Many of the critiques in your article, Mr. Umair Haque, I find non-objectionable. They are critiques one could find in any good graduate course on critical theory or anthropology in the U.S.. A deed is to have shown they need not stay there. Bravo!
But the unfortunate part is not only will your critique be non-receivable by the majority of people, but you have no positive construction. Or as an old farmer once told me:
“it is a hella of lot easier to knock a barn down than to build it”.
Hence, the problem with simply listening to and critiquing symptoms of others; there will be a moment when one is asked, often in urgency, to do something better than what they are critiquing. What are you proposing ?
In the anticipation of a non-response, I will outline an initial one of my own.
A first step towards getting beyond the critique of symptoms, would be to tighten up on the vocabulary so that people might speak of the same thing without simply resorting to anecdotal expression. What is being described, I would propose, was analyzed a long time ago by Freud, when the first industrialized countries and modern concentration camps were born, as a social psychosis. Anyone caring to (re)read Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, will have already a glimpse at what is at stake.
But far from being a mere lack of courage and cowardice, what is so difficult to analyze about a social psychosis is that it is impervious to critique. Not only because others will not listen, or the dialogue inevitably digresses into insults, but because the description and critique of the dramatis personae — ‘the Americans’, or in Freud’s case, ‘the Germans’ and ‘Moderns’- does not cut to the cause of the problem. Such masks are only the effect, secondary, but no doubt terrifying in all their narcissistic glory. The question, the positive question, remains how to get to the primary cause? (the notion that the culture of American ‘Individualism’ is the root cause, is, I believe, mistaken and just another analysis of the mask). And how would this allow for a more just construction in the future?
Should we just set up a more courageous or moral society that corrects a cowardly Slave mentality by taking it back to the very authoritarian regimes, religions, and Masters the American and French revolution overthrew? That is what many are proposing. The non-cowardly ISIS, for example, as a response to a modern psychosis, want a caliphate as the cure of the modern ills. In such a city, everyone would take the risk of death not only to earn respect, virtue, eudaimonia (if not eighty one virgins), but to be a Master, or a least, a society of warriors and potential masters.
If surely this is not being proposed,then what is a positive solution? Where is a response on the cause not the mask? That does not merely fall back into the very problem or worse than the one being critiqued?
Until these questions are responded to, we can only side with the sharing of ideas with sighs, nods, and probably a few insults.
Truly,
S
