Civilization According to George Friedman

Over the years I have read George Friedman less because he was persuasive than because while he was being unpersuasive he at least managed to be interesting--from his prognostication about American war with Japan in the 1990s forward. It is far from irrelevant to that unpersuasiveness that Friedman put his rather conventional ideological biases before the facts. Thus, for example, his insistence in The Next 100 Years (which he has since carried forward from book to book, all the way down to his last, The Storm Before the Calm) that Ronald Reagan's supply-side policies achieved their aim of "moderniz[ing] the economy through investment" by "reducing taxes in order to stimulate investment" amid a dearth of such resources when in reality no such thing ever occurred--all the hard data on investment, assets and value added showing that rather than enabling the "modernization" of America's plant the way Reagan promised and Friedman insists happened instead the tax cuts (and deregulation and the rest) enabled the economy's financialization, and what goes with that, the stagnation of manufacturing and outright deindustrialization that has prevailed since. (In more precise terms, "nonresidential investment" did not go up, while the manufacturing sector's asset growth slowed to a crawl and, where its equipment stock is concerned, flatlined, even with the help of massive military-industrial spending and the shale boom.) For the same reasons his interpretations of the facts are similarly flawed, from his characterization of the 2003 Iraq War (as having been about blocking the action of terrorists seeking "empire," and strategically sound on those terms), to his contempt for China (which he predicted would collapse in the '10s), to his attitude toward climate change (which, whether he was smarmily complacent as remote, or smarmily dismissive of it as a problem too big to solve, always had him ruling out action on the problem, the reasons why ultimately irrelevant). That Friedman is so loyal to such myths, and makes such pronouncements, may have made him more successful career-wise (elites pay less to be truly informed than to have their prejudices flattered, and here we are talking about him because of the stature this enabled him to achieve), but not a better or more useful one for those seriously interested in understanding where the world has been, where it is now, where it may be going.

Still, now and then there is something in his work that seems worth a second look, with a notable example his classification of societies as barbaric, civilized or decadent. The "barbarian" respects only his own society's ways, but those of no other people; the "civilized" can respect those of their own culture, and those of other cultures; and the "decadent" respect nothing. There is more to the theory--Friedman seeing these as phases in a life cycle, with one phase leading to the other, the barbarian growing civilized with experiences, the civilized condition with its combination of "belief" and "skepticism" being unstable and leading to decadence in its turn. But it is the phases themselves rather than any teleology in them that matters for my immediate purposes.

Where the line between barbarism and civilization is concerned Friedman's schema strikes me as much less well-founded, rich, nuanced than that of a Thorstein Veblen, who drew a distinction between the settled, industry-oriented, pragmatic, comparatively utilitarian and egalitarian civilized society and the mobile/nomadic, predatory barbaric culture with its obsession with aggression, hierarchy, precedence, conspicuous wastefulness and the rest that made its survivals the essence of his famed thinking about the "leisure class." And again reflective of his biases, Friedman in his juxtaposition of a "barbaric" America with all the youthfulness and vigor of that state with a Europe (barbaric in the sixteenth century, civilized in the eighteenth) gone decadent aligning conveniently with his pretty standard "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" view, compulsive sneering at Europeans (or rather what he imagines Europeans to be), and expectations of America's being the leading power in the world for a long time to come--as well as the old right-wing view of rationalistic examination of the social world as a sign not of progress but degeneration. There also seems to me a certain obtuseness toward class in Friedman's system, namely in what he calls the "civilized" view, this less likely to be the property of a whole society than of its formally educated, office-holding elite--perhaps especially the elite of an empire self-satisfied about their management of a diversity of subordinate peoples through a hodgepodge of "pragmatic" arrangements they tell themselves are testament to their "genius" for ruling less breeds (as seen in, for example, the more romantic, "gentlemen's history"-type accounts of the Roman or British Empires which stress such "genius" over the harsh realities and extreme brutality of empire). By contrast one imagines that in the very same societies the "common man" (the Roman plebian, the Englishman on a farm in the provinces or the slums of the cities) leading a rather narrower existence remote from such education, tasks and authority had little of what Friedman calls the "civilized" view about him. Still, if Friedman's system is far less satisfying than others as a way of understanding what we call "civilization" and those states with which one may compare it the difference between those to whom Otherness is a thing one can only meet with hostility, and those who can deal with it in an urbane and practical way--and yet again, those whose views are simply nihilistic--seems to me of some usefulness when considering the variety of ideology and attitude today.