Billions of the world’s poorest are locked into a Social Darwinist nightmare. But even in advanced democracies a managerial form of politics and neo-liberal economics has torn up the social contract. In the regime of privatization, commodification, deregulation and militarization it is barely possible to speak without inviting sarcasm about those qualities that distinguish humans from other predatory animals – trust, co-operation, community, dialogue and solidarity.
In our state of worldwide emergency, extrajudicial murder, torture and secret detentions no longer provoke widespread condemnation, disgust and shame. Popular culture as well as state policy has made them seem normal. The educated middle classes, long hailed as the transmitter of democratic values, are haunted by fears of social redundancy. Their anxiety combined with the rage of the dispossessed and the also-rans, and the indifference, bordering on contempt, of the plutocracy, make for an everyday culture of cruelty and heartlessness.
Endemic war and persecution have rendered an unprecedented sixty million people homeless. Endless misery provokes many desperate Latin Americans, Asians and Africans to make the risky journey to what they see as the centre of successful modernity. Yet more and more individuals and groups – from African-Americans in American cities, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, Muslims in India and Myanmar, to African and Middle Eastern refugees in European camps and asylum-seekers imprisoned on remote Pacific Islands – are now seen as superfluous.
Forcibly confined to zones of abandonment, containment, surveillance and incarceration, this class of the excluded performs yeoman service as the feared ‘others’ in unequal societies. They are both scapegoats for the race-and class-based anxieties of many insecure individuals and the raison d’être of a growing industry of violence.
In general, there has been an exponential rise in tribalist hatred of minorities, the main pathology of scapegoating released by political and economic shocks, even as the world is knit more closely by globalization. Whether in the screeds of angry white men, or the edicts of vengeful Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist and Jewish chauvinists, we encounter a pitiless machismo, which does not appease or seek to understand, let alone shed tears of sympathy over, the plight of weaker peoples. These must now submit, often at pain of death, expulsion and ostracism, to the core ideals of the tribe dictated by the history of its religion and territory.
Our sense of impending doom today is quickened by the premonition that it won’t be caused exclusively by selfish politicians and businessmen, illiberal, manipulable masses, or brutal terrorists. In our state of negative solidarity, ‘universal ruin’, as Baudelaire warned, has become ‘apparent in the baseness of our hearts’.
This is why it is no longer sufficient to ask ‘Why do they hate us?’ or blame political turpitude, financial malfeasance and the media. The global civil war is also a deeply intimate event; its Maginot Line runs through individual hearts and souls. We need to examine our own role in the culture that stokes unappeasable vanity and shallow narcissism. We not only need to interpret, in order to make the future less grim, a world bereft of moral certitudes and metaphysical guarantees. Above all, we need to reflect more penetratingly on our complicity in everyday forms of violence and dispossession, and our callousness before the spectacle of suffering.
The Wars in the Inner World
Behind the private and state-sanctioned cults of violence and authoritarianism today, and the grisly cycle of bombings and beheadings, there are even grimmer signs of worldwide ressentiment. McVeigh, brought up on American notions of individual freedom bereft of any religious belief, felt this humiliation acutely. But there are many more men like him in the world, especially in ‘emerging economies’, their number expanded by the mass disillusion, anger and disorientation caused by an increasingly unequal and unstable economy.
The quotient of frustration tends to be highest in countries with a large population of educated young men. A quarter of the world’s largely urban population – some 1.8 billion – is between the age of fifteen and thirty. The number of superfluous young people condemned to the anteroom of the modern world, an expanded Calais in its squalor and hopelessness, has grown exponentially in recent decades, especially in the youthful societies of Asia and Africa.
Extremist organizations find easy recruits among unemployed and unemployable youth – globally, those who fight in wars or commit violent crimes are, as usual, nearly all young men. They have undergone multiple shocks and displacements in their transition to modernity and yet find themselves unable to fulfil the promise of self-empowerment. For many of these Bazarovs and Rudins the contradiction between extravagant promise and meagre means has become intolerable.
Since 1989 the energies of postcolonial idealism have faded together with socialism as an economic and moral alternative. The unfettered globalization of capital annexed more parts of the world into a uniform pattern of desire and consumption. In the neo-liberal fantasy of individualism, everyone was supposed to be an entrepreneur, retraining and repackaging himself or herself in a dynamic economy, perpetually alert to the latter’s technological revolutions.
A heightened rhetoric of self-empowerment accompanied, for instance, the IT revolution, as young graduates and dropouts became billionaires overnight in the Bay Area, and users of Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp briefly appeared to be toppling authoritarian regimes worldwide. But the drivers of Uber cars, toiling for abysmally low fares, represent the actual fate of many self-employed ‘entrepreneurs’.
Capital continually moves across national boundaries in the search for profit, contemptuously sweeping skills and norms made obsolete by technology into the dustbin of history. We may pretend to be entrepreneurs, polishing our personal brands, decorating our stalls in virtual as well as real marketplaces; but defeat, humiliation and resentment are more commonplace experiences than success and contentment in the strenuous endeavour of franchising the individual self.
Katherine Boo in Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) sees through the cliché that Mumbai is ‘a hive of hope and ambition’ to a more disturbing fact:
Mumbai was a place of festering grievance and ambient envy. Was there a soul in this enriching, unequal city who didn’t blame his dissatisfaction on someone else? Wealthy citizens accused the slum-dwellers of making the city filthy and unliveable, even as an oversupply of human capital kept the wages of their maids and chauffeurs low. Slum-dwellers complained about the obstacles the powerful erected to prevent them from sharing in new profit. Everyone, everywhere, complained about their neighbours.