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9/11
There were ominous signs
The following reprinted article was first published in The Republic August 23, 2001, just nineteen days before September 11
by Kevin Potvin
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The size of the intellectual divide between those who promote globalization and those who oppose it make this issue so profoundly divisive, it may well become one of those historic cleavages whose eventual reconciliation will alter the course of civilization on a magnitude equal to the biggest intellectual battles of the last 1,000 years. To the great battles of the last millennium—The Magna Carta, Science versus Religion, and Church versus State—we may be in the process of adding a fourth just as momentous: the Corporate versus the Democratic.
They always lash out
All of the three great intellectual battles of the past 1,000 years featured a fading body of authority lashing out one last time at a newly emerging body of authority that every time has proven ultimately victorious. In each case, the outgoing authority gave clear expression to its utter bewilderment in the face of an irreversibly changing world, and when its arguments faltered, the old authority always fell back on the brute force of military might to keep itself installed, always in vain.
English King John issued the Magna Carta in 1215, which enshrined new rights for individual Britons, only after his military proved itself unable to turn back time. Arguments made by defenders of the monarchy—that the King has only the best interests of his subjects always in his mind—failed to sway the public, who instead insisted on the right to a trial by a jury of peers, for example, to be written down in the constitution. The King’s men predicted the collapse of the social order. Instead, freedom was tasted.
The battle between science and religion reached its apex in the conviction of Galileo by the Inquisition in 1633. Church-sanctioned astronomers, who until then held a monopoly on knowledge, maintained the Earth was the centre of the physical universe in order to prop up the Church’s assertion that its authority should be the centre of the political universe. They lost, and as they predicted, political power was dissipated to a number of different centres. Rather than a collapse of political order, newly liberated modern science laid the foundation for democracy, the most stable form of political order ever invented.
Church and State still ongoing
The battle of Church and State has still not completely resolved itself. But this battle has taken the same shape as earlier battles. The Roe vs Wade US Supreme Court decision of 1973 is, so far, its most important event. This decision severely
restricted the ability of religious agendas to hijack the powers of the State. Religious activists predicted the collapse of moral order in the wake of the decision. Instead, people have enjoyed a hitherto unattainable freedom from moral bigotry.
Now we are gripped in what may be the final approach to some nearby future event that will go down in the history books as the apex of the Corporate versus Democratic battle, one of the four great battles in a 1,000-year transformation of human society. As in all the previous battles of this magnitude, the defenders of the old world claim the interests of the people are truly in their hearts. (Witness the National Post columnists who say that only globalization can feed the hungry.) They say their opponents are confused and misguided. (See how they daily ridicule the expressions of alarm among the protestors.) They predict calamity at the breakdown of the corporate order.
Here comes war
They’ll lose, of course, because they’ve already lost—the world has changed, and the old corporate order is merely exhibiting the typical behaviour of all spent authorities. When they realize their arguments are falling on deaf ears, they will, and they have already, resort to military might in a vain attempt to roll back the clock. The corporate defenders talking on TV and filling up the newspapers will go down in the books as being as pathetically blind as King John’s scribes, the monks of Rome, and the
creationist “scientists.”
Who knows what new authority will arise from the ashes of the corporate world? What new order will emerge, and what fresh liberations will visit our lives? It is impossible to say. Could the people of the 1200s have imagined elected municipal councils? Could the people of the 1600s have imagined elected national governments?
Whatever takes shape when the corporate order finally collapses, it is beyond our ability to foresee today. Only one thing is certain. The individual’s life will be immeasurably better because of it. It’s always turned out that way in the past, and it surely will again.
In the meantime, brace yourselves. Old authorities inevitably die in a changing world, but they never give up without a fight.
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