Norton, 292 pp., 2008, $25.95
The New Asian Hemisphere: the Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East
PublicAffairs, 314 pp., 2008, $26
Cities were the building blocks of the international system of Greco-Roman antiquity. Indeed, Aristotle once quipped that “we live as frogs around a pond”, meaning that the cities of antiquity thronged around and clung to their near-Mediterranean shores in ceaseless competition with all others. This international system embodied the intrinsic Greek concept of arête, or virtue—to be realized and celebrated through heroic competition. This was another inescapable inheritance of Homer, another reason his magnificent works read as they did (and do), and it is why an entire genre of civic oratory was developed to celebrate and praise these ancient cities.1
Textbooks of rhetoric called progymnasmata taught the Greco-Roman courtier class how to go about constructing a panegyric composed of two parts. First came the ekphrasis, or description, whose purpose was to remind the audience of the foundations and framing of their world. The elite would hear articulated why the world existed as it did, why the elite rightly held supreme authority, and why society must live up to the standards of the ancestors if their world was to endure. Then came the encomium, an emotional element in which a young rhetor might show off his learning and flair with a message praising his city and its elders as being above all rivals. This was how an ambitious courtier could be “made”, especially if his audience included the emperor.
Ah, but that was then, and this is—well, this is then, too. Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World and Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere testify to the fact that an ancient genre still lives and flourishes. Their books, if read aloud, nearly keep pace with the ancient panegyrics, though these political hymns are offered not to cities but to today’s living counterparts: nation-states. Their ekphrases conform perfectly to antiquity’s rules: Remind your audience why they rule, and why their city (read: their nation) is at the world’s core. Their encomia are addressed to our living world. This is not to say Zakaria or Mahbubani need audiences with heads-of-state, regimes, emperors or advisers. But even in antiquity, the goal of the city panegyric was not solely the blessing of an emperor. It was rather about elevating and pleasing a leader-community, the archontes and curiales of the city.
Likewise Zakaria and Mahbubani seek this honor: to be the recognized interlocutors, perhaps even celebrated voices in their elite world. Their achievement replicates a core trope of Greco-Roman paideia—the elite sensibility and its abiding way of life.2 To ascend to a high place of honor in one’s own life, to complete the cursus honorum, was always the goal. Panegyric was a central ritual through which this collective elite goal might ultimately be realized. Here the rhetor might in an electric performance, to a lofty audience, be publicly and forever ratified.
Today this ratification comes through bestselling books rather than performance-panegyrics, and honors attend through television appearances, book club selections, blog buzz, fulsome reviews and, of course, sales. Needless to say, this is not what Zakaria and Mahbubani think they are doing, nor is it what they say they are doing. Yet like fine encomia, both are simple and elegant in thesis. Zakaria declares the dawn of a post-American world, but in no way does he also herald an American fall. Rather he earnestly, even plaintively hopes to posit its continuing world significance. Zakaria wants to tell all Americans that, in the end, the rise of India and China need not come at our own expense. Rather, like a good Greco-Roman, he advances the highest virtue of including great and deserving new cities in our late-modern “frog pond.” In this world the American city can still shine brightly:
[H]istorically America has succeeded not because of the ingenuity of its government programs but because of the vigor of its society. It has thrived because it kept itself open to the world. . . . [This] has allowed America to create the first universal nation.
Thus Zakaria gives praise to the new, but also solicitously pays homage to America.
Mahbubani’s panegyric takes glorifying further, spinning a faux-moral tale in which the recession of American and Western power is inevitable because of the rise of a more virtuous Asia. Hence “Asia” represents superior character, almost as though there were a discernible “Asian” persona. These virtues consist of “free-market economics”, “science and technology”, “meritocracy”, a “culture of peace”, “rule of law”, and “education.” Yes, how truly Asian.
This is the classical arête game. Sure, the West once beat us at our own virtues, but they are now lost or degraded, and the supreme American virtue of political liberty has been soiled by a bad war. Mahbubani throws the West’s vaunted “values” back at us with this polite j’accuse: that Western globalization’s “undemocratic world order is sustained by the world’s most democratic nation-states.” Hence Western “cities” have lost their incontestable claim to virtue.
Yet even if Asian cities are more stainless and pure, Mahbubani’s vision nonetheless explicitly embraces the established world of Western nation-states and our universal nation-state ideal of the right and true inhabited world, the oikoumene. Indeed, both Zakaria’s and Mahbubani’s encomia are pitched to the whole of the nation-state world, this community of like-minded elite societies sharing, as did the ancient Mediterranean, a common world identity. Zakaria gives this framework a gushing gloss as the “March to Modernity”, a virtuous place where modernity means (softly) the free-market, democratic, globally enlightened nation-state. Mahbubani in contrast envisions a slightly variant nation-state “city”, no different in material prosperity and social effectiveness but merely benefiting from just a little less—or a lot less—political liberty.
Like the ancient city’s archons, our world-courtier class still intones in the same monadic voice: The whole civic identity in which rulers and community are joined, as political ideal, is still one. This is what enables Mahbubani to exalt the Tang Dynasty as a model elite, one so enlightened that its people did not need liberty: “A rejuvenation of Chinese civilization along the lines of the Tang dynasty”, he declares, “would be a blessing for the world.” In short, elite rule is best. Thus, too, Zakaria calls carelessly “Washington” what he ought to call American society or at the very least, the American polity. Elite = Nation: Done, and so convenient.
Zakaria is usually more judicious. Yet as an American he seems remarkably tone-deaf when he writes:
When looking at the models of a new Beijing, one inevitably thinks of Albert Speer’s grandiose plans for postwar Berlin. . . . Albert Speer Jr., the son, also an architect, designed the 8-kilometer boulevard that will run from the Forbidden Palace to the Olympics. He sees no real comparison between the transformation of Beijing and his father’s designs for Hitler. This is ‘bigger,’ he says. ‘Much bigger.’
Zakaria leaves no traceable irony tag here; rather, he is without disapproval in noting the triumph of a new big-city [nation-state] elite on the scene. This is the post-American world and China is the wave of the future, so just deal with it. Zakaria’s precisely parsed phrases are wholly in keeping with the iron law of arête: These are better nation-states, not because the future is necessarily all about them, but because right at this moment in the great game they are doing better.
The larger but tacit point here is that virtuous competition ratifies all we believe, at least throughout the world’s courtier sub-cultures: Win or lose, it will still be all about us. In effect, modernity is forever, and its future will always be about the nation-state, just like antiquity was always about the eternal city-state. (Only of course it wasn’t: Antiquity’s city-network system ended, and ended badly.3) It is always about competition, arête, among the grandest city-states. If in antiquity these were Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch and Athens, so today they are the United States, the European Union, China, India and Russia.
So it is that Zakaria and Mahbubani announce the “new” and the “rising”: the “post-American world”, the “new Asian hemisphere.” But how is this in essence different from the slew of books, many by Americans but many also by others, trumpeting the U.S. triumph at the Cold War’s end? The proper nouns shift in patriotic locus, but the hallowed narrative is eternal.
But, again, these two books and lesser examples of the genre are only partly and superficially about who is up and who is down, who is rising and who is falling. In another sense they are really about preserving the enduring, shared story of literary competition as a celebration of elite identity. As in classical antiquity, we still inhabit the imagined realm of a “Great Game.” We eagerly embrace our arête contests such as the Olympics and more than a few wars. The new panegyrics correctly follow ancient form.
More specifically, perhaps, these panegyrics look back to Theodore Lascaris’s early-13th-century encomium on Nicea. He raised up as a rhetorical straw man the material, sybaritic glories of Babylon only to dismiss this sorry exemplar where “the perfumes and the wealth are perfuming the corpse of a city.”4 Then he even, daringly, took on classical Athens. Yes, he declared respectfully, they created civilization. But they did not have God, as we Byzantines do; without the grounding truth of the Almighty, they were all prey to human corruption. Nicea, he assures his audience, has both God and civilization and is superior because of that fact. It is characteristic of the new panegyrics that the objects of their praise not only be powerful but also that they be moral, or moral enough for present purposes. Standards rise relatively, and so too do their rhetorical forms.
The oratorical moment for Zakaria and Mahbubani is their opportunity to illuminate the shining virtues of newly ascendant city-states—nation-states presently on the make. Zakaria would cautiously prefer that such virtues somehow still hew to the ethos of his chosen home, the United States of America. That they no longer do only merits meek protest. He holds up a palsied hand as he posits our ultimate, pathetic, arête defeat:
But what if China . . . pushes Washington onto the sidelines in Asia, in an effort to wear out America’s patience and endurance? What if it quietly positions itself as the alternative to a hectoring and arrogant America?
Let Mahbubani trumpet the onset of “The Asian Way” or the “Asian Mind” as though some grand shift in human capability were underway. But it is Zakaria who subtly supports Mahbubani’s racialist take on arête, using his cachet with fellow Americans to basically confide: It’s true; yes, it is.
Hence Mahbubani’s encomium differs from Zakaria’s only in its muscular use of metaphor. If arête shows the “East” or “Asia” to be the greater, then this “win” suits seamlessly the literary Greco-Roman tradition, where bragging points in battle or in the arena are what it’s all about. But remember, such encomia are also about pleasing the audience and realizing the honor of being the chosen voice of the city. If today this realization of ambition takes the form of an anointed book rather than a candlelit panegyric before the emperor, it nonetheless remains the surest vehicle—if not to imperial offices and honors—then to a higher place in an elite’s cursus honorum. In this sense our contemporary courtier ethos shares much with antiquity.
Moreover, the elite sub-cultures of both late antiquity and late modernity arrived at their mature phases toward the end of their respective historical epochs. They brought with them the elegant baggage of too-long-entrenched literary tropes, with rules so intimately embedded in the art of high rhetoric that ancestral forebears had already shaped their lives-to-be before their very births. Zakaria and Mahbubani are masters of the literary rhetoric of our day. But they are best understood less for any objective truth they reveal and more for how they service the emotional needs of their audiences, who are almost invariably the elites whose very equities and elegance they celebrate. It is here that we can see how this malleable literary genre solidifies the equipoise of elite society.
Zakaria and Mahbubani are unwittingly enfolded, along with their readers, within a state-centric framework that, no matter how they dress it up, no longer explains what we see with our own eyes. A Post-American World and The New Asian Hemisphere have little to say about actual reality because they miss the biggest forces composing that reality today: identity stress, system shocks and what both mean for the future of war.
For two centuries, Western identities were vested in the nation-state, where the driving dynamic was high demand for nation-state identity, to be realized most often in war. For us war is still a self-serving moral quest, but for societies of the world’s left-behind, urgent human demand is vested now both in more universalistic movements and in more intimate communities. The past two centuries’ religion-driven nationalism is in recession, with a few key national exceptions. The nation-state may have more regulatory power than ever before, but this is often emotionally “empty power”, as humanity, seeking alternative community, moves to forms of non-state identity, flowing like a river over and around nation-state rocks and branches. Add to this shift in culture and political consciousness three exogenous shocks now waiting in the wings: a global energy crunch, global climate change and global pandemics.
These impending shocks, when they begin to hit, will rock the very human places where the demand for new identity is highest. Groups, societies and movements with a high demand for identity are also capable of today’s most effective resistance. Their path to realization after all is through struggle and sacrifice. We have seen in this new century how non-state actors can effectively resist even the greatest of nation-states. A future in which such resistance flourishes and proliferates is a future of ever-widening human conflict. Exogenous shocks can transform nation-states and relative power within and among them as well. A global energy crunch means economic decline and hardship for most, but for the anointed few such as Saudi Arabia and Russia it means amazing power and national significance, with tremendous implications for the worlds that surround them. With oil permanently over $100 per barrel and very possibly over $200 per barrel and more, one can begin to imagine a real Saudi-run Islamist Caliphate, and perhaps even a restored Russian Orthodox Eurasian empire. This is not storybook fantasy; it is fantasy come to life.
In a straightened world, Mahbubani and Zakaria’s big-winner nation-states—India and China, first and foremost—may face the emotionally despairing wreckage of their peoples’ hopes before many other national elites. For actual reality to so suddenly trash the collective, tantalizing expectations of billions could trigger systemic crises, the kind that could quickly upend not only the brittle literary conceit of “Elite = Nation”, but also along with it the fragile legitimacy of Indian and Chinese state elites. Simply consider a single elemental variable: the ease and availability of global air travel. At $200 per barrel of oil, the business models of almost all airlines simply shut down.5 Mahbubani displays a chart showing how China’s air connection to Eurasia has grown almost by an order of magnitude in just a few years. But the evanescent epoch of easy energy on which that chart depends may now be just about over.
Exogenous shocks and shifting identities together threaten the very globalization that nurtured them in the first place. Globalization has stimulated the grand drive for fossil-fuel-based energy and the grand mixing of cultures, but we have mainly been interested only in the desiccated data of economics, not in the impact on environment or culture. Two hundred years of modernity made the energy dive, climate crisis and world-girdling pandemic possible, perhaps even inevitable. We have spent two centuries exultantly dancing on what we thought was Malthus’ lifeless corpse. Now we find ourselves anxiously waiting for him to exhale.
More important, our two-century globalization—cutting its long swathe of cultural creative destruction through a host of human societies—is what has awakened today’s high identity demand and its insistent call for resistance and transcendence. Identity will not be denied, and its path to transcendence is often through war. Whether a revanchist Russia or a religiously inspired Hizballah, identity is trump. What large states apart from Russia and America still have the identity drive to fight, and if need be keep fighting? Europe shrinks even from the calling of a gendarmerie, while despotic rulers in the Third World, whether Sudan or Pakistan, use their armies precisely in precursor Dark Ages fashion—as iron-rod warlord retainers who undertake endless “pacification” actions.
Here India and China here look particularly tremulous: However impressive their army parade videos look and sound, such militaries are not for real use. Unlike Russia and America, their armies are highly tuned to the symbolic: They are the trusted, believable backstop devices legitimating both the state and a national way of life. But war, real war, would threaten the delicate civic compact that keeps teetering, giant “national” societies going. If civically and politically the Indian and Chinese armies are existentially essential, then war is also the biggest existential risk to them and to their masters.
Hence the biggest nation-states are also (lifting from Mao) the biggest paper tigers. In a world of achingly urgent demand for identity, even the most wretched non-state community can resist, fight and immobilize the proudest nation-state army. We have seen this happen with our own eyes these past few years—and it happened to us. The subsiding of the nation-state is right here in the fighting and sacrifice and burning belief of resistance, and it will very likely come home, too, in the history that awaits. Not that American citizens will be tomorrow’s domestic insurgents. But our long-term, if not endless, engagement with the passionate non-state over there will eventually come home here to haunt our own society, our way of life and our inmost beliefs.
Other globalization epochs, too, peaking in late antiquity and the High Middle Ages, ended with just such human bills coming due. Late antiquity represented the final integration of Greco-Roman civilization: a fusion of the classical mundus and Christian universalism from the 3rd to the 5th century. Then it all slowly decompressed and came apart, devolving into three separate worlds: the Latin West, the Byzantine East and the Islamic Umma. The High Middle Ages refused that long-fractured world and forged remarkable ties with India and China and even Mongol Steppe Asia.6 This even more expansive cultural mix crested with Crusader and Mongol invasions, only to separate out again and wall-up after Black Death and the Ottoman rise, which again split the oikoumene.7
The economic integration and cultural mixing of these epochs prefigure our own. Does their coming apart tell us something, too? There does seem to be a pattern here: Different “worlds” that once mingled, under stress began to hunker down, exchanging their desire for connection for a need to survive. Integration thus went into effortless recession. Smaller worlds, looking to protect themselves, began to pull away from the whole, and hence the whole began to fade as a dominant human reality.
Not a shred of such awareness intrudes into the panegyrics of our contemporary learned courtiers. They deign to mention “issues” like energy and climate change, but only as modalities to be managed within the all-seeing state system. It is thus another encomiastic opportunity for the courtier-rhetor to show how we might pull this off. They project challenges on the road to greater integration; yet they never even consider the possibility that such challenges may already be pulling us in the opposite direction.
Approaching Zakaria and Mahbubani as courtier-rhetors rather than as actual analysts lets us clearly see their social function within a global elite sub-culture. They perform almost exactly the same function for our elite as ancient courtiers did for theirs—unconsciously mirroring back to readers the framing conventions and ruling narratives of the world they cherish. Just as Lascaris’s panegyric gives us little real data on Nicea in 1254, literary works like these tell us little about our world today. But they are eloquent testaments to how elites sustain belief in their own narrative of identity, their undying hope in its eternal authority, and their stubborn expectation that they have the wisdom and the strength to keep it going forever.
We should therefore not criticize this earnest genre for its omissions, but rather sympathize with its fidelity to a social order that may very well turn out to be superior to its successors. Here is how the historian Clive Foss put it for the late Byzantine age:
For the Byzantines . . . vapidity and obscurity were not the vices which Gibbon, looking down from the heights of Reason, so eloquently condemned, but virtues to be attained after long years of study and practice. . . . Lascaris succeeds in conveying almost no information at all, but instead creates an emotional atmosphere. . . . It is difficult to believe that the audience did not go away satisfied, with warm feelings about the city . . .”8
Perhaps in meeting the emotional needs of today’s global elite subculture, we should offer Zakaria and Mahbubani well-deserved praise for earnest labor, for they have succeeded. Meanwhile, the world’s other humanity moves restlessly toward a more passionate, if less elegant future.
1.
“Heroes compete in public performance . . . in the display of Homeric virtues, aretai.” For the Greeks, virtue could only be ratified through demonstration. Hence competition became the central ritual of the very idea of arête itself. J.E. Lendon, Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Antiquity (Yale University Press, 2003).
2.
Peter Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (University of Wisconsin, 1992).
3.
J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Ancient City (Oxford University Press, 2001).
4.
Clive Foss, Nicea: A Byzantine Capital and Its Praises (Hellenic College Press, 1996).
5.
Bradford Plumer, “The End of Aviation”, The New Republic, August 28, 2008.
6.
Janet Abu-Lugod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, AD 1250–1350 (Oxford University Press, 1989).
7.
William McNeil, The Rise of the West (University of Chicago, 1964). He refers to these ends of other globalization epochs as “closing of the global ecumene.”
8.
Foss, Nicea.