The West is threatened not by alien civilizations, but by the dark shadows of the West itself, approaching from China and Russia.
John Gray. “The West is not dying, its ideas live on in China”. The New Statesman, 28 July

Liberalism is largely dead, and the illiberal ideas that once emerged in Western Europe now shape its immediate future. Chinese integral nationalism bears more resemblance to European nationalism of the interwar period, whereas Putin’s Russia employs Leninist methods to restore its influence in the world. The West is not dying, yet it is unable to grasp that the tyrannies threatening it are incarnations of European political ghosts, but the paradoxical nature of this fact prevents political elites from understanding what is happening, while the world they previously took for granted continues to slip into the realm of shadows. So writes John Gray, who is well known to the English-reading public as a critic of the unthinking acceptance of many ideas inherited from the Enlightenment era, such as progress and liberalism.

Of course, Gray is right that the nation-state is a Western invention, and that fascism and communism historically originated and developed on the European continent. Undeniably, Chinese communism was initially a response to the colonialism of European empires, but the ideas of Jacobin terror found receptive ears and impressionable minds among both Bolshevik and Chinese communists. However, I find it difficult to agree with this line of reasoning, which seemingly leads to the conclusion that, for example, the Chinese – since the case of Russia must still be viewed in the context of European history – would have lived in some ideal world before Europeans intervened there, first with warships and opium, and then with ideas. This slightly resembles a variant of the “noble savage” idea: in Gray’s case, the Western civilization nurtured by Enlightenment ideas has degraded previously “innocent” non-Western cultures. Such a convenient generalization ignores at least 3,000 years of tradition of authoritarianism, absolutism, and imperialism in China.

Gray notices the influence of Western ideas in the fact that Chinese President Xi Jinping uses the analogy of the “Thucydides Trap” in his speeches – the idea that rising geopolitical powers tend to displace current powers from their dominant positions, thereby triggering competition between these powers and the new players – while striving to convince Western leaders of China’s peaceful ascent. In Gray’s view, the prevalence of the ideas of the German jurist, political scientist, and Nazi party member Carl Schmitt and the darling of neoconservatism Leo Strauss, which legitimate socialism with Chinese characteristics, is also significant. Conversely, I think that if there is a decline somewhere in the West, it is certainly in knowledge not only of its own past but also of other cultures; yet, unfortunately, this knowledge has not only failed to become a part of education, but has also not reached the heads of the political elite, even through the mouths of advisers. Invoking Thucydides is just a kind of reverence, because no one in the West will know about the comparisons from Chinese history taken from the first four centuries BC, a period that is not called the Warring States for nothing and ended with the founding of the first, Qin empire. Ancient texts, such as “Strategies of the Warring States” (“Zhanguoce”) or “Discourses of the States” (“Guoyu”), are filled with political schemes in a Machiavellian spirit, the goal of which is hegemony. China’s strategy is not a communist revolution across the whole world, but influence. It is not the transformation of a star into a supernova that consumes the entire planetary system in an explosion, but central influence – when all stars revolve around the Pole Star.

Speaking of the geopolitical shift and the subsequent confusion, in my opinion, everything is much simpler, namely, no one has any great clarity; the minds of policymakers, like any other, if not guided by a desire for liberating knowledge, contain a profound mess, a whirlpool of contradictions where the remains of the “supernova” explosions of fascism, nazism, and communism coexist, from which new planetary systems of political regimes are fashioned. And to justify them to themselves or others, references to the past are sought, connections are established, to justify what is always clear to everyone anyway, namely, that what is decisive is power and the technique of how it is implemented. Or, using the concepts of the ancient Chinese Legalist school, fajia: shi – power, force, situation, potential, tendency; shu – technique, method.

However, one might agree with Gray on one thing: if what he calls hyperliberalism continues in the West, namely, the deconstruction of education, calling for the leveling of everything in the past that does not conform to the new standards of gender, race, and sexual equality; admitting that mathematics, if not exactly an embodiment of the patriarchy, can at least be subjective; ignoring fundamental findings of biology; acknowledging that all worldviews have equal value and everything is based on “being good” – then it becomes clear who will prevail in the upcoming geopolitical competition.

In China, there are 100 million Communist Party members and at least half a billion others who do not think about the past in the Manichaean categories of the “woke” (woke), and a very small number worry about the millions of victims of the recent past; most do not even suspect they existed. They think approximately like this: we are the descendants of the Yellow Emperor, and we have a 5,000-year-old and excellent history; we will take (read: “also steal”) from you the methods (technologies and management strategies), which will only be a function, but the substance will remain the same – a unified, centralized state, an empire, which is currently embodied by the Communist Party and whose goal is the stability of the regime and the harmonized prosperity of the masses (one must remember the call of the “Tao Te Ching” to the ruler: “Keep the people’s hearts empty and their bellies full”), and the strategy is to be planned not within the framework of the next year’s budget, but decades ahead.

It is time to wake up, but not just to the realization that gender is subjective.
Article first published in the November 2021 issue of Rīgas Laiks magazine