Anglo Modernity Reaching Its Limits
Q: Why is Anglo modernity reaching its limits? Why won't it continue to just "take up" the anti-Anglo elements?
A: A good question. Maybe it can continue indefinitely, especially if no alternative emerges — I don't see a "New World Order" in China. But we could say it's becoming progressively less generative, working increasingly through sabotage and coercion, with much more limited technological advancements or improvements in living conditions — and even the improvements tend to be disputed or ambiguous, as with developments in medicine. There were a lot of people who thought "capitalism" (i.e., Anglo-modernity) was running out of steam in the 30s, and they may have been right, but WW2 gave it a jump start. That's why the hypothesis that Trump wants to wreck China is credible — maybe that's the only playbook available, even for him. Either way, Trump will put the "Anglo modernity is reaching its limits" hypothesis to the test. That's why it's an interesting framing now.
OK, but that still doesn't quite answer your question — what are its intrinsic limits? If it's no longer generative, why not? Whatever originally made it generative, why does it no longer do so? Here the Marxist analyses of capitalism might have something to add: one Marxist argument was that capitalism needed to continue "feeding" on non-capitalist social forms as a source of value it couldn't create within itself. Maybe once enough of the world became Angloized, the Anglo world would have to re-Angloize itself, so to speak, and that's much harder. You run out of "closed" worlds to "open up." A minor example is what happens when you build a social order on overcoming racism — once all the racism, as "racism" was originally defined, has been eliminated, you have to keep finding new forms of it. There's a law of diminishing returns here — at a certain point, "racism" is so prevalent, and so hidden and permeating every act, and therefore the hunt for it so intense, that society becomes too dysfunctional to continue.
Q: I wonder if Christianity and the post-sacrificial social order it inaugurated is another important dimension here — a kind of "conversion engine" that spiritually motivates the social order to expand and "open up" closed or pagan worlds. It might also provide a model for thinking about Girard's "ultra-Christianity" and Gans's "victimary" as connected to this law of diminishing returns. When you're running out of "material for conversion," the engine goes haywire and begins to eat itself alive.
A: I think I pretty much agree with Girard on the historically transformative role of Christianity. That's an important connection — the opening up of pagan worlds, getting replicated over and over. We really want a new engine, but in the meantime we're trying to preserve the implications of the holiness of the individual and the resistance to scapegoating.
The habit of thinking in terms of social forms getting "exhausted" owes a lot to Marxism, and its notion that capitalism would ultimately be destroyed through its "contradictions." Bichler and Nitzan are more sober — they don't think there's any reason capitalism can't continue indefinitely. They do think things are likely to get worse now, but I'm not sure whether they see that as a permanent development and if so, why.
But of course we're not restricting our analysis to "capitalism" — capitalism precedes Anglo modernity (in Italy and the Netherlands, for example) but it's not separable from the Anglo credit system. Capitalism is just one way of thinking in terms of probability, and that's really the thread to follow. Thinking probabilistically is the most radical and the most normal way of processing reality — probabilistic thinking draws upon materials already provided in language but it also transforms language. It spreads and converts everything it touches but without going "viral." It does open everything up but without always veering towards deposing the tyrant — it stays tough-minded and weighs all claims in terms of the implications for institutions of deferral. The insurance company is still the best model. And this way of thinking, if pursued consistently, will still come across as inhuman to the vast majority of humanity.
Thinking probabilistically would also include assigning probabilities to knowing a particular thing. And I always insist it must be done within language — it has to be workable on any scene. Allowing certain kinds of possibilities to take shape and become more or less probable depending upon whether one weighs down on the side of them happening is part of it. It is, as you say, more a question of producing futures rather than trying to be right about a particular prediction. It's maintaining presence.
(By the way, I like the word "likely" for this approach — it means, basically, "probable," while drawing upon "like" (as in similar) and "like" (as in desire). Those two meanings of "like" must themselves be related. "Like," according to the online etymological dictionary, comes from the word for "same," which means it emerges from introducing a bit of difference into sameness. The verb, I see, comes from the same root, and originally meant something like "to suit." But this is interesting: "like" and "dislike" originally were impersonal and the liking flowed the other way — "The music likes you not" [The Two Gentlemen of Verona]. So, saying something is not suited to you got reversed into something like wanting it to be suited to you.)