Culture of helplessness

Never before in human history has there been such concentration and centralisation of capital in so few nations and in the hands of so few people.

The countries that form the Group of Seven industrialised nations with their 800 million inhabitants control more technological, economic, information and military power than the some 4.5 billion people who live in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

Five hundred multi-national corporations account for 80 per cent of world trade and 75 per cent of global investment. According to Forbes magazine, in 1995 there were 388 billionaires in the world. In 1996 there were 447. Their combined wealth is estimated at 450 billion dollars --- more than half the total earnings of the inhabitants of the globe.

With this concentration of economic and technological means, of power in the hands of very few, the revolution in telecommunications, transport, and informatics has served to plunder the majority of the world's inhabitants, especially in the South. The term plunder, however, is no longer used. More inviting names are used: aid, or free trade, or investment, or sustainable development, or structural adjustment.

This change in names is a part of the post-modern cultural game.

Post-modernism is described by Fred Jamieson as "the cultural logic of late capitalism”. This cultural logic has many aspects. We may focus here on three main aspects related to the cultural processes of post-modernism: "globalisation", "fragmentation" and "surrender”.

To expand and globalise the world market, the multi-national corporations resort to economic, political and military means. But their task is made easier if people can be convinced to think, feel and therefore act in ways which will promote the global market. Culture can help the global economy to expand and reach out to all corners of the world.

To expand the global market, a culture of "consumerism" must be developed on a global scale, a culture which plays its role in developing certain values, patterns of behaviour, perceptions of happiness or success, and attitudes towards sex and love. Culture must shape a "global consumer" with an overwhelming desire to buy. It must develop new needs, a cult of pleasure, of material possession. It must address all ages, all members of the family; it must make women sex objects and men modern sex hunters.

Thus the media produce and reproduce the culture of violence and sex, the quest to satisfy immediate needs, fleeting pleasure, quick enjoyment, the excessive, and the pornographic, in order to keep the global economy rolling.

The post-World War II years were a period of hope for many. There were those who believed in socialism and thought it was being built in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe or in parts of Asia. There were those who believed in democracy and freedom and thought they were on their way to achieving them. Asia, Africa and Latin America seemed on the path to total independence.

Today, most of these hopes have collapsed under the assault of global transnational imperialism. Loss of hope, the failure of national democratic and progressive movements, the difficulties of the economic situation and especially the attack launched by a global system on what people perceive as their interests, their history, their culture, their identity, and their nation, all of these have bred a movement of resistance.

In the absence of perspectives for the future, however, people will tend to fall back on what they know, cling to the familiar, the reassuring, to the heritage that makes them what they are, the things of the past.

Rather than a change forwards, the reaction is backwards to the closed family and its values, to the closed community, the tribe, the race or ethnic group, to religion, and tradition, to everything which seems to be identity, which differentiates from the “invading other”. Rather than being open, people close up like oysters, become divided, fight tooth and nail against each other.

Confronted by global assault, instead of uniting against the common danger, people build up destructive barriers and fortifications, adopt attitudes that divide them, join political and cultural movements which are separatist and retrograde. They revive attitudes of intolerance and discrimination in the name of religion, tradition, culture, race, or identity. They resist the "invading other", seeking hope in religion, the repetition of history, superstition or metaphysical chimera. They think in terms which fragment and disconnect; they seek absolute truth to replace the uncertainty and fluidity of the present.

These are the main reasons for the revival of ethnic, racial and religious movements, their essence and their message. But behind them lie concealed the economic forces which try to take advantage of divisions, conflicts and confrontations, in order to protect their interests and expand their power.

All economic systems, all economic powers must have their "ideology" even if they themselves have declared an "end to ideology". They must have their thinkers. The soldiers in this standing army describe themselves as “postmodern”, to indicate that the era of "modernism is now over.

Amongst these "thinkers" are people like Samuel Huntington, for whom economic interests or ideology are no longer the motor of history. Instead, he posits struggles between eight world civilisations, at the forefront of which we find first Christian (read “Western") civilisation, to be protected against the hordes of Islam (read Arab), “Confucianism” (read China), and Hinduism (read India), etc. On the basis of this analysis, he makes an appeal for the West's "political and military revival" in order to face the Islamic threat, and for the enhancement of NATO's military strength. This post-modern "Crusade" serves the purposes of the multi-nationals very well. It can conceal what is happening in the world, channel the struggle against the global hegemony exercised by the 500 multinationals into a "clash of civilisations", mobilise people behind Western neo-colonialist policies, provide Western capitalism with a new enemy to replace communism and offer a handy pretext for an even greater production and sale of arms.

Other post-modern thinkers like Bernard Lewis and Francis Fukuyama have developed theses along similar or related lines. Some of them, however, including Fukuyama, exhibit a greater degree of subtlety and sophistication than Huntington, and deal with a wider range, of issues.
Many of these ideas have been percolated into the writings of the Egyptian and Arab elite and have been adopted in a modified form. They transform the struggles taking place in our region into issues of culture and civilisation. Our differences with Israel become a “civilisational challenge” and a “competition between civilizations”, the Gulf War becomes a war over values of “civilisation and freedom” rather than oil, and a conference to be held in Cairo forces us to choose between “clash of civilisations or cultural dialogue”.

Of course, there is an element of truth in whatever analysis or thesis one produces. The trick is to compartmentalise our thinking, to separate the "cultural" from the "economic", the values of "humanism" and "democracy" in our region from the question of "oil".

This is one of the important ways in which postmodernist thinking abandons crucial issues by the wayside. It prevents us from seeing what is really happening, with a smoke-screen of seemingly very complex and learned "discourse".

Today, on the world scene, we can observe two movements or tendencies: a movement towards economic, political, military and informational concentration and centralisation, to the advantage of the very few at the expense of the very many; and a second movement, of fragmentation and division coupled with marginalisation and pauperisation of peoples, mainly in the South, and to a much lesser extent in the North.

The movement towards a "global culture" might seem to be in contradiction with the other movement towards division, fragmentation and cultural strife.
To a certain extent it is, and yet at the same time it is not. The two movements, in their essence, complement each other to serve the very restricted hegemonic few at the top. They are two faces of the same coin, combining to concentrate economic, political, military and informatics power in the hands of a minority at the top.
To maintain a global hegemony in the hands of a tiny minority over thousands of millions of the earth's peoples, unification must take place at the top, not at the bottom. People must remain divided, confused, fragmented. Divide and rule is an adage as old as historical time.

Religio-political movements in our part of the world would seem to be in conflict with Western global hegemony, and sometimes they are. But there are quarrels in all families. The United States, France, Britain and Japan have their quarrels. But not over fundamentals, not over the multi-national system as such.
The Islamic religio-political movement, with its banks, its companies, its trade in arms and other items, including drugs, or gold, or currencies, its businesses and political headquarters in Geneva, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, the Bahamas - all these are an integral part of the global economic system. The Gulf countries, Arab or otherwise, buttress this movement with their petrodollars. They were active in Afghanistan and still are. They opposed every democratic, patriotic movement in the Arab world. Despite occasional conflicts, they have been and continue to be supported by the West, or considered as an alternative when other Western-supported regimes have done their time.

The politico-religious movement is another manifestation of the post-modern era in which we live. Islamic thinkers, analysts, intellectuals arc often another, if cruder, face of post-modem thought. For them, the cultural has precedence over the economy and is separated from it. Even if they oppose the so-called West, they conceal what goes on behind the scenes, the flow of money in the unified network of global interests which maintains the multinationals at the top.
However the anti-Western "popular" religious movement has different interests from those of the leading forces. It is a genuine protest movement, but instead of looking forwards, it continues to gaze into the past. That is why it is being used to other ends by those who control it from above and use it in the struggle for power or money. The post-modem thinkers of Islam, of its culture and its civilisation, do not speak to us of that. Unwittingly, or sometimes by intention they are part and parcel of the post-modern net.

Thus postmodern thought serves to maintain the global hegemony of multi-national capitalism through two seemingly opposed cultural tendencies: the unifying, global consumer culture, and the fragmenting effect of cultural identity or multi-culturalism directed to the peoples of the world especially in the South. Both these tendencies serve a single aim. To maintain and develop global capitalism as it is, the cultural must be divorced from the economic, the political and the military in order to conceal what is going on.

But post-modem thinking as it has developed, mainly in the West, is also an ideology of apathy and helplessness. It devitalises and paralyses resistance by destroying inter-connectedness in the name of diversity and richness. It fragments knowledge in its attempt to study more clearly what is specific and local. It transforms the world into an extremely rich but disconnected kaleidoscope. These strategies may be considered some of its merits; chaos can sometimes be positive and unpredictability can open the way to knowledge, but post-modernism also propagates conceptions which deprive people of their capacity to struggle against global capitalism and so change the world.

For if we are living the end of history, as Francis Fukayama contends, how can we think of the future, or learn from the past? Is he not saying that our world the world ruled by the multinationals, by an enormous concentration of money and power, and knowledge will remain as it is? If we are witnessing the "end of theory and ideology" as Michel Foucault, Jaques Derrida and other post-modem thinkers maintain, how can we gather facts and knowledge into some coherent whole, even if this whole is to be replaced by other frames of thought and conceptions in the future? If, with Michel Foucault, we are witnessing the "end of representation", how can people organise groups, institutions, unions or parties to struggle for their rights? If we are living the death of the author as Roland Barthes says, are we not left with lifeless texts divorced from human endeavour?

All these "ends" or "deaths" deprive people of their means of struggle, their capacity to resist. They mean the surrender of history, theory, ideology, authorship and representation to neo-colonial global capitalism as weapons with which to defend itself unopposed so that it can propagate its own ideology, its history, its theories, its forms of representation and its own authorship at will - so that it can continue to drown us in a never-ending avalanche of fragmented, disconnected facts about the world while it keeps its hands firmly on the reins of power and knowledge, leaving us to swim in the net like schools of helpless fish.

The writer is a novelist, political commentator and physician. He returned recently from the US where, for four years, he taught a course on "Dissent and Creativity" at Duke University, North Carolina.