Anthony Mansueto

It has now been more than a year since the historic election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, and nearly a year since he took office. It is time once again to take stock of the current situation and see to what extent the claims we made then have turned out to be accurate and to what extent our estimate needs to be revised.

Our central claims were as follows:

First the context: The current economic crisis, we argued, the most serious since the 1970s, represents the end of the neoliberal regime of accumulation which has been dominant since 1978 and the beginning of something new --though just what remains far from clear. The effective stalemate in the jihadist war, coupled with the global ascendancy of China and, to a lesser extent India, represent an end to the post 9/11 conjuncture in which US grand strategy was defined in terms of a clash of civilizations (in reality a clash between the Technicist/Christian West and Dar-al-Islam) and a turn to engagement with the underlying challenges facing human civilizational generally and Western, capitalist modernity in particular: a deepening ecological crisis, the challenge of the “Asian regime of accumulation,” the challenges of governance in a globalized civilization, and a crisis of meaning as people lose faith in the modern ideal of divinization by means of scientific and technological progress and/or the construction of a collective political subject, but have failed to find a new ideal to replace it.

Within this context, we argued, Obama’s election was historic not only or even primarily because he is of African descent (though this certainly put to the lie the claim, widespread throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America, that the US is only or primarily a racist imperium) but because he is a member of the party of meaning and hope which is emerging to challenge the technocratic, fundamentalist, and nihilistic politics of late modernity and lead the way towards the construction a new civilization ordered towards seeking wisdom and ripening being. More precisely, we argued, Obama is a religious social liberal, as opposed to a social liberal who merely happens to also be religious, and thus brings a distinctly different vision to the task of global leadership. On the one hand, in addressing domestic challenges, we argued, he would rely on neither the market nor the state but on the organizations of civil society. On the other hand, globally, he would articulate a powerful new vision of what it means to be American rooted in Tocquevillian pluralism and aimed at creating a new kind of public arena constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value.

At the same time, we argued, Obama would be seriously constrained by the depth of the current economic crisis, by the political dynamics of the coalition which brought him to power, and by the fact that the party of meaning and hope has yet to articulate a compelling new civilizational ideal, much less translate such an ideal into a concrete political, economic, or technological program. The economic crisis, exacerbated by nearly a decade during which the United States compensated for the exhaustion of the last wave of real growth in productivity (the wave generated the application of new information technologies during the 1980s and 1990s) largely by borrowing money from the Chinese and other global lenders, leaves few attractive exits. This in turn makes strategic initiatives in the areas of climate and green technology, health care reform, infrastructure, education, research, and development more difficult. And the Democratic Party, while it has welcomed Obama as a campaign leader, remains fundamentally a coalition of investment bankers, information and technology sector capital, and, to a lesser extent, the research universities, attorneys, and growing public sector and declining industrial unions. While the Democrats are far more progressive than the Republican Party, which is a coalition of commercial banks, aerospace/defense, extractive and other backward industries, together with “left behind” middle strata and nonunionized workers, Obama is authentically constrained by his organized base. Finally, in the absence of a compelling alternative, public discourse continues to be dominated by religiously conservative populists, technicist neoliberals, and, to a lesser extent, nihilistic postmoderns.

Based on these factors, we characterized the election as opening up the possibility of a transition by reform in the context of a larger civilizational dynamic which inclines heavily towards transition by decadence and/or collapse.

What is the actual record? Our inclination is to regard our basic assessment last year as largely accurate, but to suggest that we significantly underestimated the impact of the constraints we identified on core strategic capacity building initiatives. The position of the United States in the world market offers few opportunities for renewed dynamic growth; a gradual decline in real wages and living standards to world market levels is the dominant tendency and the standard against which the economic performance of any government should be measured. The depth of the current crisis only exacerbates this situation, and means that attempts to address the ecological crisis and build strategic capacity are likely to increase rather than decrease short term pain.

Obama’s limitations on the home front have been exacerbated by a tendency to function as “organizer in chief” rather than as a true strategic leader, mobilizing his own troops largely to fine tune the legislative debate or to support packages negotiated with the Democratic leadership rather than to change the terms of the debate fundamentally. This has meant that initiatives relying on the institutions of civil society rather than either the market or the state have not been much in evidence.

On the other hand, we may have overestimated the impact of the current crisis on the Obama’s ability to has reposition the United States in the global system, and thus to significantly alter the geopolitical-theological dynamics of the world system. On this latter front his impact has been dramatic, an achievement reflected in his Nobel Prize this year.

The danger for Obama is that the political immaturity of the North American people, coupled with the responsiveness of the US political system to popular pressure, will deprive him of the support he needs to continue these vitally important global initiatives, making him, in effect, the American Gorbachev.

Our response to this situation should be twofold. On the one hand, we need to challenge Obama to exercise more dynamic leadership, explaining both to his own core constituency and to the people as a whole the realities of the current and long term ecological and economic situation and articulating clearly and powerfully his vision for the future of the United States and of the world. We should encourage him to outflank both parties by focusing on social-entrepreneurial development for marginalized communities and integrate the judicious use of state driven development where we know it works well --on large scale infrastructure and public works projects, for example-- with decentralist, nonbureaucratic solutions to social problems. This challenge to Obama should however, take place within the context of continued strong support. We must, among other things, refrain from demanding the political impossible, something which others on the left, including the religious left, especially the Network of Spiritual Progressives has done repeatedly. The 2008 general election was a repudiation of the neoliberal and especially the neoconservative right, not a victory for the left, which remains marginal in US politics. Obama was elected because progressive sectors of capital, especially investment bankers and information and high technology capital, supported by the people as a whole, were deeply concerned about the long term impact of rule by the rapacious sectors of capital which dominate the Republican Party --a rejection which intensified as the full dimensions of the economic crisis became apparent. While Obama went further than any previous US President since Lincoln (who built the Republican Party) in turning his Presidential campaign into an organizing drive, his own core constituency remains small and he governs as the leader of a rather amorphous minority tendency in his own coalition. We need to keep this in mind.

At the same time, we need to strengthen our own autonomous initiatives both because there is a real possibility that the potential represented by Obama’s election will be lost and that we will shortly be set back on a clear course towards transition through decadence or collapse and because any successful initiatives on Obama’s part will require significant “leavening” on our part in order to reach their full potential, supplying what only our vision can provide, i.e. a focus on

The Current Situation

The current economic crisis is, as we argued last year, at once an ordinary business cycle crisis and a crisis of the neoliberal regime of accumulation. Specifically, it is a business cycle crisis that, occurring when and how it did, it demonstrates that the larger neoliberal regime of accumulation has been spent.

Calling it current is actually a misnomer. It is, in fact, the economic crisis of nine years ago, returned at last to do its work. The neoliberal regime of accumulation which was put into place between 1978 and the mid-1990s --its many limitations notwithstanding-- perrmitted the implementation of a range of new information technologies which led to significant, if sometimes overestimated, gains in productivity. These gains were reflected, in turn, in the economic growth of the later 1980s and 1990s, gains which even led to a brief period of rising real wages. By the end of the 1990s, however, these gains were spent. The “natural” outcome would have been a crisis issuing in either a return to stagnation or a period in which the only available gains in productivity came from increased rates of exploitation, primarily by attacks on the welfare state in Europe and on asset-price supported high consumerism in the US. This natural outcome was avoided because the Chinese, among others, had both an interest in continuing to sell to the West, and the US in particular, and the capital to lend to us (at interest) to continue increasing our level of consumption far above that justified by levels of productivity. The availability of this “extra credit” made it possible for the West to continue “passing” its economic viability test for another eight years --something made all the easier by the decision of the supposedly accountability focused Bush government to throw in some extra points of its own, cutting taxes and increasing spending in the high technology/high value added defense/aerospace sectors. High finance, meanwhile, supposedly the arbiter of the economic viability of enterprises and economies alike, decided to grade on increasingly exotic curves on which loss meant gain and failure success.

In 2007-2008 this “settlement” finally crumbled, through a series of events which others have already analyzed in detail. The consensus solution, widely shared across almost the entire political spectrum in the West (excluding the voluntarist left and the rapacious right) centers on rebalancing exports and imports, production and consumption, coupled with some increased regulation of the financial sector. The West, and above all the United States needs to produce and export more; China and the rapidly developing East needs to reorient its economic model to focus more on domestic consumption. Implementation of this change at the level of fundamentals, in turn, requires reducing Western and especially US deficits and rebalancing exchange rates in a way which reflects the diminished role of the dollar --and the United States-- in the global economy while at the same time creating the conditions for rebuilding US strength.

This is not a realistic solution. On the one hand, unlike the 1980s and 1990s, the current decade has not witnessed the emergence of any new technologies on which the West enjoys even an initial monopoly or with respect to which it enjoys a significant comparative advantage which might lead to the emergence of dynamic new export activity. The two sectors most often cited --biotechnology and green technologies-- fail to fit the bill. The West may enjoy some head start and comparative advantage in biotechnology, but health care reform, which above all means massive reductions in cost and almost certainly in levels of care, will savage the largest market for these new technologies --the United States. “Green technology,” meanwhile, is a broad category. There are some technologies in which Europe enjoys an advantage; there are fewer in which this is true for the US. And many green technologies have low technological and low skill requirements. This means that the Western and especially the US comparative advantage will be limited. Some, such as the construction and installation of green energy facilities and the modification of buildings to make them more energy efficient, require onsite, in person production or service. These technologies are unlikely to be globally traded, providing at best some modest increase in the availability of low and medium skill jobs in otherwise stagnant economies.

This brings us to the second point. The US political system, while it may fall far short of authentic democracy in any of the higher senses of this term, is very sensitive to public opinion; the Chinese system is much less so. It is not clear how even visionary leadership will get US workers to produce more and consume less. It has, in the past --as in the prolonged period of stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s-- been possible to drive down wages and force productivity gains by increasing rates of exploitation or the implementation of new technologies. But this has almost always led to higher levels of consumption among the most privileged layers of the population.

The Chinese case is a bit more complicated. The current Communist Party leadership has argued for a shift in economic policy to focus more on domestic consumption generally and rural consumption in particular and undertook significant initiatives, even before the crisis, to move in this direction. Hu Jintao’s anointed successor, however, Xi Jinping, who was chosen over Hu’s favorite, represents the export-oriented elites of the coastal regions and is likely to turn China back towards the export driven strategy it pursued under Jiang Zemin (Hung 2009). Other East Asian economies have even less reason to turn away from their export-oriented strategies. Some, such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, already have significant domestic markets. They also have the example of Japan’s failed attempt to reorient its strategy to put more emphasis on domestic consumption. And Hong Kong and Singapore are too small to have significant domestic markets. These economies are likely to continue to reorder themselves, rather, as specialized suppliers of capital goods (in the case of Japan) and components (in the case of the other former “Asian Tigers”) in a global division of labor articulated around China’s role as a leading exporter of manufactured goods across the full value spectrum.

India is even more constrained. Its strategic focus on information and technology services means that its entry into the global market has been predicated on its ability to capitalize on its educated, English speaking upper middle strata. While access to this stratum of knowledge workers can be extended, India’s strategy provides far less in the way of “trickle down” for marginalized peasants and the unskilled urban masses than does China’s. In order to shift its priorities to focus more on production for domestic consumption, in other words, India would have to effectively abandon the economic strategy which has brought it such success in recent years. This seems unlikely when it can cope with questions of justice and social stability by means of increasing access to education and engaging in modest redistribution efforts instead.

Failing a strong, dynamic exit from the crisis, solutions to specific global challenges are likely to be weak and woefully inadequate. The following are but a few examples.

The Geopolitical-theological Situation

The current geopolitical-theological situation is defined, above all, by the following basic trends. First, the atmosphere of civilizational confrontation which defined the Bush years has given way to one of pragmatic positioning in the context of a real engagement with the global ecotechnological and political-economic challenges identified above. It should be acknowledged that a shift away from civilizational confrontation was already underway before Obama’s election and was reflected in a turn to a more sophisticated strategy of civilizational engagement on the part of the Bush government during its last two years --a turn which really did accompany Bush𔄩s “surge” in Iraq (whatever one may have thought of the war itself or Bush’s calendar for withdrawal). But Obama’s contribution on this front should not be underestimated. He is, first of all, less tied than Bush to the most backward, extractive sectors of the economy and is, as a result, less univocally committed to conserving unlimited US access to global petroleum reserves. This has both allowed him to fundamentally reorder US priorities in its relationships with Dar-al-Islam and to put the US in a position of real leadership on climate change and other critical issues. These specific initiatives are, furthermore, situated in the context of a distinctive vision of what it means to be American which, drawing on our ethnoreligious pluralism, positions the United States as something other than the “evil empire.”

Second, at the level of “fundamentals,” such as demographics, political economic capacity, and civilizational vigor, we are witnessing a relative decline of the West, especially Europe and to a lesser extent the United States, and the ascendancy of “emerging economies” such as Brazil, India, and China, the latter of which could gradually eclipse the US as global hegemon if only for reasons of size. Just how this war of position proceeds will depend on 1) the ability of the United States and Europe to revision the Western project and the extent to which Latin America, led at least in part by Brazil, defines its own civilizational path within a Western context, 2) the ability of China and India to articulate alternative visions for humanity‘s future and back them up with a credible strategy, and 3) the outcome of struggles in various regions which are either secondary players in the civilizational gran disputa (Russia and Dar-al-Islam) or battlegrounds between competing influences, whether themselves strong enough to emerge as significant players (Northeast and Southeast Asia) or largely resource and low technology/low wage entrepots (Africa).

These basic trends form the context in which the geopolitical-theological strategies of humanity’s principal civilizational centers are played out.

We have already suggested that one of Obama’s principal strengths is that he offers a powerful revisioning of what it means to be American. Specifically, drawing on the tradition of Tocquevillian pluralism, he has pointed the United States towards the ideal of a public arena which is neither secular nor confessional, but constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. This provides a powerful way to integrate into the broader humanistic tradition of rational autonomy and democratic citizenship immigrants --and ultimately whole peoples and civilizattions-- which themselves do not share that ideal, and to transform their dissent from something which is corrosive to freedom and democracy into a dynamic contribution to humanity’s ongoing disputation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. In this sense, Obama has done more than any President at least since Roosevelt and perhaps since Lincoln to advance the position of the United States as a global civilizational leader. The US once again not only stands for something powerful and compelling, but it can accommodate and thrive on, rather than being threatened by and seeking to crush, what others have to offer.

The United States also brings distinctive social capacities to the table in support of this vision, capacities which are rarely factored into discussions even of domestic policy, much less of geopolitics. This include the tradition of liberal education which, while clearly under attack, is stronger in the US than it is anywhere else in the world and which is increasingly being emulated elsewhere, especially in Asia. Widespread liberal education, which prepares people to make and evaluate arguments regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, is the precondition for the kind of public arena we are advocating. It also includes the rich networks of labor, business, civic, and religious organizations which characterize all but the most marginalized communities in the US. This kind of broad and deep civil society is also a condition for pluralistic democracy.

The difficulty, as we indicated in an earlier article, is that we are no longer able to pay for democracy, which requires very significant leisure, as well as advanced levels of literacy. The neoliberal regime of the past 30 years has increased both consumption expectations and the time spent working, with the result that there is less time left over for liberal education and civic engagement. We also face key challenges in the areas of energy and climate change, infrastructure, education, research, and development. These are the United State’s key strategic weaknesses in advancing its variant of the humanistic ideal and one which must be dealt with if we are to move forward.

Europe, meanwhile, is caught between two alternative strategies. The first, which we might characterize as technocratic, aims primarily to protect what Europe has by scaling back moderately the expenses of the welfare state, loosening labor markets, again very moderately, to encourage growth and innovation, and expanding the European Union and allowing continued, if limited and controlled, immigration to address the demographic imbalance and provide cheap labor. This approach is shared across a broad political spectrum from the social democratic left to the neoliberal center-right. The assumption here is that the European way of life is attractive enough at the material level that even if life becomes slightly less secure and demands slightly more effort, things can continue roughly as they have for the past 50 years, without any new or revitalized civilizational ideals, and that Old Europe (the ancient territories of the Holy Roman Empire) can assimilate and/or discipline the immigrant populations it requires in order survive.

The second strategy, associated above all with the Vatican and the right wing of the Christian Democratic movement, aims at restoring Europe’s Christian and especially Catholic identity as a way of restoring its civilizational dynamism and --by restoring traditional gender roles and sexual morality-- dramatically increasing the birth rate and thus resolve the demographic imbalance which makes the welfare state, among other things, increasingly untenable.

Latin America, finally, is not ordinarily taken much into account when considering the fate of the Western ideal. This is due, first of all, to the fact that until recently there were no Latin American countries with sufficient economic resources to position themselves as significant global players. Second, until recently, Latin American states were either US clients which really did lack autonomous significance or national liberation regimes which, for geopolitical-theological reasons, allied themselves with the Soviet Union or its successors in the anti-imperial bloc --Russia and Dar-al-Islam. Finally, the secularized liberal Protestant elites which dominate the United States have always been reluctant to regard Catholic civilization as fully Western (read modern, secular, humanistic or technicist, and capitalist) and have nothing but disdain for their own Pentecostal offspring, who have established more than a foothold in Latin America.

But all of this is changing. Most of the attention given to Latin American economies has focused on Brazil, now the world’s 8^th largest economy with a GDP of $1.6 trillion, using World Bank figures. But Mexico, which ranks 13^th is not all that far behind at 1.1 trillion. And Latin America as a whole has a gross regional product of $4.2 trillion, greater than that of Dar-al-Islam, which has a gross regional product of $3.8 trillion. Extractive and agroexport activities remain important, but industrial production is becoming more important. With leadership and a vision Latin America can emerge as a significant civilizational force.

Few Latin American states can now be regarded as merely US client states. And while the Chavez and to a lesser extent the Morales governments may understand and position themselves as primarily anti-imperial, their politics are in fact merely a reflection of a fumbling effort to spread the profits of fundamentally backward, extractive economies to the dispossessed without actually developing their capacities. Lula da Silva in Brazil, meanwhile, seems to be trying to carve out a middle road between the populist left and pro-imperial right.

Absolutely critical to Latin America’s future civilizational weight and positioning will be articulation of a civilizational ideal which is distinctive and faithful to both the Western and indigenous elements of its heritage. It has a great deal to work with in this regard. Jose Maria Vasconcellos’ vision of Mexicans as the raza cosmica, joining indigenous, European, African, and Asian elements, represents one powerful and compelling vision for humanity’s future, distinct from the Tocquevillian pluralism of the US but potentially in dialogue with it. The legacy of liberation theology remains powerful and prevents Latin America from becoming merely a strategic reserve for the Vatican’s conservative Catholic strategy for restoring European vitality and could become a powerful and badly needed voice for justice in humanity’s gran disputa. But both of these traditions emerged out of very different regional and global realities than exist today. It is time for something new. In the past Latin America spoke primarily to itself, organizing its people in the struggle for autonomy. Now it is time for Latin America to speak to the world.

China has been trying to actively project a profile of global civilizational --cultural as well as political-economic-- lleadership (this is what the Olympic liturgy of 08080 was all about), but is hampered by profound internal ambiguity. In many ways East Asia is the last bastion of positivistic high modernism. It has embraced high modern technology with a vengeance and expects great things in return --including a solution to the ecological problems modernity itself has created. On the other hand, China wants deeply to be China and is struggling to figure out where its deeper civilizational traditions fit into its high modern vision for the future. The same might be said of Korea, Japan, and Taiwan, though the specific traditions and development dynamics are rather different in each case. As a result, while China has made an active effort to project itself culturally as well as politically and economically on a global scale (witness the network of Confucius Institutes which it has funded) this effort lacks a focused content. No one engaging China from the outside is really clear what it means to be Chinese, in part because the Chinese themselves are unclear. What are the relative roles of the Confucian and Taoist traditions? Of Buddhism? Of Marxism and of high modernity in general? Unless China can answer these questions it will remain stronger economically than culturally and will be unsure of what is political aims really are.

India, following the collapse of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s unsuccessful attempt to transform Hinduism into a nationalist ideology, has reverted to its historic strategy, exercising global cultural influence through the attractive power of Buddhism and, to a lesser extent, Hinduism. The continuing expansion of Buddhist influence in the West, which we have no reason to believe will cease, means that like China and Southeast Asia, the West is gradually becoming “Sanskritized.” This strategy does not, on the other hand, translate easily into geopolitical-theoloigcal power, especially since India itself has never had a strong central state structure. Where China has the economic and political capacity to lead globally but is unsure where it wants to take the planet, India knows where it wants to take humanity, and has been leading the planet in that direction for 2500 years. But the destination has so little to do with building power that, in spite of its growing economic capacity, India remains an unlikely global hegemon.

Islam continues to expand as a cultural force but the various fundamentalist trends have failed to find a strategy which has really captured the imagination of the Muslim masses. The idea of a restored caliphate, in particular, while it retains salience due to its centrality in the doctrinal core of Islam, remains a fantasy which, however widely indulged, lacks a credible strategy to back it up. This is part of what fuels the rage of the jihadists, who cannot understand why so many Muslims could believe in this idea (they do) and be so little interested in acting on it (they are not). Attacks on Muslims by jihadists further alienate the Islamic public from the jihadist project. The alternative Shia vision of Islamic Republicanism has been profoundly damaged by the transformation of the Iranian state into a vehicle for the enrichment of otherwise marginalized urban men and by the inability of the Iranian leadership to articulate a credible strategy for building and projecting power, even at a regional level.

There are, to be sure, significant elements within Islam which are committed to something other than civilizational confrontation. The most important of these forces is centered in Turkey, and consists of an axis linking the ruling Justice and Development Party with the Sufi inspired Gulen movement. While the Justice and Development Party has advanced a kind of soft Ottoman Restorationist Project, it has also played a critical role in establish the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and in catalyzing civilizational dialogue generally. The Gulen movement, while far from modernizing or reformist by Western standards, understands itself to be such, which makes a difference, and it operates as an authentic spiritual force, teaching Sufi spirituality and engaging in real dialogue.

More profoundly transformational but less globally influential is the Ismaili movement and its principal civil society organization, the Aga Khan Foundation. Rooted in a rationalizing movement which identified the hidden content of Islam with Hellenic philosophy and long a vehicle for transmitting dynamic cultural influences in and out of Islam, the Ismailis are advancing an Islam predicated on sapiential literacy and freedom of conscience while engaging in highly creative development initiatives centered around nonsectarian education and leveraging cultural heritage resources in the key civilizational centers of the Islamic world. They are held back by the fact that their long history of persecution makes them reluctant to publicly engage religious questions --much less proselytize-- but they remain a powerful, largely untapped force for spiritual development and civilizational progress.

Russia, like Dar-al-Islam, remains wedded to an extractive economy. This has allowed it to recover remarkably from the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it has also led it to adopt an increasingly regressive global posture, a tendency which is already written to some extent into its strategic geography as a vulnerable continental power.

Like China, Russia remains caught between its embrace of Western high modernity and its desire to articulate a distinctive civilizational ideal. Unlike China, it appears to have embraced the worst of both the West (unfettered consumerism) and its own history (a tendency towards authoritarianism). Together with the republics of Central Asia and parts of Eastern Europe, it continues to suffer from the de-moralization, literal and figurative, which resulted from the collapse of the Soviet system. At the same time, we must remember that Russia is heir to both the tradition of Byzantine/Orthodox civilization and its own, distinctive model of state driven civilizational investment which, at the height of the Soviet period, produced the society with the highest number of philosophers per capita and claimed global leadership in many fields of science and technology, including mathematics, materials science and, arguably, cosmonautics. Whether or not Russia will be able to find its way back from its current focus on extractive economics and oligarchic consumerism remains to be seen. But there are extraordinary civilizational resources here and humanity will be much impoverished without them.

Southeast Asia is the site of an ongoing war of position between Buddhism and Islam. Indonesia, in particular, because of its underlying cultural diversity, offers the prospect of developing an Islam which is relatively open to pluralism and free of attempts at restorationism. This project will be furthered if Thailand, the strongest Buddhist country in Southeast Asia, can integrate its own Islamic minorities while respecting their autonomy.

Northeast Asia, as we noted, faces challenges similar to China’s. Here the contest is not between outside forces as such, but between a high modernity which the countries in question have all embraced and mastered, and indigenous traditions which remain very strong. No compelling synthesis has yet been worked out.

Africa is the site of conflicts between the Catholic Right and Dar-al-Islam. The former has --rather inexplicably-- made it a principal strategic reserve, perhaps largely because of strong patriarchal tendencies in the local culture and the weaker influence of liberation theology on the local church. China has also begun to expand its initiatives in the region, though these are mostly still at the economic level. Without new, dynamic leadership and a vision of what an African civilization or civilizations might look like in a post-Western, post-modern world, Africa is unlikely to play an autonomous role in the coming period.

Strategic Estimate and Strategic Direction

It is our expectation that most of the underlying trends which we have noted above will persist, creating an extraordinarily difficult environment both for those who seek to “salvage” modernity and those who hope to build something new. Specifically:

1. The ecological crisis will become a more and more significant factor in shaping the global situation. On the one hand, climate change will lead to increasingly catastrophic meteorological events, leading to a) significant threats to the viability of some coastal cities, b) severe droughts in inland areas, and c) fundamental changes to the Mediterranean/West Marine ecosystem in which Western Civilization first developed. On the other hand, depletion of petroleum resources will drive up prices and increase the leverage of petroleum producers --and thus of Russia, Dar-al-Islam, and the extractive economies of Latin America-- in spite of their failure to develop otherwise vibrant, diverse societies.

The critical unknown in this arena is, of course, whether or not humanity will develop real alternatives to petroleum and reduce carbon emissions and thus mitigate the depth of climate change and the global weight of reactionary, extractive economies. Whether or not it does, we can expect sharply higher energy prices, creating a massive constraint on economic growth on a global scale.

2. The global economy will experience a continued shift from the West towards emerging producers such as China, India, and Brazil (with Russia and the petroleum producing regions of Dar-al-Islam benefiting from mineral rents rather than real growth). This shift will be exacerbated by the failure of the West to discover new sources of economic growth. This new structure will, however, reinstate global under consumption tendencies as it becomes increasingly difficult for emerging economies to find new markets for their products. This tendency can be contained by expanding internal consumption and is not likely to be as catastrophic as it would be in the West because the state structures in question (especially in the case of China) are less vulnerable to expressions of popular discontent.

3. We can expect increasingly complex governance issues as the inadequacy of nation state system becomes more and more apparent, with metropolitan areas, civilizational domains, and the planet itself increasingly becoming the relevant political arenas. Democracy is simply not meaningful at the higher levels and the need to make unpopular decisions will favor systems which are able to resist popular discontent while avoiding unnecessary corruption, repression, etc. Nonstate actors, from transnational corporations and criminal syndicates through NGOs and global political religious movements, will continue to grow in importance, as will international political authorities. The authority of the latter, however, will be limited by their reliance on nation state sponsors and by the fact that they developed in order to manage the nation-state and inter-imperial conflicts of a century ago rather than the global governance needs of the present period.

4. At the cultural level we can expect deepening disorientation as faith in modernity fades. Left behind populations will continue to generate fundamentalisms and populisms. Cosmopolitan elites will continue “seeking.” Support will not crystallize behind an alternative to modernity until it can at least articulate a credible way of life appropriate to an era of civilizational crisis and none will become dominant (even in the sense of being one of a group of competing alternatives) until it can offer a strategy for addressing civilizational as well as existential challenges.

In the short run we can expect that:

1. Strategies for addressing the ecological crisis will both significantly increase energy costs and remain inadequate to the task of curbing climate change.

2. Economic policies will generate a recovery which institutionalizes lower real wages and lower consumption levels in the West, while continuing the secular shift in economic capacity to China, India, Brazil, and other emerging markets. Reforms at the level of regime and structure (such as health care reform in the US) will at least partly address issues such as (systemic) cost and access, but will be experienced as burdensome by the majority of the population, sapping support for further reform in other arenas.

3. Opposition parties generally (and most significantly the Republicans in the US and the Conservatives in the UK) will gain significantly but not overwhelmingly, not because of any ideological shift but because of perceived “poor performance” by governing parties.

4. We will see, similarly, some resurgence of culturally conservative populisms, both in the US and globally, as the failure to find solutions to the ecological crisis or economic contraction favors a turn towards otherworldliness and towards any ideology which seems to offer an alternative to discredited high modernity.

The strategy we articulated in previous assessments remains basically correct. We need to define a new civilizational ideal which re-engages the axial project. This is true because the axial project represents the main progressive dynamic of human civilization, recognizing the problematic character of meaning without abandoning the search for wisdom, extending the reach of reason without denying the existence of truths which transcend reason, extending the scope of participation in the human civilizational project without abandoning the quest for excellence, and valuing the human civilizational project without absolutizing it, and thus situating it in the context of a larger project of spiritual development. We need, further to give our emerging ideal real civilizational content in the form of 1) new synergistic and alchemical technologies which tap into and cultivate the latent potential of matter rather than combusting it in order to release energy and do the work of a project imposed from outside, 2) new economic structures which transcend the commodification of labor and capital while conserving room for individual and small group initiative, 3) build a new public arena constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value, and 4) articulate a new spirituality of meaning and self cultivation which is grounded in widespread sapiential literacy and which engages fundamental questions across as well as within traditions.

All of this, finally, requires political-theological leadership organizations of a new kind. Such organizations will, first of all, recognize humanity’s ordering towards transcendental ends, though they may understand those ends very differently. Second, they will recognize the contributions of both humanity’s ancient spiritual traditions (pre- and post-axial) and of modernity (both modern science and modern critical humanistic scholarship) and will, therefore, be located and act not so much within particular wisdom traditions as in relation to all of them, even when they advocate a specific political-theological position. Third, they will join goals of spiritual perfection and civilizational building, of personal regeneration and revolutionary transformation (though perhaps in varying measures). At least some will attempt to show what it means to seek perfection while living in the world, and will thus include not only as full members but among their highest level leaders individuals who are married as well as those who are single or celibate. While passionately advocating for their own perspectives, they will avoid political monopolism and hegemonism. Finally, they will conserve the best traditions of both religious orders and the communist movement: conscientious study, service to the common good, a careful balancing of unity and principle, close ties to the people, and the practice of criticism and self-criticism.

We would, however, like to highlight certain aspects of the strategy we are advocating and how they address the unique dynamics of the current situation (both period and conjuncture).

1. Among the things which we noted above regarding the current situation one of the most sobering is the fact that any credible solution to the ecological crisis is likely to involve massively increased energy costs and the fact that there are no obvious new technological levers for increasing productivity. This is because modern-industrial technology is largely spent. It is in this context that our challenge to develop new alchemical and synergistic technologies becomes not just a broad ethical or political imperative, but a condition for the resolution of existing social contradictions.

2. Similarly, the difficulty in finding new levers for increasing productivity suggests that engaging and cultivating the productivity of marginalized sectors of the population is not just a moral but an economic imperative. The Economist recently reported that the real rate of unemployment in the US is close to 18%. In other countries it is even higher. While some of these individuals will find meaningful employment even in a weak recovery, many will not. They are casualties of a regime of production and accumulation which has made their skills obsolete. Most economic development strategies --even those advanced by the left-- call for retraining these displaced workers (and, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, peasants) to fill positions at the low end of emerging industries. It occurs to no one that they might become entrepreneurs in their own right, developing and implementing new technologies, producing and marketing new goods and services in an emerging neoalchemical/synergistic economy.

3. Much the same is true of our call to create a public arena constituted by deliberation regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value. On the one hand, such an arena represents an extension of the democratic revolution, making democracy a debate about ends as well as means. On the other hand, it presupposes the cultivation of high level capacities --including authentic sapiential literacy-- by ordinary citizens, and the moderation of debate by “elders” who are themselves leading contributors to humanity’s gran disputa. Such deliberation must, furthermore, take place at the level of the basic unit of human civilization which is, as it always has been, the city and its hinterlands.

This is not just a moral imperative, but the only way to resolve a real social contradiction. On the one hand, the upward surge of democracy means that people are refusing to be excluded from political participation On the other hand, the challenges of ecological and civilizational crisis require difficult decisions which may well prove unpopular, especially to an uninformed citizenry. And the scale of global governance makes the whole concept of democratic participation problematic in a new way. By focusing democratic participation at the level of the polis, and engaging there both questions of ends and of means, under the leadership of authentic elders and teachers, we can gradually cultivate a global citizenry capable of making the difficult decisions which the future of humanity requires.

4. One of the principal checks on the development and implementation of civilizationally progressive solutions to the ecological, economic, and governance crises is the extraordinary resilience of fundamentalist and conservative/populist tendencies which serve as a strategic reserve for the most rapacious sectors of capital. This resilience lies in the fact that broad layers of the population have been left behind by globalization and the emergence of the information economy, an impasse which is, in turn, made more intractable by the difficulty involved in implementing civilizationally progressive policies.

Conversely, many of those who have not been left behind --the middle and upper strata of the humanistic and technical intelligentsia-- have settled into an attitude of genteel despair the high form of which is nihilistic postmodernism. This attitude expresses itself politically in the technocratic politics of Old Europe and similar moderate neoliberal tendencies in the US which pretend to take seriously global challenges but which are actually just trying to squeeze out another generation or two of prosperity from a dying civilization.

The solution to this impasse lies in the articulation of a vision which appeals to those who have been left behind, but which is, at the same time, civilizationally progressive. Our call for re-engaging the axial project very precisely fits this bill. On the one hand, the project is deeply rooted in humanity’s oldest spiritual traditions and, because it represents an alternative to modernity, offers an opening to the “left behind.” At the same time, we reject the spirituality of authority and submission characteristic of most fundamentalisms and conservative populisms, and give a central role to renewed civilizational progress in our vision of a mature spirituality, making it appealing to cosmopolitan elites. Our call for widespread sapiential literacy undercuts the “early literate” epistemic dynamic behind fundamentalisms by fulfilling the demand for autonomous wisdom at a higher level, as well as the dilletantism of the New Age. In short, we represent the way beyond fundamentalism and nihilism.

All four of these directions share a common requirement: that we expand access to liberal education. This is critically important because the ability to make and evaluate arguments regarding fundamental questions of meaning and value is the condition for progress in any post-axial spiritual discipline. It is the condition for life as a free human being and citizen. But liberal education is also essential if we are to unlock the creative potential of the marginalized and create new synergistic and alchemical technologies. While technical training can tell people how to do things, it is liberal education which generates new business ideas. And training within a technical discipline will not yield new technologies, much less an entirely new technological regime.

The struggle to advance liberal education must remain closely tied to the marginalized communities the creativity of which we are hoping to unlock and to the nonmarket, nonstate institutions which will carry out the work of the next stage in the human civilizational project.

* * *

The next year will likely be challenging as Barack Obama at once puts the United States in the forefront of efforts to solve critical global problems --and comes back with solutions which fall far short of what is needed to address the deepening civilizational crisis. It will be easy to conclude that the audacious hope represented by his election was an illusion after all. It will be easy to blame Obama for not being able to do the impossible. This is the moment at which our hope must ground fortitude --that strength in battle which does not veer from the correct path, dictated by a correct reading of reality, no matter how difficult that path becomes. This does not mean that we should not criticize Obama, challenging him to exercise more powerful and visionary leadership or to cut slightly different deals than he has thus far done. But we must hold fast to the hope that he represents, which offers the only real possibility that the West will lead, rather than obstruct, efforts to chart the next steps in the human civilizational project. And we must build our own capacities so that we can bring to the table a vision backed by a strategy backed by an organization that can carry forward what he has begun. Otherwise he will be the American Gorbachev. One shudders at the thought of an American Yeltsin!

It is in this season of darkness that humanity’s great spiritual traditions, having celebrated their festivals of light, begin the long wait for spring. Let that be a reminder to us as we realize just how deeply humanity has entered the darkness and let this time of dark learning also be one during which we kindle the fires of a great new light. Being is; darkness cannot prevail.