Augustine’s World. By Robert D. Kaplan. Foreign Policy, December 3, 2013. Also here.
Kaplan:
What Late Antiquity says about the 21st
century and the Syrian crisis.
The Pax
Romana was a period of relative peace and stability throughout the Greater
Mediterranean. But history is often a matter of convulsions. In 200 A.D., the
Roman Empire still existed in the shadow of the recently deceased emperor and
pagan philosopher Marcus Aurelius – at a time when, according to Princeton
University historian Peter Brown, “a charmed circle of unquestioning
conservatives” gave order to the world. Over the next 500 years, however,
everything changed.
By 700
A.D., the Roman Empire had vanished from the Near East, Europe had become
Christian, and the Near East and most of North Africa had become Muslim. During
this era, poor, uneducated, and extremist Christian heretics and sectarians –
Donatists, rabble-rousing monks, and so on – had dispersed around the
Mediterranean basin, burning and terrorizing synagogues and pagan temples,
before they themselves were overtaken in North Africa by Arab armies
proselytizing a new, more austere religion. Meanwhile, Gothic tribes ravaged
Europe, and Asia Minor was on the brink of an epic conflict between Christians
who venerated icons and other holy images and those who glorified their
destruction. Brown, in the course of a lifetime of scholarly work, gave a name
to this pungent epoch in which the world gradually turned upside down: Late
Antiquity.
Late
Antiquity was dominated by vast civilizational changes, though many were not
marked at the time. Writing about the Middle Ages that followed, the
now-deceased Oxford University historian R.W. Southern noted, “This silence in
the great changes of history is something which meets us everywhere.” Late
Antiquity appears full of drama only because we know its beginning and end. But
on any given day during that half-millennium, the Mediterranean world might not
have seemed dramatic at all, and few could have said in what direction events
were moving.
Of
course, the historical clock moves a great deal faster today, and thousands
upon thousands of words – in these pages alone – have been written on the Arab
Spring, the military rise of China, the tumult in the European Union, a nuclear
Iran, and the chipping away of America’s post-Cold War hegemony. But can we
really discern any better than the denizens of Late Antiquity in what direction
events are moving?
The
erosion of America’s role as an organizing power, which heretofore relied on
public acquiescence and the inability of anyone else to challenge the status
quo, has disoriented elites in Washington and New York whose own professional
well-being is intimately connected with America’s proactive involvement abroad.
And few developments have been more evocative regarding the sentiment of
splendid isolation creeping once again through the American citizenry, or more
integral to understanding the weakening of the United States, than Syria.
Syria
is the Levant, the geographical core of Late Antiquity. And its disintegration,
like the crumbling of Libya, Yemen, and Iraq, along with the chronic unrest in
Tunisia and Egypt, signifies not the birth of freedom but the collapse of
central authority. Rome could not save North Africa, and the United States will
not save the Near East – for as the opinion polls demonstrate, Americans have
had enough of foreign military entanglements. Anarchy, perhaps followed by new
forms of hegemony, will be the result.
IF THE
LIFE OF ANY INDIVIDUAL ENCAPSULATES Late Antiquity, it is that of St.
Augustine, a Berber born in 354 in Thagaste, modern-day Souk Ahras, just over
the border from Tunisia inside Algeria. In drifting from pagan philosophy to
Manichaeism and finally to Christianity, which he subjected to the logic of
Plato and Cicero, St. Augustine straddled the worlds of classical Rome and the
Middle Ages. His favorite poem was Virgil’s Aeneid,
which celebrates the founding of Rome’s universal civilization. He railed
against the radical Donatists (Berber schismatics), whose heresy was
undermining the stability of the Maghreb, even as he saw the benefits in
traditional bonds like tribalism. And he died at age 76 in 430, in the midst of
the assault of Genseric’s Vandals on Africa Proconsularis, Rome’s first African
colony. His great work, The City of God,
writes scholar Garry Wills, sought to console Christians who were disoriented
by the loss of Rome as the organizing principle of the known world. Rome, St.
Augustine wrote, could never satisfy human hearts: Only the City of God could
do that. Thus, as Rome weakened, religiosity intensified.
We are
at the dawn of a new epoch that may well be as chaotic as that one and that may
come upon us more quickly because of the way the electronic and communications
revolutions, combined with a population boom, have compressed history.
Consider
that, in 1989, at the end of the Cold War, the United States was the unipolar
military and economic colossus, the triumphalist liberal democracy captured by
political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his article “The End of History?”
Since then, the European Union has expanded throughout Central and Eastern
Europe, promising an end to the furies of the continent’s past. Of course, the
Middle East, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian subcontinent, was benighted
and illiberal through the first years of the 21st century. But at least it was
quiescent, if only by its own dismal standards.
Then
the world broke apart. An attack on the American homeland by Muslim extremists
led to two large U.S. ground invasions in the Middle East, which, in turn,
helped set the region in motion. Decadent autocracies later crumbled and
conservative monarchies were forced to make unprecedented concessions, even if
President George W. Bush’s Freedom Agenda did not turn out as intended. North
Africa has since devolved into a borderless world of gangs, militias, tribes,
transnational terrorists, anti-terrorist expeditionary forces, and weak regimes
gripped in stasis. The adjacent Levant erupted into protracted low-intensity
war, with only two strong legal entities left between the easternmost edge of
the Mediterranean and the Central Asian plateau: a Jewish state and a Persian
one (thus the centrality of Iran arguing for a rapprochement with the United
States).
While
this has happened, the European Union has begun to seriously stagger. A debt
crisis, negative growth, and unseemly levels of unemployment have persisted for
years as the welfare state – that signature moral accomplishment of postwar
Europe’s politicians – becomes in large measure unaffordable. The result is
that the European Union itself, so dominant in the first two decades after the
fall of the Berlin Wall, has lost some of its geopolitical force in Central and
Eastern Europe, just as Russia has re-emerged as authoritarian and powerful,
thanks to hydrocarbon revenues. The map of Europe is changing from one uniform
color back to divergent shades, with national identities – once presumed to be
in retreat – undergoing a resurgence.
As for
China – that demographic and geographical behemoth that has become the engine
of world trade – after almost a third of a century of unprecedented growth, its
economy is finally slowing down. China’s economy and military are still growing
massively in absolute terms, but the future of the Middle Kingdom is less
certain than it was just a decade ago. With ethnic minorities and Han Chinese
both pining for more freedom amid fewer opportunities, it is possible that
China might one day face a variation on the Soviet Union’s fate.
Authority,
once so secure and conveniently apportioned across the globe, seems in the
process of disintegrating into small bits, with sects and heresies – Salafists,
cybercriminals, and so on – entering from the side doors. The United States
still reigns supreme economically and militarily, with immense stores of
natural resources. Nevertheless, American power is increasingly stymied by
these new and unpredictable forces. Sheer might – tanks and jet fighters,
nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers – seem increasingly like products of an
ever-receding Industrial Age. Yet the postmodern version of Late Antiquity has
just begun.
Amid
this panorama of global unraveling and new forms of sovereignty (a phenomenon that
St. Augustine experienced 1,600 years ago), a curious observation has been made
in the interstices: Tribes suddenly matter. Yes, tribes. They were the solution
to checking the violence and undermining the religious extremists with their
death cults in Iraq. They have been the dominating reality in Afghanistan, a
world of clans and khels (what the
Pashtuns call subclans). And when those reptilian regimes in North Africa and
the Near East foundered, it was not democracies that immediately emerged, but
tribes. This was particularly the case in Yemen, Libya, and Mali, but it was
also true to a surprising degree in more developed societies like Syria, where
beneath the carapace of sectarianism lay a grand
guignol of tribes and clans, too many of which were infused with the spirit
of holy war.
In St.
Augustine’s world of imperial collapse, these ancient ties offered some respite
from disorder because within the tribe there was hierarchy and organization in
abundance. But modernity was supposed to free us from these cloistered shackles
of kinship. Indeed, modernity, wrote Ernest Gellner, the late British-Czech
social anthropologist, means the rise of centralized authority and the
consequent decline of tribalism. But the opposite is presently occurring: The crumbling
of central authority throughout much of North Africa and the Near East (as well
as the rebirth of lumpen nationalism in parts of Europe) indicates that
modernity is but a passing phase. Today, tribes with four-wheel-drive vehicles,
satellite phones, plastic explosives, and shoulder-fired missiles help close
the distance between Late Antiquity and the early 21st century.
St.
Augustine’s North Africa, now with its degraded urban conurbations of cracked
brick and sheet metal, will see its population increase from 208 million to 316
million by 2050, putting severe pressure on both natural and man-made
resources, from water to government. As these millions move to the cities in
search of jobs and connections, the political order will assuredly shift. Whatever
arises by then may not be the states as they appear on today’s map. Indeed,
what we consider modernity itself may already be behind us. The headlines
between now and then will be loud and hysterical – as they are today in Syria –
even as the fundamental shifts will at first be obscure. For history is not
only about convulsions, but about the ground shifting slowly under our feet.
In The City of God, St. Augustine revealed
that it is the devout – those in search of grace – who have no reason to fear
the future. And as the tribes of old now slowly come undone in the unstoppable
meat grinder of developing-world urbanization, religion will be more necessary
than ever as a replacement. Alas, extremist Islam (as well as evangelical
Christianity and Orthodox Judaism in the West) may make perfect sense for our
age, even as its nemesis may not be democracy but new forms of military authority.
Late Antiquity is useful to the degree that it makes us humble about what
awaits us. But whatever comes next, the charmed circle of Western elites is
decidedly not in control.
