New Face of Barbarism

Ramin Jahanbegloo

The global age has a new political and economic sphere and a new cultural space. It seems that the new faces of intolerance have fulfilled the old function of totalitarian ideologies. Globalism is the religion of our time. It has become the general theory of the new century. Pragmatic, realistic and at the base of market economy and present form of Realpolitik, globalism is in the process of becoming the modern form of consensus through which the culture of “believing without thinking” is taking place. Universal compendium of our present world, globalism has become the logic of what Ortega y Gasset characterized in his famous book The Revolt of the Masses as the “mass man”. Ortega saw bolshevism and fascism as symptoms of usurpation of power by the “mass man”. Way back in 1930, Ortega y Gasset was already commenting on the nature of mass man as “the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will.” Ortega postulates in his book that “mass man” has come to demand privilege without responsibility. “We live in a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create.”, affirms Ortega y Gasset. “Lord of all things, he is not lord of himself. He feels lost amid his own abundance. With more means at his disposal, more knowledge, more technique than ever, it turns out that the world today goes the same way as the worst of worlds that have been; it simply drifts. Today, by the very feeling that everything seems possible to us, we have the feeling that the worst is possible: retrogression, barbarism, decadence.” Content with his own mediocrity, the mass man, according to Ortega, relies on opinion rather than reason. Thus for Ortega, the mass man has no character and as an insensitive person to authority, he would become slave to power. The paradox of the mass man is that he destroys the humanist foundations on which he himself exists. The danger faced by the society of mass men is the rise of a new barbarism in which mediocrity is the only standard to which appeal can be made. If we had to clarify this disturbing situation, we could choose to refer to La Boetie’s admirable treatise, Discours de la servitude volontaire, where he raises the question of “voluntary servitude”. For La Boetie the central problem of political theory is: why do people, in all time and places, consent to their own enslavement? For La Boetie, the collective obedience of society came from “a vice for which no term can be found vile enough, which nature herself disavows and our tongues refuse to name.” La Boétie calls this vice “voluntary servitude.” For La Boetie, this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear: “Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? ... If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? ...  When a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth. ...What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough ... ?” La Boetie’s opposition to any form of tyrannical power is accompanied by an appeal for mass non-violent resistance as a method for its overthrow. In other words, if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the best means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent. To overthrow the tyrant, affirms La Boetie, masses need not to act, nor to shed blood, but just “merely by willing to be free.” In conclusion, “Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”

La Boeties’s Discours has a vital importance for the modern theory of nonviolent action. For La Boetie speaks most sharply to the problem of transition from a world of tyranny and submission to that of freedom and independence. La Boetie’s analysis of the engineering of consent and of the role played by the masses in legitimizing or dismantling authoritarian states highlights another critical problem which is that of the political self-education of the public. Ideally, what dispositions ought to characterize ideal self-aware citizens? Thus the question is: what should we learn to be good citizens? For the ancient Greeks, the aim of the polis was to educate the citizens and to make them virtuous. Aristotle's argument is that the primary tool of a political society is education, because putting persuasion before force is necessary to demonstrate proper respect for human beings. Therefore, a human being, in order to do what is good, needs to have a conception of what is good and possess the capacity to act from it. That is to say, the task of philosophy is to try to find a way to teach people to think critically and to help them with their political judgments. As Aristotle says in his Politics: “But the greatest of all the means … to secure the stability of constitutions … is a system of education suited to the Constitutions.” For some ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle, the idea of civic education was that to survive in an often hostile world as well as to keep the life of the polis vibrant, free and critically minded. Therefore, the whole enterprise of citizenship education was to idealize vita activa or political life.  That is the reason why for Aristotle, what is essential for the life of polis is the primordial distinction or difference between good life and sheer life, between what does it mean to live well and just live. Aristotle says something which is challenging for us the moderns. That citizens and states should understand that ethics is above politics, but ethical responsibility should be political. This is something what we would have a tendency to recognize in the context of civil society. Rethinking politics with Aristotle, we can say that no society can function without a moral foundation. It is morality that defines what it means to be a political human being. Then the idea of civilization is nothing other than the conviction that human beings, even society as a whole, are subject to a moral law, that they recognize  as something unconditional, that is higher than they are, something that they seek to express the recognition as the foundation of the social contract. So, insofar as we are humans and we live in the society of our fellow human beings, we need to exercise the moral law. It is only because individuals live ethically that the possibility of choice appears to them as a political task. Every existential choice is, therefore, a dialogical choice. There is, thus, a radical continuity between politics of the subject and the subject of politics. Individual choice turns out to be a decisive engagement with reality. And since life contains plurality and diversity, ethics should address diverse ways of life. Perhaps the whole ratio essendi of a civilized life is living in truth or living truly and truthfully life. This brings us to ask the question: how one can be descent?

Many might think that decency is now a matter of past. But, if we pause to ask ourselves, at the dawn of the 21st century, which moral concept describes the best our duty and responsibility to the others, a concept which helps us to cultivate the moderation which is an inherent part of any dialogue, we could reply: decency. And while it is not entirely obvious what is meant by decency these days, one assumes that violence is still indecent for human civilization, because if it isn't, then decency as a concept has lost all its meaning and it is obsolete.  Isaiah Berlin once said that the best we could hope for was what he called a "minimally decent society." Berlin speaks of a “common moral horizon” of minimum decency. For Berlin, pluralism is the most nearly adequate account of our moral universe and liberal democracy is the most nearly successful political institution to cope decently with it. “Forms of life differ,” writes Berlin in The Crooked Timber of Humanity. “Ends, moral principles, are many. But not infinitely many: they must be within the human horizon.” This is what Raymond Aron calls placing “a bet on humanity”, but there are no guarantees that things would turn out well in any sense. One might be tempted to say that in the end, democratic judgment is about general decency and common sense assessment of what constitutes cruelty and inhuman to human beings. Maybe this is why, any political view which talks about only one way of life should be viewed with some suspicion and apprehension. As such even those, who think of “globalization” as a network of transnational solidarities, are nervous of its dark side which has taken the form of a new barbarism. In fact, we are witnessing an outcome of the process of globalization that is to be feared: the confrontation of two fundamentalisms. One is religious fundamentalism; the other is its secular version.

Fundamentalism is a loaded concept. According to the Oxford Dictionary, fundamentalism means “strict maintenance of ancient or fundamental doctrines of any religion.”  Fundamentalism is, therefore, something which has to do with a hard reading of texts. As such, fundamentalists are literalists in these traditions who hold rigidly to their beliefs and insist that since their religion alone is true the other religions should not be tolerated. Thus a fundamentalist is not strictly a member of an orthodoxy. Orthodox traditions of religion should not be dubbed as fundamentalist. Most orthodox Christians and many orthodox Muslims tolerate those of other religious belief, though they may not agree with them. Unlike simple adherents to an orthodoxy, who  strictly follow the precepts of their religion, fundamentalists insist that their God is the only true God and that all other Gods or names for God are wrong. For example, Muslim fundamentalists insist that the Koran is the word of God and that all necessary knowledge is contained in it. Christian fundamentalists say the same thing of the Bible.

Only half a decade ago, fundamentalism would have been considered as “militant opposition to modernity”. In other words, fundamentalism emerges very often as a violent rejection of modernity and as retrogression to pre-modern religious fundamentals. However, the most important feature of “fundamentalism” in our world is the politicization of religion and the process of ideologization of the tradition. In case of many religions like Islam, Judaism and Christianity, fundamentalists advocate the process of rendering religious the existing order through revolutionary seizure of power or through social reforms. A common definition of fundamentalism points to religious movements that strive to reestablish socially, culturally and politically core elements within a religious tradition. Therefore, fundamentalism is reactive to and defensive toward value pluralism and hermeneutical methodology applied to religious traditions. On the contrary, in fundamentalist movements, there is an affirmation of the absolute validity of the fundamentals of a tradition. This is the reason why, it is easier to establish a fundamentalist movement where core principles are spelled out explicitly in a sacred text. The authoritarian and absolutist dimensions of fundamentalist movements manifest themselves, among other elements, in the ideological manipulation of a religious tradition. In the eyes of most religious fundamentalists, societies must be constituted on the basis of religious community. There ought to be neither singular identities nor idiosyncratic quests for a personal meaning. In other words, all individuals must belong to a religious collectivity, and their everyday lives must be governed by the normative traditions of such collectivities.

In the past decade and more precisely after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the tragic events of 9/11, fundamentalism has been extended to a wide variety of religious and political phenomena. The term "fundamentalist" is now associated with people as different from one another as Osama bin Laden, Jerry Falwell and Rashtriya Sawayamsevak Sangh (RSS).From the side of the religious fundamentalists, the essential aspect of their global struggle with the world is about the primacy of religion. Secular fundamentalists, who view that spirituality should have no place at all in political life, are often not that different to their religious cousins, who they claim to hate so much; they alone know what's best for all, and they alone have knowledge of everything. It just so happens that the two belong to two diverse groups. In both cases we have a dogmatic worldview that fails to respect democratic values, including the importance of dialogue and compromise. To be more accurate, the belief that a separation of religion and state is a core feature of democracy itself, does not necessarily mean that religious groups should be excluded from explicit public life. There is no strict connection between being a secularist and being a democrat. In fact spirituality and democracy are not incompatible with each other if both function in their well -defined spheres. Democracy needs a spiritual force as spirituality needs a political one without interfering with politics. Spiritualization of politics, which goes against the politicization of religion, is the spiritual growth of politics. As such, democracy can infuse into itself the moral values provided by spirituality and can imbibe democratic spirit in its inner soul. Therefore secular fundamentalism is the belief that there is no such thing as spiritualization of politics, meaning an ethical view of political life. The use of the word “fundamentalism” here buys into that trait common among all fundamentalists, namely an inability to tolerate others and to dialogue with them. The outcome of a fundamentalist mindset is a monolithic ideology and an authoritarian strategy: Political power is to remain either in the hands of the secularist elite or the religious elite. In both cases the res publica is not a public space of all citizens. Both secular and religious fundamentalisms hold themselves responsible for preventing religious or non-religious ideas from flourishing. For them, it is the proper role of the state, to suppress religious or non-religious communities, restrict religious or secular education and ban visible signs of observance such as the head scarf or western dress or haircuts. The American journalist HL Mencken once wrote: "We must accept the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." Today, such a view seems to be absent from the international arena. Today, it's the religious fundamentalism on one side, and the secular fundamentalism on the other. Everyone treats the perceived “other” as a threat. Therefore, people live together without recognizing each other. The new faces of barbarism have killed the appetite for recognition. This refusal of recognition consists in not feeling necessary to others and not considering others necessary to oneself. Fundamentalism is, therefore, a form of universal arrogance that is always accompanied by the hatred of others who are different. It is the impossibility of living a life in common. As such, fundamentalism is the maddest and the most senseless wagers of humanity.

Let us ask now: Is there any way to build a world of diversity and intercultural dialogue on a politics of universal hatred that renounces in recognizing the others? Why this departure from tolerance is happening in a world of multiculturalism and global responsibilities? Why the increasing division of the global village into fundamentalist camps shouting and killing each other? One might say that fanatics and fundamentalists have always been rejecting and struggling against each other. Let us take an example. In 1860, one year after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and T.H. Huxley, the naturalist described as "Darwin's bulldog", had a “theoretical” confrontation at Oxford's Natural History Museum. According to a report in McMillan's magazine, “The bishop turned to his antagonist with smiling insolence. He begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? Huxley rose to reply ... He [said he] was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth ... One lady fainted and had to be carried out.” There is a parallel with today’s confrontation between the religious and secular fundamentalists, though today fundamentalism has come to be associated with terrorism. Though fundamentalism should not necessarily lead to terrorism, it often does. Fundamentalists use extreme violence to practice extreme coercion. In fact, fundamentalism, as an enforcement of sectarianism, invariably leads to terrorism. Actually when people believe that they have the absolute truth and that there is no room to talk to others so you end up denying other people’s existence. This is where humans can no more distinguish the good from the evil and establish a modus vivendi among different values. Finding a common ground and the best possible consensus can only work if we share enough to behave civilly. It goes without saying that though some Jews, Muslims, Christians and Hindus may be terrorists, No religion in the world, much less Islam or Christianity, teaches terrorism or inspires any one to kill innocent people. It is the politicization of religion and its ideologization which is a great danger for peace and tranquility in our world. If our century decides to be fundamentalist, it would and could not be based on respectful understanding and an open and tolerant interhuman dialogue. If our century is on the side of civilization and decency, therefore fundamentalism is uncivil and indecent. If fundamentalism, in all its different forms, is akin to violence in its mode of thinking and its methods of acting, it cannot expect to be recognized by others as the triumph of people’s will. As Karen Horney observes, “one cannot step on people and be loved by them at the same time.” In reality, there can be no respect for barbarity when it is an attribute of governments and individuals. However, no one person has the ability or the necessary super-human rank of judging murderers before they kill. If we choose to be morality’s avenging angel, we may well find ourselves succumbing to the conclusion of Richard III at the end of his adventure: “There is no creature loves me, and if I die, no soul will pity me.”  In other words, the exercise of ethics in international relations is not a return to the politics of tyrants, where the motto is: “to rule others unconditionally”. Therefore, if the process for a coherent and just system of global democracy should intensify, a more nonviolent and peaceful global order is needed. Such a process will naturally lead populations to take into consideration the various forms of frustration which globalization is bringing with it and which is feeding the rise of fundamentalism and transnational terrorism. The 21st century invites reflection on the ideas of civilization and barbarity in the context of tragedies and conflict situations such as 9/11, Iraq, the Taliban, Darfur etc. And this is why one can claim that to be anti-barbarian is to say “No” to the inhuman, while keeping on the dialogue with the humans. The way is indeed harsh. All that is left to us, against the new face of barbarism is to speak about the unspeakable and delay the inhuman by thinking about it without believing in it. Why so? Skeptics may ask? Because, civilization, is the cry of men in face of the inhuman.