short-term and selfish interests of existing Western populations. If our system is indeed no more than that, then it will pass from history even more utterly than Confucian China and will deserve to do so.
A major conceit here is that it's our fault that we haven't solved the problems of peoples who refuse to live like us. It's our fault that Zimbabwe tolerates the tribalism and backwardness that allows a Robert Mugabe that robs them blind and imprisons them in a police state. It's our fault that the Venezuelans have a clown running their country who is pushing his foot down on their necks. And so on.
And of course, if the U.S. tries to solve a particular problem, from Afghanistan to Iraq, we're wrong. Of course. The convenient hubris of the Left is to damn America for both action and inaction. The 'New Order of the Ages' should yield to the wiser statism across the Atlantic, the continent that started two world wars in the last century and is hell-bent on binding everyone to their rules for survival.
Non-western societies aren't stupid: they can, if they wish, recognize the same reality we do. If climate change turns out to be real (and I have my doubts, aka the global cooling scare of the 1970s), non-western societies have the opportunity to adapt. They will likely have to become more western to manage: more democracy, not less, more capitalism, not less, more freedom, not less. Free western societies will manage. The rest of you? Sure hope you figure it out. |
Posted by: Steve White 2006-12-31 |
