Apparently Tom Wolfe is returning to literature after disappointing sales but rave reviews for Charlotte Simmons, a book I personally enjoyed because the heroine is so admirable and brave it makes you want to cheer her on from your seat. He’s now tackling an issue most of us in the wealthy nations find squeamish: while we are debating whether or not our policies and institutions are moral enough, the rest of the world has cast morality aside for tribal allegiances.
So, my people, that leaves only our blood, the bloodlines that course through our very bodies and unite us. “La Raza!” as the Puerto Ricans cry out. “The race!” cries the whole world. The Muslims? Their jihad? Their Islam? All that is nothing but a screen, a cover story. What they are, is … Arabs! Forget the rest of it! Arabs! — once the rulers of all Asia and half of Europe! Once the world’s reigning intelligentsia- — and now left behind in the dust of modern history! Back to blood, muhajeen! They, like all people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds — Back to blood!” All people, everywhere, you have no choice but — Back to blood!^
I’m not sure what I think of it yet. I like everything I’ve read from Wolfe so far, in content at least, and ignoring his often atrocious bombastic style. I never feel like he takes a point of view, as much as observes in advance, using his knowledge of sociology and the rigid link between self-identity and moral relationship to society at large. In his realism he may be closer to the future than the past of literature.
What’s more interesting to me is that his ideas here resemble the predictions of one of the greats of political science. While I find much of his work also provocative and alarming, he’s also the most cogent predictor of how the world will react during the next decade. This thinker is Samuel Huntington, who in his latest opus, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, predicts a similar outcome to the one Wolfe decides above, except Huntington has more vectors of tribal identity to discuss.
Peoples and countries with similar cultures are coming together. Peoples and countries with different cultures are coming apart. Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignments defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational. Cultural communities are replacing Cold War blocs and the fault lines between civilizations are becoming the central lines of conflict in global politics.
During the Cold War a country could be nonaligned, as many were, or it could, as some did, change its alignment from one side to another. The leaders of a country could make these choices in terms of their perceptions of their security interests, their calculations of the balance of power, and their ideological preferences. In the new world, however, cultural identity is the central factor shaping a country’s associations and antagonisms. While a country could avoid Cold War alignment. it cannot lack an identity. The question, “Which side are you on?” has been replaced by the much more fundamental one, “Who are you?” Every state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity, defines the state’s place in world politics, its friends, and its enemies. ^
Wolfe has delighted in exploring taboo topics in the past, most of his intent seeming to be to pierce our “fiction absolute” of living in the best way possible than really taking us into a partisan view of the situation. As with his other books, this new one will involve a careful study of class, gender, ethnic and religious tensions in America and how they create an otherworldly environment that destabilizes us. That Tom Wolfe — he’s half Noam Chomsky and half H.L. Mencken.