Mark Whitaker on Various Civilizational Topics

Source

These are comments from Mark Whitaker,

published here at [1]

They are a response to this original article in Substack by Michel Bauwens:

* Article: What kind of religious / spiritual revival can we expect at the end of this civilizational cycle ?

URL = https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-religious-spiritual/

Text

Mark Whitaker:

"Some comments I wrote up this morning and shared with Michel privately, who gave me the go-ahead to archive them here. Thanks, Michel. As I said I "didn't want to steal your thunder" on your post with what becomes a longer post of mine in response, though you said you wanted it archived, so here it is the first part I already shared. I will finalize my other notes later.

When I quote Michel it is in quotes:

"From Oswald Spengler, we get a streamlined evolutionary account of civilization, which points to the advent of a new religiosity at the end of the life-cycle of civilization."

I have always been skeptical of these two kinds of deductive philosophies of history that are (1) evolutionary/linear/mode after mode, or (2) are functionalist arguments that something 'had to be this way because it served a function.' A lot of this literature in the philosophy of history is really just deductive and Eurocentric/evolutionary, or both, and it is really before the invention of world history proper after World War II (defined as the study of ongoing common diffusions across multiple separate civilizations, and more empirically comparative cases) and most of these people are far earlier than the internet as well which has opened a whole treasure trove of data to more people analyzing these issues. So in writing Ecological Revolution (2009) I was trying to contribute to world history in an internet era where a wealth of more empirical data could be sifted for such analysis instead of starting from deductive first principles, that I think always yield very reductionist results for single variable models or single causal models of history, and thus wrong.

The first statement of Spengler below (numbered as 1) is merely a deduction while the latter (numbered as 2) is merely a tautology, when history is more open ended events that don't have to happen the way they did except for the ongoing choices of actions against other actions. (That is why I spent so much time in Ecological Revolution being more inductive about the dynamics of 'event upon event' dynamics. that are equally about different parties interpreting their other groups they are interacting with. Remember I told you the original draft was around 2,000 pages).

So Spengler (which I have read less than you though), seems only a functionalist argument that brooks no variations: "[1] Civilization starts with the encounter of a conquered and a conquering people, which means [2] tribal custom ceases functioning and a new order must make common life possible. This expresses itself through the emergence of two leading caste groups: the warriors (proceeding from the conquerors) and the spiritual (proceeding from the conquered) caste, which ‘civilizes’ the warriors through a higher ethos of the common good..."

I don't think so. I can think of many counterexamples. Instead of such 'tribal replacement,' many conquests are of groups with writing systems/conquerors over more oral tribal peoples (conquered) in one unit, for thousands of years, in the same 'matrix' of jurisdictional alliances over them in inequitable ways.

Second, in my deep case studies, military groups are hardly only external conquerors though are internally sponsored internecine elite groups fighting each other over the spoils of their materially consolidated wealth and power alliances. Thus, military conquest instead of only external can come from internal groups and the "elite pact breakdown" of different elite groups increasing fighting each other. Each side sponsors more martial followers against each other, until the martial followers instead of clients, start to be powerful enough to have clients of their own jurisdictional alliances, and thus start to have their own independence of action vis-a-vis their original aristocratic or royal sponsors. Thus the internal military starts to selectively follow their leaders' orders when it suits them and thus they equally start to block or deny orders to them, or third, start conducting orders of their own across all military clients in their charge--which are later simply rubberstamped by the original sponsors, afraid of losing the appearance of control of their internal military warriors. (In China's warring states these were called the 'shih'. In Japan this is the origin of the internal warrior caste of the samurai. In Europe, 'feudal' knights are various once-sponsored independent orders under the Pope and other royal houses, yet particularly the more 'international' monastic ones start to have greater control over the popes or some royal lands, with their own foreign policies and seizing land for themselves. Sometimes, these internal martial groups take over the original sponsoring groups by aligning with a regional autonomy movement that they sponsor in their own interest (in Japan this was the long simmering Kenai Independence Movement of the north that the samurai appealed to gain allies against the aristocrats and the royal houses; in Europe, this was the Swiss cantons and the Templars or the Templar or Hospitalier lands in Crete and the Levant, etc.; in China, this was the shin that gained power without any formal legitimacy against the bloodline rules of the elder Zhou world, and so were interested in finding fresh novel philosophies that justified their power that they already gained in fact, though wanted to have some ideology for supporting it; same with the origins of the samurai looking for that kind of religious transcendental legitimacy for themselves and finally sponsoring their version of Zen Buddhism as a warrior religion. However, instead of a functional replacement of power here, original sponsoring aristocrats or royal houses rarely ever accept such a settlement though, and keep trying to upend such a martial-centric jurisdictional alliance that has displaced them as the hegemonic leader. These are the various attempts of the imperial house of Japan to try to unseat various samurai dynasties over the centuries, sometimes only setting up another one they sponsored to oust the previous one (like removing the Kamakura shogunate into the Muromachi shogunate, etc. around 1333, I think.)

So, the idea that these are cleanly two different groups "external conquerors and internal conquered" is hardly seen by me at all. Besides, I have always felt that this was one of my top twelve 'mental projections' to remove--this thinking model on false dichotomies, which is a deduction only in Spengler's mental projection of assuming conquest comes from outside and the conquered from the inside, instead of the really the conquering issues coming from inside sometimes in split disagreements of response and growing power between aristocratic and royalist versions of alliances against each other, growing aristocratic powers against declining royal groups, and both eventually setting up regional privatized groups of their sponsors. And then that sets up a whole different level of opportunistic outside conquest sometimes in this divided situation. So the military hegemony "conquest", can come from inside and potentially from the outside--the latter when such internal elite pact breakdowns weaken any consolidated military response to any opportunistic outside invasion.

However, in the absence of outside invasion the military 'conquest' is simply self-sponsored activities of both royals and aristocrats against each other bringing a third 'wheel' into the picture: the military as a separate organizational form battling for its fresh jurisdictional powers against its original sponsors. If there is an invasion from the outside, the internal conquers can either be conquered or they can be encouraged to reunite under a stronger centralized military jurisdiction and leadership to respond/repulse, ending the weak elite pact breakdown for a more consolidated royalist hegemony once more.

And I disagree with this: "As this convergence is successful, cities emerge, creating the third cast: the merchants or ‘city-zens’. Eventually, as they get stronger, they will ally with the monarchy, and eliminate the caste system."

They don't have to ally with each other and sometimes don't. Think of France where the merchants joined a royalist bureaucracy, while in England the merchants were aligned more autonomously with the funding the royal houses external commercial imperialism for mutual benefit. So there is an openness to this relationship. Merchants will simply ally with anyone sometimes getting political primacy from royal sponsorship monopolies, though in other times, at the same time, other regional aristocrats sponsor other merchants (because aristocrat had their own territorial interests versus a central king as well), and even a growing military sponsorship can supports merchants as well versus kinds and royals and religious leadership alike. It depends. There is nothing like this functionalist 'natural' alliance of merchants and royals simply by the Eurocentric argument of Europe as the model case, because some align with aristocratic sponsored towns and others with royal sponsored towns, versus each other even in the European case. This is particularly clear in Central Europe for who sponsored the merchant cities (which was more competitive) or in the Mediterranean trading cities (which was more competitive). For instance, Hospitaliers were aligned with 'their' financiers in Genoa, and the Templars aligned with 'their' financers in Venice--and instead of being 'anti-caste' all were against each other on all levels for their developing merchant allied castes rooted in the commercial empires of different cities, instead of being against 'caste' relationships. Sounds like even more caste relationships to me! So, there is nothing like this automatic elimination of a caste system of aristocrats, since merchants can just perpetuate it or even create it by their economic monopolies. It really just depends. It depends on history: it can happen like that, though this kind of Spengler view can work though it can be wrong as well: merchants can buy into a caste system (like in the French aristocracy, or in perpetuating Venetian or Genoan financial powers), or they can help formulate a fresh caste system around their own privatizations and domination as managers and financiers over other groups like the British East India company slowly doing services for all the different princely states of India like taxation and armies--and slowly coming to dominate the UK Parliament's funding of elections as well by the 1800s.

"As the cities grow, they create the fourth estate: the working class, for whose pacification some form of democracy is needed. But democracy eventually succumbs to oligarchy and Caesarism, signaling both an expansion into the Empire but also prefiguring its end."

Yes, I would concur with this. Democracy and procedures of wider representation is what I would call an 'affirmative trend' (defined as the formal institutions and formal policies being elaborated by wider informal political pressures of risk abatement), thus, sometimes endeavoring to solve urban risk problems of the poorer groups (just to keep the same elites in power against more revolutionary action against them). However, even these kinds of trends can create caste based lower class political relationships in their own political dynasties and funders: raising their own hereditary political elite that can alternatively fight with and/or merge with and marry the older aristocratic forms of less representative rulership. It depends on choices here, so it is hardly required for this 'caesarism' to develop. What he is calling caesarism is the ongoing elite pact breakdown issues here of the internal militarization of all elite factions against each other as previous consolidated agreements on what formal institutions and formal policies should be doing breaks down into disagreement, where different parts of the state or other institutions work for competing alliances simultaneously, and any consolidated abilities of leadership to respond begins to end entirely,

"....spirituality and religion inform the first stages, but they gradually lose power; however, as civilization declines and eventually collapses, a new religiosity will emerge, but without the innovative capacity of the early spiritual convergence. That will have to wait for a new emerging civilizational cycle. Late imperial religions are mere coping mechanisms."

"As civilization declines": I read this as the ongoing elite pact breakdown of ongoing privatization and militarization and pluralization of more consolidated royalist jurisdictions and alliances. Plus, there is hardly a single religiosity as well, it is an ecological revolutionary pushback from multiple regions of risk and hundreds of fresh religious ideas are pushed as community recreation in the smaller scale (as the larger scale has broken down) in such breakdown of larger systemic power networks of regularity. There were at least twenty different popular religions in the late Roman Empire for instance instead of only 'the rise of consolidated Christianity.' Plus, there were far more plural Christianities as well as nothing was orthodox yet, in what that meant.

So instead of 'a' (singular) new religion emerging, this is really only the same issue as what Spengler is calling 'late state imperial religion' (off the Roman case only I think) instead of this 'new' singular religion being so different from that late imperial context. The same thing happened in the inversion of Buddhism into a 'know your inherited place/caste religion of happiness' in the Later Han Empire after 100 CE.

So this merger of caste, late imperial times, and 'new' religions in the plural are interacting into making an attempt at reconsolidation of elite power in an 'edited/winnowed' religious settlement, that is an attempt at wider jurisdictional alliance regularities instead of the popularization of a new religion. The Roman state sponsored Christianity not as a 'new religion' though as its judicial system, across the Roman state's dioceses due to a lack of common personnel by default. It simply chose to anoint (no pun intended) Christians and Roman judicial/bureaucratic agents for itself, a view that Christians started to abuse for more theocratic judgment on others for themselves--which was not the original imperial intent of the renewed royal alliance with these Christians as diocese authorities.

So, sponsoring a 'new religion' as a singular one is just a tactic in which groups already powerful try to maintain their consolidated power across different vectors/ways. It is typically a selective appropriation of that 'religion' as well instead of a support of it per se as well. This attempts to make a quite a fresh hierarchical invention out of something more heterodox, thus the hierarchy of a 'new religion' is against its origins in risk politics of the times in a plural hydra-headed responses without coordination with each other on various local risk issues of material issues like 'health, ecology, and economic' pressures.

So Spengler is somewhat addressing social risk by talking of urban issues, though all of these people truly ignore the materialist/ecological risk of 'health ecology and economy' (HEE) that is part of this religious reinvention as well. So it is hardly just 'ideational' religious invention, it is a material protest in it as well. It is a religious and a scientific invention as well in the plural epistemologies of the time of such an "ecological revolutionary" response. with many different fresh religious and materialistic/researchers of fresh ways of researching and investigating their plight are developed. Fresh forms of medicine, of religion, of scientific investigation, of different political philosophies/arguments about order and chaos and how to fix it, etc.

... (end of 2 of 3)

Just to jump ahead to Sorokin, and disagree with his false dichotomy projection as well:

"Pitirim Sorokin stresses the cyclic succession of ‘Ideate’ vs. ‘Sensate’ types of civilizations, i.e. idealist, ascetic, religious phases vs. materialist phases of civilizational life.

However, (1) if the religions movements had materialist motivations for creating more 'idealist' fresh communities of discourse among themselves, how is this really ever separate from materialist issues? (1) If materially people start to choose ascetic practices, this is kind of a 'sour grapes' effect of making wine out of sour grapes as well. So I don't hold much to this dichotomy between ideate and sensate for the inventions of these new religions, (2) though you could say it is the more materialist elites and their consolidated wealth and control (sensate) as what is being rejected as not status anymore by the ideate groups--so it is not really ideate if it is really just a protest against materialism out of sour grapes. (3) Plus these ideate religions start to accumulate their own institutionalized wealth, typically off-tax in a 'tax haven' strategy exploited by aristocratic families, which I called the 'materiality of religion.' However, on the other hand (4) even these wealthy sybarites of this late Roman world of the senses, had their own religious views of course, so I'm not sure that this false dichotomy of ideate versus sensate really has legs, i.e., an empirical ground (as just a projected mental dichotomy) to stand on on those four points.

The 'ideate' reaction is among those who are materially poorer and more ecologically at risk, urban or rural, migrant or stuck in place in poverty, thus their ideate consolidation as a community force of fresh power depends on a material context of risk and material dearth of health, ecology, economy--and thus, this aims to have more material regularity as well by such 'ideate' communities. This is the connection to material commons and religion that you have noted as well.

So it is a false dichotomy here in Sorokin that pits 'old consolidated greedy materialist without religion' (untrue), against 'rising non/materialist and idealist community origins without material interests themselves' (untrue), since the previous 'material elite' groups have their own religious ideas and the latter 'poor ideate' groups have their own material interests. To draw on only the European case, the old Roman pagan religion went through revivals by emperors well into the 500s anyway, and this was hundreds of years after supposedly Christianity was "established". Obviously, in some people's minds it was hardly established and religious policy was still open for grabs."

(https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-religious-spiritual/comment/105458420)