Amid the constant hiss and bursts of white noise there emerges a sense of reality that is simultaneously chaotic and misleading, which sometimes makes it difficult to get a sense of large-scale historical shifts in the world.
Yet we are in the midst of great historical change, so are forced to “learn how to look”, as the novelist Don deLillo wrote four decades ago.
From the white noise at least two strands are visible, heavily intertwined, as they have been for decades. With new knowledge slipping out of the periphery, Western civilisation, as an idea, has lost its imputed value and meaning as representing some kind of pinnacle of human achievement.
To imagine it in that way relies too heavily on intellectual occlusion, as it has relied, in application, on coercion and consent, and sometimes on brute force. As a portmanteau concept for explaining the predominance of Europe over the past 500 years, Western civilisation rests on achievements of the European Renaissance.
One contention is that the Renaissance might have been impossible without the (algebraic and algorithmic) knowledge produced during the Islamic Golden Age, or without the foundational texts of trigonometry produced during the Vedic era on the Indian subcontinent over the preceding 2,000 years and without Chinese inventions such as the compass, papermaking and printing. All of that is, predictably, dismissed on the basis that European knowledge is autochthonous — and has been over cosmic time.
As a political economic project, the brute force and coercion referred to above, the expansion and domination of Western civilisation, can be linked to European empire-building. It should be stressed that colonisation was primed by notions about the superiority “of the Christian and Jewish religions [and] white skinned people, over backward people [with] coloured skin”, as explained by the British colonial administrator Harry Johnston, who infused eugenicist thought into European colonisation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And so, when we assess the speech by US secretary of state Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month, it is worth situating his lamentations about the negative vibes around the (once) “great Western empires” in the context of the way in which, as he said, Europe’s “missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers, pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe”.
He glossed over the somatic and structural violence of colonial and settler colonial enterprises, so it was unsettling that Rubio received warm applause from European leaders and bureaucrats. Nevertheless, this hankering for empire may be overt and explicit in Trump World but has always been part of work in the intellectual infrastructure of the European world.
Someone should write a note and pin it somewhere — choosing a “lesser evil” is still choosing evil.
The historian Niall Ferguson, highly regarded on the right in the US and Britain, has banged the gong for empire for more than two decades; at least since publication of his best-selling book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, in about 2003. He has also made successive claims for a return of some kind of empire.
Statements in conservative/right-wing circles in the UK insist former colonies owe Britain a “debt of gratitude”, since the empire brought democratic institutions to Africa and Asia. Some intellectuals have minimised the global role of the West or Europe, and of the Judeo-Christian world in general, as some kind of lesser evil. Someone should write a note and pin it somewhere — choosing a “lesser evil” is still choosing evil.
Others, most notably the US writer Robert Kaplan, who has been writing about “the coming chaos” since about 1994, more recently wrote about a world teetering on the edge and in a state of “permanent crisis”. Providing clarity during an interview with New Statesman early last year, Kaplan explicitly stated that the US presence in Western Asia had brought prosperity to the region, and that withdrawing would edge the world towards “the coming chaos”. This is somewhat consistent with the “coming anarchy” he tied to West Africa, also in the mid-1990s.
A fitting piece of evidence is that Rubio’s celebration of European empires presages him by at least 200 years. In 1840 Thomas Macaulay praised Britain’s civilising mission. Pace the belief that Europe is “the cradle of humanity”, Rubio wants the European world to unshackle itself from the “guilt and shame” of colonialism, and take pride in the nobility of Western civilisation — “the greatest civilisation in human history”.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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