Loss of Faith: The Coming Break-Up of the Nation-State
Remnant Review (Sept. 23, 2011)
Every era ends at some point. The world of classical Greece ended with the rise of Macedon. The empire of Alexander ended the Greek city-state forever. Rome replaced Alexander's empire three centuries later. Rome broke apart over the next four centuries. The medieval world lasted for at least 800 years in the West -- a decentralized social order. In the eastern Roman empire, Byzantium was a separate civilization. We can date its end: 1453. It fell to Islam.
In the West, the Renaissance grew out of the ashes of the Black Death. "Ashes, ashes, all fall down" surely applied to Western Christendom. The Renaissance was a self-conscious break with the medieval world. We call it medieval because the Renaissance named it: the world in between Rome and modernity. The Renaissance was a self-conscious attempt to resurrect the classical world.
In 1492, Columbus opened up a new world geographically. This opening westward marked the transition to the modern world. This world has belonged to Western science, technology, philosophy, and culture. It has eclipsed Islam. The fall of the Ottoman Empire after 1875 clearly seemed to end the Islamic alternative. This had not been clear in 1800, when Barbary pirates looted Western ships in the Mediterranean.
The remarkable and unexplained advent of 2% per annum per capita economic growth in 1800 changed the old world forever. A new civilization appeared, one which was clearly radically different in 1875. As I have said before, all this has happened in just three generations: John Tyler (b. 1790), his son Lyon (b. 1853), and his grandsons Lyon, Jr. (b. 1924) and Harrison (b. 1928), both of whom are still alive.
In 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama, a then-unknown scholar, wrote an essay: "The End of History?" It was published in the neoconservative journal, The National Interest. He argued that Western democracy has triumphed, and no rival political system is likely to displace it. This article was a frontal assault against Marxism.
He was surely right about Marxism. It is dead. It will never be revived. It had been abandoned by Communist China a decade before Fukuyama's article. The symbol of Soviet Communism's demise was the fall of the Berlin Wall. On December 25, 1991, the USSR was voted out of existence by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which disbanded. That was the most remarkable collapse of an empire in history. It was bloodless.
Yet, for all this, there are signs that the social and intellectual world created by the Renaissance and extended by the Enlightenment -- right wing and left wing -- is nearing its own final days. This is marked by the crisis of the democratic nation-state. It faces these crises:
1. The bankruptcy of its welfare programs for the aged
2. Rising rates of violent crime
3. The failure in the United States of tax-funded education, K-12
4. The bankruptcy of the American empire
5. The loss of legitimacy of the democratic nation-state
6. The break-up of the European federation and euro
7. The failure of the United Nations Organization
8. The rapid extension of Islam in Western Europe
9. Falling white birthrates in the West: below replacement rate
10. The decline of historical knowledge among the West's elite
11. Loss of faith in the idea of progress
12. No replacements for the church and the nation-state
13. Boredom
There is economic growth, but Asia seems to be the wave of the future. Asia will have its demographic day of judgment in 20 to 30 years -- an aging population without either state funding or family funding -- but this is not evident now. Also, Asians kill female infants in the womb. Westerners do, too, but on an equal opportunity basis: males are killed at the same rate.
These trends are known individually by hundreds of millions of people, but there is no widespread alarm that anything fundamental is at stake. There is little sense that these trends are part of a package deal.
Rarely does a bell toll to mark the end of a civilization. The demise of the USSR in 1991 was the greatest exception in human history. Nothing else matches it. But the bells are tolling, one by one.
In this report, I am going to give you a brief survey of five chapters in three books that have shaped my thinking over the last three decades. I do not expect you to read any of these three books cover to cover. Of course, it would hardly hurt you to do this. If you read the five chapters, and decide that they are important enough in your own thinking to justify reading the books, I recommend that you do so. But I want to save you time. I want to introduce you to some ideas that I find compelling, and which I think you should consider very carefully in making your own plans.
This was published in 1980 by Basic Books, the neoconservative book publisher. It was written by the professor who had the greatest influence on my thinking. Officially, he was a sociologist. In fact, he was a social philosopher and brilliant social commentator. (He once wrote an essay on the misuse of the word "brilliant.")
He became one of the most famous conservative thinkers in the world after 1965. This was because of the social changes that disrupted the United States and many other Western nations, 1965-1970. He had given a lot of thought to the kinds of changes that were taking place. So, when he began to write systematically about these changes, beginning in 1965, his influence grew extensively.
There was another factor, which he once mentioned to me in private conversation. He became one of the favorite sociologists of the neoconservative movement. He did not regard himself as a neoconservative. He did not use the phrase. But a group of formerly left-wing Jewish intellectuals, most of whom were atheists, who had been influential in intellectual circles for decades, began to pay attention to him after they began their switch from leftism sometime around 1965. Some of them had been Marxists in the 1930s, whether Stalinists or Trotskyites. They had made a transition from Marxism to Democratic leftism in the 1950s. Then, in the middle of the 1960s, it made the next transition, and the results of that transition has become known as neoconservatism. I have written about this development here.
Nisbet told me that the greatest boost to his career had been the fact that Jewish intellectuals in New York City began to publish his articles and then his books. As he said to me, Jews read a lot of books. That was certainly accurate. When Nisbet began to be published in the Jewish periodical Commentary, and in the neoconservative quarterly publication, The Public Interest, his reputation grew. This enabled them to begin finding a market for the books which he was ready to write, beginning in 1965 or 1966. Scholars dream of such opportunities in their lives, but it rarely happens in the second half of the scholar's career. In Nisbet's case, it was the final third of his career.
Nisbet had studied at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He was highly influenced by a social thinker and remarkable historian, Frederick J. Teggart. Teggart was a philosopher of history. Nisbet was his graduate assistant, and one of his important tasks was to go to the library and get books for Teggart. He told me about carrying piles of books to Teggart's office, which was piled high with books. The University of California had the best library in the West Coast. Teggart read widely, and this introduced Nisbet to a vast array of academic materials that most of his peers had never heard of. Teggart was eclectic and not widely known, then or now. He is known today mainly because Nisbet has written about his influence in his own academic career.
Nisbet chose as his doctoral dissertation French conservative thought in the 1820s and 1830s. This topic had gone down the academic memory hole decades earlier. It was virtually unknown to the academic community. This gave Nisbet a real advantage. There was no one out there to tell him his thesis was wrong.
After World War II, he returned from the military and became a professor of sociology at Berkeley. This was during the phase of the enormous growth of higher education in the USA, because of the G.I. Bill. Millions of young men who would not otherwise been able to go to college returned to college because of the federal government's subsidy. This vastly expanded the number of colleges, and Nisbet was in the right university at the right time. Nisbet wrote a book on this change, The Degradation of the Academic Dogma (1972).
In 1953, his book, The Quest for Community, was published by Oxford University Press. It received some attention, mostly favorable, but it was hardly a bestseller. He asked these questions: "Why was it that the modern world had turned to totalitarianism in the middle of the 20th century? What had taken place in the societies that gave birth to totalitarianism?" He concluded that it had to do with the breakdown of social order. Those institutions to which men had given allegiance throughout history, such as the family, the church, the guild, the fraternal order, and similar voluntary institutions, had faded in importance in the twentieth century. This left only the isolated individual and the modern nation-state. Men gained a sense of belonging through their participation in mass-movement politics. Totalitarian leaders began to attract individuals who were isolated, even though they were living in large cities. These leaders were able to offer a sense of brotherhood to millions of people who felt alone in the midst of cities. The modern totalitarian state functioned as a substitute for the family, church, and voluntary associations that for millennia had given people a sense of purpose and participation. So, totalitarianism was born out of radical individualism, institutionally speaking, even though as a philosophy, totalitarianism is completely opposed to individualism.
In the second phase of his career, he served as an academic administrator at the newly launched undergraduate-only university, the University of California, Riverside, from 1954 to 1965. Then he took a sabbatical to teach at the University of Bologna, the very first university. When he returned, he went back into full-time teaching -- remarkable for an administrator. That was when the third and most productive phase of his career began -- also remarkable for a scholar. He wrote a series of books that were widely praised and widely read, including The Sociological Tradition (1966), Social Change and History (1969), The Social Philosophers (1973), and The Twilight of Authority (1975).
Then came The History of the Idea of Progress, which is his most profound book. For some reason, he included no footnotes -- a pity for those of us who collect footnotes.
He believed that societies need faith. If he was a practicing Christian, I did not hear about it. In his book, he traces the history of Western man's faith in progress from the Greeks to the late 20th century. I think he was wrong about the Greeks. I think they believed in cyclical history, just as J. B. Bury said in 1920. Nisbet was self-consciously reacting against Bury. I think Stanley Jaki was correct: the absence of a concept of linear time kept the Greeks and the Romans from moving beyond technology to science.
In the Introduction, he writes the following about the idea of progress:
. . . I remain convinced that this idea has done more good over a twenty-five-hundred year period, led to more creativeness in more spheres, and given more strength to human hope and to individual desire for improvement than any other single idea in Western history. . . . The springs of human action, will, and ambition lie for the most part in beliefs about universe, world, society, and man which defy rational calculations and differ greatly from physio-psychological instincts. These springs lie in what we call dogmas. . . . Everything now suggests, however, that Western faith in the dogma of progress is waning rapidly in all levels and spheres in this final part of the 20th century. The reasons, as I attempt to show in the final chapter, have much less to do with the unprecedented world wars, the totalitarianisms, the economic depressions, and other major political, military, and economic afflictions which are peculiar to the 20th century than they do with the fateful if less dramatic erosion of all the fundamental intellectual and spiritual premises upon which the idea of progress has rested throughout its long history (pp. 8-9).
Chapter 9 of his book, "Progress at Bay," discusses the evidence for the loss of faith in the West regarding the future. He writes:
Behind this spreading atmosphere of guilt and loss of meaning or purpose in the West and its heritage lies a constant erosion of faith in Western institutions; not just political but social, cultural, and religious institutions. Hardly a week passes without some fresh poll or survey indicating still greater loss of respect by Americans and Europeans for government, church, school, profession, industry, the media, and other once respected institutions -- and, naturally, those who in one or other degree preside over or represent that these institutions (p. 332).
This passage indicates something that I regard as fundamental in our understanding of the decline of faith in the idea of progress. Nisbet touches on it, but he does not sufficiently emphasize it. The issue of progress is intimately tied to the idea of morality. The loss of a sense of moral purpose is at the heart of the loss of faith in the idea of progress. It is not just that people have lost faith in progress; they have lost faith in a moral universe of cause-and-effect, which once governed the thinking of the West. We cannot separate the doctrine of the idea of progress from morality, which in turn is established through faith in God, who provides both purpose and meaning for the universe.
If there was a single source of this loss of faith, it was Charles Darwin. His concept of unplanned biological change rested on his denial of any purpose in the universe prior to man. This is the heart of his system, and he knew it. He was reacting against teleology: cosmic purpose or design.
Darwin's followers latched onto the idea of man as the highest evolutionary being in the universe. Without man, Darwinists say, there is no purpose in the universe unless there is a higher evolutionary species out there is space, whose sense of purpose trumps ours. (The idea of "higher" implies a hierarchy, which is a hierarchy of power: the survival of the fittest, as Herbert Spencer summarized it.) This places the origin of meaning and purpose in mankind: collective mankind. But who speaks for mankind? On what basis?
The heart of Darwin's theory is that nature has no autonomous purpose. It has no end in mind. It has no mind. It is not structured to benefit man, and man must struggle against the forces of nature in order to retain his dominance in nature. There is nothing outside of man that gives support to man, and there is nothing outside of man that guarantees man's success in extending his rule over nature in history. There is no natural law in Darwinism in the sense that was believed in Western history from the Greeks to Darwin. There is also no sovereign God who oversees the affairs of men, which has been the belief of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam from the beginning.
Man is cut off from any source of positive or negative sanctions in response to a transcendent system of morals. So, with the triumph of Darwinism and secularism, faith in transcendental morality has disappeared among the intellectuals. This in turn has undermined their faith in progress. There is no way to define progress unless there is a universal scale of values, meaning good, bad, and worst: the guides for mankind. The god of any society is the source of its laws and the enforcer of these laws. In the Darwinian universe, this means collective mankind. The trouble is, mankind cannot be trusted, precisely because mankind is afflicted with moral perversity.
In the Epilogue to his book, Nisbet warns that, without faith in the future, no society can be maintained for long. The Greeks, he argues, never did lose faith in their gods. The same holds true for the Romans. Obviously, this was true of Christianity. Even during the Enlightenment, most of the promoters of Enlightenment rationalism were Deists or theists of some kind. He contrasts this with the present situation.
In our day, however, religion is a spent force. If God is not dead, he is ebbing away, and has been since the early part of the century. We have, in Jonathan Swift's coruscating words, "just enough religion to make us hate but not enough to make us love one another" -- or, enough to make us see the flaws and cankers of the society around us but not enough to generate hope for the future. Just as religion has seriously waned, so have most of the systems of thought which for a time served intellectuals as surrogates. There aren't many today who find either Spencer's first cause or Marx's dialectic convincing (p. 353).
He then surveys the loss of faith within academic disciplines. He says that philosophy is a spent force. Nobody pays any attention or has any interest in what a professional philosopher thinks today. But who has succeeded the philosophers? "There is no ready answer. We appear to be destitute of any reigning intellectual class. Intellectuals and artists have gone the way of business and political titans, of clergy and philosophers, of scholars and scientists. When his literature been held in as low estate as it is today in the West? Never has the gulf between creative writer and the public been as wide as it is now" (p. 354).
He gets to the point.
The reason for this condition, this debasement of literature and estrangement of writer and public, is our lack of a true culture. And fundamental to this lack is the disappearance of the sacred, always at the heart of any genuine culture -- from ancient Athens to Victorian England. For some time we thought we could live off the yield of the sacred, even though it was gone or passing away. Then it was easy to maintain belief in progress and, so believing, to seek to add what a cherished past had contributed. It is no longer easy, for behind the death of the past, the displacement of Western pride of civilization, the waning faith in economic growth in the works of reason lies the moribundity of religious conviction, of belief and faith in something greater than the life immediately around us (p. 354).
He quotes Alexis de Tocqueville. "When men have once allowed themselves to think of no more of what is to befall them after life, they lapse readily into that complete and brutal indifference to futurity which is but to conformable to some propensities of mankind." Nisbet continues:
Only on the basis of confidence in the existence of the divine power was confidence possible with respect to design or pattern in the world and in the history of the world. . . . But it is absent now, whether ever to be recovered, we cannot know. And with the absence of the sense of sacredness of knowledge there is now to be seen in more and more areas absence of respect for or confidence in knowledge -- that is, the kind of knowledge that proceeds from reason and its intrinsic disciplines" (p. 355).
Then he asks the crucial question:
But is this contemporary Western culture likely to continue for long? The answer, it seems to me, must be in the negative -- if we take any stock in the lessons of the human past. . . . I believe, first from the fact that never in history have periods of culture such as our own lasted for a very long. They are destroyed by all the forces which constitute their essence. How can any society or age last very long if it lacks or is steadily losing the minimal requirements for a society -- such requirements being the very opposite of the egocentric and hedonistic elements which dominate Western culture today? (p. 356).
Then he raises a crucial issue. This is the issue of what he calls religious renewal. "Whatever their future, the signs are present -- visible in the currents of fundamentalism, Pentecostalism, even millennialism found in certain sectors of Judaism and Christianity. Even the spread of the occult and the cult of the West could well be one of the signs of a religious renascence, for, as it is well known, the birth of Christianity or rather its genesis as a world religion in Rome during and after the preaching of Paul was surrounded by a myriad of bizarre face and devotions." There are also other signs. "By every serious reckoning the spell of politics and the political, strong since at least the seventeenth century, is fading. It is not simply a matter of growing disillusionment with government bureaucracy; fundamentally, it is declining faith in politics as a way of mind and life" (p. 356). With politics fading as a religion, there could be a revival of supernatural religion. That, too, was basic to the replacement of Roman empire by Christendom, although Nisbet never said this explicitly.
Nisbet regarded religion and politics as inevitably at war with each other. I think he was wrong. Every religion is manifested in some kind of legal order. Every legal order for society rests on some system of morality, and every system of morality rests in turn on fundamental presuppositions that are accepted on faith. This is the heart of every society's religion. So, rather than seeing politics and religion is antithetical, I see certain kinds of religion at war with other kinds of religion. One of these battlefields is politics. This is why Christian homeschooling parents pull their children out of the tax-funded schools.
What Nisbet was talking about was a loss of faith in politics as a source of healing. He was talking about the loss of faith in messianic politics. It was clear by 1980 that what he had described three decades earlier in The Quest for Community was dying. The old totalitarianism was fading. The Soviet Union no longer had faith in the Communist future. By the time this book was published, China was going through the transformation that was begun in 1978 by Deng Xiaoping. The Chinese economy was being freed up in terms of individual ownership of the means of production: a most unMarxist concept.
It is worth noting that 1980 was the moment of truth for Soviet Communism. The Moscow Olympics brought rich Western people to Moscow. There, the leaders of the Soviet empire saw the suits and watches and shoes of the West. They saw that the highest positions of power in the USSR enabled you to look like a Russian bureaucrat. The Soviet leaders never recovered from that realization. At exactly the same time, the Solidarity movement began in Poland, launched by the chance discovery in a railroad yard that cans labeled "fish" being sent to Moscow were in fact cans of Polish ham. That marked the beginning of the Polish revolt. A year before, a Pole had become Pope Paul II. I like to think of all this as providential. Rival systems of religion and politics went to war against each other.
What was fading in 1980 was messianic politics. The idea that political change will produce some sort of social regeneration was no longer taken seriously by people in the West. Political campaigns invoke the word "hope," as Bill Clinton's campaign and Barack Obama's campaign showed us. But the hope was not fulfilled. Political hope around the world has not been fulfilled. As this confidence in politics fades, something is going to replace it. That was what Nisbet saw as a real possibility in the West. More than this, he believed that, if this religious renewal does not take place in the West, then Western civilization will fade.
This had also been the view of Ptirim Sorokin a generation before Nisbet's book was published. Sorokin was the founder of the Department of Sociology at Harvard. In 1941, Sorokin's book appeared, The Crisis of Our Age. He called the worldview of modern man "sensate." If something cannot be touched and measured, it is thought to have no validity. Like Nisbet, he believed that it is not possible to maintain such an outlook without undermining civilization.
This leads me to consideration of another chapter, the final chapter of the book by Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the present: 500 years of Western Cultural Life. It was published in the year 2000, the year Barzun turned 93. (He is still alive.)
Barzun was an intellectual giant. His first book appeared in 1927. He continued to write in multiple fields throughout his career. He had few rivals in his ability to summarize the broad sweep of Western civilization since the days of the Renaissance. This book is over 800 pages. Frankly, I have never seen a one-volume book comparable to this one in terms of its consideration of the whole of Western culture, whether scientific, artistic, philosophical, moral, or political. The book is a tour de force.
The book is odd, in that the chapters have no numbers. The final chapter is called "Demotic Life and Times." It speaks of the fourth social revolution in the West, which was set off in Russia in 1917-18. Leaders around the West pay lip service to the rule of the people. This is seen to be democratic. He believes that this outlook should be called demotic: of the people.
He believes that modern Western culture, as launched in the Renaissance, is coming to a close. He looks at style and society. He regards style as individual and society is institutional. "The aims and desires of the two overlap but generally conflict -- a small civil war, for it is of course individuals who decide to carry out the official demands that are challenged or resisted by other individuals" (p. 773) He summarizes the final decades of the 20th century. "The strongest tendency of the later 20C was Separatism. It affected all earlier forms of unity. The fact was noticed early in this book apropos of culture. The ideal of pluralism had disintegrated and separatism took its place; as one partisan of the new goal put it: 'Salad bowl is better then melting pot.' The melting pot had not eliminated all diversities; it had created a common core."
He arrives at the heart of his thesis. "At the outset, separatism might have seemed a mood that would pass. But if one surveyed the Occident and the world as well, one could see that the greatest political creation of the West, the nation-state, was stricken" (p. 774). He then lists several examples of nations that are beginning to split apart. Scotland and Wales want separatism from Great Britain. The Basques want separatism from Spain. So do the Alsatians. Italy is culturally divided between North and South. Belgian is split by language differences. "Other forces worked to de-nationalize. Immigrants from far-off emancipated colonies brought into Europe alien languages and customs. They huddled separately in slum enclaves -- a Turkish settlement here, an Algerian suburb there. France had an African village, complete with medicine man and ritual chants and dances. . . . Europe was experiencing again the grand confusion of the peoples that had occurred in the late Roman Empire and tapered off in the Middle Ages" (pp. 774-75).
This was not confined to Europe. Separatism is rampant all over the globe, he writes. India separated from British rule, and Pakistan separated from India. Then Bangladesh separated from Pakistan. The East Timorese almost destroyed Indonesia. "Wherever one looked -- at Ireland, the Middle East, South America, Southeast Asia, all of Africa, the Caribbean, and the whole ocean speckled with islands, one would find a nation or would-be nation at war to win or prevent independence" (p. 775).
He asks the question: "What makes a nation?" He answers his own question. "A large part of the answer to that question is: common historical memories. When the nation's history is poorly taught in schools, ignored by the young, and proudly rejected by qualified elders, awareness of tradition consists only in wanting to destroy it." Nisbet had made the same point two decades earlier.
I have seen this in my own professional career. The history textbooks' narratives disintegrated in the 1960s. Every racial or national group wanted to talk about its role in the history of America. Multiculturalism became dominant in the textbooks. The old nationalism, which had been promoted for half a century in the crucial high school history textbook written by David Saville Muzzey, disappeared in the late 1960s. It has never been restored. Muzzey was a progressive, a liberal Presbyterian, and a nationalist. His textbook sold more copies than any other history textbook in the United States in the 20th century. I used it when I was in high school. It was the dominant unification document for American high school graduates for 50 years. It integrated the theme of America as a nation as no other book did. He hated the Puritans, and he spent only one chapter discussing America from the 1630s until the 1750s. The unification based on national politics that was inherent in Muzzey's textbook no longer exists in the thinking of high school graduates. Social studies have been substituted for the teaching of history. (The story of Muzzey's influence is found in Frances Fitzerald's crucial book on the history of public school history textbooks, America Revised.)
Barzun writes:
The end of the half millennium destroyed what the beginning had so painfully accomplished: put an end to feudal wars by welding together neighboring regions, assimilated foreign enclaves, set up strong kings over large territories, and done everything to foster loyalty to something larger than the eye could see. A common language, a core of historical memories with heroes and villains, compulsory public schooling and military service finally made the 19C nation-state the carrier of civilization.Now all these elements were decaying and could not be restored (p. 776).
He comes to the heart of the matter institutionally.
The main merit of the nation-state was that over its large territory violence had been reduced; nobles first and citizens later were subjected to one law uniformly recognized and applied. In the last years of the era of nations, violence returned; crime was endemic in the West. Assault in the home, the office, and on city streets was commonplace and particularly vicious. . . . The prisons themselves, far from exerting the full force of the law, were scenes of perpetual violence. Humane sentiment had made them less rigorous, almost comfortable while prisons are his rights multiplied. The inmates formed gangs that govern, overawing the guards and abusing their fellow prisoners sexually and otherwise; riots and escapes were frequent (p. 776).
The public schools became battlegrounds. He cites the figure of 50,000 incidents per year. "From their early years, pupils carried guns, assaulted each other, and on occasion committed little massacres by shooting into a group at random with a rapid-fire weapon" (p. 777).
So, the nation-state's most important single function, its ability to reduce violence, was beginning to break down in the final decades of the 20th century.
There was also another factor: the expansion of the welfare state.
The welfare ideal did not merely see to it that the poor should be able to survive, but that everybody should be safe and at ease in a hundred ways. Besides providing health care, pensions ("social security"), and workmen's compensation for accidents, it undertook to protect every employee by workplace regulations and every consumer by laws against harm from foods, drugs, and the multiform dangers that industry creates. All appliances were subject to design control and inspection. The citizen must moreover be protected from actions by others that are not visibly hostile or inherently criminal, those, for example, that can be committed by the imaginative in trade, investment, and banking.At the same time, it was also held that the state had the duty of supporting art and science, medical research, and the integrity of the environment, while it also made sure the children were not simply literate but educated up to and through college -- rules, rules, definitions, classifications, and exceptions = indignation -- and litigation. The welfare state cannot avoid becoming the judiciary state (p. 777).
The cost of all this has grown ever larger. High taxes were unavoidable. So was waste.
The coming this was an enormous expansion of administrative law.
As the welfare state needed a new bureau for every added program, the lack of men and women properly trained for the diverse operations was crippling. . . . Those appointed to man them improvised their procedures, and as legislation augmented, laid down rules that filled hundreds of pages, an impenetrable jungle for citizens and officials both. One reads of a new ordinance of 1999 issue by large city to control demolition for low-cost housing; the news report casually mentions that it comes on top of 56 others. Achieving some ordinary purpose was difficult and carrying through a large undertaking [was] impossible without help. The prosperous tribe of consultants, strong minds who had mastered one set of intricacies, enabled entrepreneurs armed with patience to attain their ends (pp. 778-79).
Society became enormously complex. "As in the years before the French Revolution, demotic society had become labyrinthine" (p. 779).
This has lead to a distrust of politicians. There has been an increase of contempt for politics. "Politics was a pejorative word; an endeavor or institution that was branded as politicized lost its virtue" (p. 779). This is exactly what Nisbet had concluded 20 years earlier. The loss of faith in politics is endemic in modern man. The old belief of politics as healing, politics as a force for social salvation, is fading rapidly.
Another area of agreement between Nisbet and Barzun was that modern society produces boredom (p. 788). This is extremely dangerous for the survival of any society. It leads to a near addiction to entertainment. It fosters professional sports. It loses itself in the meaninglessness of leisure time that is put to know productive use.
In the final section, Barzun writes a hypothetical summary that might be written by some future observer. His comments on social organization are at the heart of his analysis. Here is how he assesses the characteristic features of the coming era.
As for social organization, the people were automatically divided into interest groups by their residence and occupation, or again by some personal privilege granted for a social purpose. The nation no longer existed, superseded by regions, much smaller, but sensibly determined by economic instead of linguistic and historical unity. Their business affairs were in the hands of corporation executives whose view of their role resembled that of their medieval ancestors. Not the accumulation of territories but of companies and control over markets were their one aim in life, sanctified by efficiency (p. 800)The moral anarchy complained of in the early days of the Interim rather suddenly gave way to a strict policing of everybody by everybody else. In time it became less exacting, and although fraud, corruption, sexual promiscuity, and tyranny at home or in the office did not disappear, these vices, and having to be concealed, attracted only the bold or restless. And even they agreed that the veil is a sign not of hypocrisy but of respect for human dignity.
As for peace and war, the former was the distinguishing mark of the West and the rest of the world. The numerous regions of the Occident in America formed a loose confederation obeying rules from Brussels and Washington in concert; they were prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming in offensive weaponry, and they had decided to let outside peoples and their factions eliminate one another until exhaustion interviews peacefulness into their plans (p. 801).
Then came boredom.
This leads us to the third book, published in 1999 by Cambridge University Press. It covers the same period of time that Barzun's book does. It begins with the Renaissance monarchs of Europe around 1300. The key chapter is its final one: "Conclusions: beyond the state."
Van Creveld is a military historian. He is fascinated by the effects of weaponry on society. He understands how important the growth of the state was in supplying sufficient tax money to fund modern armies and navies. He dates the origin if the nation-state a little earlier than Barzun does, sometime around 1300. It was in full swing by the 1550s. When he speaks of the state, he means Western civilization's modern nation-state. It was originally intended to bring peace by imposing law and order on groups of people. It grew stronger than any other political organization in Europe and the other continents. "The result was that it spread to the rest of the world until, during the second half of the 20th century, in one form or another its triumph had become all but complete" (p. 416).
The state is seen as sovereign, so it refuses to share any other functions with other institutions. It has a monopoly of violence. Second, it is territorial. It exercises power over all people living inside its territory.
Thirdly and most importantly, it is an abstract organization. Unlike any of its predecessors at any other time and place, is not identical with either rulers nor ruled; it is neither a man nor a community, but an invisible being known as a corporation. As a corporation as an independent persona. The latter is recognized by law and capable of behaving as if it were a person in making contracts, owning property, defending itself, and the like (p. 416).
Van Creveld believes the state is facing a major challenge from other forms of corporations today. The others are not territorial. Some are political, but others are devoted to other kinds of ends, such as making money, or protecting the environment, or spreading a religious message, or promoting some special cause. They all are better attuned to modern technology than the state is.
As a result, some of them are able to grow much richer than most states; or take over some of the latter's functions; or evade its control by establishing colonies and moving their resources outside its borders; or influence the opinions of its citizens more than governments can; or (as in the case of numerous guerrilla and terrorist organizations) successfully resisted weapon in hand, or, not seldom, some combination of all these things (p. 417).
In short, the state now has competent competitors.
Van Creveld foresees a breakdown of the nation-state. He thinks that many of its functions will be taken over by other organizations. There is an increasing amount of faith in these newer institutions.
The obverse side of this coin is the feeling, which is prevalent among the citizens of many developed countries, that when the time for delivery comes the state just does not keep its promises, that it pays, if at all, in false coin. And that, in order to secure any kind of future for themselves and their children, citizens are left with no choice but to look after themselves in ways that are independent of, and may even stand in opposition to, the will of the state (p. 417).
He speaks of the commanding heights which the state had reached between 1945 in 1975. He sees that it has declined since then. Privatization has become popular. These new organizations will not be sovereign. They will not exercise exclusive control over a specific territory. They will be forced to share operations and control of other organizations.
The organizations which, in the future, will carry out the functions of government will be more fragmented, more integrated with each other than those with which we have become familiar during the last 300 years or so. Unlike states, which in theory at any rate are each other's equals, they will tend to form hierarchical relationships with each other. Sometimes sovereignty will be divided, as is currently happening in Northern Ireland and is may eventually happen in the holy land. A hierarchical structure in which some political entities are more equal than others also means that those entities will operate at one or more removes from their populations (p. 418).
He thinks that the effect on day-to-day security will be adverse.
People or organizations who used to rest peacefully in the bosom of the state will have to do, indeed are already doing, more to defend themselves, for example, by purchasing all kinds of specialized equipment; fortifying the premises in which they live and operate; mounting their own guards, whether in or out of uniform; and possibly even setting up their own armed forces under suitable commanders. . . (p. 419).
In other words, as the state begins to disintegrate, localism will replace nationalism. "Compared to what we have witnessed in 1914-45, most of the violence in question will almost certainly be local, sporadic, and on a rather small scale." He thinks Bosnia and Sri Lanka are heralds of the future.
For groups as diverse as government employees and the recipients of social security (particularly those who hope to receive benefits in the future), the writing is on the wall. Either they start looking elsewhere for their economic status and, in some cases, even their physical protection; or else there is probably no future for them. As was also the case during previous periods when empires fell apart and feudal structures emerged, often looking elsewhere will mean losing their freedom by becoming the clients of the strong and the rich, whether in the form of individuals or, which is perhaps more likely for the majority, of corporations of various sorts (p. 419).
This is going to create opportunities for creative entrepreneurs.
Conversely, organizations and people whose wealth and status are independent of the state, internationally oriented, and prepared to take advantage of opportunities that are opening up in every field from global communication and trade to providing private education stand to gain; and, as several analysts have argued, are already gaining at the expense of all the rest. With the state weakening, many of them will undoubtedly find it both easier and more necessary to translate whatever advantages they have into direct political power. Instead of merely lobbying and bribing, as is the case today, they will rule -- at least by carrying some of the functions of government, in regard to some people, and to some extent (p. 420).
Will this be a peaceful transition? In some places, yes. There will be great prosperity as national borders become less significant. Technology will advance. Economic opportunities will open up. Transportation and communication will become more efficient. "Regional and local organizations will acquire a new lease on life. . ." (p. 420). But, in other places, "the retreat of the state will lead to less fortunate consequences." Local organizations may become more authoritarian than the state has been in the past. He concludes:
On balance, the dangers and the opportunities are probably about equal. Neither is the retreat of the state to be regretted, nor will tomorrow's world be either much better or much worse than the one which is even now fading into the shadows (p. 421).
Nisbet's book presents the case that the modern world is losing faith in the future. This cannot last, he said, because societies need to have faith in the future and faith in progress. He thought that there would be some kind of religious revival or renewal to reverse the pessimism of the present age.
Barzun saw the same sorts of social processes that Nisbet did, especially the spread of boredom. He recognized the we have moved from a period of dawn into a period of decadence. He understood that faith in the existing institutional structures was fading by the end of the 20th century. He recognized that the rise of violence undermined the legitimacy of the modern nation-state.
This was also understood by van Creveld, who focused on the inability of the modern state to provide peace within its own borders. People want peace, and the modern nation-state developed on the basis of a promise, namely, that it would supply this peace. Now that promise is looking faded. Furthermore, those who hope in the state to provide their welfare for them in the future are going to be disappointed. They had better find other ways of gaining their status and their income than by relying on the nation-state. He sees that there will be a time of decentralization, in which local communities, local corporations, and local associations begin to replace the role of the modern welfare state.
The nation-state has rested on a series of promises. Nisbet, Barzun, and van Creveld agree: the state is failing to deliver the goods. This is undermining the state's legitimacy, and it will lead to decentralization. That is another word for fragmentation. It will lead to greater liberty for some people and less liberty for others. But will almost certainly lead to greater economic productivity, as long as peace is maintained. Technology will continue to develop. Education will move out of the control of the state. There will be new ways of learning, new ways of organizing, new ways of delivering the goods.
On the whole, the three books are cautiously optimistic. They are optimistic about what lies ahead when compared to what the state has become in the modern world. The idea of progress can become widespread again, but it is unlikely to become widespread within the confines of the public school system or a typical federal bureaucracy.