The Crystal Palace now extends all over the world, encompassing the non-West and the West alike, literally in the form of the downtown areas of hundreds of cities, from radically ‘renovated’ Shanghai to the surreal follies of Dubai and Gurgaon. Homo economicus, the autonomous, reasoning, rights-bearing individual, that quintessential product of industrialism and modern political philosophy, has actually realized his fantastical plans to bring all of human existence into the mesh of production and consumption: Kalimantan in Indonesia, once famous for its headhunters, now hosts McDonald’s. The growth of GDP, however uneven, is the irreplaceable index of national power and wealth. Whether or not the non-West catches up with the West, the irrepressibly glamorous god of materialism has superseded the religions and cultures of the past in the life and thought of most non-Western peoples, most profoundly among their educated classes.
Same Same
Baal, bringing economic disruption in his wake, atomizing societies, threatening older values, and making social maladjustment inevitable, has also created global fault lines – those that run through human souls as well as nations and societies undergoing massive change. From his victims emerge the foot soldiers of radical Islamism as well as Hindu and Chinese nationalism.
Most of them are not the poorest of the poor, or members of the peasantry and the urban underclass. They are educated youth, often unemployed, rural–urban migrants, or others from the lower middle class. They have abandoned the most traditional sectors of their societies, and have succumbed to the fantasies of consumerism without being able to satisfy them. They respond to their own loss and disorientation with a hatred of modernity’s supposed beneficiaries; they trumpet the merits of their indigenous culture or assert its superiority, even as they have been uprooted from this culture.
Regardless of their national origins and locally attuned rhetoric, these disenfranchised men target those they regard as venal, callous and mendacious elites. Donald Trump led an upsurge of white nationalists enraged at being duped by globalized liberals. A similar loathing of London technocrats and cosmopolitans led to Brexit. Hindu nationalists, who tend to belong to lower middle classes with education and some experience of mobility, aim at ‘pseudo-secularist’ English-speaking Indians, accusing them of disdain for Hinduism and vernacular traditions. Chinese nationalists despise the small minority of their West-oriented technocratic compatriots. Radical Islamists, eager autodidacts of Islam, spend much time parsing differences between who they decide are genuine Muslims and nominal ones, those who have surrendered to the hedonism and rootlessness of consumer society.
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The most resonant recent acknowledgement of Baal’s insidious appeal and sinister workings comes from Anwar al-Awlaki. This extraordinarily influential American-accented preacher of jihad charged in one of his most popular lecture series, ‘The Life of the Prophet: The Makkan Period’, that ‘a global culture’ has seduced ‘Muslims and especially Muslims living in the West’. Quoting the Slavophile Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn (‘To destroy a people, you must sever their roots’), Awlaki claimed that Muslims ‘are suffering from a serious identity crisis’, sharing more in common with a ‘rock star or a soccer player’ than ‘with the companions of Rasool Allah [Mohammed]’.
Awlaki’s rants on blogs, social media and YouTube, which have spawned a whole generation of ‘Facebook terrorists’ in the West, gain their persuasive power from a widely shared experience among young Muslims of attraction and self-hatred before the gods of sensuousness. Awlaki himself left America and plunged into jihadism out of fear that he, who sermonized against fornication, might be exposed as a frequenter of prostitutes. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whose savage attacks on Shiites helped push Iraq into civil war and laid the foundations for ISIS, was fleeing a long past of pimping, drug-dealing and heavy drinking; and he never quite escaped it. The Afghan-American Omar Mateen was a habitué of the gay club in Orlando where he massacred forty-nine people.
The quest for a moral victory over an unmanly self and a clear identity, both quickly achieved by identifying a single enemy, leads some young Muslims to affiliate themselves with ISIS and al-Qaeda. It has been baffling for many to confront among Justin Bieber-loving Muslims a political species – radicals, revolutionaries, millenarian fantasists – long thought to be extinct in post-industrial, ostensibly post-ideological, Western Europe and America. But the fierce backlash against modernity, as we’ll see in the next chapter, began even before it had entrenched itself as a universal norm; Rousseau was present as a critic at the creation of the new individualistic society, pointing to devastating contradictions right in the heart and soul of the bourgeois individual entrusted with progress, and improvising his own militantly secessionist solutions.
This central revolutionary tradition inaugurated by Rousseau is scarcely even a memory today. Bland fanatics, sedulously polishing the image of a ‘liberal’ West against totalitarianism and Islam, have banished it to obscurity. This is usually done through a combination of reductionist history and ahistorical explanations, largely involving clinical psychology. Thus, politicians and journalists routinely describe the domestic terrorist as a deranged ‘lone wolf’, even when, as with Timothy McVeigh, and many other anti-government militants in the United States, he explicitly articulated a point of view – anti-governmentalism – that mirrors mainstream ideas and ideologies.
McVeigh claimed to be defending the American constitution, and on the day of his atrocity in 1995 in Oklahoma City he wore a T-shirt bearing a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: ‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.’ McVeigh also showed himself to be a true product of the First Gulf War – the war that went straight to video – with his carefully staged killing; he was looking for saturation media coverage as well as high body counts. He then justified his spectacular violence with reference to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and other expedient and devastatingly effective American acts of war.
The generation of militant white supremacists that followed McVeigh upheld the same conventional rationalizations of violence. Republican politicians long before Trump and Ted Cruz were echoing McVeigh’s core belief in freedom from venal government. And gun-owning truck drivers in Louisiana have more in common with trishul-wielding Hindus in India, bearded Islamists in Pakistan, and nationalists and populists elsewhere, than any of them realize.
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‘Variety,’ Tocqueville was already warning in the mid-nineteenth century, ‘is disappearing from within the human species; the same manner of acting, thinking, and feeling is found in all corners of the world … all peoples deal with each other more and copy each other more faithfully.’ Even those anti-imperialists who asserted their national personality and particularity against Europe’s rationalistic, aggressively universalizing missions actually ended up radically reconfiguring ancient religions and cultures such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam along European lines, infusing these modernized faiths with political purpose, reformist zeal and even revolutionary content.
By the century’s end, Herzl was hoping that ‘Darwinian mimicry’ would make the Jews as powerful as their European tormentors. It is definitely not some esoteric Hadith that makes ISIS so eager today to adopt the modern West’s methods and technologies of war, revolution and propaganda – especially, as the homicidal dandyism of Jihadi John revealed, its media-friendly shock-and-awe violence.
The intellectual pedigree of today’s nasty atrocities is not to be found in religious scriptures. French colonialists in Algeria had used torture techniques originally deployed by the Nazis during their occupation of France (and also were some of the first hijackers of a civilian aeroplane). Americans in the global war on terror resorted to cruel interrogation methods that the Soviet Union had patented during the Cold War. In the latest stage of this gruesome reciprocity, the heirs of Zarqawi in ISIS dress their Western hostages in Guantanamo’s orange suits, and turn on their smartphone cameras, before beheadi
ng their victims.
In many Western countries, what we term ‘radical Islamism’ has grown in tandem with a nativist radical right against the backdrop of economic decline, social fragmentation and disenchantment with electoral politics. Marginalized blue-collar Christians in Rust Belt America and post-communist Poland as well as long-bearded young Muslims in France push a narrative of victimhood and heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and the inauthentic. Their blogs, YouTube videos and social media incarnations mirror each other, down to the conspiracy theories about transnational Jews. The writings of Anders Behring Breivik, who killed nearly two hundred people in Norway in 2011, contained the same strictures against feminism as any Islamist screed. The German-Iranian teenager who killed nine people in Munich on the fifth anniversary of Breivik’s attack confirmed the mimetic nature of today’s violence by choosing a picture of Breivik as his WhatsApp profile.
Identity has long been interchangeable in our global civil war: after all, the militants armed and funded by the West against the Soviet Union were once hailed as ‘freedom fighters’, and they eventually found their capitalist sponsors indistinguishable from godless communists. Today, American veterans of wars against jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan – African-American as well as Muslim – aim their weapons at their fellow citizens. Yet we continue to look for explanations and enemies in the drastic cultural and religious otherness of those responsible, in a religious ideology that, originating in the Middle East, evidently seduces vulnerable young people away from Western values.
It is a reassuring, even self-flattering, impulse. What could be more alien to liberal, secular and democratic societies than a bunch of seventh-century fundamentalists prepared to kill themselves in the name of Allah in order to inflict maximum damage? For those brought up on stories of how a West defined by Enlightenment rationalism and humanism made, or ought to make, the modern world, blaming Islamic theology, or fixating on the repellant rhetoric of ISIS, can even be indispensable in achieving moral self-entrancement, and toughening up convictions of superiority: we, liberal, democratic and rational, are not at all like these savages. But these spine-stiffening exercises can no longer obscure the fact that the history of the Atlantic West has long been continuous with the world it made.
The belief systems and institutions that Britain, France and the United States initiated and advanced – the commercial society, the global market economy, the nation state and utilitarian rationality – first caused a long emergency in Europe, before roiling the older worlds of Asia and Africa. And it is now clear that the radical aspirations they ignited, which first erupted as revolutions and revolts in European societies in the nineteenth century, are far from burning themselves out. New political religions and demagogues are still emerging; older forms of faith and ways of life are undergoing a metamorphosis as dramatic as the one that Christianity underwent in the secular modern age. The modern West can no longer be distinguished from its apparent enemies.
3. Loving Oneself Through Others: Progress and Its Contradictions
We resent everyone … who run at our side, who hamper our stride or leave us behind. In clearer terms: all contemporaries are odious.
Emil Cioran
The Affluent Universal Society
In 1736, Voltaire published ‘Le Mondain’, an eloquent ode to the good life, as he boldly and originally conceived it. This philosophical poem heralded nothing less than a moral revolution, one that would change the character of Western culture and eventually the shape of the modern world.
This was a time, after all, when life ideals dating back to the Middle Ages – the classical belief in a golden age, poverty and the pastoral life – were dominant. The pursuit of wealth, let alone its enjoyment, invited odium from civic and religious moralists. Voltaire, however, audaciously dismissed the Christian past as one long night of ignorance, prejudice and deprivation.
He exhorted human beings to look forward to the present and the future. The golden age, he asserted, was where he was, a sensuous utopia where ‘needful superfluous things appear’. He praised the civilizing effects worldwide of trade, material prosperity and consumerism. In fact, Voltaire made a life of luxury and comfort seem a legitimate, even necessary, political and economic goal, one reached best by global commerce and consumption:
See how that fleet, with canvas wings,
From Texel, Bordeaux, London brings,
By happy commerce to our shores,
All Indus, and all Ganges stores;
Whilst France, that pierced the Turkish lines,
Sultans make drunk with rich French wines.
Boldly confessing his love of conspicuous consumption, Voltaire flouted Rousseau’s dictum that the rich have a duty ‘never to make people conscious of inequalities of wealth’. But then this rising commoner felt himself to be on the right side of universal progress. And he was not alone, nor wholly wrong.
By the mid-eighteenth century, history had been periodized in the way that is now conventional: antiquity, the Middle Ages and the modern era, in which society seemed to be moving on from war and xenophobia to a cosmopolis defined by trade, mutual tolerance and refined culture. Wealth, traditionally concentrated in and signified by immovable property, had previously appeared an end in itself only among merchant communities. Montaigne, for instance, had been under the impression that in a trade one man can only benefit at the expense of another. In the eighteenth century, however, moneymaking through trade and commerce began to appear more desirable than the old kind of wealth.
Montesquieu was already writing approvingly in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), two decades before the Wealth of Nations (1776), that politicians ‘speak to us only of manufactures, commerce, finance, wealth, and even luxury’. Rousseau echoed him complainingly in Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) when he wrote that ‘ancient politicians spoke incessantly about morals and virtue, ours speak only of business and money’. Much to Rousseau’s disapproval, the intellectual, too, seemed to become a promoter of the new commercial society (and zealous protector of his elevated status). When Voltaire was born in 1694, the philosophe had denoted a secluded figure, remote from the frivolity of the court. By the time he died in 1778, the philosophe referred to someone who actively shaped society. ‘The spirit of the century,’ as Voltaire himself noted, ‘has made the men of letters as fit for society as for the study; and it is in this that they are superior to those of past centuries.’
The German philosopher and theologian Herder attacked the conceit of French philosophes, which was later manifested by intellectuals in many powerful countries, that they lived in the best of all worlds, and were a source of sweetness and light:
As a rule, the philosopher is never more of an ass than when he most confidently wishes to play God; when with remarkable assurance, he pronounces on the perfection of the world, wholly convinced that everything moves just so, in a nice, straight line, that every succeeding generation reaches perfection in a completely linear progression, according to his ideals of virtue and happiness. It so happens that he is always the ratio ultima, the last, the highest, link in the chain of being, the very culmination of it all. ‘Just see to what enlightenment, virtue, and happiness the world has swung! And here, behold, am I at the top of the pendulum, the gilded tongue of the world’s scales!’
But Herder, when he wrote this, was the little-known inhabitant of a politically incoherent country. So was the teenaged Fichte, the son of a rural weaver, as he fantasized in 1788 about writing a devastating satirical critique of the new ideal of luxury. As the century ended, intellectuals of the Atlantic West exalted the commercial ethos and argued against those stern Christians and civic republicans who had stressed the moral perils of economic egoism and sensual indulgence.
A whole new domain of human activity, now known to us by the words ‘economics’ and ‘economy’, opened up, and rapidly assumed a supreme value. Its publicists insisted, contra Montaigne, that individual interests, fa
r from being opposed, could be harmonized by trade, and, more remarkably, such private gains were also congruent with the public good. Adam Smith envisaged an open global system of trade powered by envy and admiration of the rich. He argued that the human instinct for emulation of others could be turned, through a mechanism he called the ‘invisible hand’, into a constructive moral and social force. Montesquieu thought that commerce, which renders ‘superfluous things useful and useful things necessary’, would ‘cure destructive prejudices’ and promote ‘communication between peoples’. In Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1772), Diderot fantasized about the new boldly sensuous man, a connoisseur of:
the delights of society. He loves women, the theatre and fine food. He takes to the social whirl with the same good grace he displays when confronting the uncertain elements which toss him about. He’s affable and light-hearted. He’s a true Frenchman, balancing a treatise of integral and differential calculus on one side, with a voyage round the world on the other.
If Diderot hailed the cosmopolitan intellectual as a suave man of the world, even a proto-James Bond with his taste for philandering and lavish expense budgets, Voltaire exalted the globetrotting merchant in Philosophical Letters (1773), claiming that he ‘enriches his country, dispatches orders from his counting-house to Surat and Grand Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world’.
Voltaire himself became a paid-up member of the globally networked elite by joining a company that imported grain from North Africa to Marseilles and re-exported it to Italy and Spain. In the last years of his life he exported watches from his factory in Switzerland to Russia and Turkey, and also explored sales opportunities in Algeria and Tunisia. He died a very wealthy man, his fortune amassed through publishing royalties, royal patronage, real estate, financial speculation, playing the lottery, moneylending to princes, watchmaking. (He also practised some dishonourable methods: the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who worked for him in Berlin, thought his financial dealings were those of a scoundrel.)
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