My podcast this week talks about India’s push to reform the United Nations Security Council, and its growing soft power, based not in imitating the West but the deep roots of its own cultural traditions of responsible statecraft.
India is a graceful, if forceful, entrant to the unruly multipolar world’s main stage. The China and USA rivalry, we all understand. The pantomime of Russian evil, we have all grown too tired of. Old, complacement Europe and tired, delusional Britain, we know too well. And little, old Australia looks like a little country lost.
But over the last week I have been reflecting on my general theme that the world is going through a crisis it has not seen for 100 years. This view is supported by comments by Xi JinPing in Moscow after his summit meeting in March 2023 with Vladimir Putin. A strong case can be made in support of the idea, and I articulated some of the similarities between the world crisis of 1911-18+ and the world crisis of 2020-2023+ in my YouTube livestream this week that I have also released as some separate videos.
But one of my principles of method (to be grandiose), or my gardener’s rule of thumb (to be humble) is not to shackle my mind with single, certain narratives of the past, of History. History is complex enough to sustain a 1001 nights of storytelling about its past and future. We can always renew our story-telling tomorrow night with new glimpses, memories, archetypes, characters, documents and plots. We might plot the story of the World Crisis one night as a tragedy, in which an unhappy American Empire, led by a vengeful, demented Captain Ahab destroys itself in its eternal search for the unattainable. Then the next night, we might tell a lighter comedy of a pluripotent, symphony of civilizations that offers all the cultured peoples of the world a night of fine music, splendid conversation and true culture. What will the story of the World Crisis be, tomorrow?
Since April 2021 on the podcast I have been exploring a general thesis about today’s greatest World Crisis of 100 years. That thesis has been that four great motions are changing the force field of the world crisis, and giving birth to a new kind of multipolar world. Empires or Great States are in rivalry, with America declining and China rising. Political institutions and cultures are disordered, most acutely in the Atlantic states; so much so that we may have entered something I called a post-democratic society. Societies are fragmented, driven by profound changes that cannot be readily manipulated, such as population ageing, education patterns, digital technology and wider global distributions of wealth. Finally, the cultures of “the West” are in decay, although at the same time a centuries long process of convergence on Anglo-American culture or Western civilization, is going into reverse. Then, of course, the four horsemen of catastrophic contingency ride in: climate, disease, finance and war.
But it might be that I have it wrong. It is certainly the case that there are certain tropes, habits of thought, and patterns of metahistory with which I emplot this story. It is good to change that up, and to look with truly open eyes, neither shaded by gloom nor pinked up with optimism, on how events might unfold. None of us are experts in the future after all.
So I have decided to write a series of posts on my substack exploring theses on the world crisis. You can join my free weekly newsletter at jeffrich.substack.com, and I would encourage all readers of the blog to do so. You can also support me by upgrading to a paid subscription that is about $10 AUD per month.
The posts on the theses on the world crisis will be for my paid subscribers only.
They will reflect on my current thoughts on how to tell the story of today’s world crisis. On Monday the series will begin with some regathered reflections on the meaning of “world crisis” and theses on the world crisis, taken from my forthcoming book, 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. If you would like to go on this journey of discovery into the centre of the world crisis with me please consider signing up to my newsletter and upgrading to a paid subscription.
