Being politically correct is becoming more and more difficult

Hundreds of millions of people all over the world now know about Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish environmental activist, who recently addressed the United Nations Climate Action Summit in New York and also participated in a huge protest march just a few days ago, right here in Montréal. To get to New York, she refused to take a plane and decided to cross the ocean on a racing yacht instead, in order to reduce her own personal contribution to atmospheric pollution. Her message, that the world’s most important decision-makers nowadays are much more interested in making huge piles of money than in doing anything real about climate change, ought to be supported by anyone still capable of differentiating between individual wish-fulfillment and objective reality.

Here in the Kingdom of Canada (section Québec), we are in currently in the middle of a federal election campaign, in which the only two political parties that have ever governed the Canadian Confederation, since it was originally set up back in 1867, are both severely lacking in ecological conviction. The currently ruling Liberal Party talks a lot about reducing Canada’s role as one of the largest per capita contributors to pollution, increasingly exacerbated by oil-sands production in the province of Alberta, and has attempted to introduce a small carbon tax. But it nevertheless supports oil pipeline construction in a major way, having bought one recently for several billion dollars, in order to complete its construction. After the private American corporation that started building it decided that there was too much popular opposition to the project for them to make any real money off of it. (Except from the Canadian government.)

While the Conservative Party, much more popular in Alberta than in any of the other provinces, is even more obsessed with increasing fossil-fuel production, rather than reducing it, and is running on a political platform that does not include any significant climate protection promises at all. If returned to power, that they already enjoyed as recently as 2006-2015, they have also promised to do away with the carbon tax altogether. In other words, the Conservatives have taken a much more atavistic outlook than the Liberals have, toward what certainly seems to have become the world’s most important political objective. Although one could argue that  their very limited promises are much closer to their real, business-as-usual point of view than the Liberal promises really are.

People all over the world who enthusiastically support the movement against all the different kinds of pollution currently threatening our collective future are much less reactionary and antediluvian than are the climate skeptics and the laissez-faire politicians. At least the anti-pollution people are trying their best to move the world in the right direction, advocating severe cuts in the use of fossil fuels, as well as in the use of many other kinds of harmful products (such as micro-plastics) constantly being added to the toxic soup by short-sighted neoliberal fixation on quarter-year profit maximization. Nevertheless, political correctness, which in this case means moving away from neoliberalism and doing the right thing about climate change instead, is not an easily-achieved objective.

Even when someone like Thunberg attempts to reduce her own personal contribution to pollution, the results are not terribly convincing. A private yacht crossing the Atlantic Ocean, for example, even when it is extremely well-equipped with the latest energy-saving equipment, is not at all carbon neutral. It is in fact impossible for anyone to possess any large modern piece of machinery like an ocean-going yacht, or even a private automobile, without almost every individual component involved having emerged from some kind of massive, pollution-producing, industrial process.

Which unfortunately includes all the fuel sources available these days, not only fossil fuels (by far the most important producer of greenhouse gasses), but also wind and solar power, as well as hydrogen and hydroelectricity. The same thing goes for any piece of modern communications equipment, like a computer or a smartphone, and almost everything else in regular use on this planet nowadays. Rebooting every part of the modern, globally-integrated, economy, in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, and in every country, during the same extremely limited period of time (ten years to turn everything around!), is not going to be an easy thing to do. Not by a very long shot.

Still, getting several million people all over the world, especially young people, to demonstrate against massive pollution of our air, our water and our soil, is a laudable objective in and of itself. The goal being to convince every one of the world’s governments (international, national, regional and local governments), as well as every one of the world’s private corporations and investment funds (which are often much more powerful than most governments), to fully participate in bringing an end to life-threatening pollution. Especially the most dangerous kinds of pollution but also all the other kinds as well. Everyone participating in this objective, however, has to realize at the outset that pulling this off, before it is too late, constitutes the most difficult objective ever undertaken by human beings, particularly since it has to succeed in such a short time period.

It is incredibly difficult not only for technical reasons, but also because for the past forty years at least, almost all decision-making, all over the world, has been totally dominated by a completely contradictory, ideological agenda, based on purely short-term profit-making, designed exclusively to satisfy “shareholder rights”. Ever since all the socialist and communist movements fell apart completely, in the 1970s and the 1980s, economic “externalities”, such as climate change, enormous social inequality, unprecedented economic instability and extremely dangerous geopolitical confrontations, have all been deliberately ignored, almost everywhere, by every major public or private investor. Even nationalized public utilities, like Hydro-Québec, have been forced to operate as if their only goal were to make a profit for their owners.

Montréal is also quite an unlikely city, after all, to have hosted what seems to have been the largest anti-climate-change protest march in the entire world. In spite of the huge numbers of people who participated in that demonstration, it is nevertheless also true that most of the people living in the greater Montréal area are quite conservative, even more so than in some other large cities. At the present time, most of them would certainly not support any radical changes in our ecosystem that involved a massive reduction in their own capacity (for example) to move around freely. Such freedom of movement, given the state of our seriously underdeveloped public transportation system, still necessarily means doing so most of the time, as now, in cars with only one or two people in them at any given time. Walking and cycling are not often terribly viable alternatives.

Developers in Montréal are also just as reactionary as developers in any other large city, as are our very own slum landlords. I verified this for myself the other day when I decided to re-visit Île Sainte-Hélène, part of a public park in the middle of the Saint Lawrence River, near downtown Montréal. For the first time since the previous municipal administration authorized the construction of a huge, fake-Chinese village next to the subway station over there. Which is billed by its promoters, owned by the Montréal Canadians hockey team, as a giant sound-and-light show for pop music to be performed at night. One thousand trees were cut down to allow this project to go ahead, over the objections of hundreds of homeowners on the nearby South Shore, who are regularly forced to give up their sleep time to help entertain the fans. Curiously enough, most of the musicians involved probably support the objectives of the anti-climate-change demonstrators, but not to the extent of refusing to condone backward development.

The area I visited is also right across the other side of the river from Griffintown, a sort of southwestern extension of the extremely built-up downtown area, that used to be full of working-class houses. All that housing has now been replaced with dozens of newer buildings, some of which are just as tall as the ones in the downtown core. True to their nature, the developers of that area concentrated on building mostly luxury condos, often purchased by absentee landowners for speculative purposes, as well as a few more office towers, deliberately deciding not to include any much less profitable infrastructure, such as schools, public parks and social housing. The same attitude was also taken by all the other developers in the greater Montréal region, none of whom have given any indication of wanting to change their approach even on the current projects on which they are now working. None of those people seem the least bit interested in going along with any of the proposals supported by the marchers in the climate-change demonstration, even after the recently-elected, relatively progressive city administration, decided to support those proposals as much as they possibly can, given the much-reduced role assigned to governments these days.

We also have to avoid going overboard on this issue, to guard against over-subscribing to the delirious misinterpretations of reality coming from the dark side of the ecology movement. Some of the more extreme partisans in that movement seem to have given up on human beings altogether, not so secretly hoping that climate change will eventually eliminate people altogether (including themselves). Which they seem to think is the only sure-fire way of preserving what is left of the natural environment on this planet, for the benefit of all the innocent plant and animal species that are currently being wiped out by massive human over-consumption. Eco-fascism is most definitely a “thing” and has been around in fact for quite a long time. So as more and more people become convinced, like the ones in Montréal, about the imminence of the climate change threat, we have to guard against an additional mental-health problem centring on ecological delirium. Keeping it all rational and scientific is the only way that we can attempt to deal with this enormous problem without going down the toilet with it.

But it is not just in the fight against climate change that political correctness has become an increasingly difficult stance to maintain. Dozens of other major political objectives in this world are every bit as controversial as climate change, at least from the point of view of political rectitude, which theoretically seeks to eliminate every form of disgusting behaviour (both neoliberal and neofascist) that currently exists. Nuclear war is also just as much a “clear and present danger” as is climate change, given the ever-increasing number of unstable political regimes currently in power. Not only in Donald Trump’s USA (notice that the initials DT also refer to “delirium tremens”), but also in places like Pakistan. The prime minister of that much beleaguered country, Imran Khan, warned just a few days ago about the imminent danger of nuclear war with India, over the Kashmiri situation. It is also just as possible to get delirious about nuclear annihilation as it is to go insane over climate change, but simply ignoring the possibility of a nuclear exchange altogether is certainly not a more viable option. Not only for human beings but also for all the plants and animals that we were talking about earlier.

Another example of political correctness gone delirious, that is very much in the news right now, also has to do with the increasingly mentally-unstable president of the USA. To wit, Donald Trump’s sickening attempt to blackmail the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, into launching an inquiry into Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s alleged links to corruption in that country. Through his son Hunter’s involvement with a Ukrainian company whose activities were denounced as part of a local corruption scandal. The quid pro quo for Trump being the temporary suspension of several hundred million dollars worth of promised US military aid, designed to help Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression in the southern and eastern parts of its territory. (Why does Vladimir Putin seem to be, once again, the only foreign leader supporting DT on this issue as well?)

Which of course led to the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives decision to launch an inquiry with the intent of impeaching the USA’s extremely unconstitutional president. This kind of political correctness looks perfectly legitimate at first glance, because every one of Trump’s actions since he became a presidential candidate himself three years ago point in exactly the same direction, namely that he has always tried to bully every one of his opponents into complete submission, all over the world, as if he were some kind of mafia chieftain. In the process, he has also deliberately ignored just about every moral principle (separation of powers, involving foreign countries in US elections, accepting emoluments, etc.) enunciated in the entire US constitution, on dozens of different occasions.

Nevertheless, where the political correctness of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry threatens to break down ideologically lies in the fact that ever since its founding back in 1840, the more “moderate” or “mainstream” elements in the Democratic Party have always been associated with corruption themselves, in hundreds of different scandals that have broken out over the years. In fact, the Democratic Party has long had much the same negative track record on corruption as have most of the leading stalwarts of the Republican Party, ever since its own founding back in 1856.

In recent times, however, following the 1980 presidential campaign that elected Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has pulled significantly ahead of its Democratic counterpart in the championing of corruption. Through its eager endorsement of neoliberalism, deliberately downgrading government’s overall role in the economy and society in general (specifically including the fight against pollution), to the enormously profitable benefit of the billionaire class. Resulting several decades later in the ultra-corrupt government of Donald Trump, a real-estate, casino and “reality” show billionaire, essentially cutting out the political middleman in the USA by dominating the entire country directly as president, rather than (as well as) dominating just a part of it as a major, tax-evading tycoon.

In spite of all that, the 63 million ultra-foolish US citizens who voted for Trump because he demagogically promised to “drain the swamp” of federal politics, still have a point when it comes to Democratic adversaries like Joe Biden. It is not a very big stretch of the popular imagination to suppose that old-fashioned VIPs like Biden might indeed be personally profiting from such events as the young Biden’s business ventures in the Ukraine, as well as from the older Biden’s position as a leading federal politician. Especially given his stint as vice-president from 2009 to 2017, in Democratic administrations that often supported neoliberal legislation as well, although not quite as often as the Republican big-shots did back then.

I have not yet read anything to indicate that either the older or the younger Biden broke any US laws in this particular instance, nor do I expect to read about something like that in the future, because it sounds very much like Trump made the whole thing up. Nevertheless, everything in Joe Biden’s political career points to a person who is as close to ultra-elitist Big Business as any Democratic politician can be. Without crossing the line, however, to the extent that Donald Trump has done from the very beginning, his own business investments profiting very directly every day from the commanding heights of his position as “POTUS”. No one in the USA could possibly be more corrupt than this particular jackass. A fact that does not, however, absolve Joe Biden, or any other mainstream Democrat, from legitimate suspicion in his (or her) own right. People who realize just how laughably corrupt the Trump Republicans have all become are still entirely justified in refusing to accept the Democrats’ attempt to portray themselves as paragons of virtue, when it comes to protecting lower and middle-income citizens from the forty-year-old, libertarian, “open conspiracy” designed to turn the entire country, and the entire world if possible, over to the ultra-rich.

The financial pages in the media are also full these days with dire predictions concerning world economic instability caused by the same kind of absurd over-consumption, with no real money available to support such a thing, that led to the “Great Recession” of 2008. Back then, it was focused on selling millions of houses, all over the world, to millions of people much too poor to pay for their mortgages, whereas nowadays it seems to be concentrated on truly incredible levels of credit-card and student-loan debt, in many different countries once again. Not to mention the fantastically ridiculous, extremely volatile, bitcoin schemes, that also require massive over-consumption of electricity supplies to make them functional. Including Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s exceedingly dangerous proposal for a new kind of libra money, as well as his increasingly delusional attempts to ward off increasing regulatory pressure, from many different quarters, to break his enormous company up into several different pieces. Any criticism of  Zuckerberg over this kind of thing, however, also applies to all the other near-monopoly billionaires in this world, not only in the USA, but also in China (the Alibaba conglomerate, for example) and in many other countries.

All of which is now inciting many financial observers to wonder just how long this kind of thing can continue, before provoking a much more important crash than the 2008 debacle. Especially given the fact that the world’s most important central banks no longer seem to have any wriggle room left over to contain such an event a second time around. The overstated forms of political correctness in this particular case coming from all those pundits in the same financial media who are always pooh-poohing their colleagues’ dire warnings, on the delirious grounds that lightning, after all, does not strike twice in the same place. (Actually, it does, quite often.)

Yet another well-known example of political correctness gone awry, in many different parts of the world, is the attempt that millions of people seem to be making, especially in the Western countries, to accommodate some of the less obviously destructive characteristics of the Muslim fundamentalist movement, which often uses terrorist tactics to meet its goals. Like in Québec, where thousands of naive supporters of political correctness are still firmly opposed to the new provincial law banning the wearing of religious symbols by civil servants deemed to be in positions of authority. These appeasers have gone so far as to change their own definitions of what feminism is all about, in order to cave into the demands of the hijab-wearing anti-feminists belonging to the ultra-right-wing populist, Islamist movement. In reality, Islamic extremism is just another, oriental manifestation of pro-nazi ideology, that is every bit as reactionary and antediluvian as is white supremacy. The self-mortifying appeasers in Québec, and in many other Western countries, are simply supporting one kind of neofascism against another kind, adopting a completely head-in-the-sand attitude according to which only people of Western origin are capable of doing evil.

This kind of identification with the aggressor reminds me very much of a video that I watched recently, depicting the extreme left-wing ideology of political correctness gone utterly insane, in a school called Evergreen College in the state of Washington (USA). White people working for that college, as well as many of the students themselves, were forced to go through political indoctrination sessions worthy of the Maoist Red Guards during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China. In which all white people were deemed to be guilty at birth of supporting “white privilege” just because of the colour of their skin. And in which it was explicitly claimed, on dozens of occasions, that only white people can ever be racist. Professors opposed to this neofascist theory were surrounded by crowds of ultra-left students berating them over and over again, constantly chanting for them to resign.

In the real world, of course, racism is not at all confined to the white-supremacist variety. Nor are white people in the USA always rich and privileged, more than half of them being considered “poor white trash” instead. Anyone living in the state of Washington should also know that one hundred years ago, most of the almost entirely white population in that state back then were also exceptionally poor. Which is why Washington state was one of the main recruiting grounds for the ultra-socialist Industrial Workers of the World. Agreeing with the idea that all white people are privileged, and always have been privileged, seems to indicate that the “ultra-leftist” radicals at the Evergreen college are taking their cues from the German Nazi regime of days gone by, believing that white “Aryans” have always dominated the entire world. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. There are hundreds of millions of poor white people in this world, as there have been in the past, just as there are even more hundreds of millions of poor people possessing various other skin colours.

Not to mention the fact that anyone at all who keeps up with the international news nowadays, even minimally, will have heard over and over again about Chinese racism in Africa, or about South African black people rioting over the presence in their midst of “job-stealing” immigrants from other African countries, or about Sri Lankan Buddhist racism against the Tamil (Hindu) population, or about Burmese buddhist racism against the Rohingya (Muslim) minority, or about anti-indigenous racism being practised regularly all over Latin America, as well as in such “whiter” places as North America, Australia and the Russian Federation. “Even” inside the USA, white racism is most definitely not the only kind of racism currently being practised in every part of that country. People who refuse to recognize that racism is a universal scourge all over the world, practised all throughout history, are just going berserk. This whole thing is completely unreal and is just another example of the delirium mentioned earlier.

Only a few days ago, I also read another article (“Interculturalism versus multiculturalism”), published in the “Montreal Gazette” (October 1, 2019), in which the author, Rahul Varma, specifically denounced something called “majoritarianism”, which seems to refer to rule by the majority of the population. It seems that any majority coming from any kind of demographically dominant population (ethnic, cultural, religious, etc.), anywhere in the world, necessarily commits the sin of “hierarchy” whenever they make any decision at all that could even theoretically be challenged by any kind of minority population. On the grounds that any kind of minority whatsoever would necessarily feel “marginalized”, “disempowered” and suffering from “second-class citizenship”, in any situation in which each and every minority point of view was not equal to each and every majority point of view. Which is an impossible goal, even on the face of it, there being a very large number of different kinds of minorities, in every country in the world, none of which can be expected to agree with every other minority, let alone every majority.

A recent case in point being the ongoing discussion all over Canada about the very poor treatment of indigenous peoples, particularly when they come before the courts. Which led to the development of the “Gladue reports” often used in bail and pre-sentencing hearings, so that judges would not be overly harsh any more, as they often have been in the past, toward such people as indigenous men convicted of committing violent crimes against indigenous women. No one seems to have noticed, however, that whenever an indigenous man gets a reduced sentence (less than what a white man would get in similar circumstances) for having viciously attacked an indigenous woman, the woman ends up being twice victimized, not only by the majority society that mistreated the man, but also by the violent man involved. A situation that seems to parallel the equally deplorable situation in which any woman (of any ethnic origin) finds herself, whenever she is initially victimized by any man who committed some particular sexual crime against her, and again by the surrounding society whenever it decides, as so often happens, to dismiss, or to downplay, her complaint because of a similar, pro-male prejudice.

In “The Gazette” piece, Rahul Varma even went so far as to claim that multicultural Canada was doing the right thing by refusing to be “majoritarian”, while intercultural Québec was not! Which would probably come as a complete surprise to most (or all) of the Canadian minorities, such as any of the indigenous peoples living within its borders, not to mention any of the francophone minorities living in any of the nine anglophone-majority provinces, or the three northern territories. Even the francophone majority in Québec is, after all, just a larger part of the overall francophone minority in Canada (23% of the total population). It is absolutely amazing nowadays just how incredibly foolish, and downright delirious, some of the practitioners of political rectitude have recently become.

Another very interesting example of political correctness gone awry, in a radically different context, is the ongoing debate between the supporters and the enemies of Israel. In that particular debate, people on the Israeli side choose to focus their vitriol exclusively against the mostly-Muslim terrorists operating in that particular theatre of war, whether it be the Hamas organization in Gaza, the Hezbollah organization based in Lebanon, or the Iranian revolutionary guards supposedly controlling those other movements. Their adversaries, however, choose to focus all of their vitriol exclusively against “the Zionist entity” that they  regularly accuse of practising state terrorism and attempted genocide.

Applying the reality principle to that debate, however, does not mean taking a fake-compromise position by blaming both sides equally. It is after all Israel that is the main aggressor in this case, gradually taking over more and more territory that used to be occupied during the colonial period by the Palestinian people. (Who, according to some Israeli historians, may very well be the converted descendants of most of the original Jewish population that used to live in that same region thousands of years ago.) Since its inception in 1948, modern Israel has also managed to maintain a “comfortable” kill ratio of about twenty to one against its regional adversaries, with the help of such extremely well-armed foreign allies as the “Christian Zionists” in the USA.

Opponents of Israel, however, cannot just unthinkingly condone whatever military actions that non-state organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah take against their common enemy. Firing totally un-targeted rockets randomly into Israeli territory is not, after all, a morally neutral method of attack, even if it is considerably less “efficient” than the much more deadly Israeli government counter-attacks. Simply by the force of numbers, the people in Israel being killed by Hamas and Hezbollah are much more likely to be ordinary Israeli civilians than they are to be Israeli soldiers, or Israeli leaders. Not to mention the fact that the victims of those rockets could also include Israeli pacifists, as well as members of Israel’s Arab minority.

To be sure, bombing people from the air, like both Israel and its Western allies often do, is considerably worse. Even Barack Obama’s military drones aimed specifically at pro-terrorist targets in many different parts of the Muslim world ended up killing many more civilians than they did genuine “bad guys”. Identification with the aggressor is not a very comfortable ideological position to adopt, from a moral standpoint, not only in the Middle East but also in every other part of the world in which non-state terrorism has been pitted, over the years, against state terrorism. Which even includes such relatively less well-known events as the Canadian government’s war with the FLQ terrorists in Québec fifty years ago.

Identification with the aggressor also seems to have overtaken politically-correct people operating in numerous other recent situations. Such as the two female lawyers in the USA who apparently helped big-time (and thoroughly corrupt) financier Jeffrey Epstein get away with some of the rape and sexual aggression charges that he faced over the years, especially from underage girls, before his tragic suicide in a prison cell.

Still another example would be many of the different supporters of anarchism, all over the world, who claim that they are trying to fight against evil behaviour through their opposition to any form of government, or state control, over ordinary people’s lives. Many of those anarchists, however, are also libertarians, which means that they are not nearly so eager to condemn the machinations of large private corporations over the same common folk. Even nowadays when “private enterprise”, in many different parts of the world, is trying to control the thoughts and the spending habits of all the less rich and less powerful people in the world, even more than most governments are. With the possible exception of the People’s Republic of China, where current leader Xi Jinping, seen bowing three times recently over the grave of Mao Ze dong, is also the same leader who not so long ago adopted Mao’s own particular delirium of requiring everyone in China to follow his every train of thought, “for the good of the country, and the world”.

These sometimes wildly different examples of political rectitude gone rogue all seem to have at least one thing in common, which is the increasing difficulty millions of people have when trying to react rationally to all the enormous challenges of living in today’s increasingly dangerous world. Flying off the handle in so many different ways is making it even harder to deal with any of these problems, as well as the ever-increasing tendency for all these competing kinds of crises (industrial pollution, enormous social inequality, ever-worsening geopolitical confrontations, ever-increasing economic instability and thought control) to reinforce each other as they unfold together. We need to develop some kind of considered approach to all of these peculiar, post-modern situations if we are to have any hope whatever of resolving any of these crises (or all of them together, if need be) before it is too late.

A much more intelligent response than delirium to any of these different kinds of situations (or all of them at once) would be for everyone making political statements to resolutely avoid overstating one’s case, from an ultra-right as well as from an ultra-left point of view. Not, however, as I pointed out just now regarding Israel’s position in the Middle East, by adopting a ridiculously inappropriate  “compromise solution” to every possible ideological conflict. It is not by avoiding what mainstream, middle-of-the-road politicians mistakenly refer to as a “radical” or an “extremist” point of view, which in their deliberate misinterpretation means any analysis of any political situation that comes too close to genuinely criticizing, or even regularly denouncing, any of their favourite billionaires or rogue governments. It is not some individual’s or group’s position on the left-centre-right yardstick in any particular country that should determine one’s attitude toward the situations in which those people find themselves.

What is important instead is to avoid outrageous over-estimation of any critical characteristic in any given political situation, while at the same time also avoiding equally inaccurate under-estimation of reality, in order to favour some previously-chosen point of view. In other words, to avoid prejudice as much as humanly possible, and to arrive at some particular conclusion concerning some particular situation from the standpoint of a universal-humanist ethic. An ethic that does not discriminate against, or in favour of, any particular empire, country, region, majority or minority culture, religion, social class, or gender, by putting the genuine (and not just the self-perceived) interests of human beings as a whole to the forefront, or at least the greatest possible number of human beings under consideration at any one given time. Which is obviously a very difficult thing to do properly. But for which I submit all the great variety of examples mentioned in this blogpost so as to illustrate my point. Anyone reading my blog has probably already figured out that I am very much an "equal opportunity denouncer" of wrongdoing.

The only kind of political correctness that is acceptable nowadays ought to be the kind that is as close as possible to an objective estimation of the relative importance of all the real, verifiable facts that are currently available to us. Which cannot be merely made up as we go along, like the “fake-news” ramblings of a professional demagogue like Donald Trump, who seems himself to be the most delirious, unreal personality currently alive on this God-forsaken planet. In other words, could everyone just try a little harder to use their brains more often, and to avoid trying to out-Trump the Donald himself, as often as possible? Thank you very much.

The end of planetary civilization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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