A Justification for Empire

 

Dissolution of the Ottoman Empire

A correspondent observes that “history illustrates that racism is declining, but ever so slowly.”

I’m not so sure. That is the “Whig view of history” we are traditionally served: that the progress of history is always towards our own political preferences. Accordingly, we declare ourselves on “the right side of history,” and justify our views with “this is 2021, after all.”

 Which may be so, in broad terms. Given that there is a God, it makes sense that the greater trajectory of history should arc towards justice. However, recently I have come to doubt this particular premise: that racism specifically is in decline. It seems to me that racism has grown frighteningly worse over the past few years. That in turn makes me look back and question. What are the real dynamics here?

When you think of it, racism was almost necessarily worse in the past few centuries than it was earlier. The very concept of “races” of humans is a modern scientific one. We can pretty much trace it to Darwin. Before Darwin, ancestry might have mattered, breeding might have mattered, but not race. Hitler and the Nazis certainly traced their racial theories to him. 

The modern idea of the nation state emerges from the same source. It was born in the 1860s, in the wake of Darwin, and reached the status of international law by 1917, with Wilson’s 14 points. "National aspirations must be respected; people may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. 'Self determination' is not a mere phrase; it is an imperative principle of action.” Wilson believed firmly in race and in racial segregation at home; it was a “progressive” idea. National borders were to be established on the basis of race; races were in principle not to mix. 

Before the nation state, we generally had little such notion; which is why empires seemed reasonable ways to run things. And they did produce general peace among racial groups. With nation states, interracial war broke out.

In an empire, civil allegiance was not to one’s race, but to a royal family or to a set of shared ideals. Anyone could become a Roman citizen, for example, based on merit. The Holy Roman Empire or the Ottoman Empire were based on shared religious principles, not race.

Racism may now be growing, not declining, because we are losing our shared ideals. Religion was replaced for a time by secular humanism, but this has not proved durable. Postmodernism has rejected the very possibility of shared ideals. What is left is self-interest and instinct, which throws us into tribalism. For humans are instinctively tribal animals. Only civilization ever kept us from each other’s throats.

I am not advocating a return to Empire. But until corrupted by Darwinism in the nineteenth century, the problem with empires was not racism, but the lack of democracy. That might even have been simply necessary at the time, based on distance, not race. The British, after all, did not extend the Imperial franchise to the Thirteen Colonies, Canada or Australia. Instead, as soon as responsible government was introduced, these regions became independent. It was apparently not practical for them to send representatives to serve in Westminster.

Are we doomed to an inevitable spiral downward into savagery? I imagine not, on the grounds that there is a God, and the arc of history generally really does bend towards justice.