Lewis Lapham at Lapham's Quarterly:
Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country
in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for
everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and
religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound, and beyond, too,
if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole…We shall run
the world’s business, whether the world likes it or not.
—Joseph Conrad
In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and
were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only
if they talked the language of successful businessmen.
—Hannah Arendt
Time itself didn’t have long to wait for the ascendance of American commercial empire. Conrad in his 1904 novel, Nostromo,
assigns the voice of economic dominance to the San Francisco banker
Holroyd, “his massive profile” that “of a Caesar’s head on an old Roman
coin,” buying control of an imaginatively constituted South American
republic. Fifteen years later the voice is President Woodrow Wilson’s,
in Paris at the end of World War I giving the word for everything (free
trade, national self-determination, peace without victory) to the
bankrupted thrones and dominions of bourgeois Europe.
Fare forward another thirty years to the end of World War II, and it is the voice of the American diplomat George Kennan,
circulating in 1948 as a State Department memorandum phrased in the
language of the successful businessman: “We have about 50 percent of the
world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population…Our real task in
the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will
permit us to maintain this position of disparity…To do so, we will have
to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming,” disregard “unreal
objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards,
and democratization.”
The American word for everything held its value for nearly the whole
of the twentieth century, but time is no more inclined to stay than
wait. The first 2019 issue of Foreign Affairs, voice of America’s material interests and moneyed elites, asks on its cover, who will run the world?
and follows up the question with a collection of articles and
essays—“How a World Order Ends,” “The Eroding Balance of Terror,” “The
Age of Uneasy Peace,” “The Free-Trade Paradox,” “America’s Long
Goodbye”—explaining why America is no longer up to the task.
Not, God forbid, through any fault of America’s own. But because
globalization is dehumanization, and the rule of money is the rule of
nobody. The great, good, and glorious machine that generates the world’s
wealth and directs the world’s trade (aka “creatively destructive
capitalism,” “the unfettered free market”) doesn’t come equipped with
the freedoms of human thought, conscience, or speech. Admittedly, a
design flaw, but not one that troubles the upper servants of American
oligarchy. They enjoy first-class accommodations on the bridge deck of Leviathan
and make no complaint of its brutality—name of the game, nature of the
beast. What disturbs them is the insult to their vanity. The bewildered
policy-speak in the winter issue of Foreign Affairs is the
voice of merchants who would be kings reduced in function to engine-room
sweat labor heaving steel mills and shopping malls, movie studios and
migrants, into a remorseless furnace.
The dehumanization of the world’s trade is a refinement relatively
new under the sun, and the reader curious to know how things worked
before the nineteenth-century coming of the steam engine can find
Joseph Addison in 1711 on the floor of the Royal Exchange in the
midst of “a prosperous and happy multitude” of Danes, Russians,
Frenchmen, Swedes, Persians, Englishmen, and Egyptians “thriving in
their own private fortunes and at the same time promoting the public
stock…bringing into their country whatever is wanting and carrying out
of it whatever is superfluous.” Addison is an early prototype of the
tabloid gossip columnist trafficking in the lives of the rich and
famous, and his heart “naturally overflows with pleasure” at the
silk-smooth sight and sound of the most “useful members in a
commonwealth,” who “knit mankind together in a mutual intercourse of
good offices, distribute the gifts of nature, find work for the poor,
and wealth to the rich, and magnificence to the great.”
Addison exaggerates the benevolence of merchants and overlooks mankind’s
long history of economic warfare (cf. Paul Strohm’s essay “Maken Engelond Gret Ayeyn”),
but in 1711 he can still see a global economy run by and for human
beings. Moneymaking is not yet the primary objective of the journeys to
the East and the sailings to the West. The worth of a thing still
matters as much or more as the price of a thing. The traders on the
eighteenth-century floor of the Change accepted the truth.....
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