Rules of Reckoning

The global crisis that we are experiencing is aggravated by an intellectual crisis of world political thought. Nevertheless, people are inventive, and maybe AI will help, writes Valdai Club Chairman Andrey Bystritskiy.

There is virtually no doubt that the problems of 2024 will reappear in full and even with reinforcements in 2025. One of the reasons for the protracted global political crisis in which we now exist is that the creative ability of modern political thought is clearly insufficient to offer a more or less realistic and digestible model of the future.

Well-thought-out planning is a characteristic feature of humans. Of course, wolves also somehow plan their pursuit of harmless herbivores, but still, as a rule, they do not plan further than the next dinner. Man, as a much more dangerous and sophisticated predator, is more prudent.

Since ancient times, humans and their communities have planned the methods and results of their interactions. Naturally, not all actions were included in their planning, but the main ones were certainly presumed: such as war and trade, the influx of slaves and the construction of cities, and much more, of course. But most importantly, the goal of their plans was a certainty, from their point of view, ensuring fair and relatively stable peace around them.

For example, when Pharaoh Ramses II went to war with the Hittites, the goal of the campaign was certainly to create conditions for safe trade both in the Mediterranean and in the adjacent regions of the Middle East. Oddly enough, despite the fact that, in general, it is unknown who the victor was: the Egyptians or the Hittites, history continued, and trade was preserved. The plans, on the whole, were fulfilled, although not without losses: many city-states, along with their leaders and priests, disappeared practically without a trace.

Over the centuries, people made fairly simple plans that were quite often fulfilled. The peculiarity of these plans was that everyone understood them. The ideological structure in which these plans existed was accessible to ordinary people, aristocrats, and all sorts of other leaders. In general, the plans were based on clear ideas about competition, domination and hierarchy, both within societies and outside, and on an understanding of the role of strength, cohesion, loyalty and efficiency. Most importantly, everyone understood what good and evil were. This is convincingly described in the Old Testament. In its own way, all this looked very harmonious, although from a modern perspective, it is extremely difficult to call such a world beautiful and fair, humanistic and comfortable. But it was possible to make plans in it, and very technological ones, with understandable KPI, in modern language. Like counting the number of killed enemies and captured slaves in the thousands.

It is clear that as time passed, amazing theories developed, world religions arose, and the human personality became more and more evident, liberated from the indivisible and faceless mass of people. Already in the times of Ancient Rome, it became much more difficult to create realistic plans. It became somehow more difficult to understand justice, good, responsibility, hierarchy, and the role of the individual. Nevertheless, people somehow coped. Caesar, however, was stabbed to death: some citizens did not agree with him on what plan to offer Rome and, in general, what kind of Rome the Romans needed.

It’s important to note, however, that in general the Romans and, for example, their opponents, the Parthians, saw the world quite similarly. This allowed them to constantly fight, and constantly plan mutual destruction and absorption, and, at the same time, coexist relatively successfully.

So, Constantine the Great’s adoption of Christianity turned out to be a very wise step, which allowed him to give the plans another, one might say, spiritual dimension and make these plans universal. The widely spoken languages ​​of that time — Greek and Aramaic — also helped. They were more or less understood in many places.

The emergence of Islam added spice to the drawing up of plans, since competition appeared. But even Islam and Christianity got along quite well, and showed, by the way, fantastic flexibility in drawing up plans for the development, capture and division of the world.

Political theory did become somewhat more complicated, but the plans as a whole remained clear to almost everyone who could read.

The breakthrough happened later, generally around the Renaissance and immediately after it. The Peace of Westphalia can be considered the manifesto of the new political planning, which at its core contained an entire political theory. Both this theory and the system of constructing the desired and realistic results of certain political actions based on it worked quite successfully, probably until the First World War. Of course, later everything became much more complicated.

A small digression is necessary here. The processes that I describe using the example of Middle Eastern and European history, of course, took place everywhere. In China, and in India, and in Asia as a whole, and in America, long before Columbus arrived there, the same complication of the world was taking place, the number of its dimensions and subjects acting in this coordinate system was growing.

So, again, the main reason for the sharp increase in the difficulty of political planning has been the rapid complication of the world. The matrix of the world — that is, a certain set of various subjects operating in the modern world, united by practically countless connections — has become extremely difficult to understand. Just imagine that in a world oversaturated with connections and information there are states represented by their more or less numerous leaders, endless corporations, including media, various kinds of associations, including civil and political ones, secret and overt unions, religious groups of various sizes and ideologies, and finally, just eight billion people, connected by communication networks that are already incomprehensible to the ordinary mind.

But the complication of the world matrix itself is not the worst. If, for example, you know the rules of interaction between elements, you can theoretically calculate a system of any level of complexity. The problem is aggravated by the blurring, or even disappearance, of efficiency criteria. For what purpose does all this global machinery operate? What should the success of an individual, a society or a country, and, finally, the world as a whole look like? I have no doubt that in the conditions of modern connectivity, the world can and should be considered as a whole at a certain level. Roughly speaking, what are good and evil today? The Crusaders in the 11th century understood that the reconquest of the Holy Sepulchre was a universal good. There was no doubt. But, alas, we are in the 21st century, and we have to reconsider the entire strategy of human development. Roughly speaking, we need to build a plan, but how do we approach it so that the numerous contradictions and conflicts of our era allow us to build at least a partially harmonious model?

In general, we are experiencing not just a global political crisis, but also a crisis of global political thought.

It is difficult to say why this happened. After all, even in the era of confrontation between the USSR and the USA, seemingly irreconcilable enemies, in many respects Soviet and American societies were close to each other. Both countries lived with future ideas, first of all, the conquest of space, and a great future. The flourishing of the individual and his mastery of all forms of creativity were assumed. Of course, in the backyard of the future of both Soviet and American citizens there would definitely be a small (or large!) spacecraft. The difference was in the approach to property and in the degree of scepticism regarding human nature.

However, later, and not even after or as a result of the collapse of the USSR, something happened that Zygmunt Bauman called retrotopia, that is, the substitution of the desired future with the remembered past. Bauman gives many reasons for this, and it is not only a matter of the usual dreaming about a past Golden Age. From my point of view, this turn of looking back is a consequence of cognitive dissonance, the inability to build a plan for achieving an acceptable future, the weakness of the analytical apparatus and the fear of coming to unexpected conclusions.

For example, if you pay attention to the rhetoric of the EU leadership, you can see that they appeal exclusively to models of the past, primarily the times of Nazi Germany. In general, the Western political thought that is accessible to me, seems to be largely retrograde. Moreover, in some cases it is close to what can be called a malignant simplification: being unable to come up with a solution based on a correct understanding of today’s reality, the situation is simplified to the extent that old recipes are applicable. In addition, this is evidence of a major intellectual problem, since solutions to the problems of our time cannot be found in any past. All these solutions cannot but be new, otherwise they will not be solutions.

However, it must be recognised that the task facing modern political thought is extremely difficult. It is necessary to somehow put together a puzzle of the good of the individual and the good of society, it is necessary to understand what the social organisation of modern society should be so that both the individual and the public good are in harmony. Spells about the confrontation between democracy and autocracy, in general, do not work, and not only because it is not entirely clear what modern democracy and autocracy are, but also because a contradiction arises between the growing emancipation of the individual and predetermined value systems.

Roughly speaking, if people want to trust someone, do other people have the right to judge them for it? Perhaps the one they trust is wonderfully good? And in general, nothing can be imposed on a truly emancipated individual in principle, according, by the way, to liberal theory. But there are also hidden contradictions: without a certain coordination of communities of individuals, no productive activity in real earthly conditions is possible. I am not even talking about natural limitations, such as inevitable illnesses, fading and death. Although at all times people have dreamed of overcoming this inevitability, so far this is, to put it mildly, far away. Incidentally, the physical limitations of man fit poorly into the modern neoliberal model, since it undermines its focus on the individual, and makes the value hierarchy headed by man unstable. This does not mean that humanistic values ​​do not work. On the contrary, they are indispensable. All that remains is to come up with a value system for the future world, which is obviously a non-trivial task.

So the limitations are natural in themselves, but how can they be organised so that they at least do not lead to insoluble contradictions?

And from the same series, an equally important question, to which there is also no real answer: how is it possible to regulate the growing interdependence between countries and, by the way, other entities? Neither the climate problem nor the problem of the information and communication space can be resolved without such a global level of regulation.

In general, the global crisis that we are experiencing is aggravated by an intellectual crisis of world political thought. Nevertheless, people are inventive, and maybe AI will help.

In the book already mentioned, Zygmunt Bauman writes that the task is to plan the integration of the future world without relying on division, that is, a world in which we all can talk as equals. Of course, this sounds truly utopian. But, on the other hand, there is no way out. Either we, as a multitude of subjects that exists in the modern world, begin a dialogue to build a plan for the future and come up with rules of reckoning that will allow us to calculate the path, or... But it is better not to talk about this.

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Reason and individualism are important components of civilisational development, although they are not the only components. The key focus for discussions about the development of civilisation should therefore be the limits of reason. Is the pre-modern heavy luggage slowing down development, or is it the foundational building block of civilisation as the primordial instincts of human nature cannot be transcended?
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