Thucydides Was Wrong—The Conceptual Heartland is The Thing
Geopolitics is a really bad idea
Of course, location means a great deal. For one thing, mayhem on your doorstep is a bad thing, possibly costly and dangerous. That is why the Greeks set up the polis not all that long ago, given the long expanse of written history.
The Greeks knew that one thing was wrong and they wanted to fix it. Their solution was a creative one — even brilliant — but it left a lot of problems in its wake. They did not want to have a king. They knew that putting their hopes and dreams on one person — one man, to be particular — would not end well. Even if they liked his performance, there was no protection for the people if his successors were ‘bad to the bone’.
The Greeks had a good idea there. They indicated that they wouldn’t make any man their king. They decided that they would agree on codes of behavior and make ‘them’ the king. This was Basileus, rule by law.
It started out this way: A group of soldiers, once they took possession of land on which they wanted to live, would form a circle. If in the process they had acquired a good deal of treasure, they would distribute it among themselves — the small stuff in the circle itself. If any of them had been particularly heroic, they would get larger shares first. Then, the rest of the soldiers would each get an equal share.
They would decide among themselves how they would get along, with unanimity as the goal. They kept talking until they all agreed. This was not only how they would make decisions as a community, but how the land would be parceled out to be worked and where and how they would live. They would elect leaders for a period, the famous basis for democracy. This was called the demos, in fact, and the result was the establishment of the polis. The elected people were as one among them all.
Then, until the next convocation and until otherwise committed on by the people, those decisions were the law. They were not matters of debate, having been decided on by the people. If something hadn’t been decided, they had to convene quickly to decide what to do. Obviously, there as some flux in this. At times these temporarily empowered agents had to decide things on the fly. The results are among the sagas of song and story. As it turns out, many enjoyed opportunity for such creativity in power-wielding. In some cases, by trying to control the dialog and attenuating time-related developments, many figured out how to act kingly anyway.
This is a way of viewing all phenomena along a geological matrix only. In such a system, there are precious few situations when anything other than the results of such physical controlling mechanisms were in play. Ultimately, on regional and national scales, leaders would bring on official or casual advisors to tell them of things that they did not otherwise know. Regardless, the official officials always had the last word. This also has resulted in songs and stories, many of them dire.
What passed for governance of this kind devolved down through the years into torrid tales and futile shrugs — this is the way it must be because this is how it has always been. This is a sorrowful condition indeed, made all the more tragic because it is not true. Much has been learned about human history in the last hundred years or so that has not been assimilated into general knowledge.
As it turns out, the Greeks were not the source of the time-tested governance model for our species. They were an offshoot. The source was further to the east, and much earlier. In fact, based on what has been found in clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia — mostly where Iraq now is — a more comprehensive, nuanced history takes shape. It is not that location wasn’t important to them and protection of the homeland wasn’t a priority, but the Sumerians were undeniably obsessed with something else as well. They were obsessed with doing things right — whether they involved governance or science or societal commitments, they invented writing and ciphering to track what they did and to assure that things were done in order, according to more or less universal norms.
They cared about conceptual space. They cared about process. They had little devices that they called the me, pronounced ‘may’, which helped them to know how to do things. Samuel Noah Kramer, one of the first to interpret the Sumerian language, identified about a hundred of them. It is not yet clear what form the me took. For that matter, only a small part of the Sumerian civilization has been investigated directly, although the scientists feel that what they have found and translated is representative of the culture because they have found some very large libraries from those times.
Sumer was based on a network of city-states that were run by the ‘great organizations’ that oversaw food production and water management in a public-private way that met the fundamental needs of the people and supported stability for almost two thousand years that we know about. In the process, the systems and norms also allowed for initiative, progress, and innovation. Most of the people had both public and private responsibilities. Cultures sprang out of this all over the world, with iterations, like the Greek one, that exhibited similarities. The Greek version tended to be less flexible and more didactic than most. This resulted in the famous Peloponnesian Wars and the infamous spate of jealousy by the Spartans with regard to the Athenians and their newfound prosperity.
The point reminds me of an interaction I had decades ago with a potential business partner. We were travelling in California, doing computer things, when we had some down time at a restaurant. He informed me that he was armed. My response was, “OK”. He indicated that if anyone were to give us a “hard time” he would give them two opportunities to “back down”. If they didn’t, he would pull out his weapon and “shoot to kill”. I offered my opinion that perhaps there should be more steps in the process. Perhaps, he could pull out his gun and wave it around. That might get them to leave, or at least to stop “bothering us”.
“Oh no, that wouldn’t work. It would have to be shoot to kill”. This was repeated like some pronouncement from above, an article of faith in the world of warfare that he seemed committed to. I then offered another idea. He could “wing them”. Shoot them in the leg or the arm or in some corporal, but not lethal place. “Nope — shoot to kill, that was the only thing”.
We did not go into business.
This is the thing now. According to Thucydides and the Greek way, if one community — one demos — sees another that is doing equally well or better, they have to take them down. As he wrote: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon [Sparta], made war inevitable.” That is it. There is some declaration from above that this must be so. The example now is the United States and China. There can be no rapprochement there — it is Sparta vs Athens, no questions asked.
This lies at the heart of geopolitics. When there is great success, there must be a fight. Another Samuel, Samuel Huntington, made that case in the 1990s in his “clash of civilizations” publications. His basic point was that, with the end of the Cold War, we needed to be on the hunt for new enemies, and he offered up some examples. We have been working the list ever since.
The problem with this is that there is one big civilization and we are it. As mentioned earlier, all of the cultures converge at points in time and through history. The Sumerian example resulted in many folk as they travelled to the north through the Caucasus and went east and west. The Chinese lay claim to older culture, too, but there were influences. Thousands of cultures spread out in Asia, in Africa — which is, of course very, very old, predating Mesopotamia — in the Western Hemisphere, and elsewhere. The island cultures — of course.
When they set out on their voyages of discovery and conquest, Northern European nations came in contact with many of these. In fact, as often as not, they attempted to destroy them. In many cases, they did. They said that they were offering a better way — in essence, the Greek way — but they did so with blind eyes and closed minds. They pushed people of the many cultures into a world in which European interests, culture, and ethnicity were preeminent. This was mostly a brought on by the British, who led out and engaged in the most extreme behavior on the whole. Well, that may well be matched by earlier conquests by the Spanish and Portuguese in the New World — aided by the pandemics they brought with them. Later, it was brought on by the British for sure. This was as has been identified as the Lockean Heartland, a system designed to promote the interests of British aristocracy and promote as preeminent English ethnic heritage.
They failed to destroy all of the cultures. Even where people have been stripped away from the details and traditions of their ancestors, they are becoming aware of them now. They are piecing these things together. Interestingly, this is most clearly occurring through genealogical Internet sites and genetic testing programs.
China is the biggest of these stories. A major reason for this is that China is big. This is in large part the point. Duh. You might ask, why is China so big? Why are there so many Chinese? You would think that after thousands of years of history, it might be said that the successful cultures thrived. And, as they thrived, they grew.
Looking at China from a geopolitical lens, from a Grecian and a British lens, many think they know what they see. What can they see? From a Grecian standpoint, there are only a few options. You turn authority over to one person. That authority is all-encompassing. Basically everything that happens within those physical borders is in one way or another under that person’s authority. With scale, you likely select more than one person, but it is a temporary proposition. Every so often, they must face competition as to who gets the prerogative to act in all areas.
If the the reappointment process is interrupted, under the Grecian model the alarms go off. At best, you are authoritarian, or worse, totalitarian, and worse than that, ultimate monarch in a hereditary monarchy. This is a top-down thing. This is a geopolitical thing. The boss of all gets to dictate all — eclipsing natural law, science, social norms and prerogatives — certainly the hundred areas covered by the Sumerian me. So, when Westerners look at China, that is what they see.
When Mao Zedong announced the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and said, “China has stood up”, he said something else that I have never heard or read in any coverage of China and Chinese affairs. This includes a masters degree in a good school and much study in the thirty years since. Mao pronounced recommitment to “the organic law of China”.
My sense is that if you were to ask the burgeoning China expert to the left or to the right of you, you are going to get a blank stare.
Who cares, right? It’s China. They are the “other”. That is exactly where the Greeks were most vulnerable. Why couldn’t Sparta and Athens just get along? As Thucydides said: Impossible!
The Chinese do things in a different way. As Chalmers Johnson taught, this had much more to do with embrace of Chinese tradition than it has to do with arcane 19th century European philosophy in the wake of Lockean Heartland failures. This is where our times are most interesting. As is generally understood, European colonization in recent times hearkens back to Roman rule, which started out as a Grecian outpost that gained power after Greece had weakened itself in its internal battles for supremacy between Sparta and Athens. It had to be one way or another. As Rome took control, they were not in the least interested in Greece’s finer ideas. In fact, they destroyed the libraries and many of the Grecian buildings to boot. The command-and-control of physical space was the thing, and they played the part to its ultimate end.
This led to the colonial European period. This led to geopolitics.
This comes back to my one-time partner and his gun. If you are from Sparta and you see something good in Athens, does that mean you have to destroy it? Can’t you enjoy it, if not simply deal with the fact that it exists?
Could it be that you can’t deal with the possibility that someone might be having more fun than you are — or living with less angst and pain, or whatever? Wouldn’t it be better to find out what that thing is that they are doing and do it yourself, to share the wealth, to share the knowledge? This is the fancy Heckscher-Ohlin Theory: Everyone does what they do best and buys the rest from the rest. This way, everyone gets the best and gets rewarded for doing so. Look it up. It's in the books.
Look up the organic law of China, too. I am not going to tell you here what it is. It really, though, does have a lot to do with the Sumerian me.