In a world ravaged by centuries of hegemonic dominance, multipolarity is emerging as a quiet but very powerful force, reshaping the global order. It offers an alternative to the unilateral power that has long defined international relations, providing a vision of balance, where no nation dictates the destinies of others. For too long, the world has been shaped by empires seeking to impose their will, with unilateral excesses of power at the expense of authentic diversity. Multipolarity rejects this, standing instead in favor of coexistence and shared responsibility, a shift that signals the possibility of a more peaceful future.
This vision seeks not the destruction of power, but its redistribution, providing the possibility of presence to cultures once marginalized by the rule of the few. Multipolarity supports a framework in which nations, rooted in their distinct histories and cultures, can contribute to a global balance. It thrives most visibly in Eurasia, where ancient traditions meet modern ambitions, forming a foundation for cooperation. From the bustling metropolises of China to the vast plains of Russia, this interconnected complex challenges the unipolar world, fostering alliances that respect sovereignty while cultivating cooperation.
Yet as this balance begins to take shape, those accustomed to wielding unchecked power are resisting. The great maritime hegemons, whose control of trade routes once dictated the global course, now find themselves struggling with diminished influence. The seas that served as their avenues of dominance are now receding in importance, as they are surpassed by the power of land-based alliances.
The rise of Eurasia is shifting the “center of gravity,” challenging the primacy of oceanic empires. This transition marks not just a redistribution of power, but a fundamental redefinition of the very structure of our world.
Despite its promise, multipolarity faces significant challenges, as instability and rivalries, old and new, threaten to disrupt its progress. The dream of equal power is fragile, vulnerable to the pressures of economic inequalities, historical grievances, and ideological differences. Chaos looms on the horizon, its potential to disrupt the delicate framework of cooperation a constant concern. Multipolarity is not a certain upcoming outcome, but an evolving process, requiring vigilance and a commitment to dialogue among its proponents. Without careful management, its promise could dissolve into a fragmented, conflict-ridden reality.
The question of whether multipolarity can endure remains unanswered, but its emergence marks a pivotal moment in history. It represents an opportunity to move beyond cycles of domination and exploitation that have long plagued humanity. While the path ahead is uncertain, the pursuit of multipolarity is a profound call for nations to reconsider the nature of power and responsibility in the modern world. It is a challenge to abandon old hierarchies and embrace a model that values the voices of the many over the ambitions of the few—a vision that, if realized, could transform the world for the better.
Donald Trump’s supporters and critics share a unanimous consensus. His election heralded a real revolution in world events. It represents a confirmation rather than a push. The paradigm shift arguably began with the failed war on terror, then progressed through the 2008 economic crash, the Covid hysteria, and finally the war in Ukraine. At every turn, the administrators of the neoliberal world order have proven incapable of managing, self-deprecating according to their own logic of legitimacy. The globalized elite is no longer able to define events according to their collective interest, as new forces emerge, capable of acting against the post-Cold War “rules-based” order that had hitherto constrained them.
The Cold War represented a bipolar world order, with communism and liberalism jockeying for supremacy, in a competition largely waged in the Third World. The victory of the latter was seen as ushering in an “End of History”, with a dominant, triumphant “McWorld” [McWorld is a term referring to the spread of McDonald’s restaurants around the world, as a result of globalization and more generally the effects of the international “McDonaldization” of services and the commercialization of goods, as an element of globalization as a whole]. Now, this is proving to be ephemeral, like the Athenian Empire of Classical Antiquity, which fell from hubris and excess.
The West sold its enemies the industrial base painstakingly created by its best men and used the proceeds of this sale to transform its economy into a “casino”, where “property”, “the house” always wins. It has constructed consent for its power by introducing a caste of dependent puppets who are rewarded with wealth extracted from the “natives” of the countries, locals who still remember a time when they were freer and happier. It has embarked on the most outrageous adventures in foreign lands, activities presided over by mediocrities promoted on low wages, in government, in the media, in business and in universities, in all the interconnected clientelistic systems that reward traits such as conformity, servility and dishonesty, while punishing courage and integrity.
All this has led to a peculiar “liquid vacuum”, filled with new forces, has led to the beginning of the new multipolar world. We say new forces, but they are really the old forces, reasserting themselves above and against the interregnum of liberalism. At the same time, the new phenomenon is an insurgent right-wing and traditionalist movement, spanning cultures and continents within and outside the West. The great Kipling’s “Gods of Headings in Copybooks” as well as the “Mighty Gods” of Russell Ronald Reno have all returned, bringing with them concepts long thought dead and buried. To understand this, perhaps there is no more useful introduction than an understanding of the concept of multipolarity, and hence its study.
In Kipling’s time, in the United Kingdom and perhaps in the United States, calligraphy notebooks or “copy books” as they are called in English, were lined books, similar to today’s notebooks, but at the top of each page were printed short sayings: Scripture verses, aphorisms, maxims and axioms, which introduced to the minds of young students the rules of life, the important and essential things, (given ostensibly not as some moral precepts, but as “examples of calligraphy”). In the twelve blank lines below, the student had to use calligraphic writing to copy the saying exactly, once on each line, until he had written it twelve times. Formally, to learn the art of calligraphy, but in reality, to impress the specific idea on his mind.
“The Gods of the Headings of the Copybooks”
“In every incarnation of mine, through time and in all races,
I do penance and pay due homage to the gods of the Agora.
Peeking through pious fingers, I observe their rise and fall,
and I see that the gods of the headings of the calligraphy notebooks have more endurance in time.
We lived in the trees when they came and found us.
They showed us in turn that Water certainly soaks us and that Fire certainly burns us:
But they did not seem to us to have a high Mind, a Vision and a broad Mind.
So, we left them as teachers to the gorillas,
while we followed the Path of Humanity.
We moved with the dictates of the Spirit. They never changed their pace,
not being cloudy or wind-blown like the Gods of the Agora,
And yet they always followed our progress, and it was not recently learned
that a tribe was lost from its ice island, or that the lights were extinguished in Rome.
Unfortunately, with the fundamental Hopes of our World they had no contact,
They denied that the Moon is made of Cheese.
They denied that Wishes are Horses, that Pigs have Wings, thus we worshipped the Gods of the Agora,
who promised us all these beauties. When the measures were being taken for Cambria,
They promised us eternal peace on earth.
They swore that if we surrendered our weapons, there would be an end to the war of the tribes.
But They sold us with disarmament and delivered us bound to our enemy.
And the gods of the calligraphy notebook headings said: “Stay good to the Devil you know.”
On the first Female Sandstones, They promised us a Fuller Life
(which began with loving one’s neighbor and ended with loving one’s neighbor’s wife)
Until our women had no children, nor our men faith and reason,
And the gods of the calligraphy notebook headings said: “Sin leads to death.”
In the Carboniferous Period, they promised us that we would have an abundant share in everything,
robbing the chosen Peter to pay for Paul the collective.
But although we had a lot of money, we could not buy anything with it,
And the gods of the headings of the calligraphy notebooks said: “You die without work.”
Then the gods of the Market collapsed, and their sweet-talking magicians also left
And the hearts of the workers were humbled and began to believe
that in truth All is not Shiny Gold, and that Two and Two make us four
And the gods of the headings of the calligraphy notebooks tried desperately to explain this again.
As it will be in the future, so it will be in the beginning of Man
Only four certainties have we had since the beginning of Social Progress.
That the Dog always returns to his vomit, and the Pig always to her mud
And the burnt and bound finger of the Fool, in the end, trembling, will go back to the Fire.
And when these things are done after this, and the wonderful new world begins
When we are all paid for our existence, but no one has to pay for his sins,
Then, as surely as Water rains on us and Fire burns us,
Then surely the gods of the headings of the calligraphy notebooks
return with terror and slaughter.
The essence of the poem is that in any case, spiritual values are superior to material values. The masterful way in which Kipling develops this idea, starting each stanza with a historical metaphor, demonstrates why he is widely considered an excellent craftsman of speech and a leading classical poet.
Imagine today’s kindergarten students, who grow up in the consumerist, materialistic and universal pseudo-culture of globalization, having to write with great care the phrase “I love my nation and its culture”. Perhaps this would reduce the enthusiasm of internationalists and perhaps reduce the number of future traitors.
Kipling did not place specific examples of headings in his poem, as in his time, this was completely unnecessary. In our time, careful study is required in order to be able to clearly understand the meaning and deeper significance of the poem.
In the first stanza, the poet pays some honors to the gods of the Agora, although these are not clearly defined (it is obvious that he refers to the worship of money, interest and material gain) but he notes that in their opposite, “the gods of the headings of calligraphy notebooks” have withstood the test of time. What would the stateless rationalist economists of “social accounting” answer to this, who believe and boldly proclaim that ultimately “the market solves all problems”?
In the second stanza, he says that we still lived in trees, but the human race abandoned the “headings of calligraphy notebooks,” considering them to lack “High Mind, Vision, and Broad Mind,” while following the “Path of Humanity.”
Each stanza reveals another example of what happens when society makes a fatal choice. Each stanza gives us another critical overview of contemporary values and processes. Is there not, for reasons “unknown” to experts, a rapidly increasing low birth rate in the Western world? Are not so-called Christians far from God and his Church?
We must not forget that “The Gods of the Headlines…” is a poem by Kipling, the “bard of Empire” that constitutes one of his many angry post-war outbursts, regarding the decline and disintegration of Anglo-Saxon society! The poem was first published on October 26, 1919 in the London Sunday newspaper “Sunday Pictorial” (“Sunday Mirror” since 1963). In America, it was published as “The Gods of the Copybook Maxims”, in Harper’s Magazine in January 1920.
In the poem, his narrator pits the “Gods” of the title, who embody eternal truths, against the “Gods of the Bazaar,” who represent an optimistic self-deception into which society had fallen since the early 20th century, drugged by the fairy tale of “progress through science.”
Kipling’s narrative voice contrasts the supposedly eternal wisdom of these standard educational texts with the modernist and naive contemporary ideas of the “Bazaar.” It makes indirect references, through puns and poetic allusions, [to earlier periods of geochronology and to the Welsh Prime Minister Lord George and the Liberal efforts for disarmament – “The Cambrian Measures” where Cambria, the Latin rendering of the name used by the Welsh for their country and people (Cymru, Cymry, “fellow countrymen”) – to Feminism “first Female Sandstones” and to the socialist policies supported by trade unionists, many of whom were coal miners (“the coal age”)]. It is noteworthy that the great English writer, poet and literary critic Thomas Stearns Eliot included the poem in question in his collection “A Selection of Kipling’s Verse” (1941).
The Russell Ronald Reno III (born 1959), known as R. R. Reno or “Rusty” Reno, is an American theologian and publisher of the conservative monthly cultural magazine First Things. He is a former professor of theology and ethics at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, USA.
He has been heavily involved in the controversy during the Covid-19 pandemic, downplaying the dangers of the virus and attacking both government policy and the stance taken by churches to control the epidemic (at the expense of regular economic and church activity). The pandemic, he said, “is not, and never has been, a threat to society” and that the mask mandates were “imposed cowardice,” while veterans who refused to wear masks were “men, not cowards.”
Reno is the author of the book: “Return of the Mighty Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West” (from the conservative “Regnery Gateway” publications, Washington, 2019)
After the shocking carnage of the world wars, the West embraced the ideal of the “open society.” The visionary promise of this ideal: By breaking free from the old attachments to nation, race, and religion that had fueled centuries of violence, we could build a prosperous world without borders, free from dogma, and governed by technocratic administrators.
But the populism and nationalism that have recently upended politics in America and Europe are a sign that after three generations, the postwar consensus is crumbling. With compelling insight, Rhine argues that we are seeing the return of “strong gods”—the powerful beliefs that bind people to their homeland and to each other.
“In response to the disastrous first half of the twentieth century, political, cultural, and economic elites promoted open borders, open markets, and “open minds.” But this endless work of opening up has become entrenched in a set of “anti-dogmatic doctrines” that destroy the social solidarity rooted in family, faith, and nation. While they worry about the return of fascism, our societies are disintegrating. But man will not tolerate social disintegration indefinitely. He longs to be part of an “us”—the fruit of shared love—that gives his life meaning.”
Rhine warns that the powerful gods will return, in one form or another. Our duty is to follow those who, appealing to our reason as well as our hearts, inspire the best of our traditions.
Otherwise, we will invite the darker gods whose return our open society was intended to prevent.
