Washed-Up and Grounded

I've discovered that it is incredibly fun to come up with grand Theories of Everything, with the main motivation being "why not". This is one particular theory that I sketched out over a few days. I do not pretend that it is correct in any particular sense, or that it truly is a Theory of Everything. But I found that thinking about it in a spirit of fun and lightness helped me make some curious connections that I would not have thought of before. If this were a formal theory, it would have been falsified immediately. Which is why I'm not presenting it as such, but rather as a hypothesis someone can entertain, seeing the consequences that follow from it.

It's admittedly not a very original or brilliant theory. After sketching it out initially I discovered that Carl Schmitt already came up with a version of it in his 1942 book Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (Land and Sea: A World-Historical Meditation). I do not retain the political commitments that Schmitt has put forward in the book (especially considering the year that it was published and Schmitt's job at that point). Still, I mean to read it sometime to see where old Carl and I agree and disagree. The main agreement we have is that societies can be put in two categories. Schmitt calls them land powers and sea powers. I call them maritime and telluric instead. Instead of outlining a sustained argument for the difference between them, I'm going to put forward a series of binary oppositions. These oppositions are not absolute, and some of them are deliberately counterintuitive. The reader is encouraged to take them as merely an interesting hypothesis she can affirm or reject, or entertain. I recommend assuming that these binaries are true and absolute, and imagining how the world looks different and what new connections are opened up.

Some of these oppositions might sound strange. The capitalism/markets distinction I freely steal from Braudel. Braudel defined the market economy as a low-level decentralized grassroots exchange of goods and services, while capitalism for him is the realm of monopolistic accumulation, often in association with the state. (Classical liberals: the former term is what you would refer to as capitalism instead, while the latter is maybe associated more with monopolistic rent-seeking through regulatory capture. For Marxists both are part of the same modality of capitalism.) I'm choosing to expand Braudel's definition a little more to encompass the idea that it's centralized production (maybe aided by increasing returns to scale) from the view of extraction of surplus, often tied to the state. It's broad enough to include command economies like the Soviet Union. My protest to correctly annoyed readers is that the market/capitalism binary is too snappy to give up just like that.

I also have "progressive" and "conservative" on one side, while I put "reactionary" and "revolutionary" on the other side. I'll cash out the difference and say that this is the difference between two conceptions of rupture in historical time. The former stands for continuity and the latter stands for breaks. The reason for the binary progressive/reactionary and conservative/revolutionary is to put in mind something like the classical square of opposition in Aristotle, but not reproducing his logic exactly. Progressivism and reaction are contraries in the Aristotelian sense, while conservatism and revolution occupy the position of subcontraries. The contradictories are progressive–revolutionary and conservative–reactionary. The subalternations are the terms on the same side: progressive–conservative and reactionary–revolutionary.

The subalternations are the clearest: progress (especially in the classical Whig sense) depends on stable institutions, while at the same time conserving institutions often means affirming the slow tradition/procedure-linked progress they work out. The revolutionary break often involves the revival of a mode of the past, as did Robespierre with the classical past, and often the violent return to an earlier mode requires the revolutionary. Eric Hoffer makes a substantial argument on this line in his book The True Believer, though it mostly applies to the reactionary-revolutionary subalternation. ¹ Progress and reaction are contraries in that both disagree on temporal direction and attitude toward continuity, which leaves a space for an action that is neither progress nor reaction. Interpreting the subcontraries strictly as subcontraries in Aristotle's sense is a tad too awkward so I'll just say that the same applies to the pair conservative-revolutionary. Progressive/revolutionary and conservative/reactionary are contradictories in that they have the same orientation but the opposite attitudes toward time, and so any action in history can belong to only one or the other. The Aristotelian material is admittedly something of a stretch; I include it to gesture at a more intricate relation between the four terms which I think is more interesting than is usually presented.

I hope that the colonial/imperial distinction makes more sense: I use "imperialism" in the sense of a polity that has a contiguous territory that are all brought under an unitary state, while "colonialism" means subordinating some distant unconnected territory as a subsidiary of the state. This is despite the fact that many use the terms "colonialism" and "imperialism" interchangeably, or as a world-system (the famous "highest stage of capitalism") I've also put in some pairs which tend more to intellectual culture, which shouldn't ideally be downstream of geography (empiricism/rationalism for example) which I retain mostly for provocation.

Some hypothetical conclusions—

We suppose that all societies are either maritime or telluric. In reality there are societies that are more intermediate between the two categories but for sake of an argument I am assuming that they can be analyzed into pure maritime and telluric components. Societies can be mixed, but what they "appear as" is different: if other societies interact with a telluric empire through its ports, then it appears as maritime to them, and similarly for land neighbours of maritime systems. A society itself can have both a littoral and an inland component but appears to oscillate depending on which group of elites is in charge of the national apparatus, and also whether the national apparatus itself has been dismantled and reconstructed from another base. Regional elites are either telluric or maritime, while the structure of the state itself can be telluric or maritime in contradistinction (maybe a good rule of thumb is looking at the geography of the capital city). The leadership can be telluric or maritime depending on which elites are in power or which regional elites the ruling elites are allied with, even if they do not "fit" the local form. River-based societies are ambivalent but a good rule of thumb is that a river leading to an open sea is maritime but a river that is "enclosed" and is anyway wrapped around by the same nation is probably part of a telluric system.

We can complexify the internal relations that societies have. When telluric societies have a "captive" maritime front, and maritime societies a captive interior, both extract a different kind of surplus from it but try to extract the sort of surplus suited to them, inherently causing a kind of impedance mismatch. Telluric societies want to either get rent from maritime transactions or guarantee an inflow of needed goods/outflow of produced good in a consistent manner and can collapse if this fails. Maritime societies want to sell goods produced from a telluric interior and extract a slice of the pie, or to have them as a captive market for imports. Today the notion of the "maritime" is also broader. Railway lines and airports tend to make regions more maritime and often cluster near already maritime regions anyway. Given however that I am more interested in longue durée geographical determinism, I'm putting this down as a more secondary phenomenon.

Then there is the relation that societies fall into with each other. Telluric empires need a maritime frontier for trade with the outside, since they cannot always be wholly self-contained. Even internally they can end up having maritime-ish regional trade. Maritime societies like having a telluric interior or base that they can fall back on whose goods (industrial and agricultural) they can trade, so their fortunes do not rise and fall depending on the market. And to ensure that they are more substantial than purely commercial city-states. Telluric empires want to dominate and subsume maritime networks and to bring them under control. while maritime hegemonies work on dismantling and incorporating telluric territories by getting friendly elites on board.

You can sketch out a theory of intellectual history, too. Translations happen when ideas pass from telluric societies to maritime societies and vice versa: metaphysics becomes sociology, inductive theories are reconstructed deductively, and so on depending on the direction. Questions of theology become questions of ecclesiology, and vice versa. A new scientific theory is axiomatized or it becomes absorbed into practical tinkering. We can assume as a likely story that geography determines mentality. More plausibly there are social structures determining this, insofar as telluric empires are more likely to have Grand Academies and the like which would have greatest interest in abstract pure theory.

And for the grand synthesis: History is the history of maritime flows attempting to escape the telluric empires seeking to destroy or subsume them and trying to subvert and hegemonize the empires in return (these tendencies do not have to be part of two distinct empires, like a maritime empire against a telluric empire but can be a dynamic within one polity, or crisscrossing a few polities). Telluric empires think that maritime polities are decadent and can/should be destroyed, especially insofar as telluric empires think of uncontrolled maritime networks as inherently subversive. Maritime polities think that telluric empires are opportunities for extraction and subsumption into a hinterland or interior.

So far everything has proceeded a priori, so some application of this schema to the real world. This of course means playing a little fast and loose with history to see if there is anything that might interest us. The twentieth century, under this interpretation, is about the way the nineteenth-century empires destroyed each other in the Great War, leading to the rise of the United States, the maritime hegemony with the intense telluric interior. The Second World War being the final counter-attack with the last serious attempt to institute a telluric land-empire by the German Reich (this is broadly in keeping with Adam Tooze's interpretation of Nazi Germany). The Cold War then being the conflict between a maritime hegemony and a telluric land empire that ended with the latter falling apart and the former establishing global hegemony. What is the situation today? I think we are seeing the return in part of the old telluric order, for better or for worse.

Consider the great powers of today. The story of China seems to me to be the dialectic between the maritime south and the comparatively telluric north (consider where the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia came from). India too, if we consider the grand imperial formations in the North on land, whether Hindu or Persianate, while the South was the province of thalassocracies and intrepid traders. It might even throw some light on the United States, which has a rather more unusual structure compared to the rest of the world. The original Thirteen Colonies seem to be much more "maritime" in temperament compared to the rest of America.

This is especially more true with the Mid-Atlantic and New England, today. The South and the Midwest, whether the despotic extraction in plantations or the industrialization of labour and offered the raw material for Northeastern capital. Westward expansion under Manifest Destiny was definitely telluric. Though when the West Coast was reached a maritime frontier formed out of the telluric front. This is maybe why California has the reputation and contradictions that it has. What is unusual about the United States as a whole is how the interface to the country is still the Northeast, which opens up to the Atlantic. The Acela Corridor stretching from Boston to Washington, D.C. is the purest example, the maritime nature intensified by Amtrak. ²

Philosophy is also an interesting casualty of the maritime-telluric split. Systematic philosophy reaches its apotheosis in German Idealism, associated with the telluric German context. ³ And again with phenomenology, with Husserl and Heidegger returning to an explicit thought of the Earth. Perhaps the popularity of both across the Rhine came down to the similar position of France, which in the twentieth century went through a mania of formalization that swept philosophy, psychoanalysis, mathematics and the human sciences. The translation of the 3 Hs to the Anglophone world ended up turning metaphysics into sociology or anthropology, dating back to the early British Idealists who dropped the focus on metaphysics. Brandom's Hegel and Dreyfus's Heidegger are the contemporary versions. In both cases it is read into Pragmatism, which would seem (alongside English empiricism) to be the most quintessential maritime philosophy. The same can be said for "French theory" which in Anglophone departments was turned into an elaborate social theory. The "classical" style of the European humanities is telluric and perhaps that is why it finds it difficult to get a foothold in the New World. ⁴

I could if one wished go further in extrapolating more and more consequences from this hypothesis, but it is indeed simply a hypothesis, a likely story that the reader has been asked to temporarily take on. I could write this as someone who likes and lives in a wholly maritime society, though with a philosophical temperament closer to the telluric (it is perhaps more difficult to be a rationalist as opposed to being an empiricist today). One hopes that we have more mixed types who can go back and forth across the divide, to the extent that one exists and is not merely a figment of our imagination.