Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (65 page)

On September 11, 2001, several thousand people in the United States were killed by terrorist attacks on civilians and military organized by the Al-Qaeda (al-Qâ’ida) terrorist group, which was based in Afghanistan and was openly supported by the Taliban government of that country. In response, the American government declared a “war on terrorism” and lent full American military support to the Tajiks and others in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, the lone remaining enclave in the country not under Taliban control. After a short civil war, the Taliban regime was overthrown in November 2001 and a democratic system led by Hamid Qarzai (elected president, 2002) was installed. The Al-Qaeda terrorists were largely suppressed or driven out. Unfortunately, Afghanistan was still torn by violent separatists, and the Taliban fundamentalists soon recovered. The Taliban increasingly adopted the terrorist tactics of Al-Qaeda in their attempt to destroy their country once again.
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THE LITTORAL SYSTEM AND CENTRAL EURASIA

Amid the beginnings of a new Regional Empire Period on the continent, the distinction between the old Littoral states and the peripheral states remained. Korea remained divided and separate both from Japan and from the continent; Southeast Asia continued to be divided into a small number of relatively compact states; most of the Arabian coast was divided among small commercially oriented principalities; the Levant remained divided into a small number of states; and England, though formally a member of the European Union, remained uncooperative and in general very much apart from the other European nations in many ways. On the whole, by the beginning of the new period the Littoral System states continued to be relatively prosperous and politically influential for their size.

The major peripheral powers around Central Eurasia—India, China, Russia, and the European Union—also were strong and rapidly growing. Only Southwest Asia was missing a major power or powers, due to the destruction and repression brought on the region by local and foreign fundamentalisms.

The restoration of much of Central Eurasia partially reestablished the world order of Eurasia before the destruction of the Junghars and the subjugation of the other major Central Eurasian nations. The newly independent Central Eurasian states—essentially, Western Central Asia and the Central Steppe (former Soviet Central Asia), Southern Central Asia (Afghanistan), and the Eastern Steppe (Mongolia)—were politically at odds with each other, poor, and vulnerable to outside pressure. They could be compared to the Littoral System, but the comparison would not be apt in view of Central Eurasia’s lack of its former commercial prosperity and the political strength produced by commercial strength.

Economic and Political Prospects

Most of the governments of the newly independent Central Eurasian states are modern “democracies”: pseudo-republics ruled by greedy tyrants or demagogues. The danger of the spread there of religious-political fundamentalism, the most pernicious and destructive form of Modernist populism, remains very great. The opinion in the region has been that the only way to prevent a fundamentalist takeover is soviet-style political and religious repression. Prospects for Central Eurasian recovery therefore look dim.

The Central Eurasian Culture Complex will obviously not be revived in order to restore the old Silk Road internal economy. The newly independent states of Western Central Asia depend overwhelmingly on the production of commodities such as oil and gas, cotton, and (in Afghanistan) illicit drugs. The last-named are pure luxury goods according to economic theory, but the political pressure against this trade will undoubtedly prevent it from taking the place of the old Silk Road internal and external trade in luxury goods. Mongolia, the only nation of eastern Central Eurasia to be fully independent again, is also poverty-stricken and run by self-serving old politicians who have no idea how to modernize the country’s economy. East Turkistan and Tibet continue to be occupied by the Chinese army, and China continues to repress those countries.
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Will they succeed in regaining independence in time to save their cultures and languages?

In short, can Central Eurasia recover as a world area, or will it continue to be poverty-stricken, prey to fundamentalism, and home to terrorists that could affect the rest of Eurasia?

A positive answer to these questions depends to a great extent on whether China will free most of Tibet and most of East Turkistan so those peoples can peacefully join with the already freed states to form a new Central Eurasian confederation. As Central Eurasia is surrounded on three sides by the fast-growing economies of Russia, China, and India, the result would surely be strong economic growth, cultural recovery, and the stabilization of that potentially explosive region. But Central Eurasia proper will only recover if and when a relatively coherent unifying political system develops there: not a monolithic sovereignty that would crush the local states in a federal union, but a generous suzerainty like the benevolent influence once exercised by the nomadic empires, one that would help everyone to work together to improve the economy and the political situation of Central Eurasia. If independent Central Eurasians eventually come to understand this and manage to create an enlightened, liberal confederation like the European Union, perhaps they can then work with the Chinese toward the liberation of the East Turkistanian and Tibetan ethnolinguistic regions.

Similarly, the Middle East—essentially, Iran and the Near East—will only begin to recover and grow if Middle Eastern peoples can agree to cooperate to build a peaceful, prosperous, safe, multicultural confederation such as the European Union. The chances of Middle Eastern countries doing so look very slim. Although stability, economic growth, and liberalism—or at least de facto separation of church and state—are now evident in several of the far outlying states of the Arabic-speaking world, proving that it is possible, much of the Middle East remains dominated by hatred and the fanatic rhetoric of Modern fundamentalist populism, including various Islamic, Jewish, and Christian forms.

Modernism and the Arts in Contemporary Central Eurasia

In Central Eurasian cities today, it is not difficult to find evidence that Modernism is the ruling force in the arts. In fact, it is increasingly difficult to find evidence of anything that has survived its onslaught there. The architecture of the major cities, such as Tashkent
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or Urumchi, is overwhelmingly Modern, as is the “art” that adorns it. In Lhasa, which once contained many of the loveliest gems of Tibetan domestic architecture, the Potala (preserved as a museum and tourist attraction) looks down over a Modern concrete Chinese city.
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In Central Eurasia, old monuments of the traditional local culture are rare, and the size and aggressive style of the Modern buildings makes the traditional buildings look out of place. Young artists study in universities and art institutes, where they are taught Modernism, which as always is presented as new and therefore better than anything old.

Because Central Eurasia was so thoroughly depressed economically, and isolated politically and culturally from the rest of the world, Modernism has not yet completely won there. For decades, the most extreme forms of Modern art were forbidden in the communist empires, where the only acceptable art was “socialist realism,” which blended some Modern ideas with elements of the pre-Modern elite culture of Western Europe. For that reason, Modernism in the arts is still new in Central Eurasia. That is the stage at which the virus is most deadly, but interest in the traditional arts remains relatively high, especially among religious adherents. There is still time to save the arts, if Central Eurasians learn to value their own traditions, in which Art and Beauty retain their historical meanings, and especially if they can understand and recognize Modernism for what it really is.

The source of Modernism in the arts is Europe and its cultural offshoots in the Littoral and around the world. The fact that it is necessary still to talk about Modernism at all—it is, after all, a century-old “revolutionary” movement—brings up many other questions that seem not to be raised, particularly:

For a century every new generation of Modern artists has openly asserted that the art of the preceding generation—Modern art—is a failure as art. Most styles or movements of Modernism thus succeeded at most to be fashionable for a short time (i.e., they were considered to be art, or good art) before they were made unfashionable (i.e., non-art, or bad art) by the next Modern avant-garde movement created to displace them. So far there is no indication that this vicious cycle in the arts—Modernism—is going to end.

The phenomenon of Modernism and the destruction of art has been addressed already by a radical writer and painter of the early twentieth century, who in 1954 notes that after
forty years
of “extremism” and endless rejection of what has preceded, young artists knowingly or unknowingly only repeat what has been done before, thinking it new and provocatively original.The artist has become “a slave of the great god Progress, who is a very jealous god indeed.”
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Since then,
another fifty-three years
have passed at the time of writing, with no change.

Why have the arts not recovered? Why have they remained in a state of permanent revolution ever since the early twentieth century, with no sign of any tendency to recover stability to match the contemporary world’s relative sociopolitical stability? Clearly, while the artists’ expression of their feelings about society and politics is reflected in their art, and artists depend on society to feed them and appreciate their art, the two spheres of endeavor are otherwise unrelated. The art world, having adopted Modernism wholeheartedly, is now a prisoner of the demon of permanent revolution—the necessity of rejecting anything that went immediately before—in order to remain Modern, up-to-date, avant-garde. For the artist,
“nothing
is permitted”
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other than this vicious cycle of rejection, which has by now become nearly total—that is, there is probably nothing that has not been tried by “experimental” avant-garde artists, and practically nothing left of the essence of Art. “The rational limit has already been overstepped—there is nothing more to be anticipated. Indeed, what has been reached is hardening into a canon.”
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Only cosmetic labeling remains, as most clearly seen in graphic art, where nothing more is required than a signature (the only indispensible element), frame (sometimes omitted), and label (optional). An artistic poem is a piece of literature written with obscure diction, a title (often omitted), and unjustified margins. Art music is deliberately produced sound in which the harmony, the melody (sometimes omitted), and the rhythm are at extreme variance with anything found in nature, not to speak of anything “popular.” The social niche or behavioral template for “artists” remains (though not the economic niche), but what they produce is literally no longer art, poetry, or music, because the very definition of those things, and the ability to redefine them, has been lost: graphic artists cannot define art, poets cannot define poetry, composers cannot define music—nor can the army of critics who feed off the status quo. In other words, the professionals cannot explain what art, music, or poetry is to or for them.
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They cannot explain what it is because they do not know what it is. Modernism’s rejection not only of all previous artistic forms but even of artistic Reason—the acceptance of the ordering principles of Nature, or at least the idea that such principles exist—has inevitably led to the destruction of the traditional arts as methods for producing genuine art.

The achievement of stability and prosperity, and even some support for artists—commercially successful ones—has resulted in making artistic Modernism institutionalized: truly permanent revolution. This is disastrous. “For quite a time it has been so unwelcome to point out the realities of the present period that a sort of conspiracy of silence has developed. Everyone pretends, including the horde of impoverished artists, the professional pundits, the picture-dealers and so on, everyone pretends that we enjoy normal conditions, and even that art is flourishing.”
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But in fact, we now have a world without genuine new art: permanent revolution actually means stasis.