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 hat
President Bush has called the first war of the 21st century has
much in common with the great wars of the century just past. Now,
as then, the root cause of the carnage lies in radical discontent
with modern industrial society — a hydra-headed historical
phenomenon that is well described as the Industrial Counterrevolution.
At first glance,
shadowy Islamist terrorists look very different from any enemy we
have ever faced. And indeed, the tactics they employ are novel,
as are the tactics that must be used to defeat them. But the fundamental
nature of our present adversaries, once seen plainly, is all too
familiar. The evil we confront today is the evil of totalitarianism:
Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and their coconspirators are the modern-day
successors of Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, Mao and Pol
Pot.
The atrocities
of today's terrorists are the last shudder of a historical convulsion
of unprecedented fury and destructive power. It was spawned by the
spiritual confusion that accompanied the coming of the modern age,
and consists of a profound hostility toward the disciplines and
opportunities of human freedom. With the collapse of the Soviet
Empire we thought we were done with totalitarianism. But it lives
still, and lives to do harm. As we prepare once more to face this
old and dangerous adversary, we need to reacquaint ourselves with
its origins and nature.
To understand
what gave rise to the totalitarian plague, you have to appreciate
the radical historical discontinuity represented by the technological
dynamism of the past 150 years. In the second half of the 19th century,
various strands of economic development — new energy sources,
new production techniques, breakthroughs in transportation and communication
— were woven into new organizational forms to produce a wealth-creating
capacity of unprecedented scale, complexity, and power. It was during
this great confluence that the scientific method was first systematically
integrated into economic life; technological and organizational
innovation became normal, routine, and ubiquitous. Nobel prize-winning
economist Douglass North refers to the "wedding of science
and technology" as the "Second Economic Revolution"
— the first being the advent of agriculture ten millennia ago.
The Industrial
Revolution was the economic expression of a much more general transformation,
a radical new form of social order whose defining feature was the
embrace of open-ended discovery: open-endedness in the pursuit of
knowledge (provisional and refutable hypotheses supplanting revelation
and authority), open-endedness in economic life (innovation and
free-floating market transactions in place of tradition and the
"just price"), open-endedness in politics (power emerging
from the people rather than the divine right of kings and hereditary
aristocracies), and open-endedness in life paths (following your
dreams instead of knowing your place). In short, industrialization
both advanced and reflected a larger dynamic of liberalization
— a dramatic and qualitative shift in the dimensions of social
freedom.
The emergence
of this new liberal order in the North Atlantic world came as a
series of jolting shocks. Kings were knocked from their thrones
or else made subservient to parliaments; nobles were stripped of
rank and power. Science displaced the earth from the center of the
Universe, dragged humanity into the animal kingdom, and cast a pall
of doubt over the most cherished religious beliefs. As if these
assaults on age-old verities were not enough, the coup de grace
was then applied with the eruption of mechanized, urbanized society.
The natural, easy rhythms of country life gave way to the clanging,
clock-driven tempo of the city and the factory, and new technologies
of miraculous power and demonic destructiveness burst forth. Vast
riches were heaped up in the midst of brutal hardship and want;
new social classes erupted and struggled for position.
In countries
outside of the North Atlantic world, the experience of modernization
was, if anything, even more vertiginous. Social changes were often
accelerated by the confrontation, all at once, with Western innovations
that had taken decades or centuries to develop originally. Moreover,
these changes were experienced not as homegrown developments, but
as real or figurative conquests by foreign powers. Modernity thus
came as a humiliation — a shocking realization that the local
culture was hopelessly backward compared with that of the new foreign
masters.
It is unsurprising
that, in all the wrenching social tumult, many people felt lost
— adrift in a surging flux without landmarks or firm ground.
The deepest thinkers of the 19th century identified this anomie
as the spiritual crisis of the age: Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed
the death of God, while Max Weber wrote of society's "disenchantment."
But it was Karl Marx who traced most clearly the connection between
this spiritual crisis and the economic upheavals of his day. As
he and Friedrich Engels wrote in this breathtaking passage from
the Communist Manifesto:
Constant
revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relationships, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices
and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all
that is holy is profaned….
Thus did industrialization
beget a massive backlash — a reaction against the dizzying
plenitude of open-endedness, a lurch toward some antidote to the
jarring, jangling uncertainty of a world where "all that is
solid melts into air." The Industrial Counterrevolution was
protean and, in its many guises, captured minds of almost every
persuasion. But in all its forms, it held out this promise: that
political power, whether at the national or global level, could
recreate the simplicity, certainty, and solidarity of preindustrial
life. The appeal of that promise powered a disastrous century of
collectivist experimentation.
The promise
of redemption through politics — of reintegration into some
larger whole — was present even in the milder incarnations
of the collectivist impulse. As against the "chaos" and
"anarchy" of the market order, a central state with expanded
fiscal and regulatory powers offered the reassurance that somebody
was "in charge." In particular, the nationalization or
regulation of previously autonomous private enterprises reasserted
the primacy of the group, which had always held sway in earlier
times. In all the various permutations of incremental collectivism
— social democracy, the welfare and regulatory state, Keynesian
"fine tuning," development planning — the emotional
appeal of group cohesion buttressed the intellectual arguments for
greater government involvement in economic life.
But it was
in the radical centralizing movements of totalitarianism that the
rebellion against open-endedness overwhelmed all other considerations.
Robert Nisbet, in his seminal Quest for Community, identified
the rise of totalitarianism in modern times as an effort to recreate,
through the state, the lost sense of community that had obtained
in the premodern world. "The greatest appeal of the totalitarian
party, Marxist or other," wrote Nisbet, "lies in its capacity
to provide a sense of moral coherence and communal membership to
those who have become, to one degree or another, victims of the
sense of exclusion from the ordinary channels of belonging in society."
And in his
great but too little remembered 1936 book, The Good Society,
Walter Lippmann diagnosed the totalitarian threat as a "collectivist
counter-revolution" against industrial society's complex division
of labor. "[T]he industrial revolution," he wrote, "has
instituted a way of life organized on a very large scale, with men
and communities no longer autonomous but elaborately interdependent,
with change no longer so gradual as to be imperceptible, but highly
dynamic within the span of each man's experience. No more profound
or pervasive transformation of habits and values and ideas was ever
imposed so suddenly on the great mass of mankind." Opposition
to that transformation, he continued, had hatched the monstrous
tyrannies that at that time menaced the world:
[A]s the
revolutionary transformation proceeds, it must evoke resistance
and rebellion at every stage. It evokes resistance and rebellion
on the right and on the left — that is to say, among those
who possess power and wealth, and among those who do not….
Though these two movements wage a desperate class struggle, they
are, with reference to the great industrial revolution of the
modern age, two forms of reaction and counter-revolution. For,
in the last analysis, these two collectivist movements are efforts
to resist, by various kinds of coercion, the consequences of the
increasing division of labor.
The misbegotten
secular religions of totalitarianism won their devoted and ruthless
followings by offering an escape from the stresses of modernity
— specifically, from the agoraphobic panic that liberal open-endedness
roused. They aspired to "re-enchant" the world with grand
dreams of class or racial destiny — dreams that integrated
their adherents into communities of true believers, and elevated
them from lost souls to agents of great and inexorable forces. With
their insidiously appealing lies, the false faiths of communism
and fascism launched their mad rebellion against the liberal rigors
of questioning and self-doubt — and so against tolerance and
pluralism and peaceable persuasion. They inflicted upon a century
their awful, evil perversion of modernity: the instrumentalities
of mass production and mass prosperity twisted into engines of mass
destruction and mass murder.
The liberal
revolution survived the reactionary challenge. Fascism was put to
rout, at horrible cost, in the great struggle of World War II; Communism
was contained and waited out until it imploded, just a decade ago.
And coincident with Communism's demise has come a global rediscovery
of liberal ideas and institutions. Free markets and democracy have
registered impressive gains around the world. However, the dead
hand of the collectivist past still exerts a powerful influence:
The inertia of old mindsets and vested interests blocks progress
at every turn, and so our new era of globalization is a messy and
sometimes volatile one. But it is an era of hope, and of possibility.
As the horrible
events of September 11 made clear, we are not yet finished with
the totalitarian threat. In the tragic, broken societies of the
Islamic world — where free markets have gained little foothold,
and democracy even less — radical hostility to modernity still
festers on a large scale. And it has given rise to a distinctive
form of totalitarianism: one that uses a perverted form of religious
faith, rather than any purely secular ideology, as its reactionary
mythos. For the past quarter-century, radical Islamist fundamentalism
has roiled the nations in which it arose. Now it has reached out
to wage a direct, frontal assault on its antithesis — its "Great
Satan": the United States.
Despite the
trappings of religious fervor, Islamist totalitarianism is strikingly
similar to its defunct, secular cousins. It is an expression, not
of spirituality, but of anomie: in particular, a seething resentment
of Western prosperity and strength. Consider the origins of the
Muslim Brotherhood. Founded in 1928 to resist the British presence
in Egypt, the Brotherhood was the original radical Islamist terror
network. As detailed in David Pryce-Jones' powerful The Closed
Circle, the official account of its formation records this statement
at the group's initial meeting: "We know not the practical
way to reach the glory of Islam and serve the welfare of Muslims.
We are weary of this life of humiliation and restriction. Lo, we
see that the Arabs and the Muslims have no status and dignity."
And —
just like its Communist and fascist predecessors — Islamist
totalitarianism seeks redemption through politics. It is animated
by the pursuit of temporal power: the destruction of the "decadent"
(i.e., liberal) West and creation of a pan-Islamic utopian state
featuring unrestrained centralization of authority. Whether the
utopian blueprint calls for mullahs, commissars, or Gauleiters to
wield absolute power is of secondary importance: It is the utopian
idea itself — the millennial fantasy of a totalitarian state
— that unites all the radical movements of the Industrial Counterrevolution.
The point bears
emphasis. Radical Islamist fundamentalism not does content itself
with mere rejection of the West's alleged vices. If that were all
there was to it, its program might be simply to stage a retreat
from modernity's wickedness — to do, in other words, what the
Amish have done. But Islamist totalitarianism, though it claims
otherworldly inspiration, is obsessed with worldly power and influence.
It does not merely reject the West; it wants to beat the West at
its own game of worldly success. Osama bin Laden is constantly claiming
that the United States is weak and can be defeated; he and his colleagues
lust for power and believe they can attain it. And so, although
it attempts to appropriate a particular religious tradition, Islamist
totalitarianism is not, at bottom, a religious movement. It is a
political movement — a quest for political power.
Indeed, Islamist
fundamentalism shares with other totalitarian movements a commitment
to centralization not just of political power, but of economic control
as well. Consider Iran, where the first and greatest victory for
Islamist totalitarianism was won. As Shaul Bakhash describes in
his Reign of the Ayatollahs:
[T]he government
took over large sectors of the economy through nationalization
and expropriation, including banking, insurance, major industry,
large-scale agriculture and construction, and an important part
of foreign trade. It also involved itself in the domestic distribution
of goods. As a result, the economic role of the state was greatly
swollen and that of the private sector greatly diminished by the
revolution.
Today, the
sectaries of radical Islamism continue to uphold various collectivist
strains of "Islamic economics" — trumpeted as righteous
alternatives to the secular and individualist corruption of "Eurocentric"
globalization.
Before the
September 11 attacks, it appeared that Islamist totalitarianism
was a movement in decline. In the decades since the Iranian revolution,
formidable Islamist opposition movements have built up around the
Islamic world, but totalitarian regimes have come to power only
in the Sudan and Afghanistan — backwaters even by regional
standards. Elsewhere, insurgencies have been crushed (in Syria)
or at least brutally repressed (in Algeria, Egypt, and Chechnya).
In Iran, revolutionary fervor steadily gave way to disillusionment
and cynicism; the reformist government of Mohammed Khatami has moved
gingerly toward a more moderate course.
In the wake
of September 11, it is unclear whether the U.S. military response
will precipitate a new wave of radicalization in the Islamic world
— one which might topple existing regimes and bring totalitarians
to power. It is unclear whether terrorists will be able to outmaneuver
the escalation of security and intelligence activity now underway,
and bring off further successful attacks in the United States or
elsewhere. It is, in short, unclear what further horrors must be
endured, at home and around the world, because of Islamist totalitarianism.
But this much
is clear: The United States is now at war with the totalitarians
of radical Islamism. And in prior conflicts with the totalitarian
impulse of the Industrial Counterrevolution, the United States has
been undefeated. Americans triumphed first over fascism, then over
Communism — movements with ideologies of potentially global
appeal, and with political bases in militarily formidable great
powers. Americans will rise again to this latest challenge. Unlike
its predecessors, radical Islamism speaks only to the disaffected
minority of a particular region, and none of the governments of
that region holds any hope of prevailing against the resolute exercise
of U.S. power. However long the present war must last, and however
costly it must be, the final outcome cannot be doubted: interment
of Islamist totalitarianism in what President Bush so stirringly
referred to as "history's unmarked grave of discarded lies."
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