“ … the only thing we have to fear is fear itself …”
Franklin D. Roosevelt,
Inaugural Address (1933)
"There is always
an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Menken, The
Divine Afflatus (1917)
Let me begin here with an admission: When I look at our
world today, at the end of 2015, I am afraid.
I am not afraid of terrorists, Islamic or otherwise. They
want me to be afraid – that’s what terrorists do, attempt to incite terror. I
know that there is an infinitesimal chance that I, or someone close to me, may
become their victim; we may be in the busy centre of a large European city, or
on an aeroplane – just a question of being in the wrong place at the wrong
time. I could also be driving along the motorway/highway/autobahn when some
confused or crazy fool comes shooting onto it through the exit ramp. Or I could
just be struck by lightning. But I repeat, I am not afraid of terrorists; I
refuse to grant them this power over me. They are attacking the values of the
open society in which I live. The vulnerability we have towards their attacks –
despite all the reasonable security measures in place – is the inevitable price
we pay for the values of openness and tolerance which are at the foundation of
any society which truly claims to be civilized.
I am not afraid of migrants, be they refugees fleeing from
war or persecution, or so-called “economic” migrants, those prepared to uproot
themselves, abandon their homes, families and friends, give up everything they
know in order to seek a better future for themselves and their children. I
realise that their arrival will challenge the country, culture and society in
which I live. But I believe that this challenge can be fruitful, creative and
positive if we face up to it with courage, honesty, openness, and generosity. I
accept that the arrival of larger groups of migrants will change the culture in
which I live; that there will be an inevitable interaction and mingling between
my (Western European) culture and the different life-experiences and traditions
that these migrants bring with them. But cultures are and have always been
dynamic and fluid realities, constantly shifting, and frothing, and mixing, and
growing. My grandfather wouldn’t have known what to do with a pizza, or a
vanilla latté, my grandmother would have been scandalised by Madonna and Lady
Gaga, or the use of the word “fuck” on prime-time TV.
I am not afraid of Islam. I don’t much like it, but then a
general attitude of scepticism and suspicion regarding all religions has been
growing continuously in me in the past decades. There are aspects of Islam,
particularly the ambivalence regarding violence towards non-believers in many
places in the Quran, which I find disturbing. (On the other hand, there are
passages of the Old Testament which aren’t particularly edifying in this sense
either.) I find the cultural misogyny of most Islamic determined traditions
deeply distasteful. But I am also aware that the Christian and other religious
traditions have anything but a pristine history when it comes to their
treatment of women – and that not all of these historic attitudes have been
left behind. I believe that secularism and the freedom to believe and practice
religion (in so far as this practice does not restrict the freedom of others)
are some more of those basic values I mentioned earlier, those foundational
values of civilized society. As long as its practitioners accept these basic
values, any religion, no matter how idiotic it may seem, can be practiced in a
free society. Ultimately, I believe, the basic values of the secular, open, and
free society will prevail over backward-looking, exclusivist, chauvinist and
fundamentalist versions of every religion, though it may take generations. And
that includes Islam.
As long, of course, as we hold fast to those values, born
in the Enlightenment and matured – with much struggle and suffering – primarily
in Europe and North America – in the 19th and 20th
Centuries; openness, tolerance, secularism, participation, democracy, civil
rights, the rule of law and an independent judiciary, freedom of thought and
expression, a critical press, the social securing of the basics necessary for
life.
But as I look around the world at the end of 2015, these are
the values which I see increasingly under threat. And not only that, they are
being challenged and scraped away bit by bit in their original heartlands;
Europe and North America.
It is this of which I am afraid. I take Roosevelt’s
observation seriously. For what I perceive increasingly in the past year is a
growth of uncertainty and fear in our society. I am becoming more afraid of
fear itself; more specifically of the exploitation of that fear and the
consequences of that exploitation.
Living in the centre of Europe I don’t have to look far to
see it. There’s Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey. Closer to home, to the
east there are Viktor Orban in Hungary and Jarosław Kaczyński and his PiS party in Poland. Looking west, Gert Wilders
in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France and UKIP in Great Britain. And all
the other populist right-wing demagogues in many other European countries. In
this context – despite the perennial tendency of US Americans to
perceive their culture as exceptional – Donald Trump is also just another
confirmation of a widespread trend in the developed democracies. Here in
Germany, where Angela Merkel has taken a courageous stand on the question of
migrants (and if you’d told me a year ago that I would find myself praising the
German chancellor I’d have replied with an expletive!) and where the country
has provided a safe haven for a million people this year, Pegida and the Alternative
für Deutschland have been gaining in popularity.
Despite all their
particularist agendas, all of these various obnoxious figures are pretty much
carbon copies of each other. All feed off and exploit the same fear that is
widely present in our societies. This fear has many sources, but basically it
is rooted in the apprehension many (particularly those who are less educated)
feel when faced with a world in which change is all prevailing, in which the
shape of the future appears to be less certain and more threatening. The
demagogues all put forward the same kind of analyses and strategies;
retrenchment, stigmatization and persecution of those who are obviously other, building walls and fences, narrow
nationalist pride, appeals to cultural (and often religious) chauvinism.
They are all
offering (to paraphrase Menken) simple and easy solutions for complex problems.
These solutions are not only wrong, they are dangerous. For, playing to and
exploiting the inchoate fears widely present in our societies, they deny the enlightenment
values which are the fundament of our societies, appealing instead to emotional
irrationalities. To anyone with any sense of the sorry history of the 20th
Century it should be obvious where this leads. Make no mistake, my friends,
even if these people are democratically elected, even if they keep the forms of
democracy in the countries they control, regularly having themselves
re-elected, they are proponents of an evil the world has already seen too much
of. Putin, Trump, Le Pen, Orban, Kaczyński, Farage, Erdogan and all the others
are proponents of what might best be described as fascism lite. And they are quite prepared to use many of the
techniques perfected by their predecessors. To give but one example, all of
them are prepared to publicly trumpet untruths and continue to do so, even when
these statements have been repeatedly rationally proved to be untrue. Both
Hitler and Goebbels described this strategy as “the big lie.”
So, faced with
this resurgence of irrational, dangerous, fascist demagoguery, what can we do?
How should we, in our ordinary little lives, react to this exploitation of fear
which will, if it continues to grow, destroy the fundamental values of the
societies in which we live?
"All that is necessary for evil to
triumph is for good men to do nothing," is a quotation usually attributed
to Edmund Burke, though in this form it goes back to Tolstoy. No matter, it
gives us a strategy for responding to these attempts (far more dangerous than
anything ISIS can do) to destroy the character of our societies. We must
respond immediately to the facile, dangerous lies put about by these fear
mongers wherever we encounter them; from friends, family members, work
colleagues, acquaintances; at home, at work, in the bus, in the pub, on
Facebook. Many of us are just too polite, or too apprehensive of conflict, or
just too lazy (I know that all these reasons frequently apply to me) to engage
here, to get involved. But, I am becoming increasingly convinced, the failure
to contradict the nasty simplistic views, grown in fear and cultivated in
ignorance by neo-fascist ideologues, only leads to their growth and spread. If
they are not countered, they will lead us into a new Dark Age.
Images retrieved from:
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/06/26/fear-used-turn-spirituality/
http://ntrsctn.com/irl/2015/09/throw-things-at-donald-trum-in-new-game-trumpealo
