It's the End of the World as we Know It!

 

Slavoj Žižek, "We are witnessing the "disintegration of the Western world" (Google translated from Serbian)

The fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria surprised even the opposition, led by Abu Mohammad al-Golani's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, offering fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

What role did Israel, Turkey, Russia and the United States play in this sudden reversal? Did Russia refrain from intervening on Assad's behalf simply because it cannot afford another military operation outside the Ukrainian theater, or was there some sort of deal behind the scenes?

Has the US again fallen into the trap of supporting Islamists against Russia, ignoring the lessons learned from supporting the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s? What did Israel do? It is certainly benefiting from diverting the world's attention from Gaza and the West Bank, and is even claiming new territory in southern Syria for itself.

Like most commenters, I simply don't know the answers to these questions, which is why I prefer to focus on the bigger picture. A general feature of the story, as in Afghanistan after the US withdrawal and in Iran during the 1979 revolution, is that there was no major, decisive battle. The regime simply collapsed like a house of cards. Victory went to the side that was actually willing to fight and die for its cause.

The fact that the regime was universally despised does not fully explain what happened. Why did secular resistance to Assad disappear, leaving only Muslim fundamentalists to make the most of the moment?

The same question could be applied to Afghanistan. Why were thousands of people willing to risk their lives to catch a flight and get out of Kabul, but not to fight the Taliban? The armed forces of the old Afghan regime were better armed, but simply not dedicated to the fight.

A similar set of facts fascinated the philosopher Michel Foucault when he visited Iran (twice) in 1979. He was struck by what he saw as the revolutionaries' indifference to their own survival. Theirs was "a partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling," explains Patrick Gamez. They sought "transformation through struggle and trial, contrary to the pacific, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power." ... The key to understanding this view is the concept of truth in action...the concept of truth as subjective, reserved for the obedient."

As Foucault himself put it:

"...if this subject who speaks of law (or rather, rights) speaks the truth, that truth is no longer the universal truth of the philosopher. ... The totality interests him only to the extent that he can see it one-sidedly, turn it around and see it from his own point of view. In other words, the truth is the truth that can be applied only from its combative position, from the perspective of the desired victory and ultimately, so to speak, the survival of the speaking subject itself."

Can this perspective be dismissed as evidence of a pre-modern "primitive" society that has not yet discovered modern individualism? To anyone with a minimal familiarity with Western Marxism, the answer is clear. As the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács argued, Marxism is "universally true" precisely because it is "biased" towards a particular subjective position.

What Foucault sought in Iran - an agonistic ("war") form of truth-telling - was there from the beginning in Marx, who saw that participation in the class struggle was not an obstacle to the acquisition of "objective" knowledge of history, but rather a prerequisite for it .

The positivist concept of knowledge as an "objective" expression of reality - what Foucault characterized as the "pacific, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power" - is the ideology of the "end of ideology".

On the one hand, we have supposedly non-ideological expert knowledge; on the other hand, we have dispersed individuals, each focused on their own idiosyncratic "care of the self" (Foucault's term)—the little things that bring pleasure to one's life. From this standpoint of liberal individualism, any universal commitment, especially if it involves risking one's life, is dubious and "irrational."

Here we encounter an interesting paradox – while traditional Marxism probably cannot provide a convincing account of the Taliban's success, it helps clarify what Foucault was looking for in Iran (and what should fascinate us in Syria). At a time when the triumph of global capitalism suppressed the secular spirit of collective engagement in the search for a better life, Foucault hoped to find an example of collective engagement that did not rely on religious fundamentalism. But he didn't find it.

The best explanation of why religion now seems to hold a monopoly on collective commitment and self-sacrifice comes from Boris Buden, who argues that religion as a political force reflects the post-political disintegration of society – the breakdown of traditional mechanisms that guaranteed stable communal bonds. Fundamentalist religion is not only political; it is politics in itself. For its supporters, it is no longer just a social phenomenon, but the very structure of society.

Therefore, it is no longer possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from its politicization - in the post-political universe, religion is a channel through which antagonistic passions return. Recent events that appear to be triumphs of religious fundamentalism do not represent the return of religion to politics, but simply the return of the political as such.

The question is, therefore, what happened to secular radical politics (the great forgotten achievement of European modernity)? In its absence, Noam Chomsky believes we are approaching the end of organized society - a point of no return beyond which we cannot even adopt common sense measures to "prevent cataclysmic environmental destruction".

While Chomsky focuses on our indifference to the environment, I would extend his view to our general reluctance to engage in political struggles in general. Making collective decisions to prevent foreseeable calamities is a distinctly political process.

The problem of the West is that it is not willing to fight for a great common goal. For example, "peacekeepers" who want to end Russia's war in Ukraine on any terms will end up defending their comfortable lives and are willing to sacrifice Ukraine for that purpose. Italian philosopher Franco Berardi is right. We are witnessing the "disintegration of the Western world".