The Last Global Institution

Although the claim may be somewhat exaggerated, it is clear that the phenomenon known of globalization has been under strain in recent years. With the exception of major crises like the World Wars and the Great Depression, for the most part, global trade has been on the ascendency for nearly five centuries, ever since the great European powers made their first maritime expeditions in search of more convenient and lucrative trading routes to the Orient. The transit of goods, and then services, across the globe, has only increased with the passage of time.

Even with the rekindling of global geo-political tensions and regional and national economic protectionism, the fact remains that new technologies like the internet and the free flow of information has made it nearly impossible for there to be a retreat from the high tide of globalization. Short of a cataclysmic event, such as a Coronal Mass Ejection which would knock out much of the worldwide electrical grid, or a World War which involves the use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, the genie seems out of the bottle. Even in places like China, their increasingly sophisticated middle class cannot coexist with an authoritarian government. A robust middle class is one of the greatest socioeconomic guarantors of liberty. Even in authoritarian countries, an enterprising person with a secure VPN and some courage can gaze into the average life of someone half a world away and ask themselves, “Is my government really giving me the utopia it promises?” This is all the more true in authoritarian, communistic regimes, where the state is god. Nothing destroys a false idol more than demonstrating its complete impotence, its unreality.

Democracy, to quote C.S. Lewis, is medicine, not cure. It mitigates the worst instincts of human nature. It is difficult to deify the functionaries of a democracy precisely because you can hire and fire them. You can’t hire and fire a God-Emperor.

Returning to the initial thesis, barring something cataclysmic, it seems that we will, consequences be damned, attempt to keep the status quo, if only because the current time is still, in the aggregate, the most peaceful and prosperous era in human history. Yet it does seem that the world is poised to break up, almost in a 1984-esque style, into world blocks. To briefly review, in that classic dystopia, the world is broken up into three world systems/superstates, each presumably totalitarian: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia. In the real world, the pandemic laid bare the utter fragility of ‘just in time’ manufacturing and supply chain logistics, as well as the problems inherent with relying on deriving supplies from parts of the world which are inherently unstable and/or hostile.

The Green Revolution, if it should be called that, has made matters worse. Oil was/is extracted and refined by several countries worldwide, and this resource to a large degree defined economic geopolitics in the last quarter of the 20th century. Oil, and other related fossil fuels, were the indispensible resource. What Greens chronically fail to understand is that their crusade to ‘renewable’ resources of energy requires a complication of our supply chains on an order of magnitude more complex than we could even imagine. OPEC may have been the organization which managed (manipulated) the price of oil. But imagine the cartels of the 21st century that will come to exist. No longer will there just be a organization in charge of oil. Now, because of the vast amount of rare earth and other minerals needed for ‘green energy’, we will have a lithium lobby, a cobalt lobby, a copper lobby, a magnanese lobby, a tungsten lobby, and so on. That is not even taking into account the intense resources required to process these raw materials. Greens used to decry the ‘Blood Diamonds’ of Africa, and the despoilment of Africa and South America. They, too, will sign their blood-pact with Mephistopheles, and pay deeply for their token virtue. And their grandchildren will mock them, as they themselves hurled abuse on the grandparents before them.

“Our fathers ate sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

Why is all this important, and what does this have to do with a blog usually dedicated to spiritual and ecclesiastical affairs? There are a few reasons. The world is beginning to decouple, once again, like during the Cold War, into competing world systems. Some call this ‘multipolar’ vs. ‘unipolar’, but I find that to be somewhat misleading. The usual methods of propagandizing, whether in the West or in the East, are not working as well as they used to. The Church is a stalwart defender of human rights and human liberty, understood as derived from our natural status as God’s creation with an immortal soul. While not wedded to any particular form of government, the Church insists upon giving people the ability to freely seek and choose the good, and especially the Supreme Good, which is God.

Pope Francis, with respect, has an extremely poor track record in his realpolitik during his Pontificate. He and his official representatives have often sided with or colluded with deeply corrupt and anti-Christian governments. It has been well documented that, due to his Argentinian background, Pope Francis’ knee-jerk reaction to America is to decry any action of the United States Government as ‘Neo-Imperialism’, rather than trying to engage the logic and objectives of US Foreign Policy. Frequently this leads to embarrassing and outrageous statements which betray enormous ignorance of our culture, both political and otherwise. I will give Pope Francis his due: the United States Government has commited grievous and many sins in Latin America and elsewhere. Our government has extrajuridically murdered innocent people, started bloody wars, coups d’etat, destabilized whole societies, and caused enormous damage to indiginous cultures. These facts fill me, as an American, with shame. However, I still believe, in our bones, we represent a force for good in the world.

Yet even the ‘Pax Americana’, as a global hegemon and sponsor of many international institutions, is receeding. We have reasonable cause to be alarmed as overtly malevolent actors move into the vacuum.

One example of this is West Africa, which is at present undergoing a string of coups. France has long managed this region as a shadow-empire, well within its sphere of influence. Yet now, according to polls across the Sahel, the locals prefer the protection of Russia’s mercenaries rather than French troops, even though the latter have been at the forefront of the counterinsurgency against the likes of Boko Haram and other extremist groups. The Church has made heroic efforts in places like Cameroon to stop the bloodshed and persecution between the Francophones and the Anglophones, but in many respects, the Church in South America, Asia and Africa, where she commands the most clout, seems to be struggling to present a unified message. In South America, the clergy are contaminated by Liberation Theology and Communism, and so bizarrely have sympathy for the very governments which would line them up against a wall for execution. In Africa, the fact remains that the concept of the Nation-State is an imported concept. In the Sahel region, something like 40% of the population is migratory, not respecting any national borders as they pasture their herds, as they have done for centuries, like the Fulani people.

The Church as an institution precedes the Nation-State and precedes all the institutions of modernity. One wonders if it is uniquely suited to help equip Africa for a prosperous and peaceful future: not on Western terms, but on their own. The same is also true in Asia, where the Church is especially one of martyrs, and Rome is repeating the grievous eras of Soviet-era ostpolitik. The appeasement of hostile governments has done nothing but embolden our enemies and betray the faithful. Noble and courageous souls like Cardinal Zen have made that abundantly clear, but claim to have been repeatedly ignored in Rome and elsewhere.

The Church is the only body left in the world with the institutional heft which, for the sake of humanity, can draw from the ‘attic’ or our cultural reserves solutions for the crises of the current moment. They are not new crises. St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI were already doing this during their Pontificates, as did St. Paul VI and others in Encyclicals like Populorum Progressio. Pope Francis has attempted to tackle these themes with Encyclicals like Fratelli Tutti, but these sometimes lack the philosophical and theological depth to build a dialogue with the modern world on our terms. What was so powerful about so many of our 20th century Pontiffs was that they knew, as men of the times, how to apply eternal truths to contemporary problems. It is deeply concerning how many documents out of Rome occasionally read like they were penned by a consultant from the World Economic Forum, and not from people deeply immersed in Christian Scripture and Tradition.

Political commentators and pundits increasingly ask what unites people domestically and internationally, in an increasingly divided and confused world. The Church in many places has her light under a bushel basket, and sometimes I think that is for fear of seeming to “proselytize”. And so what? Did not Christ command us to “teach all nations”? Is not the Church Mater et Magistra, Mother and Teacher? We led the world through the last Dark Age, amid a general collapse of societal cohesion. We are poised to do so again. But we must prepare. We must stand ready. We are the custodians of the Civilization of Love, and the Gospel of Peace. It’s no coincidence that Christ called us the Light of the World, and so we are, even today.