William
Lind is a specialist in 4th-generation warfare: non-state warfare. He is also
an observer of culture.
He
has written an assessment of the assassination of Archduke Francis
Ferdinand on June 28, 1914. Within five weeks, this led to the
outbreak of World War I on August 1.
With the commemoration of Christ’s first Advent, the end of the
calendar year and a widespread (and justified) sense that we are all walking on
the edge of a precipice, an old question pops up again: when will the world
end? Many seers, prophets, and charlatans have predicted a date when the world
will end, only to find themselves both relieved and disappointed. Unlike them,
I know with complete certainty when the world will end. It will end on June 28,
1914.
Had Archduke Franz Ferdinand lived, we would almost certainly
inhabit a better world. There would have been no war; he was the leader of the
peace party in Vienna. Without the vast civilizational catastrophe that was
World War I, the West would not have lost faith in itself, its culture, and
religion. Instead of cultural Marxism, we could still have Christian,
conservative monarchy as the West’s leading paradigm. I doubt the House of
Hapsburg, which had twice repelled the Moslem hordes from the gates of Vienna,
would have opened those gates to more than a million Islamic “refugees” (really
migrants). Interestingly, it is mostly states that were part of the Empire,
Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, that have the moral courage to say no to
the EU’s refugee quotas. Had the Archduke lived, there would be no Lenin, no
Stalin, no Hitler, no Holocaust. Israel might have been established as a
province of the Ottoman Empire, under German and Austro-Hungarian protection;
the Zionists were quite influential at the Viennese court and Kaiser Wilhelm II
had a number of close Jewish friends. Russia, which by 1910 had reached the
economic takeoff point, would not have lost the 60 million people killed by
Soviet Communism, the figure revealed when the Soviet archives were opened in
1989. Economically, the Russian people might enjoy the same standard of living
Americans have today, while still residing under a Christian monarch in an
Orthodox country.
Vienna was not only a political capital, it was a cultural
capital as well, the rival of Paris. While the cultural pessimism that now
rules the West was already stirring, without World War I and the fall of the
Empire it probably would not have become dominant. Music, art, and architecture
would still strive for beauty, not alienation (thank you Adorno). Nietzsche’s
“transvaluation of all values,” where the old sins become virtues and the old
virtues sins, would have remained the delusion of a syphilitic philosopher
instead of the guiding rule of Western elites. In the year 2017, a Hapsburg
Vienna might well be the source of much of the world’s cultural and
intellectual greatness.
Only a handful of people are left who understand how much was
lost on that June day in 1914. With those pistol shots in Sarajevo, the West
put a gun to its own head and blew its brains out. Our history since has been
the twitching of a corpse.
In 1971, when doing graduate work in Vienna, I had the good
fortune to meet the Empire face-to-face. My landlady was Frau Baron von
Garabedian-Elislago. Her father was General von Krauss-Elislago, Archduke Franz
Ferdinand’s aide-de-camp and favorite soldier. She knew the Archduke and the
last Emperor, Kaiser Karl. As you entered her apartment, you saw two
magnificent Renaissance chests, gifts to her father from the Archduke. She
could remember the picnics on the decks of Austrian battleships in the
Adriatic.
The good Frau Baron was lively, funny, and a window into all
that was lost. She spoke six languages fluently. She enjoyed high culture as
only a truly educated person can. One night as we were coming out of the
Burgtheater she gestured dismissively to two statues and said, “Those are the
monkeys who founded the republic.”
Now, we Americans live in a country where the monkeys seem to be
running everything. Our downward spiral accelerates. Soon, education and cultural
levels will be so low that no one will be able to understand the value of a
place governed by Christian monarchy and devoted to the life of the mind. But
Hapsburg Vienna was such a place. Until, on June 28, 1914, the world ended.
Well,
as academic historians like to say, yes and no.
In
assessing historical change, I'm well aware of the ups and downs of events in
history. They have meaning in terms of subjective imputation. Ultimately, the
imputation that counts is God's imputation, which goes on constantly, and will
be reflected historically at the final judgment. The apostle Paul announced
this regarding historical development: "And we know that all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to
His purpose" (Romans 8:28).
I
look at the event that Lind describes, and also the crucial event which took
place three years later only because of what Lind describes, namely, Lenin's
successful overturning of the Russian revolutionary government on October
25, 1917. I conclude that the historical effects of these monumental
events, however negative in the short run and mid-term, will turn out to have
been been positive in the long run.
In
short, as the 1940's radio newscaster Gabriel Heater announced every evening,
"There's good news tonight!"
WORLDVIEW AND ITS EFFECTS
Lind
does not mention why the Archduke was in a position to have been a significant
man of peace. It was because of the most important self-fulfilling prediction
of modern times: the belief of Austrian economist Carl Menger that there would
be a great military conflagration sometime early in the 20th century, a
conflagration that would lead to the disruption of the old order. He predicted
this in the late 19th century. This prediction was important because Menger was
the tutor of the son of the Emperor, Rudolf. Menger's dark outlook influenced
the thinking of the young man, who committed suicide on January 30, 1889. This
left the Archduke as the heir to the Hapsburg throne. Here is the account of
Ludwig von Mises in his Notes and Recollections, which he wrote in
1940, shortly after his arrival in the United States as a refugee of the Nazi
regime.
I believe I know what
discouraged Menger and what silenced him so early. His sharp mind had
recognized the destiny of Austria, of Europe, and of the world. He saw the
greatest and most advanced of all civilizations rushing to the abyss of
destruction. He foresaw all the horrors which we are experiencing today. He
knew the consequences of the world’s turning away from true Liberalism and
Capitalism. Nonetheless, he did what he could do to stem the tide. His
book Untersuchungen über die Methode der Socialwissenschaften und der
Politischen Oekonomie insbesondere was meant as a polemic essay
against all those pernicious intellectual currents that were poisoning the
world from the universities of" “Great Prussia."
The knowledge that his fight was without expectation of success,
however, sapped his strength. He had transmitted this pessimism to his young
student and friend, Archduke Rudolf, successor to the Austro-Hungarian throne.
The Archduke committed suicide because he despaired about the future of his
empire and the fate of European civilization, not because of a woman. (He took
a young girl along in death who, too, wished to die; but he did not commit
suicide on her account.)
This
is not the standard account of the suicide. I regard this as an accurate
account. It is certainly one that is worth considering.
I
also invoke the insights of the enormously learned founder of the Department of
Sociology at Harvard University in 1933, Pitirim Sorokin. He offered these
cultural categories which he saw as successive: idealistic, ideational, and
sensate. Wikipedia summarizes:
In his Social
and Cultural Dynamics, his magnum opus, Sorokin classified societies
according to their 'cultural mentality', which can be "ideational"
(reality is spiritual), "sensate" (reality is material), or
"idealistic" (a synthesis of the two). He suggested that major
civilizations evolve from an ideational to an idealistic, and eventually to a sensate
mentality. Each of these phases of cultural development not only seeks to
describe the nature of reality, but also stipulates the nature of human needs
and goals to be satisfied, the extent to which they should be satisfied, and
the methods of satisfaction. Sorokin has interpreted the contemporary Western
civilization as a sensate civilization, dedicated to technological progress and
prophesied its fall into decadence and the emergence of a new ideational or
idealistic era.
The
most impressive recent historical study of this decline into decadence is
Jacques Barzun's magnum opus, From Dawn to Decadence -- 500 Years of
Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present (2000). It was published
when he was 93. He died at age 104.
I
do not believe that historical interpretations that rest heavily on categories
of inevitable development provide anything like a secure foundation of
historical analysis. But I do believe that there are general categories
relating culture and historical development. These connections are much looser
than grand theorists would like us to believe, but there are general
categories. The categories I use are the ones found in Deuteronomy 28 and
Leviticus 26. They are fundamentally ethical categories. In this sense, I am in
sympathy with Lind's analysis.
THE WEST AND THE REST
Western
analysts are hypnotized by the categories of "the West and the rest."
These categories are rapidly disappearing. I think it is safe to say that,
within half a century, the technological distinctions between the West and the
rest will no longer be significant. We do not know whether the cultural
distinctions will still be significant. I think they will be far less
significant.
New
technologies and exponentially declining costs of information will undermine
the present world order. The gatekeepers are in full retreat in the West, and
they have been for two decades. The symbol of this retreat is the success that
Matt Drudge had in reporting Newsweek's spike of the story of Bill
Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. He posted a series of reports on Sunday evening,
January 17, 1998. The original reports are here. Three days later, the Establishment media
ran the story. The Establishment media could no longer control the flow of
information. This was a monumental breakthrough. Drudge became a
multimillionaire, while Newsweek went bankrupt in 2010.
On
February 2, Time grudgingly ran
this assessment: "The Internet made this story. And the story
made the Internet. Clinterngate, or whatever we are going to call it, is to the
Internet what the Kennedy assassination was to TV news: its coming of age as a
media force. Or some might say media farce." The author held his nose.
Let's not give Drudge
too much credit. Though he thumbs his nose at traditional news outlets, they
supply most of his information. His sources are inside the media, not (usually)
inside the institutions they cover. His scoops -- including this one -- are
generally stuff the grownups either have declined to publish or are about to
publish. Having pilfered other folks' material, Drudge has the considerable
gall to emblazon his own E-mail dispatches with the warning, WORLD EXCLUSIVE.
MUST CREDIT THE DRUDGE REPORT.
There is a case to be made, however, for lower standards. In
this case, the lower standards were vindicated. Almost no one now denies there
is a legitimate story here. Taped conversations and suspected subornation of
perjury moved the story safely beyond furtive rumors of sexual dalliance. For
Drudge, though, furtive rumors of dalliance are enough.
Even for traditional media journalists, furtive rumors of
dalliance are enough -- at least to gossip about among themselves, if not to
share with their readers and viewers. There is something slightly elitist about
the attitude that we journalists can be trusted to evaluate such rumors
appropriately but that our readers and viewers cannot. Actually, though, almost
everybody has the same standards -- that is, almost none -- in passing along
juicy rumors to friends and colleagues.
Information
is vastly less expensive for readers to access today, and the wide range of
interpretations available to the public is greater than at any time in the
history of man. There is a great amount of chaff, but there
is far more wheat than ever before. This is a huge advantage for
consumers of information and also for decentralized decision-making. Liberty is
far greater today than at any time in the history of man, and the falling cost
of information is the primary source of this liberty. Liberty is going to
increase, not decrease, from now on.
CULTURAL DECLINE
Lind
believes that the West is declining culturally. It is not difficult to make
this case. But there is more to the world than the West. Culturally, China
today is vastly superior to what it was under Mao. The Soviet Union is far
better off culturally today than it was under Stalin and his Communist
successors. I think the same can be said of India. The traditional local
oligarchies of Asian village life are under siege from new technologies. Cheap
smart phones, when coupled with free Internet service provided by Amazon,
Google, and Facebook, no later than 2030, will complete the destruction of
these oligarchies within half a century. It may not take this long.
I
believe that nice guys do not finish last. I believe that honesty is the best
policy. I believe that righteousness is productive, and debauchery is
unproductive. I believe that drug addicts and alcoholics self-destruct, and
hard-working people who are committed to their families are successful in the
long run. The patterns of success and failure are ultimately ethical
and covenantal, not technological. But advancing technologies
steadily decrease the costs of production. This decentralizing process favors
hard-working, thrifty people far more than it favors debauched people and
political power-seekers. The Soviet Union and Red China are no more. This was
not random.
This
is why I do not agree with Lind's overall assessment. Bad as the West's
cultural decline may be, it is not unilateral. It is also not universal. There
is more to civilization than the West. The West's cultural decline threatens
the elitist Western Establishments far more than it threatens the rest of us.
Therefore,
there's good news tonight!
Happy
new year.
