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I think it's interesting you relate this to chivalry and feudalism given Liberalism and Marxism joined forces on the most destructive war in human history, ostensibly over Danzig, and retconned it to a fantasy between the lines of blameless heroes and mindlessly-evil orcs. Not that you agree with the framing, but I question the relation of that behavior to chivalry and feudalism.
Martin's critique of classical virtues fails because he has not and it seems cannot finish the story. So people who find Martin's critique cogent should also realize he was unable to finish the story, likely because he is unable to do so without leaning heavily on the values and archetypes he has deconstructed.
Martin is not saying that classical virtues don't exist. He very obviously believes they do exist. He just doesn't think it's as simple as Lord of the Rings makes it out to be. It's hard to walk in the Shadow to Mount Doom, but it's also extremely hard to make a decision between two things you value and love when they are at odds. It's not enough to just do what the church, or Plato, or Aristotle tells you because in the end you will be the one who has to choose.
The first (and second) world wars are great examples of this. People choose governments and institutions that claimed that they stood for these high-minded ideals, which were in reality just neo-feudal skinsuits for individuals/nations that wanted wealth/territory/power. Those ideals were why we could not back down. You get similar, although more personal, conflicts like this in the Middle Ages like the Wars of the Roses, Castillian Civil Wars, Thirty Years War, etc. People are so steeped in ideology, either personal or abstract, that they can't live up to the ideals that they want to. At least that's my reading of Martin.
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Those wars were only as destructive as they were because of the level of technology available to the combatants at the time. Had the Holy Roman Empire and its enemies had access to machine guns and mustard gas during the Thirty Years’ War, we can be certain that the casualty figures in that war would have been even worse than the over 50% fatality rate suffered by many of the affected areas.
I think it’s very difficult to argue that the world is not more peaceful now — less wars per year, and less wanton destruction and predation toward civilians during the wars that do take place — than it was under feudalism. The nations of Europe were in a state of near-constant military conflict with each other for over a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. (Which was itself a massively violent expansionist military power engaged in constant wars.)
Obviously I’m not in favor of the World Wars. I was tearing up just a few hours ago listening to the famous anti-war WWI ballad “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The worst thing about those wars is that they were (in the minds of the powerful men who engineered them) fought for the same reasons as feudal wars were: competition over territory and resources, imperial competition, grievances between powerful individuals, etc. But they were sold to the public as being fought for liberal, messianic reasons — every bit as moralized and totalizing as the “traditional chivalric virtues” which those liberal values had originally hoped to supplant. And clearly to some extent this is still happening (the Iraq Wars and the current Ukraine conflict come to mind), but the fact that there hasn’t been a war of anywhere remotely near the destructiveness of the World Wars in 80 years is, I think, instructive of the fact that globalist liberalism is, overall, more conducive to peace than feudalism was.
I see no reason to believe that this should be the case.
My understanding is that the 30 Years War was as lethal as it was because the fatality rate is measured by the population in the area the war was being fought in, not by the population of the belligerent states involved.
Technology shapes conflicts decisively. Had the Holy Roman Empire had machine guns and mustard gas, and presumably also telegraphs and railways and steam ships and modern farming, I see no reason to believe that the war would have played out the way it did only with increased lethality. It seems to me that what would actually happen is, essentially, something like World War 1 on the tactical level, higher lethality for the military forces and much, much lower mortality for the general population of non-combatants. You might even get significantly lower mortality for the soldiers; the Christmas Truce didn't emerge due to Materialist Rationality, after all.
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The demand for unconditional surrender was justified on liberal precepts and was very much unlike all those feudal wars throughout history in which it was SOP to sue for peace and come to a political arrangement. In WWI this outcome was disrupted by American intervention, and in WWII this outcome was enforced on the altar of liberal values. So the liberal/Marxist demand for unconditional surrender, directly related to their own fantasy-crafting about the "good vs evil" nature of the conflict, has to be related to the massive destruction of that war in addition to the technological improvements. And likewise the technology has to account for the 80 years of relative military peace due to the threat of MAD from not just nukes but conventional warfare.
But if we are going to do an account of "80 years of peace" under liberalism, you also have to account for demographic replacement in the US and Europe. Maybe abandoning certain values and sensibilities reduced the frequency of armed conflict, but it has led directly to demographic suicide. That's not a "peace" in my book.
Edit: January 1943, that's when Roosevelt and Churchill publicly and officially made the war aim "unconditional surrender." How does that not make you rage with anger? That is justified with liberal platitudes, show me a feudal conflict like that, as bloody as they were...
The allies demanded unconditional surrender citing the "barbarian leaders" of the enemy and then proceeded to firebomb and nuke hundreds of thousands of civilians while declaring themselves the blameless heroes. You can't let liberalism off the hook for this or even compare it to feudal conflicts which do not at all appear to have been motivated by this distinctly modern "good vs evil" narrative-crafting.
Let's not redefine words. If things are peaceful, they're peaceful. They still might have other undesirable features, like demographic collapse, or things like natural disasters, disease, famine, etc.
The shakers died out completely peacefully. Nobody forced them not to reproduce, they made the choice themselves.
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80 years of peace is actually bull. Look at the history and there are lots of wars. The reason they’re not happening to you isn’t “liberal democracy’s boon” it’s geography. If you’re American, you basically live in a fortress — friendly governments on our two land borders and two entire oceans between America and the rest of the world.
And there have been wars. They’ve just happening in Africa, MENA, or South America. We’ve blown up lots of real estate during the Great Liberal Peace. Further, I have long suspected that the intervention of international organizations has made wars worse rather than better. In the bad old days, you’d fight until victory or defeat. Once the other side knuckles under, the thing is done, and you accept whatever the results were. If you fought beyond the point of futility, that’s on you. Now wars are more common because nobody is decisively defeated. The international community sees to it by putting in peace keepers or demanding ceasefires when they decide that the weaker side is losing too badly. This not only delays surrender, but because the weaker side never loses badly enough, the war flares up again as soon as the losing side can rearm.
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I think demographic replacement is fundamentally different from the low level of violence that permeated the middle ages at all times. Yes it absolutely sucks to see your culture be flushed down the toilet, but it's absolutely not the same as having your farm burned down, your daughters raped, and winter food stores plundered every 10-20 years.
Is accute disease worse than chronic? If I'm healthy for one to two decades between bouts I may choose accute episodes.
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Global liberalism is still very young! Feudalism lasted for more than a millennium, and both its forms and its ideological underpinnings evolved substantially over the course of that time. Global liberalism was birthed in the slaughter of the World Wars, but it still has a long time to internalize the lessons from that transition. And the same is certainly true for mass immigration! The signs are all around us that the nations of Europe are beginning to wake up and prepare for course-correction on that issue. Keir Starmer of all people is out here openly admitting that mass immigration to the U.K. was both disastrous and intentionally engineered over the objections of the public! We are at only one early stage in the development of what will eventually be the flowering of the Globalist Age; the kinks are still being worked out! Who knows what fresh Renaissance will arise in response to the mistakes and overcorrections of our era?
Oh I agree we are in a Globalist Age, and many others on the Online Right are wrong to deny this or think it's even avoidable. But is clinging to Liberalism really the best path forward given this reality? Pax Americana is not even close to a worthy justification for clinging to the noble lies of Liberalism. It's actually a reason to jettison it.
I think Liberalism can be tweaked and refined significantly. For example, its claims of universal human equality made more sense in the context under which they were developed. However, now that we have a much larger exposure to the full breadth of global humanity, we can observe conclusively that this supposed equality is not the reality on the ground. So, we can refine liberalism to take that into account - either by limiting its universalist commitments, or by using the technologies we have available — and the even better ones yet to be developed! — to actually make that equality a reality through eugenics.
Liberalism is built for 130-IQ Anglos — so, let’s make the rest of the world more like 130-IQ Anglos! I also think we can syncretize liberalism with the more communitarian aspects of Asian societies, strengthening both traditions through fusion. There’s a lot of room for intellectual and political developments to obviate some of the worst and most deluded/obsolete aspects of Classical Liberalism.
Liberalism was built by and for 130-IQ Anglos, which leaves me wondering why you think the rest of the world will be as passionate about muh Social Contract. It was created as a post-hoc rationalization for their own political and imperial and separatist ambitions. Muh Social Contract and "inalienable rights" are nothing except noble lies they made to justify their own expansion of power. It's not suitable for the Globalist Age foremost because it's not true, and secondly, like you said, it was made by and for them, not for a Globalist Age.
Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.
Can you explain? It is not obvious to me. Though that might be due to me confusing "Liberal Values" for "Values that are Liberal" such as morphological freedom.
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So, my model for this is post-war Japan. The American military occupied the country, wrote a constitution for it based on liberalism (but adapted somewhat to meet the local culture where it was) and then said, “You might hate this now and see it as a foreign imposition, but wait and see what results it will produce for your country.” And what do you know, Japan became one of the leading lights of the world. They had the legal and political forms of liberal democracy, undergirded by a cultural and religious substrate of traditionalist communitarianism. It seems like they really got the best of both worlds. This couldn’t have happened without them being defeated and subjugated by liberal powers. And it allowed them to develop a relationship with America wherein, while they are undeniably a junior partner, they can compete on a genuine peer basis with America in many respects.
This seems like the model that can be productively imposed on many of the other countries of the world. They will hate it at first, their citizens will rebel, they will be manifestly unprepared for and unworthy of liberalism. But in time, when it turns out that their governments actually work and aren’t just rapacious machines designed to rape and exploit their citizens, their descendants will grow to appreciate it.
Now, of course, I see the weaknesses of the model. Sure, it worked in Japan, but it worked because the Japanese are themselves an extremely industrious and high-IQ population, and also because they basically did not have a choice but to accept their subjugation. We’ve seen more recent examples of what happens when countries resist their vassalage by America, and it doesn’t seem like America has the stomach to see the process through to the end anymore. The imperial/colonial powers of the Age of Exploration had a massive surplus of ambitious and restless young men who could be mobilized toward the subjugation of the world; the countries of the modern West have declining and demoralized populations. We can’t stomach the casualties or the optics of what real Muscular Liberalism would look like in practice; this is why the Neocons have been so soundly repudiated.
What would be needed, then, is both a new animating ideology/spirit, and an acceleration of the automation and de-personalization of war. A form of military and economic dominance that doesn’t reward a country for having a surplus of militant young men, and which doesn’t require the mass spilling of the blood of First Worlders. I believe that the new animating spirit will necessarily be based on some form of liberalism. We don’t have any other realistic options. It can be a revitalized, syncretized liberalism, in the same way that post-Renaissance Christianity was strengthened by its reconciliation with Hellenism, but it’s not going to be based on a repudiation of Globalist Liberal principles. We have to make the best of that.
It’s not so simple. Japan was already modernising: the period between the end of the shogunate and WW2 is basically Japan speed-running the Enlightenment. The Americans made the very sensible choice to avoid provoking excess resentment by leaving Emperor Hirohito alive and allowing them to preserve many of their existing traditions in new forms: ken-jutsu (an art of war) became ken-do (a school sport), and so on. So they didn’t feel they were losing more than they had already lost by adopting American ways.
Beyond that, much of Japan’s liberalisation is potemkin - the same party has been in charge for the vast majority of the last seventy years, the police has very broad discretion and prosecution will rubber-stamp anything they do.
The Japanese mostly copied America because America looked worth copying: it was huge and rich and advanced, and everything Japan felt it out to be. Plus the road of imperial conquest was now closed to them, so they chose the next best option.
The main thing that has changed is that liberal countries are no longer unquestionably worth imitating. Europe is increasingly poor despite being liberal, China is increasingly rich despite being culturally illiberal.
EDIT: interesting, completely the opposite perspective from @MaiqTheTrue
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The problem of course being that modern Global Liberals have long since lost the will to do what was done in Japan even if it would work. The project was basically taking a feudalist society turned Empire with no real history of democratic institutions and zero concept of the idea of human rights and rebirth a new country and a nearly completely new culture from the ashes of what the culture of Japan was before Nagasaki.
They took over everything, confiscated weapons larger than a kitchen knife, banned large swathes of Japanese culture (shogi was nearly banned because it was a war-game. It survived because those defending it managed to convince the occupation forces that Shogi is democratic because even a pawn can become a king). The school system was fully controlled for a generation.
Compare that to the occupation of Afghanistan. We didn’t even try to curb the worst parts of Islam, we didn’t ban weapons. We certainly didn’t impose a modern, Western educational system on Afghanistan. Basically, they could keep everything backwards about Islamic culture.
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