The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers

How They Can’t Face Their Loss to the “Eurasian Miracle”

by Bruce Lerro / October 19th, 2024

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
~ John M. Hobson

Orientation

In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International  relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

• Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
• They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
  To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

• savagery (hunter-gatherers);
• barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
• civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

• All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
• Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
• Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
• Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
• Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

• the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
• the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
• the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
• the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
• the globalization myth; and
• the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world  got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

• 1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
• 1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
• 1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to  changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

• Narrow Eurocentric
• Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism	National civilizing mission/cultural conversion	Civilizing mission, via international government protectorates	Anglo-Saxon hegemony	To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies	Universalization of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace
Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan Mackinder, K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman Haushofer	Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch, W.Wilson	Hobson, Buell, Woolf Krasner, Fukuyama	Gilpin Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski, Cooper, Ignatieff	Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held Nussbaum	Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

• The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
• The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
• Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
• Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coerced national civilizing mission	Benign international mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has  conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it  to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^thcentury parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction. 

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks  between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is  contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

• the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
• financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
• overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
• Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the  white race in his book National Life and Character, a Forecast.  He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

• The white race cannot survive in the topics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

• The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

• Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

• Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
• Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
• Tropical climatic threat
• Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

• Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
• Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
• Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
• Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

 Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute  sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

• in colored immigration problem
• a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant
Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a  Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920);  Clashing Tides of Color (1935).  In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism  in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
	Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
	Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

 

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

• From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
• From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
• Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
• Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

• With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
• Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
• In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries  occupy what both call the capitalist  semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
• In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.FacebookRedditEmail

Bruce Lerro has taught for 25 years as an adjunct college professor of psychology at Golden Gate University, Dominican University and Diablo Valley College in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has applied a Vygotskian socio-historical perspective to his three books found on Amazon. He is a co-founder, organizer and writer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. Read other articles by Bruce, or visit Bruce's website.

Industrial Policy Without Nationalism

Can we expand the state’s role in the economy while diminishing its capacity for war?

By J.W. Mason

October 2, 2024

Source: Dissent




In the first two years after Biden’s election, there was considerable enthusiasm on the left for the administration’s embrace of a larger, more active economic role for the federal government. I was among those who saw both the ambitions of the Build Back Better bill and the self-conscious embrace of industrial policy as an unexpectedly sharp break with the economic policy consensus of the past thirty years.

Biden squandered that early promise with his embrace of Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza. His legacy will be the piles of shattered buildings and children’s corpses that he, with aides like Antony Blinken, did so much to create.

The administration has also struck a Trumpian note on immigration, promising to “shut down the border” to desperate asylum seekers. And internationally, it is committed to a Manichean view of the world where the United States is locked into a perpetual struggle for dominance with rivals like Russia and China.

Can industrial policy be salvaged from this wreckage? I am not sure.

There are really two questions here. First, is there an inherent connection between industrial policy and economic nationalism, because support for one country’s industries must come at the cost of its trade partners? And second, is it possible in practice to pursue industrial policy without militarism? Or does it require the support of the national security establishment, the only powerful constituency that favors a bigger and more active government?

Much of the conversation around industrial policy assumes that one country’s gain must be another’s loss. U.S. officials insist on the need to outcompete China in key markets and constantly complain about how “unfair” Chinese support for its manufacturers disadvantages U.S. producers. European officials make similar complaints about the United States.

This zero-sum view of trade policy is shared by an influential strand of thought on the left, most associated with Robert Brenner and his followers. In their view, the world economy faces a permanent condition of overcapacity, in which industrial investment in one country simply depresses production and profits elsewhere. In the uncompromising words of Dylan Riley, “the present period does not hold out even the hope of growth,” allowing only for “a politics of zero-sum redistribution.” Development, in this context, simply means the displacement of manufacturing in the rich countries by lower-cost competitors.

I don’t know if anyone in the Biden administration has read Brenner or been influenced by him. But there is certainly a similarity in language. The same complaints that Chinese investment is exacerbating global overcapacity in manufacturing could come almost verbatim from the State Department or the pages of New Left Review. More broadly, there is a shared sense that China’s desire to industrialize is fundamentally illegitimate. The problem, Brenner complains, is that China and other developing countries have sought to “export goods that were already being produced” instead of respecting the existing “world division of labor along Smithian lines” and focusing on exports complementary to what was already being produced in the North.

Fortunately, we can be fairly confident that this understanding of world trade is wrong.

The zero-sum vision sees trade flows as driven by relative prices, with lower-cost producers beating out higher-cost ones for a fixed pool of demand. But as Keynesian economists have long understood, the most important factor in trade flows is changes in incomes, not prices. Far from being fixed, demand is the most dynamic element in the system.

A country experiencing an economic boom—perhaps from an upsurge in investment—will see a rapid rise in both production and demand. Some of the additional spending will fall on imports; countries that grow faster therefore tend to develop trade deficits while countries that grow slowly tend to develop trade surpluses. (It is true that some countries manage to combine rapid growth with trade surpluses, while others must throttle back demand to avoid deficits. But as the British economist A.P. Thirlwall argued, this is mainly a function of what kinds of goods they produce, rather than relative prices.)

We can see this dynamic clearly in the United States, where the trade deficit consistently falls in recessions and widens when growth resumes. It was even more stark, though less immediately obvious, in Europe in the 2000s. During the first decade of the euro, Germany developed large surpluses with other European countries, which were widely attributed to superior competitiveness thanks to wage restraint and faster productivity growth. But this was wrong. While German surpluses with the rest of the European Union rose from 2 percent to 3 percent of German GDP during the 2000s, there was no change in the fraction of income being spent in the rest of the bloc on German exports. Meanwhile, the share of German income spent on EU imports actually rose.

If Germans were buying more from the rest of the European Union, and non-German Europeans were buying the same amount from Germany, how could it be that the German trade surplus with Europe increased? The answer is that total expenditure was rising much faster in the rest of Europe. German surpluses were the result of austerity and stagnation within the country, not competitiveness. If Germany had adopted a program to boost green investment during the 2000s, its trade surpluses would have been smaller, not larger. The same thing happened in reverse after the crisis: the countries of Southern Europe rapidly closed their large trade deficits without any improvement in export performance, as deep falls in income and expenditure squeezed their imports.

Europe’s trade imbalances of a decade ago might seem far afield from current debates over industrial policy. But they illustrate a critical point. When a country adopts policies to boost investment spending, that creates new demand in its economy. And the additional imports drawn in by this demand are likely to outweigh whatever advantages it gains in the particular sector where investment is subsidized. Measures like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or CHIPS and Science Act may eventually boost U.S. net exports in the specific sectors they target. But they also raise demand for everything else. This is why a zero-sum view of industrial policy is wrong. If the United States successfully boosts investment in, say, wind turbine production, it will probably boost net exports of turbines. But it will also raise imports of other things—not just inputs for turbines, but all the goods purchased by everyone whose income is raised by the new spending. For most U.S. trade partners, the rise in overall demand will matter much more than greater U.S. competitiveness in a few targeted sectors.

China might look like an exception to this pattern. It has combined an investment boom with persistent trade surpluses, thanks to the very rapid qualitative upgrading of its manufacturing base. For most lower- and middle-income countries, rapid income growth leads to a disproportionate rise in demand for more advanced manufactures they can’t make themselves. This has been much less true of China. As economists like Dani Rodrik have shown, what is exceptional about China is the range and sophistication of the goods it produces relative to its income level. This is why it’s been able to maintain trade surpluses while growing rapidly.

While Biden administration officials and their allies like to attribute China’s success to wage repression, the reality is close to the opposite. As scholars of inequality like Branko Milanovic and Thomas Piketty have documented, what stands out about China’s growth is how widely the gains have been shared. Twenty-first-century China, unlike the United States or Western Europe, has seen substantial income growth even for those at the bottom of the income distribution.

More important for the present argument, China has not just added an enormous amount of manufacturing capacity; it has also been an enormous source of demand. This is the critical point missed by those who see a zero-sum competition for markets. Consider automobiles. Already by 2010 China was the world’s largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as many vehicles as the United States, a position it has held ever since. Yet this surge in auto production was accompanied by an even larger surge in auto consumption, so that China remained a net importer of automobiles until 2022. The tremendous growth of China’s auto industry did not come at the expense of production elsewhere; there were simply more cars being made and sold.

All this applies even more for the green industries that are the focus of today’s industrial policy debate. There has been a huge rise in production—especially but not only in China—but there has been an equally huge growth in expenditure. Globally, solar power generation increased by a factor of 100 over the past fifteen years, wind power by a factor of ten. And there is no sign of this growth slowing. To speak of excess capacity in this sector is bizarre. In a recent speech, Treasury Under Secretary Jay Shambaugh complained that China plans to produce more lithium-ion batteries and solar modules than are required to hit net-zero emissions targets. But if the necessary technologies come online fast enough, there’s no reason we can’t do better. Is Shambaugh worried the world will decarbonize too fast?

Even in narrow economic terms, there are positive spillovers from China’s big push into green technology. China may gain a larger share of the market for batteries or solar panels—though again, it’s important to stress that this market is anything but fixed in size—but the investment spending in that sector will create demand elsewhere, to the benefit of countries that export to China. Technological improvements are also likely to spread rapidly. One recent National Bureau of Economic Research study of industrial policy in semiconductors found that when governments adopt policies to support their own industry, they are able to significantly raise productivity—but thanks to the international character of chip production, the gains are almost as large for the countries they trade with. Ironically, as Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie observe, the United States stands to lose out on exactly these benefits thanks to the Biden administration’s hostility to investment by Chinese firms.

None of this is to say that other countries face no disruptions or challenges from China’s growth, or from policies to support particular industries in the United States or elsewhere. The point is that these disruptions can be managed. Lost demand in one sector can be offset by increased demand somewhere else. Subsidies in one country can be matched by subsidies in another. Indeed, in the absence of any global authority to coordinate green investment, a subsidy race may be the best way to hasten decarbonization.

As a matter of economics, then, there is no reason that industrial policy has to involve us-against-them nationalism or heightened conflict between the United States and China. As a matter of politics, unfortunately, the link may be tighter.

They are certainly linked in the rhetoric of the Biden administration. Virtually every initiative, it now seems, is justified by the need to meet the threat of foreign rivals. A central goal of the CHIPS Act is to not only reduce U.S. reliance on Chinese imports but to cut China off from technologies where the United States still has the lead. Meanwhile arms deliveries to Ukraine are sold as a form of stimulus. This bellicose posture is deeply written in the DNA of Bidenomics: before becoming Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan ran a think tank whose vision of “foreign policy for the middle class” was “Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China.” Thea Riofrancos calls this mindset the “security-sustainability nexus.” Is its current dominance in U.S. politics a contingent outcome—the result, perhaps, of the particular people who ended up in top positions in the Biden administration? And if so, can we imagine a U.S. industrial policy where the China hawks are not in the driver’s seat?

In a recent paper, Benjamin Braun and Daniela Gabor argue that it is “the salience of geopolitical competition” with China that has allowed the United States to go as far with industrial policy as it has. In the absence of much more popular pressure and a broader political realignment, they suggest, the only way that “green planners” can overcome the deep-seated resistance to bigger government is through an alliance with the “geopolitical hawks.”

Many of us have pointed to the economic mobilization of the Second World War as a model for a quick decarbonization of the U.S. economy through public investment. It’s an appealing example, since it combines both the most rapid expansion and redirection of economic activity in U.S. history and the closest the country has ever come to a planned economy. But given the already dangerous entanglement of industrial policy with war and empire, it’s a model we may not want to invoke.

On the other hand, the climate crisis is urgent. And the arguments that it calls for a more direct public role in steering investment are as strong as ever. It’s safe to say that neither the historic boom in new factory construction nor the rapid growth in solar energy (which accounts for the majority of new electrical generating capacity added in 2024) would have happened without the IRA. It’s easy to see how climate advocates could be tempted to strike a Faustian bargain with the national security state, if that’s the only way to get these measures passed.

Personally, I would like to avoid this particular deal with the devil. I believe we should oppose any policy aimed at strengthening the United States vis-à-vis China and reject the idea that U.S. military supremacy is in the interest of humanity. An all-out war between the United States and China (or Russia) would be perhaps the one outcome worse for humanity than uncontrolled climate change. Even if the new Cold War can be kept to a simmer—and that’s not something to take for granted—the green side of industrial policy is likely to lose ground whenever it conflicts with national security goals, as we’ve recently seen with Biden’s tariffs on Chinese solar cells, batteries, and electric vehicles. The Democratic pollster David Shor recently tweeted that he “would much rather live in a world where we see a 4 degree rise in temperature than live in a world where China is a global hegemon.” Administration officials would not, presumably, spell it out so baldly, but it’s safe to say that many of them feel the same way.

Adam Tooze has observed that historically socialists often favored balanced budgets—because they expected, not without reason, that the main beneficiary of laxer fiscal rules would be the military. The big question about industrial policy today is whether that logic still applies, or whether an expansion of the state’s role in the economic realm can be combined with a diminution of its capacity for war.


J.W. Masonn is associate professor of economics at John Jay College, CUNY, and a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His book Money and Things, with Arjun Jayadev, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

What is microdosing? An introduction to the psychedelic wellness trend and why it’s so popular

Microdosing with drugs like psilocybin has become so popular that advocates want to bring it above ground

A jar of freeze-dried Jack Frost mushrooms at the combined booth of Fruity Spores and Sacred Three Mushrooms during the inaugural Shroom Fest Sunday, June 9, 2024 at ReelWorks Denver. (Photo by Daniel Brenner/Special to The Denver Post)

By Tiney Ricciardi | cricciardi@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
UPDATED: August 19, 2024 

In late 2023, Crystal Peterson was feeling desperate.

The 44-year-old Cortez resident had long suffered from panic attacks that awoke her in the middle of the night. As the nights grew longer with the onset of winter, her mental anguish worsened.

Peterson had tried taking medication to help her sleep. She also experimented with mindfulness techniques like meditation and yoga. She even tried equine therapy, exercising more and changing her diet – nothing alleviated the feelings of overwhelm and distress.

Last December, Peterson decided to try microdosing psychedelic mushrooms after attending an informational session about the practice. She began working with a coach to determine a regimen that suited her needs, and within days, Peterson said she noticed improvement.

“The mushrooms helped me compartmentalize my stresses,” she said. “The things that are usually overwhelming and, ‘Oh my god!’ in my head are like, ‘No, you got this. We’re going to do this one step at a time.’ … I’ve really, really liked having less stress.”

As research into psychedelics has expanded, many Americans have turned to microdosing as a holistic alternative to improve their mental health. The practice involves taking a small dose of psychedelics as a supplement to enhance mood and cognitive function. While there’s limited scientific data to support how well – or if – microdosing works, anecdotal reports like Peterson’s number in the tens of thousands of people who say it’s helped them manage a wide variety of conditions, from chronic pain to creativity.

Psilocybin, one of the most commonly used drugs for microdosing, is now decriminalized in Colorado, though it remains a federally scheduled substance. Fueled by their personal experiences, advocates aim to bring microdosing above ground and make it more accessible. That includes one biotechnology company in Colorado that’s developing a full-spectrum psilocybin formula it hopes to put through clinical trials and get approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (The company, AJNA BioSciences, has a license from the Drug Enforcement Administration to conduct research.)

“When it’s used correctly with the right education and support, it can have a massive impact in people’s lives,” said Alli Schaper, co-founder of the advocacy organization Microdosing Collective. “We estimate there’s thousands of illicit market brands shipping microdosing supplements across the U.S. We might as well legalize it and make it safer.”

Displays illustrating psychedelic mushrooms are seen at the MAPS conference at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver on June 21, 2023. MAPS stands for Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies.

 (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)

Guidelines for getting started

Because microdosing isn’t standardized like traditional medicine, there are few hard and fast rules about how to do it. Over time, however, the underground community has developed general guidelines.

For example, a microdose is supposed to be “sub-perceptual,” meaning an amount small enough that the drug does not cause a trip or significant impairment. Most say the sweet spot is between .1 and .4 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms. But exactly how much requires personal experimentation since no two mushrooms are identical and each individual’s sensitivity to the substance is unique.

People often grind up dried mushrooms and put them in capsules for consumption, and sometimes they add non-psychoactive fungi like lion’s mane or reishi. There is an abundance of illegal microdosing products available to buy online, but because they are unregulated it’s impossible to know if the dosages and ingredients are as advertised without lab testing.

A widely cited rule of thumb: Start low and go slow.

Jayme Ely, a microdosing mentor based near Telluride, advises trying your first dose on a day with few or no obligations. Start at the low end of the spectrum – somewhere around .1 or .2 grams of mushrooms – to get a baseline understanding of the effects.

“Do it on Sunday when you’re just at home, see if you feel anything,” Ely suggested. “With microdosing you don’t feel anything. The effects are so subtle you don’t even notice it.”

If you want to up the dosage, do so incrementally, Ely said, or you could become nauseous or experience a mild trip, which are both common effects of ingesting psilocybin. The goal is to find a threshold, but not cross it to the point of hallucinating or impairment.

“If you take a microdose and you find you’re going through your day and everything is wonderful, fine. Drive yourself to work the next day, or lunch or whatever. If you go beyond the recommendations, you might have some experiences… like not feeling in control or not feeling comfortable, feeling nauseous or out of my zone a little bit,” she said.

After determining a dosage, it’s time to decide how often to microdose. Regimens vary widely, though once again there are some templates.

Famed mycologist Paul Stamets has advocated for microdosing four days in a row and then abstaining for the rest of the week. The Fadiman Protocol, named for researcher James Fadiman, calls for microdosing once every three days. Still, some people do it every other day or even just as needed.

For those just starting out, Ely recommends following Stamets’ schedule – four days on, three days off – to set a baseline.

“I always tell people, stick with the four days, even if you think you’re healed and the world has changed the next day. Stay consistent for four days at least,” she said.
Surge in popularity

Even though psilocybin was decriminalized in Colorado in 2022, there are no prescription formulas approved by the FDA that doctors can prescribe to patients who want to try microdosing. Complicating matters further is the fact psilocybin remains a federally scheduled substance alongside LSD or acid, another popular microdosing drug.

Without guidance from healthcare professionals, people have turned to online communities to fill in the information gaps. According to a recent study, internet searches for microdosing have skyrocketed by 1,240% since 2015. About 275,000 people share and seek advice about it in the /microdosing subreddit.

Tracey Tee, founder of Moms on Mushrooms, in the woods near her home in Franktown, Colorado on July 16, 2024. Moms on Mushrooms is a virtual community where women can go to learn about microdosing with psychedelics and connect over their experiences as parents. (Photo by Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post)

Coloradan Tracey Tee recognized the need for a safe space where women could learn about microdosing and connect over their shared experiences as parents. In 2022, she founded a virtual group called Moms on Mushrooms, which has grown to about 3,000 members. Tee said the popularity of microdosing reflects the need for alternative avenues to address mental health in an increasingly stressful world.

“Moms feel all of that, not only for themselves but also the humans they’re raising,” she said. “We’ve reached a point where we need a reset and I think a lot of people are discovering taking more and more pills passively over any number of years isn’t solving the problem.”

To that end, Tee said microdosing is unlike conventional medicine: “It’s not Advil, you don’t swallow it back and wait for it to change your life.”

It often requires introspection, reflection and a commitment to working through challenges that may arise, a process commonly called “integration.” For Montrose mom Bri Taylor, that included a lifestyle change. She stopped drinking alcohol and said microdosing makes her a more present parent for her two young sons.

For Monique Alvarez in Cortez, many of the benefits appeared in retrospect. After several months of microdosing consistently, she said she was able to tap into new sources of creativity.

“It’s easier to access better ideas, better solutions, and more innovative ideas. I’m able to see things from different perspectives. The dots are connecting in ways they haven’t before,” Alvarez said.
Up from the underground

Given the interest in microdosing, advocates see one important issue that still needs to be addressed: access.

When Colorado rolls out a legal industry around psychedelic therapy in 2025, microdosing won’t fit into that model, which focuses on giving people large quantities of psilocybin mushrooms for a guided trip. So right now and for the foreseeable future, the only legal ways to source microdoses are to grow your own mushrooms or find someone willing to share their stash.

Sharing and gifting have become more commonplace in Colorado since certain psychedelics were decriminalized. Ely, for example, frequently hosts informational sessions for small groups and sends attendees home with complimentary microdosing starter kits. She grows the mushrooms and makes microdosing capsules herself under the moniker Love On Telluride. She also offers mentorship to people who want it throughout their microdosing practice.

Denver was a leader in 2019 when the city effectively decriminalized “magic mushrooms,” inspiring a wave of similar efforts around the country. Oregon and Colorado are the only states to legalize psychedelic-assisted therapy so far, though several others are considering following suit.

As legalization has become a political talking point, Schaper at Microdosing Collective said regulators often fail to recognize the full scope of psychedelics’ potential by focusing on healing through large, so-called “macro-doses,” which have also attracted the bulk of research.

The organization, launched in 2022, is now concentrated on finding a way to offer more Americans safe access to microdosing. It’s starting in California, where lawmakers have attempted – and so far failed – multiple times to approve regulated psychedelic-assisted therapy programs.

Schaper said while models like those in Oregon and Colorado represent important progress, they are cost-prohibitive and do not reflect how Americans currently use or want to use psychedelics. The Microdosing Collective recently hired a lobbyist intent on educating policymakers in hopes one day anyone can buy microdoses like they would any other supplement.

“There’s a huge opportunity to help people with their mental health with microdosing psychedelics and making sure it’s not trapped in big pharma and also not trapped at the service centers,” she said.

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Originally Published: August 19, 2024 

Israel’s military starts drafting ultra-Orthodox Jews – but the battle over serving ‘the army of God’ vs. the army of the state isn’t over, and points to key questions for the country’s future

Michael Brenner, American University
Wed, July 31, 2024
THE CONVERSATION

Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men attend a rally against army recruitment in Jerusalem on June 30, 2024. AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean

In late July 2024, the Israeli military sent out the first 1,000 conscription notices to ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, following a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that the government must stop exempting them.

But will these Haredim, as the ultra-Orthodox are called in Israel, actually join the Israel Defense Forces and be followed by thousands more in the near future? It depends on whom they obey: the state authorities or their religious authorities.

Yitzhak Yosef, whose term as one of the government’s two chief rabbis recently ended, told religious students that “anyone who receives a draft notice should tear it up and not go,” the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth reported. “He is a soldier in the army of God.”

Yosef is not the only Haredi rabbi to oppose army service, and many Haredi men have taken to the streets to protest since the Supreme Court’s decision, which followed years of political wrangling over the issue.

Ever since the state of Israel’s founding in 1948, ultra-Orthodox Jews – those who take the strictest approach toward following Jewish law, and are now around 14% of the population – have been exempt from military service. Among all other Jewish citizens, from the secular to the modern Orthodox, men are required to serve 32 months, and women 24, plus reserve duty. Amid the war in the Gaza Strip, other Israelis’ resentment toward the ultra-Orthodox exemption is at a high.

As a historian, I see the conscription debate as more than a political crisis for Israel’s government. The question is so sensitive because it opens up fundamental questions about the cohesion of Israeli society in general, and of the Haredi population’s attitude toward the Jewish state in particular.

It also illustrates the complexity of a country that is not as easily explained as many of its supporters and critics alike believe.

Yitzhak Yosef, center, the Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel, attends a protest against religious reforms in Jerusalem in 2022. AP Photo/Mahmoud Illean

Initial compromise

Historically, Orthodox Jews struggled to justify the idea of a Jewish state. They prayed for centuries to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the temple, but had a specific return in mind: a Jewish state established by the Messiah. Any other kind of Jewish sovereignty, they believed, would be blasphemy.

Theodor Herzl, who founded modern political Zionism in the late 1800s, had a long beard like a Biblical prophet. Yet he was thoroughly secular and assimilated – he even lit a Christmas tree with his family. Herzl’s movement to encourage more European Jews to migrate to the Holy Land had little appeal for the Orthodox.

There was, however, always a minority among the Orthodox who identified with Zionism, the belief that Jewish people should have a sovereign political state in the land of Israel. According to the Talmud, the central source of Jewish law, saving lives is more important than other commandments – and Zionism saved Jews from pogroms and other anti-Jewish violence in Europe.

During the Holocaust, the vast majority of observant Jews in Eastern Europe were murdered. Afterward, many survivors who had previously opposed Zionism sought refuge in the new state of Israel.

On the eve of Israel’s independence, David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister of the state-to-be, entered an agreement with the leaders of the two camps of Orthodox Jews.

The Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox, still refused to recognize the legitimacy of a secular Jewish state. The so-called national religious camp, on the other hand, embraced it.

Among other concessions, the new state granted exemption to young Haredi Jews who wanted to study religious texts full time instead of joining the army. That hardly seemed consequential, as the young men in question numbered only a few hundred.
Shifting views

During the Six-Day War of 1967, Israel captured the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as well as the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Golan Heights and Sinai Peninsula. Since then, the national religious camp, once a moderate force, has developed into the spearhead of the right-wing settler movement.

Jewish settlers study the Torah in a tent at the West Bank outpost of Homesh, near the Palestinian village of Burqa, Jan. 17, 2022. AP Photo/Ariel Schalit

Unlike the first generations of Orthodox Zionists, national religious Israelis today are Zionists not despite but because of messianism. Israel, they believe, will help bring about the messianic age. Therefore, right-wing religious Zionists – like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich – are enthusiastic proponents of army service.

Not so the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox.

To be clear, Haredi Jews are very diverse. This demographic includes families with roots everywhere from Poland and Romania to Morocco and Iraq. It includes people who support Israel’s existence, and opponents who burn the flag on the country’s Independence Day. It includes men who join the workforce and men who dedicate their life to religious study.

The majority of Haredim living in Israel are not Zionists, yet live there because it is the Holy Land and the state subsidizes their study. Anything else – secular education, army service and, often, paid work – is seen as a distraction.

A minority of Haredi Jews serve in the armed forces voluntarily, and more have enlisted since the beginning of the latest Israel-Hamas war. But they have no legal obligation to do so; nor do Israel’s Arab citizens.

Jewish men pray in Jerusalem for the success of the Israeli army and for the return of the Israeli hostages, on Nov. 9, 2023. AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg

Growing Haredi sector

Israel’s governments have continued to tolerate this situation as ultra-Orthodox political parties became much-needed partners.

Yet legal and popular opposition has increased.

In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that the defense minister has no right to exempt Haredi Jews from military service and asked the government to find ways to draft them. In 2014, a center-right government under Netanyahu passed a law aiming to have 60% of Haredi men serving within three years. But the 2015 elections brought Haredi parties back in power, and implementation was effectively abandoned.

Since then, Haredi parties have become more powerful as their population grows. Yet the Supreme Court has made clear that the government either needs to draft Haredim, or the legislature has to come up with a new law to excuse them.

Seven in 10 Israeli Jews oppose the blanket exemption, meaning another exemption might jeopardize Netanyahu’s government. Frustration is also rising over plans to raise the military service of men to three years and to double the duty of reservists to 42 days a year during emergencies.

None of this would matter if the Haredim were still the same tiny segment of society they were in 1948. Today, however, ultra-Orthodox women have 6.5 children on average, compared with 2.5 among other Jewish Israeli women, and around 1.3 million of the country’s 9.5 million people are Haredim.

The resulting transformation of Israeli society is easy to see. If the trend continues, Israel will become a very different, very religious society – one that can hardly survive economically.

On average, a non-Haredi household pays nine times more income tax than a Haredi one, while the latter receives over 50% more state support. Even if they were ready to work, most Haredim would have a hard time finding well-paid jobs, as their state-subsidized private schools teach hardly any secular topics.

For Israeli society, this portends further fragmentation and a weakening of the economy – to say nothing of the army. In Haredim’s eyes, however, Israel succeeds because of religious Jews’ study and prayer.

In total, the state plans to issue draft orders to 3,000 Haredi men over the next few weeks, and they are not chosen randomly. Most work, or study in higher education institutions, rather than traditional religious schools. This small group might indeed follow the secular state authorities, rather than the appeals of their rabbis.

Without even a minimal secular education, the majority of Haredi youth, however, would not be easily integrated into the army. Thus, the draft of this segment of Israel’s population may remain more symbolic – telling them that they too have to share more than the spiritual burden of a war-plagued society.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on March 15, 2024.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Michael Brenner, American University

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