On the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the continuing war indicates that the foundations of a rules-based global order are not just the rules themselves but also the structure of sovereignty that supports those rules. Sovereignty includes both the use of power and the establishment of a legitimating vision of order. The challenges to the Westphalian system of global order consequently come not just from the Russian invasion but also from the Russian idea of its civilizational mission against Western secularism as well as China’s idea of a “shared humanity for mankind.” Telos 201 provides analyses of both of these alternative visions for global order. Matthew Dal Santo, for example, describes Russia’s stance as a defense of a spiritual rather than a secular conception of the basis of order. Gordon Chang analyzes the way in which China has been promoting its tianxia model of unified global governance against the chaos and conflict of separate sovereign nation-states. The frame within which to view these alternative visions is not the struggle between spirituality and secularism or between China and the West, but the global development of nationalism.
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When we consider the way in which power functions on a global level, it will also be crucial to understand how a world order will reflect a particular way of structuring the relationship between values and power. Even the seemingly most egregious use of power can only take place within the framework of an attempt to realize values in the world, and realist accounts of global order must also recognize the importance of some ideology such as nationalism as a means of establishing political values. Accordingly, discussions of balance-of-power dynamics can only begin once great powers emerge as a consequence of the political will of certain peoples to understand themselves in a certain way. Based on such measures as GDP, population, and military spending, Russia does not rank particularly well in relation to countries such as Brazil and India, neither of which pretends to great power status. If Russia can be considered a great power today, it is primarily because of the goals and values that its government embodies. Values form the foundations of global order, and Russia only continues to project its power because it maintains a sense of the global reach of its values for determining order for others.
Without the traditional literary and intellectual canons, the focus of humanities education has shifted toward promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, which have become in many respects code words for identity politics, socialist-inspired redistribution, and college for all as entry into the job market. But because these three policies are partisan positions that have been enshrined as overarching truths (or in Elliott’s terms, “truth-posits”) for higher education, college humanities have to a large extent abandoned genuine debate about the origins and consequences of different ideas in favor of activist promotion of such ideas. The strike itself foregrounds the focus on equity without, however, considering the consequences of such a policy. Populism has now arrived in China. As opposed to the 1989 protests driven by students as well as an intra-government political struggle, the current unrest, while including students, has been driven much more clearly by a broader mass of people who have grown frustrated with the bureaucratic overreach of the zero COVID policy. With the largest and most comprehensive system of bureaucratically organized surveillance, management, and domination of the populace in the world, China has certainly been ripe for such populist revolt. While the original theory of the new class was developed by Milovan Djilas in order to explain state socialism in the Soviet Union, the populist reaction to the new class has up to now been associated mainly with liberal democracies whose state bureaucracies are still relatively undeveloped when compared to the Chinese version. The Chinese state receded somewhat during the reform and opening up period, but the rule of Xi Jinping, the growth of the surveillance state, and especially the zero COVID policy have led to new extremes in the level of new class management of the population. Moreover, the lockdowns and their economic effects have highlighted the divide between the new class and the broader populace. As one protester shouted to the police, the police are state functionaries with stable incomes while most of the people are dependent on the flourishing of a market economy that has been throttled by the COVID lockdowns. In his response to my post last week on affirmative action, Florindo Volpacchio emphasizes that the goal of affirmative action is “to recognize the social pathology of discrimination and inequality that privileged race and sexual identity to begin with.” It is certainly important to remember this history and its effects on present conditions, and Volpacchio rightly points out past injustices, including slavery and segregation. Yet those injustices are also clearly in the past. There are no longer any legally enforced forms of segregation and discrimination against Blacks, and the United States can be proud of the progress that has been made. But while Volpacchio seeks to judge affirmative action based on its symbolic intent, its practical effects cannot be ignored, especially as they perpetuate the type of discrimination based on race that they are meant to oppose. Since the history of racial injustice involved the categorization and differential treatment of people based on their race, the resistance to this history must reject such differential treatment and affirm the principle of equality before the law. Yet affirmative action re-establishes racial discrimination as a valid policy for college admissions and hiring. Though this policy favors Blacks today, this can only be done at the cost of disfavoring others, to the point where it disfavors Asian Americans in comparison to both Blacks and Whites. As Thomas Sowell has demonstrated through his careful and extensive research, the track record of worldwide attempts to engineer equality through a set of reverse discriminatory practices is in fact dismal, leading consistently to a skewing of benefits to the wealthier members of the groups they are meant to assist as well as to growing identity-based polarization and even civil war. After decades of contention, most observers agree that affirmative action in the form of racial preferences in college admissions will be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. There are indeed few arguments left to support it. A supermajority of Americans opposes it, with 74 percent of Americans, including 58 percent of Blacks, indicating in the most recent Pew Research poll that race or ethnicity should not be a factor in college admissions. Racial preferences do not help the disadvantaged. As even a supporter of affirmative action writes: “Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.” As these statistics indicate, the racial categories do not correlate with disadvantaged status. They are even more problematic as a proxy for diversity. It is not clear why some markers of identity such as race and ethnicity should be considered significant for viewpoint diversity while others, such as religion, should not. Politically, university faculty have become much less diverse in terms of party affiliation over the last several decades of affirmative action policy, with a documented 11.5 to 1 ratio of Democrats to Republicans at leading universities in 2016. Moreover, because the defense of affirmative action has become a marker of anti-racism, the university support for the policy has suppressed opposing viewpoints by branding them as racist or sexist and not worthy of discussion, thus further reducing viewpoint diversity by encouraging pervasive self-censorship. |
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