The Elephant in 21st Century Global Order

The Elephant in 21st Century Global Order

Posted by Veterans Today on March 15, 2015

The Blindness of the English Speaker

By Reg Little for Veterans Today

Most mainstream English language commentary on global developments does little more than grope blindly and uncertainly towards one or two aspects of the elephantine energies transforming the contemporary world. The gentle, cautious, considerate and cooperative movement of the beast seems to demand no more.

VT is playing a unique role in initiating informed examination of many critical international issues where policies and actions often seem misguided and counterproductive. In recent times perhaps the most notable have concerned ISIS in the Middle East and the Kiev Government in Ukraine, although VT’s exploration of the evolution of Western financial culture offers remarkable and critical new insights into the historical background of the contemporary West.

Yet the fundamental character of a global order undergoing rapid and fundamental transformation is mostly neglected. Even amongst its highly qualified and widely experienced contributors, VT offers little insight into the major force driving global change – the remarkable rise of an elephantine and dominant Asian culture, shaped by Chinese thought and history, and the comparative decline of the recently dominant, essentially mono-cultural English speaking maritime powers, the US, the UK and their allies.

This is not a criticism. For understandable, if indefensible, historical reasons, Western nations have literally educated no advisors in official positions with the qualifications, experience and spirit necessary to guide decision makers when interacting with Chinese thought culture. This is despite its role in transforming Asia over the past half century and in now driving even vaster change across the Eurasian continent.

The above assertions are based on over half a century of relevant, if unique, experience in Asia, often observing from close range Western ignorance and ineptness. As an Australian diplomat for twenty five years who received 18 months of Japanese and 15 months of Chinese full-time, in-country language training, it is difficult not to conclude that Western policy only grows in blindness and ineptitude.

One product of the above training and a curious nature led to the use of Japanese experience in the 1960s to project China’s future economic miracle as early as 1976. After spending more than half a diplomatic life working on East Asia, with other experience serving to complement and balance that interest, it became clear that without specialized training and experience even the most gifted native English speakers have great difficulty in relating effectively to developments in East Asia.

Over a subsequent quarter of a century actively engaged in Chinese and Asian exchanges and conferences examining the interaction of culture, economics and politics, this concern has only deepened. This is despite the fact that formal university study of economics in three countries had done its best to discourage and ridicule such interests. Becoming a Founding Director of the Beijing based International Confucian Association in 1994 and being elected a Vice President in 2009 offered access to a world that would be beyond the imagination of almost any trained Western economist. The President of this association from 2004 to 2014 is the head of a discreet family that might be said to have played an unrivaled role in both China’s economic revival and its cultural renaissance.

One British historian, John Hobson, has diagnosed the malaise as “intellectual apartheid”. This mentality helped consolidate an English speaking empire, or global order, but now precipitates its decline. This makes it almost impossible for a native English speaker to comprehend that a rival, unrelated cerebral and cultural universe may exist. Even more it is inconceivable that this alternative universe may be more deeply and diversely cultivated than that of the English speakers who have so transformed the past two centuries and defined words like “progress” and “innovation”.

Experience has also made it clear that even advanced diplomatic language training only equips one to begin the journey of discovery. Much emotional engagement, many troubling setbacks, supportive friends and colleagues, a stubborn character and a healthy share of good fortune are all necessary to escape the increasingly crippling handicaps of mono-lingual and mono-cultural English language certainty and other forms of Western self-delusion.

Prisoners of Intellectual Apartheid

With China deftly and reassuringly assuming the strategic leadership of a vibrant Eurasian community likely to be composed of more than 4 billion people the maritime English speaking powers are now in serious danger of being marginalised on the periphery of a transformed global community. Even worse, in a multi-lingual global community, these maritime nations will be trapped in the certainties and regrets of a failing abstract, rational, theoretical and belief based thought culture. Sadly, this English language culture comprehends little of the wisdom of the likely emerging global power centre.

Being Australian, this concern is made more acute by the reality that few Australians have access to the robust integrity of the type of information available on VT. Both mainstream and alternative media in Australia do little more than rehearse the programmed disinformation that characterises mainstream American media.

Moreover, Australia’s history is limited to a military and psychological dependence on a powerful English speaking capital in the northern hemisphere. When London and Washington become confused by and preoccupied with counterproductive initiatives in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, both political leaders and political followers have little encouragement or capacity to reflect on what might be Australia’s own priorities and problems.

Several decades ago there was some rhetoric about Australia making a distinctive contribution to broader Western interests by developing a unique level of expertise concerning its own region. Today, however, almost all news and political comment seems like a hand-me-down from old friends in the northern hemisphere. As a member of the famed five eyes intelligence community, Australia now seems blind, informed only about the imagined and often misjudged anxieties of its old friends.

There is a frightening reality that no English speaker wants to even countenance. This is that China is drawing deeply on a distinctive and, for the English speaker, almost totally inaccessible culture and history. Very few of the West’s so called academic sinologists address this phenomena in any meaningful way. Here “intellectual apartheid” is again a baleful influence as most academics have been educated to pay professional deference to comforting stereotypes that permit no questioning of English speaking certainties and assumed superiorities.

End of Empire Challenges

The challenges confronted by President Obama and Prime Minister Abbott at this time as they address a world of fading English speaking certainties are daunting. They are trapped in a world where they are continually guided in the wrong directions. The Australian Prime Minister reinforces American rhetoric and disinformation about the loss of Australian lives on MH17 and becomes a major contributor of troops to support the United States in the fight against ISIS, a group that seems to be an unfortunate product of American initiative. When examined closely, both Obama and Abbott seem to be struggling with the best of intentions in the midst of a tangle of conflicting, competing and confusing pressures, none of which they can afford to neglect.

Moreover, working within Western democratic structures that do little to prepare politicians for high office and then work continually to distract them with electoral, funding, lobbying and media imperatives, English speaking leaders are severely handicapped from the outset. They cannot even begin to understand the rigorous education, decades of professional preparation, collegial vetting and focused mentoring that prepare Chinese leaders. Moreover, no democratic leader rises to power with an assured tenure for a decade undistracted by the intrusion of electoral processes.

The English speaking world asserts the democratic process as a right desired by all people. Yet the successes of Asian peoples working with or without democratic forms but sharing common traditional values of government cannot but pose some weighty questions about practical aspects of democratic process. These questions can only grow as China becomes an ever more powerful strategic influence and model at the centre of global developments.

The apparent heresy of the preceding sentences immediately highlights several critical issues. The first involves determining whether China’s contemporary practices are a product of ancient traditions adjusted for the 21st Century or are a predictable result of a revolution based on the ideals of a relatively recent Western ideology – Communism. Experience of Capitalist Japan in the 1960s can lead one to argue that all East Asian governments are best understood as modern variations of ancient traditions of Confucian, Legalist and other distinctive values.

The second critical issue, which is even more heretical, is whether most Western democracies are proving themselves uncompetitive and dysfunctional in a global community where the Chinese economy is becoming dominant and trend setting. The third issue, again more heretical, is whether the contemporary bankruptcy of most Western economies, is not an inevitable outcome where the power of democratic institutions is effectively overshadowed by the might of finance, often exercised through ubiquitous privately owned central banks capable of uncontrolled money creation and debasement.

The above paragraphs just touch on some complex and weighty questions, which cannot be explored further here. They highlight, however, the way in which China’s peaceful rise is beginning to pose awkward questions that are alien to Western thought and consciousness.

Chinese Culture and History

This might lead to the recognition of a need for a quick exploration of the unique thought culture that informs China’s, and Asia’s, peaceful rise. This culture remains a closed book to the West but, at least on the basis of my experience, enables one to anticipate with some confidence the likely course of Chinese led global developments over the rest of this century and beyond. For Westerners nurtured on Abrahamic beliefs, there are many challenging dimensions to this thought culture and it will only be possible here to touch on half a dozen and then to comment briefly on the role of a long, continuously recorded history in establishing and refining their authority and wisdom.

First, there is Confucianism, which builds a powerful social and political ethos on the affections and ever changing relationships of the family. These make nonsense of the West’s fashionable “universal values”, with their glorification of characteristics like equality, freedom and individualism, which are dysfunctional in a family environment.

Second, there is Daoism, which poses riddle after riddle in dispensing of almost all certainties and reassurances in human life, even as it introduces a depth of sensitivity about the challenges confronting organic life that is nourishing, inspiring and resilience building.

Third, there is the Book of Changes, which presents as a book of divination, but that in reality is designed to invite reflection on the challenges and central values and imperatives of human existence. Moreover, it was designed several millennia ago around a type of mathematical, probabilistic formulation that 20th Century scientists have shown mirrors the structure used to explain the DNA of living creatures.

Fourth, there is Legalism, seen both as a rival and complement to Confucianism. It is concerned with practical and formal issues, focusing on the administrative imperatives of large government. While often denigrated from a Confucian perspective, the discreet practice of legalism’s strict authority has been an underlying source of political strength in Confucian societies.

Fifth, there are reputedly over a thousand strategic classics, which explore deeply the practical essentials in winning, holding and expanding political power, mostly reinforcing value systems inherent in the influences outlined above. These emphasise needs like studying and understanding both oneself and one’s adversaries and winning victory by soft strategies that minimize destruction.

Sixth, there is a voluminous library of heath classics that have been marginalized, if not discredited, by the West’s aggressive corporate health cultures. The growing recognition of problems inherent in Western processed food, synthetic drugs and invasive surgery has already led to a powerful alternative health culture that has begun to identify the values of Chinese foods, herbs, therapies and soft exercises.

All of the above cultural dimensions are founded in classics that date back more than two millennia and that have been tested, proven and refined over a long, eventful and continuously recorded subsequent history. No other contemporary power even begins to rival this ready use of ancient classical language and wisdom in contemporary practice or this achievement of continuous and ever enriching history in the face of the most daunting challenges.

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