Modern Western Imperialism and Tolerance

One implication in Eric Voegelin’s philosophical study of the nexus between eschatology and Empire during the period he termed “the Ecumenic Age” (an epochal period consisting of an indeterminate number of centuries before, and after, the zero fulcrum of the “year of our Lord”) is that the Imperial dynamic—that began the West proper with the Hellenizing Imperialism of Alexander the Great (4th century B.C.) and his descendants, continuing thereafter with the transfer of Empire to the Romans (1st century B.C.), then after that with the Christianization of the Roman Empire with the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century A.D., followed by the transfer of the Roman Empire to the Franks with its pinnacle being the coronation by Pope Leo III of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day of 800 A.D.—never really ended, and continues into our present.

That is to say, it is arguable that the putative breakdown of Empire in the West that is one supposed hallmark of Modernity, where the rise of a new system of Nation-States replacing the medieval kaleidoscope of shifting Imperial (or sub-Imperial) blocs—a protracted and complex process roughly beginning with the dislocations and wars following the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century and lasting to the mid-20th century wherein two horrendous wars marked the final stage of decomposition—was not really an abandonment of Empire, but only its transformation or reconfiguration into a new form. That new form was simply the transfer of Empire from the British Empire to the American Empire. Notwithstanding profound currents of anti-Americanism in modern Europe, it is evident that America represents and functions as—in its capacity of global geopolitical economic superiority as well as a major pop cultural influence—the vanguard of the West, the new head of the heart of the West, Europe.

In a previous essay, I discussed some of these issues in the context of the American Empire. Some historians have construed a similar typology of a passing of Empire in the passing of the Roman Empire to a “second Rome” with Byzantium, the so-called Eastern Roman Empire, and then to a “third Rome” as Moscow, after Byzantium was overthrown by invading Muslims in the 15th century and the spiritual locus of Christianity—or Orthodox Christianity, at any rate—moved further eastward to Russia, with her Tsars explicitly (as well as linguistically) harkening back to the Roman Caesars. This typology, of course, ignores the West (which was the point among the Eastern Orthodox!). In the West, as already noted, the Roman Empire was translated into the “Holy Roman Empire” of the Franco-Germans (roughly spanning from the 9th century A.D. to the turn of the 19th century), with reverberations in the German Caesars of the modern period up to the end of World War I: the Kaisers.
At any rate, the point of today’s essay is simplex: modern Western Empire—beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese mutations, continuing with the Dutch and French mutations, increasing with the British (with the Germans and Italians joining in along the way), and to date most maximally expressed in its American incarnation—is the most tolerant of all Empires in world history, achieving at last a vision and goal that was implicit in the Roman Empire but too often vitiated and undermined for various reasons, both internal and external: to accomodate and to accord with equal rights different individuals and groups whose differences may include as wide a diversity of belief and behavior as possible, given a reasonable limit imposed by internal laws and morality, not to mention public safety—a limit that is minimalized as much as possible.

Of course, this implicit doctrine of minimalization has come under an important challenge recently: the alternative Imperial culture of Islam, which not only embraces values that are profoundly anti-liberal, but also embraces a view of the world that divides the world into two camps—the camp of Islam and the camp of the Infidel—and interprets that division as a perpetual affront to the Absolute Truth of Islam whose triumphalist supremacy cannot be assuaged until the whole world comes under the rule of Islam.

Ironically, most of our Western people who tend to sugarcoat and whitewash this problem of Islamic inassimilability are also the same people who vaunt the Western value of assimilating all cultures and subcultures. But the classical virtue of tolerance in Western Empire has never presupposed a catholic magnanimity that would tolerate a system that is aggressively and dangerously intolerant of that same tolerance.

The classical virtue of tolerance in Western Empire, then, may be expressed thusly as:

the intolerance of intolerance;
and, consequently:

the intolerance of the tolerance of intolerance;

where the PC value of tolerance begins the same as the classical Western-Imperialistic virtue as:

the intolerance of intolerance;

but has devolved in its strange double-helix of deformation into:

the tolerance of the intolerance of tolerance so long as that intolerance is non-Western and non-white;
leading, in its antagonism to classical Liberalism epitomized by Western Imperialism, to:

the intolerance of the classic Western-Imperialistic intolerance of the tolerance of intolerance.