It was also during the Cold War that many Anglo-American writers began to absurdly prettify – on an industrial scale – the rise of the ‘democratic West’. The diversity and contradictions of the Enlightenment were squeezed out in its standard liberal version – for instance, in Peter Gay’s commercially successful two-volume history in the 1950s – that presented it as a unified project of individual emancipation, inaugurating the necessary and inevitable passage of humankind from tradition to modernity, immaturity to adulthood. (Gay almost entirely ignored Rousseau, the devastating internal critic of the Enlightenment, who appeared in other Cold War accounts as merely the forebear of totalitarianism.)
American scholarship in literature, politics, art history and philosophy in the 1950s was, as Carl Schorske reminisced in his path-breaking book Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980), ‘turning away from history as its basis for self-understanding’. One inevitable result of cutting the ‘cord of consciousness’ linking the past to the present was sanitized history. The centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, genocide and slavery in Europe and America were downplayed in accounts that showed how the Atlantic West privileged with reason and individual autonomy made the modern world, and became with its liberal democracies a vision of the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with.
The number of available Western models multiplied with the post-1945 defanging of Italy, Germany and Japan, and their transformation, under American supervision, into relatively healthy, quasi-Westernized nations. Their irruptions of militarism and fascism were explained away as pathological aberrations rather than as outcomes of improvised political solutions to the problem of catching up with an expansionist Atlantic West.
The long, absurd and ultimately futile struggle of Marxist revolutionaries to attain a historical condition beyond conflict and change came to be mimicked in the Cold War’s historical imaginings of the West: Hegel’s ‘end of history’ reappeared as the ‘end of ideology’ in the 1960s. More remarkably, it came to signify, after the varied intoxications of the Reagan – Thatcher years, the final triumph of free markets and democracy.
The switch to social welfarism after 1945 across the West had indicated that unregulated capitalism was no longer politically tenable. Karl Polanyi summed up a larger mood when he claimed in The Great Transformation (1944) that ‘the utopian experiment of a self-regulating market will be no more than a memory’. In the 1980s, the decade of deregulation and privatization in the West, however, this experiment was revived. The collapse of communist regimes in 1989 further emboldened the bland fanatics, who had been intellectually nurtured during the Cold War in a ‘paradise’, as Niebuhr called it, albeit one ‘suspended in a hell of global insecurity’. The old Hegelian-Marxist teleology was retrofitted rather than discarded in Fukuyama’s influential end-of-history hypothesis.
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Writing during the heyday of Modernization Theory, the French critic Raymond Aron, though resolutely anti-communist, termed American-style individualism the product of a short history of unrepeatable national success, which ‘spreads unlimited optimism, denigrates the past, and encourages the adoption of institutions which are in themselves destructive of the collective unity’. By the late 1980s, however, there were very few voices warning against the triumphalist faith that history had resolved its contradictions and ended its struggles in the universal regime of free-market individualism.
Responding to Fukuyama’s thesis in 1989, Allan Bloom was full of foreboding about the gathering revolts against a world that ‘has been made safe for reason as understood by the market’, and ‘a global common market the only goal of which is to minister to men’s bodily needs and whims’. ‘If an alternative is sought,’ Bloom wrote, ‘there is nowhere else to seek it. I would suggest that fascism has a future, if not the future.’ The English political philosopher John Gray warned of the return of ‘more primordial forces, nationalist and religious, fundamentalist and soon, perhaps, Malthusian’ that the Cold War had tranquillized; he pointed to the intellectual incapacity of liberalism as well as Marxism in this new world order.
Soon after 1989, ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Rwanda, as well as the resurgence of far-right parties in Italy and Austria and anti-immigrant neo-Nazi groups in newly reunified Germany, showed that we would confront authoritarian politics, vicious ethnic prejudice and extreme nationalism whenever and wherever the conditions of their possibility reappeared, regardless of how many times we told ourselves, ‘never again’. The wars in Chechnya, Afghanistan, Africa and South America in the 1990s revealed large numbers of individuals, armed gangs, arms dealers, human traffickers, drug lords, mafias and private security firms snatching the monopoly of violence from flailing states – precursors to the twenty-first century’s terrorists and ‘lone wolves’ who would erase the fading distinction between civilian and military.
The easy availability of assault weapons in the United States was always likely to assist the privatization and socialization of violence. Timothy McVeigh’s murder on 19 April 1995 of 168 Americans in Oklahoma City now seems an early clue to the presently exploding netherworld of political rage, conspiracy theory and paranoia. Writing in a small-town newspaper in 1992, McVeigh, then a young veteran of the First Gulf War, chillingly foresaw our demagogic present:
Racism on the rise? You had better believe it. Is this America’s frustrations venting themselves? Is it a valid frustration? Who is to blame for the mess? At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people, democracy seems to be headed down the same road. No one is seeing the ‘big’ picture.
The Asian financial crisis of 1997, which plunged several countries into chaos and mass suffering, showed, more than a decade before the Euro-American financial crisis of 2008, how mobile and speculative finance could be as devastatingly unpredictable and hostile to socio-political order as weapons of war. The irruption of fundamentalist hatred on 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world benignly globalized by capital and consumption, exposing paradise to the hell of global insecurity. ‘Our world, parts of our world,’ Don DeLillo warned soon afterwards, ‘have crumbled into theirs’, condemning Americans to live ‘in a place of danger and rage’.
In this new totality, Afghan deserts and caves could immediately connect with and short-circuit New York, America’s financial centre, obliterating old distinctions maintained even during the nuclear standoff of the Cold War between internal and external spaces, war and peace, and the West and its enemies. The 9/11 terrorists had been trained by Islamists once sponsored by the CIA and Middle-Eastern plutocrats, and they were armed with America’s own box-cutters and civilian aeroplanes. These ‘barbarians’ who struck at the heart of empire hinted that the ‘global village’ would manifest its contradictions through a state of permanent and uncontrolled crisis.
But the shock to naive minds only further entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the Cold War – thinking through binary oppositions of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ worlds, liberalism and totalitarianism – while reviving nineteenth-century Western clichés about the non-West. Once again the secular and democratic West, identified with the legacy of the Enlightenment (reason, individual autonomy, freedom of speech), seemed called upon to subdue its perennially backward other: in this case, Islam, marked by fear of criticism and blind allegiance to a tyrannical God and tribe. Invocations of a new ‘long struggle’ against ‘Islamofascism’ aroused many retired Cold Warriors, who had been missing the ideological certainties of battling Communism.
Apparently triumphant in Afghanistan, the West’s shock-and-awe response redoubled an old delusion. Liberal democracy, whose nurturing modernization theorists had entrusted to middle-class beneficiaries of capitalism, could apparently now be implanted by force in societies that had no tradition of it: military invasion would bring forth democracy. In this dominant discourse, the racial and religious ‘other’ was either an irredeemable brute, the exact opposite of rational
Westerners, to be exterminated universally through an endless war on terror, or a Western-style Homo Economicus who was prevented from pursuing his rational self-interest and enhancing the common good by his deficient political leaders and institutions. The assault on Iraq, meant to overthrow a sadistic despot and institute a market society through wholesale privatization, was powered by an ideological fantasy of regime change on a global scale. Intellectual narcissism survived, and was often deepened by, the realization, slowly dawning in the latter half of the 2010s, that economic power had begun to shift from the West. The Chinese, who had ‘got capitalism’, were, after all, ‘downloading western apps’, according to Niall Ferguson.
A Crippling Historical Amnesia
One event after another in recent years has cruelly exposed such facile, self-satisfied narratives. The doubters of Western-style progress today include more than just marginal communities and some angry environmental activists. In 2014 The Economist said that, on the basis of IMF data, emerging economies – or, most of the human population – might have to wait for three centuries in order to catch up with the West. In this assessment, the last decade of high growth was an ‘aberration’ and ‘billions of people will be poorer for a lot longer than they might have expected just a few years ago’.
The implications are sobering: the non-West not only finds itself replicating the West’s trauma on an infinitely larger scale. While helping inflict the profoundest damage yet on the environment – manifest today in rising sea levels, erratic rainfall, drought, declining harvests and devastating floods – the non-West also has no real prospect of catching up with the West.
There is, plainly, no deep logic to the unfolding of time. But then we identify emollient patterns and noble purposes in history because evasions, suppressions and downright falsehoods have resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge – about the West and the non-West alike. Obscuring the costs of the West’s own ‘progress’, it turns out, severely undermined the possibility of explaining the proliferation of a politics of violence and hysteria in the world today, let alone finding a way to contain it.
Thus, the intellectual cottage industry about Islam and Islamism that is sent into overdrive after every terrorist attack rarely lingers on the fact that it was France’s revolutionary state that first introduced terror into the political realm (the Arabic word irhab for ‘terrorism’ was long understood as state-led terror). Devout Spanish peasants, fighting back against Napoleon’s secular universalist project, were the first irregulars to wage war against a regular modern nation state and army: the predecessors of the lawless guerrillas and terrorists who today race their lawful adversaries to extremes of senseless violence.
It was actually in the Atlantic West that we first witnessed the paradox of religious fundamentalism: that it reflects the weakening of religious conviction. The death of God was attended by hysterical assertions that He exists. The very mathematicians and physicists who led the seventeenth century’s scientific revolution, and overturned the established Christian world view – Descartes, Pascal, Newton – were forced by tormenting doubt and ambivalence into reaffirming the existence of a Creator. It should not surprise anyone today that engineering graduates and students, such as Osama bin Laden, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Abu Musab al-Suri and Anwar al-Awlaki, or, for that matter, Hindu-supremacist techies, cling most desperately to DIY fundamentalist versions of ebbing, if not irretrievably vanished, religious faiths.
Nor do the Islam-mongers pay any attention to the paradox, illuminated consistently from post-revolutionary France to ISIS: that the actual experience of individual freedom in itself can provoke a desperate longing for a ‘master’, as Tocqueville put it; it can also spawn what the French writer, speaking sympathetically of French imperialists in Algeria, called an ‘insatiable need for action, violent emotions, vicissitudes and dangers’. Anarchists, terrorists and despots always thrive in these circumstances of spiritual and psychological weakening.
The pied pipers of ISIS have grasped particularly keenly that insulted and injured men, whether in Parisian banlieus or Asian and African shanty towns, can be turned into obedient and fearless fighters if they are given a rousing cause to fight for, especially one connected, however tenuously, with the past glory of Islam, and aimed at exterminating a world of soul-killing mediocrity, cowardice, opportunism and immoral deal-making. Thus, ISIS is able simultaneously to stoke sectarian hatreds in Asia and Africa and insinuate their message of self-empowerment through mass murder in the older struggles of Muslim minorities for identity and dignity in European societies.
Craving intellectual and political prestige for their DIY Islam, the adolescent jihadists receive endorsements from the self-appointed paladins of the West, who perversely go to war or suspend civil liberties while speaking of the need to defend ‘Western values’ against religious fundamentalism. This only helps the self-proclaimed enemies of Western values to stake their position on ideological purity as well as making it painfully easy, to a degree barely noticed in the West, for Islamist media to revel in the confusion and hypocrisy of Western pronouncements. A recent issue of ISIS’s magazine Dabiq approvingly quoted George W. Bush’s us-versus-them exhortation, insisting that there is no ‘Grey Zone’ in the holy war.
Clashing by night, the ignorant armies of ideologues endow each other’s cherished self-conceptions and projected spectres with the veracity they crave. But their self-flattering oppositions collapse once we cease to take them at face value and expose the overlaps between them. And we come closer to understanding ressentiment today when we recognize that it arises out of an intensely competitive human desire for convergence and resemblance rather than religious, cultural, theological and ideological difference.
The Early Birds of Modernity: Enlightened Upstarts
Escape from the stultifying dualisms of East and West, religion and reason, requires us to train fresh eyes on the most fateful event of human history: the rise of an industrial and materialist civilization, which, emerging in Britain and France, spread itself over the old world of Asia and Africa and the new world of America and Oceania, creating the original conditions of our current state of negative solidarity.
The utter novelty of this event is too easily missed. For the changes brought about by two coalescing revolutions, the French and the industrial, marked a sharp break in historical continuity; they ushered in a new era of global consciousness. Rapidly overcoming geographical limits with, respectively, their ideas and steamships, they opened up a new, potentially boundless setting for human action. They inaugurated what we now call modernity – the world of mass politics and ceaseless social and economic change, and a whole new universe of possibilities about how human beings could act in and shape history, collectively and individually.
The revolutionary tradition with its concepts of democracy, the pursuit of liberty, and equality moved quickly from the economically developed and politically complex ancien régimes of the Atlantic West to the simpler ancien régimes of Prussia, Austria and Russia, before taking root in Asia and Africa. The late eighteenth-century plea for constitutional monarchy from a small minority of property-owning bourgeois escalated into mass movements for republican democracy and universal suffrage, and, eventually, into demands for the abolition of private property and full collectivization.
‘The desire for equality,’ Tocqueville wrote, ‘always becomes more insatiable as equality is greater.’ And, as the French aristocrat predicted, the egalitarian impulse, the urge for social levelling generated by the revolutions, kept turning radical, culminating in Mao Zedong and Pol Pot’s ferocious great leaps forward and Year Zero. It also telescoped historical phases: revolution erupted in pre-industrial, overwhelmingly rural China, and India embraced universal suffrage, which was won after much agitation in Europe, immediately after emerging as a nation state.
Certainly, the cliché that the French Revolution introduced the world to revolutionary ideas of equality, fraternity and liberty und
erstates how politics, long monopolized by absolutist elites, began to open up to commoners with talent and skill. The revolutionary conscript armies of France that flooded Europe, and reached as far as Egypt, transformed the relationship of ordinary people to time, space and their own selves – introducing them to the earth-shaking idea that human beings could use their own reason to fundamentally reshape their circumstances.
History, largely experienced previously as a series of natural disasters, could now be seen as a movement in which everyone could potentially enlist. Intellectuals and artists rose as a class for the first time to lend a hand in the making of history, and locate the meaning of life in politics and art rather than traditional religion. The balance in European culture shifted from the religious to the secular – a momentous process that is still ongoing in many parts of the world.
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A revealed religion had dominated Europe until the seventeenth century; all other intellectual and cultural currents were subordinate to Christianity. Man did not presume to make his world; he was rather made by it. The world itself was seen as unchanging. Thus, there was no such thing as politics as we understand it: an organized competition for power, or contentious notions of equality and justice, identity and citizenship. All legitimacy derived from God and the timeless natural order. In Saint Paul’s resonant words: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God; and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.’
The discoveries of natural science in the seventeenth century presented a new challenge to Christianity’s hegemony (even though its exponents, from Galileo to Kepler to Descartes to Newton, were devout Christians). They seemed to replace God with man armed with critical reason. Bakunin, who took this emancipation to an extreme, carefully described its philosophical origins:
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