Skip to content or view screen version

The Clash of Our Civilisation

Brainaddict | 25.06.2004 15:07 | Analysis

The War on Terror, while maintaining a moderate level of violence that sporadically leaps to catastrophic highs, is essentially a war of words. George W. Bush understands this as well as anybody, at least on some level. He understands that it is about getting the world to operate to his definitions of good and evil – his and no one else’s.

This is nothing new of course; controlling the meanings of words is the essence of politics and has been since time immemorial, through monarchy, dictatorship and democracy.
What is interesting about Bush’s war of words is that it is happening in an age when any intellectual worth their salt is capable of tearing apart the language Bush uses and the assumptions that underlie it before they’ve had their morning coffee. As a British person I almost compulsively contest every word Blair says these days - as I hear them, in my mind, on the basis of language alone, and without having to make any effort. Many people I know, while perhaps doing it less consciously, are quite capable of doing the same.
Most people I know realise, or can follow an explanation to the effect, that words do not mean their dictionary definitions. Words mean their associations in our minds, and those associations can form differently for all of us. To someone born in the West democracy is associated with escape from oppression. To a religious person in Saudi Arabia democracy is associated with the West, and the West with oppression. Thus words can take on completely opposite meanings for different people. Anybody in the Western world with a moderate education level can understand this.
Yet Bush goes to war under the banner of ‘liberation’, and large percentages of the populations of the Alliance countries expect the Iraqis to be grateful, expect them to react as joyously to the word ‘freedom’ as we Westerners do. Who are these people among us? Why are they so numerous? And why are Bush and Blair still re-electable?
The conclusion is unavoidable: that our society is rotten with a divide that has gone unnoticed for decades but has been forced into the light by the new grip of terror upon the public mind. It is a divide between those who believe in truth and the ability of language to express it, and those who do not. It is a divide between fundamentalists and academics, between CNN viewers and literature readers. Between politicians, who believe in truth because it suits them, and the educated populace, who do not because they can not, and who see their viewpoint confirmed daily by the gibberish spewed from the mouths of politicians.
Hitherto this divide has been seen as one of many in our world: just another difference in a society that embraces difference. Now we are embroiled in a war that was justified with words, to the country, to the world, by Blair to his Members of Parliament, and that war is throwing an already worn-down country into chaos and uncertainty from which it may not emerge.
It must be understood that what should concern the West at this moment in history is not the supposed failures of Islamic cultures, as so many have suggested, but the failures of our own culture, and specifically our intellectual culture. The real clash happening right now is not one of civilisations; it is between those who imbue words with truth and those who do not. This clash is the result of a failure at the heart of Western thought.
Let us look first at the symptoms of failure. We have a quasi-colonial war in a generation taught to despise colonialism. We have the right to fair trial being eroded, particularly for certain people groups, when we thought the battles for fairness and equality were on the way to being won. We have the abject failure of the majority media to act independently when protection of media rights has never been stronger. We have a massive increase in surveillance and monitoring, though we’ve all read 1984. Last but not least, we have the supposed ‘apathy’ of people towards politics, now so serious that it threatens to undermine the legitimacy of governments.
Put another way, all that we have feared for years, but didn’t think would really happen, is beginning to happen right now. The War on Terror is following the law that you become what you fight: it is visiting terror upon us and upon the rest of the world. And it is happening because of a divide in our society that has not yet been recognised as lethal. The ship is sinking, because what we thought was a piece of avant garde ornamentation has turned out to be a crack in the hull – a rift between those whose faith in words is limited, and those whose use of words is uncritical and undoubting, be their reasons pragmatic or ideological.
It is important not to see one side as completely right and the other as completely wrong. That is after all exactly what Bush does and that is why he will never learn anything that will redeem his policies. Which does not mean that we should not learn from him. Whilst the fundamentalists of every stripe in our culture have not understood the weaknesses of language, they have understood something that the postmodern commentators and intellectuals have failed to apprehend: the importance to themselves of their own standpoint.
I believe that this failure in Western thought stems from a confusion of the standpoint itself with the expression of that standpoint. When comparing standpoints as expressed in language, we have been forced to admit that everybody’s standpoint is equal, since the language used to express the standpoint cannot be criticised without embarking on the absurd course of policing the associations that a whole range of words have for different people – something that can legitimately be done for a few words for the purposes of counteracting prejudice, but on a large scale would become totalitarian. In essence, since the expression of any standpoint does not map to an absolute truth, we have to say that each expression of a standpoint is equally true.
So far so good, but now follows a grave error: we make the mistake of assuming that because the expression of a standpoint contains no truth, then the standpoint itself is only as true as that of anybody else. It seems on the surface a logical step to take. Yet it contains an assumption that is not entirely true. It assumes that our standpoint is constructed solely by language. While there is an obvious dialectic between language and standpoint there is a component of standpoint that exists apart from language. This becomes clear once we admit that people tend to select their standpoint on the basis of ‘gut instincts’, for want of a better term, and then rationalise it with language after the fact. Perhaps part of the problem is that many intellectuals are reluctant to admit that they do this, that it is the standard process for selecting a standpoint. A standpoint is not a construction purely of language; it is a construction of language plus blind impulse plus animal instinct plus irrational longing. The meaning of our standpoint to us is therefore more absolute than anything that can be expressed by mere words.
The idea that our standpoint is only as true as that of everybody else’s has disempowered an entire generation. By repeating over and over that everybody’s standpoint is equal, we have destroyed the ability to act on our own standpoint. It appears to us that any action we commit to would come into conflict with somebody – a person with an equally good standpoint – so it is better not to act at all. Millions of educated people have become incapable of acting in opposition to other standpoints, and thus incapable of acting at all.
Meanwhile the various Western fundamentalists laugh – up their sleeves, all the way to the bank, all the way to Iraq – and rightly so. They are winning and they will win, because those who oppose them are paralysed. This is what has led to the reign of mounting terror under which we now live. Those who act do not care to think and those who think do not care to act. And those who do not care to think are getting everything they want, including – but by no means limited to – a war without an end in sight.
And here is the bitter pill to swallow: the fundamentalists are right. They are right to believe that their own standpoint is more important than those of others. To believe otherwise, as so many educated people these days attempt to do, is the height of inauthenticity. It is a vicious denial of ourselves, the ethic of self-sacrifice taken to an extreme that Christianity only demanded at the height of its oppressiveness. Becoming carried away by the abstract, we have lost sight of the fact that the opinions of ‘I’ are more important to our selves than those of other people.
Note that I have deliberately avoided the use of the term ‘validity’ when describing differing standpoints. Validity is not the issue. Different standpoints may all be equally valid, but they are not equally important. Each of us has one standpoint that is more important to us than any other: our own. It is almost a matter of definition – if it were not more important than any other, we would not have adopted it.
We all have an ideological position where we feel most comfortable – even if it is the position that all ideologies are nonsense. This fashion for pretending that we support the standpoints of others as thoroughly as our own must end. We must repeat to ourselves over and over: while the expression of a standpoint contains no absolute truth, there is one truth to which I adhere: my own standpoint. And if I have any sense I will believe this truth only on a contingent and conditional basis, yet my truth it nonetheless is.
Some people will be uncomfortable with the word ‘truth’ to describe their standpoint: very well, find another word - it makes no difference. The fact is that our own standpoint is our standpoint because we have chosen it. We chose it because it seemed more true or self-consistent or beautiful than other standpoints we could have adopted. Our standpoint may contain such ideals as the refusal to force our own ‘truth’ onto others, and that is for the good, but our standpoint is nonetheless more important to us than any other worldview that exists, and once we admit that, we will allow ourselves to act. It is time to stop deny ourselves, time to end the sacrifice of our own views on the altar of equality.
By all means create a world that treats all humans as equal. By all means be tolerant of standpoints that differ from your own while not contradicting it. But where another standpoint conflicts with yours, sally forth with courage, conviction and compassion to do battle for your vision of the future. If you do not, the fundamentalists win by default. Your children will not thank you for your tolerance of that which enslaves them. Every human on earth has beliefs, everyone has those beliefs for reasons that make sense to them, and everyone is entitled to act upon those beliefs.
Once we allow ourselves to act, we have a hope beyond the dismal future promised and threatened by Bush and his ilk. We can begin to take steps to close that gap in the hull. An important step might be an aggressive overhaul of education. Our education systems are still based on learning facts, rooted in an era when facts were hard to come by. Facts and competing facts are now available at the fingertips on the internet, so let us relieve schools of the duty of instilling, or more often failing to instil, them in children. Let us instead teach our children about communication and language. Let every school leaver understand the inherent weaknesses of language and the way it can be used to manipulate, to distort, and to gain power. Let them understand that their lives are created and framed by communication, and that left unexamined the communication may crush them.
This presents a path to greater freedom, to a world where politicians can no longer get away with murder, and to a world where people have the tools to understand what is happening to them and around them. What fear prevents us from taking the path? Do we fear that we are wrong? Of course we do, and it is good to be ever prepared to question your own principles, but any psychologist will tell you that to lack confidence in yourself to the point of paralysis is a pathological condition.
It is time then to stop repeating to ourselves the mantra that everyone’s standpoint is equally true. It is an intellectual dishonesty brought on by guilt, and a damaging dishonesty at that. We must tell ourselves and our children and their children that the standpoint of ‘I’ is the basis for all action, and that there is no reason to feel bad about acting on that standpoint, no reason to feel guilty for telling others that their expressed standpoint is incompatible with our standpoint. We must be prepared to fight for the survival and satisfaction of our standpoint, and we must teach each other how to fight in a manner that will not result in oppression.
If this can be done, if we can learn from fundamentalism how to accept our rootedness in our own standpoint such that we can act on it, then thought and action can be united. Right now there seems little hope for the future, but this one change would give me hope: that those who think learn how to act. I can think of nothing else that will give us a fighting chance of beating the fundamentalists, both religious and political, nothing else that will save us from the terror that they would visit upon our world.
As for the Islamic cultures – let them look to their own. We will have a hard enough time saving ourselves. Any attempt to save them would be the height of hypocrisy. And it would obscure the fact that there are two burdens the Middle East needs to be relieved of as soon as possible. Firstly, the well thought out, ineffectual moralisings of Western intellectuals, and secondly, the unthinking, devastatingly successful actions of those Westerners who still believe, or find it convenient to believe, that the words they speak or hear are true.

Brainaddict
- e-mail: jacobstringer@fastmail.fm