The relations between nihilism and religion / Josep Ramoneda

On the causes of violence
1. Why, when thinking on war and terrorism, the politically correct discourse omits that the agresivity that drives to violence –domination, possesion, submition- all take part of the complex psychological and relational system that configures the human economy of pleasure ? Why does it take so much admitting that violence is very human ? Shame ? Ideology ? Hipocrisy ? Or did not Caín killed Abel ? The modern optimism has for long wished to believe that violence was the fruit of the social relations -of one being, seemingly elusive-, and not a component of this animal with liberty and reason (so to say, with the will to power and the will to truth ; that’s to say, capable of using strategic violence) that we call human. J.J. Rousseau carried the illusion to paroxism when he explained that the human was good in nature and that it was social life what corrupted us. Le bon sauvage -like Adám and Eva before their fall- became thus myth of our innocence. Is a way that leads directly to irresponsability : nobody is to blame of their acts, because the society is the guilty. And yet, the realist Hobbes had already explained us that the person had accepted to subject s/h-self to the monopoly of State-violence as, otherwise the state of natural war would have destroyed all. A pact to defend us ourselves, of which the democratic state represents the most sophisticated formula.

The civilisating process has been the atttempt –unequal, at some catastrophic moments- of lenght and affirmation on this pact, throwing on the way a few shreds of our economy of the desire, as Freud said. Only that violence has no limits. The States abused and speculated with it, and the revolutionary violence brought in a step up on quality about how to use it, up to reaching the new stage of globalised violence, in total confusion between the public and the private.

Martín van Creveld says that the occidental culture finds of difficult understanding the diversity of causes in the will to combat. To a culture that puts the criteria of cost-profit (in solid cash) as the mesure of all things, it becomes unconceivable that a cityzen had an idea so distinct of the value of live, that may will to lose it for god and the promise of a garden and twenty beautyful virgins. Yet, we do not have to be Freudian to understand the pathos of the destructive violence. Only destruction ensures the absolute correlation between what is said and what is done. Is a constructive project, reality never allows that our fantasies realize hundred percent, there are always things that happily break the armony of the dreamed order. The destruction is the inmediate proof, as praxis, that we are capable of doing what we may propose us. Is the omnipotence of the nihilist that understands that everything is allowed. And given that omnipotence is a divine atribute, nothing better for strenghtening the nihilistic action than to act for divine commandment. The armony between the nihilist and their religious destiny is perfect. And very difficult to respond ideologically, as Pascal Bruckner wrote, because the thirst of sacrifice is not refutable.

2. Although the nihilist realizes in the very action, and therefore, the religious stake is not a condition sine qua non , but a confirmation of the fantasy ; to break the armony between nihilism and religion is essential for cutting the terrorist chain. It is for this reason, that the name « infinite justice » initially given to this antiterrorist operation lead by usa, was a very serious mistake or a very alarming symptom. Infinite Justice is a proper expression of the religious nihilism. The human justice can only be concrete. The infinite justice can only be an atribute of god ; willing to realize it is equivalent to break with the notion of limits. And when all is possible, all is allowed. But for that very reason there must be an interappeal to the Islam in the point that it eases the connection between the destructive violence and religion : the submision of the civil power to the religious one ; the negatioon of an autonomous legitimacy and full to the political power, which extreme form is the holy war ; that’s to say, war as a divine duty. While there is not a pronouncement for the separation of religion and state, the islamic fundamentalism shall always find a platform where translating the faith in divine furore, and the believer, in a kamikaze.

3. Freud writes that : « when there is availability of a group apart against which demonstrating the agresivity, it will be possible to maintain united by love a considerable number of people ». It is certainly the logic of Ben Laden : to make the usa a satanic force against which uniting all muslim society. But is also the logic in the answer from Bush, as making out of Ben Laden a methaphore of evil, against which uniting the world in coalition. The simmetry between the agression and the response make us doubt of the good foundation of this, in a conflict that demands more cunning and information than ideology and confrontation. The methaphore-Ben Laden is the necessary construction of an enemy in a culture where the war is simply not compatible with the fight against the invisible. Before having the proof of Ben Laden’s guilt we had the myth, because it was necessary to point at someone in front of which unite the patriots. Furthermore, even if it was demonstrated that Ben Laden is innocent, the myth would go on working. The usa has responded to the invisibility of the agressor with the invisibility of the victims. Is this a mode of templating the brutal irruption of a society in love with the asepsy of virtuality ? The Ben Laden methaphore against the emptiness left by the towers, does not this virtualitation goes in favour of the terrorist strategy of confronting symbols ?

Ben Laden’s terrorism is one of franchises, has said professor Jean François Daguzan : a constellation of components, of which Ben Laden is the centre, the reference and the symbol that ensures is mediatic visibility. If Ben Laden disappears, the net will remain untouched. To make Ben Laden the myth of the enemy number one only favours the the survival of the net beyond its luck ; myths always pull. But above all it confirms that the usa automatisms of leadership are hostage to the logic of conventional wars. It is not suficient with Ben Laden, a state is needed : Afghanistan. All against Afghanistan, when the terrorist net is all over the world. It is in the underground world that our societies hide, where the money flows, drugs, weapons, and where dealers live, also mercenaries and terrorists, that the terror has its roots. But, as Kapucinsky has said, in front of the impotence to act on this hidden world, to which not few complicities from the visible society reach, it is preferable to ignore it and concentrate all sights in a great enemy.
This very logic of the conventional war is the one that drives the project of a great coalition as if the problem of terrorism was tobe sorted out defeating a state. Van Creveld posed the question ten years ago, but the western politicians did not want to see it : « in the light of the many blows that terrorists and guerrillas have thrown at the most powerful armies in the world, the question is to know wether us, people of the developped states, have a truly exact perception that war is of capital importance ».
The great coalition is a bunch, filled of contradictions, of which the cunniest try to benefit by laundering their crimes, forgiving themselves debts and setting high prices to their colaboration. Where more terrorists have been exported from : Pakistan or Afghanistan ? Where more money to terrorism has been sent from : Emirates and Arabia Saudi, or Afghanistan ? But we need an enemy state and, Afghanistan joins the most precious characteristics : the weakest, the easiest to hate. Before the attack there where more than sound reasons to apply a doctrine of injerence in Afghanistan : above all, the tragic fate of the women, subjected to the most absolute of psychological and phisical mistreatment. The great coalition generates confusion over the objectives, because we must remember that it is not about making a world that is « with us (u.s.a.) or against us ». It is about building a world that is possible to live in, not inmersed in globalised violence, not the nihilist nor the one of an impossible dream of absolute safety.

4. If god existed, before the atrocities would speak. I remember Coetzee’s book on Dostoyevsky. There are violences, and violations that open like traps to hunt god. And god does not know, does not answer. In the margins of Occident has grown the nihilist violence, that now becomes anti-occidental. Assuming that the destructive violence does not need necessaarily causes as the will to combat is given, we can analyze the situations that favour the emergence of it. It is the territory of the excluded doctrines : to achieve that the world be homogeneous –one class, one race, one ethnia, one creed only- is the fantasy that better pairs with this will to destroy. Is the point in which belief (in a religion or ideology) and violence meet. Violence is always simplifying, so is always very comfortable with these beliefs that define a world and reject everything else. But the simplification of violence too gets to those who use it, and that is one of the dangers in the so called democratic societies. The simplification has costs in terms of liberty.

The changes suffered by the world in the last ten years have been so huge that it was naïf to think that occident could only get vantages of that which Fukuyama called « the great disruption », when he realised that history does not end. « A revolution continues in the production, one unceasingly upheaval in all social conditions and a constant motion distinguish this époque of all others before. All rusty and stagnated relations, with their entourage of beliefs and venerated ideas for centuries, break : the new become old before they can ossify ». This quotation, Marx and Engels, is the eloge of the revolutionary character of the bourgeoisie that we can read in the first part of te communist manifest. I have allowed myself a liberty though : to put « this epoque » where it said « bourgeois age », to adjust it to our time. It could perfectly be a description of the great acceleration in the 20th century and the vertigoes as a consequence of seeing how orders that seemed cristalised fell. The powerful occident has not known, has not been able or has not wanted to administrate the rythms, because history does not allow easy government and because the eufemistically called « creative destruction » that goes with the moments in which some power believes that the world can be shaped to its image and will, has unfolded. The « creative destruction » always brings « destructive destruction ». When time reaches its maturity, stories lose their relevance ; only the event matters, as Tarantino showed, the film maker of the end of history. Some cultures have felt threatened, abandoned, and in this confusion the radical answer has grown, the suicidal response. After the writtings that threaded the lives and communities have been destroyed, some have believed what Coetzee’s character thought : « if one does not kill nobody takes seriously ». And they have created the absolute event.

The illusory american superiority seemed such that while being the usa hated everywhere they looked unvulnerable. Could one imagine a bigger event than destroying that myth ? How to repair the sink of that taboo ? With a great coalition that allies all states around usa. The usa scar must not make us forget that three quarters of the world are not habitable. But we must not think that terrorism is the fruit of unequality that we could resolve by a more just world. The nihilist violence shall always find paths to reproduce itself. The exigence of working for a sustainable, humane world, that some discover now, seems to me as avant-garde as always, without a doubt since much before the attack to usa.