The Return of Marco Polo's World

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Yet what if that’s not the whole story? What if in describing the psychological attraction of Stalinist ideology, Wat is also providing a warning about now? What if the response to sustained chaos will lead back, inversely, to the ideological intensities of the twentieth century? I am not talking about new Hitlers and Stalins, so much as about disease-variants of them.

  Our time on earth, in fact, may be ripe for utopian ideologies. Far more than the early twentieth century even, we are bombarded by stimuli: If there were too many books and ideas, too many people and systems, back in Wat’s time, they were only a fraction of what people must cope with now. The soul itself, explains the contemporary Romanian philosopher Horia-Roman Patapievici, is being hollowed out because of the substitution of the inner imagination by technology: smartphones, intelligent toys, the array of electronics at malls. Technology, as Martin Heidegger saw, is in many respects devoid of purpose, with mental anguish and confusion merely the result. Thus, we desperately require meaning in our lives, which obviously conventional politics cannot satisfy, even as technology and primitivism—witness the Islamic State—can flow together in new belief systems that assign themselves to traditional religions.

  Then there is loneliness. Toward the end of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the philosopher Hannah Arendt observes: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination…is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.” Totalitarianism, she goes on, is the product of the lonely mind that deduces one thing from the other in linear fashion toward the worst possible result, and thus is a “suicidal escape from this reality,” since by pressing men and women so close together in howling, marching formations individuality and thus loneliness are obliterated. But even with all of our electronic diversions, is loneliness any less prevalent now than it was when Arendt published her magnum opus in 1951? People are currently more isolated than ever, more prone to the symptoms of the lonely, totalitarian mind, or what psychiatrists call “racing thoughts.”

  People everywhere—in the West, in the Middle East, in Russia, in China—desperately need something to believe in, if only to alleviate their mental condition. They are dangerously ready for a new catechism given the right circumstances, for what passes as a new fad or cult in the West can migrate toward extremism in less stable or chaotic societies.

  The jet-age elites are of little help in translating or alleviating any of this. Cosmopolitan, increasingly denationalized, less and less bound to territory, the elites revel in the overflow of information which they process through 24/7 multitasking. Every one of them is just so brilliant! They can analyze everything while they believe in nothing, and have increasingly less loyalty to the passports they own. This makes them wholly disconnected from the so-called unwashed masses, whose upheavals and yearnings for a new totality, a new catechism, in order to fill the emptiness and loneliness in their souls, regularly surprise and shock these same elites.

  The rise of the Islamic State may be only a portent, and its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi but an early example of the disease-variants that follow in the footsteps of twentieth-century totalitarians. Al-Baghdadi arose out of the chaos of the Arab Spring and the American invasion of Iraq. The Arab Spring was not about the rise of democracy, as Western elites initially announced—projecting their own values and experiences onto an alien part of the world about which they comprehend little—but about a fundamental crisis in central authority. That central authority was illegitimate because it was seen as both corrupt and secular. While Western journalists at first fixated on cosmopolitan young urbanites in Arab capitals—because each group saw itself reflected in the other—the Arab masses writhing and toiling underneath yearned for a purity of belief and logic, even as their own ethnic and sectarian divisions, magnified rather than reduced by communications technology, undermine the emergence of any civil society that might assuage their individual demand for dignity and justice. Such conditions have led, and can only lead, to new forms of authoritarianism. And the worse and more prolonged the anarchy, the more extreme and brutal it is, the more utopian and millenarian these new forms of authoritarianism will take.

  The same liberal-trending elites in Cairo who seduced Western journalists in early 2011 in Tahrir Square would later be accepting of the new Pharaonic strongman, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after they themselves experienced just the slightest whiff of chaos wrought by Egyptian democracy in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. But Egypt is not a serious concern. An age-old geographic cluster of civilization defined precisely by the Nile Valley, the state there has a long and natural tradition of legitimacy, so that suffocating forms of authoritarianism were not required to hold it together. Countries like Libya, Syria, and Iraq are in another category, however, since their borders do not define ancient, geographic states and population nodes nearly to the degree of Egypt. Thus, they required more extreme forms of authoritarianism bordering on totalitarianism merely in order to survive. That is the root cause for the ideological intensity of the Muammar Qaddafi, Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, and Saddam Hussein regimes. The latter two regimes were Baath Socialist, a variant of a European utopian ideology transferred to the Middle East. Because totalitarianism eviscerates all forms of political organization between the regime at the top and the tribe and extended family at the bottom, the upshot of its demise in Libya, Syria, and Iraq has been anarchy, which, in turn, will not, as I’ve indicated, lead to liberal democracy but to new forms of tyranny. And because the depth and extent of the chaos in those places has been many times that which Egypt experienced, the form of any new tyranny in those places threatens to border on something utopian in nature.

  In Iraq, since 2003, because of an American invasion (which I mistakenly supported) and an arguably precipitous American withdrawal later on, people have experienced a level of Hobbesian barbarism and loss of dignity and safety far more profound than what Germans experienced prior to Hitler, and greater than what individual Russians experienced in the course of the collapse of the Romanov dynasty and ensuing civil war, which preceded Lenin and Stalin. Since 2011, Libya and Syria have replicated Iraq. This is to say nothing of the sense of personal alienation and loneliness that even people in these underdeveloped societies have experienced, thanks to the postmodern, technological condition which we all labor under. Add to the mix the alienation of being a young, unemployed Muslim male in Europe, unable to marry, and it becomes actually easy to fathom the psychology of recruits to the Islamic State, for sexual frustration can be appeased much more easily by a totalizing ideology than by being able to vote once every few years in an election.

  But doesn’t technology empower—by putting people in touch with each other so that they can speak with one voice? Precisely: It is speaking with one voice that is the danger. The freedom of the Internet is a conceit. Most people think that they generate their own ideas; in fact, their ideas are prepared by others who think for them. The very idea that some sermon or blog or tweet has gone viral is a sad reflection on the state of individualism in the twenty-first century. The electronic swarm is a negation of loneliness that prepares the way for new ideologies of totalitarianism. Imagine the swarm of electronic followers in countries where all personal dignity has been erased because of war and crime and chaos, where a postmodern form of extreme religiosity is clearly the only panacea.

  The ascent of the Islamic State and other jihadist movements, both Sunni and Shiite, is actually not altogether new in imperial and post-imperial history. The seasoned, Paris-based commentator William Pfaff, who covered international politics for decades before he died, observes that the rise of radical populist movements, demanding in many cases the restoration of a lost golden age, occurred twice in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Qing China (the Taiping and Boxer rebellions), once in mid-nineteenth-century British India (the Sepoy Mutiny), and once in la
te-nineteenth-century British Sudan (the Mahdist revolt). In that vein, as Pfaff explains, groups such as the Ugandan-based Lord’s Resistance Army and the Nigerian-based Boko Haram, which we in the West label, in almost infantile fashion, as merely “terrorist,” are, in fact, redemptive millennial movements that are a response to the twin threats of modernism and globalization.

  Globalization, as it intensifies, carries the potential to unleash utopian ideologies by diluting concrete, traditional bonds to territory and ethnicity, for in the partial void will come a heightened appeal to more abstract ideals, the very weapons of Utopia. It is not only the Middle East that should concern us. China is in the process of transformation from a developing country to a national security state that in future years and decades could adopt new and dangerous hybrid forms of nationalism and central control as a response to its economic troubles. Russia’s Vladimir Putin may yet be the forerunner of even greater xenophobia and nationalism under leaders further to the right than himself, as a response to Russia’s weakening social and economic condition. Not only religion, but nationalism, too, in an age of globalization can become yet more ideological and abstract.

  We must be both humble and vigilant, therefore. Humble, in the sense that we don’t assume Progress. That is, we shouldn’t feel safe in smug assumptions about the direction of history. Vigilant, in that we always stand firm in the defense of an individual such as Aleksander Wat, who, however doubt-ridden and self-questioning, refuses to submit to pulverizing forces.

  The thousands of terra-cotta warriors from the third-century-B.C. Qin Dynasty, first unearthed in the mid-1970s, constitute one of the wonders of the world. I stared down into the vast clay pit where these life-sized soldiers, no two of them exactly alike, stand in a state of freeze-frame marching. They are all headed east. For Qin, though in the heart of today’s China, had been the westernmost of the Warring States. Thus, to the east lay all of Qin’s enemies. Beyond Qin, in the opposite direction westward, the agricultural cradle that has always defined Chinese civilization begins to give way to the emptier deserts of Central Asia.

  A short drive from the site of the terra-cotta warriors in Shaanxi Province brought me to the Great Mosque of Xian, an eclectic confection of Arabic script underneath a traditional, upturned Chinese roof decorated with peacock-blue Persian tiles. The minaret here is easily mistaken for a pagoda. The result makes for an exquisite aesthetic, mixing the Middle East and the Far East, made even more precious by the dust. The Han-related Hui people, who maintain this mosque, account for the easternmost tentacle of Islam on the main body of the Asian mainland: The medieval Silk Road begins and ends right here—in what is, to repeat, the heart of the current Chinese state. For China’s political borders now encompass much more than the agricultural core of historic Han China.

  Next up was Dunhuang, almost nine hundred miles to the northwest of Xian. Twenty minutes after takeoff, the intricate checkerwork of cereal cultivation began to thin out—a rumor of what would soon become a bleached and bony wasteland, the mountaintops like protruding vertebrae. Politically I was still deep inside China; demographically and ethnically less so, though geographically I had already crossed into Central Asia—into the southwest corner of the Gobi Desert, to be precise. By the time the plane landed the terrain had been reduced to a sheet of sandpaper, almost absent of topographical features.

  Dunhuang was founded in middle antiquity as a military outpost of Han China, in the drive to establish and maintain protectorates in the desert and steppe lands to the west of the agricultural cradle. Buddhism, which took root during this period in what is now Pakistan’s northwest frontier, would become central to the Silk Road as the belief system of merchants and traders. There are hundreds of caves, their walls covered in medieval Buddhist frescoes, in the friable cliffsides around Dunhuang. In their lace-like delicacy, the tea-rose and mint-green colors of these frescoes seemed washed by milk. The paintings bear the artistic influences of not only Tang China but also Tibet, India, and Sassanian Iran. For Dunhuang was a Silk Road nexus.

  Just an hour beyond Dunhuang, hard lava-red hills suddenly give way to a horrifying ashy emptiness. This is the Yangguan Pass, where the protection of imperial China officially came to a halt. I thought of what the eighth-century Tang poet Wang Wei wrote of this very place:

  Let us empty another cup of wine.

  For, once West of Yangguan Pass, there will be no more friends.

  But now I do continue west, yet once again, still well within the borders of the twenty-first-century Chinese state.

  In Urumqi, beyond stacks of half-finished apartment blocks, I saw the towering, snow-mantled curtain of the Tien Shan (“Mountains of Heaven”) emanating terror and death. I shivered just looking at these gelid mountains. Twenty-one years before, on a previous visit, I found Urumqi a somnolent city of under a million when I arrived on a ramshackle train from Kazakhstan and left on a ramshackle bus for the Chinese border with Kyrgyzstan. No longer. Today Urumqi, the capital of China’s westernmost Xinjiang Province, has a population of 3.8 million. It is bursting with traffic jams on webworks of new highways and overpasses, with gleaming skyscrapers all around. The city is a testimony to Beijing’s attempt to dominate its Central Asian minority areas by smothering them with development, even as the Chinese build urban nodes for a postmodern Silk Road of long-distance highways, railways, and energy pipelines linking China with the former Soviet republics nearby. For it isn’t only the Tien Shan that manifests the reality of Central Asia deep inside China: It is also the signs in Arabic script, evidence of the Turkic Uighur language spoken by more than a third of Urumqi’s inhabitants, a language strikingly similar to Turkish proper. (There are, too, signs in the Russian alphabet, indicating the presence of Kazakh, Uzbek, and other Muslim minorities.) When one adds these ethnic Turkic areas to Tibet, you have a third of China’s land area. China is a prison house of nations, albeit to a lesser extent than the former Soviet Union.

  And yet, whether it is the new highways, the high-speed rail trains that swept by my bus here in Chinese Central Asia, the unending new wind farms on the steppe, or the ceaseless new apartment blocks—or even the very number of terra-cotta warriors themselves—China has always manifested an ambition of jaw-dropping, epic proportions. The sheer scale of it is impressive and frightening, both in antiquity and now. The fissiparous possibilities of China’s geography and ethnic makeup appear more than matched by the unifying force of this ambition.

  My journey ends in Kashgar, adjacent to the borders of Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan. Eighty percent of the Kashgar region’s population of 4.5 million are Muslim Uighur Turks. The signature event here is the Sunday livestock market, where throngs of Uighur men in wispy beards and flat brocaded caps furiously bargain amid packed masses of sheep, lambs, horses, donkeys, cattle, and furry Bactrian camels. The entire scene is veiled by a greasy film of dust, so that your memory of it is in black-and-white rather than color. But as authentic as it might appear to a first-time visitor, the livestock market in 2015 actually represents a more regulated, sanitized version of what I had experienced in 1994. Then, instead of Chinese-built trucks bringing the animals to market, there had been a chaos of donkey carts, and instead of a vast, rectangular space outside town set aside for the weekly event as exists now, the livestock market in the 1990s had been integrated into the bustling, equally chaotic traditional bazaar of Kashgar, with animals jostling against muddy stalls of brass and copper ware, all making for a deafening panorama of visual splendor reminiscent of earlier centuries.

  But over twenty-one years, the ability of the Chinese state to extend its reach into the minority desert hinterlands has advanced so much that Kashgar today is a place of new, regimented apartment blocks, with paved streets and a grid pattern, while the animals are kept far from town. It is modernism, deliberately imposed by the Chinese authorities, that is diluting Turkic Uighur culture here. Kashgar is becoming a city of
light industry—plastics and electronics—with the workers often imported from the Han core far to the east and housed in these new apartment blocks. The Uighur population fights back by copying mass culture imported from Turkey—the music and dances in the upscale Uighur restaurants are sometimes right out of Turkish television.

  Whereas the medieval Great Mosque of Xian exudes an elegant confluence of civilizations—Chinese, Arab, and Persian—here, deeper along the Silk Road in the twenty-first century, there is evidence of a crude clash. One day I witnessed hundreds of Uighur men with their beards and embroidered hats emerge from the fifteenth-century Id Kah Mosque in the center of Kashgar, only to face a well-organized group of Chinese who were engaged in loud line dancing to music from the movie Rush Hour. Their festivities were timed to coincide with afternoon Muslim prayers. Thus was mass global culture employed as an affront to a very traditional one.

  My entire trip constituted evidence of a postmodern geopolitical drama. The late Harvard China scholar John King Fairbank once said that China’s sense of itself is based on the cultural difference that exists between this surrounding belt of desert and the sown of China proper—in other words, between the pastoral and the arable. China’s ethnic geography reflects, in the words of Fairbanks and his Boston University colleague Merle Goldman, this “core-periphery” dynamic, with the core being the arable central plain of inner Han China, and the periphery being these pastoral frontier uplands heavily populated by minorities. To the early Chinese, agriculture meant civilization itself: that is, the Middle Kingdom, Zhongguo, which owed nothing to these surrounding peoples of the desert and steppe. From this worldview followed the kind of cultural certainty that China shared with Western Christendom.