I am aware that a Jewish refugee fleeing German Nazism or Russian despotism to Britain or America would think differently: many intellectuals with such ordeals in their past gave Anglo-American liberalism its robust self-definitions during the Cold War. But the Cold War, it is now clear, was also a time of intellectual myopia, when, as the conservative American thinker Allan Bloom pointed out, ‘the threat from outside disciplined us inside while protecting us from too much depressing reflection on ourselves’.
Anglo-America made the modern world in the sense that the forces it helped to disseminate – technology, economic organization and science – are still overwhelming millions of lives. A particular ‘experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils’ that the critic Marshall Berman called modernity has become universal, cutting ‘across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology’. This is also why Anglo-American achievements cannot be seen in isolation from their ambiguous consequences and victims elsewhere; why many Anglo-American assumptions, derived from a unique and unrepeatable historical experience, are an unreliable guide to today’s chaos, especially as it infects Anglo-America.
Pointing this out might offend the fierce partisans of nation or civilization – the people who bring sectarian passions into the life of the mind, and present their own side as superior and blameless. But a curious and sceptical sensibility would recognize that to stake one’s position on national or civilizational superiority, or turn the accident of birth into a source of pride, is intellectually sterile. It would also understand why seemingly discordant and peripheral voices have a greater chance of being heard today.
After a long, uneasy equipoise since 1945, the old West-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder. Anglo-America no longer confidently produces, as it did for two centuries, the surplus of global history; and the people it once dominated now chafe against the norms and valuations produced by that history. Some of the most acrimonious debates today occur between people whose lives are marked by the Atlantic West’s still largely unacknowledged history of violence, and those who see it as the apotheosis of liberal modernity: the region that since the Enlightenment has made the crucial breakthroughs in science, philosophy, art and literature, and made possible the emancipation of the individual from custom and tradition.
As a stepchild of the West, I feel sympathetic to both sides of the debate. I know that the divergent experiences invoked by the polemical representatives of East and West – loss and fulfilment, deprivation and plenitude – can coexist within the same person. Human identity, frequently seen as fixed and singular, is always manifold and self-conflicted. It is also why I emphasize the subjective experience, and the contradictory notions of selfhood, in the pages that follow, and rely more on novelists and poets than historians and sociologists.
Materialist analyses that invoke the abstractions of nation and capital, chart the movement of goods, the drastic change in climate systems, and the growth of inequality through the techniques of statistics, quantitative sociology and historicism will remain indispensable. But our unit of analysis should also be the irreducible human being, her or his fears, desires and resentments. It is in the unstable relationship between the inner and public selves that one can start to take a more precise measure of today’s global civil war.
2. Clearing a Space: History’s Winners and Their Illusions
My times – my wild beast,
Who will dare to look into your eyes
And to weld with his blood
The severed vertebrae of two centuries?
But your spine has been smashed forever,
My beautiful, pitiful age,
And grimacing dumbly
You now look back, feebly,
A beast once supple and lithe,
At the tracks left by your paws.
Osip Mandelstam, ‘My Age, My Beast’ (1918)
Our Way on the Highway of Progress
In 1992, a year after the Soviet Union imploded, The Economist editorialized ‘that there was no serious alternative to free-market capitalism as the way to organize economic life’. Today, however, the early post-Cold War consensus – that a global capitalist economy would alleviate ethnic and religious differences and usher in worldwide prosperity and peace – lies in tatters. The era of ‘free-market triumphalism’, The Economist now admits, ‘has come to a juddering halt’. But no plausible alternatives of political and economic organization are in sight.
Routine massacres in Western metropolises accompany spiralling wars in Asia and Africa, and civil liberties are consumed by perpetual warfare against real and imagined enemies. In the face of unintelligible disasters, feelings and hunches seem more reliable – the suspicion, for instance, that things cannot go on this way, and that old practices and institutions are failing to conform to new realities.
The first step in understanding them is to dismantle the conceptual and intellectual architecture of history’s winners in the West: the simple-minded and dangerously misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from a triumphalist history of Anglo-American achievements that has long shaped the speeches of statesmen, think-tank reports, technocratic surveys, newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless columnists, TV pundits and so-called terrorism experts.
At the height of the Cold War, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr mocked such ‘bland fanatics of Western civilization’, ‘who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence’. Embedded in the West’s major institutions for over half a century, the bland fanatics have held fast to a fundamentalist creed, obscuring our view of a complex changing world: the belief that Anglo-American institutions of the nation state and liberal democracy will be gradually generalized around the world; the aspiring middle classes created by industrial capitalism will bring about accountable, representative and stable governments; religion would give way to secularism; rational human beings would defeat the forces of irrationalism – that every society, in short, is destined to evolve just as a handful of countries in the West sometimes did.
This religion of universal progress has had many presumptive popes and encyclicals: from the nineteenth-century dream championed by The Economist, in which capital, goods, jobs and people freely circulate, to Henry Luce’s proclamation of an ‘American century’ of free trade, and ‘Modernization Theory’, which proclaimed a ‘great world revolution in human aspirations and economic development’.