How do we speak of the unspeakable? I’m not just referring to the outrageous assault on Iran by the duopoly of Trumpanyahoo. Our hearts were already pierced by cries from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean of parents for their perished children and children for their perished parents. A place where amputees now play football on crutches under the sky of a false ceasefire, slated for supervision by a spurious Board of Peace, devised by Trumpitup to usurp the UN for personal glory. Can you get your head round it? This is the hypermodern world, split between the words and pictures on our screens and the secrets of our heart. Distant horror comes close and the close hides itself until the heart breaks. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” said Wittgenstein. He was wrong. The silence must be broken.
This is the hypermodern world, where Trumpitup rails and fulminates, sowing division at home and abroad, in different measure. An ethnic enclave under genocidal bombardment? A country in the centre of Europe invaded by its overweening neighbour? Here there’s a schism between perpetrators and victims, and in both cases, Trumpitup sides with the perpetrators while declaring he’s seeking peace.
A country in Africa embroiled in civil war? This he ignores, to him they’re all savages. Instead he goes for what he thinks are easier targets, and claims to have solved several lesser armed conflicts around the world, although when he turns his fleeting attention elsewhere, they frequently break out again. Meanwhile, offended that he didn’t get the Peace Prize, he turns to military adventurism in Venezuela, threatens Greenland and Cuba, and now, equally unprovoked, joins Netan-Yahoo in mounting a full-scale air war against Iran for which there is clearly neither a strategy nor an endgame. All this is without mentioning the mayhem he has brought at home, where it seems no-one can stop him.
Are you safe at home in actually existing democracy? Then you’re faced with different camps, some abhorrent, like the disdain of right-wing populists and the defensiveness of the establishment. These are opposed by the fellow-feeling of heartfelt anger at the inhumanity of war (here I include myself, although too infirm nowadays to join the demonstrations, as I did in 1968 and 2003). But there is also a general and pervasive sense of mass bewilderment.
How could it have come to this? And what shall we call it? It’s more than a bad dream. A malevolent parody of Alice in Wonderland? A replay of Kafka for the digital age? A surrealist legalistic drama? A badly-plotted disaster movie? A fiendish trumped-up reality show?
This is the hypermodern world, and it’s driving us mad. We no longer know how to distinguish the real from the spectacle, how to trust our own existential truth. This is not a philosophical question but the conundrum of everyday life, which remains unspoken but overflows in the symptomatic memes of the social media. We are free to say what we want, but our power of speaking truth has degenerated, as if we’re becoming demented; only the cause is not a neurological disease, its origin is anthropogenic, like climate change, a social consequence of the ruling political economy and its transformation into surveillance capitalism. The targets in Iran are chosen by AI. That’s why they make mistakes and drop bombs on schoolchildren, even when Israel’s super-sophisticated digital surveillance techniques enable them to assassinate the Iran’s Supreme Leader.1
Trumpitup, of course, is an arch-climate change denier, and serves the interests of the digital capitalists with even less understanding of where they’re taking us than he has of economics. The way it engulfs the planet even more rapidly than climate change and is similarly devoid of reason, conscience, intelligence, humanity and heart.
Is there a remedy? Two answers occur to me. One is to stop Trump. But this is primarily something the US, its politicians and its people, have to do, while the rest of the world can only resist the best we can. Trumpitup has torn up the Constitution. What is preventing them from impeaching him and restoring it? This is not a rhetorical question, but nor am I in a position to attempt an answer, since I don’t understand how he got elected in the first place.
The other answer is yes. Not, however, by imagining that it’s possible to reverse direction, for example by punitive regulation of social media platforms, which I don’t spurn, but only by hanging on to the recognition of the madness and finding a way through the wreckage. Disavow denial. Let conscience stream.
Look at it this way. We are inside history, which lurches from crisis to crisis. Each time the components of the crisis are historically contingent, but it feels the same. As Gramsci famously put it , ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ Hypermodernism is bloated with morbid symptoms, but we cannot afford to be defeatist, and Gramsci also advocated, even more pithily, for ‘pessimism of the spirit, optimism of the will’. In other words, a belief in conscience and responsibility, reason, intelligence and imagination. Think of this as a secular version of Pascal’s wager: weigh the gain and loss in wagering that wisdom will overcome stupidity. If you win, you have everything to gain; if you lose, you lose everything. Better believe it, then.
But of course this is not a political programme. That’s another question altogether, and all an old man like me can do is find hope in the emerging signs of preparation for a crucial ideological battle which I probably won’t live to see.
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