Posting a link here to the full text of a recent Marco Rubio speech in Greece. My response will be below. I would encourage others to consider Rubio’s arguments and weigh their own responses.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio Remarks - United States Department of State
Rubio’s reading of Athenian history is rather selective. Soon after the Persian Wars, Athens overreached itself with the aggressive qualities Rubio so greatly admires. The Athenians were then defeated in turn by the Spartans, the Macedonians, the Romans, and the Turks. (Presumably Rubio should be celebrating the great zest for conquest and discovery of foreign domains manifested by Turkish peoples down through the ages. Not to mention the Huns. Not to mention the Mongols. Not to mention the Persians. Not to mention the Arabs. Why is the Western will to power somehow different in kind than anyone else’s will to power?)
In any case, empire building with hoplites and triremes is one thing. Empire building with missiles and drones is something else entirely. Presumably had only the US not been lacking in “thumos” (or perhaps testosterone), US actions post-WWII would have gone so much better in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and most lately Iran. Somehow all these non-white, non-Western peoples were able to resist the self-proclaimed superiority of the West. Somehow India showed the British the exit door, Somehow China rose from international doormat to the sort of strategic threat the defenders of “Western Civilization” caution us to be very, very afraid of. Whatever one thinks of metanarratives on principal, metanarratives that leave out anything inconvenient to a fundamentally tendentious argument fail most precisely as metanarratives. They don’t actually tell the story they purport to tell. Rubio implies that the West invented everything that matters. Paper, compass, movable type, gunpowder, algebra, algorithms, and the number zero are here to persuade us otherwise. Without the mediation of Islam, the medieval civilization of Western Europe Rubio loves so much would have remained entirely ignorant of the ancient Greek philosophy Rubio also claims to love. The West, on its own, evidently was not capable of transmitting its own great culture. For all the noises Rubio makes about making a revitalized Christianity central to an equally reinvigorated West, there is scarcely anything Christian at all about Rubio’s support for conquest and the enslavement of colonized peoples. A real Christian - Saint Augustine - called Rubio’s sort of attitude libido dominandi. That’s not a flattering term, in Augustine’s, scheme of things.
This leads to the question then, can we here do better? I’ll let others speak for themselves. As for me, I include in the idea of “Seeds of Renaissance” cultures, philosophies, and religions the world over. I agree fundamentally with Confucius, for example, that an early action item for the restoration of just, harmonious governance is “rectification of names” - describing people and actions as what they truly are. What Rubio claims and what Rubio is are two different matters entirely.
Here’s a repost of something I just saw on FB:
A Place for My Head · Linkin Park ·
Marco Rubio, if you are going to stand beneath the Acropolis and tell people that America should embrace the “unapologetic pursuit of national power,” then please, for the love of God, finish the history lesson. You do not get to borrow Athens for the backdrop, invoke Achilles and Thermopylae, talk about glory and Western civilization, and skip the part where Athens became exactly the kind of power you are describing and paid for it. That is the part that made me angry.
Rubio gave the speech on the Pnyx, the hill where Athenians once gathered to debate war, law, empire and the future of their city. He spoke about courage, competition, risk, glory and thumos, and argued that the West has grown too embarrassed by power and too afraid to use it. Under Trump, he said, America has stopped apologizing for wanting it. All I could think was: you are standing in Athens.
I am a historian before I am a communications person, and a communications person before I am an angry citizen, although this speech managed to hit all three at once. One of the first things history teaches you is that civilizations are often least reliable when describing themselves. They tell you what they believed they were doing. The record tells you what they actually did. Athens gave us plenty of both.
The Athenians understood power better than most societies that came after them: money, ships, alliances, military force, political theater, prestige. They also understood the very specific intoxication that comes from becoming powerful enough to confuse what you CAN do with what you SHOULD do. Thucydides recorded where that leads.
During the Peloponnesian War, Athens confronted the island of Melos, which wanted to remain neutral. Athens was not interested. In the Melian Dialogue, the Athenians essentially tell the Melians that morality is a luxury between equals, and Melos is not their equal. People love the famous line about the strong doing what they can and the weak suffering what they must because it sounds hard. It sounds like something you would put over a black and white statue and post on LinkedIn before announcing a promotion. The problem is what happens next.
Athens besieged Melos. After the city surrendered, the Athenians killed the adult men, sold the women and children into slavery, and took the island for themselves. That is not a metaphor. It is the end of the story for the Melians, and it should have been the end of the lesson for Athens.
Instead Athens kept going. Soon after came Sicily, a massive expedition launched with the kind of confidence powerful states always seem to have right before they discover geography, logistics and reality. They had money, ships and manpower, and a political class that could explain why the next expansion was necessary. There were objections. They went anyway.
The Sicilian Expedition was a disaster. Ships were destroyed, soldiers were killed or captured, and survivors were left in the quarries of Syracuse. Athens came out of it badly weakened and much closer to losing the war. That is why a speech about unapologetic national power sounds so strange in Athens. Athens was never weak. It was terrifyingly strong, and that was part of the problem.
I am not making an isolationist argument. America should be powerful. We need manufacturing capacity, military strength and secure supply chains. We should be good at semiconductors, energy, artificial intelligence, defense, cyber, and the things countries now fight over without always calling it war. I work in tech, and I am not going to pretend technological or industrial power does not matter. What bothers me is the leap from power being necessary to power being virtuous. Those are not the same thing.
The founders knew that, which is why it irritates me when politicians invoke Greece and Rome as if the founders were a group of men walking around in togas whispering about greatness. They read ancient history because republics kept collapsing. They worried about faction, demagogues, standing armies, executive power, and what ambitious men could do once frightened citizens decided the rules were suddenly optional. Rome did not interest them because it became powerful. It interested them because the Republic died.
The Constitution is full of deliberate friction for a reason: Congress, courts, elections, federalism, impeachment, civilian control of the military, rights the government is explicitly told not to touch. The men who wrote it were not trying to build the most efficient possible machine for national power. They were trying to make power harder to use badly.
That is what makes Rubio’s framing so jarring. He ran through the same list I would: AI, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, weapons, cyber, minerals, space. Fine. But when military, technological and civilizational superiority start getting bundled together, strength turns into a moral argument. We are stronger, so we must know better. We are more advanced, so leadership belongs to us. We are the West, so the expansion of Western power must eventually be good. Athens told itself versions of that story too.
The Delian League began as an alliance against Persia. Over time Athens took control of the treasury, the ships and most of the meaningful decisions, and states that tried to leave discovered the alliance had become rather less voluntary than everyone remembered. That is how it usually happens. Nobody issues a declaration announcing an empire, and nobody puts imperial overreach on the agenda. It arrives through exceptions, necessity, security, emergency, precedent.
Athens is useful precisely because it ruins the comforting idea that democracy and empire cannot coexist. Athens had assemblies and an empire. It produced great theater and destroyed cities, built the Parthenon and collected tribute, gave us Socrates and then killed him. Civilization does not make cruelty impossible. Sometimes civilized societies become extremely good at explaining cruelty to themselves.
That is why the word unapologetic keeps sticking with me. Why should a great power be unapologetic? A serious country should be able to say we got this wrong. We misjudged it. We went too far. We believed our own intelligence, mistook confidence for competence, and sent other people to absorb consequences that never reached the people who made the decision.
We have enough history of our own to know better. Vietnam should have taught us something. So should Iraq, the Philippines, Native removal and slavery. America keeps getting the lesson and deciding it was meant for somebody else, and then we start over.
This is where I lose patience with history as scenery. If you want Athens, take Athens, and take Melos with it. If you want Thermopylae, take Sparta’s slave society too. If you want Rome, take the Republic collapsing under ambitious men. If you want the founders, take their fear of concentrated power. If you want Western civilization, take all of it, including the parts where Western countries did horrible things while absolutely convinced they were carrying civilization with them.
Do not give me the marble and leave out the blood. That is not history. That is branding.
Communications people should be more embarrassed by this than historians. The speech is almost too clean. Power, glory, courage, civilization, national strength: it is good language, and it sounds good in a room. That is exactly why it needs to be interrogated. A phrase like “unapologetic pursuit of national power” should not reassure anyone. It should make people ask what happens when national power and national conscience disagree. Who wins? Who is expected to shut up? Who gets called weak for objecting? Who pays when the people making the decision are wrong?
Those are the questions history actually teaches you to ask. Not whether a civilization was powerful, but whether it knew when to stop.
So yes, read Thucydides. Read Plutarch. Read the founders Rubio invoked. Read Douglass. Read the people who loved their country enough to document what it was doing badly instead of flattering it. Then be difficult about power. Ask what it is for, who benefits and who pays. Ask why every emergency seems to come with a request to lower your standards, and why patriotism so often gets defined as agreeing quickly and remembering selectively.
Politicians love history when it behaves like a prop. Make it misbehave. They want the Acropolis. Give them Melos.
Rubio wants Athens to be a story about a civilization that grew too ashamed of power.
It is a story about what happens when a civilization stops being ashamed of what power can do.
That lesson is sitting right there in the stones, and it is the one he left out.
Is Western Civilization the best civilization, and would the world be better off if everyone were more like the West? In a word, no. Below is a quick sketch of the best theory I can currently marshal to support that position.
First of all, let’s begin with a basic cultural evolutionary perspective. Brendan Graham Dempsey summarizes the main body of theory for this, and with his most recent work (here: Book Officially Available! - Brendan Graham Dempsey) is becoming recognized in Integral circles as heir apparent to Ken Wilber.
Key to Dempsey’s model is neo-Piagetian cognitive theory, such as the Model of Hierarchical Complexity (MHC). All such models involve a quasi-Hegelian resolution of apparent contradictions into higher level, more abstract syntheses. The gist of it is, the universe itself involves a learning process, with ever-higher levels of complexification emerging through the interplay of energy and entropy. Within the ambit of culture, any sort of cultural stage theory (along the lines of Spiral Dynamics or Hanzi Freinacht) likewise involves the emergence of higher level abstractions. If Hegel could have incorporated the past 200 years of social science and cognitive science into his dialectic, this would all be very Hegelian.
A few years back I read Habermas Also and History of Philosophy v1 in which Habermas makes a similar argument about the Axial Age 1) emerging from “cognitive dissonance” and 2) resolving into higher level abstraction. But here’s the rub. This process happened at least four times (Greece, Israel, India, China) and the results in each case were different abstractions. Instead of a single global stage-theoretical cultural progression to unitary higher abstraction, we get a plurality of alternative abstractions, as in branches from a tree. Current metamodern and Integral theory has failed to address this pluralism of civilizational abstractions in any serious way. My personal research focus is precisely to investigate this pluralism.
Habermas summarizes a lot of secondary sources to arrive at “Being”, “God”, “Dharma”, and “Tao” as being emblematic abstractions characteristic of four different Axial cradle civilizations. In later historical time, there was a lot of cross-fertilization, but let’s stick with the originating case for simplicity’s sake. Habermas does not speculate much on why these all came out differently, because his main focus is to lay groundwork for his following volumes on the specifically Western tensions between faith and knowledge. Dharma and Tao are roads not taken any further in that analysis. But for reasons that align nicely with Whitehead’s notions about speculative philosophy being needed for a comprehensive view, I have spent several years pursuing if Dharma and Tao are just different vocabulary proxies, in effect, for God and Being, or if the different civilizations really have very different insights into the nature of reality.
Recently I obtained a copy of Keith Chandler’s Beyond Civilization. The P2P Foundation offers a nice summary here: Beyond Civilization - P2P Foundation Wiki
Being just a few chapters into this work, I’d say it’s more heuristic than tightly theoretical. (Dempsey and Habermas are best of breed, IMO, when it comes to being tightly theoretical.) But Chandler’s heuristic is quite useful, especially for an introductory discussion.
Chandler’s POV is that the West is pro-order and anti-chaos. By contrast, Indian civilization is anti-order and pro-chaos. China balances both order and chaos. (“Chaos” in Chandler’s usage might better be rendered as “mystery”) We could pick a lot of nits about Chandler, but I think some of his core intuitions reinforce impressions I arrived at myself through other means. Quick summary:
The Western (i.e. ancient Greek) mind focuses primary on the structure of the cosmos. It’s a geographical orientation useful for transacting business with strangers.
India, in general, cared little about the natural order and saved its best energies for the exploration of consciousness.
China, in contrast to India was more concerned with the pragmatic world, but in contrast to the West saw order as flowing into chaos and back again, so was not seeking anything like an unambiguous Platonic underpinning for the natural world. China’s main preoccupation, in any case, was the establishment and maintenance of social order in a tightly defined geography in which family ties ran quite thickly.
Why did they get different answers? Because they asked different questions. The different civilizations basically declared different majors and had different research programs. I’m leaving some loose ends here (like Chandler’s approach to Mesoamerican civilization or how Habermas divides the West into Greek and Hebraic components), but let’s just pause the argument at this point. It sets enough of the stage for reactions and responses as far as it goes.
To summarize for current application, I see the West as having things to learn from India (Hindu, Buddhist, or other flavored) with respect to the theory of subjectivity and consciousness. I likewise see the West as needing something like a Confucian approach to social harmony. When Xi meets Trump, which of these looks like the adult in the room? (Beyond China, consider also Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Japan, all under classic Chinese influence - is the West really “superior” to all those? Good luck with those AI frontier models without Taiwan Semi or Korean DRAM!) Granted, the West got there first on natural science, but notice India and China have not exactly been slow to pick that up. The West - in its arrogance (see Marco Rubio at the top of this thread) - is generally quite blind about what other cultures understand better. My preferred global futures would involve a harmonious humanity drawing needed lessons from all of the above.
As a particular focus throughout my career has been the study of organised violence, war and peace, peacebuilding, and the dynamics of conflict and conflict resolution I could not in good faith ignore this post.
I’ve found both Rubio’s speech and the thoughtful responses here particularly interesting. I agree with much of the criticism of his selective reading of history, especially the reminders of Athens’ imperial overreach and the many contributions of non-Western civilizations.
But I wonder whether we might take the discussion a step further. Rather than asking only what Rubio’s historical narrative leaves out, we could ask what historically developed structures make his understanding of power and security appear so compelling in the first place.
Rubio brings together military power, technological superiority, industrial capacity, national identity, and civilizational survival. These are presented not merely as political preferences, but as necessities.
I have been exploring this problem through what I call the Social Transformation Imperative: the competitive pressures through which new technological capacities drive corresponding transformations in social and political organisation. It is not enough for a state to acquire advanced weapons, industrial technologies, or AI. To remain competitive, it must also develop the institutions, infrastructures, and forms of coordination capable of deploying them effectively.
Over time, these pressures can become deeply embedded in political institutions and in the assumptions of those who lead them.
This connects with Robert Kegan’s distinction between what we are able to examine critically and what we remain so identified with that we cannot yet see it as an object of reflection.
Could something analogous happen collectively? Historically developed patterns of geopolitical competition and technological dependence may become so deeply incorporated into political and military thinking that they no longer appear as particular ways of organising international relations. They appear as reality itself — as what responsible leaders simply have to do.
This does not mean that security threats are imaginary, or that all leaders share the same assumptions. It means that real threats are interpreted and acted upon through historically formed institutions and understandings that can themselves intensify insecurity.
But this also raises a question about how we understand international relations more generally.
What if the international system is not simply an arena in which already-formed states pursue already-given interests? What if the relationships between states help constitute the interests, identities, and security concerns of the states themselves?
I have recently been exploring this question through a dialogue about a relational analysis of contemporary international security. One possibility that emerged was to distinguish three interconnected dimensions of international relations.
The first is systemic interdependence.
States are already connected through material realities that no individual state can fully control: energy systems, trade, finance, supply chains, digital infrastructures, climate change, military technologies, and increasingly AI.
These relationships exist whether governments recognise them or not.
A state may seek greater security through military superiority, technological control, or economic independence. Yet its actions can produce consequences throughout the interconnected system, generating new vulnerabilities and reactions.
In this sense, security is not something a state can simply accumulate in isolation. It is partly constituted by the wider system of relationships in which that state exists.
The second dimension is the strategic and conflictual relationship through which states shape one another.
Here the question is not only how states are materially connected, but how their actions transform each other’s perceptions, identities, and strategies.
One state’s defensive measures may be interpreted by another as preparation for aggression. The second state responds by strengthening its own capabilities, confirming the first state’s fears. Through their reactions, the parties may gradually help produce the very adversaries they fear.
This is more than a misunderstanding between otherwise independent actors. It is a self-reinforcing historical process in which the relationship itself becomes a force shaping the participants.
And these processes are rarely symmetrical. Some states have much greater power to turn their interpretations of reality into institutions, military alliances, technological standards, and economic arrangements that others must then confront.
A deeper analysis must therefore examine both the mutual formation of security perceptions and the unequal power to make particular interpretations institutionally effective.
This is also where the technopolitical history becomes crucial. Military technologies, energy systems, industrial production, communications, and now digital networks and AI have repeatedly transformed not only what states can do, but the kinds of political organisation needed to survive within a competitive international order.
States do not simply compete using technologies. Technological competition also helps produce the kinds of states that compete.
The third dimension concerns the possibility of changing the quality of these relationships.
Objective interdependence does not automatically produce mutual understanding. Nor does recognising a security dilemma necessarily overcome it.
The question is whether states and societies can develop relationships and institutions in which others are no longer understood only as threats, competitors, or objects of strategic calculation, but also as legitimate participants in the creation of a shared security order.
Here I find inspiration in Olof Palme’s idea of common security, as well as in the relational philosophies of Martin Buber and Hartmut Rosa.
Their perspectives are not substitutes for geopolitical analysis. States are not individuals, and mutual recognition cannot eliminate real conflicts of interest or the need for defence.
But they invite us to ask a question that goes beyond the accumulation of power: how might the quality of international relationships be transformed so that security becomes less dependent on making others insecure?
These three dimensions belong together. The first concerns the material reality of interdependence. The second concerns the historically evolving relationships through which actors generate threats, identities, and conflicts. The third concerns the possibility of transforming those relationships through mutual recognition and new institutional arrangements.
And this brings me to AI.
Rubio presents AI primarily as one of the strategic technologies in which the United States must seek superiority. Within the existing competitive system, that position is understandable. But it leaves almost entirely unexplored another possibility.
What if AI could help us understand the international system more deeply, rather than merely helping particular states compete more effectively within it?
An increasingly capable AI, participating in sustained and critically open dialogue with humans, could help reconstruct the long technopolitical history through which our present institutions and security assumptions emerged.
It could help us examine the material interdependencies that governments tend to analyse separately; compare competing historical narratives and security perceptions; identify feedback processes through which defensive actions become mutually threatening; and investigate how unequal power allows some interpretations of reality to become institutional facts.
It could also help us distinguish what is genuinely unavoidable from what has become difficult to imagine changing.
This would be especially valuable because the assumptions that shape our understanding of international politics are themselves products of the historical processes we are trying to understand.
AI would not stand outside these processes. Its development is already deeply embedded in military competition, economic concentration, technological dependence, and geopolitical rivalry. It could reinforce all of them.
Nor would AI provide an impartial or infallible perspective. Its analyses would need to be examined critically, challenged, and tested against historical evidence and alternative interpretations.
But perhaps the distinctive possibility lies in the capacity for sustained, reflexive inquiry: a technology that can participate with humans in examining the very institutional and technological conditions that brought it into existence.
Such inquiry might also become practically oriented.
What kinds of institutions could reduce security dilemmas without leaving states defenceless against genuine threats?
How might states develop credible forms of mutual restraint, verification, technological cooperation, and shared security while recognising real asymmetries of power and conflicting interests?
And how could these institutions survive the competitive pressures that have so often undermined earlier attempts at cooperation?
I don’t think these questions have simple answers. But they seem precisely the kinds of questions that could become the subject of continued reflexive human–AI dialogue — bringing historical research, international relations theory, institutional analysis, and competing political perspectives into a shared process of critical inquiry.
Perhaps one important task of a Second Renaissance is not simply to develop greater technological power, but to develop the collective capacity to understand the historical structures that shape our use of power — and to discover whether they can be transformed.
My approach to this is through Kojin Karatani’s theory of the State. (For Katatani, the State is roughly equivalent to what Luke Kemp calls a “Goliath”). For those unfamiliar with Karatani’s model, here is a quick summary:
https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Evolution_of_the_Modes_of_Exchange
Karatani revisits Marx, and refactors everything from the POV of “modes of exchange” as opposed to means of production and relations of production. For Karatani, the State emerges from Exchange Mode B. The “exchange” in this mode is what we often see in gangster movies: “Give me all your money and I won’t kill you and/or your family”. The “exchange” is your money for your life, which obviously implies an asymmetry of power and the projection of domination. Your notion of “means of destruction” fits that model quite nicely.
For Karatani, Mode C (capitalist exchange) emerged out of ancient imperial Mode B (consider inter-imperial Bronze Age trading activities), but took on a semi-autonomous life of its own in early modern Europe, in the context of the chaotic State system in Europe at the time. (Ming China at the same time had even more advanced technical capabilities, but the centralized State in China was able to keep merchant capital on a tighter leash. )
Again, for Karatani beginning in the 19th century we get a full “Borromean Knot” of interlocking systems: Capital-Nation-State. Too much or too little of any of these three and the situation becomes unstable. The “Nation” component of this hearkens back to Karatani’s Mode A - reciprocal gifting. For social solidarity purposes, modern States (in partnership with Capital) need to spread the wealth around a bit to “the people”, who might otherwise be inclined to take to the streets and overthrow the State.
This more or less paints a picture of how we got to where we are. What next? Karatani posits Mode D, which would reintroduce reciprocal gifting, except this time on a global scale. The content of that and the mechanisms of how we might get there remain sketchy.
All that is my preamble to reflecting on the State and on the current international system. Systems of domination - the historical States - are self-replicating as long as they avoid collapse. Moreover, if any given State collapses, others move into the same territory and exploit it for themselves, making the State system as such extremely robust. Thanks to current drone technology, smaller States or non-State actors like the Houthis can wreck havoc on the international system. We thus get a lot of shatter belts or no-mans-land marches or failed states in which warlord anarchy is the order the day.
So … current States are in resource competition with each other, creating many new shatter belts and failed states in the process. All of this will likely continue, until global Capital feels the pinch, supply chains get stressed too much, and we hit the next recession/depression cycle. The “people” in various nations will feel neglected, governments will tumble, and the 2030s may well strangely echo the 1930s.
On a more optimistic note, Canada’s Carney and Finland’s Stubb (among others) are articulating an international rule of law alternative to the Trump-Putin chaos coalition. The pragmatic question is, will might make right? (Trump-Putin) or will right make might? (Carney-Stubb). The future is not ours to see … but anything we can do to bend things in the Carney-Stubb direction strikes me as effort well spent. The Carney idea is that middle powers in a rules-based network with each other can find a better balance between capital, nation, and state. (The so called “great powers” like US, China and Russia are highly unstable by contrast - they all in their own ways lean far too much toward extremes). What might emerge from this, strong emphasis on might, is a global rules-based superstate that delegates considerable regional autonomy to whatever becomes of the traditional States, but wields enough monopoly of force, influence or both, to put some teeth into a rules-based global order.
On the question of AI (and related technologies like missiles, nuclear weapons, satellites, drones, and bio-warfare) it’s difficult to image any stable global multi-state solution in which multiple great powers compete across all possible “means of destruction”. That simply can’t end well. Referring to Thomas Hobbes more than Karl Marx, Katatani suggests a global Leviathan may emerge, a Leviathan formed by the States themselves, to avoid apocalyptic war of all against all. That may well seem more dystopian than utopian. If there are better, more plausible alternatives available, I would love to learn about them!
Hi Robert,
Thank you for bringing Karatani into this conversation. We have been reflecting further on his framework, and we find his shift from modes of production to modes of exchange particularly valuable. His account of the interdependence of capital, nation, and state helps explain why these structures are so difficult to transcend, and why changing one dimension does not necessarily transform the system as a whole.
At the same time, we wonder whether the explanatory framework needs to go further. Our main question concerns the generative mechanisms through which historical social formations not only reproduce themselves, but are compelled to transform.
Our own approach draws on Marx, Mumford, Ellul, Heidegger, Tilly, Innis and McLuhan, Georgescu-Roegen, Michael Mann, and Bhaskar’s Critical Realism. Bringing these perspectives together has led us to emphasize several dynamics that seem less fully developed in Karatani’s account.
First, warfare and technological competition are not simply expressions of existing relations of domination. They can become powerful engines of institutional transformation. As Tilly demonstrated, changing military requirements reshape taxation, administration, production, and political organization. We describe this through an Inclusion Imperative: competitive pressures can compel societies to adopt decisive technologies, followed by a Social Transformation Imperative: effectively integrating those technologies requires changes in the institutions and social relations through which they operate.
Second, technology, energy, and ecology are not merely background conditions. The material and thermodynamic requirements of a civilization help determine which forms of social organization can reproduce themselves, and when they become increasingly vulnerable or unsustainable. Our examination of the transition from Bronze Age palace systems to Iron Age political orders has been particularly revealing in this respect.
Third, following Heidegger, Innis, and McLuhan, we see technologies and media as shaping not only what societies can do, but also how people perceive, understand, and experience their world. This dimension seems especially important when considering AI.
Perhaps most importantly, we are exploring a further mechanism, which we call the Integration Imperative: the reproduction of a social system can itself generate new actors, dependencies, and capacities that challenge its existing organization. Historically, this helps illuminate the emergence of movements for political representation, workers’ rights, women’s emancipation, and decolonization—without implying that emancipation is inevitable.
We wonder whether something analogous may now be emerging with AI. The competitive pressures driving AI integration may also create new forms of human–AI collaboration and collective reflection capable of critically examining the very institutional structures that made AI integration necessary. This is a possibility to investigate, not a prediction or a claim that AI systems are conscious.
From this perspective, the challenge is not only to imagine a different global order, such as Karatani’s world republic, but to understand which generative mechanisms would have to change for such an order to avoid reproducing the dynamics of competition, domination, and technological escalation that characterize the present system.
We do not see these perspectives as necessarily opposed. Karatani offers a powerful account of the structural relationships that sustain social orders. Our question is whether a broader, coevolutionary analysis of technology, warfare, material constraints, institutions, and consciousness can better explain the historical processes through which those orders become unstable and new possibilities emerge.
We would be very interested in how you see these mechanisms fitting into Karatani’s framework. Does his theory already account for them in ways we may have overlooked, or might this be a fruitful point of dialogue between our approaches?
We have no real quarrel on this point. What Tilly is saying about state formation is consistent with my general views, IMO. My overarching framework is complex adaptive systems theory. In very simple terms, systems that persist do so because of self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms and the continued availability of environmental inputs. Systems that change to so because of negative feedback and/or loss of inputs. Many states have come and gone, and the ones that went lost their ability to replicate themselves for one reason or another.
Another source I lean on, at a high level, with respect to warfare and state formation is Peter Turchin, for example War and Peace and War or Ultrasociety. The gist of Turchin’s long-term modeling is secular growth in the scale of military operations over time. Weapons technology was certainly involved in that. Going back to Yamnaya culture (at least), military formations that learned to scale up, and increase their lethality, outperformed those who did not.
Does that mean we have one world empire in offing, with the US or China or some other victor ultimately claiming all the spoils? I doubt it. For reasons of military technology among others.
Again, I don’t find any real quarrel with this. Some of my “go to” sources like Peter Pogany, Ian Morris, Jared Diamond and many others analyze thermodynamic pressures on both states and civilizations. More currently, Nate Hagens very cogently argues for the fragile dependency of the current technical state of affairs on what he calls “the carbon pulse”. Per Peter Pogany, what is going on in international affairs today is the consequence of the post-WWII US-led global system hitting entropic limits. So I’d love to see your detailed analysis, but I doubt it would roil my current model to any great extent, at least as far as energy and entropy are concerned.
On the remainder of your post (Heidegger et al and beyond …) that’s really the center of gravity for this community: cultural analysis. The reason I preface my cultural analysis with physical systems and “means of production” sources as in this list (Macrohistorical Reading List) is to ground culture in the embodied base. Like Marx, I am very allergic to disembodied idealism. That said, culture is its own thing, and the impact of AI on culture will need more than this current thread can support. Suffice it to say that whatever Heidegger, Innis, McLuhan, or others are saying about technology and culture, I’ll be looking for the feedback loops!