Virtual Asabiya

I've finally begun reading Peter Turchin's War And Peace And War in earnest, which has been strongly recommended by a number of reactionary writers. The major premise of the book - as far as I've gotten - is the concept of asabiya, a word borrowed from Arabic to describe a society's ability to cooperate towards national goals. Subsequently, he alleges that the primary environment for forging asabiya is at civilizational boundaries.

The first historical example given is of the conflict between the Russians and Tatars in the middle ages. The Russians were agricultural, centralized, and deeply Christian. The Tatars were Muslim horse-mounted herders. The boundary between the two was where the forests of eastern Europe gave way to the vast steppe. The Tatars regularly raided hundreds of miles into Russian lands to steal livestock and people, whom they sold off as slaves in the Islamic world. Both sides held great disdain for the other. The Russians saw the Tatars as uncivilized demons, incapable of creating their own wealth. The Tatars looked down on the Russians' dirt-digging as lowly, and thought the men were engaged in women's work. The Tatars were masculine and mobile; the Russians feminine and settled.

After hundreds of years of being constantly raided and having millions sold into brutal slavery, the Russians evolved from a loose federation that couldn't even unite on the battlefield against the Mongols into a centralized system organized to neuter the Tatar's mobility advantage. Moscow garrisoned troops in strategic fortified locations and then used rivers and a vast network of wooden palisade walls to create obstacles for the mounted hordes. The goal wasn't to prevent entry, but to slow the invaders down enough that border troops had enough time to counter. Even more importantly, says Turchin, the Russians developed a willingness to make sacrifices to aid their fellow Orthodox Christians. Ultimately it was that sense of shared destiny and willingness to co-operate that would forge the great Russian empire.

Hundreds of years later, the dynamic between Islam and Christendom remains similar. The west is civilized and effeminate; Islam remains relatively masculine and mobile. Muslims now travel thousands of miles to raid western welfare systems, repatriating much of the wealth to families back home. The only thing that has really changed is that Christendom is no longer Christian. The religious identity that compelled westerners to act together against predation on fellow countrymen has been replaced by a civic identity based on a secular religion that encourages such predation. The Russians solved their Muslim invasion problem with palisade walls and strong border patrols. In America, a wall cannot be built and the border agents are shot at by their own people! Our society is marked by a complete absence of asabiya - an inability to co-operate for mutual aid. To the extent co-operation does occur, it is not to beneficial ends. The last time our country took decisive action against the Muslim world was the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Not in the name of Christianity, but of the new false religion. We went to spread democracy, which meant to proselytize Equality. However, the Cult of Equality is a false religion, thus its actions constitute a fake asabiya. It was not intended to benefit Americans, but the whole world. We invaded Iraq to save Iraqis. At least, that was story used to gain the co-operation of the American public.

If no asabiya is preferable to fake asabiya, then at least we have that to look forward to, because there seems to be no hope that Americans will ever again co-operate towards mutual goals. The notion that anyone will blindly sacrifice for any arbitrary US citizen is quickly fading. The last holdouts have been the white civic nationalists, but they are losing their clout. Whites can only be told they are the devil so many times. It's hard to imagine what would unite Americans at this point. Traditionally, the government has leveraged some external enemy. Following World War II, the Soviets were the official national bogeymen. After the fall of the Berlin wall, Islamic terrorism became the global threat. Today, it isn't certain what foreign threat could fill the void. The left have already sided with North Korea, Mexico, and China against Trump, and now seem hopeful for an economic depression. It seems that even if foreign armies landed on America's shores tomorrow, half of the country would be praising them as liberators.

In the long run, while this experiment of multiculturalism - the merging of various civilizations under one roof - will destroy asabiya on the large scale, it is likely to increase it within the individual national components. Much of this is thanks to technology. Increasingly, people don't know who their neighbors are, but interact with various online groups. At the same time that forcing different people into close proximity is causing conflicts, the online identities give rise to virtual asabiya. Thus, the civilizational boundary is no longer at the national border, but cuts right through the entire society. As the civic identity fades and the multicultural experiments fail, it may turn out that virtual asabiya ends up a far stronger force than even what united the great nations of the past.