In a previous essay, I conceptualized that we are currently undergoing a return to the early modern world of the Renaissance. By this I meant that there will be a colorful array of reorganization, state-like and state-adjacent corporate groupings carrying out functions of the state, the growing power of well-guided micro-states capable of harnessing new information technologies, and, what may seem most absurd, is an opening to a variety of new and creative ideas derived from past worlds. None of this has quite happened yet, but you can begin to see the seeds of it begin to sprout. We are still stuck in the Post World Order, the Pax Americana, a modified and distorted vision of what Britain had achieved in the 19th century. And like the Pax Britanica, American liberalism (very different in policy and vision, though equally ideological and flowery) reigns through a velvet fist. However the coming crack-up of global power will not be on account of the rapid corporatized state-building of rivals, such as how Germany, the United States, and Japan began to flank Great Britain (along with a rising threat from Russia). Instead, it will be a process, in some places imperceptible, of dispersal and decentralization. This process does not eliminate control. On the contrary, it allows a more effective harnessing of power through new information, travel, and cooperative technologies.
Thus, there will be a fracturing, an opening, into which a variety of new spirits will pour. One day Hitler and Nazis will be as distantly archaic as Napoleon and Bonapartists. And just as British Liberals fretted over a Lincoln or a Bismarck as a reactionary-revolutionary (despite neither of them reflecting much in the way of the Corsican), so too accusations of Fascism (simultaneously backwards and novel) fly against those who begin to break-down this order (at home and abroad). The good and the bad of these orders will make themselves apparent in the future. However, the qualification I want to add is that this new Renaissance will be something of a camara-obscura. Whereas the Renaissance gave way to state-building and centralization, technological capabilities reflect the opposite. It will be a great rejuvenation of politics, but in a way in which sees the state increasingly marginalized, or fitted in a network of institutions and organizations that break free from its grasp and gain their own momentum. It will be akin to how great Roman landlords imperceptibly transformed over hundreds of years into feudal nobility as the state withered. I believe this emerging world may become something of a new Middle Ages.
I don't adopt this term polemically. And I am also aware that there are too many cheap complaints about "feudalism", under which we new serfs will labor at our gig or wage jobs under the pseudo-benevolence of Bill Gates. However, inanity aside, one must not turn his gaze away from the Shield of Achilles. There is a reemergent pattern that even the jumbled may sense in an incoherent way.
What constitutes a new "Middle Ages"? A primary concept, which will become increasingly important, is "feudalism". It is well known among historians that this conceit is primarily heuristic, at best, if not a misleading slur. However, I will not abandon it, but rather tinker with it. The importance of feudalism was that social bonds depended on non-state and unequal pledges of fidelity. The lesser served the greater and the greater provided for the lesser. These contracts between patron and client were enforced through either states that were the personal property of a family, usually cloaked in the ruins of Rome, or with extra-state institutions that had taken over responsibilities. As the Roman Empire withered, the Church utilized its judicial privileges increasingly to maintain order between feuding landowners. Like the world of today, where borders are increasingly shattered, the flood of semi-civilized immigrants looking for food and land will strain the coherence of any former state-body. There will be lamentations for what was, staring at the ruins of greatness (or perhaps misremembered as such). There will be pragmatic efforts to harness this new energy in various deals. And there will be, to some degree or another, the effort to appropriate old mantles for new purposes. Various barbarian chiefs appeared as regal consuls, the bishops operated as procurators, the ambitious deigned to wear the name Caesar. Obviously a shock, like 476, marked the "end" of the Roman Empire, but that was not obvious then, nor was the century or so prior clear that the Roman state would all but vanish. It is only in the eye of the historian that any of these things, in fact, occurred, even as turmoil was felt by all.
This dispersal and fragmentation will require new kinds of arrangements where citizenship will be increasingly meaningless. As it has already begun, citizenship is being redefined as a kind of shareholdership, which entitles one to benefits from the state-qua-business. But as corporate businesses are increasingly the means of life (funds, entitlements, benefits, insurance) and, at the same time, spread out geographically, these will be more important than the increasingly abstract definitions of citizenship. Equality will degrade as the mechanisms of the state are either abandoned through non-use or increasingly privatized. One example of this phenomenon may be public schools, which are increasingly abandoned and may dissolve into charter programs and outright privatization. Like the "neoliberal" shift in the 1970s, these efforts are less ideological than strategic. People will really consider the USSR, PRC, and Communism to be the source of ideological discomfort, when they pursued similar aims. The conservative cliche about wanting a businessman to run the government, with a focus on the economy, reflects less an ideological twist (pace cookie-cutter leftists) than exhaustion. Kojeve noted that history's end came with the loss of all politics. The economy simply is the political. But if the state can no longer provide this biological and material comfort, and such is its only legitimacy, then it must become more efficient. Administrative bloat and managerial incompetence will increasingly wear away the sheen of trust in the government. In Europe this process may take a very different shape, whereas in the US it's already underway. China, by contrast, has been able to regain the initiative of trust, but only through effective decentralization. You can find parallel videos of Chinese success and Chinese barbarism, but this reflects, I argue, the party's policy. Let a thousand flowers bloom, as each province pursues its own ends. But is this enough? Of course not. I don't foresee dozens of Chinese states reentering a War of Three Kingdoms phase. Rather, they under the party-state, will be forced to integrate with extra-state bodies. The SCO, OBOR, these kinds of confederations will become increasingly important, with China fittingly seated as eldest brother.
This is, effectively, the scaling of a feudal political economy. It's not as if the state did not exist (if it can be spoken of somewhat anachronistically) in Medieval Europe. Rather, it was enmeshed in wider and wider non-state networks. An economic union like the EU will never become "the state", but it will exert discipline and control over its constituent members. NATO may very well blend into a kind of preferred nation status, blending into something like NAFTA. Russia's preeminence among post-Soviet states has already led to joint economic-military partnership. This may seem like a return to empire, but I see the contrary. These larger units of government will depend on an array of various partnerships between betters and lessers, whether these are private corporations, states, NGOs, or contractors. The dreams of a massively centralized state, which animated Fascism or Communism or the New Liberals, reflected technological capabilities. Spatial concentration is no longer necessary, and virtuality is increasingly the default. Nation-states may splinter apart, when pressed, because larger networks of legitimacy may absorb constituent parts. The ultimate delusion of talk about a "national divorce" in the United States, or even anti-EU sentiment, is that there is not really an alternative. Do red-state voters want the fragments of their country absorbed into a geopolitical alliance with China? Do those who want out of the European Union have an alternative? Do they want to be direct vassals of the US or Russia? The age of nation-states is rapidly coming to a close.
This phenomenon will happen across the world. The entirely fictional nation-states of Africa are already often governed as private property for a family or tribe. The way "out" for many Africans will simply to turn to foreign corporations to provide a sense of stability and authority. Whether American, British, French, or Chinese, these means provide a stronger form of legitimacy. Pretending that the warlord who sends his nephew to the UN is legitimate is only to prop up the currently stuck world-order. South America is equally fictive in its chaotic politics. Parties or landlords will provide a new hierarchy in which to receive goods and offer deference. The various backwards and broken states of Asia already find themselves under the aegis of larger transnational organizations, which will allow the fiction of the state to dissolve into a small power within a wider organization.
I don't see this "new feudalism" as necessarily bad or good. It will open up new opportunities to restructure politics beyond the various liberal fetishes which have failed to fulfill their promises or are revealed as bankrupt. Equality before the law and equity will never be strictly abandoned, even if they're absurd in practice and used as a weapon. Instead the agencies that offered hierarchies of membership, access, privilege, and so on will become more populated, and the egalitarian institutions will wither. Again, it will not be because of some ideological push, it will instead reflect success. Divisions of belonging may fall along ethnic, religious, or economic lines, but, as in the Middle Ages, these will likely blend. Race and language may be a powerful determinant of belonging. Actual religion, or certain ideological cults (such as Diversity&Inclusion, or modern Maoism), will also be a bond. Simply having resources may buy you access. But these will become increasingly important and the state will seem increasingly diffuse. As demonstrated in recent controversies, the power of the CIA or NSA will be less important than the conglomerated partnership with Alphabet or Twitter. The compact will increasingly be less about individuals (as atomized citizens in a Mass Democracy) than your enrollment in larger bodies that act for you. Just as a lord may negotiate a settlement from the king, so too will a tech board improve its members by extracting a concession from the government. Elon buying Twitter is a lord receiving his grant to inherit the land populated with serfs. But don't forget: serfs are not slaves. Serfs have rights. And just as the Medieval world was fractious world of competing claims, so too will the modern world reflect these adjustments. There will be modern versions of bishoprics, monasteries, guilds, nobles, free-cities, and so on, that will have the same pull. They will have a kind of independence beyond the state which they pledge loyalty, but may in fact subvert, ignore, or deprecate. This is the world that Philip Bobbitt has noted over a decade ago coming increasingly to fruition.
But the most important point I want to consider is how this covenantal hierarchy will rely on some kind of altar. I don't think every people necessarily are religious in all times and places, but there is always a religion. There is alway something that orients the process of fidelity, as greaters and lessers exercise trust in the contract that binds them. What shimmer of the eternal will bind together these unwieldy confederacies and allow all the constituent parties and members to participate within it? Christendom and Dar al Islam were both forms of this unity, as well as the animistic emperor-cult of Heaven in China. However now, unlike the past, the unity can be experienced in a way far more diffusively. An AI peering at you through data-crawls and a camera will not inspire reverence, even as some dream of cybernetic gods. I believe the church will persevere through all of this, though I don't know in what role. A Russian-led Eurasian confederacy will not be able to rely on Orthodoxy, even as some Russophiles draw on the esoteric gruel of Duginist fusion of Christianity & Islam. The cult of the red emperor may be some form of unity for a Chinese-led bloc. Gay transhumanism may provide some glue in the Western world. But these are all just fictional at this point. There is no institutional unity, yet, to provide the basis of order, to legitimate the process under which all agree (at least formally).
I'm not sure yet what will come, but as Athena's owl begins to flap her wings, we may begin to imagine what we may do.
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