The end of planetary civilization

I just finished reading Amin Maalouf’s new best-seller, “Le naufrage des civilisations”, published in March 2019, that does not yet seem to have been translated into English. Maalouf is of Lebanese (Christian Melkite) origin, living in France since 1976 and elected to the French Academy in 2011. He has become an extremely prolific author, of dozens of novels and essays, translated into over 40 different languages, who started out working as a journalist several decades before that, covering world-wide events for his Arab-speaking readers, as well as covering Arab politics for his Western readers. As such, he has developed what some reviewers have called “utopian realism”, attempting to address the world from a planetary point of view rather than from a more limited, regional perspective. In this latest book, however, he has come to the conclusion that humanity as a whole is on a distinctly regressive trajectory, and seems to be heading toward a shipwreck (“naufrage”) of world civilization, similar in some ways to the Titanic shipwreck of 1912, unless we reverse course immediately.

Curiously enough, I never knew much about Maalouf until now, although I do remember reading an article about one of his first books, “The crusades through Arab eyes”, published in French away back in 1983. I enjoyed reading his most recent work, however, so much that I also read one of his earlier essays right afterwards, “Les identités meurtrières” (1998), translated later into English under the title “In the name of identity: Violence and the need to belong”. It was extremely interesting to compare several of his points of view in that earlier (and much smaller) work with the ones that he has adopted nowadays, such as his significantly more critical attitude toward Western civilization. Unfortunately, he does not go nearly far enough in that particular direction, and also seems to be even less focused than he was back then on the extremely destructive role of ever-increasing class divisions in society.

Quite by accident, I also ended up reading another recent best-seller right after that, Tom Phillips much less serious book called “Humans: A brief history of how we f*cked it all up”, originally published in the UK in 2018. Much of this particular work is a deliberately comical compilation of dozens of disastrous decisions made throughout the ages, particularly focusing on those committed by people in power. Like the Scottish elite’s totally tragic (and also financially disastrous) attempt to colonize Panama back in 1698, which led directly to the very unequal union (1707) that we now call Great Britain. Phillips’ work does, however, intersect Maalouf’s considerably more scholarly offering towards the end, when he dwells on several hubristic misinterpretations of modern science, that seem to be leading us all into an imminent ecological quagmire.

In this blogpost, I want to concentrate my attention on Maalouf’s 2019 book, since many of the points he raises are more than a little similar to many of the arguments that I have been making, for the last several years in my blog, as well as in the books and articles that I managed to get published as far back as the early 1980s. One of the main similarities has to do with Maalouf’s focus on 1979 as a seminal year in which just about everything changed in a major way, including the massive comeback of economic liberalism (aka neoliberalism). Via the worldwide recession deliberately induced by the 1979-1989 monetarist assault on inflation (curiously not mentioned in his book), and the practically simultaneous rise to political power of such neoliberal champions as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Following as they did in the ultra-individualist footsteps of the American novelist, and “philosopher”, Ayn Rand.

1979 was also the year in which Deng Xiao-ping took over the People’s Republic of China, who then promptly set out to complete the equally momentous expansion of the industrial revolution into his country. That also then spread (although less convincingly) into many other huge, formerly “underdeveloped” countries, such as India and Brazil, including more minor industrialization in some smaller countries like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. China’s 1979 decision to “take the capitalist road”, following its defection more than a decade before that, from the former Soviet bloc of nations, also helped accelerate the collapse of the entire “Eastern” bloc itself, as well as the demise of the USSR and its replacement by the much less-industrialized Russian Federation. Even the USA, though finally triumphant in its extremely violent Cold War against “totalitarian communism”, also began suffering from partial de-industrialization itself, shooting itself in the foot (for neoliberal reasons) by deliberately exporting millions of industrial jobs out of the country, especially to China but also to other places like Mexico.

Maalouf, however, puts even more emphasis in his book on explaining the coming-into-being of “the other 1979” in the Middle East, centring on the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the unsuccessful, but nevertheless highly influential, ultra-Islamic attempt to overthrow the “pro-Western” absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Which both helped inaugurate, as Maalouf so eloquently describes it, the subsequent rise of religious fundamentalism all over the Muslim world. As he put it, the Levantine region in which he was born and raised then became the world’s most important foyer of ultra-reactionary degeneracy, spawning such anti-human abominations as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The Western empires, including Israel, initially helped the ultra-right-wing, feudal monarchies, religious atavists and military elites in every Muslim country, to win their all-out war against communist influence throughout that part of the world. As well as against many different, popular-nationalist regimes, considered by establishment ideologues to be “objective allies” of communism because of their opposition to economic liberalism, such as the Nasser regime in Egypt, the Bhutto regime in Pakistan and the Sukarno regime in Indonesia.

Although Maalouf makes dozens of references in his book to the rise of neoliberalism, he does not actually use that term as such, referring instead to “conservative” forces in the USA and the UK who succeeded in convincing dozens of other countries to abandon government “intervention” into the economy, and society, in favour of promoting exclusively private investment instead. Neoliberalism, however, is quite the appropriate term for this current obsession with “private enterprise”, which is nothing but an almost religious revival of nineteenth-century economic and social liberalism, focused exclusively on short-term profit, to the detriment of everything (and everyone) else. Maalouf seems to want to avoid using the word liberalism in any negative way whatsoever, probably because a large part of his book is given over to trying to uphold what he sees as the civilizing effect of an international liberal order, based on free trade, the “free” flow of capital (i.e., tax evasion on a truly colossal scale) and the free migration of large numbers of people from one part of the world to the other.

He is particularly insistent on trying to preserve the rights of religious and ethnic minorities all over the world, and protecting them from conservative-nationalist assaults on their well-being, emanating from majority populations and their associated regimes. Like many other liberal-minded observers, he propagates the idea of a direct link between the free flow of capital and support for fundamental human rights, which seems to reflect his own origins (of which he is quite proud), as part of a religious minority in Lebanon, and a family that was also quite prosperous. Maalouf, however, is also considerably more honest than most other liberal propagandists in the sense that at least at one point in his book, he recognizes that the popularity of regimes like that of colonel Nasser in Egypt (1952-1970) was largely based on national resistance against foreign (Western) imperialism. He also admits quite readily that various ethnic and religious minorities all over the world have often helped imperialist regimes repress and control majority populations throughout history.

But he studiously avoids any extended discussion about how to reconcile national liberation of majority peoples from imperialism (not only from Western imperialism but also from all the other reconstructed empires that have re-emerged recently in the former “Third World”), with the protection of minority rights in every country. Nor does he seem to think that such a thing is even possible, since for him the much-maligned, international liberal order seems to be the only force protecting civilization from total disaster. He refuses to even consider the possibility that nationalism could be used instead as a positive ideological weapon, getting all the world’s republican nations to compete among themselves in order to enrich the less-fortunate social classes, which are even more downtrodden because of their own gender divisions, along with similar divisions between majority and minority populations, in every region of every continent. As opposed to just further enriching the world’s extremely tiny coterie of dominant private investors (Big Business) and the equally tiny, but sometimes just as powerful, group of government bureaucrats and corrupt politicians who openly foster a cosy, symbiotic relationship with the billionaire class.

This much more inclusive kind of nationalism used to exist, at least minimally, prior to the onslaught of neoliberalism, in many different countries that had developed strong labour movements, and social-democratic programs (the so-called “welfare state”) aimed at benefiting the less wealthy members of society. It was the focus of such movements on the well-being of the entire working-class, that made a more positive form of “cooperative commonwealth” possible. One of the great paradoxes of today’s world, however, is that even though the planetary working class (from the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy) is much more numerous, and objectively much more important, than it has ever been before, subjectively it no longer has any significant, political or social influence whatsoever.

Maalouf also quite rapidly dismisses the economic nationalism of the former, totalitarian-communist bloc of nations as being inherently incapable of innovation or efficiency. Which may very well have been true of most of those particular countries, at least in some of the most important sectors of the economy. However, his much too rapid exposition on that part of the problem completely ignored all the very important roles played in every country in the world, no matter how liberal, by government-controlled agencies. No form of private capitalism has ever existed anywhere without necessary support from government, at least in the sense of keeping all those robber barons from killing each other off using private armies and paid mercenaries.

Every since capitalism started existing as an entity separate from its feudal origins, about 500 years ago, every one of the different kinds of capitalist enterprise ever invented, whether private-capitalist or state-capitalist, and notwithstanding all the horrendous corruption involved, has always depended on the organizational capabilities of government for its very survival. In spite of all the “fake-news” mythology about “self-made men” like Donald Trump, the only place where any of those people were ever self-made was inside their own overheated ego-projections.

Even though Maalouf refuses to use the same terms as the ones that most other observers use, his page-by-page description of how the world’s great civilizations have become so incredibly degenerate is nevertheless quite well pieced together. In reality, what has happened is that neoliberal imperialism set out several decades ago to completely demolish every possible kind of positive, democratic, anti-capitalist behaviour, all over the world, and unleash in its place a Frankenstein monster known as neofascism.

Which has constantly been feeding off the very accurate perception of the working class (often mistakenly referred to as the “middle” class), that ordinary people have been frozen out from sharing in any of the world’s newly-created wealth (since 1979), their children never again being allowed to become more prosperous than previous generations were. Even in those regions (North America, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) which enjoyed significant increases in real income during the so-called “thirty glorious years”, of slightly more democratic capitalism, between 1945 and 1975. To be sure, much of the relative prosperity of some sections of the overall populations in those countries back then came from imperialist exploitation of “Third World” resources, as well as from an almost complete ignorance of ecological considerations. Most of that wealth was scooped up (as usual) by the capitalist class, but a small portion of it was allowed to percolate down into certain layers of the working-class, in order to prevent some of them from supporting communism or democratic socialism.

Nowadays, however, all the “conservative nationalist” movements featured in Maalouf’s book, where various different kinds of authoritarian regimes are currently in power (the USA, the UK, China, Russia, Poland, Hungary, Israel, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Honduras, etc.), or on the verge of taking power (Italy, France, Germany, Austria, etc.), should simply be seen as different forms of antediluvian neofascism. Which also ought to include even more extremely reactionary movements such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, not to mention thousands of other well-armed organizations spread out all over the world, like the white-supremacist, “survival” movements in the USA, and in dozens of other countries. To be sure, all those ultra-right-wing populist movements, whether they are currently wielding state power or not, are often quite different one from the other, as well as also constantly evolving, but they nevertheless all seem to be contributing mightily, each in its own way, to Maalouf’s world-wide generalization concerning the “decline and fall” of planetary civilization.

Liberal-minded observers like Maalouf, however, refuse to recognize the inherent hypocrisy of neoliberal capitalism, as it relates to their own moral focus on fostering human rights. Unfortunately for them, if “human rights” are to be genuinely protected in any society, they cannot just be confined to such programs as gender parity, nor only to protecting religious and/or ethnic minorities from the oppression of majority populations. Both of those social objectives are extremely important in and of themselves, but neither of them can be artificially separated from the rest of society.

From a moral standpoint, the concept of “human rights” must necessarily include much greater degrees of freedom from class domination, in which billions of “ordinary people”, all over the world, belonging to all the “inferior” classes (agricultural, industrial and service workers, as well as peasants and family farmers) are still being horribly exploited and oppressed by very small numbers of ultra-rich investors and their closest collaborators. Those “inferior” social classes include most of the world’s men and women, as well as both majority and minority ethnicities and religions, comprising at least 95% of the entire human population. Although, in some countries, a few of those people are quite well-paid, at least in certain, very limited sections of the overall working-class, the vast majority of them are in fact extremely poor, and do not enjoy any of the benefits obtained over the years by the tiny “labour aristocracy”.

The human rights of all those socially and financially inferior masses of people cannot be recognized, or ignored, depending on whether or not they belong to any particular gender, religion or ethnic group. To be sure, it is obviously true that most women are treated much more poorly in most societies, and in most social classes, than are most men. It is also true that majority religions, or majority ethnic groups, very often treat minorities very poorly as well, although as mentioned earlier, the opposite situation (minority groups collaborating with ruling- class investors) also prevails almost as often. But it is totally impossible to protect anyone’s human rights, in any society, if the ever-increasing inequality between the social classes, deliberately exacerbated by neoliberalism and by neofascism, is completely left out of the overall picture.

While it is true that the communist movement has almost entirely disappeared from sight, and that even when it held state power it often treated the working class more poorly than it was treated by some social-democratic governments, this does not mean that working-class oppression by the capitalist class has also ceased to exist. On the contrary, the disappearance of what was most often fake communism, and the concurrent decline and fall of social-democracy as well as most of the world’s labour movement, has instead brought about a situation in which private capitalist and state capitalist oppression of the working-class, and all the other “inferior” classes of people, has become even more intense, and even more intensely immoral, than it was fifty or a hundred years ago.

Since 1979, neoliberal capitalism has become much worse than the somewhat more paternalistic capitalism that used to exist, in a small number of countries, during the so-called “glorious” years following the Second World War. It has also, as Maalouf (indirectly) describes it in his book, contributed mightily to the rise of neofascism all over the world. Every single authoritarian, right-wing populist, regime currently in power has incorporated a neoliberal approach into its economic and social policies, while also intensifying ultra-reactionary attitudes toward ethnic and religious minorities (and more than a few majority populations), as well as towards women’s liberation.

One of the more interesting examples of this sort of thing was put into place by the extremely neoliberal European Union, that since its inception has done everything it could to encourage the short-term accumulation of maximum profit for its own large-scale investors, while simultaneously refusing to do anything at all (at least at a European level) to help out the rest of the population. Which helped bring about an enormous rise in anti-European isolationism, typified by the Brexit movement in the UK and anti-immigrant sentiment all over that continent, particularly concentrated in ex-“communist” Eastern Europe.

Collaboration between neoliberalism and neofascism, on a world scale, has resulted in popular support for barbarian leaders like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, not only in many different parts of the Western world, but also just about everywhere else as well. Millions of ordinary people personally identify with such reactionary leaders not only because they are totally alienated from their own collective well-being, but also because they feel that such leaders are “blessed” with personality flaws similar to their own. Such “deplorable” people identify with misogyny, for example, when as either men and women, they agree with thoroughly antediluvian arguments about how “women should stay at home with the children and do housework all the time, rather than taking jobs away from their menfolk”, or that “women should support life, and therefore foreswear the right to have an abortion, or to use any other form of birth control”. Similarly blatant forms of racism and anti-welfare attitudes also belong to the same atavistic trends, as do patriotic slogans like “may my country always be right, but my country right or wrong”.

Although Maalouf in his book does not refer directly to this kind of reactionary popular thinking, the very existence of these kinds of movements in today’s world makes it hard to imagine how the human race is going to be able to overcome this kind of widespread regression. Whenever deplorable leaders like Donald Trump, and their equally inadequate followers, react to the kind of arguments that Maalouf makes, they almost always “double-down” on whatever flaw that is being exposed, by turning reality on its head and accusing their accusers of propagating “fake news”. Which is to say any kind of reality principle that is opposed to their particular point of view. They dismiss as “negative thinking” any kind of reference to the real world that does not conform with their previously agreed-upon (barbarian) definitions of their own wishes and desires, always and forever inventing their own fake worlds and negatively projecting all their faults onto everyone who does not agree with them about everything that exists.

Nevertheless, those of us still ready to read this kind of book can realize that Maalouf has also made a major contribution to the literature on the barbarian degeneration of world civilization by underlining the incredible rise of what other observers refer to as “Big Data”, which is to say the constant collection of enormous quantities of electronic information about the lives and the commercial preferences of most of the world’s individual people. Artificial intelligence on a scale not even imagined by such authors as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley has now become very much of a reality all over this God-forsaken planet, with both big business and big government indulging in thought control to a fantastic degree.

Anyone anywhere trying to break out of this kind of managed consciousness, in order to lead large numbers of people toward freedom from this form of barbarian regression, can quite easily be spotted, and if necessary effectively neutralized, by the ultra-narcissistic people who possess such enormous power over others. Which is rapidly becoming even greater than the power that comes from individual possession of billions of dollars worth of capital, or from the political management of major imperialist nations.

The joint ideological domination of neoliberalism and neofascism, all over the world, has also led to a situation in which millions of people all over the world are getting their priorities all mixed up in specific countries. In Québec, for example, the provincial government’s recent decision to uphold public neutrality toward religion (laicity), by banning the wearing of religious symbols, on the part of public employees deemed to be “in positions of authority” (while representing the state), has come under very severe criticism. Much of this criticism is obviously coming from Canadian nationalists (known locally as “federalists”), who do not want Québec nationalists to get away with doing anything at all that is not just as popular in English Canada as it is in Québec. Much of the discussion about religious symbols is just as obviously focused on the hijab, an article of blatantly anti-feminist clothing very strongly associated in the Muslim world with ultra-right-wing Islamist populism.

At the same time, the Québec government is also undermining its own position by officially supporting the continuing presence of certain religious symbols in government buildings, the Christian crucifix for example having been taken down in the National Assembly, but deliberately not taken down in dozens of other government buildings. So the ongoing debate on the “national question” gets all mixed up with debates over “the real meaning” of laicity, Muslim fundamentalism and women’s liberation. Similarly confusing debates are also currently going on in every other part of the world, the prevalence of joint neoliberal and neofascist attitudes toward everything preventing millions of people from supporting progressive movements like national liberation, social-democracy, laicity and women’s liberation, all at the same time.

Neoliberalism and neofascism have also joined forces in an all-out assault on the natural environment. Although certain liberal-minded parties in the world, such as the Democratic Party in the USA, the Liberal Party in Canada and Emmanuel Macron’s liberal republicans in France, often pretend to be fighting against massive recent increases in industrial pollution and climate change, in reality they support the all-out expansion of such obvious culprits as the fossil-fuel industry almost as much as do such champions of anti-environmentalism as the USA’s Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Amin Maalouf, however, does not have very much to say about extremely dangerous environmental degradation in his book, even though he comes from a region in which the link between the enormous expansion of the fossil-fuel industry, and the rise of allied, inter-connected, ultra-right-wing barbarian corporations, governments and terrorist movements, is even more obvious than it is everywhere else. Extremely reactionary attitudes toward the natural environment certainly seem to be part and parcel of the “shipwreck of civilization” that is supposed to be the main focus of Maalouf’s book. How can someone coming from the Middle East possibly downplay what may very well be the most important characteristic of organized barbarianism in today’s world?

Curiously enough, even though a large part of Maalouf’s book is about the separation of the human race into several competing cultures, more or less on the same lines as Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, he does not offer in his book any extensive discussion of current geopolitics, and the fact that a third world war, very much involving nuclear weapons, may soon be breaking out. He also has nothing to say about the world-wide peace movement and its increasingly ineffectual efforts, in spite of the selfless dedication since the 1950s of tens of thousands of militants, to bring about nuclear disarmament and an end to dozens of highly dangerous regional clashes as well.

Nor does he attempt to make any developed argument about how the various different crises in the world—the ecological crisis, ever-increasing world economic instability caused mainly by unprecedentedly high levels of financial speculation since the Great Recession of 2008, the geopolitical (resource-based) confrontations in every part of the world, the enormous expansion of social inequality, the implantation of thought control through Big Data collection, as well as the constantly deepening cultural chasms already mentioned—all seem to be mutually reinforcing each other, and rapidly converging into one super-colossal mega-crisis of planetary proportions.

The most generous explanation for such frequent “oversights” in Maalouf’s analysis seems to stem from the same weakness from which many other liberal-minded observers like him also suffer, namely what could be called a “solution” bias. Such observers sometimes recognize quite honestly that civilizations all over the world are degenerating badly these days, but they are so intensely frightened by the ever-increasing onslaught of barbarism that they refuse to tell the whole truth. They feel that there has to be a solution to all of this disgusting decline, and they must therefore “pull their punches” from time to time, refusing to always call a spade, a spade.

The enormous problems that human civilization is facing in today’s world are not just caused by the difficulty that majority populations have when dealing with ethnic or religious minorities, or any other particular issue. Joint neoliberal and neofascist control of world politics is not just resulting in barbaric attitudes toward minorities and toward women’s liberation, it is also resulting in barbaric attitudes toward the natural environment, toward geopolitical divisions, toward class divisions, as well as in atavistic-religious attitudes toward disease control (the anti-vaccination movement).

It is, therefore, entirely possible that most of us, if not all of us, and not just already-old people from the baby-boom generation, are not going to make it out alive, of the current period of human history. In other words, today’s world is probably even worse off than what Maalouf was describing in his book. Socially-based minority rule by various combinations of private capitalism with equally predatory forms of state capitalism, is our main problem these days, and not just majority-ethnic and majority-religious mistreatment of cultural minorities. Starting in 1979, discarding all forms of social democracy as well as all varieties of economic anti-imperialism, and leaving all forms of investment in the hands of a very small minority of private and state capitalists, was (to say the least) not such a good idea after all.