Fighting for Survival: Whither Modern Civilization?
By Amir NOUR
(1)
A red alert in an age of fear, anger and
extremes
July 07, 2018 "Information
Clearing House"
-
In anticipation of its 2018 edition, the
well-regarded Munich Security Conference
issued a report which aimed to serve as a
useful compilation for an impressive
gathering of over 300 decision makers and
security professionals coming from all four
corners of the world.
Quoting the following message delivered by
the newly elected United Nations
Secretary-general António Guterres, the
epigraph to the very first article of the
report clearly nailed the colors to the
mast: “When I took office one year ago, I
appealed for 2017 to be a year for peace.
Unfortunately, in fundamental ways, the
world has gone in reverse. On New Year’s Day
2018, I am not issuing an appeal. I am
issuing an alert—a red alert for our world.
Conflicts have deepened and new dangers have
emerged. Global anxieties about nuclear
weapons are the highest since the Cold War.
Climate change is moving faster than we are.
Inequalities are growing. We see horrific
violations of human rights. Nationalism and
xenophobia are on the rise”.[3]
Could there be any more accurate and concise
depiction of the state of the world in the
early years of the twenty-first century?
Epochal developments in nearly all areas of
human activity have triggered increasing
concern about the sustainability of an
international order conceived, shaped and
erected in large measure by the United
States of America, in the wake of World War
II, thanks to its economic and military
might. But this so-called US-led “liberal”
order has been witnessing steady erosion and
is today brutally called into question, to
say the least. And surprisingly enough, its
very foundations have been subject to
incessant assaults carried out by those who
have constructed it—led today by the Donald
Trump administration, in response to what it
views as excesses of an unbridled
globalization. As John Ikenberry stated “the
world’s most powerful state has begun to
sabotage the order it created. A hostile
revisionist power has indeed arrived on the
scene, but it sits in the Oval Office, the
beating heart of the Free world”.[4]
The conjunction of such realities as illegal
wars waged by self-proclaimed global
policemen against weaker “disobedient”
albeit sovereign states, and unparalleled
economic inequality stemming from the
contradictions of capitalist globalization
and the behavior of unfettered corporate
expansion exploiting almost every area of
public and private life, has generated a
growing global authoritarianism and social
Darwinism.
Thus, along a similar train of thought as
other leading critics of this twenty-first
century-style global capitalism—like Paul
Krugman and Thomas Piketty[5]—Nobel Prize
laureate Joseph Stiglitz described this
pervasive reality of great divide in an
important book.[6] During the past decade,
he writes, “four of the central issues
facing our society have been the great
divide—the huge inequality that is emerging
in the United States and many other advanced
countries— economic mismanagement,
globalization, and the role of the state and
the market”. This situation is “related to
the role of special interests in our
politics —a politics that increasingly
represents the interests of the 1 percent”.
That’s why in 2014, Oxfam submitted a
landmark briefing paper[7] calling on the
world’s elite gathered in Davos to make
commitments needed to counter the growing
tide of inequality. The paper indicates that
almost half of the world’s wealth is now
owned by just one percent of the population.
This massive concentration of economic
resources in the hands of fewer people,
Oxfam warns, presents a real threat to
inclusive political and economic systems,
and compounds other inequalities. All the
more so since left unchecked, political
institutions are undermined and governments
overwhelmingly serve the interests of
economic elites—to the detriments of
ordinary people. These prospects have since
been proven right in another report[8] from
Oxfam which showed that just eight men own
the same wealth as the poorest half of the
world and considered “beyond grotesque” that
a handful of rich men headed by the
Microsoft founder Bill Gates are worth
$426bn, equivalent to the wealth of 3.6
billion people.
By the same token, a report from the
Institute for Policy Studies [9] found that
the 3 wealthiest citizens in the US (Jeff
Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffet) are
richer than the poorest half of the
population of this country, equivalent to
160 million people! Their combined wealth
amounts to a staggering figure of $248.5
billion. Commenting on these findings, Chuck
Collins, an economist and co-author of the
report, said that the “billionaire class”
continues to separate from the rest of the
population at an accelerated pace, and that
“so much money concentrated in so few hands
when so many people are struggling is not
only a sign of bad economic policy, it is a
moral crisis”.
Pankaj Mishra aptly captured and eloquently
summed up the big picture and the
choreography of this danse macabre in which
the world got trapped. He rightfully
observed that “future historians may well
see such uncoordinated mayhem as commencing
the third—and the longest and the
strangest—of all world wars: one that
approximates, in its ubiquity, a global
civil war.[10]
But how did the world get to experience its
present horrendous predicament?
From Prometheus to Homo Deus
Marshalling an impressive array of research
in his 2014 book “The Progress Paradox”[11],
Gregg Easterbrook makes the assertion that
almost all aspects of Western life have
vastly improved in the past century, and
that the last fifty years made almost
everything so much better for almost
everybody that it is sheer perversity to
feel bad about most anything. Very
recently[12], he reiterated this claim, and
in doing so, he denounced all those who are
engaged in a “politics of competitive
nostalgia” which demands return to an
idealized past that can never be reached
because, he says, it never existed in the
first place. Instead, Easterbrook is
convinced that by almost every meaningful
measure, the modern world is better than it
has ever been, and an even better future can
be reached.
In the same vein, assessing the human
condition in the third millennium, cognitive
scientist Steven Pinker, also drawing upon
wide-ranging research and seventy-five
graphs, points out that “life, health,
prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge and
happiness”[13] are on the rise, not just in
the West, but worldwide. He draws the
apparently logical conclusion that there has
never been a better time to be a human
being.
And yet today, most men and women feel less
happy than in previous generations; a fact
that prompted David Callahan to ask the big
question: why do so many walk around
scowling, rather than smiling at their good
fortune in being born into the present
generation?[14]
So, why is this global discontent, in the
face of an undeniable improvement in the
general human condition?
Is it attributable, as Pinker thinks, only
to the fact that this progress “which is not
the result of some cosmic force, but a gift
of the Enlightenment, the conviction that
reason and science can enhance human
flourishing” swims against currents of human
nature—tribalism, authoritarianism,
demonization, magical thinking, which
“demagogues committed to political,
religious and romantic ideologies” are all
too willing to exploit in a rearguard war,
resulting in a “corrosive fatalism and
willingness to wreck the precious
institutions of liberal democracy”?
Or is the current global crisis, as many
others believe, because botched experiments
in nation-building, democracy,
industrialization, and urbanization scar
much of the world, and such concepts as
modernity, secularism, development, and
progress are no more than long-held utopian
views by the powerful few as benign ideals
for the many? This opinion is shared by
Pankaj Mishra who asserts that the political
impasses and economic shocks of our
societies, as well as the irreparably
damaged environment, corroborate the
bleakest views of a long list of thinkers,
starting with nineteenth-century critics,
who condemned modern capitalism as “a
heartless machine for economic growth, or
the enrichment of the few, which works
against such fundamentally human aspirations
as stability, community and a better
future”.[15]
Also jumps to mind here the response to a
question posed to Noam Chomsky by his
interviewer on whether civilization can
survive the predatory capitalism most
advanced economies have returned to since
the late 1970s: “Really existing capitalist
democracy—RECD for short (pronounced
‘wrecked’)—is radically incompatible with
democracy. It seems to me unlikely that
civilization can survive really existing
capitalism and the sharply attenuated
democracy that goes along with it”.[16]
It is noteworthy that as far back as 1932,
Aldous Huxley’s novel “Brave New World”
foresaw such a looming scientific
dictatorship, though it seemed as much
frightening as it was a projection into the
remote future. Less than thirty years later
however, in a fascinating and no less scary
non-fiction book[17], Huxley compared the
modern-day world with the prophetic fantasy
envisioned in his previous analysis,
including threats to humanity induced by
dazzling advances in the field of the
science of thought control in particular.
His new book was meant to be a challenge to
any complacency with regard to the
increasingly powerful pressures to adopt
these modern tools, as well as a plea that
mankind should educate itself for freedom
before it was too late.
Nowadays, there’s little doubt that we are
well on our way to almost everything Aldous
Huxley’s book warned us against. Indeed, a
recent book by Franklin Foer[18] addressed
these very daunting challenges, with
particular emphasis on the dangers that the
GAFA—the four technology giants Google,
Apple, Facebook and Amazon—pose to our
culture and careers. He argued that in their
methods of consumer observation and data
gathering, and in their intention to replace
human decision-making with merciless
algorithms, these companies “are shredding
the principles that protect individuality”.
It’s even worse than that, he adds, because
in their quest to dominate the markets and
the world, these “fearsome four”, as Foer
characterizes them, “have lulled us into a
sense of pliant dependency as they influence
our thinking and activities”. And since they
are far more powerful than the elite “gate
keeping” institutions of the past—the major
television networks or the leading
newspapers—they have become the new arbiters
of media, economy, politics and the
arts.[19]
A similar opinion is expressed by Yuval Noah
Harari, an author and historian who has
managed to capture the imagination of
millions of people around the world, thanks
to his two global bestsellers[20]. In
Sapiens, Harari explains how humankind came
to rule the planet, and in Homo Deus, he
examines humanity’s future. He underlined
that “The global empire being forged before
our eyes is not governed by a particular
state or ethnic group. Much like the Roman
Empire, it is ruled by a multi-ethnic elite,
and is held together by a common culture and
common interests. Throughout the world, more
and more entrepreneurs, engineers, experts,
scholars, lawyers and managers are called to
join the empire. They must ponder whether to
answer the imperial call or to remain loyal
to their state and their people. More and
more choose the empire”.
As for his vision of the future, Harari
believes that the pursuit of projects,
dreams, and nightmares that will shape the
twenty-first century—from overcoming death
to creating artificial life—may ultimately
render most human beings superfluous. He
predicts that the main products of the
twenty-first-century economy will not be
textiles, vehicles, and weapons but bodies,
brains, and minds. Thus, “while the
industrial revolution created the working
class, the next big revolution will create
the useless class […] Democracy and the free
market will both collapse once Google and
Facebook know us better than we know
ourselves, and authority will shift from
individual humans to networked algorithms.
Humans won’t fight machines; they will merge
with them”.
Equally worryingly, Harari is of the opinion
that fascism and dictatorships might come
back, but they will do so in a new form, a
form which is much more relevant to the new
technological realities of the 21st century.
In ancient times, he observes, land was the
most important asset in the world. Politics,
therefore, was the struggle to control land.
And dictatorship meant that all the land was
owned by a single ruler or by a small
oligarch. But in the modern age, as machines
became more important than land, “politics
became the struggle to control the machines.
And dictatorship meant that too many of the
machines became concentrated in the hands of
the government or of a small elite. Now data
is replacing both land and machines as the
most important asset”. Harari concludes that
“the greatest danger that now faces liberal
democracy is that the revolution in
information technology will make
dictatorships more efficient than
democracies”. This is the shape of the new
world, he adds, and the gap between those
who get on board and those left behind will
be larger than the gap between industrial
empires and agrarian tribes, larger even
than the gap between Sapiens and
Neanderthals. This is the next stage of
evolution. This is Homo Deus.
The global spiritual influx: requiem for
Western consumerist secularism?
For the intelligent layman to fathom the
whys and wherefores of today’s world
reality, a cross-specialization and
interdisciplinary approach based on the
latest trend in the realm of social
sciences—social neuroscience in particular,
which posits that humans are fundamentally a
social species, rather than
individualists[21]—is crucially needed.
In this regard, Malek Bennabi[22] can be
thought of as a pioneer, well ahead of his
Western peers. The essence of his most
original ideas is expressed in his book on
the question of ideas in the Muslim
world.[23] Taking stock of the universe and
man’s place in it, Bennabi provided a
comprehensive analysis through a
breathtaking historical, theological,
philosophical and sociological perspective.
He made the fundamental observation that
faced with his own loneliness, man feels
overwhelmed by a sense of cosmic void. It is
his way of filling this void that determines
the type of his culture and civilization,
that’s to say all the internal and external
features of his historical vocation. The
Algerian thinker believes that there are
essentially two different ways of doing it:
either looking at one’s feet down to the
earth below, or lifting up one’s eyes to
heaven. The former attempts to overcome his
solitude with material things, with his
overbearing gaze wanting to possess, while
the latter would have recourse to ideas to
achieve his goal, with his questioning gaze
searching for truth. And thus arise two
kinds of culture: a culture of empire with
technical roots, and a culture of
civilization with ethical and metaphysical
roots.
Bennabi then explains that for each of these
two types of civilizations, the point of
failure comes to the excess of its core,
that is: overindulgence of mysticism for the
latter, and overindulgence of materialism
for the former. Thus, for instance, over the
course of their respective historical
trajectories, the Islamic civilization has
been taken away from its initial balance,
only to be inexorably thrown into the hands
of the theologians and mystics. Similarly,
Western civilization’s embrace of
intemperate materialism, both capitalist and
communist, has led to a systematic
destruction of the moral fabric of its
societies, hence progressively dragging the
world it eventually dominated into a
situation where objects are increasingly
overwhelming humanity.
As if pondering and agreeing with Bennabi’s
deep reflection, Indian author J.C.
Kapur[24] contends that consumerism is
making the soul of its addicts empty,
permitting all kinds of transgressions with
low culture instruments, hence further
invigorating unicentralism and limiting
humans merely to the status of consumers of
material objects. He believes that in the
quest for new directions “our salvation will
lie in the recognition of the fact that the
images of materialism that are being
projected are leading towards a moral,
ethical and spiritual vacuum that would bar
all processes of human development and
evolution”. Even more worrying is for him
the fact that with the implosion of the
Soviet Union in 1991 and the ensuing
marketization of its successor state’s
economy, the global market economies have
now arrived at the stage of an “Armament
Protected Consumerism” leading towards an
ecologically, socially, emotionally and
psychically unsustainable paradigm. And so,
any attempts to structure a new “Imperial
Civilization” on the parameters of a global
information society can only be short-lived.
He, accordingly, poses the big question as
to what focal point should be given to human
activity: will it be around material gain or
the unending search for the true nature of
man in harmony with the cosmic laws?
In effect, for more than two centuries, a
diehard tradition of thought, from early
“positivists” like Auguste Comte and
Friedrich Nietzsche, to modern outspoken
“atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher
Hitchens, Daniel Bennett and Sam Harris, has
assumed that modernization would render all
religions obsolete, and fantasized about a
free, democratic, secular, and materially
superior world where reason and science
would guide humanity towards a bright and
happy future. A case in point here is what
French politician Jean Jaurès said in a
speech in 1903: “If the very idea of God
took a palpable form, if God himself stood
visible on the multitudes, the first duty of
man would be to refuse obedience and treat
Him as the equal with whom we discuss, and
not the master that one submits to”.
And so, proponents of this “new religion”
have regularly pronounced faith to be dead.
Some of them went as far as to assume the
“death of God”, while others did not
hesitate to write about nothing less than
“God’s funeral”![25]
Up to the sixties of the 20th century, the
trend to total secularization in the
“Western” world seemed irreversible. And so
was admittedly the case in the overwhelming
majority of the newly decolonized countries
of the third world. Their “Westernized”
ruling classes did all they could to
persuade their fellow citizens that the
superiority of the “advanced” countries lays
in the Western ideas and institutions and
hoped to access modernity by simply and
blindly adopting both; the most extreme
example in this respect being Atatürk’s (the
father of the Turks) Republic of Turkey.
Today, it’s become all too obvious that the
demise of religion and this sense of
wonderful expectation about the intrinsic
virtues of technological progress have all
but gone missing. And it is no longer
possible, as Pankaj Mishra pointed out to
deny or obscure the great chasm “between an
elite that seizes modernity’s choicest
fruits while disdaining older truths and
uprooted masses, who, on finding themselves
cheated of the same fruits, recoil into
cultural supremacism, populism and rancorous
brutality”. [26]
Now that the contradictions and high costs
of this minority’s progress have become
visible on a global scale, there’s an urgent
need for a truly life-saving transformative
thinking along the lines J.C. Kapur referred
to, or even some of the compelling insights
developed by Deepak Chopra and Leonard
Mlodinow in their 2011 book.[27]
It’s worth recalling in this regard that
back in December 1975, in an interview given
to Le Point magazine, the famed French
novelist and Minister André Malraux denied
having ever said that “the 21st century will
be religious (spiritual) or won’t be”; a
quote too often credited to him, to this
day. He surely did say however that “I do
not exclude the possibility of a spiritual
event on a planetary scale”. On this, he was
indeed prophetic, since only four years
after this interview, the Iranian Islamic
revolution broke out, ushering in an
exceptional revival of faith, particularly
in the Muslim world, even though religion
there has never ceased to hold sway. To be
sure, this revolution was the most striking
and violent “local” manifestation of the
rejection of the “global spiritual
emptiness” that had until then characterized
the “post-modern” world, forcefully promoted
by the Enlightenment movement, but equally
fiercely castigated during the “May 1968”
wave of tectonic social and political
changes that swept the European continent,
starting in France precisely.
It seems clear for everybody to see that the
“sacred” character of the thoroughly
secularized state born after the Treaty of
Westphalia in 1648 is now crumbling. And
like all other political forms, the
nation-state experienced a rise and a
climax, and is presently in decline. For a
lot of people, consequently, religions—far
from declining as expected or hoped
for—constitute the most solid landmark to
fill the void and face today’s world
disorder and uncertainty.[28] In the words
of the bestselling author and influential
scholar of religion Rodney Stark, the world
is more religious than ever before. He
reached that conclusion after surveying more
than a million people in 163 countries to
paint the full picture that both mainstream
scholars and popular commentators have
missed. [29] Assuredly, “God is
Back”[30]—if, at all, He has ever gone
away—and he who wants to correctly
understand the politics of the 21st century
cannot afford to ignore Him, whether he
believes in Him or not.
So much so that an increasing number of
social scientists have deemed it necessary
to attempt to comprehend religious behavior
rather than to discredit it as irrational,
anachronistic, and an obstacle to progress.
This is precisely what Rodney Stark and
Roger Finke did in their book[31], which
they concluded by saying “it seems time to
carry the secularization doctrine to the
graveyard of failed theories, and there to
whisper requiescat in pace”.
Rise, decline and revival: the case for a
“universal civilization”
Long before those two Californian scholars
pronounced their requiem, British historian
Arnold Toynbee had written a study[32] in
which he highlighted the important
historical fact that civilizations die from
suicide, not by murder. He explained that
civilizations start to decay when they lose
their moral fiber and their cultural elite
turns parasitic, exploiting the masses and
creating an internal and external
proletariat. Toynbee propounds that having
become reactionary, this once
“mystically-inspired creative minority” ends
up being an “elite dominant minority” unable
to respond creatively to existential
challenges.
In the case of the Western civilization,
Toynbee found that religion was its
Achilles’ heel, and warned that its
scaffolding is built on technology, whereas
“man cannot live by technology alone”. He
further observed that “the Western
civilization that has run like a wildfire
round the world has not been the whole of
the seamless web; it has been a flare of
cotton waste: a technological selvage with a
religious center piece torn out”. And with
an amazing foresight, he made the prediction
that “in the fullness of time, when the
ecumenical house of many mansions stands
firmly on its own foundations and the
temporary Western technological scaffolding
falls away—as I have no doubt that it will—I
believe it will become manifest that the
foundations are firm at last because they
have been carried down to the bedrock of
religion…for religion, after all, is the
serious business of the human race”.
In the following paragraphs, we’ll attempt
to explain why and how the 500-year long
global dominance of the “Western
civilization” is coming to an end—a fate
first and most significantly epitomized and
signaled by the West’s self-immolation
during the bloodbath of the two World wars
it ignited in a span of only 30 years. We
shall do so by surveying the writings of
seven authors who have had a profound
influence on Western Man’s thinking, and
seven other authors who have predicted and
warned against an impending twilight of this
Western predominance. Indeed, what we take
to be the ethical, social, economic, and
ideological bedrock of Western thought has,
far and away, been laid down in seven
landmark references put forward since the
beginning of the European Renaissance and
the Age of the Enlightenment.
Thus, in his 1513 book “The Prince”, Italian
Nicolo Machiavelli described
methods—including through deliberate deceit,
hypocrisy and perjury—that an aspiring
prince can use to acquire the throne, or an
existing prince can resort to in order to
maintain his reign. English Pastor Thomas
Robert Malthus claimed in his 1798 “Essay on
the Principle of Population” that population
tends to grow faster than the food supply.
He also posited that the planet would be
unable to support more than one billion
inhabitants, and advocated therefore for a
limitation on the number of poor people as a
better controlling device. English Charles
Darwin’s 1859 seminal book “The Origins of
Species” promoted a theory of evolution by
natural selection through the notion of
“survival of the fittest”, thus and so
profoundly challenging Victorian-era ideas
about the role of humans in the universe.
English philosopher/sociologist Herbert
Spencer’s 1864 “Principles of Biology”
transferred Darwin’s theory from the realm
of nature to society. He believed that the
strongest or fittest would and should
dominate the poor and the weak who should
ultimately disappear. This meant that
certain races (in particular European
Protestants), individuals and nations were
entitled to dominate others because of their
“superiority” in the natural order. German
Karl Marx’s 1867 “Capital” is the
foundational theoretical text in materialist
philosophy, economics and politics. Belief
in some of its teachings led to communism
and caused millions of deaths in the hope
(or utopia) of bringing about an egalitarian
society. In his most celebrated book “Thus
Spoke Zarathustra” (1883-1885) German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche elaborates
on ideas like eternal recurrence of the
same, death of God, and the prophecy of the
“Übermensch” (Overman), that is, the ideal
superior man of the future who could rise
above conventional Christian morality to
create and impose his own values. Finally,
Austrian Sigmund Freud’s theories, although
subject to a lot of criticism, were
enormously influential. His best known 1930
book “Civilization and Its Discontents”,
analyzes what he sees as the fundamental
tensions between civilization and the
individual. The primary friction, he
asserts, stems from the fact that the
immutable individual’s quest for instinctive
freedom (notably, desires for sex) are at
odds with what is best for society
(civilization) as a whole, which is why laws
are created to prohibit killing, rape, and
adultery, and implement severe punishments
if they are broken. The result is an ongoing
feeling of discontent among the citizens of
that civilization.
Beyond shadow of a doubt, Western Man’s
mindset, worldview and behavior have been
considerably influenced by the
presuppositions of the “seven deadly sins’
embodied in this literature. This led to
such calamities for the world as
materialism, individualism, scientism,
unbridled pursuit of profit, nationalism,
racial supremacy, excessive will to power,
wars, colonization, imperialism, and
eventually to civilizational decadence and
decline. As a result of this irreversible
process, more particularly following the
moral wreckage and colossal human and
material cost of the Great War, prominent
thinkers and philosophers started to voice
their concern about the coming demise of the
West. Chiefly among those are seven authors
whose books argue that while it is true that
the West is in decline, there’s still time
to mitigate it or even to reverse it and
preserve it for posterity.[33] Those books
are: Oswald Spangler’s “The Decline of the
West” (1926); Arnold Toynbee’s “Civilization
on Trial” (1958); Eric Voegelin’s “Order and
History” (1956-1987); Francis Fukuyama’s
“The End of History and the Last Man”
(1992); Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order” (1998); Niall Ferguson’s
“Civilization: The West and the Rest”
(2012); and Michel Onfray’s “Décadence: Vie
et mort du judéo-christianisme”[34] (2017).
Another stated or implied common feature of
these books is the belief that the “Western
Christian civilization” has to be defended
anew not both from internal decay and
threats arising externally, mainly Islam or,
even worse, an alliance of “Islamic” and
“Sinic (Chinese)” civilizations. This fear
of Islam is by no means new; it’s
deep-rooted in the Western psyche. Today,
however, it is being exacerbated to such an
unprecedented—and sometimes
absurd[35]—extent that the debate on the
resurgence of Islam has become, more often
than not, inextricably intertwined with the
talk about the decline of the Western
civilization.
Back in 1948, English theist Arnold Toynbee
observed[36] that the Western civilization
has produced an economic and political
plenum and, in the same breath, a social and
spiritual void. He also said that in the
foreground of the future, Islam may exert
valuable influences upon the “cosmopolitan
proletariat of western society that has cast
its net round the world and embraced the
whole of mankind”. As for the more distant
future, he speculated on “the possible
contribution of Islam to some new
manifestation of religion”, warned that “if
the present situation of mankind were to
precipitate a ‘race war’, Islam Might be
moved to play her historic role once again.
Absit omen”, and advised that “Westerners,
who are mentally still-slumbering, have now
to realize that our neighbors’ past is going
to become a vital part of our Western
future”.
Seventy years later, in his abovementioned
controversial book, French atheist
philosopher Michel Onfray echoed Toynbee’s
predictions. He pointed out that History
testified that there was no civilization
built on atheism and materialism “which both
are signs or even symptoms of the
decomposition of a civilization” and that
“we don’t bind men together without the help
of the sacred”. He pronounced the death of
the Judeo-Christian tradition, which will
soon be overthrown by Islam, a religion
“endowed with a planetary army made up of
countless believers willing to die for their
religion, God and His Prophet”.
For our part, we will deliberately refrain
from indulging in any rhetoric of hatred and
mutual misunderstanding embodied in such
deadly and confrontational slogans as “Clash
of Civilizations”. A much better alternative
route would be to seek common denominators
among all peoples and cultures converging
towards the objective of building lasting
peace and security and shared prosperity in
today’s globalized albeit disoriented world.
In a forthcoming analysis, we’ll attempt to
explain the reasons why, and the only
conditions and circumstances under which
Islam will indeed be able to answer to the
appeal to play its “historic role once
again”. It can only do so as a driving force
within a “global alliance of the willing”
aiming to build a truly “universal
civilization”. Bonum omen.
Notes
- Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the book L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot (The Orient and the Occident at a time of a new Sykes-Picot), Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014: downloadable free of charge, by clicking on the following links:http://algerienetwork.com/blog/lorient-et-loccident-a-lheure-dun-nouveau-sykes-picot-par-amir-nour/ (French) http://algerienetwork.com/blog/العالم-العربي-على-موعد-مع-سايكس-بيكو-ج/ (Arabic) ↑
- Albert Einstein, in an interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173 ↑
- Read and watch: https://news.un.org/en/story/2017/12/640812-un-chief-issues-red-alert-urges-world-come-together-2018-tackle-pressing ↑
- G. John Ikenberry, The Plot Against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive?, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2017. ↑
- Commenting on Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Paul Krugman said “He’s telling us that we are on the road not just to a highly unequal society, but to a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth […] We are becoming very much the kind of society we imagined we’re nothing like.”
- Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzQYA9Qjsi0 ↑
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them, 2015. ↑
- Oxfam, Working for the Few: Political Capture and Inequality, Briefing Paper 178, January 20, 2014. ↑
- Read the report titled An Economy For the 99%. ↑
- Chuck Collins and Josh Hoxie, Billionaire Bonanza 2017: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us. ↑
- Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. ↑
- Gregg Easterbrook, The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse, 2004 ↑
- Gregg Easterbrook, It’s Better than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear, PublicAffairs, 2018. ↑
- Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, Viking, 2018. ↑
- David Callahan, The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, 2004. ↑
- Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger, op. cit. ↑
- Noam Chomsky, Optimism over Despair: On capitalism, Empire and Social Change, Penguin Books, 2017. ↑
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, Harper & Row Publishers, 1958.↑
- Franklin Foer, World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Penguin Press, 2017. ↑
- Jon Gertner, Are tech giants robbing us of our decision-making and our individuality?, The Washington Post, October 6, 2017. ↑
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harvill Secker, 2014 and Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harper, 2017.↑
- Read J.T. Cacioppo and J. Decety, Social Neuroscience: Challenges and Opportunities in the Study of Complex Behavior, in Annals of the New York academy of Sciences, Vol. 1224, 2011. ↑
- Malek Bennabi (1905-1973) is best known for having coined the concept of “colonizability” (the inner aptitude to be colonized) and the notion of “mondialisme” (Globalism). ↑
- Malek Bennabi, Le problème des idées dans le Monde musulman, 1970.↑
- J.C. Kapur, Our Future: Consumerism or Humanism, Kapur Surya Foundation, New Delhi, 2005. ↑
- Andrew Norman Wilson, God’s Funeral: The Decline of Faith in Western Civilization, W.W. Norton, 1999. ↑
- In Age of Anger, op. cit. ↑
- Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow, War of the Worldviews: Science vs. Spirituality, 2011. ↑
- Manlio Graziano, Holy Wars and Holy Alliance: The Return of Religion to the Global Political Stage, Columbia University Press, 2017. ↑
- Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious than Ever, ISI Books, 2015. ↑
- For more on that subject, read: D. Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes, 2004; J. Micklethwait and A. Wooldridge, God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World, 2009; M. Duffy Toft, D. Philpott and T. Samuel Shah, God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics, 2011; ↑
- Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, Acts of Faith: Explaining the Human Side of Religion, 2000.↑
- Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, Oxford University Press, New York, 1948. ↑
- Emanuel L. Paparella Is Western Civilization Doomed? A review Essay, Modern Diplomacy, Oct. 20, 2015. ↑
- (Decadence: The Life and Death of the Judeo-Christian Tradition), Flammarion, 2017. ↑
- Read Mike Adam’s Darwinian analysis titled The Coming Collapse of Western Civilization: The Shocking Reason Why Liberal Americans Are Weak, But Islamic Soldiers Are Strong, September 30, 2016. ↑
- Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, op. cit. ↑
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