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The MoA Week In Review – OT 2024-022
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
Ukraine:
Middle East:
Source – bigger
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Other issues:
Empire:
> Americans now find themselves living in an oligarchy administered day-to-day by institutional bureaucracies that move in lock-step with each other, enforcing a set of ideologically-driven top-down imperatives that seemingly change from week-to-week and cover nearly every subject under the sun. <
China:
Russia:
Europe:
Use as open (not related to Ukraine or Palestine) thread …
Can someone elucidate for me if and how Emmanuel Todd addresses the actual societal mechanisms for the decline of the West in his new book?
I hear him describing various anthropological and historical developments (see excerpts below from Todd himself and from Pepe Escobar’s review of his book) but I see nothing about societal mechanisms, about specific cause and effects operating in class society.
There is no mention of the development of ruling-class ideas nor their power to shape society, nor are cause-and-effect mechanisms forthrightly identified, only generalizations which have arrows turning inward.
Did working people get screwed six ways to Sunday and then forgo Protestantism, or the reverse? What role did neoliberalism have on social bonds where said policies came from political class compradors? was this first or last?
Did educational aptitudes and achievements decline in society overall because religion faded into the void, zapping causal origins? or did education become bad and expensive, mostly servant of the financial sector and the ruling class, generating a compliant political class and indebted ex-students, and then the disintegration of social bonds?
Escobar writes,
The collapse of Protestantism could not but destroy the work ethic to the benefit of mass greed: that is, neoliberalism
Here there is a pointing, but who exactly is being pointed at?
I also wonder about Todd’s critique of “the spirit of 1968” (as presented by Escobar). Does it holds water?
???one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American sexual revolution and May 68 in France”; “to believe that the individual would be greater if freed from the collective”. That led to an inevitable debacle: “Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the void. [emphasis mine]
Is this not a conflation of ruling-class ideas with the ideas of the 1960s revolution? I did not live in France like Todd, but on the West coast of the US and in Denmark at that time. I strongly disagree with the characterization that that revolution was all about “the individual would be greater if freed from the collective.” Maybe i missed something? We were all about justice, equal rights, fairness, against imperialist wars and so on, not about seeking freedom from belonging within communities, collectives and families and such — all about freedom from tyrants and tyranny, freedom for all from identifiable systemic oppressions. And many were Protestants.
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Contextual excerpts assembled (skip over mostly)
Emmanuel Todd’s general argument as summarized in week in review articles, emphases mine.
From Todd
“the vaporisation of Protestantism in the United States, in England and throughout the Protestant world has caused the disappearance of what constituted the strength and specificity of the West.”
“Great America, from [Theodore] Roosevelt to Eisenhower”. This was “an America that retained all the positive values of Protestantism, its educational effectiveness, its relationship to work, its capacity for integrating the individual into the community”. Ultimately, the historian suggested, “the Protestant matrix has disappeared at the height of American power”
and from P Escobar:
…he focuses on the key reasons that have led to the West’s downfall. Among them: the end of the nation-state; de-industrialization (which explains NATO’s deficit in producing weapons for Ukraine); the “degree zero” of the West’s religious matrix, Protestantism; the sharp increase of mortality rates in the US (much higher than in Russia), along with suicides and homicides; and the supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars…
7. Here we reach the crux of Todd’s argument: his post-Max Weber reinterpretation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published a little over a century ago, in 1904/1905: “If Protestantism was the matrix for the ascension of the West, its death, today, is the cause of the disintegration and defeat.”
Todd clearly defines how the 1688 English “Glorious Revolution”, the 1776 American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution were the true pillars of the liberal West. Consequently, an expanded “West” is not historically “liberal”, because it also engineered “Italian fascism, German Nazism and Japanese militarism”.
In a nutshell, Todd shows how Protestantism imposed universal literacy on the populations it controlled, ”because all faithful must directly access the Holy Scriptures. A literate population is capable of economic and technological development. The Protestant religion modeled, by accident, a superior, efficient workforce.” And it is in this sense that Germany was “at the heart of Western development”, even if the Industrial Revolution took place in England.
Todd’s key formulation is undisputable: ”The crucial factor of the ascension of the West was Protestantism’s attachment to alphabetization.”
Moreover Protestantism, Todd stresses, is twice at the heart of the history of the West: via the educational and economic drive – with fear of damnation and the need to feel chosen by God engendering a work ethic and a strong, collective morality – and via the idea that Men are unequal (remember the White Man’s Burden).
The collapse of Protestantism could not but destroy the work ethic to the benefit of mass greed: that is, neoliberalism.
8. Todd’s sharp critique of the spirit of 1968 would merit a whole new book. He refers to “one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American sexual revolution and May 68 in France”; ”to believe that the individual would be greater if freed from the collective”. That led to an inevitable debacle: “Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the void.” And that’s how we became “a multitude of mimetic midgets who do not dare to think by themselves – but reveal themselves as capable of intolerance as the believers of ancient times.”
9. Todd’s brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely shatters the Church of Woke – from New York to the EU sphere, and will provoke serial fits of rage. He shows how transgenderism is “one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality.”
And there’s an added analytical bonus: “The transgender ideology says that a man may become a woman, and a woman may become a man. This is a false affirmation, and in this sense, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.”
It gets worse, when it comes to the geopolitical ramifications. Todd establishes a playful mental and social connection between this cult of the fake and the Hegemon’s wobbly behavior in international relations. Example: the Iranian nuclear dear clinched under Obama becoming a hardcore sanctions regime under Trump. Todd: “American foreign policy is, in its own way, gender fluid.” …
Pepe Escobar
Posted by: suzan | Jan 21 2024 18:53 utc | 24
Posted by: petra | Jan 21 2024 21:26 utc | 37
Continuity is not well understood.
CHAPTER II
OF ARMENIA MINOR OF THE PORT OF LAIASSUS AND OF THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PROVINCE.
IN commencing the description of the countries which Marco Polo visited in Asia, and of things worthy of notice which he observed therein, it is proper to mention that we are to dis tinguish two Armenias, the Lesser and the Greater. The king of the Lesser Armenia dwells in a city called Sebastoz, and rules his dominions with strict regard to justice. The towns, fortified places, and castles are numerous. […] Those persons who design to travel into the interior of the Levant, 1 usually proceed in the first instance to this port of Laiassus. The boundaries of the Lesser Armenia are, on the south, the Land of Promise, now occupied by the Saracens; 2 on the north, Karamania, in habited by Turkomans; towards the north-east lie the cities of Kaisariah, Sevasta, 3 and many others subject to the Tar tars; and on the western side it is bounded by the sea, which extends to the shores of Christendom.
[…]—————–
CHAPTER III
OF THE PROVINCE CALLED TURKOMANIA, WHERE ARE THE CITIES OF KOGNI, KAISARIAH, AND SEVASTA, AND OF ITS COMMERCE.
THE inhabitants of Turkomania 4 may be distinguished into three classes. The Turkomans, who reverence Mahomet and follow his law, are a rude people, and dull of intellect.
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[1] Levant is a translation of the word Anatolia or Anadoli, from the Greek ” ortus, oriens,” signifying the country that lies eastward from Greece. As the name of a region therefore it should be equivalent to Natolia, in its more extensive acceptation; and it is evident that our author employs it to denote Asia Minor. Smyrna is at present esteened the principal port in the Levant, and the term seems to be now confined to the sea-coast, and to mercantile usage.
[2] For the Land of Promise, or Palestine, which extends no further to the north than Tyre, is here to be understood Syria, or that part of itcalled Coelo-Syria, which borders on Cilicia or the southern part of Armenia Minor. As the more general denomination of Syria includes Palestine, and the latter name was, in the time of the Crusades, more familiar to Europeans than the former, it is not surprising that they should some times be confounded. The Saracens here spoken of were the subjects of the Mameluk sultans or soldans of Egypt, who recoverd from the Christian powers in Syria, what the princes of the family of Saladin, or of the Ayubite dynasty, had lost. In other parts of the work the term is employed indiscriminately with that of Mahometan.
[3] The Turkomans of Karamania were a race of Tartars settled in Asia Minor, under the government of the Seljuk princes, of whom an account will be found in the following note. Kaisariah or Cassarea, and Sevasta or Sebaste, the Sebastopolis Cappadocias of Ptolemy and Siwas or Sivas of the present day, were cities belonging to the same dynasty, that had been conquered by the. Moghuls in the year 1242.
[4] By Turkomania we are to understand, generally, the possessions of the great Seljuk dynasty in Asia Minor, extending from Cilicia and Painphylia, in the south, to the shores of the Euxine sea, and from Pisidia and Mysia, in the west, to the borders of Armenia Minor;…
[…]—————–
CHAPTER IV
OF ARMENIA MAJOR, IN WHICH ARE THE CITIES OF ARZTNGAN, ARGIRON, AND DARZIZ OF THE CASTLE OF PAIPURTH OF THE MOUNTAIN WHERE THE ARK OF NOAH RESTED OF THE BOUNDARIES OF THE PROVINCE AND OF A REMARKABLE FOUNTAIN OF OIL.
ARMENIA Major is an extensive province, at the entrance of which is a city named Arzingan,[1] where there is a manufacture of very fine cotton cloth called bombazines,[2] as well as of many other curious fabrics, which it would be tedious to enumerate. It possesses the handsomest and most excellent baths of warm water, issuing from the earth, that are any where to be found.[3] Its inhabitants are for the most part native Armenians, but under the dominion of the Tartars.
[…]—————–
CHAPTER VI
OF THE PROVINCE OF MOSUL AND ITS DIFFERENT INHABITANTS OF THE PEOPLE NAMED KURDS AND OF THE TRADE OF THIS COUNTRY.
MOSUL is a large province 1 inhabited by various descriptions of people, one class of whom pay reverence to Mahomet, and are called Arabians. 2 The others profess the Christian faith, but not according to the canons of the church, which they depart from in many instances, and are denominated Nestorians, Jacobites, and Armenians. They have a patriarch whom they call Jacolit, 3 and by him archbishops, bishops, and abbots are consecrated and sent to all parts of India, to Cairo, to Baldach (Baghdad), and to all places inhabited by Christains ; in the same manner as by the pope of the Romish church. All those cloths of gold and of silk which we call muslins 4 are of the manufacture of Mosul, and all the great merchants termed Mossulini, who convey spices and drugs, in large quantities, from one country to another, are from this province. In the mountainous parts there is a race of people named Kurds, some of whom are Christians of the Nestorian [!] and Jacobite sects, and others Mahometans. They are all an unprincipled people, whose occupation it is to rob the merchants. [The Travels of Marco Polo the Venetian: 30-42]
Posted by: sln2002 | Jan 21 2024 21:56 utc | 41
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