Gary Rumor’s Anti-Entropic Continuum

What is the meaning of modern life? I have two books in front of me Volume Two of Thomas Campbell’s “My Big Toe” and Christopher Beckwith’s “Empires of the Silk Road”.
Campbell’s Book “explains the characteristics, origins, dynamics and function of human consciousness. It lays out an operational and functional model of consciousness.” This is from the jacket. I read the first volume but have been putting off on reading the second. It is a book about a science guy who did out of body experiments and claims that we are in a giant computer sort of universe that is intelligent. He has a really abrasive style that turns me off and makes it hard to take him seriously. He is a hyper inner space cadet and I am not in the mood.
Although today I met a woman who runs an art gallery on Anaheim in Long Beach. We got into a pretty trippy conversation about the government, taxes and art. I wanted to discuss the ideas of Beckwith but I realized it would be too much work. I got to tell my story about being punched in the stomach by the Secret Service. It was pretty cool, full of neat paintings from around the world. She calls herself an ‘Art Emissary’ and I was particularly impressed with a Balinese painting of a battle between demons and another one of a seventies disco space alien battle. I was looking for the address on the card she gave me but no luck. The Gallery is in the same building as the Park Hotel if you are interested.
Beckwith started out great, talking about a theory of the comitatus, the friends of the king in ancient times who pledged their lives to him, and defended him against all comers and were rewarded with the good life or as good as their king could provide in the ancient cultures of central Asia. He traces this down through the ages and sees in this one of the main motivators for the development of a trade in luxury goods across Asia through history. He goes back to about 2000 BC and brings it up to the end of the Junghar Confederation in the 18th century, the last of the great steppe nomad empires of central Asia. Then he goes into a rant against modernism. He brings up some good points but I think he looses it at some points especially when he goes on about the loss of a following for modern classical music because of its atonality, the lack of a definition of what modern art is and he really rails against the destruction of the cultural artifacts of the past in central Asia brought about by modernism, in particular he rages against the Chinese cultural revolution for destroying Tibetan monasteries and fundamentalism in Iran.
This is the first historian that I have read to have a similar viewpoint on the Middle East to mine. He speaks of the break up of the Ottoman Empire by the British as a mistake.
I quote him Page 271 “The Allies’ vengeance against the Ottomans did not win long term colonial power in the region for the British, as they had hoped. The British did dominate Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq as well as Egypt, until shortly after the Second World War, but the great diminution of the British power after that war forced them to abandon most of the colonies. As they with drew from Palestine in 1947, a civil war broke out and a radical Jewish nationalist (Zionist) state formed. The results were incendiary.”
In the next paragraph he talks about the inability of a normal formation of power in the Middle East to reform.
…”the age-old division of Southwestern Asia between two large powers, one centered in Greece or Constantinople and another in Persia, could not be reestablished. The fragmentation and animosity in the Middle East worsened and led to ever increasing instability during the later part of the twentieth century.”
In his notes he mentions this. “The British foreign Minister Jack Straw has publicly admitted is government made ‘quite serious mistakes” in Palestine and India, among many other countries of Southwest and South Asia.”
Thus someone in the field backs up my assertion that the British made a mess of things in their colonial administration of that part of the world. He does not go so far to agree with my assertion that it was a deliberate sabotaging of the local peoples so that the British or their American allies could come back at a later date and swoop in and pick up the pieces in a new bigger empire. but the evidence is there.
Beckwith makes some interesting points about the history of international commerce across the ages. He says that until the 18th century closing of the silk road by the national policies of the Russians, Chinese in particular, being replaced by the littoral system of trading ports mostly dominated by the British, that most trade had been done overland and was promoted by central Asian empires. These were ruled by Mongols, Turks, Iranians and other central Asian peoples down through history.
He is opposed to the cultural devastation brought about by modernism. He sees the domination of the world by a series of American style republics, mostly oligarchies as he sees them, as being just as bad for the cultures of central Asia as the socialist modernism of the last century as promoted by the Chinese and Russian Communists. He seems to be in favor of a return to some form of aristocracy and monarchical rule. Up until the 18th century most people in the world would have agreed with him.
Beckwith seems to be particularly enamoured with the comitatus. A band of brothers, warriors sworn by a blood oath to protect their leader to the death. I don’t think he is advocating a return to that but he is saying that government by greed and the market is no replacement for the sense of noblesse oblige that aristocratic rulers felt to their followers. He seems to be an advocate of some form of intellectual aestheticism, perhaps led by spiritual leaders or an aristocracy for whom artists and intellectuals can focus on serving.
It certainly goes against the grain of my Maoist youth. I have previously noted that anarchists and monarchists have a lot in common in their idealism and romanticism.
Beckwith accuses the Chinese Communists of massacring the Tibetans and Uighurs and destroying almost all of the Buddhist monasteries in the areas they ruled. In particular he says Tibet has only 13 remaining monasteries when it had hundreds before the Chinese took over. He says the cultural revolution was a particularly devastating time for the ancient cultures of Central Asia.
I am going to a Maoist Talk Tuesday night if I can and confront them on this very question. There is something here. Is all of history to be destroyed as the garbage of the past? Beckwith blames it on modernism, the cult of constant change and disregard for all that is old. Beckwith rails against the Chinese arrogance that is wiping out the inheritance of the cultures of the peoples of central Asia. He is not advocating one religion or another, but he is saying that there should be a respect for the past and the cultural inheritance of the past just as in the west we respect the old parts of Paris, but I think he forgets that Paris went through a major urban renewal in the 19th century and a lot of what he calls old is merely Paris of a 150 years ago. Perhaps to someone in a place like Los Angeles where I live, Paris is old. but compared to the sweep of history it is mostly less that 200 years old. The old Paris was destroyed in its own urban renewal.
He deplores what is occurring in China and central Asia with the replacement of traditional architecture with the bland institutional modernist high rises. But I am sure the people there are looking at modernism in a different light. For them it is a path out of poverty and ignorance. Beckwith does admire the scientific advances brought about by the Soviet Union.
My own opinion is that there should be a balance. Change out of poverty is important, as is education. Beckwith calls most of the education in the democracies propaganda to promote the modernist ideology. He is what I would call a true conservative, one who wants to preserve things of value from the past. That is different from what the modern conservatives in the USA promote, a pro business, capitalist agenda with some reactionary populism that is anti-immigrant, anti-feminist, anti-gay and anti-abortion. That is not conservatism as in preserving the cultural values and the environment of the past. That is a radical agenda to promote a value system that has as much to do with the past of this country as the Jesus theme park in Orlando has to do with the message of the historical Jesus. It is a fake.
Beckwith is in favor of the Shah of Iran’s attempt to dominate the Middle East with a revived Persian Empire. He saw what the Shah was attempting to be part of the traditional move on the part of a Persian and Greek/Turkish force to dominate the region and bring about stability. He doesn’t seem to give much credence to an Egyptian or Arab based power bloc. Egypt historically also dominated in Syria and Palestine. Arabia was a wild card coming up in a period of weakness on the part of the Greeks and Persians. But they have long been players and he cannot count them out. What is new and odd is the return of the Crusaders in the form of the Zionists. That is an unstable force in the region and is culturally disruptive. It blocks the attempts of the normal regional players from dominating. It is in my mind the British card that was played to keep them in the game.
Secretary of State Clinton is back in the Middle East attempting to get the region to accept Israel. It will never happen. Not in this form. Iran, Turkey, and Egypt are the normal players and one of them will have to dominate. Or the Arabs and Jews will have to make up and form a unitary state. It could happen if the USA and the British would stop stirring up the pot and insisting on having a colony in the heart of the Middle East. I could see a revived Phoenicia with Israel and Lebanon and Jordan forming a unitary state but dividing Israel and Palestine into two mini states is inherently unstable and can only be propped up by constant intervention from the west.
Ultimately the best thing would be for a revived Greco-Turkish State in the region but I don’t see that happening in the near future. There is currently almost as much bad blood between the Greeks and Turks as between the Jews and Arabs but historically there is no reason for it to continue. Once the Persian get the west off their backs and can breathe again and develop some normal institution perhaps they will lead the way to a stable Middle East but the Americans have to get out and the Chinese have to remain as strictly trading partners. They are playing a pretty cool game there now lets hope they don’t get the “Special Nation” bug that the Americans have with that whole hogwash about American Exceptionalism. The Chinese are good at it with their Middle Kingdom but at least they tend to stick the their section of the world. Islam once thought it was the wave of the future, just like Marxists did. It seems that every hyped up nation seems to think it is the best thing ever.
Lets hope in the future we can find a way to play this out without blowing up the place.

Tags: Art Talk, Comitatus Method of Rule In Central Asia, Inner Space Cadets, Middle East Solutions

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Gnosis:, History, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.