By Slavoj Žižek
The lesson of the recent
referendum in Turkey is a very sad one.
After Recep Tayyip Erdogan's
dubious victory, Western liberal media were full of critical analyses: the
century of the Kemalist endeavour to secularize Turkey is over; the Turkish
voters were offered not so much a democratic choice as a referendum to limit
democracy and voluntarily endorse an authoritarian regime.
However, more important and
less noticed was the subtle ambiguity of many Western reactions - an ambiguity
which recalls the ambiguity of Trump's politics towards Israel: even while he
stated that the United States should recognize Jerusalem as the capital of
Israel, many of his supporters are openly anti-Semitic.
But is this really an
inconsistent stance?
A cartoon published back in
July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse depicted two stocky Nazi-looking
Austrians sit at a table, and one of them holding a newspaper and commenting to
his friend: "Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism
is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!"
This caricature thereby
inverts the standard argument against the critics of the policies of the State
of Israel. But when today's Christian fundamentalist supporters of Israeli
politics reject Leftist critiques of Israeli policies, is their implicit line
of argumentation not uncannily close to its reasoning?
Remember Anders Breivik, the
Norwegian anti-immigrant mass murderer: he was anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel,
since he saw in the State of Israel the first line of defence against the
Muslim expansion; he even wanted to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt, but he
wrote in his "Manifesto":
"There is no Jewish
problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only
have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live
in France and the UK. The US on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews
(600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem."
His figures thus realize the
ultimate paradox of the Zionist anti-Semite - and we find the traces of this
strange stance more often than one would expect. Reinhard Heydrich himself, the
mastermind of the Holocaust, wrote in 1935:
"We must separate the
Jews into two categories, the Zionists and the partisans of assimilation. The
Zionists profess a strictly racial concept and, through emigration to Palestine,
they help to build their own Jewish State ... our good wishes and our official
goodwill go with them."
As Frank Ruda has pointed out,
today we are getting a new version of this Zionist anti-Semitism: Islamophobic
respect for Islam. The same politicians who warn of the danger of the
Islamisation of the Christian West - from Trump to Putin - respectfully
congratulated Erdogan for his victory. The authoritarian reign of Islam is fine
for Turkey, it would seem, but not for us.
We can thus easily imagine a
new version of the cartoon from Die Presse, with two stocky Nazi-looking
Austrians sitting at a table, one of them holding a newspaper and commenting:
"Here you can see again how a totally justified Islamophobia is being
misused for a cheap critique of Turkey!"
(Samuel) Huntington's Disease
How are we to understand this
weird logic? It is a reaction, a false cure, to the great social disease of our
time: Huntington's. Typically, the first symptoms of Huntington's disease are
jerky, random and uncontrollable movements called chorea. Chorea may initially
manifest as general restlessness, small unintentional or uncompleted motions,
lack of coordination.
Does an explosion of brutal
populism not look quite similar? It begins with what appear to be random acts of
excessive violence against immigrants, outbursts which lack coordination and
merely express a general unease and restlessness apropos of "foreign
intruders," but then it gradually grows into a well-coordinated and
ideologically grounded movement: what the other Huntington (that is, Samuel)
called "the
clash of civilizations." This lucky coincidence is telling: what is
usually referred to under this term is effectively the Huntington's disease of
today's global capitalism.
According to Samuel
Huntington, after the end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of
ideology" had been replaced by the "velvet curtain of culture."
Huntington's dark vision of the "clash of civilizations" may appear
to be the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the "End
of History" in the guise of a world-wide liberal democracy. What could be
more different from Fukuyama's pseudo-Hegelian idea that the final formula of
the best possible social order was found in capitalist liberal democracy, than
a "clash of civilizations" as the fundamental political struggle in
the twenty-first century? How, then, do the two fit together?
From today's experience, the
answer is clear: the "clash of civilizations" is politics at
"the end of history." The ethnic-religious conflicts are the form of
struggle which fits global capitalism: in our age of post-politics, when
politics proper is progressively replaced by expert social administration, the
only remaining legitimate source of conflicts are cultural (ethnic, religious)
tensions. Today's rise of "irrational" violence is thus to be
conceived as strictly correlative to the depoliticization of our societies -
that is, to the disappearance of the political dimension proper, its
translation into different levels of "administration" of social
affairs.
"America First!"
If we accept this thesis
concerning the "clash of civilizations," the only alternative to it
remains the peaceful coexistence of civilizations (or of "ways of
life" - a more popular term today): so forced marriages, misogynistic
violence and homophobia are fine, just as long as they are confined to another
country which is otherwise fully included in the world market.
The New World Order (NWO) that
is emerging is thus no longer the Fukuyamaist NWO of global liberal democracy,
but a NWO of the peaceful coexistence of different politico-theological ways of
life - coexistence, of course, against the background of the smooth functioning
of global capitalism. The obscenity of this process is that it can present
itself as progress in the anti-colonial struggle: the liberal West will no
longer be allowed to impose its standards on others; all ways of life will be
treated as equal.
It is little wonder, then,
that Robert Mugabe exhibited such sympathy for Trump's slogan "America
first!": "America first!" for you, "Zimbabwe first!"
for me, "India first!" or "North Korea first!" for them.
This is already how the British Empire, the first global capitalist empire,
functioned: each ethnic-religious community was allowed to pursue its own way
of life (for instance, honour killings or the burning of widows by Hindus in
India were permitted). While these local "customs" were either
criticized as barbaric or praised for their premodern wisdom, they were
tolerated because what mattered was that they remained economically part of the
Empire.
There is thus something deeply
hypocritical about those liberals who criticize the slogan "America
first!" - as if this is not more or less what every country is doing, as
if America did not play a global role precisely because it suited its own
interests. The underlying message of "America first!" is nonetheless
a sad one: the American century is over; American exceptionalism is no more;
America has resigned itself to being just one among the nations. The supreme
irony is that the Leftists, who for a long time criticized the U.S. pretension
to be the global policeman, may begin to long for the good old days when,
hypocrisy notwithstanding, the United States imposed democratic standards onto
the world.
There are already signs that
this is happening. In the reactions to Trump's retaliatory missile strike on a
Syrian army military base (as a punishment for the use of chemical weapons),
the contradictions between those who oppose (and support) Trump exploded: the
strike was applauded of some "human rights" liberals and rejected by
some Republican conservative isolationists. In short, the paradox is that Trump
is at his most dangerous when he acts most like Hillary Clinton.
We can see what "America
first!" means in action from the following Reuters
news report: "A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir
Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald
Trump and undermine voters' faith in the American electoral system, three
current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters." Yes, Putin's regime
should be relentlessly criticized - but, in this case, has not the United
States regularly done the same thing? Did a U.S. team not help Boris Yeltsin
win a key election in Russia? And what about the United States' active support
for the Maidan uprising in Ukraine?
This is "America
first!" in practice: when they are doing it, it's a dangerous plot; when
we are doing it, it's supporting democracy.
In this NWO, universality will
more and more be reduced to tolerance - tolerance for different "ways of
life." Following the formula of Zionist anti-Semitism, there will be no
contradiction between imposing in our own countries the strictest
"politically correct" pro-feminist rules and simultaneously rejecting
any critique of the dark side of Islam as neocolonialist arrogance.
Between Private Capital and
State Power
In this New World Order, there
will be less and less place for figures like Julian Assange, who, in spite of
all his problematic gestures, remains today's most powerful symbol of what Kant
called "the public use of reason" - a space for public knowledge and
debate outside of state control. No wonder that, against the expectations that
Trump will show more leniency towards Assange, the new U.S. attorney general,
Jeff Sessions, recently
stated that the arrest of the Wikileaks founder was now a
"priority."
It is well-known what lies
ahead: Wikileaks will be proclaimed a terrorist organization, and rather than
genuine advocates of public space like Assange, public figures which exemplify
the privatization of our commons will predominate. The figure of Elon Musk is
emblematic here: he belongs to the same series with Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos,
Mark Zuckerberg, all "socially conscious" billionaires. They stand
for global capital at its most seductive and "progressive" - which is
to say, at its most dangerous.
Musk likes to warn about the
threats that new technologies pose to human dignity and freedom - which, of
course, doesn't prevent him from investing in a brain-computer interface
venture called Neuralink, a company which is focussed on creating devices that
can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventual purpose of helping human
beings merge with software and keep pace with advancements in artificial
intelligence. These enhancements could improve memory or allow for more
direct interface with computing devices: "Over time I think we will
probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital
intelligence."
Every technological innovation
is always first presented like this, emphasizing its health or humanitarian
benefits, which function to blind us to the more ominous implications and
consequences: can we even imagine what new forms of control this so-called
"neural lace" contains? This is why it is absolutely imperative to
keep it out of the control of private capital and state power - that is, to
render it totally accessible to public debate. Assange was right in his strangely
ignored book on Google: to understand how our lives are regulated today,
and how this regulation is experienced as our freedom, we have to focus on the
shadowy collusion between private corporations which control our commons and
secret state agencies.
Today's global capitalism can
no longer afford a positive vision of emancipated humanity, even as an
ideological dream. Fukuyamaist liberal-democratic universalism failed because
of its own immanent limitations and inconsistencies, and populism is the
symptom of this failure - its Huntington's disease. But the solution is not
populist nationalism, Rightist or Leftist. The only solution is a new
universalism - it is demanded by the problems humanity is confronting today,
from ecological threats to refugee crises.
Protecting the New Commons
In his book What
Happened in the Twentieth Century?, Peter Sloterdijk provides his own outline
of what is to be done in twenty-first century, best encapsulated in the title
of the first two essays in the book, "The Anthropocene" and
"From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures."
"Anthropocene"
designates a new epoch in the life of our planet in which we, humans, cannot
any longer rely on the Earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of
our productive activity: we cannot any longer afford to ignore the side effects
(the collateral damage) of our productivity, which cannot any longer be reduced
to the background of the figure of humanity. We have to accept that we live on
a "Spaceship Earth," and are thus accountable for its conditions.
Earth is no longer the impenetrable background/horizon of our productive
activity, it emerges as an(other) finite object which we can inadvertently
destroy or transform it to make it unliveable.
This means that, at the very
moment when we become powerful enough to affect the most basic conditions of
our life, we have to accept that we are just another animal species on a small
planet. A new way to relate to our environs is necessary once we realize this:
no longer a heroic worker expressing his/her creative potentials and drawing
from the inexhaustible resources from his/her environs, but a much more modest
agent collaborating with his/her environs, permanently negotiating a tolerable
level of safety and stability.
So in order to establish this
new mode of relating to our environs, a radical politico-economic change is
necessary, what Sloterdijk calls "the domestication of the wild animal
Culture."
Until now, each culture
disciplined or educated its own members and guaranteed civic peace among them
in the guise of state power, but the relationship between different cultures
and states was permanently under the shadow of potential war, with each state
of peace nothing more than a temporary armistice. As Hegel conceptualized it,
the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism - namely,
the readiness to sacrifice one's life for one's nation-state, which means that
the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the
ethical life within a state. Today, is North Korea with it ruthless pursuit of
nuclear weapons and rockets advanced enough to reach distant targets not the
ultimate example of this logic of unconditional nation-state sovereignty?
However, the moment we fully
accept the fact that we live on a Spaceship Earth, the task that urgently
imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves, of imposing
universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities, a task
rendered all the more difficult by the ongoing rise of sectarian religious and
ethnic "heroic" violence and readiness to sacrifice oneself (and the
world) for one's specific Cause.
The measures Sloterdijk
proposes as necessary for the survival of humanity - the overcoming of
capitalist expansionism, achieving broad international solidarity capable to
forming an executive power ready to violate state sovereignty, and so on - are
they not all measures destined to protect our natural and cultural commons? If
they do not point towards some kind of reinvented Communism, if they do not
imply a Communist horizon, then the term "Communism" has no meaning
at all.
This is why the idea of the
European Union is worth fighting for, despite of the misery of its actual
existence: in today's global capitalist world, it offers the only model of a
trans-national organization with the authority to limit national sovereignty
and the capacity to guarantee a minimum of ecological and social welfare
standards. Something that directly descends from the best traditions of
European Enlightenment survives in it. Our - Europeans - duty is not to
humiliate ourselves as the ultimate culprits of colonialist exploitation but to
fight for this part of our legacy as vital for the survival of humanity.
Europe is more and more alone
in the New World Order, dismissed as an old, exhausted, irrelevant, contingent,
reduced to playing a secondary role in today's bit geo-political conflicts. As
Bruno Latour recently put it: "L'Europe est seule, oui, mais seule
l'Europe peut nous sauver." Europe is alone, yes, but Europe alone can
save us.
Today's populism, which is
once again nationalist and secular, presents conservative Christians with
opportunities to gain political advantage over the secular progressivism they
see as a threat. That rhymes with the interwar years. Do Christians therefore
need to speak, yet again, about human dignity in ways that put limits on
populism, too?
Flannel about empowerment and
the increase of purchasing liberty conceals a barbarous indifference to the
notion that learning changes you, that this takes time, and that the point of
the intellectual life is not productivity but comprehension, and the liberty to
ask awkward questions. The proposal that the quality of teaching should be
measured by levels of graduate salary is simply one of the more egregious
versions of this indifference ...
Culture - like religion and
nation and race - provides a source of identity for contemporary human beings.
And, like all three, it can become a form of confinement, conceptual mistakes
underwriting moral ones. Yet all of them can also give contours to our freedom.
Social identities connect the small scale where we live our lives alongside our
kith and kin with larger movements, causes, and concerns. They can make a wider
world intelligible, alive, and urgent. They can expand our horizons to
communities larger than the ones we personally inhabit. But our lives must make
sense, too, at the largest of all scales.
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