I have recently come into a greater personal consciousness of that particular strain of anti-western [read: anti-American] antagonism that is purportedly responsible for terrorism. A lot of talking heads will set this up as a Muslim/Christian conflict: an increasingly Muslim east against a [post-] Judeo-Christian west. That's a stereotype and it doesn't hold water. It's less a feud of the monotheists and more of a violent indictment of the religion of Self that has risen in the postindustrial world. I agree with the newly vocal minority of critics who suggest that what fundamentalist Muslims really hate is the godlessness, unqualified secularism, and rampant decadence of the consumerist west.
The thing is, I hate it too. The new imperialism is more insidious than the old. American pols talk the talk of "spreading democracy" but that quickly turns out to be a euphemism for the real (or hyperreal) gospel of the corporation. I don't need to rehash here the social sins of American institutions abroad. Those are only symptoms of a deeper disease that is not simply cultural or legal or structural. Forget Secular Humanism. We're way past that, post-humanist maybe. The new American gospel is Secular Consumerism. It tears away all mystery, atomizes individuals, and hurtles inexorably towards the Total Realization of Everything (cf. Baudrillard's
Lucidity Pact) --- that self-destructive paradoxical finality where there is nothing left to imagine, so everything becomes unreal and illusory.
[We're virtual now. How can the suffering of Those people over There be real? My own life isn't real. I don't care what anybody does as long as my sustained virtuality is not interrupted. Put a needle in my arm and start pumping RSS and mini-feeds.]
Militant Islam has a reasonable goal (if not a reasonable method): to retain the right to have a society based on symbolic exchange, which maintains a place for mystery and imagination, and which has communal respect for the intrinsic boundaries of human beings. Our urge to "spread democracy" amounts to little more than a desperate attempt to legitimize, for ourselves first and others second, our new consumer religion. Everyone should live as we do. We feel threatened when they don't.
It gives me pause when I realize that if 9/11 had happened 5 years later than it did, some part of me would have seen a certain justice in the event. Our quintessentially American arena of pop discourse --- the on-screen spectacle --- was expertly used against us. Our monumental, phallic shrine to pure money --- dollars representing nothing tangible, capital divorced from the object realm and Platonized to an abstract fetish --- was destroyed in a jarringly physical way. Though I would never, ever condone one human being taking the life of another, I am certain that I hate everything those towers represented just as much as the zealots who destroyed them. I see the same injustice, oppression, imperialism, complacency, decadence, and deception that they saw. I mourn for those lives lost (not innocent lives, simply ignorant lives), but I refuse to mourn for the wounds of the institution. The
only difference between our "enemy" and me is that I cannot, will not, set myself up as judge and executioner --- because I and those I love have been complicit in oppression, and we are guilty as well. For that I am filled with remorse.
Tangentially: the God that I believe in does not allow us to take vengeance into our own hands. He does not, as so many others, make himself known by his capacity to destroy or to punish or inflict. Instead, He says, "Look what I have made." He is known by the ability to create that which is good and to repair that which is broken. Yet vengeance still belongs to Him, because only a God whose essence wholly contains and defines Beauty and Creation and Wholeness and Love could be trusted to take vengeance justly. Furthermore, a God who does not take vengeance could not be said to love or to care, or to be anything other than transcendently apathetic. And I believe that at the last, He will take just revenge --- not on human beings whom He loves, but assuredly on all the towering structures of human greed and oppression. Though for the moment, we are beating Him to it by destroying ourselves. The God I believe in is not spiteful, but is grieved by us.
Another thought: It is entirely possible that my sentiments here will land me under scrutiny by some kind of governmental body, or on some sort of "watch list." So be it. That is simply more damning evidence that our insipid secular consumerism is just as dogmatic and theocratic as any fundamentalist regime in the Middle East. We're the real fascists now.
[A nod to
this post for provoking some of this]
Labels: Essay
33 people were murdered at Virginia Tech. This is big news; in fact, it's more than news, it's a circus. Maybe it's even entertaining.
I have recently come into a greater personal consciousness of that particular strain of anti-western [read: anti-American] antagonism that is purportedly responsible for terrorism. A lot of talking heads will set this up as a Muslim/Christian conflict: an increasingly Muslim east against a [post-] Judeo-Christian west. That's a stereotype and it doesn't hold water. It's less a feud of the monotheists and more of a violent indictment of the religion of Self that has risen in the postindustrial world. I agree with the newly vocal minority of critics who suggest that what fundamentalist Muslims really hate is the godlessness, unqualified secularism, and rampant decadence of the consumerist west.
