Manifest Destiny Manifest Terror The source of
future troubles for the world, troubles that can indeed threaten the very continuity of
modern civilization, no matter how one defines it: Western, Christian, Secular, or simply
human, is not terrorism per se, and is not simply the resentment that the people of the
underdeveloped world harbor towards more developed countries, as some do indeed assert.
Nor does it squarely lie in the triumphalist attitude exhibited by the peoples and
governments of the developed countries - in that sense of hubris that imbues all of their
actions and modes of address vis-à-vis everything
“other.” For while the
inhabitants of the developed world seem to revel in their imagined “victory”
over the rest of the world, the inhabitants of the underdeveloped world continue to wallow
in their seeming ignominy and all too real frustration, blaming all their misery on their
rich neighbors. Everybody is,
thus, still caught up in that all too familiar worldview that pits “us,” however
we define ourselves, against “them,” how we define them. This at a time
when all ideologies have failed, and/or are failing, and all borders are becoming
increasingly meaningless and artificial. The
Arab-Israeli Conflict, among many other ongoing conflicts in the world today, may indeed
encapsulate this tendency: the failure of ideologies in this instance and the artificial
nature of the borders involved being all too demonstrable. Still, the tendency itself
transcends regional conflicts and is quite global in both essence and character. This is
evident even from a casual consideration of the ongoing US-led global anti-terrorism
campaign, with all the controversies and dilemmas it is provoking, and the way in which a
saintly in-God-we-trust America is pitted against a declared axis of well-nigh
inexhaustible evil.[1]
Or, looking at it from the point of view of Usama Bin Ladin and his sympathizers, the way
an evil and greedy superpower is trying to impose its ways and pursue its interests on the
expense of the inhabitants of the Muslim World, its peoples and its cultures. Such
mentalities, triumphalist on the one hand, victimary on the other, cannot and will not, in
their nature, be accommodative of the needs, desires, points of view and aspirations of
the other side, no matter how legitimate and human they happen to be. The same goes for
the accursed progeny of these mentalities: globalization and modernism[2]
in the first instance, fundamentalism and terrorism in the other. For
globalization, as a project for the not so distant future, seems pretty much to occur
concomitantly with the process of leveling, that is the process of creating smaller and
smaller, and hence more controllable, entities out of existing countries, with the
pretension that this is being done in order to accommodate various ethnic and sectarian
aspirations. The main problem with this project is that the prosperity, if not the very
survival, of the smaller entities will always be dependent on their ability to service the
needs of, and accept the role assigned to them by the project leaders, the emerging larger
blocks, chiefly: the EU and North America. As such, these smaller entities will always
live at the mercy of the large blocks and will never have the chance to mount any serious
challenge to their global domination. These are the real lessons of the US-led
intervention in Former Yugoslavia, and in Iraq and Afghanistan.[3] And while
globalization pits smaller entities against larger blocks, modernism pits ways of life and
modes of thoughts against each other, giving absolutely no chance for the possibility of
accommodating any piece of existing traditions, and precluding the very possibility of
analyzing traditional culture with the aim of actually learning from it and probing and
absorbing what is actually useful in it. This is so simply because modernism seems to
posit its values as a new faith system. In a sense, then, it is not modern at all. It is,
in fact, an extension of the very traditional system of thought it claims to replace, with
some of the terms having been changed and new ones introduced and adopted.[4]
This being the
case, it was only natural for the proponents of tradition to be hardened in their stands,
to dig deeper and to embark on founding a counter-ideology of sorts, leading to the
emergence of various fundamentalist creeds all over the world. Thus, fundamentalism is, in
part at least, a response to modernism - to that triumphalist and disdainful attitude that
many people, especially in the developed world, reflected vis-à-vis traditional culture,
transforming it into the “mother of all evils.” Still, one has
to admit that modernity and its values, regardless of their transformation into an ism,
did impose themselves upon the lives of people in both the developed and under-developed
worlds, in an all too quick, perhaps even sudden (especially in the case of the
underdeveloped world) manner, so much so that it left many people gasping and unbalanced.
Modernity, in effect destabilized whole societies and shook most people’s faith to
its very foundations. For many
people, then, the transitional period into modernity was not long enough. Perhaps, for
some, it could never be long enough. Still, and while there is a real need for people to
be given the necessary opportunity and time to absorb the values of modernity and learn of
their necessity on basis of their own experiences, such an opportunity is exactly what the
proponents of globalization and modernism are not willing to give.[5]
Greed is a factor here, of course, but so are the isms involved and that sense of Manifest
Destiny and that revisionist view of history that transforms the entire human experience
into a mere prelude to the arrival of the modern age as a new messianic age.
The proponents
of victimary thought, on the other hand, and while they may not refer to themselves as
such, do, naturally, share that messianic outlook on things. Indeed, the two mentalities
are essentially united in this respected, being two avatars of the same lacking deity that
is human pretension and perennial sense of insecurity. But in this case, the messianic age
is yet to come. In the mean time, there could only be desperation, lethargy, rebellion,
and, for some, as we have seen long before September 11 and continue to see after,
terrorism. Terrorism is
the choice of the totally dejected and inherently irreconcilables, those whose own sense
of Manifest Destiny is no less strong than that of their modernist brethren. But they have
reality to contend with, a reality that does not augur well at all for any of their
dreams, leaving them no option but to confront it with an act of complete and total
negation, of themselves and the world. The nihilistic
tendency in terrorism is all too visible, but so is the nihilistic tendency in modernism
itself which, in effect, denies the possibility of any future development, or evolution,
beyond the bounds it prescribes. For though modernism does not pretend to predict the
future, it, nonetheless, delineates it, that is, it puts an overall framework for it, and,
as such, limits its possibilities. Perhaps this gives some sense of purpose for the
“faithful” (and the profiteers), but, as is the problem with all faith-systems,
it also blinds people to the possibilities that exist outside the bounds of their familiar
modes of thought, leading, at occasions, to a benign dismissal of these possibilities as
irrelevant and temporary heresies, and to a total rejection of, and an unavoidable
face-off with them, whenever they appear too real and present, and perhaps even too
relevant, to be shunned.
Such was the
situation that was created by the September 11 Attack. The heresy was made all too visible
and relevant through the acts of terror that took place, and the face-off, that is, war
unlimited and unbound, was, thus, made “inevitable,” in the logic of the
prevailing system of thought. And as war
gives an even better opportunity to the protagonists of globalization and modernism to
carry out their plans and speed up the pace of their execution, it will also supply the
terrorists with greater justification to implement their own equally, though more
flagrantly so, nihilistic schemes, the scales involved in both cases notwithstanding. And
as the two groups of believers in Manifest Destiny compete against each other,[6]
each seeking victory rather than trying to find some common grounds with the other,
humanity will be driven further and further to the brink of disaster. Yes, humanity did
find itself in a similar position during the Cold War, but the fact that it has survived
is no reason for optimism. Optimism should rather be derived from our ability to resist
and avoid being put in such positions to begin with. Our survival should never be the
subject of gambling. Only when this realization begins to seep deeply into our
“collective consciousness” and notably affect our “collective
behavior,” will we have a good reason to be manifestly optimistic and to set optimistically
on working out our ever not-so-manifest individual and collective destinies.
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lust for salvation, Brother, as though it were a woman, and I - a man.
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