Rising extremism may force us to find ways to save our threatened humanity

People protest against Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Isis) jihadists on August 9, 2014. PHOTO | AFP

What you need to know:

  • With the advent of international terrorism and the birth of organisations such as IS, leading thinkers are now questioning whether 30 years of unfettered neoliberalism and a “me culture” have unleashed more, not less, misery in this world.
  • In order to achieve even more financial success, people are surrendering their freedoms to a “compulsive, atomising, joyless, hedonism”, which has destroyed connectedness, which he describes as “the essence of humanity”.
  • Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” theory postulated that the end of the Cold War would give rise to a global desire for capitalism and liberal democracy, is now being viewed as a false prophet.

Since the rise of the Islamic State (IS), which would like to see a world where all Muslims are governed by an Islamic caliphate, leading intellectuals have been forced to question whether they had miscalculated the impact of Western-style liberal democracy in Asian and African countries.

Francis Fukuyama, whose “end of history” theory postulated that the end of the Cold War would give rise to a global desire for capitalism and liberal democracy, is now being viewed as a false prophet.

With the advent of international terrorism and the birth of organisations such as IS, leading thinkers are now questioning whether 30 years of unfettered neoliberalism and a “me culture” have unleashed more, not less, misery in this world.

In a world where everyone is competing for finite resources and where economic success is held up as the ultimate goal, value systems have changed, making human interaction less meaningful, writes Paul Verhaeghe in the Guardian.

TEMPORARY ALLIANCES

“Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.”

The leftist writer George Monbiot says the severing of emotional ties precipitated by the dogma of individualism has had a profound effect on the quality of people’s lives. Pointing out that loneliness and social isolation had reached epidemic proportions in the United Kingdom, Monbiot argues that the modern world is denying human beings, the most social of creatures, the very thing that they need to thrive — social contact.

In order to achieve even more financial success, people are surrendering their freedoms to a “compulsive, atomising, joyless, hedonism”, which has destroyed connectedness, which he describes as “the essence of humanity”.

Indian writer Pankaj Mishra goes further by claiming that capitalism has failed to bring about either democracy or equality in countries such as China and Russia.

Arguing that “the Western model is broken”, Mishra states: “If we are appalled and dumbfounded by a world in flames, it is because we have been living … with vanities and illusions: that Asian and African societies would become, like Europe, more secular and instrumentally rational as economic growth accelerated; that with socialism dead and buried, free markets would guarantee rapid economic growth and worldwide prosperity. What these fantasies of inverted Hegelianism always disguised was a sobering fact: that the dynamics and specific features of Western ‘progress’ were not and could not be replicated or correctly sequenced in the non-West.”

HANDLING OF IS

Perhaps it is not yet “the end of history” but the beginning of new ways of thinking and being, which may ultimately create a more just, humane, and compassionate world. IS and other global jihadis will certainly not deliver us to this world, but they have stirred up a pot that may temper the mindless greed and individualism that are threatening to tear up this world and destroy our humanity.

Meanwhile, the following letter by an American called Aubrey Bailey that was published in a US newspaper and circulated on social media summarises the contradictions inherent in the United States Government’s handling of IS.

“Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain. We support the Iraqi government in the fight against the Islamic State. We don’t like IS, but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like.

We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting him. We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS. So some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win.

If the people we want to defeat are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. And all this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now?”