View source for William Irwin Thompson on Citizens vs Subjects Then and Now


=Discussion=

William Irwin Thompson:

"When I was too young to read Aristotle on the polis—when I was in the eighth grade and studying ancient history in LA—I learned that the Greek polis emerged in the Assembly of wise seniors and able-bodied young men who could defend Athens in democratic hoplite formations against the attacks of the Persian Empire. War was no longer a warrior’s individual heroic display in his Homeric aresteia, but a collaborative effort.

The Persian Empire was a communication system held together by good roads and fast horses with messengers and military outposts. An empire, as opposed to the Greek democratic polis, was the territory of the subjected. The territorially assembled were subjects and not citizens. From the dawn of civilizations in ancient Mesopotamia, India, and China, empires had an ethnic and religious dyadic system of identity of “us” and “them.” Even to this day, the Han Chinese maintain a system of exclusion of “foreign devils” and hold to their system of identity by using the communist party as its priesthood.

The Roman Empire, by contrast, introduced the idea of the citizen, and St. Paul in Syria was proud to be a Roman citizen and used his citizenship as a means to transform a local Palestinian prophetic movement into a universal religion. Classical Rome tried to use its clumsy system of polytheism as the cement for imperial identity, but it was not successful, and Persian Manicheanism, Mithraism, Gnosticism, and Christianity remained attractive alternatives. With Emperor Constantine first, and then Justinian, Christianity proved to be a simpler and more effective way to hold an empire together. Even after the final collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., Christianity survived and grew during the Dark Ages and Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire by the Pope in 800 A.D.

What is happening today is that these two ancient and archetypal forms of empire have returned and are competing for dominance. The so-called American Empire sought to absorb civilizations into its multicultural identity. With the Marshall Plan, and the postwar Bretton Woods American Dollar economy, it first absorbed Western Europe. Now it is trying to show that Islamic Civilization can also become American. The Umah and the oil barrel can both live in peace within a new expanded “us.” So when I walk the streets of my city, Portland, Maine, I see little girls in hijabs playing baseball in the local schoolyard, and I see Somali women wearing the Dirac and Guntiino. This multicultural America is what Trump wishes to eliminate in his nativistic movement of a return to White Protestant America. In this nativist vision, if immigrants come to America, they should wear blue jeans and American college sweatshirts. Paradoxically, Trump’s vision is isomorphic to the Han Chinese vision of empire and identity in which China seeks to shut out the incursions of the World Wide Web.

If the USA follows Justin Trudeau’s vision of a multi-cultural North America, and is able to absorb Islamic Civilization, as before it absorbed Irish Catholics and Central European Jews, then the Roman model of Empire rather than the Persian will emerge, and thanks to the Internet and the politics of the Internet that Bernie Sanders exploits so well in his fund-raising, the Noosphere first articulated by Russian Vernadsky and then by French Teilhard de Chardin will emerge as a global noetic polity.

Sanguinal polities are based upon blood lines; imperial polities are based upon territory and an imperial language. With the emergence of English as a global language with a world English literature of writers like Salman Rushdi and Amitav Gosh, the Noosphere is no longer a visionary idea, but a cultural reality. To put a stop to this cultural evolution is what Trump is all about."

(https://www.metapsychosis.com/the-metapolitics-of-the-noosphere/)

[[Category:Civilizational Analysis]]
[[Category:Politics]]
[[Category:Democracy]]