So far we have glanced at two of the options open to
traditional
societies in an increasingly modern world: to try to carry on as if
nothing had happened, or to attempt to adopt some version of the
British model. That leaves the third: to seek a radical alternative to
the brand of modernity initiated by Britain. This too is not an
inherently foolish idea. It stands to reason that British modernity
should in many ways be an idiosyncratic product of its local history,
and even those who have adopted it have manifestly customized it in
numerous respects. For example, the British were Christians, but East
Asian modernization has shown conclusively that you do not have to be
Christian to be modern; as one nineteenth-century Japanese scholar
remarked dismissively before his country's modernization had even
begun, "Christianity is Buddhism with hair on it." So to take the
argument a stage further, might there not be other and quite different
ways to live effectively in the modern world, or even to transform it
altogether? The British, after all, had at best muddled through to a
parochial modernity whose nature they could hardly be expected to grasp
until they had attained it; given hindsight, surely the whole
phenomenon called out for a profound rethinking that could then be
translated into radical political action. The idea is plausible, but to
date the experience of such attempts has not been encouraging.
By far the most sustained of these movements was Marxism,
a theory of
human society, and especially of industrial society, that was devised
in the nineteenth century and extensively applied by the Communist
parties of the twentieth. Its most stable component was its aversion to
the market economy that had hitherto been the foundation of industrial
society. As a political praxis it was originally intended to inform the
politics of advanced industrial societies, deftly nudging them into a
future of classless freedom and plenty through a process of political
revolution. In fact, it turned out to work best as a technique for
amassing political and economic power in underdeveloped countries,
starting with the Russian revolution of October 1917. And amass power
it did: the Soviet Union became a superpower, and Communist China a
major player on the international scene. What Marxism did not do was
deliver to the societies it ruled either freedom or plenty, and toward
the end of the century it collapsed. At the beginning of the twenty-
first century, in the countries that matter, Communists have either
relinquished political power (as in Russia) or retained it only on the
basis of renouncing their traditional hostility to the market (as in
China).
One of the key strengths of Marxism lay in its commitment
to
understanding the future of the modern world, and to living in what
would eventually be a transformed version of it. Thus the nightmare for
the enemies of Marxism, though by the end of the twentieth century no
one any longer remembered this, was that it had come up with a form of
society more effective than their own. "We are advancing full steam
ahead on the path of industrialization," as Stalin declared in 1929,
anticipating that his country would soon leave the "esteemed
capitalists" and their "civilization" behind; "we shall see which
countries may then be 'classified' as backward and which as advanced"
(compare the Irish air balloon). Those who clung to the disorganization
of electoral democracy and the market economy would be the dinosaurs of
social evolution, and the Marxists with their planned economies and
ruthlessly centralized power structures would be its mammals. BrAesame
token, one of the key weaknesses of this futuristic doctrine was that
it lacked roots in the inherited beliefs and cultures of ordinary
people and had no place for them in its doctrinal system. Thus Marxism
deemphasized identitywhich may be why, once shown not to work, it
disappeared almost without trace. And yet, ironically, some of its
major successes in coming to power through revolution had been achieved
where Marxists contrived to play the nationalist role as defenders of a
country against foreign enemies, and did so better than the
nationalists themselvesas in China and Vietnam, though not in Russia.