Universal parochialism
This blogpost is part of my ongoing investigation into the different ways in which parochial behaviour all over the world is preventing people from coming together as a species and solving the huge crises that threaten our continued existence. Climate change is the first contender, especially following the recent COP-26 gabfest that, true to form, did not come anywhere near adopting an even minimally adequate response to that threat. I will update my own take on that extremely dangerous consequence of aggravated pollution later on in this blogpost. As happens quite frequently in my research, I have also developed new insights into why major threats of this kind are not being addressed appropriately, sometimes coming from sources that would not seem at first glance to contain any information that could help us understand why this is happening, but that turn out to be very useful anyway. For example, David Lowenthal’s 2015 blockbuster, “The past is a foreign country—Revisited”, which I just finished reading. What I got out of consulting that book changed my perspective on people’s attitudes toward all those converging crises.
While the climate change issue seems to be the most dangerous of the current threats to our collective future, we are also still very much in the midst of confronting an ongoing series of killer pandemics. The latest one of them, the SARS-CoV-2 disaster, is into its fifth wave in many parts of the world, once again causing mayhem, especially in Europe, in spite of all our so far inadequately-organized counter-attacks. In some of the poorer regions of the world, such as in most of Africa, no one even knows how many people have died from this latest pandemic, of Chinese origin, although it does not seem to be having the same effect on that continent as it is having in Europe. What we do know is that the richer countries have hoarded a very large part of the best available vaccines, spending much more money on them than poorer countries can afford to spend, and maintaining patent protection for their huge private corporations, even in severely under-privileged regions. With the result that very few people in some of the world’s poorest countries are protected in any way at all. A completely reactionary decision that may help to explain the emergence, first noticed in poorly-vaccinated South Africa, of what could turn out to be an even more dangerous strain of the disease than all its predecessors.
At the same time, we are also still faced with an ongoing proliferation of geopolitical confrontations, like the recently-revived stand-off between the USA and China over the status of Taiwan. Which is only one of the constantly deteriorating series of conflicts in the contiguous regions stretching from North Africa all the way over to the easternmost parts of Asia. Any one of those numerous confrontations, not just in those areas but also in the rest of the world, could easily degenerate to the point of “forcing” the incompetent leaders involved in each one of those conflicts into deciding that they no longer have any “non-military alternatives” to “protect” themselves from their designated enemies. The Russian intervention into the Ukraine, “unofficially protected” by NATO, is another example, as is the confrontation between India and Pakistan, most of the time centring on the status of the Kashmir region. Any one of which, under the right conditions, could touch off an escalation reaching all the way up to nuclear war.
We have currently returned to the degree of tension that used to exist during the “near misses” of the Cold War period, in an increasingly destabilized world. Military confrontations are becoming even more dangerous than they were during the 1990s, because of unusually massive crop failures, caused by the consequences of climate change (drought, fires, flooding, etc.), in many different regions, as well as by equally massive increases in deaths attributed to pandemics, not only in the poorer countries, but also among the most deprived populations living in the richer countries. To make things even worse, because of the widespread adoption of neoliberalism over the past several decades, the already enormous gap between the richer countries and the poorer countries is accelerating again, rather than decreasing. This geographical division is also being aggravated by ever-increasing inequality between the social classes inside each country, more and more wealth accruing to fewer and fewer people all over the world. The “poverty pandemic”, that has been hitting an increasingly large proportion of the world’s people in recent years, makes it that much more difficult to organize any kind of concerted assault on the causes of any of those other world crises.
What is required to deal with all these converging conundrums is inter-cultural and international cooperation on an unprecedented scale. Unfortunately, even as a concept, cooperation, whether international, inter-cultural, or between the severely divided social classes, has a very bad reputation these days. The neoliberal system, promoting short-term maximization of profit (vulture capitalism), has dominated the world since 1979. This system still controls not only the immensely powerful private-capitalist network of corporate profit, on every continent, but also the equally powerful state-capitalist system of accumulation. Even in countries like the USA, Japan and many European nations, that still officially support “free enterprise”, thoroughly corrupt government bureaucrats and politicians, regardless of political stripe, run the public system of control in perfect imitation of the private system, exchanging senior management personnel back and forth all the time between the two sectors, and running their competing centres of power as if they were private bailiwicks.
Meanwhile, in countries like China, or the Russian remnant of the defunct Soviet Union, the public managers of the “revolutionary” period, most of whom never really believed in any kind of socialism from the very beginning, gradually regurgitated their own private-capitalist offspring as “red-diaper babies”, feeding off the property of the only theoretically “communist” state. In an ugly, self-indulgent frenzy, those same senior bureaucrats are still benefitting from ongoing government largesse even now, in the same general way that the huge vulture corporations in the officially private-capitalist countries have always done since their inception. At the same time, in spite of feeble international attempts at containing worldwide corruption, organized crime and rampant tax evasion, all three of those plagues are also infecting the world more than they ever did before.
This large-scale ideological convergence between all the Cold War enemies of the past has led to the rise of a highly-integrated, worldwide system of co-dependance, every ruling elite in every region celebrating the adoption of some local version of symbiotic neoliberalism and neofascism (ultra-right-wing populism). A convergence involving all three sections of the thoroughly outdated system that used to exist during the Cold War, the “first world”, that pretended to be based exclusively on private capitalism, the “second world”, that pretended to be based exclusively on state capitalism, and the neocolonial “third world”, no part of which was ever genuinely “non-aligned”.
In each individual country, the divisions between competing political parties do not often amount to any genuine, long-term, principled differences of opinion. In the USA, for example, even the very severe, current divisions between the two main political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, are not really based on any fundamental distinctions. Today’s Democratic Party pretends to favour relatively “free” international trade and cooperation, slightly more than the Republican Party does, as well as being somewhat closer to the union movement. Both, however, in spite of the presence of a relatively ineffectual, left-wing faction inside the Democratic Party, resolutely favour the domination of the nation by the wealthiest representatives of private capitalism. In times past, however, during the last half of the nineteenth century, before and after the Civil War, the Republican Party supported everything that it now opposes, as did the Democratic Party. During the first half of the twentieth century, those two parties simply switched sides, adopting each other’s previous political profile.
As for China, it has been even more intensely divided between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party (CPC) since the 1920s, when those two parties fought the first of three civil wars, eventually resulting in the 1949 division of that country into two separate nations. The Communist Party took over the mainland, now known as the People’s Republic of China, while the remnants of the Nationalist Party took over the offshore island of Taiwan, where it is still more or less ensconced nowadays. A Japanese colony between 1895 and 1949, Taiwan’s status was not at all fixed, not even before 1895, nor has its status become any more certain in recent times. These days, the island is divided politically between the Nationalist Party, which agrees with the CPC that Taiwan is an integral part of China, and the currently ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which believes instead that the Taiwanese people should be free to make up their own minds about their relationship with China. The CPC, while retaining a fierce but fake adhesion to its own officially “Communist” point of view, has in fact copied many of the characteristics of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), when it was ruling China (1928-1949) under a pro-capitalist dictatorship. If anything, today’s CPC is even more intensely nationalist, and imperialist, than the KMT ever was.
The corresponding divisions between rival political parties inside many other nations are often a lot more complicated than the divisions inside the USA or China, but they are not any more principled, even when they involve many different parties, with many different names, that are nevertheless still borrowing each other’s prior points of views all the time. In spite of ongoing international tensions between one group of countries (including the USA) collectively claiming to be more democratic than a more openly authoritarian group of nations (such as the PRC), thoroughly corrupt vulture capitalism has everywhere become the only truly recognized, and universalized, system of value.
All the world’s officially established countries currently support that system, based as it is on providing a quantitative (monetary) valuation for everything that moves, whether material goods or immaterial services. Some of those services, such as non-fungible tokens, have only recently been conjured out of thin air, in order to artificially expand the size of the overall world market. As a consequence, all the attempts at worldwide coordination toward adequately dealing with any of the existential threats previously mentioned are therefore constantly being undermined, by neoliberal lobbyists and by neofascist decision makers all over the world, determined to preserve short-term maximization of profit, for both integrated systems, by any means possible.
This two-headed vulture (private and state capitalism combined into one single entity) adopted its universal measure of an accepted monetary value for everything, in a world that is still nevertheless very much divided between completely parochial empires, each regional centre of power trying to impose its own cultural heritage on every other region. Which explains why, in the almost complete absence of any fundamental rejection of the vulture-capitalist worldview anywhere on this planet, geopolitical confrontations between competing empires, many of them armed with nuclear weapons, are still combining with climate change, serial pandemics and unprecedentedly violent chasms between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor, all four inter-related and inter-connected crises merging into one, integrated mega-threat to our continued existence as a species.
I discovered just recently that my point of view on all this seems to be quite similar to that expressed by someone who I had never heard about before, French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy. That is, until I read the transcript of an interview with Dupuy, compiled by Laurent Testot, that was published in the October, 2021 edition of the French magazine “Sciences Humaines”. It seems that Dupuy has even come out with a book on this subject, “La catastrophe ou la vie. Pensées par temps de pandémie” (“Catastrophe or life: Thoughts compiled during a pandemic”), also published in 2021, that I have not yet had the opportunity to read. In the same issue of the same magazine, Testot also contributed his own analysis of the climate-change crisis, centred on his impression that fear of what is happening to us now, and of what could happen to humanity in the near future, may not help much in dealing with this extremely dangerous situation, if that fear is allowed to degenerate into irrational impulsiveness.
While I was trying to figure out how we got into this bloody mess, it occurred to me that the human beings living today could not be all that different from their predecessors who lived on this very same solar satellite in the past, made all the same kinds of mistakes in days gone by as they do now, but were not really threatened with total extinction until just recently. Even though numerous prophets and philosophers in previous periods of history have predicted over and over again that people’s rotten behaviour toward each other, and toward “Mother Nature”, would inevitably result in total disaster for everyone, none of those predictions turned out to be very credible until just recently. Following the onslaught of the nuclear arms race and the subsequent realization that our greatly enhanced industrial capacity has much more influence on the terrestrial environment than ever before, we can no longer rely on the non-human part of the natural world to bail us out every time that “superior people” (slave-owners, feudal lords, ultra-rich investors) over-exploit “inferior people” (slaves, peasants, industrial and service workers), as well as simultaneously over-exploiting the most dangerous possible sources of food and energy.
So why are the world’s tiny groups of dominant people, and their very numerous followers, doing everything they can to avoid taking these threats seriously? Why do so many people seem to be overcome by denial, concentrating on every kind of ridiculous ideological diversion rather than coming to grips with the threat of impending catastrophe? What is it about so many human beings that makes them want to continue with “business as usual”, always putting off serious treatment of these existential perils to a perennially later time? Why are we reacting as we have always done in the past, waiting for all the unprecedented dangers to just go away by themselves and to leave us alone forever?
It seems as if a large number of people all over the world, especially those with a great deal of money and power, prefer to constantly regurgitate the same kinds of absurd misinterpretations of reality that have always been so popular in days gone by. Why come up with something new if one can just repeat some comforting refrain from the past? I came to this conclusion after having recently finished reading David Lowenthal’s monumental work, “The past is a foreign country — revisited”, that I mentioned earlier. This was an updated version of his previously published (1985) book of the same title, incorporating a great deal of new material. It was fleshed out in particular with a large number of references to another one of Lowenthal’s highly controversial works, published in 1998, “The heritage crusade and the spoils of history”, which I already analyzed in one of my previous blogposts. The 2015 book (660 pages) is chock full of thousands of footnotes gleaned from an enormous “select bibliography” comprising over 800 well-referenced entries, some of them dating back to much earlier periods of history.
What I took away from Lowenthal’s work can be summed up from an idea that he borrowed from Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher from the early part of the twentieth century, to the effect that there is no historical document coming from any of the great civilizations of the past that is not at the same time a document of barbarism as well (page 610). Referring in this way to Lowenthal’s contribution, which is focused exclusively on history writing, may at first glance seem to be precisely the wrong way of trying to understand what is happening right now, not to mention trying to predict the theoretically unfathomable future of humanity.
Nevertheless, it turns out that it is in reality the only way to proceed, based on the fact that the study of the past includes everything that we know, from whatever we think happened at the beginning of time to whatever took place one second ago, in every part of the world. Even though the ways that people behaved in the past often seem as incomprehensible to people living nowadays as the ways in which fellow humans behave in foreign countries seem equally indecipherable, in reality human beings separated from us historically or geographically are not really as morally different from today’s people, living in whatever country, as we often pretend. It seems to me that a great deal of current rejection of the way that other people behave, elsewhere today or in the past periods of any particular civilization, stems from an egotistical desire to see ourselves, or our little group of people, as being much better, further advanced, or more progressive, than every other individual or interest group living now, or who ever lived in the past.
Lowenthal also cited nineteenth-century French historian Ernest Renan’s cynical but also quite accurate description of every nation’s approach to its own genesis: “Getting its history wrong is crucial for the formation of a nation” (page 509). In another part of his book, Lowenthal referred to the contemporary, German-born, University of Chicago historian Constantin Fasolt’s description of Christian truth as always being the opposite of historical truth (page 361), an observation that also applies to every other religion, as well as to every other secular ideology.
Throughout his book, Lowenthal provided literally hundreds of other deliberate misinterpretations of history, citing for example Erich Gruen’s criticism of Hellenistic Jews for finding no inconsistency in considering “the Scriptures” to be “Holy Writ”, while at the same time “rewriting them to their own taste” (page 576). On that same page, he also criticized a contemporary spokesman for the Nez Percé people in the USA who claimed that his people’s culture and history needed no footnotes. In other words, no historical research at all is needed to prove anything about his people, who claim the eternal right to reinterpret whatever they want to think about themselves, whenever they feel like it. Even if it totally contradicts everything that that they may have been thinking about themselves at any time in the past.
Lowenthal was also highly critical of the way in which official museums and historical re-enactments very often mis-represent the past that they are supposed to be using to educate (or rather mis-educate) the public. He showed how an earlier generation of museum directors, in several different countries, deliberately misinterpreted the past in order to provide exclusively positive portrayals of patriotic leaders from long ago, such as the “Founding Fathers” of the USA’s revolutionary period, that had very little in common with what they were really doing at the time. As an illustration of the probable effects of such misinformation, he cited the example of a typical visitor to the reconstructed Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts, who thought that the Pilgrim Fathers were the American founders of free-enterprise individualism, whereas in reality their view was that capitalism was blasphemous (page 493).
A more recent generation of directors then proceeded to again misinterpret the past in a more populist way, putting the emphasis, for a short period of time, on ordinary people rather than on leaders, and pretending to “self-critically” admit many of their country’s past “mistakes”. In other words, adapting museum displays and activities in contradictory ways, following the fashions of the time, in the same general way as the representative of the indigenous Nez Percé people was doing for his own culture.
Lowenthal also denounced dozens of history movies and television programs for deliberate misinterpretation of everything that they touched. One of his favourite targets was US writer Alex Haley, who himself adapted his book, “Roots”, about the origins of Afro-American slavery in the USA, into an extremely popular, and also extremely inaccurate television series. As Lowenthal adroitly pointed out in his tongue-in-cheek observation, Haley’s fictitious African village, “Juffure”, “amalgamated West Africa with Avalon, Eden, and idealized small-town America in a Club-Med-cum-Platonic city-state” (page 373).
Sources as deliberately misleading as Haley, who also tried to justify every one of his deliberate distortions, or Julian Fellowes, who adopted the same attitude toward every ideological distortion that he introduced into his equally popular “Downton Abbey” series in the UK (page 376), have become the main source of “historical” information for the vast majority of people in many different parts of the world. A non-Western example of a similar sort of revisionism, too recent to have appeared in Lowenthal’s book, was a movie that rapidly became the PRC’s all-time most popular film, patriotically depicting a “game-changing” Chinese victory over US forces in the Battle of Lake Changjin, during the Korean “Civil War”. Thereby deliberately ignoring the fact that China lost almost a million soldiers during that horribly unequal stalemate.
In Lowenthal’s view, “Envisaging the past as either blood-drenched or rose-coloured flouts ordinary historical reality”, in other words, “no dung, no puddles, no weeds” (page 536). In reality, such as in early New England, as Jane Langton pointed out, most people lived in quite ordinary conditions: “Stark. Black. No trees, only stumps. Cowpats. Horse dung. Pig manure. Smoke-blackened rooms. Unwashed illiterate people huddled against the cold. Trampled dirt around the house” (page 537). To which I might add that, as was the case for most human beings throughout history, most people around the world nowadays still live in equally dismal conditions, with very few material possessions, not only in very poor countries but also quite often hidden within very rich countries.
The vast majority of people on this Earth live disgusting little lives focused entirely on drudge work and deprivation, not at all like the much more exciting lives of trans-human, private-jet-setters and their completely artificial meta-universes. In this regard, Lowenthal also highlighted the point of view expressed by people like Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of the Goldman Sachs corporation, for whom the constantly growing gap between the rich and the poor is really quite marvellous: “There’s no greater privilege than watching it grow bigger and bigger each day” (page 588, a quote from a text published in the digital magazine “Onion”, in 2011, in an article entitled, “Gap between rich and poor named the 8th wonder of the world”).
For Lowenthal, as for all the other professional historians like him, there is a way that things are and were in the real world, which is independent of the way in which self-satisfied, professional accumulators like Blankfein, or anyone else, choose to refer to them (page 338). People cannot simply go around revising the past to make it consistent with their current views, nor to promote their own personal or group agendas, at any given time in history (page 502).
Underlying historical reality is material, not invented, and has to be discovered by using scientific methods only, as we are continually finding out nowadays in a completely different context, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to mutate. People cannot simply believe whatever they want to believe about anything at all, a lesson that we are also learning these days as we try to face up to the very material links between human pollution and climate change. The exact same lesson also has to be learned when having to deal with the threat posed by the ongoing proliferation of nuclear weapons, or the continually accelerating division between the social classes. We cannot just go on doing whatever we want, or thinking whatever we want, without dire consequences. Which is even more true in today’s world than it was at any time in the past.
Towards the end of his book, Lowenthal also referred to the fact that many people living today still consider themselves to be quite progressive and advanced in comparison with their ancestors: “Our racist, sexist, elitist forebears are anathematized as cruel and avaricious hierarchs, and hypocrites to boot” (pages 598-599). In my opinion, many of today’s critics of bygone heroes, portraying them as incredibly racist, sexist and elitist, compared to falsely innocent, contemporary observers, are the real hypocrites. Our own period of history, which may very well turn out to be the last period of human existence, should be seen as every bit as racist, sexist and elitist as most human societies have been in the past.
Although anti-racist movements like “Idle No More” and“Black Lives Matter”, as well as anti-misogynous movements like “Me-Too”, seem to be quite popular in some parts of the world, if we take a truly global look at the entire world that we live in, racism, sexism, age-ism and elitism are still much more popular than those progressive movements, in practically every country, despite official disclaimers. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of countries in every part of the world are simultaneously practising all the other reactionary ideologies, such as extractivism, imperialism, militarism and religious fanaticism.
Some of the people in the Western world may consider themselves to be quite a bit less racist or less sexist than their ancestors, or than the people who live in the non-Western countries, but other people who also live in the West, such as the pro-Trump Republicans in the USA, and similar, ultra-right-wing populist movements in every other part of the Western world, put the lie to that pretension. The Western countries are certainly just as elitist as those in any other part of the world, the West being the region most responsible for the currently unprecedented chasm between the social classes.
Many people in the West are also the most hypocritical in that regard for, against all odds, trying to prove, of all things, that elitism, exemplified in the domination of “superior” social classes over “inferior” ones, no longer exists in today’s world! Those falsely-progressive people continue to repeat this ridiculous fiction from time to time, similar in many ways to the bygone, post-class pretensions of Soviet propagandists, in spite of the fact that it is constantly intersecting with racist and sexist forms of domination. The alternative, however, is not to discriminate in the opposite direction, by supporting the woke movement’s reverse excesses of racism and sexism, but to come up with a truly universal attack on all forms of social discrimination.
In my opinion, all the world’s reactionary ideologies have precisely the same fundamental characteristic in common: they are all promoting different varieties of domination of one group of people over another. Imperialism, for example, is the control of a dominant nation over a dominated one, considering the “inferior nation” to be either a formal colony, a “protectorate”, or an “associated state”. The “inferior nation” can also be a neocolonial satrapy, politically independent but economically dependent on a richer, more “developed” state, or imperial nation. The dominant nation also uses the related ideology of extractivism to assert its hegemony not only over its own people, but especially over many other, much weaker nations, as well as over the entire natural environment, most of the raw materials used in those countries coming from outside their own official borders.
In every part of the world, imperialism also quite often takes the form of a dominant nation “absorbing” one or several dominated nations altogether, by including the dependent entities as provinces, forming part of the dominant nation’s official territory. In his book, Lowenthal added the fact that established nation-states often use international bodies such as UNESCO to alienate indigenous heritage sites and to “stifle tribal advocacy” (page 506). To which I might also add that some “settler” states practise linguistic imperialism as well, by imposing a dominant language on every minority, refusing to recognize not only indigenous languages, but often even refusing to recognize less popular “settler” languages as equal to its own, chosen language.
Another reactionary ideology, militarism, is often used to enforce imperial domination, the military forces of large and small empires often specializing in counter-insurgency operations against opposing forces all over the world. International military alliances like NATO, or the defunct Warsaw Pact, reinforce imperial strength even further. Militarism, however, is also a very important ideology for maintaining the territorial ambitions of less powerful states, too.
Militant formations such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State also use military ideology, fighting a terrorist war whose goal, in this particular case, is to impose ultra-right-wing, religious fundamentalism on every Muslim-majority country and Muslim-immigrant community. The ultimate goal of the “caliphate” form of militant imperialism is to eventually force the entire world into becoming true believers. Militarily dominant nations often initiate operations aimed at crushing such private-terrorist movements by using state terrorism, deliberately targeting civilian populations in imitation of their terrorist enemies. Muslim fanaticism, however, is not just confined to privately-operated terrorist movements. It is also well-entrenched inside the ruling parties of dozens of Muslim-majority countries as well, which often either finance terrorist zealots from within their own populations, or use state terrorism themselves to try to wipe out militants belonging to rival forms of fundamentalist ideology.
Unfortunately, religious fanaticism is also just as powerful inside all the other religions as well, such as the well-armed, ultra-Christian zealots embedded within the Trump Republicans in the USA, as well as in the ruling parties dominating such countries as Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Russia. Similar movements in many other countries also currently dominate most of the other religions as well, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. Even the PRC is using the ancient fanaticism of feudal zealots like Confucius to strengthen its home base among its Han majority. This ideology, just like all the other reactionary religious ideologies, is used in an attempt to dominate rival religions, or to eliminate them altogether.
Lowenthal’s approach to ideological misinterpretations of the past appealed to me in particular because of his all-inclusive denunciations of many popular errors, about both the far-away past and the recent past, not only among so-called “ordinary people” but also among leading lights all over the world. His targets included Westerners and non-Westerners alike, even though his references and his bibliography were largely dominated by Western sources. In each one of my blogposts, I have also deliberately tried to adopt the profile of an “equal-opportunity denouncer”, even though most of my own sources are necessarily confined to material written in English and in French, and even then only the material that I have found the time to select and to read.
But I try my best to cover the entire world in many of my blogposts, including majority and minority populations in every major region, always trying to go beyond the ridiculous prejudice of blaming the Western world for everything, or for the equally absurd prejudice of blaming any other part of the world instead. One of my favourite ways of avoiding prejudice is also to underline the astonishing similarity between the original definitions of democracy and of socialism, which are most often seen as opposites. Instead, they should be seen as synonyms, based as they both are, from a culturally unprejudiced point of view, on treating all people, in every region in the world, as equals.
During the 2015 elections in Canada, the Conservative Party tried to get a lot of political mileage out of denouncing “barbarian cultural practices” in many non-Western countries, as if the Western countries have not also acted in equally barbarian fashion, albeit often for different reasons. The practices being targeted by the Tories in 2015, when Stephen Harper was the prime minister of Canada, such as forced marriages between really young girls and much older men, excision, the death penalty for apostasy, or even the more mundane imposition of forcing women and girls in many different countries to wear extremely hot, uncomfortable, sexist, cover-up clothing in public. According to the Harper government, those backward practices were mainly taking place in dozens of African and Asian countries, and mainly among people adhering to ultra-orthodox forms of the Muslim religion, in Muslim-majority countries or in Muslim-minority populations living elsewhere. I was reminded of this highly successful electoral strategy through an article written by Stephanie Taylor, “Divisive 2015 campaign haunting Tories: MP”, published in “The Montreal Gazette”, on November 15, 2021.
The first thing that has to be said about those barbarian cultural practices, then and now, is that they are and were indeed barbarian, as well as being extremely reactionary. It is also important to point out that such practices are by no means confined to regions dominated by Muslim fanatics, since many of those practices, particularly those concerning the excessively poor treatment of girls and women, are also supported by similar fundamentalists quite active in most of the other religions in this world. Equally important is the fact that those kinds of constraints on designated groups of people are also contrary to the needs of economic and social development. All over the world, the countries and regions that are the most economically prosperous and socially advanced are those in which girls and women, in particular, are well treated. Something that is also true for the victims of other kinds of reactionary ideologies, such as racism, ethnic exclusivism and class-based elitism (extreme differences in income and in prestige). Whenever large numbers of human beings are treated poorly by other people practising reactionary ideologies, the human race as a whole is set back, in every possible way.
Even the great Muslim dynasties of the past (the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, for example) were a great deal more prosperous when they were following a more secular form of Islamic philosophy (Mutazilism) than when they were following a more fundamentalist, religious regimen. Today’s Muslim fanatics, such as those in Al Qaeda and the Islamic State movement, are therefore making the same kind of erroneous projections onto the past in their propaganda that Lowenthal was denouncing in his book.
But even more important than all those objections is that barbarian cultural practices are not at all confined to the former “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America), that is to say to the non-Western parts of the world. The countries belonging to the “Western” part of the world, in North America and in Europe, also including Australia, New Zealand and Israel, possess their own barbarian cultural practices, which are not always the same as those that the Conservative Party of Canada was denouncing in 2015, but are, nevertheless, every bit as barbarian. For example, counter-insurgency campaigns initiated by actively imperialist countries like the USA, Britain, France and Israel, aimed at destroying nationalist or communist movements outside their own home regions, have largely relied on aerial bombardment (planes, missiles, drones, long-range artillery), which is a particularly barbarian, indiscriminate method of social control, most of the time killing far more women and children than enemy soldiers or militants.
My own favourite example of Western hypocrisy in this regard was the official French reaction to the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the effect that the French Republic was very proud to have contributed so much to the wording of that declaration, and to the historical recognition of the importance of human rights in this world. 1948, however, was also the same year in which that same republic was fighting an extremely violent colonial war (1946 to 1954) to maintain control over French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), just a few years before also fighting another extremely violent colonial war to retain control over Algeria (1954-1962). Both of those wars having been accompanied by some of the most gruesome denials of human rights ever recorded.
My French example, however, has also been replicated by all the other “great” empires of the past, and the present, currently trying to preserve whatever still exists of their past empires, or trying to revive the imperial ambitions of their ancestors. Another fascinating example of hypocrisy was that practised by the former prime minister of Canada, Pierre-Elliott Trudeau, who in 1970 also ignored human rights altogether during the “October Crisis” in Québec, before turning around a few years later (1982) and embedding the “Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms” within his newly-formulated constitution. Even nowadays, however, it is impossible for any of the 450 innocent individuals in Québec, jailed for no good reason back in 1970, to seek judicial recourse, even though everyone currently admits that what the government did back then was totally contrary to the rights presumably “guaranteed” in the Charter. And even though thousands of other victims, of similar denials of basic human rights also committed in Canada in past decades, have themselves been able to seek judicial recourse for those other crimes.
Neoliberalism itself, also initiated by the Western countries, as well as raw-material extractivism, affecting huge, dependent populations in the poorest, neocolonial parts of the world, end up killing a much greater number of people than those killed directly or indirectly in wars, through hunger, disease and thoroughly inadequate social, educational and sanitary conditions associated with extreme deprivation. Even though China, Japan and several other non-Western, imperial nations are also very much involved in neoliberalism and extractivism, copying the Western countries in this regard, the overall deleterious effect is still mostly Western in origin. Quite a few non-Western countries, in Asia, Africa and Latin America, also regularly attempt to impose military-imperialist control over other countries in their respective regions. Many of the ongoing wars in today’s world, for example in the Middle East (Syria, Yemen, etc.), are civil wars in which many other outside countries have also become inextricably involved.
Unfortunately, designating other people’s cultural practices as exclusively barbarian, is not the only kind of completely misleading propaganda from which we have to protect ourselves these days. We also have to be on our guard against many other ideological onslaughts, like the one that seems to be coming from inside the Catholic Church, more particularly from that religious organization’s “progressive” wing, centring on the current pope. Those falsely-naive people erroneously believe that what they call “techno-science”, being practised by all the world’s multinational corporations, is a contemporary form of rationalism, using advanced technological systems that are trying to run the world in a scientific fashion, and thereby alienating people from their “symbolic and spiritual essence”.
Jean-Claude Ravet, who was the editor-in-chief of the Jesuit “Relations” magazine in Québec from 2008 to 2019, published an article in the Montréal newspaper, “Le Devoir”, on November 29, 2021, claiming that the current pandemic is being used to force people into getting vaccinated, against their will in some cases, as part of a worldwide, anti-democratic conspiracy that he calls “scientism”. This is exactly the same “spiritual ideology” that I denounced in one of my more recent blogposts, focusing on French journalist Hervé Kempf’s 2017 book promoting the dubious ideas of the twentieth-century German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas, as well as the somewhat similar ideas of the former Jesuit priest, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who recently became Pope Francis.
In my opinion, capitalism, in the form of either private or state capitalism, or of both of them together, is most definitely not a rational way of running the world, not in days gone by and not at the present time. Nor does it have anything to do with applying the scientific method to the field of human social organization. Substituting the kind of world that rich and powerful people enjoy controlling, by hook or by crook, with what all the rest of the people in the world are trying to accomplish, in their more ordinary lives, does not seem to me to be terribly scientific. Following the science, whether it applies to protecting the world from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, or in protecting the natural environment from the dangers of climate change, or in protecting the world’s very numerous poor people from the insatiable appetites of the world’s very small number of rich and powerful rulers, or in protecting everyone alive from the dangers of nuclear war, does not mean the same thing as agreeing with capitalism’s generalized stranglehold on contemporary human society.
In any case, trying to save the world from something like climate change, for example, is most certainly not an easy thing to do. Many sincere people talk about making the transition away from fossil fuels, that provide 80% of the world’s currently available sources of energy, to some more acceptable sources of energy that do not have any negative effect, or rather not nearly as negative an effect, on the natural environment. Many of those people also point out that it will be very difficult, or even impossible, to accomplish that task without moving away from today’s constant increase in the production of new goods and services. Instead, they often propose abandoning the frenzied, performance-based economy in which we (or rather some of us) are now living and focus instead on a much more sober, contained approach to consumption. They have suggested that we set up a circulatory economy in place of the current one, based on producing only goods that can be entirely recycled, and refusing to produce more goods or services than what our new-found focus on sobriety would entail. Which certainly seems to be the right thing to do.
In my opinion, however, it would have been much better had we started out on this path a long time ago, such as right after the initial, 1972 publication of the “Limits to Growth” report, rather than adopting neoliberalism instead, in 1979. That way, we would have had a forty-year start on the extremely difficult task of changing our overall approach to practically everything. Many of the earnest people proposing all those revolutionary changes nowadays do not seem to realize the full import of what they are proposing, which amounts to nothing less than forever forsaking today’s frenzied forms of capitalism, both private capitalism and state capitalism, and adopting some form of genuine socialism instead. Not the kind of incomplete and insincere socialism proposed in the past by the occasionally elected, and then regularly unelected, social-democratic movements, nor the kind proposed in the past by the even more insincere ideology of “revolutionary socialism”, adopted by the totalitarian-communist movements.
The post-capitalist society being proposed nowadays by the people believing in sober forms of production and consumption, or genuinely sustainable development, as opposed to the falsely sustainable rhetoric that we hear about so often, sounds as if it was designed to be a completely popular, joyous, worldwide uprising of billions of like-minded people, all cooperating together in a totally non-violent way, and simultaneously, voluntarily, doing away with all forms of capitalism forever, without running into any particularly disagreeable problems along the way. In other words, a completely fantastic utopia like many of those that have been proposed in the past. On what planet are these sympathetic but deluded, over-sincere people living? Doing what they are proposing to do is going to be a damn sight more difficult than just propagating their chosen alternative.
When the much more powerful, but even more deluded, people who run the worldwide, jointly neoliberal and neofascist convergence between private and state capitalism, talk about what has to be done in the future to provide the world with a post-fossil-fuels-based economy, what are they proposing instead? In all their proposals, the world’s existing elites insist upon maintaining existing profit margins (15% on every investment seems to be the agreed-upon percentage) during this entire “transition period”, or doing even substantially better than that. They propose to go on adopting a general “business-as-usual” approach to everything, continuing for several more decades to profit from their prior investments, in fossil fuels as well as in every other kind of investment. While that is being accomplished, they also propose to gradually use those profits to invest instead in electrifying everything, getting everyone gradually (step by step) used to a battery-based economy rather than to a fossil-fuel-based economy, over the next several decades.
They insist, therefore, on setting up a process by which no major investor, whether private or state-capitalist, will ever have to default on any of his (or her) major investments, no matter what the cost may turn out be be for those other, ordinary, inferior, non-capitalist people with whom they share this planet. We will get there eventually, they say, bit by bit, with every major investor receiving his (or her) pound of flesh from the ordinary people of this world, even if it turns out to be a much bigger pound of flesh than was required in the past. As a result of which, once that they have been assured of preserving their dominant system completely intact, they then propose to succeed in saving everyone from the upcoming catastrophe, or at least those that are still alive at that point. How many of us are going to survive that oh-so-realistic brand of “transition”?
My analysis of the private/state capitalist point of view on this subject is based on a projection going forward of what those people have recently been telling everyone in the media. One example of that message has to do with the lawsuits currently being launched all over the world against any governments that change their minds about some kind of “development” or another, under popular pressure, such as the recent decisions in Québec toward abandoning already-initiated, petroleum exploration in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The corporations involved want the government to pay them, as compensation for those decisions, exactly the sum of money that they would have made on those investments if they had discovered any petroleum in that region, and exploited it for several decades after that, until it was all gone. Billions of dollars, in other worlds, or maybe hundreds of billions.
The same sort of thing is also taking place anywhere in the world whenever any government makes any other decision about any other unfinished project (in the mining industry, for example). In other words, all the world’s major investors want all their projected projects to survive, by hook or by crook, regardless of the changing political situation. For their part, the governments involved, which form part of the jointly-run, private-capitalist/state-capitalist continuum, usually agree to pay such compensation, voluntarily. Or at least they plan to pay because the loss of confidence of the private capitalists toward the state capitalists in government would result in a very uncomfortable situation indeed, that is to say the potentially total loss of any further economic “development” in the future. That is the way that the system works, in every country, and there is no getting out of that system according to anyone currently participating in it.
So it seems to me that we are all in a total impasse about our collective future. On the one hand, we have truly naive people, most of whom possess very little money, power or influence, proposing that all we have to do to make things better is to convince everyone that we ought to cooperate with each other all the time, about all those things. Which is quite true, after all, if that was the way the world works. On the other hand, we have most of the very rich, very powerful and very influential people telling us that unless we guarantee that the entire neoliberal/neofascist, private capitalist/state capitalist system of domination is preserved forever, there will not be any future for anyone. So how are we going to convince them not to do that? As they used to say on US television when I was growing up, “that is the 64 000 dollar question”.
