Mainstream extremism: the origins of denial

Helena Norberg-Hodge, an author and documentary film producer who advocates for a local solution to world economic problems, wrote a fascinating summary of her views in a short article, “Globalization and extremism—join the dots”, that was published in the November-December 2019 edition of the British newsmagazine, “The New Internationalist”. In that article, she started off in the same way that I also began many of my own blogposts, by trying to find out why, in today’s world, there are so many “rightwing authoritarian leaders and extremist political parties gaining strength” in so many different countries, such as Donald Trump’s USA, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Recep Erdogan’s Turkey and Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Her answer to that question is that worldwide economic globalization has not only caused an enormous social problem, “expanding the obscene gap between rich and poor”, but has also caused the majority of the world’s population to feel politically and psychologically, as well as economically, insecure. In her view, these related varieties of globalized insecurity have made millions of people “highly susceptible to false narratives purporting to explain their precarious situation”. As she describes it, people’s economic insecurity is especially based on job insecurity, caused by “footloose corporations” eliminating even long-held jobs, through “downsizing and offshoring, mergers and takeovers, artificial intelligence and automation”. To explain where this job insecurity comes from, pro-capitalist, rightwing, authoritarian politicians refuse to blame giant global corporations for ruining so many working-class lives, and choose instead to manipulate millions of susceptible people into blaming big government, immigrants and minorities for their problems. In spite of the fact (I might add) that most of the immigrants and the members of minority groups also belong to the same working-class as the majority populations, a class that has become much bigger and more worldwide than it ever used to be.

Norberg-Hodge also emphasized in her article just how ironic it is to blame big government for any of those policies by pointing out that the political insecurity that millions of people are also feeling, comes from the fact that most governments are being impoverished by the huge subsidies and tax breaks that they have been foolishly handing out “to attract big business” in the first place. Leaving those governments unable “to cover the heavy social and environmental costs of global growth”, and causing ordinary people to “see their government leaders as inept at running the nation’s affairs”, as well as getting them to support imitating the success of big business by running “the country (even) more like a business”. She also points out how psychological insecurity resulting from the “social fragmentation and isolation” caused by “the undermining of local and national economies”, coupled with the enormous consumerist propaganda of global advertising, has succeeded in getting millions of people to replace what she considers to be relatively healthy, local identities with extremely unhealthy, ultra rightwing, extremist and fundamentalist, identities instead.

Curiously enough, I happened to come across Norberg-Hodge’s article when I was also in the process of reading British socialist leader Chris Harman’s monumental book (728 pages), “A people’s history of the world: From the stone age to the new millenium”, first published back in 2008. I was particularly fascinated by Norberg-Hodge’s description of the “economic transformation driven by the deregulation of global banks and corporations, largely through free-trade treaties”, while “businesses and individuals at the national and local level are burdened with ever heavier regulations and squeezed for taxes to subsidize transnationals that pay almost no tax.” That seemed to me to be almost a kind of logical extension of Harman’s description of how social-class oppression itself came into being, when the first regional empires were originally set up over 5000 years ago by ruling-class merchants and aristocrats. Those newly-dominant folks were intent on persuading much more numerous, ordinary peasants and artisans that they (the rulers) were the only ones capable of representing everyone in civilized society. They began to see “their control over resources as being in the interests of society as a whole”, “themselves remaining fit, well and protected from the famines and impoverishment that periodically afflicted the population as a whole” (page 25). In other words, neoliberalism could very well be just the latest, most up-to-date version of what has been unfortunately going on in most human societies for the past several thousand years!

I certainly agree with many of Norberg-Hodge’s contributions to the ongoing debate over the causes of mainstream global extremism. My take on those same authoritarian radicals that she was talking about is that they are all a bunch of neofascist politicians, whose intense hatred of all forms of socialism, and of any emphasis whatever on anything that all the people in the world have in common (the original definition of communism), forces them to focus on racial segregation and misogyny as two very useful ways of avoiding any talk about the even more intense division of today’s world into competing social classes. A division that has become even more obvious nowadays than it was back in the era of “classical” fascism during the first half of the twentieth century.

However, I cannot agree at all with Norberg-Hodge’s equation of “worldwide economic integration, or globalization”, since the Second World War, with what used to be called “development” in “the Global South” or “progress” in “the Global North”. It seems to me that we have to distinguish between what was going on in the world during the so-called “thirty glorious years” (1945-1975) and what has been emerging internationally since the joint, neoliberal and ultraconservative “counter-revolution” started up right afterwards. Following the 1945 victory of the liberal-communist coalition against classical fascism, there had ensued a short period of what German social-economist Wolfgang Streeck calls “democratic capitalism”. 

A very peculiar period of world history during which international capitalism had to contend with a competing “Eastern” bloc of nations theoretically focusing on promoting worldwide communism, and thereby forcing world capitalism to tone down its previously radical emphasis on laissez-faire. Which did not, however, prevent the military wing of capitalism from killing off several million pro-communist workers and peasants anyway, in order to “contain” the spread of the rival ideology. During which time, nevertheless, a certain amount of real economic development and real social progress was allowed to briefly co-exist, here and there, alongside ordinary capitalist and imperialist exploitation, inside both the Global North and the Global South.

That strange little period did not last very long, however, for two very important reasons. One was that the world’s most important private-capitalist investors, dominating most of the only slightly democratic governments of the Global North, had no intention of “sharing the wealth” (even a little bit), for any longer than absolutely necessary, with any of the “inferior” social classes of the North, or the equally “inferior” colonies (or semi-colonies) of the Global South. The other was that the leaders of the only-theoretically communist dictatorships of the “Eastern bloc” of nations betrayed the communist ideal almost from the outset and ran their governments with an iron fist, creating a “new class” (Milovan Djilas) of government bureaucrats to replace the bourgeois/aristocratic rulers of the past.

During the 1970s, the internal corruption inside each “communist” country, the division of the Eastern bloc into two warring factions (pro-Soviet “revisionists” versus pro-Chinese “maoists”), the emerging geopolitical alliance between the USA and China against the remaining members of the Soviet bloc, as well as the neocolonial corruption of the former “liberation movements” in the Global South and the largely-provoked decline in popularity of the communist and social-democratic parties in the “Western” part of the Global North, finally made it possible for the private capitalists in the Global North to abandon their temporary concessions and return to the vigorous pursuit of a revived form of laissez-faire known since the 1970s as neoliberalism.

It is in fact this “new” form of economic and social liberalism, putting an end not only to the “thirty glorious years”, but also to a long (85-year) period of succeeding crises of capitalism (the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War), that had fostered a kind of economic-nationalist (“neomercantilist”), or at least Keynesian, drift away from classical liberalism. When Helena Norberg-Hodge referred to those “footloose corporations” and their worldwide globalization causing political, economic, social and psychological insecurity, she was in fact describing the joint, post-1975 rise of both neoliberalism and neofascism, leading to an accompanying rise in the number of ultra-rightwing governments and movements. In other words, a phenomenon that I like to call “mainstream extremism”, that got its first experience with power when the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile (1973-1990) handed that country’s economy over to the neoliberal economists from the USA known as “the Chicago boys”.

That South American extremist, and dozens of other military dictators just like him, were paradoxically but also very firmly and very directly, supported by the popularly-elected and re-elected regimes of Margaret Thatcher in the UK (1979-1990) and Ronald Reagan in the USA (1981-1989). Both of them becoming champions of worldwide neoliberalism, anti-communism and anti-social-democracy, imitated by dozens of other rightwing clones since that time. The reactionary character of their regimes not being surpassed until the more recent rise of such even more antediluvian politicians as Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Donald Trump in the USA, Narendra Modi in India, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and all the other half-neoliberal, half-neofascist atavists currently in power.

Not to forget that the neoliberal movement also got an enormous boost from the simultaneous “war on inflation” of the world’s most important central banks, led by US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. By simultaneously raising interest rates all over the world from about 5% to about 20% (!), between 1979 and 1981, those “monetarist” banks effectively wiped out inflation by deliberately causing the biggest recession that had afflicted the world since the Great Depression. An economic assault that not coincidentally also made it a great deal more difficult for increasingly indebted governments to maintain any kind of active role in managing the world economy.

To be sure, during the 1945-1975 period of (slightly more) democratic capitalism, as well as during the post-1975 period of mainstream extremism, the big-business private investors were most definitely extending their exploitation and control of both the “inferior” classes of the Global North and the “inferior” nations of the Global South. But during the “thirty glorious years”, they were not doing so with quite as much assurance, nor with quite as much intensity, as they have been since 1975. As for the former “Eastern” bloc of nations, all of them have now reintegrated the “brave new world” of neoliberalism and neofascism that has taken over the entire planet, even if some of them (such as the “People’s” Republic of China) are still run by almost completely totalitarian regimes. Totalitarianism, however, currently exists not only in several formerly communist countries, but also in several other, very backward theocracies like Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Both kinds of totalitarianism are even more radical forms of “mainstream extremism” than that currently running dozens of other countries, all over the world, including such “outstanding” examples as the USA, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Italy, India, Israel, Austria, Colombia, Zimbabwe and tutti quanti. Not to forget, in this ever-increasing list of rogue regimes, that the USA is still the most powerful country in the world (not only militarily, but also in many other ways), and therefore has the capacity to do more harm to the entire world population (as it already has in the recent past) than any other country in that list, including China (at least so far).

In today’s world, there are two main subjects about which most of the world’s neoliberal/neofascist leaders, and also most of their very numerous followers, engage in increasingly obvious denial of current reality. The first of these is the constant deterioration of the natural environment, caused by unprecedentedly high levels of pollution: agricultural waste, industrial waste and ordinary biological waste from almost eight billion people, none of which is being properly treated before being thrown into the air that we are forced to breathe, the water that we are forced to drink and the soil upon which we depend for most of our food.

Resulting, among many other extremely negative effects, in the kind of worldwide climate change that has already greatly expanded both the wildfire and extreme flooding seasons in dozens of different regions. Thereby also adding Donald-Trump clones like Australian prime minister Scott Morrison to the worldwide rogues’ gallery of backward, mainstream extremists. Moreover, the Chinese claim to have done more to end climate change than any other nation is bogus, since as Ma Tianjie explains in her own article (“How green is China?”, published in the same issue of “The New Internationalist” as the Norberg-Hodge article), for every Chinese coal mine recently closed by the regime, that country has financed the opening up of new coal mines, most of them in various Third World countries.

The second subject eliciting mainstream-extremist denial these days is an equally toxic confluence of all the different ways by which human beings are constantly mistreating each other, now more than ever before, especially through the unprecedentedly enormous income gap between the rich and the poor that Norberg-Hodge was mentioning. But also by the neofascist intensification of all the different kinds of exploitation and oppression (including the sexual kind) constantly being directed against the world’s poorest and least powerful categories of people, including most of the world’s women, many of the religious and ethnic minorities on every continent, and a very large percentage of the world’s children as well. The entire world-system, especially the legal branch of that system, seems intent on forever ensuring that none of the most oppressed and exploited people on the planet will ever come anywhere close to freedom.

It is as if all the world’s most reactionary antediluvians, running all the ultra-rightwing movements and governments in every country, were collectively screaming at the top of their lungs, “f—- the environment” and “f—-the common people”! To which they seem to be adding several more comments like these ones: “All the so-called ‘stakeholders’ in the world economy who are not good, upstanding shareholders like ourselves can just go to hell forever! We don’t want to have anything to do with the plight of the ignorant masses, nor with the God-forsaken natural environment! All we want is short-term profit maximization for all eternity, no matter what the cost! And to make sure that we have the power necessary to make ever more obscene gobs of money, we are going to lie and cheat and manipulate ordinary people even more than before, into enthusiastically supporting every last one of our fake ‘anti-establishment’, ultra-narcissist authoritarians, in every single country! We superior beings do not just want to lord it over the undeserving commoners like we have already been doing for thousands of years, we want them to truly enjoy being good, loyal slaves for us forever!”

After forty years of conjointly installing neoliberal and neofascist regimes all over the world, these incredibly disgusting individuals seem to be indulging in some kind of primitive childishness, or infantile egocentrism, blowing their stacks every time someone decides to stand up to them. They are constantly getting violently ticked off whenever some person, or some group, that they associate with “weakness”, does something unexpected, like a former victim accusing them of rape in public, or a previously battered spouse running off to a women’s shelter (thereby leaving them in the lurch), or a young, media-friendly person intensely worried about climate change, or a group of lower-class people banding together for the first time against economic and social domination, or a previously quiescent, “inferior” nation that suddenly gets indignant about foreign imperialism, or any other formerly servile, social entity that no longer tolerates some form or another of sadistic torture.

This is the sort of thing that Montreal newspaper columnist Pierre Trudel (“Le consentement”,  “Le Devoir”, January 7, 2020) was referring to when he wrote about victim Vanessa Springora’s so-called “consent” when she was sexually assaulted several decades ago, as a 14-year-old girl, by the well-known French author, Gabriel Matzneff, who has become very successful openly describing, in excruciating detail, his own sex crimes in his novels. Trudel’s conclusion about such cases, or any similar use of legal consent to “justify” the heinous acts of any other perpetrator of any other form of social violence, is completely illegitimate, since there is no such thing as “free consent” in any situation involving social inequality. To which I would add that given the prevalence of social inequality in practically every human situation, there really is not very much “free consent” going on in any top-down relationship whatsoever.

Of course, there are millions of people all over the world, just like Vanessa Springora, who are fighting back against all these ultra-reactionary individuals and their movements, including even a few people in high places who claim that they also support such progressive ideas as cleaning up the environment and putting an end to the more extreme varieties of exploitation and oppression. But none of that opposition to the joint domination of the world by people promoting different varieties of neoliberalism and neofascism seems to be having any real, long-lasting effect in human society, while the “open conspiracy” of ideological denial seems to be getting stronger and stronger with every passing day.

The mechanism by which all this denial of reality is taking place is exactly the same as the one already discovered by political sociologists in the USA, when they were trying to find out from whence the Trump phenomenon originated. Observers like Steve Tesich and Ralph Keyes posited that the whole idea of calling reality “fake news”, and simultaneously creating a “new reality” which would be more palatable to the points of view of ultra-reactionary people, came from the US defeat in the Vietnam War and the constitutional failures of the Watergate crisis (that also took place during that very decisive decade, the 1970s). Not being able to accept those two very negative realities, so completely unnerving to the ultra-proud American psyche, millions of ordinary people started believing in the almost “psychedelic” ideological inventions of that country’s ever-active populist opinion manipulators (such as Breitbart News Network and Fox News), who created a “better reality” for them than the one that existed in the much-too-negative, much too real, real world.

Fake, “reality-show” billionaire Donald Trump, with the help of Russian hackers further manipulating the already manipulative (and equally billionaire) social media, and the completely undemocratic Electoral College institution, then managed to turn that deliberately phoney worldview into an upset victory in the 2016 presidential election. Setting up a new regime combining most of the neoliberal policies of all the previous administrations (since 1981 in the USA) with a generous new layer of authoritarian neofascism. A process that also seems to apply quite well to all the other recent outbreaks of neofascism all over the world, not only in the countries mentioned by Norberg-Hodge, and all the other ones that I added to her list, but also in places like Russia, that have also experienced extremely debilitating recent events, tearing at the national and/or religious psyche.

Fake news, of course, has been around for a very long time, some of the earlier forms of which have been the equally strange systems of belief in supernatural phenomena known as religions. All the world’s known religions, as well as the somewhat newer kinds of reactionary beliefs (including Adam Smith’s eighteenth-century fantasy about “private vice creating public virtue”), seem to me to be have something in common with what some psychoanalysts refer to as reaction formations, by which aspects of reality deemed unacceptable give rise to imagined, ersatz inventions of the mind to make the world seem more psychologically palatable. Also more or less similar to what some of the psychotherapists studying borderline personality disorder refer to as pseudo-mentalization, describing how disturbed minds make up false representations of reality as a psychological coping mechanism for dealing with aspects of the real world that seem to them totally alien to their own well-established worldview.

The founders of ultra-right-wing (neofascist) populism, as well as most of its neoliberal fellow-travellers, also seem to be using “negative projection”, ascribing the term “fake news” to reality and accepting as reality the objects of their own feverish imaginations. Sometimes it seems that whenever someone, somewhere, gets upset about any kind of human travesty whatever, the ultra-reactionaries just retreat even more into their little fantasy worlds. A good example being any time that Greta Thunberg, or the scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, accuse climate skeptics of doing nothing on purpose, they often end up (paradoxically) creating even more Donald Trump clones than those previously existing, all of them “doubling down” on the use of fossil fuels more than ever before. In other words, even though science is still progressing somewhat, even today, ignorance is getting even stronger than science has ever been, with the overall result that regression is trumping progression.

Which brings me to the other, even more important, reason why I cannot accept Helena Norberg-Hodge’s proposed solution to everything that is going on nowadays. In her article, she also devoted several paragraphs to describing the Ladakh society, “an Indian-administered region on the Tibetan Plateau” where she has been working for the past four decades. According to her account, it was the economic development of that region since the 1970s that got the Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority into fighting with each other over scarce resources, rather than cooperating together as they had in the past, when everyone was equally poor. A situation that according to her was further corrupted by the introduction of Westernized education and dependence on political decision-making centred in the distant government at New Delhi. In concluding her article, she definitely gave the impression that the solution to enormous divisions like these, all over the world, is to get as far away as possible from development, progress and “global economic deregulation”, and to return to localized harmony instead.

But I really do not see how we can possibly get the genie back into the bottle. In my opinion, Norberg-Hodge has made the fundamental error of confounding the kind of deregulated, free-trade-oriented globalization introduced by the neoliberal juggernaut during the late 1970s with any alternative form of globalization. She did not even consider the possibility that real development and real progress could theoretically have put an end to widespread poverty and to the constant reinforcement of social inequality, if globalization had not been carried out almost exclusively under the control of the world’s most backward, big-time investors, economists and politicians. A good example of which is the European Union, which set up a smaller, regional version of deregulated globalization that was supposed to have also included a concerted, regional “war on poverty”, but somehow “never got around” to doing anything of the sort.

Back in the 1945-1975 period, many communist and social-democratic movements and governments, on every continent, were at least theoretically promoting a much more progressive form of globalization. If the neoliberal and neofascist movements had not joined together to take over the world as they did in the late 1970s, a completely different kind of globalization could have been put into place instead, focusing on worldwide cooperation and genuinely progressive development for poor and middle-class people, and not just for the ultra-rich ones. Who knows, it might even have adopted a much more ecologically friendly attitude back then towards the natural environment than the totally indifferent, or even downright hostile, attitude most world leaders have adopted nowadays.

Unfortunately, the kind of local traditions that are popular in every part of the world are exactly the kind of ultra-conservative traditions that classical fascists used to promote back in the twentieth century, and that today’s neofascist politicians are promoting all over again. Things like the caste system in India, still affecting not only the majority Hindu community in that country, but also copied by most of India’s important minorities, such as the largest sections of the Muslim community. Also things like excision, forced marriages of very young girls, priestly pedophilia in most of the world’s Catholic communities, polygamy, the death penalty for apostasy, the stoning of “witches”, “conversion therapy” for homosexuals, deference to feudal authority, and so on and so forth, the list is endless. Every major religion in the world today, and most of the minor ones as well, especially their ultra-conservative, fundamentalist (“evangelical”) offshoots, are all ancient depositories of reactionary behaviour, constantly being dusted off and revived by every single neofascist movement in the entire world.

Norberg-Hodge’s disparaging references to Western education, that replaced local cultural traditions among the Ladakh people, also sounds a bit too much like the Nigerian form of Islamic neofascism, “Boko Haram”, whose very name means “Western education is sinful”. I have nothing at all against incorporating traditional agricultural techniques into an overall program of genuine development of local economies, that bureaucratic governments very often tend to completely ignore. But that is not the same as rejecting Western education altogether, as if it did not include any positive elements whatsoever and was exclusively dedicated to maximizing short-term profit for multinational banks and global corporations. It seems to me that Norberg-Hodge, as well as the Indian bureaucrats to which she refers, are much too focused on extreme ideological division (“either/or” clivage) between 100% opposing ideas, rather than focusing on significantly reducing the more extreme kinds of exploitation and oppression, step by step, year after year, thereby reversing today’s extremely unacceptable trend of the constant worsening of the human condition. 

La religion tue la liberté

Je viens de lire le récit, “Une minute quarante-neuf secondes”, publié en août dernier chez Actes Sud par Riss, le dessinateur du journal satirique “Charlie Hebdo” qui a survécu, blessé, à l’attaque meurtrière du 7 janvier 2015 à Paris. Pendant laquelle douze de ses compagnons furent massacrés par deux terroristes musulmans, armés jusqu’aux dents, ostensiblement pour avoir osé republier des caricatures danoises du prophète Mohamed, en 2006, ainsi que d’avoir aussi publié leurs propres caricatures similaires par la suite. Cinq autres victimes furent aussi tuées par d’autres terroristes musulmans, le 8 et le 9 janvier de cette même année, dans la même série d’attentats en France, notamment contre un marché juif.

C’est un livre très bien écrit, même si d’une intensité presque intolérable par moments, non seulement sur l’attentat anti-Charlie et ses séquelles en tant que tel, mais aussi sur les efforts colossales de Riss, ainsi que de ceux de ses collaborateurs qui étaient vraiment dédiés aux principes du journalisme, de remettre sur les rails cette revue satirique après l’élimination épouvantable de la plupart de ses dessinateurs. Une bonne partie du livre est aussi consacrée à une dénonciation très méritée des interventions délibérément démoralisantes de certains politiciens et intellectuels français, qui n’ont pas vraiment souhaité la réussite du nouveau “Charlie Hebdo”. Dont quelques-uns qui frôlaient la collaboration avec les tueurs islamistes eux-mêmes. Toute la France a été divisée en 2015 entre les “Je suis Charlie” et les “Je ne suis pas Charlie”, les sous-groupes de chaque liste se trouvant dans le premier ensemble, ou le deuxième, souvent pour des raisons très contradictoires.

Dans son livre (pages 181-190), Riss a divisé les “Je suis Charlie” en cinq sous-groupes, soit les libertaires favorisant les points de vue les plus divers possibles, les voltairiens philosophiquement favorables à la liberté d’expression en tant que telle, les laÏcs pour qui aucune religion ne devrait échapper à la critique, les racistes de l’extrême-droite française détestant tous les musulmans en tant que musulmans, et les penseurs “jésuites” distinguant entre l’islam, en tant que religion, et l’islamisme, en tant qu’idéologie politique. Ensuite, il a aussi divisé les “Je ne suis pas Charlie” en cinq autres sous-groupes, soit les imams confondant n’importe quelle religion avec une “race”, les musulmans réactionnaires mettant le droit de religion au-dessus de tous les autres droits, les “trotsko-staliniens” de l’extrême-gauche opposés à n’importe quelle critique d’une religion jugée très populaire auprès de la masse musulmane, les haineux détestant le style d’humour de la revue (avec ou sans Mohamed), et les partisans de la “laïcité apaisée” dirigeant leur hargne contre la prétendue ”islamophobie” de tous les non-musulmans. (Voir aussi la recension du livre de Riss publié par Julien Beauregard, “Nous étions Charlie”, dans “L’Aut’journal”, le 29 novembre 2019.)

Personnellement, je m’identifie davantage avec les laïcs de la première liste, puisque je trouve complètement ridicule la prétention selon laquelle une croyance religieuse aurait beaucoup plus de valeur que n’importe quelle autre croyance idéologique. Tout comme Riss (pages 100-101), je ne croit pas du tout à la vie après la mort, ni à aucune autre forme de métaphysique religieuse. Surtout pas à l’arrogance absurde des religions faussement “universelles”, pour qui les femmes n’existent que pour combler les besoins sexuels (au ciel) de martyres exclusivement masculins, ou pour qui les femmes, à cause de leur sexe, n’ont pas le droit à la réincarnation, et ainsi de suite. La misogynie éhontée de l’ensemble de toutes les religions les placent définitivement parmi toutes les autres idéologies politiques, le plus souvent du côté de l’extrême-droite populiste. Les fondamentalistes, ou vrai-croyants, de toutes ces religions sont en fait la source principale de l’appui à tous les mouvements néo-fascistes actuels (qu’ils soient au pouvoir ou non), provenant de plusieurs variétés différentes de chrétiens, de musulmans, de juifs, de bouddhistes, de hindoues, de sikhs, de confucéens, de shintoïstes, et même d’animistes, dans tous les pays et dans toutes les régions du monde entier.

Je dois ajouter, toutefois, que je trouve très étonnant le fait que des “trotsko-staliniens” en France pourraient avoir adopté un point de vue si réactionnaire par rapport à la religion que celui mentionné par Riss. Il me semble que tous les partis ou les mouvements communistes du vingtième siècle, que j’ai moi-même côtoyé brièvement il y a cinquante ans, détestaient toutes les religions mythologiques de façon égale, en tant que “opium du peuple”, utilisé par le capitalisme pour éloigner “les masses populaires” du mouvement communiste. À l’époque de la guerre froide (1945-1991), il me semble qu’aucune des diverses tendances marxistes-léninistes, provenant de l’influence de Trotsky ou de l’influence de Staline, n’aurait abandonné si cavalièrement un individu ou un peuple au contrôle néfaste d’une quelconque religion métaphysique. Depuis plusieurs décennies maintenant, je me suis libéré quand même de l’influence marxiste-léniniste d’autrefois, ayant découvert sur le tard que l’ensemble des pays se réclamant du communisme ne cachait en fait que des régimes totalitaires du capitalisme d’état, en concurrence avec le capitalisme privé du libéralisme faussement démocratique. En réalité, toutes les idéologies politiques du monde agissent comme des religions, et toutes les religions métaphysiques agissent comme des idéologies politiques. On n’est pas plus avancé avec l’un ou l’autre de ces deux sous-ensembles.

Malheureusement, même le socialisme démocratique, théoriquement opposé au communisme totalitaire, doit aussi être rejeté de nos jours, tous les partis socialistes ou sociaux-démocrates du monde entier ayant accepté depuis plusieurs décennies de jouer complètement le jeu de la démocratie libérale et d’avoir par le fait même totalement abandonné le socialisme. En France, par exemple, le gouvernement socialiste de François Mitterrand, après avoir subi un assaut brutal pendant deux ans (1981-1983) contre son programme économique, de la part du capitalisme international ainsi que du patronat français, a laissé tomber le socialisme de façon définitive, adoptant, en reddition totale, le capitalisme néolibéral de l’empire anglo-américain, devenu dès cette époque l’idéologie de choix un peu partout au monde “libre”.

Ainsi, à part les religions meurtrières, alliées à l’extrême-droite populiste, l’autre idéologie dominante du temps présent se trouve être ce néolibéralisme, très similaire au laissez-faire du dix-neuvième siècle, associé comme son prédécesseur, davantage au capitalisme privé qu’à l’état. Et liberticide aussi, en dépit de son nom, parce que ne prônant la liberté que pour des gens riches et puissants. De nos jours, on perçoit que la quasi totalité des pays du monde sont gouvernés par des régimes sous l’influence conjointe du néo-fascisme et du néolibéralisme, des pays encore totalitaires comme la République populaire de Chine étant davantage du côté du capitalisme d’état, tout en adoptant une bonne dose du néolibéralisme aussi, et des pays pas vraiment libres du tout, comme les États-Unis d’Amérique, se penchant davantage du côté du capitalisme privé, tout en adoptant une bonne dose de populisme d’extrême-droite (néo-fasciste) aussi.

Aux États-Unis aussi bien qu’en Grande-Bretagne, ainsi que dans plusieurs autres pays, des dizaines de millions d’ouvriers ont perdu la plupart de leurs emplois industriels dans la désindustrialisation délibérée des années 1980, orchestrée par des champions du néolibéralisme tels que Ronald Reagan et Margaret Thatcher. Plus récemment, une bonne partie de ces mêmes ouvriers, malheureusement aliénés et manipulés par le capitalisme à la fois libéral et conservateur, ont contribué réellement à la montée constante du populisme d’extrême-droite (le néo-fascisme), en votant souvent, encore tout dernièrement, en faveur des mêmes partis politiques (tels que les Républicains aux États-Unis et les Conservateurs au Royaume-Uni) qui les avaient abandonnés, de façon si atroce, il y a 30-40 ans. Bien sûr, la France a aussi été très affectée par cette même désindustrialisation, mais la classe ouvrière française ne donne pas l’impression de collaborer autant avec le néolibéralisme qu’ailleurs en Occident. Le populisme d’extrême-droite, à la fois néo-fasciste et néolibérale, ne semble pas attirer un si grand nombre d’ouvriers français, même parmi les gilets jaunes.

Dans son livre, je ne pense pas que Riss utilise le mot “néolibéralisme” en tant que tel, mais il me semble qu’il parle quand même de l’influence néfaste de cette idéologie-là quand il dénonce, par exemple, “l’égocentrisme infantile érigé en valeur moderne d’épanouissement” (p. 11). Une idéologie hyper-individualiste, le néolibéralisme est aussi très souvent complété par la “pleine conscience” de la psychologie populaire, mettant l’accent exclusif sur l’environnement immédiat, presque corporel, de chaque individu. La maximisation du profit à court terme, de l’économisme libéral, fait fi de toutes les “externalités” non strictement économiques, telles que l’égalité sociale et l’environnement naturel de toute la planète. Tout comme la pleine conscience essaie de couper chaque individu isolé de toutes les “externalités” de la vie moderne, y compris du devoir de tout bon citoyen de se soucier quand même un peu de la santé collective de la grande société environnante (le “bien commun”).

Riss revient aussi à ce thème de dévouement social dans sa dénonciation de certains faux collaborateurs de “Charlie Hebdo”, plus intéressés par les millions de dollars en dons reçus du grand public après l’attentat que par la remise sur pied du journal satirique, voulant continuer à dénoncer publiquement et férocement l’attitude criminelle des grandes corporations néolibérales et de leurs alliés politiques dirigeant des gouvernements corrompus, envers la société humaine qui les entoure. Il parle ainsi de l’appât du gain parmi certains autres journalistes crapuleux (et leurs avocats) ailleurs dans son texte; “Et moi, je n’ai droit à rien?” (page 151). Pour ma part, je trouve très intéressant le fait de souligner la similarité structurelle entre, d’une part, le fondamentalisme religieux, qui n’accepte pas la séparation entre la religion et la politique (Riss), et d’autre part, le néolibéralisme, qui n’accepte pas la séparation entre les affaires et la politique. (Voir l’article de Pierre-Luc Desjardins, “Contestation sociale: De la France au Québec”, dans “Le Devoir” du 5 décembre 2019.)

En ce qui concerne l’islamophobie en tant qu’idéologie, je pense quand même (en bon “jésuite” que je suis) qu’on doit distinguer entre l’islam “modéré” des croyants musulmans qui acceptent, tout comme certains croyants similaires de toutes les autres religions, de garder leur foi pour eux-mêmes, et les musulmans “radicaux”, fondamentalistes et proselytes, qui essaient, souvent avec énormément de violence, de dominer le monde autour d’eux de manière impérialiste. Bien sûr, on peut argumenter que ces “militants militaristes” se trouvent en “guerre mondiale” contre tous les autres empires rivaux (les États-Unis, l’Union européenne, Israël, la Russie, la Chine, etc.). Il reste que ces mêmes fous furieux, poussés dans le dos par des empires régionaux comme l’Arabie saoudite, la Turquie et l’Iran, ont souvent été très facilement manipulés par plusieurs grandes puissances occidentales (et par Israël), utilisant leur militantisme meurtrier “à bon escient” pour débarrasser le monde musulman (y compris dans le diaspora) de certains autres courants de pensée, plutôt nationalistes et communistes. Même les pays dit communistes ont manipulé ces mêmes terroristes contre des nationaux-communistes qui ne voulaient pas être contrôlés par ces empires qu’on persiste encore de nos jours d’appeler “communistes”.

Même si tous les fondamentalistes musulmans, comme les fondamentalistes de toutes les autres religions, n’appuient pas toujours (ou n’appuient pas ouvertement) les éléments les plus meurtriers de leur religion, il reste que ces mêmes éléments terroristes ne pourraient jamais fonctionner autant qu’ils le font à l’heure actuelle, sans la montée du fondamentalisme religieux, source principale de l’appui populaire pour tous les mouvements d’extrême-droite populiste. L’islam est aussi la religion dans laquelle le fondamentalisme musulman, basé comme tous les autres fondamentalismes sur une interprétation littérale des textes sacrés, est devenu le plus militarisé de nos jours. Plusieurs pays importants du monde musulman, pas seulement au Moyen-Orient, ayant été bouleversés encore récemment par des conflits militaires très meurtriers, deviennent par le fait même uns sorte d’aimant pour ces terroristes. Le terrorisme islamiste fait la plupart de ses victimes parmi les musulmans “modérés”, mais tue aussi très régulièrement beaucoup de gens non-musulmans (des “mécréants”) un peu partout en Afrique et en Asie, mais aussi en Europe et en Amérique du Nord.

Vers la fin de son livre, Riss parle aussi un peu de ses voyages après l’attentat, dans plusieurs pays de l’Europe, pour mettre l’accent sur le fait que chacun de ces pays est devenu, pas seulement autrefois mais aussi récemment, une sorte de fosse commune et l’Europe toute entière “un cimetière de l’Atlantique à l’Oural” (page 289). Pas uniquement, bien sûr, grâce au terrorisme religieux mais aussi de toutes sortes de guerres, civiques autant qu’internationales, liées aux chocs extrêmes entre toutes sortes d’idéologies opposées. Je pense qu’on peut facilement appliquer cette même observation à l’ensemble des autres continents de ce monde. Dans son livre, Riss a aussi parlé de sa rencontre pendant un reportage au Vietnam avec le colonel Bang, du Viêt-minh (pages 295-298), dans un pays asiatique aussi affecté, sinon plus, par la guerre idéologique que la plupart des pays européens.

De ce côté-ci de l’Atlantique, le gouvernement actuel du Québec, essayant en dépit de son statut provincial d’imiter un peu le républicanisme de plusieurs pays européens (dont la France), a adopté la loi 21, sur la laïcité de l’État, qui interdit aux fonctionnaires “en position d’autorité” de porter des signes religieux pendant leur heures de travail. Une loi qui a été dénoncée par tous les fédéralistes canadiens comme si c’était en train d’éliminer complètement l’influence de la religion sur l’état du Québec. En réalité, la séparation entre la religion et l’état n’existe pas ici, ou très peu, toutes les organisations religieuses, et leurs édifices, étant toujours exemptés de l’impôt (fédéral et provincial), l’état provincial subventionnant encore la quasi totalité des écoles confessionnelles, et ainsi de suite. Les fédéralistes canadiens, toutefois, fidèles à la constitution canadienne de 1982 et à la charte des droits adossée à cette constitution, appuient une forme extrême de multiculturalisme censée protéger intégralement tous les courants religieux, même les plus fondamentalistes. Ils voient la loi 21 comme étant issu directement du mouvement indépendantiste du Québec, même si ce mouvement est sérieusement affaibli à l’heure actuelle, et par conséquence ces mêmes fédéralistes veulent éliminer cette loi québécoise, laïque, en tant que symbole futur de la reddition totale et complète du “séparatisme” québécois à l’empire canadien.

La plupart des fédéralistes appuient aussi les quelques dizaines de femmes musulmanes portant le hijab fondamentaliste, qui veulent trouver un emploi dans le secteur public au Québec, sans être obligées d’enlever leur foulard au travail. Les nationalistes canadiens de l’anti-laïcité fédérale ont même poussé l’audace jusqu’à traiter ces femmes intégristes, pratiquant la servitude volontaire, en  “féministes” luttant contre un état “colonialiste”! Selon leur idéologie d’individualisme ultra-libéral, tout le monde doit soutenir ces pauvres “victimes” non seulement en fonction de l’article 27 de la charte canadienne des droits, favorisant le multiculturalisme, mais aussi en fonction de l’article 28, sur l’égalité entre les hommes et les femmes. En d’autres mots, ils accusent le gouvernement du Québec d’être colonialiste et anti-féministe, tandis qu’en réalité c’est l’article 27 de la charte canadienne qui est en contraction flagrante avec l’article 28 de la même charte! Ce sont en fait les fédéralistes canadiens qui sont les véritables misogynes dans cette histoire, tout en étant les véritables colonialistes.

Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed, une chroniqueuse musulmane portant le hijab, a publié un article (“A time to reflect on all violence against women”) dans le quotidien anglophone de Montréal, “The Gazette”, le 6 décembre dernier, commémorant le trentième anniversaire du massacre anti-féministe de quatorze étudiantes, commis à l’École polytechnique de Montréal par un tueur du nom de Marc Lépine. Elle a oublié, toutefois, de mentionner dans son article que ce même Lépine (qui a pris le nom de famille de sa mère) est aussi le fils d’un homme d’affaires, Rachid Gharbi, un musulman algérien dénoncé par Madame Lépine pour sa violence misogyne. Même si Gharbi semble avoir été un musulman non-pratiquant, on peut quand même avoir le droit de critiquer la misogynie inhérente à toute idéologie métaphysique sans être faussement accusé d'"amalgame islamophobe" uniquement parce qu'on dénonce l'idéologie religieuse en tant que telle et pas uniquement son aile fondamentaliste (Riss, page 189). En tant que bon "jésuite", j'aimerais même poser la question si Naqvi-Mohamed n’est pas en train de se mettre dans une contradiction idéologique structurellement similaire à celle du premier ministre du Canada, Justin Trudeau. Qui, pendant la campagne électorale récente, a promis de se battre aussi fortement pour aider l’industrie pétrochimique du Canada que pour lutter contre le changement climatique dans le monde entier. En d’autres mots, n’est-il pas difficile, quand même, pour des gens comme Trudeau et Naqvi-Mohamed, de soutenir deux idées si totalement contradictoires en même temps?

Il me semble aussi qu’en dépit de sa prétendue liberté d’expression individualiste, Naqvi-Mohamed souffre, comme toutes les autres musulmanes portant le hijab, de la servitude volontaire. D’une manière très similaire aux soeurs voilées de l’Église catholique d’autrefois au Québec, comme celles dans le film récent (2019) du cinéaste Léa Pool, concernant une congrégation québécoise qui laissaient tomber leurs voiles pendant la Révolution tranquille, laïque, des années 1960, se libérant enfin d’au moins une première partie de leurs chaînes catholiques. Dans le cas des femmes “ordinaires”, mariées et mères de famille, je dirais comme Riss (page 260), que la famille agit aussi à la manière d’une communauté religieuse, même de nos jours, c’est-à-dire comme une cellule de prison pour la femme musulmane pratiquante, et pour les femmes catholiques pratiquantes aussi. Ainsi que pour toutes les autres femmes pratiquantes au sein de toutes les autres religions métaphysiques. À mon avis, c’est complètement absurde de comparer les porteuses de hijab, anti-laïques, aux victimes de la tuerie anti-féministe de l’École polytechnique, comme l’essaient de faire Mélissa Blais et Diane Lamoureux dans leur article, publié dans le quotidien “Le Devoir” du 6 décembre 2019, “Un devoir de mémoire, mais aussi d’actions”.

En réalité, le désir de liberté est toujours présent dans les esprits des êtres humains vivants, mais il est souvent occulté par le blasphème, soit le mot choisi par les pratiquants de religion pour nier l’existence même de la liberté d’expression. C’est la servitude volontaire des individus manipulés et aliénés par les religions métaphysiques, et par les autres idéologies liberticides, qui est à l’origine de cette “superstition honteuse” (le blasphème), en tant que tueur de liberté bien implantée malheureusement dans beaucoup d’esprits (Riss, pages 215-216). Quand les gens tombent sous le contrôle du totalitarisme dans leurs têtes, c’est en ce moment-là que les religions, et les autres idéologies meurtrières, gagnent le pari. Que ce soit le totalitarisme faussement communiste, le totalitarisme faussement démocratique (le laissez-faire et le néolibéralisme) ou le totalitarisme ultra-religieux et ultra-ethnique de l’extrême-droite.

Ainsi, la perversion polymorphe de toutes les religions métaphysiques, aussi bien que de toutes les autres idéologies antédiluviennes (du sous-ensemble séculier), tuent la liberté constamment, surtout la plus précieuse des formes différentes de la liberté, soit la liberté d’expression. En ce faisant, elles font partie d’une grande “conspiration ouverte” (“open conspiracy”) sur la scène mondiale, un système sadomasochiste de communication perverse entre les agresseurs sadiques de toutes les variétés existantes de totalitarisme, et les esclaves volontaires, masochistes. Ceux qui continuent de lutter quand même pour la liberté véritable, sans concession, sont souvent dénoncés par les réactionnaires de tout acabit comme étant “l’ennemi du peuple”, tandis que ce sont ces réactionnaires aux-mêmes qui sont en réalité l’ennemi de tous les peuples du monde entier.

Sapiens: cortex versus striatum?

Even though I first heard about the extremely popular book by Yuval Noah Harari, “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind” several months ago, I did not get around to actually reading it until now. First published in Hebrew back in 2011, Harari’s highly entertaining history of the world was “updated with new material” in 2014 for the English edition, which judging by unusually frequent references to the USA, seems to have been aimed mainly at an American readership. Since that time, however, having been translated into dozens of other languages, it has now become the first of a set of three block busting bestsellers, that have collectively turned their author into a world-wide celebrity, far beyond his home base in the World History Programme of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Sapiens book is not at all the ordinary kind of dry collection of historical facts, arranged in chronological and geographical order, as well as in conceptual order (political, economic, social and cultural history), that I was expecting to read. That said, however, Harari’s decision to deliberately avoid thoroughness in his one-volume history, of everything important that human beings were supposed to have done since our species first appeared on this planet, certainly leaves out a great deal of highly pertinent information. The errors of omission in such a work being every bit as important as any errors of commission.

Especially since those same errors of omission seem to have led to what initially seemed to me to be Harari’s much too optimistic interpretation of today’s world, such as severely underplaying the importance of the current ecological crisis (well-publicized since the 1970s). An unfounded “optimism” that upon further reading turned into Harari’s overly-positive approach not toward the future of human beings, but instead toward what he projects as humankind’s ultimate replacement by a race of super-robots! Harari seems to be caught, therefore, in an even more extreme variety of the kind of “yellow-brick-road” illusions that led to the similarly overwrought views of the US State Department bureaucrat, Francis Fukuyama, back in 1989, when he wrote about the end of history because of what he thought was the total victory of liberal capitalism, all over the world.

A very good example of what is wrong with Harari’s approach has to do, paradoxically, with his initially quite well thought out analysis of the shortcomings of a significant part of the arguments provided by what he calls “the prophets of doom” from the ecological movement. One of the major misinterpretations of the “Limits to Growth” philosophy is that resources are scarce and that we are running out of everything that we need in order to keep the modern economy functioning properly; so we have to scale back on everything drastically, right now, or we are all going to die. Harari’s response to that ideological discourse is quite similar to the one concocted back in the 1980s by another “yellow-brick-road” illusionist, Lyndon Larouche.

In itself, Harari’s answer to the limits theory is completely valid, the entire history of the industrial revolution providing abundant evidence of the fact that whenever some source of raw materials was drying up, scientists and engineers soon managed to find a completely new source, dependent on a totally different technology. For example, burning scarce supplies of wood for heating houses, and for operating blacksmith furnaces, was replaced with coal, which was itself largely replaced by more efficient petroleum, long before the world’s coal supplies ran out. Hydraulic power was eventually replaced with hydroelectricity, to which were added nuclear fission, wind and solar power. For his part, Lyndon Larouche’s favourite source was fusion energy, the peaceful harnessing of the power behind the hydrogen bomb, to produce electricity from naturally occurring, extremely abundant isotopes of hydrogen (such as deuterium and tritium).

Harari should have known, however, that opposition to change from huge, already established, firms (like those in the fossil-fuel industry) and also from recently established ideologies, like the neoliberalism that took over the entire world during the 1980s (Thatcher, Reagan, etc.), are often quite capable of blocking major development projects that they do not support. Harari devotes several pages in his text to “the marriage of science and empire”, and fully realizes that in order to develop new things, scientists and engineers require enormous amounts of money that can only come from either very rich private capitalists, or from very rich state capitalists. For example, since the US Army launched the Internet back in the early 1980s, trillions of dollars have been invested since then to develop extremely profitable social media all over the world. But the secret of harnessing fusion energy has not yet been found, either because of severely underfunded research, or because some scientific secrets are a lot more difficult to uncover than others. We have developed a much more modest form of hydrogen power nowadays, but it is a much less significant contribution to humanity than fusion power would have been.

Twenty-five years after Fukuyama, Harari did not even seem to notice the rise of ultra-conservative atavism, also known as ultra-right-wing populism, or more simply as neofascism, not only in the Western countries but also in several different parts of the former “Third World” (fundamentalist Islamic terrorism being an excellent example). Harari has a lot to say about Nazism (more on that later), but nothing whatever to say about classical, Italian fascism, nor about the other forms of fascism (including Catholic and Jewish varieties) developed in several dozen other countries, all over the world, from the 1920s to the 1960s.

In my opinion, much of today’s neofascist atavism ought to be seen as a consequence of the post 1979, world-wide, neoliberal fixation on exclusively private capitalism as a capital-accumulating antidote to the kind of profit-limiting government “intervention” into economic and social policy, that characterized the entire 1914-1979, “neomercantilist” period of history. More or less in the same way that the laissez-faire of the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century engendered (among other things) the rise of classical fascism during the 1920s. I was already writing about the recent, neofascist trend around the same time that Harari’s English-language version was being published. For example, in my blogpost from July 5, 2104, called “Regression trumps progress”.

Which explains the second part of my title for this blogpost, “cortex versus striatum”, based on the curious contributions of scientific journalist Sébastien Bohler, from his recent book (2019), “Le bug humain”, about how the human brain really works. That I found out about by reading a review (“Le cerveau, notre meilleur ennemi”) (“Our best enemy, the brain”), written by Fouad Laroui and published in the September-October 2019 edition of the French newsmagazine, “La Revue”. Bohler’s thesis, according to which the domination of the relatively primitive striatum in the brain, over the much more recent and much less primitive cortex, could presumably be interpreted as helping to explain why, in spite of all its cortex-driven advances, humanity never seems to be able to go beyond recurring episodes of an atavistic frame of mind, as in the current return of ultra-right-wing populism, all over the world.

The striatum is a small part of the brain that seems to communicate with the body through such hormones and neurotransmitters as dopamine, seeking to satisfy (at least according to Bohler) five (and only five) basic needs: eating, reproducing, laying the foundations of power and seeking useful information, while still expending the least amount of effort possible. (I always think of Donald Trump whenever I read that list of primitive desires.) All of which seems to fit in quite well with Harari’s contention (page 432) that recent discoveries in biology confirm that happiness is not so much related to “external parameters” like social relations and political rights as it is to the influence of “biochemical substances such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin”.

According to him, those substances tend to maintain the body at a steady state of emotional influences, making it impossible to remain happy, or sad, or angry, or whatever, without a constantly renewing stream of those same biochemical substances. Which he then interprets as meaning that instead of trying to improve the world through seeking world peace and/or ecological balance, we should instead be devoting our future efforts to controlling our biochemical happiness. As in Aldous Huxley’s science-fiction novel, “Brave New World”, that Harari considers to be a much more prescient work than George Orwell’s “1984”. But Harari never really explains in his book why happiness in and of itself ought to be the number one goal of human beings, which seems to contradict his own attempts as a good Buddhist to avoid craving altogether. Did he get the happiness idea from Thomas Jefferson?

If Harari is right about biochemical substances, and if Bohler’s book backs him up on this, then we inadequate humans are in for a very difficult time indeed in the immediate future. Certainly nothing like the rather smooth sailing projected by Harari’s artificial-intelligence-assisted transition into a robotic super-race. However, instead of accepting at face value what seems to be a biologically-grounded explanation of the past, and of the future, of homo sapiens as a species, what would happen if we quite simply decided to turn this hypothesis on its head, into something radically different?

It may very well turn out that Harari (and perhaps Bohler as well) made the same misinterpretation of biological science as Herbert Spencer made back in the nineteenth century, turning Darwin’s theory of evolution through “natural selection” into a “survival of the fittest” dictum applying to human society as well. Resulting in the foundation of “social Darwinism”, that underlay much of Western imperialism’s disdain for the various non-Western societies that they were turning into colonies and/or neo-colonial satrapies back then, as well as of Nazism’s own 1933-1945 version of racist imperialism. Not to mention the American empire joining forces with dozens of allied military dictatorships, during the Cold War, in the physical elimination of several million communist peasants, throughout the “Third World”  (another historical “detail” that escaped Harari’s attention).

Turning the whole Harari hypothesis upside down would mean that it was the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and neofascism back in the 1970s, and the domination of those two reactionary ideologies since then, that caused such complete misreadings of recent biological science, rather than the other way around. Which could mean that instead of trying to find a biological underpinning for pessimistic interpretations of human history, and the projected need for an artificial replacement for our atavistic species, we should be positing instead an ideological underpinning for why some of today’s biologically-based theories seem to be leading us to “the eve of destruction”. Rather than accepting neoliberalism and neofascism as the only credible ideologies in today’s world, we should maybe be getting back to the reasons why we gave up so easily on much less reactionary modes of thought like democratic socialism back in the 1970s and 1980s.

The very numerous errors of omission contained in Harari’s book, therefore, cannot just be explained by the fact that no one could possibly include everything important that there is to say about humanity in only a little less than 500 pages of text. His chapters on “the scent of money” and “the capitalist creed”, for example, are considerably more developed than his treatment of any of the competing, anti-capitalist creeds, as well as being downright naive, even adolescent, at times. He starts out by providing only the official liberal view on those two related subjects, without delving into any of the very numerous criticisms, and denunciations, of the enormous conceptual weaknesses inherent in that highly biased, pro-capitalist, point of view.

In spite of loving capitalism so much, at least theoretically, Harari is still quite capable of making a causal connection between private investment and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as well as of several other major historical abominations, such as capitalism’s horrible treatment of the European working-class. (Without explaining why he thinks that only the European part of that social class was exploited so drastically, and why the same kind of treatment is not just as obvious nowadays as it was back in the nineteenth century). His naive emphasis on productive, economic growth as the very essence of capitalism fails to account for such recurring fetiches as its periodic fixation on speculative investment instead, leading to a long series of financial crises and economic depressions. Which, by the way, are lurking again, right around the corner, and do not just belong to the not-so-distant past (2008).

For him, the eighteenth-century Mississippi Bubble, for example, was an example of anti-capitalism, and not of capitalism itself at work, presumably because that “joint venture” of private capital and the French state turned out so very badly, causing an enormously destructive panic among investors, as well as as a major setback for the French economy. Resulting in the fact that France totally lost its battle with Great Britain for the control of the entire region that became the USA later on. (Harari did not mention the British retention of the northern part of that region, Canada and Québec, after the American Revolution, in his highly oversimplified analysis.) He also seems to truly believe in such incredible pronouncements as writing (page 356) that dictatorial states are opposed to defending private property (not even in today’s China?) and that “an oil-rich country cursed with a despotic government, endemic warfare and a corrupt judicial system will usually receive a low credit rating” (page 366). Which, to say the least, does not seem to describe very well the current situation in the Middle East.

Harari often denounces private capitalism quite severely, in dozens of different circumstances, such as the 10 million peasants killed off by the British East India company in the Bengal famine of 1769-1773, or the King of Belgium’s elimination of ten million colonial, Congolese subjects in his late nineteenth century rubber plantations. (Many more recent unnatural disasters, such as the 1943 Bengal famine, are completely ignored.) In spite of all that, he nevertheless totally supports Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” dictum in his book, of private vice somehow transmogrifying itself into public good (“egoism equals altruism”). He manages to convince himself through several succeeding chapters that, in spite of everything, capitalism has remained basically a good thing over the past few centuries, even though it has so often been associated with so very many, major, unnatural disasters. In his view, private capitalism, working alongside the “imagined communities” of the modern nation-state, has nevertheless managed to eventually produce good news, at least in recent times, since (according to him) recent statistics prove that humanity nowadays is not nearly as poor as it was in centuries gone by. So far as I can tell, the recent, unprecedented rise in social inequality, on every continent, somehow managed to escape his notice.

Since the only other alternative system he can think of, totalitarian communism, turned out to be a total disaster, resulting in such extremely murderous abominations as China’s “Great Leap Forward” (1959-62), capitalism must therefore be the only real alternative we have left, which means that we have to make do with it, after all. Even consumerism, convincing millions of people to consume goods and services that they do not need in any way whatsoever, and are often quite harmful to them (such as opioids, pornography, prostitution, gambling, video games and all the other contemporary obsessions), is also okay as a system. For no other reason than that at least it proves that people are doing exactly what the capitalist/consumerist system wants them to do, a claim that no other system can apparently make. In other words, successful manipulation of psychologically damaged people is a true sign of success!

Harari can also be quite insensitive toward poor people in many of his different comparisons, as when he ironizes about such middle-class habits as taking a shower every day for reasons of hygiene, that he considers to be a mere fad, a social habit not at all necessary. He seems completely impervious to the fact that upper middle-class people in Israel using a lot of water every day may be contributing to the much reduced consumption of poorer populations, not only within Israel but also in neighbouring countries, that constantly suffer from having his country completely dominate the vast majority of water use in that region.

His treatment of communism is extremely short and dismissive, concentrating exclusively on the totalitarian nature and social engineering experiments of the communist regimes that, in fact, though Harari never mentions it, abandoned the ideal of a classless society completely. Nor does Harari have anything whatever to say about the other, non-communist forms of economic nationalism that have been put into practice over the past few centuries, such as the governments that used the “infant industry” argument to protect their economies from neocolonialism (centred in Britain during the nineteenth century and in the USA in the twentieth century) while they were industrializing their own economies. His treatment of democratic socialism is also practically non-existent, no mean feat for a historian based in a country theoretically founded on democratic-socialist principles, which led even the USSR to support Israel in the beginning. At least before it joined Britain and France in attacking economic-nationalist Egypt, during the Suez canal crisis.

Harari’s congratulatory attitude toward liberal capitalism is particularly upsetting, so far as I am concerned, given the fact that in the rest of his book, he usually avoids the rather pedestrian error of maneuvering around historical controversies, without coming down on any one side, as do most of the other world histories that I have read over the past several decades. Instead, he plunges right into controversy from the very beginning, postulating the existence of a “cognitive revolution” about 70 000 years ago, that seems to have turned our previously uninspiring species of animal into a global killing machine, wiping out all the extremely large mammals that it encountered on its destructive path, over several dozen millennia, out of East Africa into all the other regions of our planet. A point of view that, to say the least, does not jibe very well with the more romantic description provided by many traditional historians, according to which all the world’s “prehistoric” peoples lived in perfect harmony with “Mother Nature” when they were still nomadic, or at least semi-nomadic, hunters and gatherers.

Harari’s coverage of the agricultural revolution (starting about 12000 years ago), as “history’s biggest fraud” since it presumably forced peasants into working much harder than hunters and gatherers had to do, is every bit as controversial as his treatment of “the first cognitive revolution”. As are his interpretations of the scientific revolution (500 years ago), which he thinks was based on the “discovery of ignorance” (that according to him had never before even been considered as a concept), and of the industrial revolution (200 years ago), even more enslaving for workers than the agricultural one was for peasants. So far as Harari is concerned, it was those economic systems that ruined millions of people’s lives, as systems, and not just the landowning aristocrats and the industrial capitalists, as slave-driving individuals exploiting the downtrodden masses. He finishes up his book by postulating the existence of an upcoming “second cognitive revolution”, based largely on the development of artificial intelligence, as part of what he sees as a “permanent revolution”, an idea that he seems to have further developed in his more recent works.

Apparently, Harari has gone on to write extensively about a “useless class” of future unemployables, an expression that recalls the Nazi reference to “useless eaters”, although his solution to that problem, the guaranteed annual income, seems a lot more palatable than anything the Nazis ever did. It will probably, however, be exceedingly difficult to convince the billionaire class to part with even a penny of their eternally-increasing wealth since they, like all the other psychologically dependent seekers of dopamine, will never want to stop pounding over and over again on the pleasure button, for all eternity.

Having myself published several books and articles supporting “universal skepticism” over the past twenty years, I find that by far the most entertaining aspect of Harari’s book is his entirely irreverent, even downright cynical, attitude toward most of the different forms of religion and ideology that have been invented over the past several thousand years. Which is to say, the kind of “imagined communities”, or “imagined orders”, that have been used by the world’s most successful ruling classes, throughout the sedentary part of history (since the agricultural revolution), to keep millions of ordinary peasants and workers under the control of the various different empires that sprang up over the centuries, from the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia (2250 BC) to the American Empire nowadays. (There is, however, no mention in his book of the quite popular contention that Israel also constitutes an empire, currently competing with Iran and Saudi Arabia for control of the entire Middle Eastern region.)

In spite of their entirely non-material nature, the world’s very numerous ideologies, for which Harari means not only spiritual religions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, but also “secular religions” like liberalism, nationalism, humanism (including human rights), communism and Nazism, have all been more than useful in preventing both individuals and masses of people from creating any true forms of intellectual liberty. Not even during any of the world’s various political revolutions, such as the ones that began in the USA in 1775, in France in 1789, in Russia in 1917, or in China in 1949.

His treatment of Nazism is particularly odd, however, since he classifies it as a kind of illiberal humanism, whose extremely inhumane treatment of its victims was based on its contention that human beings have always been engaged in a biological “battle for existence” (social Darwinism), that favoured the “more advanced” peoples, such as Aryans like themselves. According to Harari (page 263), contemporary biology has also proven that they may have been right after all, not so far as genocide is concerned, but at least in the sense of anticipating the current revival in the quest for superhuman powers. A quest in which he himself indulges toward the end of his book, with all his talk about cyborgs and such. I find it strange, however, that in the twenty-first century we no longer seem to be able to rely on history professors, even those hailing from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, to defend us all against Nazi ideology in any coherent way.

Harari himself seems to have succumbed at least in part to this kind of “progressive” thought control, not only through his tendency to support economic liberalism (otherwise known as laissez-faire, or neoliberal capitalism), through the exclusion of all the other possible points of view concerning economic development. But also through his adhesion to a form of “special-seeing” Buddhism. It seems to me that Buddhists fail in becoming successful followers of Siddhartha Gautama not merely by continuing to simultaneously believe in pagan gods, as Harari contends, but also by continuing to believe that they too are capable of attaining nirvana (an end to craving). The “enlightened one” (Buddha) himself only having done so according to Gautama’s own account, that no one else has ever succeeded in verifying, or replicating.

I do however very much agree with yet another aspect of Harari’s thinking, namely his contention that it is almost impossible to expect individual ideas, or ideas belonging only to an intellectual minority, no matter how well thought out they may be, to prevail over culturally implanted ideas. The division of all the world’s people into social classes, for example, at least since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, seems to be an unimpeachable constant in human societies throughout the ages. Even, or perhaps especially, when the very existence of social classes is called into question for purely ideological reasons, such as in today’s prevailing neoliberal order (particularly well-ensconced in the Western group of countries). Curiously enough, Harari seems to be able to support such very particular points of view, while still simultaneously pretending that he is being entirely neutral toward all points of view. Quite a mean feat, when you really think about it.

Once again, I do not agree at all with his overly optimistic attitude toward the very numerous problems affecting today’s world. In my view, most people living nowadays seem to be almost entirely controlled by two prevailing ideologies, neoliberalism and neofascism, which in many (if not most) countries seem to operate in tandem. So far as I am concerned, this observation applies to Islamic fundamentalist nations (Saudi Arabia, Iran, etc.) as well as to sub-national movements like Hamas, Hezbollah and the so-called Islamic State. But it also applies to a wide variety of other governments and movements, also heavily influenced by other kinds of religious fundamentalism and ethnic isolationism, such as the Trump regime in the USA, Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Modi’s India, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Orban’s Hungary, Netanyahu’s Israel, and dozens of other such regimes, all over the world. The first example of this kind of joint neoliberalism and neofascism having been the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile (1973-1990), which was after all founded over forty years before the English version of Harari’s book came out, and still has an extremely powerful influence on that unfortunate country even nowadays.

The world that we are living in right now desperately needs a much more advanced system of international cooperation than anything that has so far existed, to deal not only with the horrendous ecological crisis, but also with the ever-widening proliferation of nuclear weapons all over the world. Not to mention the ever-growing rate of resistance to antibiotics among the world’s very numerous “superbugs” (see the article written by Canadian scientists Steven Hoffman and Charu Kauschic, that was published in “The Montreal Gazette” on November 20, 2019.) The nerve-wracking problem of superbugs, largely caused by the unnecessary overuse of antibiotics, is also being compounded in today’s world by the increased proliferation of religious fundamentalism, one of the major contributors to an enormous recent decline in “herd immunity”. These problems, along with unprecedented inequality between the social classes, and increasing intolerance of women’s liberation as well as of hundreds of ethnic minorities all over the world, cannot possibly be addressed in any real way without the development of some kind of world-wide cooperative organization of truly sovereign states that would not just be run by the same imperial powers that currently dominate the United Nations.

The communist international no longer exists, nor does the socialist international in any real sense. Everyone nowadays therefore acquaints internationalism with domination by enormous, neoliberal, multinational corporations, operating out of those same imperial nations, combining private capitalism with state capitalism. Harari’s book, theoretically focused on describing the past in a completely scientific (non-ideological) way, instead plays up exactly the kind of ideological blinders that prevent humanity from surviving much longer. Thereby paving the way, so far as he is concerned, for its replacement by a trans-human transition to a new race of super-intelligent robots. Harari’s history of “Sapiens”, therefore, reads more like a funeral oration than as a panegyric. It also seems to give credence to Bohler’s equally depressing theory about the striatum managing to win out over the cortex in the long run.