[Revised and improved, Thursday, February 8, 2024, 2:32pm]
Some words are worth a thousand pictures; some moves are worth a thousand random steps.
Science & the Forces of Nature
Science says the world is determined by causes acting relentlessly as dictated by the universal laws of nature, impervious to worthy human ends and values.
Realism says the world of human affairs is analogous, with the situational requirements of national survival dictating conditions that limit the range within which suitable policies are found, regardless of the internal constitutional form of government.
From that follows the notorious claim that nations are as identical in their geopolitical imperatives and policies as billiard balls (Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, p. 18).
Both claims are true, so far as they go.
No human agent — whether an individual man or a collective agency like a nation-state — can act against the laws of nature.
There are no such things as superheroes, and nations are even farther from idealized agents free from limits than are real people.
So, scientific reality must be deferred to, even when sects arise that deny the evidence of science because it undermines claims upon which their ideology’s support rests.
But reality can be ignored for a while, if the consequences are long-term. Those lacking foresight or a deep understanding of the accelerating changes going on around them may not see or recognize the consequences in their lifetimes. Sometimes a generation can pass before the consequences become apparent to all. People and nations can argue and dither, delaying effective measures until the late innings.
The risk here is that by the time the signs of trouble are too evident for even the most resistant observers to ignore,the threat may have become lethal, the cancer metastasized, leaving he who hesitates trapped in an untreatable condition (Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 3).
If the threat is grave enough, science will steamroll public opinion, in its own sweet time.
So, science wins in the end, winnowing out all those who cannot or will not adapt to shifting empirical realities.
History and Its Underlying Currents
Geopolitical realism works similarly.
As with the relentless and incessant forces of nature, so with the irresistible undercurrents of history.
Leaders and nations that fail to perceive changes to which we must all adapt — whether for lack of understanding or a contrary will –will be winnowed out by the sifting processes of natural selection and its social equivalents in demographics, economics, geopolitics, and the technological advances and social reactions that drive or follow them.
They will decline or disappear, leaving standing the survivors of the old order and the emerging powers of the new order.
Evolutionary competition eliminates those unprepared for what is coming, whether natural or historical events. Those who cannot or will not adapt to changing circumstances leave the world to those who do.
But when ill-informed and unprepared leaders run nations, they can take whole nations down with them.
Both scientific and geopolitical claims about what’s coming can be disputed. Such claims, whether true or false, can win or lose the battle for public opinion.
But underlying causal forces will grind on regardless.
Sadly, in the arena of politics, manipulation, rhetoric and persuasion are more powerful than knowledge or understanding.
Wrong decisions, whether formed in free nations by public opinion, filtered through the election process, or by the proclivities and obsessions that lurk in the inner chambers of an autocrat’s mind, the causal forces at work in nature and history, not mistaken perceptions about them, determine outcomes.
Room for Maneuver; Room for Hope
So, there are causal limits against which one cannot fight. One can only adapt to them, preserving human values as best one can.
But as an agent/agency adapts to changing circumstances, it can leave room for human values, both pragmatic and moral, within its range of feasible choices, sometimes more, sometimes less, but always to some degree.
In the most extreme cases, choice may be limited to the scope of a prisoner in a concentration camp holding to their nature and their principles despite all that is done to them which they are helpless to prevent.
So, there is room for moral agents to maneuver in this relentlessly causal world that envelops us. They may not always be able to prevent undesirable outcomes, some of which are inevitable (given the circumstance that lead up to them), but they can always show the strength of their nature and their principles as they struggle against the odds.
And there are some inevitable outcomes — death and taxes among them — that cannot be prevented, but only deferred to our own advantage.
But, by deferring the inevitable, moral agents can build a life worth living — and worth having lived, when it comes to that.
…and multiply their net worth with tax deferral and the magic of compounding growth.
And, honestly, life works pretty much like that, too.
Determinismcan mean no single thing in a creature as divided (multi-faceted, to show it in a more flattering light) as the human being, which has, at the least, three parts providing motivations, each in its own way and in its own direction.
Each of these directions may interfere with or amplify the directions of the other two.
1. Survival-Machine
The most deeply rooted mover is the survival-machine, driven by a set of motivations common across all life, plants as well as animals.
Animals differ from plants because in animals data is not simply collected or registered to trigger mechanical, chemical and other strictly deterministic chains of cause and effect.
Animals add a middleman, the neurological system.
Animal senses — in a wild variety of kinds, ranges and sensitivities — collect inputs (as do plants) but process them as inputs to a nervous system, that is, as sensory inputs. Sensory inputs are always incomplete because they are but samples of the surrounding environment filtered through a single nervous system, and limited by the sensory parameters of its species, and of any defects or surpluses in that individual.
The nervous system works like a clearinghouse or a switchboard, matching certain combinations of sensory inputs with certain combinations of motor outputs.
Plants respond to chemical messages within their network of tissues — and, we are now discovering, within underground mycorrhizal networks in which fungal filaments connect the roots of communities of plants, passing chemical messages between plants so networked.
An animal’s sensory system differs from a plants system of electro-mechanical signals, for the sensory inputs are treated as data in some virtual workspace, and assembled into an image or model of the outside world to which the animal reacts. The animal reacts, not to an objective reality directly, but to its image as assembled in the animal’s nervous system, whether correctly or incorrectly.
For example, the human immune system reacts directly and in causally deterministic fashion to pathogens tagged as invasive. But the human, unable to perceive the microbes, reats to them only through an acquired knowledge of symptoms, leading to a diagnosis, always in principle fallible, for it is but a model assembled in the mind through experience, education or reasoning.
Here enters error, a form of divergence from reality that can only occur in a nervous system, and only in reference to an internal model of external reality that misses the mark widely enough to be a strategic liability if acted upon.
In short, animals react to their environments through the medium of a sensory image or internal representation of the external world. And the testing and refining of those models becomes part of the tactics of survival.
Thus nature selects for camouflage in prey and in ambush predators. Camouflage is not not just the camouflage of form and color but also of behavior, both instinctive and learned. Thus the low to the ground creep of a stalking cat is a camouflage of behavior.
The relevant conclusion for our purposes is that plants are survival-machines that operate through strictly mechanical causal triggers, animals operate the same way in what we call their autonomous functions (breathing, digesting, discharging waste, immune system responses, and so on) but also with voluntary motion, by which we mean motion initiated by a combination of four elements.
First, an image assembled from sensory data forms, representing approaching threats and accessible opportunities.
Second, perceived threats provoke fear and flight, while perceived opportunities provoke desire and pursuit.
Third, a counterfactual image is formed of a future state enjoying desired outcomes or suffering painful ones.
Fourth, the animal follows a course of pursuit or avoidance, which may be driven by a reflex (at the less voluntary end) or an imaginable response or a multi-stage plan (at the more voluntary end).
Fear and desire (respectively, of pain and pleasure) are the instinctive, pre-rational motives to animate action.
The greater the foresight and rationality of the animal, the more reasoning about long-term consequences can override instinctive feelings of fear and desire.
In sum, animals differ from plants in their capacity to assess sensory inputs through images and feelings constructed from sensory data in a virtual space provided within the nervous system in which fallible models of the external world are constructed internally to guide the animal’s reactions to events affecting it.
So, the most primitive level of voluntary determination in a human being is that of the sensory or image-activated survival-machine, which I will hereafter shorten to survival-machine.
Survival-machines are guided by the survival of the individual animal, without other considerations.
The iconic survival-machine is the praying mantis. It begins life folded in half , covered in a sticky gelatinous substance, one among several hundred falling to the ground beneath the egg-case from which they all hatch simultaneously. After flopping around as they slowly unfold themselves, the fastest among them stand erect and immediately begin killing and eating their nearest siblings. Looking ahead, it’s hard to see how ethical behavior could ever arise among such creatures, although John Scalzi, in the later books of The Old Men’s Wars, a 6-part series, gives it a go, in a narrative that is both entertaining and thought-provoking.
Survival-machines are driven, in their first stage, by fear and desire, up to and including obsessive forms of each.
In the second stage, they are driven by the ruthless calculations of survival famously expressed by Niccolo Machiavelli in the West and by Sun Tzu in the East.
And, since survival is a long game — not a constant barrage of life-and-death crises — the survival-machine in daily life is an advantage-seeking-machine, with self-interest its guiding light.
The more advanced the culture, the more self-interest is softened by the social veneers of polite society.
But it still erupts in its more naked forms in politics, especially in times of change and stress, like the ties we live in. We live in such times.
But human beings have two more levels of organization, built atop that first and most primitive level.
2. Social Animal, Social Ape
The second level of organization (or aspect of human behavior) is the social animal, specifically, the social ape.
Social apes are effective survival-machines — at their best, not in isolation, but as members in good standing of a troop.
The power of the troop is decisive, so troops must consist of sufficiently effective members and in sufficient numbers to fend off predators and compete with rival troops — for troops of social apes, having all the same needs, are in direct competition with one another — and they must be led by sufficiently effective leaders.
The social ape is thus driven by its status within its troop, a sort of group-determined self-image, that determines its membership, qualifying it for the basic benefits of membership. The more assertive members, typically alpha males, are driven to seek leadership rank, which determines access to special benefits and privileges within the troop.
These drives manifest as peer pressure, conformism, solidarity , and the like, but also as nobleness and belongingness — and even redemption of sins — as Shakespeare’s Henry V has it :
The social ape surges with passions, noble and ignoble, lofty and base.
It is a precarious platform upon which to set one’s moral compass, a platform open to your stoutest friends and your most unyielding enemies; it is the dynamic of conflicts and wars.
The ancient Greeks embraced it, and their constant internecine wars made them easy prey for the Romans, who were inclined to admire them more than conquer them. But the fratricidal and quarrelsome Greeks left the Romans little choice, for their quarrels would have undone the Empire.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,…
3. Rational Being
The last and highest level, but also the least compelling and importunate, is the rational being.
In survival-machine terms, rationality can be thought of as a tool for survival, culminating in Machiavelli’s new prince or Sun Tzu’s general with the way of Tao.
It can also be thought of as partly extending and surpassing the survival-machine, rising to a more long-term, even universal mindset. Put differently, rational beings can look beyond mere survival to pursue instead an idealized survival of the best aspect of human beings, even when that may require individual sacrifice in hope of a better future. In more familiar language, rational beings can choose the risks of heroism or the price of martyrdom, not an ordinary choice for a survival-machine.
Make no mistake, the willingness to self-sacrifice is not unique to rational beings.
It belongs as much — and, by the numbers, likely more) to the battlefield bonding of the bands of brothers discussed above.
The downside of this wider reach of striving for “something bigger than” one’s mortal self is that this kind of courage is just as potent when serving genocidal, racist and bloodily sectarian causes as when serving praiseworthy ones.
Armed with an ideology that screams for authority and justifies any action that spreads its power, many will set no limits to what they will do.
And a classic tactic of tyrants is to make the populace, and its leading figures, partners in their crimes, for then the people’s destiny is tied to their master’s, for should the victims of their crimes ever gain the upper hand, reprisals will come.
So, the wrath visited upon a defeated enemy becomes the chains linking blind followers to their masters for life.
The Rational Being Not a Species, nor a Tribe of Blood and Soil, But an Aspiration Open to All Who Can Will It
The rational being is also not a species but an abstract category defined by a general capacity. If species, as products of natural selection, are locked in competition for resources and survival, then rational beings, defined not by blood but by a shared capacity, are able to be guided by the defining characteristics of that general capacity, rather than by blood and lineage.
In other words, shared capacities inherently offer a common ground, although many motives, biological and social, may work against this impulse toward the universality inherent in the mutually recognizable recognizable likeness to one another of rational beings, of beings willing to “listen to reason”.
Free Will: the Multifaceted Nature of Being Human
Each of these three levels “determines” outcomes in foreseeable ways (thus, rivals, followers and enemies can all think strategically about which of these levels will best explain an agent’s likely actions (and thus how best to anticipate their actions or react to them), but none of them is, by itself, simply predictive.
In other words, free will, like strategy, maps out scenarios, not certainties.
And that is the scope and measure of free will in beings capable of rational action.
It does not mean that they are absolutely unconditioned.
To be unconditioned in that sense would be to be a god, not a human being. Their every act would be a miracle, an act independent of the laws of nature that govern all physical objects.
Free will can not and does not mean that.
Any act of a human being can be free, not in the sense that it follows from no prior circumstances (of birth, upbringing, culture, personal influences or personal experiences) but only in the sense that it is not mechanically predetermined but instead determined by its nature and circumstances as either a survival-machine, a social ape or a rational being.
For an agent to be free of all determining preconditions, including education, beliefs and personal experience, would to be a rudderless amnesiac without commitments, loyalties or responsibilities.
Far from being a model to aspire to, anyone in that condition would be shunted into an institution as a danger to themselves and others.
In conclusion, then, free will, when examined in abstraction from the context within which it arises and derives whatever meaning it has, can only be a nonsense concept, an empty word devoid of meaning, a term of magical thinking.
What it can be, considered within that context, has just been outlined.
In my last post, I spoke of power-seekers as a single category, overlooking that, for purposes of distinguishing good from bad (especially, bad in the sense of evil), there are crucial sub-categories.
An Interlude: Thinking is Born of Dialogue
That post, and this addendum, was stimulated by a delightful conversational dialogue I had with two visitors, Matthew of Malta and Linda of Miami-Barcelona-Vienna. They will both recognize the jumping-off points — and the big question left hanging — that triggered my subsequent reflections.
I should add that they are both thoroughly enmeshed in the practical world, yet hold a place in their busy lives for reflection, for thinking and for philosophy. This places them closer to the model of the philosopher-king than I am, whose career has fostered every form of expertise except the lucrative kind.
While on the subject, I’d like to mention that I heard from another former Gables grad (Coral Gables High School, especially its magnet programs in IB and DE, but including whoever had a taste for thinking things through), Jiyansh Agarwal, who is literally, a budding rocket scientist at UF, but who still finds time to read this blog and other philosophical writings, and to think and philosophize for himself.
And that makes me a little more like the philosopher-king, following the model of Socrates, whose practical profile owed more to those of his students who were active, practical agents of change, and of conserving that which merits conservation, than hewas, preferring to work outside the spotlights of power.
Teaching is an odd profession, whose practitioners are practical more in their vicarious investment in the lives of their students than as manifested in their own lives.
So, I will continue to work quietly in my non-lucrative way, hoping to benefit the world more in my legacy than in my lifetime.
Power-Seeking and Its Kinds
Leaders are power-seekers, I wrote in my last post, focusing on the the more Machiavellian and realpolitik side of power.
That’s a little too grimdark, a subgenre of ” of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, and violent. The term is inspired by the tagline of the tabletop strategy game Warhammer 40,000: “In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war.” Many of you are familiar with this subgenre from Game of Thrones, or from Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, which introduces Logan Ninefingers, whose motto “You can never have too many knives”, is underlined time after time in his tale. (A fun read, whose grimdark is relieved by wit, wordplay and dark humor.)
So, I need to make two further distinctions, between 1) power over self and 2) power over others, and sub-dividing that latter category into power over others 1) for one’s own ends or 2) for the good of those over whom one holds power.
Power over self means self-understanding, self-control. and self-discipline. It is the foundation of personal freedom, the independence in thought and action of the free man, who is identical to the moral agent.
Thus, the free man can be a slave, like Epictetus, a martyr nailed to a cross, like Christ, or a persecuted and/or executed dissident like Socrates or Alexander Navalny.
The tensions that live within the free man is the subject of the least read of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterpieces, The Idiot, where Prince Leo Myshkin is a man of complete moral purity in the inevitably impure society, the only place where human life occurs, and thus the crucible within which moral agency must emerge, if it is to emerge.
Alexander Navalny, whose prison term is set to grow longer and harsher for opposing the Russian invasion of UkraineSocrates, drinking the poisoned chalice, so as to speak the truth while obeying the laws of his homeland Athens
In modern market societies where individuals are allowed to make their own choices, and to make their own ways, the free man must first become self-sufficient, pulling his own weight and owing his living to no other. In terms of one’s way of life, this means that one must be a partner in the running of a household, managing the responsibilities of a household and, likely, a family. As for a career, it means one must be one’s own boss, whether literally (i.e., entrepreneur, self-employed, contract freelancer) or, effectively, as one who maintains an employable resume across jobs and bosses, always prepared to find a new boss, if they have outgrown the role for which their current one will pay them or if their purposes or values diverge too far from those of their employment.
Power over self is thus an absolute and necessary good, a prerequisite for being a free man and moral agent.
Power Over Others and Its Kinds
Power over others is more dubious, more complicated and more ambiguous.
The crudest version is the tyrant (in modern parlance, the dictator, although that is a profound misunderstanding of the original meaning of the term in the Roman Republic, before it was corrupted by the likes of Sulla and Caesar).
The tyrant is an asocial monster who uses others for his own pleasure and benefit. He (or she) is the serial killer who has taken hostage an entire nation, viewing his followers, citizens and slaves (all one in the end) as mere objects to be used, favored and discarded as suits his needs.
In modern terminology, the tyrant is a sociopath who achieves ultimate power in a nation. Kim Jon Un is the perfect current example.
The tyrant is a narcissist who gains the power to work his fantasies out in real life on real people. He is obsessed with personal loyalty and revenge, considers himself above all laws, and acts with impunity whenever he has the power to do so.
Power over others for one’s own ends is tyranny (dictatorship if you are irremediably modern in your viewpoint). In it the one with power views themselves as the only existing subject. All others are mere objects without rights or perspectives that the tyran need concern himself with.
Tyrants can have favorites for a while, or even a lifetime, but favorites hold only a provisional status and are on lifetime probation. To renounce their loyalty to the tyrant, to betray him or merely to displease him is grounds for revenge, banishment or execution.
An example from history is Henry VIII, who had beheaded his mentor (Thomas More), his right-hand man (Thomas Cromwell) and two of his wives (Ann Boleyn and Catherine Howard).
An example from current events? Pick any of the dozen or more headlines a year in which an estranged ex-husband (it’s almost always a man) slaughters his ex and his children by his ex, usually by gunshot or arson.
Love that destroys what does not return its love is not love, better, it is the perversion of love that reaches no higher than self-love disguised as a love for those in one’s power.
Can Power Over Others Ever Be Good?
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s
Power over others can never be wholly without its Machiavellian or Realpolitik character, for we live in a world of peoples and nations competing for resources.
The nations of Europe (which now decisively excludes Russia, in the political sense), formerly the cockpit of World Wars, have subsided into an arena of peace, under the now-shuddering Pax Americana, marred only by economic squabbling, which is only to be expected.
Resources will still be squabbled over, even after we all put down our cudgels.
But geopolitics, where civilizations clash, is as much a cockpit as ever, but the stakes are higher, and more final, in the nuclear age (soon to become the age of a manifold weapons of mass destruction).
So, the cold, hard Machiavellian perspective cannot be lain aside.
But political realism can be exercised on behalf of better and worse ends, and that makes all the difference that counts for anything in this world of realism, the world as it is, behind the veils of rhetoric and propaganda, of ideology and party-thinking, of polarization and denial.
Even comparatively good governments and parties must meet, withstand and ultimately defeat or outlast worse parties and governments.
If only true (or sufficiently true) moral agents follow at all the laws and rules of peace, they will die at the hands of the immoral and amoral.
When the rules of peace are broken, war or slavery must follow.
Ukraine is a clear case. Taiwan would be another. The Israeli-Hamas War is a far muddier case (most liberals will be under peer pressure to disagree; I will only say that sympathy born of the moment overlooks the long-term strategic realism driving the belligerents, and such essentially disengaged bystanders are an easy audience for belligerents to manipulate and plan for). But that’s a topic for another occasion.
And, by the way, Caesar himself is a debatable case. He did introduce benefits for the plebians but he did so by destroying the republic.
Opinion, then and now, is strongly divided over whether he was a democrat serving the people or a demagogue serving himself. Though the case is mixed, I find myself mostly siding with the latter.
Amended Conclusion
So, I have amended the implied conclusion of my last post in two ways.
1) Power over oneself is an absolute and necessary good and the foundation of personal freedom and moral agency.
2) Power over others is necessary in any organized human community or common endeavor (whether a nation, a party, a corporation, an NGO or even a sports team).
Power over others is good or bad depending upon whether it is exercised: 1) primarily for the good of those in power or for the good of the ruled (among which are the rulers, under the rule of law), and 2) whether those who are ruled entered into this hierarchy of power as free persons and independently-choosing moral agents or not.
And the signs of the free citizenship is that no one is assigned higher or lower rank in the hierarchy of power by birth, and that no one either rules over or is ruled, except in rotation and according to free, independent and periodic votes of all who are to be ruled. In short, you are free, not if you are without rule but if you are ruled by consent.
Final qualifier: now, more than ever, freedom must be understood in terms of freedom from manipulation by misinformation, disinformation and by other ways of perverting truth to serve power, so greatly amplified in our day by the wide-open Wild West of the Internet.
Being a moral agent has, in this sense, never been harder. Or perhaps it’s just that, before, information silos were imposed from without, by insularity, ignorance or autocracy, while now, information silos are self-imposed by the agent’s own free choice but governed by their ignorance and thoughtless biases.
Hegemons… they’re always there, because power abhors a vacuum.
History’s pendulum swings from eras of hegemons to eras of warlords, punctuated by the occasional balance among powers.
So, you don’t get to choose whether you have one or not, you only get to choose (when you’re lucky) which one.
America’s misdeeds as a hegemon are no worse than any other hegemon’s.
Hegemonic Americans won liberty for themselves at cost of imposing tyranny on slaves by the American South and the acceptance of slavery’s continuation by the American North.
Hegemonic America was hostile to emerging republics that stood in its path, like the Cherokee Nation and the early Mexican republics, and to those that threatened its hold on its own populations, like Toussaint’s Haiti.
With many declaiming Manifest Destiny, the hegemonic power let settler’s make inroads into neighboring territories, often beginning peaceably but routinely ending with the subjugation or expulsion of the prior inhabitants.
The hegemon expanded by making treaties and breaking them at will, like any other hegemonic power. letting its settler — land-hungry migrants from its wealthier and more settled regions — instigate the crises it would then have to resolve, not surprisingly, in favor of its own citizens.
Americans entered Mexico as immigrants and then took over large parts, expelling or subjugating the earlier inhabitants. No wonder Texans distrust immigrants — they need only look to their own past behavior!
But though America is not without sin, as no hegemon can be or ever has been, it is neither the worst nor the most dangerous would-be hegemon at present.
Four features make it preferable to its alternatives, China at the global level and Russia in the European theater. And the regional contenders elsewhere are a very mixed lot, including Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Indonesia and Nigeria, to name some of the more prominent or belligerent or both.
1. It has completed its regional expansion
Like England before it, it has incorporated all it can or needs to incorporate to make it hegemonic in its region, so it no longer has a hunger for territory (and that always means the territory of other peoples, since any land worth having is already occupied).
Like England before it, subject areas and peoples, like the Navajo Nation, Hawaii, formerly suppressed Mexican-Americans and formerly enslaved African-Americans, have been incorporated as members (including Puerto Rico, whose statehood lies in its own referendum-determined hands), or decolonized, as with the Philippines and the Panama Canal.
2. It is an Offshore Balancer
An offshore balancer is a nation hegemonic on its island, island chain or continent whose nearest rivals contest a larger land mass (i.e., Eurasia) and whose interest dictates that it hold the balance between rivals, making sure that no one rival becomes hegemonic over that larger land mass.
England, as Great Britain, and then the United Kingdom, played that role in Europe from the time of Louis XIV to the time of Bismarck.
Belgium and Holland, in particular, were the tripwires that would bring the UK into a continental land war, always with smaller land forces, backed by naval dominion, to tip the balance against whatever power threatened to become the hegemon of Europe, displacing the UK as the dominant European hegemon.
This strategy was first developed by Republican Rome, when it expanded beyond continental Italy into Sicily, Spain and Africa, then Greece, Egypt and Asia. But, as Rome stripped Carthage of colonies, these conquered territories simply became Roman colonies rather than formally independent (though geopolitically dependent) client states.
Where Rome held influence over a client state in proximity to a powerful rival state, as it held influence over Armenia which bordered Parthia/Persia, that hold was tenuous and continually problematic.
The United Kingdom and the Untied States have been successively less committed to holding overseas territories, and when either did so it was as a consequence of holding clear naval superiority in an era predating the rise of nationalism globally.
The United States became the premier offshore balancer with the two World Wars, during which it accumulated West European allies (as in the “special relationship” with the UK) exhibiting no desire to acquire territory on the continent.
That set it apart from the remaining would-be hegemons of Europe, Germany until the end of WWII, Russia since the end of WWII at least until the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s maximal ambition seems to be a one -nation Greater Russia composed of the Slavs of Eastern Orthodoxy, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, with perhaps the Baltics as colonies, and holding influence via energy-dependence over most of continental Europe.
China’s hegemonic ambitions are comprised, at a minimum, of complete political and cultural control over Tibet and Xinjiang (this means their ethnic colonization by Han settlers, much as the US did with territories wrested from Indian nations and Mexico, and over Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and the islands and atolls of the Nine Dashed Lines making up the bulk of the South China Sea.
The brutality shown by both Russia and China in their treatment of peoples and nations who stand in the way of their regional hegemony is of the same caliber as that of England and the US when they were establishing their regional hegemonies.
But that is now many generations in the past, while the brutality of the would-be expansionist hegemons is in the present, and informs the character of their leaderships and the rampant nationalism of their populations.
China’s further ambitions would incorporate much of Southeast and Pacific Rim Asia as client states rather than as independent states over which China and America presently share influence.
NATO is the embodiment of American hegemony in Europe but, as is typical for offshore balancers, it is an alliance of the willing because the greater threat of the nearer power aligns the interests of smaller powers with the more remote and more benign power.
The Quad, composed of three powers threatened directly by the nearer power of China — Japan, Australia and India — and the anchoring greater power at a distance, America, is the skeletal framework of a functionally-similar alliance in Pacific Asia.
Incidentally, I do not claim that the power considerations of an offshore balancer are uppermost in the minds of their rulers, electorates or peoples.
For example, the World Wars, in the popular mind in both America and Britain, were fought in defense of democracy rather than in pursuit of the interests of offshore balancers. But one need only consider when neutrality or isolationism gave way to a concern for defending democracy to realize that the strategic interests of an offshore balancer became evident to all as danger to those strategic interests loomed closer.
But it is always more effective to call for sacrifices from the populace by appealing to God, King and Country, or higher principles like democracy and the sovereignty of small nations, than to the coldly calculated strategic interests of offshore balancers.
So it was with a British Empire that denied sovereignty to its colonies, and with a United States that denied meaningful enfranchisement to its African-Americans, not to mention meaningful rights to its Japanese-Americans (German-Americans not being subjected to the same treatment).
And there is always this: with sufficient time and sufficient security, nations do try to live up to their more benign myths, once they can afford them.
3. It Shares with the Anglosphere a Cultural History of Citizen Rights, Limited Government, Pluralism & Divided Powers
The US and the UK have another advantage over rival hegemons, this one cultural rather than geographic.
Both nations belong to an Anglo-American tradition of common law, the rights of citizenship, limited government, multi-party government, and toleration of both political and religious minorities, that eventually extended to ethnic minorities as well.
4. It Shares with Europe a Cultural History epitomized by the Enlightenment
Enlightenment universalism is the only enduring and sharable basis for global recognition of the sovereignty of peoples and nations and the universality of human rights.
Neither of these are fully accomplished. Neither may ever be. But both are aspirational goals that define Western civilization, in its rhetoric, its aspirations, and its best practices, if not always in its predominant or recurring practices.
For power lies with ruling classes and with the majorities whose acquiescence rulers depend upon, and neither the one nor the other is blameless or faultless, sinless or without a bias for its own self-interest.
Russia nd China belittle these cultural ideals, partly because they are not dominant threads in their own cultures, partly because they would be inconvenient to the hegemony-building tasks they have set for themselves.
Conclusion: Freedom Earned Not Inherited
So, one need not indulge in the myth that the United States is blameless or sinless or that people of European stock or of the Anglosphere or its culture are the chosen race of history to recognize that, in the very pragmatic business of choosing a hegemon, one can only do worse than the United States.
That sounds too bleak.
One can also see that the hegemony of the United States is destined to become more modest and more consultative and collegial, as affluence and the ideas and practices of human rights and national sovereignty spread further.
That presumed destiny is under attack now by a significant vocal and belligerent minority. But a main driver of this increasingly desperate and constitution-bending backlash is that its short-term prospects are much better than its long-term prospects (https://cogitoergodunn.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/the-current-economic-revolution/) — as underlying economic and demographic trends strengthen its opposition, while offering routes out of its decline to those wiling to take them.
Enlightenment ideas, although predictably imperfect in their practice and execution, are more promising than rival ideas.
And they have shown themselves to be realizable in some degree (and so not mere utopian dreams), capable of incremental improvement (however slow and disrupted and the long-term trend has been one of improvement and extension to larger segments of the populace).
And these Enlightenment ideas have shown themselves to be transcultural (having taken root in the previously autocratic powers of Germany and Japan and among the overseas Chinese and urban Russians). In truth, the autocratic rulers of China and Russia must actively suppress them to prevent their growing naturally within the currents of their own indigenous cultures.
None of this is to say that those transitions will be easy or are inevitable . Chance shifts in power can tilt the balance one way or another. The global Enlightenment is at best in a recessionary phase, at worst falling by the wayside.
This only means that it is worth fighting for and must be fought for.
Ukraine is today’s fulcrum, Taiwan will be tomorrow’s.
But there are signs of light on the horizon. Putin seems, at long last, to have overreached militarily. Xi may have prematurely tried to bring the market economy under party control, thereby half-strangling his golden goose.
Freedom and the other ideals of the Enlightenment are not inherited but earned. Take them for granted, and some hegemon or other will take them away.
When All Is Said and Dunn 