My Grand Narrative can Beat your Grand Narrative

My good friend Chris Ankersen has the annoying habit of being smarter and better written than me. (Thankfully I am better looking). Here's his take on the Michael Vlahos piece Fall of Modernity which I linked to earlier:

I came lately across a very interesting article which has been making the rounds, partly because it has been referred to by David Kilcullen, the current 'Brad Pitt' of the counterinsurgency world. Its title, 'The Fall of Modernity,' perhaps occludes the strength of its message. It paints a convincing picture that the age of American/Western supremacy is coming to the beginning of its end (compare, according to the article, today with Rome in the 3rd Century AD/CE: Empire is not over, but getting there). This message, and many others associated with an Imperial theme, are not new. Micheal Vlahos, of a Johns Hopkins-based think-tank, does a particularly good job in this rendition, however, and the article is worth reading for the sophisticated-yet-clearly

-explained concepts he introduces: Fall of Modernity.

What is most interesting, though, is that Vlahos implicates the American project in the downfall of the American project. This is not typical conservative thinking; indeed it resonates more with Marxian theory. You know the story: capitalism is capitalism's own worst enemy, and its own contradictions will eventually bring about its dissolution (contradictions such as its production of poor people at the same time that it makes others obscenely wealthy). The result is a rather all-consuming sense that 'it doesn't really matter what we do, because we are locked in our own death spiral'. In his words:

"We declare that “resistance is futile,” yet the opposite is true. The bigger we make the enemy, the bigger they become. Ours is the complicity of backhand legitimization. Whether we admit this or shout the reverse, effectively our war narrative works to set up superpower defeat—even if at first it seems only a drama of defeat played out in the media—because with one stroke, our narrative itself will have become a lie. This is doubly destructive. Not only do we fail myth—what are we? the D-list to the Greatest Generation—but myth is no longer there for us. World War II cannot save us because according to the strictures of our own myth, we are no longer worthy of being saved."

Of course, such 'defeatist' talk is rife amongst the chattering classes, the media, and the academy. But, if we look at one of the sources cited in Vlahos's footnotes, it is not difficult to see from whence Vlahos derives his pessimism. He includes a link to a PowerPoint presentation made by member of the US Joint Staff, which explains the US strategy in the war against terror. It is worth a look, but will not inspire confidence. Seen after reading Vlahos's piece, it will almost seem a caricature, and a bad one at that.

If (and of course we must cling to idea, as Dickens's Scrooge did, that the future is conditional, not predetermined), Vlahos is correct, there are a number of implications. Not the least among them is that perfecting the tactics of the war on terror is akin to re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (a metaphor which is acceptable, perhaps, due to the passage of 90 years since the catastrophe. A parallel metaphor, say 'remembering to turn the lights off in the World Trade Centre', jangles our sensitivities). It certainly makes the work of those such as Kilcullen and Petreas far more difficult and maybe just a little beside the point.

If the big picture is as badly and as baldly out of whack as Vlahos claims, we need more than fine tuning. But is it possible to generate a new Grand Narrative, one sufficiently big enough to counter the growing one of Alterity, supposedly the source of strength for our current enemies? One pure enough not to be brought to its knees through its own corrosion? One catchy enough to enlighten the masses 'at home and abroad'? Is such a trick possible 'on the fly' and if so, how long does it take and how do we do it? Vlahos, of course, points out that the need to 'beat' the other side with a bigger, better argument is part of the problem. His conclusion seems to point to a very postmodern position: not domination, but co-existance; plurality and indeterminacy, not monopoly and certainty. Not a single, or even an opposing pair of Grand Narratives, but rather many less sure, more fungible claims.

As usual, the question returns to the eternal 'Quid tunc?'