High life
The chaos theory
Taki
VeRougemont ry long ago, the age of the Gods was challenged by the rise of individual men. Kings and heroes came onto the scene and one of them, Alexander the Great, even believed himself divine (only towards the end). Kings created oligarchies in which patricians and heroes fought to be number two, until freedom-loving types left the old continent and established a great republic across the pond. All's well that ends well, but not quite. As Gore Vidal wrote in an essay on Giovanni Batista Vico, published in the New York Review of Books:
Thanks to man's nature, the established republics tend to imperial acquisitiveness, and so, in due course, these empire republics meet their natural terminus in, let us say, the jungles of Vietnam.
Mind you, although Gore Vidal's scholarship is on a par with Vico's, he has been known to be rather hard on Uncle Sam, especially about Vietnam and where big, had conglomerates are concerned. The jungles of Vietnam did not defeat America; Congress and a reluctance to use its real power did. Vidal wrote his essay on chaos two years ago, and it makes more sense today than it did back then. In fact, it is as apt as anything I've read since Tuesday's suicide bombing: A characteristic of our present chaos is the dramatic migration of tribes. They are on the move from east to west, from south to north. Liberal tradition requires that borders must always be open for those in search of safety or even the pursuit of happiness. In the case of the United States the acquisition of new citizens from all the tribes on earth has always been thought to be a very good thing. But, eventually, with so many billions of people on the move, even the great-hearted may well become edgy once we have gobbled up all the computer-proficient immigrants.
Hear, hear. Some on this side of the globe have called the third millennium the Christian era, which brings to mind Hitler calling on phantom divisions to defend Berlin in April 1945. Most of the world is not Christian at all, and even the Christian Western societies now live in a secular world of greed and porn. Christianity and Hollywood are a lousy mix. One billion three hundred million Muslims the world over are looking at what Uncle Sam will do over the coming weeks and months, and the poor little Greek boy predicts chaos. Here's Vidal again, this time quoting John Jay Chapman, one of America's greatest essayists. Chapman, who died in 1933, on Plato: It has thus become impossible for anyone to read Plato's dialogues or any other creation of the Greek brain with real sympathy, for those creations speak from a wonderful, cruel, remote, witty age. and represent the amusements of a wonderful, cruel, remote. witty people, who lived for amusement, and for this reason perished.
On one side we have religious fanatics leading the people to sacrifice in return for a heaven of milk and honey and virgins, while on the other there's a remote, witty and sometimes cruel people bent on making money and on amusing themselves. I wonder who will perish first? Will our technology prevail? Or will it become the new theocracy, one which will turn all of us into its prisoners? And what happens when the mediaeval mullah casually dumps a bag of bacteria in powdery spores out of an aeroplane, an aeroplane he hasn't even had to hijack? Bioterrorism is the future, one that could foment political instability and total chaos. Barbarians used to toss plagueinfected corpses over the walls of besieged cities, spreading the deadly infection inside the walls. Next time it will be easier, and much more deadly.
So, what is to be done? Dunno, is the answer. Americans are rightly howling for revenge, but against whom? All the computers and state-of-the-art high-tech will not produce incontrovertible proof of guilt. As a moral and democratic state America cannot kill innocents, as it has in the past. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden saw hundreds of thousands of old men, women and children incinerated. I never bought the canard that it was in order to save lives. Why, then, did we bomb Serbia? In order to save Albanian Muslim drug-runners, and a hell of a lot of mujahedin to boot?
No. What I think America should do now is to wait. Waiting for the counterstrike can be more unsettling for the guilty than a rainfall of Cruise missiles. Wait, get some good intelligence, lean on Israel to stop the settlements and harsh treatment of the Palestinians, and, once it's ready, bring the guilty to justice. Uncle Sam was never meant to be Alexander the Great, or Napoleon for that matter.
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