In his recent article “The new Multipolar Order, Heptarchy and its Meanings”, published by the excellent The Postil Magazine, the great Russian geopolitical philosopher Alexander Dugin articulated the deeper origins of the Great Divide in world affairs triggered about 500 years ago by the Discovery Age which coincided, I believe not coincidentally, with the Chinese mapping of the entire world thanks to Admiral He’s epic voyages in the 1420’s once they cracked how to calculate longitude at sea. Soon thereafter, the Mandarins finagled a compliant Emperor into a draconian Maritime Ban altering world trade flows for centuries which in turn created an opening for the emerging West to inject their less developed mores into the international arena. And here we are.
On the outer level, this involved ships making long passages past areas like South of the Canary Islands, taboo for Western mariners for centuries. But now they knew there were destinations beyond their previous ken and, no less importantly, that they could later find their way home. This naturally opened up avenues for trade - and excessive exploitation - which over time has evolved into the current World Order.
On the inner level, this involved a mindset known loosely as ‘modernism.’ Dugin succinctly sets the stage for our contemplation:
Modern Times: The Invention of Progress
This is where the most interesting part begins. The Western European New Age (Modernity) brought with it an idea completely alien to all these civilizations, including the Catholic-Christian one—the idea of linear time and the progressive development of mankind (later this was formalized into the idea of progress). Those who adopted this attitude began to operate with the fundamental ideas that the “old,” “ancient,” and “traditional” are obviously worse, more primitive, and coarser than the “new,” “progressive,” and “modern.” Moreover, linear progress dogmatically asserted that the new removes the old, overcomes and surpasses it in all parameters. In other words, the new replaces the old, abolishes it, takes its place. This negates the dimension of eternity, which is at the heart of all religions and all traditional civilizations and constitutes their sacred core.
The idea of linear progress simultaneously redefined all forms of traditional society (including the traditional society of Western Europe). Thus, the “ancient international system,” or the “first nomos of the Earth,” came to be regarded collectively as the past, which should be replaced by the present on the road to the future. At the same time, the model of post-traditional, post-Catholic (partly Protestant, partly materialistic—atheistic in accordance with the paradigm of the natural-scientific worldview) European society was taken as the present (contemporary, Modern). In Western Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea of a unified civilization (civilization in the singular), which would embody in itself the destiny of all mankind, was first conceived. This destiny consisted in the overcoming of tradition and traditional values; and thus, it swept away the very foundation of the sacred civilizations that existed in that period. They meant nothing more than backwardness (from the modern West), a set of prejudices and false idols.
I recommend reading the entire article; not long but travels far.
However, at this point I want to jump Dugin’s ship and rather journey on my own, which is informed by the classical Buddhist tradition essentially via the sitting practice of basic meditation. There is no need to describe it or provide instruction rather to mention some of its effects as they relate to these geopolitical or societal dynamics. Simply put, Buddhist-style meditation – when well taught and practiced over many years – engenders a heightened but natural sense of what is often called ‘Nowness’. This involves a sense of presence, which is awareness of the atmosphere in which experience unfolds, so it possesses both an inner and outer aspect (basically joining objective and subjective).
This sense of Nowness is deliberately fostered in many cultures, not only those with formal meditation traditions, albeit the latter did tend to shape various important pre-modern civilizations especially in India and the Far East around China. All traditional societies, from tribal to established civilizational, share this capacity for experiencing nowness-presence, usually via Religious or Royal Court ritual conduct. Each presents a situation of heightened awareness where every moment counts. Such ritualized drama forces all participating to pay attention to every arising detail, thus heightening the vivid sense of presence, or atmosphere, collectively dwelling forever and only in the luminous, immanent Present. Such environments stop time – which is the experiential threshold of the ‘eternity’ Dugin mentioned above.
In the old World, indeed since before the Stone Age, one could – and many did – travel from Lisbon to Beijing. In Christian Europe one would experience Sacred Nowness in the Court of a King, at a High Mass or in a small, rural chapel. Then one could do the same thing in Third Rome Moscow albeit in very different Byzantine Empire style. Or in the Courts and mosques of various Kings in Turkey, Arabia and Persia. Or in the caves of meditating yogis, or ‘mystics’, in the high Himalayan mountains around Ur, Swat, Bhutan and Nepal. Or in the various ashrams of spiritual communities or Courts of hundreds of Kings in India, then also in all countries further East such as Siam, Burma, Sumatra, China, Korea and Japan where the dress, customs, architecture, rituals and monarchical traditions all communicated sacred perception, sacred atmospheres, in so many different ways, from the mind-blowing, intimidating formality of an Emperor’s Court, where life and death decisions were made every hour, to a humble country tea-house presided over by a simple lay practitioner manifesting the exquisitely graceful simplicity of Japanese Zen meditation in action which permeated even exceptional rituals such as formal suicide preceded by a ‘death poem’. And of course such lineages of sacred awareness manifested beyond special moments or deliberate ritual within organized society to almost everything everywhere: the way a woman dresses or moves her hands whilst talking; the way a Knight’s armor glistens and the polished upstanding handle of his sword wakes the observer up, communicating a sense of power, majesty, chivalry and courage; the way a well-made meal glistens on the plate; the rustle of discrete petticoats under the table; the thrill of naked birdsong at dawn; the first pink blush on nearby snow-capped mountain peaks. This is the marvellous world we have tended to deny in our zeal to ‘modernize’.
Along with deliberate ritual, of course the experience of Nowness, or Sacredness, happens naturally whenever there is a heightened sense of being in the present, for example at births, deaths, weddings, funerals, great sporting events, sudden catastrophes, seeming miracles, declarations of War, declarations of Peace, Moon Landings, Presidential Elections (rarely!) and so on. Any time a moment becomes impactful, charged or deeply meaningful one is thrust into a heightened sense of presence-with-awareness connecting the Heart to experience on the spot - for Nowness is mainly experienced in Heart-Mind not Head-Mind. Moreover, though increasingly rare in our modernist world, sacredness is a flavor of experience to which all human beings are naturally attracted and spontaneously reverent.
So from East to West in the ancient, traditional world one could encounter sacred atmospheres whose different cultural flavors are generally the basis of today’s main civilizations in the emerging ‘multipolar world order’; but the key point here is the difference between ‘ancient-traditional-sacred’ and ‘modern-progressive-secular.’
Let us continue with Dugin, first repeating some of his introductory section above:
In Western Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the idea of a unified civilization (civilization in the singular), which would embody in itself the destiny of all mankind, was first conceived. This destiny consisted in the overcoming of tradition and traditional values; and thus, it swept away the very foundation of the sacred civilizations that existed in that period. They meant nothing more than backwardness (from the modern West), a set of prejudices and false idols.
Now from later on, after describing phases of ‘nomos’ (Order) through history up to the current era:
The Unipolar Moment
The collapse of the socialist camp, the Warsaw Pact and the end of the USSR led to the end of the bipolar world order, based on the ideological principle of capitalism versus socialism. Socialism lost, the USSR capitulated and collapsed—and moreover, recognized and accepted the ideology of the enemy. Hence the Russian Federation, built on the basis of liberal-capitalist norms. Together with socialism and the USSR, Russia lost its sovereignty.
This is how the “fourth nomos of the Earth” began to take shape, which Carl Schmitt himself did not live to see, but whose probability he foresaw. Barry Buzan defined it as a “postmodern international system.” By all accounts, this new model of international relations and the emerging system of international law should have consolidated the established unipolarity. Of the two poles, only one—the liberal one—remained. Henceforth, all states, peoples and societies were obliged to accept the only ideological model—the liberal one.
At this time, theories that consolidated unipolarity emerged. An example of this is Robert Gilpin’s “stable hegemony theory.” Charles Krauthammer cautiously called it a “unipolar moment,” i.e., a temporary situational state of world politics, and Francis Fukuyama confidently proclaimed the “end of history,” i.e., the irreversible and final triumph of liberal democracy; that is, the modern West, on a global scale.
At the political level, this was reflected in Senator John McCain’s call for the creation of a new international organization—the League of Democracies—to replace the irrelevant UN, which would explicitly recognize the complete and total hegemony of the liberal West and the supremacy of the United States on a global scale.
Objections to this mood of radical transition to a unipolar-globalist-postmodern international system were raised by Samuel Huntington, who rather unexpectedly for a culture based on Modernity and linear progress, on the acceptance of the universalism of Western civilization, and at its apogee, suddenly suggested that after the end of the bi-polar world there will be not the end of history (i.e., the complete triumph of liberal capitalism on a planetary scale), but the resurfacing of ancient civilizations. Huntington decoded postmodernity as the end of the Modern and a return to the Premodern, i.e., to the international system that existed before the age of the Great Discoveries (i.e., before the planetary colonization of the world and the beginning of the New Age). Thus, he proclaimed the “return of civilizations;” that is, the new emergence of those forces that dominated the “first nomos of the Earth”—the “antique-classical international system.”
In other words, Huntington predicted multipolarity and a completely new interpretation of postmodernism in International Relations—not total liberalism, but on the contrary, a return to the sovereignty of civilizational “large spaces” on the basis of a special culture and religion. As will become clear in the future, Huntington was absolutely right, while Fukuyama and the proponents of unipolarity were somewhat hasty.
The Power of Mindset
So the Hegemon, which anti-Hegemonic voices decry in both elite cocktail circuits and ill-mannered internet commentariat, is not so much a racial characteristic of evil White Anglo-Saxons or Jewish world-conquering Secret Society conspirators, but rather a mindset, a way of experiencing reality. To a fearful person in the forest at night, all sounds terrify, all movements are made by a lurking monster. Similarly, to the materialist mindset all experience evidences a dead, mechanical, objective world, a world in which the different atmospheres each and every person, place or thing offers up is always and only the same ‘objective reality’. Some scientists dissect corpses to study Life; such a profoundly flawed approach is doomed to failure because its underlying mindset regards all living processes as comprised of no more than unliving physical component parts. It essentially presupposes a universe of zombies, basically - machines. Indeed it is probably no coincidence that this reality-as-machine worldview spawned such a plethora of mechanical and technological advances. That mindset brought such forms into manifest reality.
So the oft decried Hegemony is the inevitable progeny of this world view, or mindset, which regards all realities as fundamentally the same reality, and also dead. Some describe Hegemony as originating from a desire to plunder, to become rich, to exert control. Though not inaccurate it is incomplete for all such are symptoms not causes, all are streams flowing from the same river, which is the reductionist materialist, or secular, mindset which sees all realities as part of the same Reality and which therefore does not recognize Dugin’s ‘civilizational “large spaces”’ which are living, valuable and unique, vivid, presence-rich cultural atmospheres encountered in nations, chapels, Cathedrals and Courts.
Here Dugin describes the transition from the Old Order to the Modern:
The Second Nomos of the Earth
Thus began the construction of the “global international system” (according to Barry Buzan) or the “second nomos of the Earth” (according to Carl Schmitt).
Now the West began to transform itself and, in parallel, to influence the zones of other civilizations more and more actively. In Western Europe itself there was a rapid process of destruction of sacral foundations of its own culture, dismantling of Papal influence (especially through the Reformation), formation of European nations on the basis of sovereignty (previously only the Papal See and partly the Western European Emperor were considered sovereign), breaking and moving to the periphery of theological dogmatics and transitioning to natural sciences on the basis of materialism and atheism. European culture was demi-devived, de-Christianized and universalized.
In parallel, the colonization of other civilizations—the American continent, Africa, Asia—was in full swing. And even those empires that resisted direct occupation—Chinese, Russian, Iranian and Ottoman—and maintained their independence, were subjected to cultural colonization, gradually absorbing the attitudes of Western European Modernity to the detriment of their own sacred traditional values.
This last paragraph is of key importance because the degree to which the Rest of the World – especially China – has absorbed the modern materialist mindset is the degree to which multipolarity will fail because each pole or cultural zone therein will just be more of the same albeit with slightly different language and dress codes; all will be ‘materialist post-modern’, quite possibly a totalitarian nightmare.
President Xi in his speeches always puts ‘modernization’ front and centre as an overriding goal. This emphasis gives me pause about the proposed multipolar BRICS+ initiative.
Conclusion: Nowness is All
Dugin’s article correctly identifies the emergence of the Modern World and identifies as a defining characteristic its substitution by materialist, atheistic secularism of the ancient traditional civilizational mores which were based on a sense of the eternal, the sacred. As it happens, the underlying experiential basis of sacred perception can be naturally developed by regular meditation practice which in turn helps attune all members of society to that way of being, which is to experience and appreciate Nowness. It is profoundly ironic that the Modern mindset’s fixation on an ever-progressing Present, which relegates the Past to forever being more backward and the Future to forever being more bright, has eliminated actual, living, beating heart awareness of Presence or Nowness. (It is also ironic that the philosophical term ‘eternity’ is actually experienced by resting in the timelessness of the present moment, which has no beginning or end, but that has been covered elsewhere.)
This mindset, or awareness issue, is the true fault line playing out in the geopolitical realm. It looks like a struggle between Great Nations and Powers – and it is – but such conflict boils down to whether or not one’s mind is attuned to immediate present realities, or perhaps how it is attuned. The Not side ignores particularities by shmushing everything into a Single Universal Concept-based Reality Construct. The hegemonic mentality behind the external geopolitical ‘Hegemon’ ends up manifesting all types of left brain blindness induced pursuits involving pleasure, profit and power but at root it comes from simply not learning how to be Present. (As such, it is no more than an ontological bad habit that simply needs a little collective retraining to be remedied.) That said, the degree to which various multipolar civilizational poles are in thrall to the same hegemonic One Materialist Reality mindset as is the case with the West remains to be determined. ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’
What I hope to have communicated in this Article is that the Hegemon is not merely a nation, language or particular culture rather a Mindset. For sure the Hegemonic mindset of modernism first flourished in the West (though no doubt not for the first time in human history) and then spread, but it is not some sort of racial characteristic as so many attest, rather a psycho-social sidetrack one can stray into for a long time with widespread effects, many of which have taken root in the very same civilizations now pushing back against ‘the Hegemonic West’.
In any case, whilst all the geopolitical machinations – which are important – unfold, the single best thing us ordinary folks can do to help further a better future is to remain firmly and gently rooted in the Present. As such, simple ‘mindfulness and awareness practice’ is not a bad way each and every one of has can help both ourselves and the planet.
PS On the same day (October 1 2023) Postil published another article of Dugin’s entitled “Breaking away from the Civilization of Death” which is also well worth reading and which might soon serve as the basis for a subsequent article.