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HISTORY
Slavoj Zizek
It is 2027, with the human race rendered infertile - the earth’s youngest
inhabitant, born 18 years ago, was just killed in Buenos Aires. The UK lives
in a permanent state of emergency, anti-terrorist quads chasing illegal
immigrants, the state power administering the dwindling population which
vegetates in sterile hedonism. Are these two features – hedonist
permissiveness plus new forms of social apartheid and control based on fear
– not what our societies are about? Here comes Cuaron’s stroke of a genius
– as he put it in one of his interviews: “Many of the stories of the future
involve something like ‘Big Brother,’ but I think that’s a 20th-century view of
tyranny. The tyranny happening now is taking new disguises — the tyranny
of the 21st century is called ‘democracy’.” This is why the rulers of his world
are not grey and uniformed Orwellian “totalitarian” bureaucrats, but
enlightened democratic administrators, cultured, each with his or her own
“life style.” When the hero visits an ex-friend, now a top government official,
to gain a special permit for a refugee, we enter something like a Manhattan
upper-class gay couple loft, the informally dressed official with his crippled
partner at the table.
The Last Men doesn’t want his daydreaming disturbed – this is why
“harassment” is a key word in his mental universe. At its most elementary,
the term designates brutal facts of rape, beating, and other modes of social
violence which, of course, should be ruthlessly condemned. However, in the
predominant use, this elementary meaning imperceptibly slips into the
condemnation of any excessive proximity of another real human being, with
his or her desires, fears and pleasures. Two topics determine today's liberal
tolerant attitude towards others: the respect of otherness, openness towards
it, and the obsessive fear of harassment. The other is OK insofar as his
presence is not intrusive, insofar as the other is not really other. Tolerance
coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other
effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into
his/her space – in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my
over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central
'human right' in our society: the right not to be harassed, i.e., to be kept at a
safe distance from the others.
The courts in most of the Western societies now impose a restraining order
when someone sues another person for harassing him or her (stalking him
or her or making unwarranted sexual advances). The harasser can be legally
prohibited from knowingly approaching the victim, and must remain at a
distance of more than 100 yards. Necessary as this measure is, there is
nonetheless in it something of the defense against the traumatic reality of
the other's desire: is it not obvious that there is something dreadfully violent
about openly displaying one's passion for and to another human? Passion by
definition hurts its object, and even if its addressee gladly agrees to occupy
this place, he or she cannot ever do it without a moment of awe and
surprise.
This is the case even with the growing prohibition of smoking. First, all
offices were declared "smoke-free," then flights, then restaurants, then
airports, then bars, then private clubs, then, in some campuses, 50 yards
around the entrances to the buildings, then - in a unique case of
pedagogical censorship, reminding us of the famous Stalinist practice of
retouching the photos of nomenklatura – the US Postal Service removed the
cigarette from the stamps with the photo-portrait of blues guitarist Robert
Johnson and of Jackson Pollock. These prohibitions target the other's
excessive and risky enjoyment, embodied in the act of "irresponsibly"
lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply with an unabashed pleasure (in
contrast to Clintonite yuppies who do it without inhaling, or who have sex
without actual penetration, or food without fat) – indeed, as Jacques Lacan
put it, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.
We from the First World countries find it more and more difficult even to
imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to
sacrifice one's life. It effectively appears as if the split between First World
and Third World runs more and more along the lines of the opposition
between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth,
and dedicating one's life to some transcendent Cause. Is this antagonism
not the one between what Nietzsche called "passive" and "active" nihilism?
We in the West are the Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while
the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the nihilist
struggle up to their self-destruction. No wonder that the only place in
Children of Men where a strange sense of freedom prevails, a kind of
liberated territory without this all-pervasive suffocating oppression, is
Blackpool, the whole city isolated by a wall and turned into a refugee camp
run by its inhabitants, illegal immigrants, and, at the film’s end, ruthlessly
bombed by the air force. Life is thriving here, with Islam fundamentalist
military demonstrations, but also acts of authentic solidarity – no wonder
the newborn child makes it appearance here.
So what went wrong with us? Any attentive reader of Marquis de Sade
cannot help noticing the paradox of how the Sadean unconstrained
assertion of sexuality, deprived of the last vestiges of spiritual
transcendence, turns sexuality itself into a mechanic exercise lacking any
authentic sensual passion. And is not a similar reversal clearly discernible in
the deadlock of today's Last Men, "postmodern" individuals who reject all
"higher" goals and dedicate their life to survival filled with more and more
refined and artificially aroused pleasures? If the old hierarchic societies
oppressed vital forces through their rigid ideological systems and the state
apparatuses that enforced them, today’s societies are losing their vitality
through their very permissive hedonism: everything is allowed, but
decaffeinated, deprived of its substance.
And the same as for our pleasures goes for our democracy: it is more and
more a decaffeinated democracy, a democracy deprived of its substance, of
its political edge. A century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Men who begin to
fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away
freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church.” The first thing
one should add to it today is that the same holds for the advocates of
religion themselves: how many fanatical defenders of religion started with
ferociously attacking the contemporary secular culture and ended up
forsaking religion itself (losing any meaningful religious experience). And is
it not that, in a strictly homologous way, the liberal warriors are so eager to
fight the anti-democratic fundamentalism that they will end by flinging away
freedom and democracy themselves if only they may fight terror? They have
such a passion for proving that the non-Christian fundamentalism is the
main threat to freedom that they are ready to fall back on the position that
we have to limit our own freedom here and now, in our allegedly Christian
societies. If the terrorists are ready to wreck this world for love of the other,
our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of
hatred for the Muslim other. Jonathan Alter, Alan Derschowitz, and Sam
Harris love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture –
the ultimate degradation of human dignity - to defend it…
This is why the “clash of civilizations” is the Huntington's disease of our time
– as Samuel Huntington put it, after the end of the Cold War, the “iron
curtain of ideology” has been replaced by the “velvet curtain of culture.”
This dark vision may appear the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama’s bright
prospect of the End of History in the guise of a world-wide liberal
democracy; perhaps, however, the »clash of civilizations« IS »the end of
history,« i.e., the ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which
fits global capitalism. In our age of »post-politics,« when politics proper is
progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining
legitimate source of conflicts are cultural (ethnic, religious) tensions.