Article 72 – New World: Values over Ideology
Ongoing Issues of Concern in the New Multipolar World Order
This Article continues from yesterday’s ‘Article 71 – New World: A Different Take on Diversity.’ It will also take the form of a numbered list and attempt to keep things simple. I don’t believe yesterday’s Article quite succeeded on that front, but these are somewhat complex topics which the author is not entirely familiar with to start with, on top which we are all dealing with emerging and not yet fully terraformed, geopolitical landscapes.
First, I highly recommend Matthew Ehret’s: “BRICS+: Cure for Intellectual Toxicity of Cultural Relativism.” He claims that we are entering a new period of cross-cultural ferment which will engender a global, civilizational Renaissance, and goes back in history to show how this sort of dynamic has unfolded in the past. It’s shorter and more clear than most of his pieces; highly recommended.
Second, I also recommend karlof1’s: “Xi and China at the BRICS Summit.” It provides both analysis, overview and many good excerpts from recent speeches.
1. The New World Order is already here:
Yes, we have a long way to go, but since that is the rest of History, we might as well say that we have already passed the starting line. From now on, any future Articles about geopolitics will take this as a given. Consider: the current state of Geopolitical Multipolarity features an emerging BRICs+ bloc and the Western ‘Hegemonic’ bloc. As such it is already Multipolar in that there are at least two poles. More realistically, we could say there are many poles, such as: The Hegemonic Bloc, Brazil, South Africa+, Iran+, Russia+, India and China. (Perhaps later we shall see Latin America, Africa, Malaysia-Indonesia, and even later if the West joins in, then Australia-New Zealand, Canada, US and UK, each as separate, sovereign nations or blocs.)
2. Meanwhile, the Old Hegemonic Order isn’t dead yet:
There is not yet one unified Multipolar Order, but rather a global, multipolar struggle to establish what sort of New Order, if any, there will be. Quite possibly the Hegemon will succeed in ensuring there isn’t a single, agreed-upon Way; in which case we will simply have a bifurcated Order which will still, whether the Hegemon admits or not, indeed be Multipolar. (So Point 1 holds!)
3. Shared Values not Concept-based Ideologies:
My Article yesterday floated the notion that the Multipolar World needs some sort of Unity principle so that all members feel parts of the same Whole. This is how reality works on an ontological level so any new Order should reflect that else find itself unbalanced by ideology, which have written about long ago on this blog. However, the Article’s suggestion to use traditional China’s fusion of Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism as a unifying Value System naturally would not appeal to individuals and nations with strong alternative traditions, such as Christianity and Islam; so clearly that suggestion falls short, though the reason behind making it has merit.
4. Xi’s Values speech:
On that topic, here is a paragraph from Xi’s seminal Global Civilizational Initiative speech in March 2023:
Shared human values are the basis of inter-civilization exchanges and development
Human civilizations have different development trajectories, but they have the same core values, which are the spiritual bonds that connect civilizations, countries, and nations, as well as the underlying force behind the progress of humankind. President Xi called for the promotion of shared human values of peace, development, fairness, justice, democracy, and freedom in 2015. They are the consensus of various civilizations and reflect universally recognized values, and they provide the impetus for building a global community of shared future.
While championing these common values, we also need to appreciate their connotations for other civilizations and respect the approaches that other countries and peoples adopt to realize them. With this in mind, we should seek common ground while putting aside differences, oppose uniting only with like-minded people while alienating those with different views, and refrain from imposing our own values and models on others and from ideological aggression. These points embody the meaning and the fundamental requirements of our shared human values. Only by upholding openness, inclusiveness, and mutual respect can these values be truly upheld and an even closer global community of shared future be built.
These are good points and well made. And yet – at least to me – they have an amorphous quality, like trying to hold water in a sieve. More on that later.
5. The need for a Multipolar Fourth Estate:
in a comment in response to karlof1’s substack linked above:
It occurred to me as I got to the end of your piece whilst reflecting yet again on my reluctance to jump on board enthusiastically, that what is missing is the Fourth Branch principle, namely high quality critique. I only see Xi's version of China and Chinese political philosophy; it is extremely one-sided; I never read informed criticism. I don't know if this is because it is discouraged in China or because I simply don't know where to look, but so it is. All individuals and nations have a Dark Side. We may wish to present only the virtuous aspects of our character to others but we all, without exception, have dark sides within. The wise have come to terms with them, not by denial or suppression, but by holding to deeper wisdom which includes, but does not indulge, such tendencies and perspectives. China has a dark side; XI Jinping Thought has a dark side. Naturally, he is not going to reveal what it is, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. That is the job of a Fourth Estate which I am not so sure will exist in our new Multipolar World Order. I am not saying everything should be the same as in the West, but along with some truly terrible elements, the Western way is still the fundamental model of development being followed in many regards because it is not all bad. (Chinese police uniforms, for example, look the same as pretty much all others world wide. Modern dress in China comes from the Western style of last century - pants, shirts, suits, ties etc., not mandarin-style robes which are far more elegant and comfortable.) China has taken the Western ball and is running with it, arguably doing a better job (we could never run countries with over a billion people in them!!), but that doesn't mean that they are getting everything right. The lack of well-informed critique is, I think, a shortcoming. It allows problems to be seen and dealt with rather than being hidden or allowed to fester for long periods of time before emerging as Stage Four illnesses bringing down the entire State.
6. Shared Values, Yin and Yang:
That which is shared perhaps should remain unspoken, somewhat formless except in vague, finger-painted ways such as Xi expresses. Values are not material substances. We can use words to point towards them but never entirely contain them either. Furthermore, values are always transmitted and experienced through the medium of culture which varies from civilization to civilization, nation to nation, even family to family; as such they are highly subjective and thus invisible to the materialist perspective. They are seminal skeins in the essential but non-material tartan of the living tapestry of our individual and collective life journeys.
If Yang comprises the outer visible forms of any given society, such as its human being members, governance systems, architecture, agriculture, financial systems and so forth, perhaps the Yin is the Value systems animating all that from within, but which is essentially formless in the same way that although for us as individuals the outer world appears as solid, real and self-existing but the inner world of thoughts, feelings and perceptions lacks any materiality such as that measured by definable place or shape since our experience, such as it is, lacks both even though it has no end of particularities, textures, layers, levels, subtlety, artistry and so forth.
So maybe my desire to see a shared Value System, expressed as a Suggestion in Article 71, is begging for ideological corruption and should be discarded. Let them be formless!
7. Material progress alone falls short as a unifying principle or Value:
This is the theme of late animating this series of Articles. If coming from a materialist mindset, the drive for ‘modernization’ as an end in itself, though worthy in many obvious regards, yet could be another systemic corruption trap, especially once relative prosperity has been achieved, like in the West once the traumas of the Great War from 1913 – 1948 was processed. Yes, Western nations exploited the Rest of the World in selfish, ‘colonialist’ ways, and yes in so doing they started immoral, cruel wars, but within Europe and the US itself, peace and plenty abounded and almost all citizens were lifted out of poverty and ended up living in considerable comfort.
But look where we are today: blighted with systemic corruption from a leadership class an overly dumbed-down, complacent population has allowed to take parasitical root in its midst and now threatens to turn all that prosperity – most of which of course earned by the labour of their own working classes who are now being thrown to the wolves – into some sort of ghastly, and perhaps unavoidable, totalitarian dystopia.
If I am right that much of this is due to an over-reliance on the soul-deadening mentality that is reductionist materialism, that secular view of ‘objective reality’ which reduces all life to soulless mechanical meaninglessness, then we must do what we can to guard against this bright new Multipolar World Order falling into the same political and ontological abyss.
Later addition: have pasted in a pdf file of an article about some of the Value principles China is pushing. It shows, among other things, how Confucian precepts were used in the composition of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
This is a thoughtful, impressive piece. Bravo. I think, though, that your feeling that China lacks a proper Fourth Estate may reflect a Western bias about what that should look like. After all, when the Chinese describe their polity it is always followed by the phrase "with Chinese characteristics." So it doesn't look like what we think of as an institutional base of critique. But what I've noticed is that it has, instead, a very effective and sophisticated system of communication between the center and the fringe. That has always been a component of the successful dynasties.
For example, If some mandarin tries to take advantage of their position to the detriment of the people, word has a way of filtering back from the lowest levels to the Court. And said official was/is likely to use their head.