The Trend Of History

The Trend of History The triumph of Liberal Democracy in the last, brief moment of history is a gift from nature squandered. As free markets and democracy bend and disfigure in the western world, on the chosen path of the chosen people, a fork in the road on the roof of the world has come into focus. After twenty centuries of trying, western civilization has finally pushed across and into the Eastern world, multinational American corporations completing the work begun in Henry the Navigators bobbing, Portuguese caravels. A linear history now shattered on contact and found wanting; not the end of history, but a trend of history. From its beginning, the past has been measured in progressively larger units of space, from local tales passed from generation to generation, to regional experience with improvements in transportation, to our present day when history is measured in minutes across a spatial plane that extends infinitely in every direction. Where the village of one's ancestors once anchored a world no larger than one could see, ours is anchored in the palm of our hands with Blackberry's, IPods, and I Phones. And yet, we of the Englishspeaking world still consider ourselves decidedly "Western" in a digital age with no reference points. Cruel geography placed a screen across Asia Minor, and as civilization crawled out of the damp edges of the world, it became convenient to stay to one side or the other of mountains, rivers, and barren steppes, like mercury, rolling on down, away, and apart. The dichotomy that is history became east and west by an accident of creation, and has remained long past the age where simple nature was any impediment to human kind. "Us and them" remains a permanent feature of our digital cultures and our cheap plastic souls. Generations of denizens from the "West" have always accepted as understood, that ours is the pre-eminent civilization and sum of all history. Ours has been a journey of arrogance and conceit as we crafted that history in our own image. Only the centre of gravity has shifted over recorded time, the West laying claim to first the Euphrates, the Danube, the English Channel, and then the new world, always heading west in an effort to get to

the East. Rome, Paris, London, New York City USA. No "North", no "South", just West and East on a wobbling sphere in space. If you're not East or West you're nobody, or worse, Argentina.

The foundations of our western part of the globe have become free markets, unbridled capitalism, corporate nations, faux democracies in a riot of hues and hypocrisy, and exponential expectations. Unchecked opportunity for wealth accumulation became our religion, supplanting a Christian ethic that stood in tough for two millennia, cast aside now like an aged and irrelevant wife. In the West, there never was any doubt - at any time - that the economic engine that had made us all wealthy, lazy, and stupid was not a God given right of man, and the natural course of history. To us were given the fruits of the Garden of Eden by God himself, in much the same way as Adam Smith gave us the rationale for raping the Earth. The American way to the American dream. In the East, there was Japan...and then nothing. Straw hats perhaps, and take out. The East was mysterious in a quaint sort of way, communists of course, old grainy war films, Chairman Mao. Richard Nixon went to China, a trip we all remember as the first time we gave one billion Chinese any interest at all. We missed the significance of the visit, coming as it did when the great Western economic engine slipped a gear for the very first time. If the West had given that confluence of events any space in history at all, we would be recalling it as a moment of supreme irony - and perhaps, the beginning of the end. The West believed the East had always been a mix of badly mismanaged command economies based on borrowed western ideas, grafted to customs and totems as old as time itself. To the West, it looked arcane and dysfunctional, as everything did before the triumph of the triumph of Americanism. In the East - where patience is a foundation of both history and culture - they politely absorbed the lectures and admonitions and quietly went about their business. The tortoise and the hare. Once Richard Nixon closed the gold window and exports from America slipped below the waterline for good, the battle ship America began an

imperceptible list to port that would not be fixed by everyone running over to starboard. Through successive booms, busts, recessions and recoveries the Western economy began to lurch and stagger towards exhaustion on a forty year flare out. Technology raced ahead of morality. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Wall Street. The latter spreading radiated derivative debris throughout the arteries of global economics. With each successive blast, a greater triumph for the West. We were manufacturing our own proof of the validity of our greed. Westerners became consumers, chasing accumulation of crap as if it were a standard for civilization itself. The wider we spread the gospel of free markets and democracy, the richer it seemed, we got. Or at least some of us did anyways. By Christmas 2006 (the annual western celebration of consumption), it would have been crazy talk to suggest that the same God who gifted the West with so much, would so cruelly wrench it away, and so quickly, and pass it across Asia Minor to the East. In the West they would call it a "reset", in the heavens they know it as balance.

You just have to believe that in idle chatter before the meetings of the Chinese Politburo, while the comrades are all quietly renewing acquaintance and passing along gossip, it has not gone un-murmured that the proverbial "shoe" is now on the other foot. It simply cannot have escaped notice or comment that China was now the pre-eminent superpower on the planet. I wonder if they joke how they accomplished it without firing a shot in anger, or if they're smug with their patience and fortitude. I wonder if they chuckle over who got the best value in the cheap t-shirts for debt and foreign reserves deal. I wonder if there is an office pool or anything on the date when the West will realize they had switched jerseys. If this is not the time when the economic, social, and political ideals of the western world prove themselves unsustainable, the multi trillion dollar fight to prop up the beast will surely hasten it. What's that old saw..."it may not be the best system, but it is the best we've got"? Perhaps not. There are those who believe the price of homes in America will resume their northward march, and that the auto industry will return to 16 million unit years. Others see that given enough time, the great western banking houses can earn their way back to mortgage shredding prosperity. There are those

who think that "drill baby drill" is the solution, and not the problem. Those would be the nervous voices of the titanic western civilization, all cylinders blazing, full steam ahead through the ice fields. The United States of America was the sole earthly superpower for two decades on the bridge between the 20th and 21st century. For perhaps the only time in history, a nation state had held the earth in economic hegemony, giving righteous glory to free markets and democracy. Twentyfive years of spectacular excess, gluttony, and hubris in a stress test they themselves set. Two and half short decades at the tail end of 100 centuries of history. Not the end of history, but a trend of history. With the inclusion now of global influence on international economics and the rising importance of Chinese interests in particular, the pre eminence of Western socioeconomic thought has waned. And while some may say not a moment too soon, it is a moment that has been sealed in time and we, just fortunate to be included in the same frame.

Originally published as "The Trend of History In The East" for the Asia Chronicle, where Aetius Romulous is a regular columnist and syndicated writer on geopolitics and socioeconomics.

Related Articles by Aetius Romulous A Crisis Carol Free Markets Are Not Rational Economic Democracy Demands One World Balance Stock Markets are Not Democratic Freud's Bastards Lorax Economics