For
decades, Sam Huntington’s famous thesis of a “clash of civilizations”
has been regarded as the opposite of “the end of history” idea posited
by Francis Fukuyama. In reality, it turns out that the two go together:
One is a condition of the other. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek
insightfully puts it in a paper prepared for an upcoming colloquium of
the Berggruen Institute Europe at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice, “the
clash of civilizations is the politics of the end of history.”
Let me explain.
The
original formulation that humanity was reaching “the end of history”
was argued by the French Hegelian-Marxist philosopher Alexandre Kojève
in the mid-20th century. For Kojève, the core factor driving history
forward, the raison d’etre of human initiative, was the materialist
struggle to overcome necessity and nature in order to realize the full
potential of human freedom. This historical progression, he posited,
would culminate in a kind of satisfied stasis devoid of major conflict
once a sufficient level of prosperity and security was achieved. After
the Cold War, Fukuyama tacked on the notion that the triumph of liberal
democracy and free markets set the stage for the inexorable achievement
Kojève predicted.
Though
under-emphasized in the afterglow of those early post-Cold War days,
Fukuyama then already had a sense that conflict would hardly disappear.
Rather, he suspected that tensions in the times ahead, would, as Hegel
himself had seen it, mainly concern “the struggle for recognition” — or
what we have come to call “identity politics” these days.
Others
at the time, like the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, had a different worry.
His concern was that the triumph of modern liberal sensibilities tied to
consumer capitalism, which shed all historical tradition and faith in
the future while sanctifying the individual pursuit of happiness in the
present, would drift into a kind of moral indifference. “The real evil
of liberal capitalist societies,” Paz said to
me in one conversation in Mexico City, “is the predominant nihilism”
that takes the form of “a passive indifference to values. Without a
higher unity we only tolerate difference because we are equally
indifferent to everything and everyone.”
In his Tre Oci paper, Žižek threads these two strands together.
Worldless Places And The Reality Of Fictions
“Although
capitalism is global and encompasses the whole world,” Žižek writes,
“it deprives the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive
mapping. Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes
meaning: It is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all,
no global ‘capitalist world view,’ no ‘capitalist civilization’ proper.
The fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism
can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or
Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be
formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning.”
It
is in this context that Žižek offers the surprising observation that,
if Kojève were alive today, he would see South Korea as the place where
history has ended thanks to the triumph of liberal capitalism. Why?
“South
Korea is arguably the country of free choice — not in the political
sense, but in the sense of daily life, especially among the younger
depoliticized generation. The choice we are talking about is the
indifferent choice of moderate daily pleasures, the choice among options
which don’t really matter, what one listens to and reads, how one
dresses, how one socializes and eats, to which foreign country one goes
for a holiday,” Žižek submits.
He cites the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi’s report on a visit to Seoul:
“Korea
is the ground zero of the world, a blueprint for the future of the
planet. … In the emptied cultural space, the Korean experience is marked
by an extreme degree of individualization and simultaneously it is
headed towards the ultimate cabling of the collective mind. These lonely
monads walk in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with
the pictures, tweets, games coming out of their small screens, perfectly
insulated and perfectly wired into the smooth interface of the flow. …
South Korea has the highest suicide rate in the world. Suicide is the
most common cause of death for those under 40 in South Korea.”
“What
Berardi’s impressions on Seoul provide,” says Žižek, “is the image of a
place deprived of history, a worldless place. This new generation
mostly doesn’t care about big issues like human rights and meaningful
freedoms or the threat of war. While the world still notices the
aggressive pronouncements of the North Korean regime accompanied by
nuclear threats, the large majority in South Korea just ignores them.
Since the standard of living is relatively high, one comfortably lives
in a bubble.”
What
happens in South Korea doesn’t stay there. Worried that the floating
indifference of the K-Pop crowd will spread to the young generation in
next-door China, Žižek notes, the authorities there are fighting back
under President Xi Jinping’s project of rejuvenating traditional values
associated with the continuous history of Chinese civilization
stretching back millennia.
To
understand what is going on, Žižek advises that we “closely follow the
writings of Wang Huning, a current member of the Chinese Communist
Party’s Politburo Standing Committee and the director of Central
Guidance Commission on Building Spiritual Civilization. Wang is correct
in emphasizing the key role of culture, of the domain of symbolic
fictions.”
Warming
to this topic, the Slovenian philosopher argues that “The true
materialist way to oppose the topic of the ‘fiction of reality’ is not
to strictly distinguish between fiction and reality but to focus on
the reality of fictions. Fictions are not outside reality, they are
materialized in our social interactions, in our institutions and customs
— as we can see in today’s mess, if we destroy fictions on which our
social interactions are based, our social reality itself begins to fall
apart.”
Wang, who designates himself as a neo-conservative, grasps the danger. According to Žižek:
Wang
sees his task as imposing a new common ethical substance, and we should
not dismiss this as an excuse to impose the full control of the
Communist Party over social life. He is replying to a real problem. Thirty
years ago, he wrote a book, “America against America,” where he
perspicuously noted the antagonisms of the American way of life,
including its darker sides: social disintegration, lack of solidarity
and shared values, nihilist consumerism and individualism. Wang’s fear
was that the same disease may spread to China, which is now happening at
the popular level of mass culture. Xi’s reforms meant to bolster
‘spiritual civilization’ are a desperate attempt to put a stop to this
trend.
Will it work? Žižek is not so sure:
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