This is the first of a four-part series of excerpts from Starobin's new book, After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age.
The possibility of a black chaos tends to be taken most seriously by those who have experienced the worst that history can offer. That's why the Jews and the Kurds take chaos so seriously, as do, for that matter, the Palestinians, driven from their ancestral homes when Israel was established in 1948.
Notwithstanding the creation of Israel as a sanctuary, Jews in Israel and elsewhere still take very seriously the possibility of chaos, as indeed they should with American power on the wane. Theodor Herzl, the modern philosopher and founder of the Zionist movement, sincerely believed that the establishment of a Jewish homeland in the Holy Land would solve the age-old problem of anti-Semitism by providing Jews with a route out of the cauldron of Christian Europe. "The Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies," he wrote in his 1896 manifesto Der Judenstaat.
The cruel truth has turned out to be quite the reverse: Israel's Jews, the target of anti-Semitic ravings from WMD-aspiring Islamic terrorist groups as well as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, are at greater risk than Diaspora Jews in countries like America, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. In the After America world, with the ebbing clout of Israel's longtime protector in the Middle East, Israel's sense of embattlement stands to intensify. While Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, that arsenal has failed to deter sworn enemies like Hamas, whose weapon of choice is the rocket and the suicide bomber. "This place could turn into a massive killing ground," Benny Morris, a prominent historian of Zionism who lives in Jerusalem, told me on a trip to Israel in 2004....
Is chaos always so terrible? Strictly speaking, chaos is a state of nature with an inherent randomness or unpredictability, which is not the same as instability. A chaotic system is therefore not necessarily an imbalanced one, much less a horrible void. So let's consider this: The end of the American-enforced global order might generate chaos, but this chaos would not necessarily be of an awful kind. The After America world would be one in which there is no Big Daddy -- no omnipotent force, no "God" to enforce order and set standards and rules of conduct. And yet this world, for all its potential to go awry, actually turns out to function like a system of more or less happy chaos. Yes, happy chaos.
A happy chaos scenario might take its cue not from gloomy mythic poets like T. S. Eliot, or from the Bible, which depicts chaos as a rebellious beast, but from modern science. The chaos of science is value-neutral and altogether unromantic. Chaos theorists look for clues about its qualities by studying flows and processes of everything from weather and highway traffic patterns to the evanescent dissipation of a swirl of cigarette smoke. A system of chaos is all about sequences and chain reactions. The outcome of such sequences can be unpleasant, as in the famous Butterfly Effect, coined by the zoologist Konrad Lorenz, in which the beating of a butterfly's wings in Brazil is said to set off a tornado in Texas. But the same logic suggests that chain reactions can lead to positive results.
For those who scoff at the prospect of a happy chaos, who believe that all disorder is basically bad, think about an example that is close to the American bone: migration. The greatest settlement in American history, the settlement of the frontier West, was a profile in chaos, not the master plan of a grand visionary. The settlers were at the mercy of climate and unfamiliar landscape and often ended up in a place different from the one for which they started out. And the spurs to settlement had a haphazard quality. Who could have predicted the fallout from the discovery of gold in 1840s California?
It was as if a global pistol had been fired; the migrants raced in from everywhere, pans in hand, and they brought with them a swarm of tricksters and charlatans, as well as legitimate entrepreneurs, who hoped to profit from the boom. "Gold fever" was a social and economic revolution that transformed San Francisco from a runt village into one of America's most dynamic cities and ports. California, which was admitted to the American union as a full-fledged state in 1850, was born in a whirlwind....
A happy chaos of the twenty-first century would be proof of the idea that small is beautiful, that diversity and dispersion is a good thing, and that it is the control freaks of the world, whether in the form of an autocratic parent or a hegemonic global power, that account for the greatest miseries on earth. For believers in the American Goliath, that sounds like a heretical notion, but it was embraced, late in life, by one of the architects of the American Century, the diplomat George Kennan.
In the late 1940s, Kennan helped map the political strategy for containing Soviet expansion. But in the early 1990s, with the Cold War won and the Soviet no more, he startled readers with a book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, embracing the notion that America had become a "monster country," like China and India. And "there is a real question as to whether 'bigness' in a body politic is not an evil in itself, quite aside from the policies pursued in its name," Kennan wrote.
Reprinted from After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, by Paul Starobin, with permission of Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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