Futurist Daniel Greenfield Sees Barbarism, Empires Coming
“A Knight at the Crossroads” by Viktor Vasnetsov (1878)
The who’s who of the conservative world seem to have found a common spokesman in Daniel Greenfield whose “The Shape of a Post-Modern World“ is almost a bulleted list of what the future holds for key players like Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese, and other countries not quite in the first tier of influence.
His points are clearly stated and uncluttered as he estimates a future that is independent of most of our fragmentary, piecemeal, and delusional thinking about geopolitics. The future will unfold according to its own logic based upon today’s realities and the playing out of historical models.
Ironically, the future will look more like our barbaric past than people want to acknowledge. Empires will reestablish themselves with a vengeance. Family-based oligarchies will make a comeback. America and Europe will lose moral compass, drown in pop culture, steadily undermine their own identity, and NATO will become impotent. Russia and China have already abandoned Communism, but they will thrive in the same way that thuggish empires of the past did, but remain militarily ruthless.
Greenfield doesn’t say so directly, but Christianity has already thrown in the towel. He regrets that only Islam will see itself as an ideological force in a future that seems more dominated by survival-of-the-fittest mechanisms beyond conscious control. He describes Islam, grudgingly as a Jew, as having a staying power for all the wrong reasons: “It is an ideology and post-ideological powers who believe in very little are poorly adapted to fighting it. Instead many of their elites secretly admire its dedication.”
History is the key to Greenfield’s vision of the future. His passing admiration of Islam hints that the world will be far from sanitized: “Islam emerged by taking advantage of the slow collapse of the Roman Empire. Its reemergence as a world power once again coincides with the fall of empires. Like a hyena trotting after prey, Islam is a cultural carrion eater consuming the skills and knowledge of superior civilizations to sustain its warlordism whose religious fanaticism eventually decay into decadent dynasties.”
