Radio Farda Interview with Ramin Jahanbegloo: “Us and De-civilisation”

Perhaps our world has always been this way—chaotic and at times intensely meaningless. Darkness has always sought to overcome light, and chaos is inherent in this existence. In this sense, our times are no different from yesterday or tomorrow. Yet in his latest book, Ramin Jahanbegloo views this global chaos from a unique perspective, and by addressing the characteristics of today’s world—such as mass migrations, globalization, capitalism, advanced technology, and the dominance of utilitarian thinking—he attempts to provide an answer to the nature of this chaos and the specific crises of our present era.

To this end, he sets the concept of de-civilisation against civilisation and calls the current age the age of de-civilisation, citing among its causes “the meaninglessness of politics” and “the refusal to think and question,” with some of its symptoms being ISIS and the destruction of nature. From this perspective, Jahanbegloo’s new book can be considered a pessimistic and cautionary work, but where he speaks of Gandhi and Tagore and the necessity of re-reading their thought, he sees the situation as changeable, a necessity reflected in the title of his book: “The Decline of Civilisation and Why We Must Return to Gandhi and Tagore.”(*)

This book was published in English two months ago by the publishing house “Aleph Book Company” in India, and during this time it has received positive feedback in the country’s media. You are reading Radio Farda’s interview with the philosopher-author Ramin Jahanbegloo.

In 1993, Samuel Huntington published his famous article “The Clash of Civilizations” in the journal Foreign Affairs. Now that one of the world’s great challenges appears to be the growth of jihadist groups and radical readings of Islam, you see the arena of struggle differently and say that the real battle is not between civilisations but between civilisation and currents that are de-civilising. Does analysing today’s world events based on the clash of civilisations theory lead us astray?

In my view, the “Clash of Civilizations” theory has many shortcomings. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in the early 1990s, Huntington sought to formulate a new paradigm for the post-Cold War era, but many weaknesses can be seen in this paradigm. One of the major weaknesses of his work was that he created culturally monolithic blocs based on different religions, thereby ignoring the diversity that exists within each of these religions and cultures. For example, when he considers Western culture as a single bloc, he does not take into account the many differences that exist today among Western nations and their ways of life, but only pays attention to its general foundations. Similarly, regarding Islamic countries, he does not concern himself much with details. This approach creates significant problems.

Essentially, in addressing the category of civilisation, Huntington forgets two important issues. First, that in the discussion of civilisation, matters such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion have always existed, but for Huntington, these ethical aspects are not important at all, and he considers himself a kind of realist who does not care about ethics. Second, he does not consider the aspect of multiplicity or plurality that exists within the concept of civilisation.

In any case, throughout history, civilisation has also always created an inter-civilisational state, meaning that different civilisations have adopted characteristics from one another, and essentially, every civilisation strengthens its own heritage through its perspective on other civilisations. If we study ancient civilisations, for example, ancient Iran, ancient China, and ancient Greece, we see that each of them had very strong intercultural relations. Herodotus says of the Persians of the Achaemenid period that the Persians are a multicultural people because they adopt many things from the Egyptians, Lydians, and other peoples, such as their clothing, their army and its method of organisation, and many other matters. These are points that are ignored in the “Clash of Civilizations” theory. Our main issue is how we want to look at civilisation; do we still want to see civilisations as large, separate blocs, or do we consider civilisation as the process of the formation of human consciousness?

The final point I wish to make concerns the difference between two concepts Hegel employs in relation to civilization: Volksgeist, meaning the spirit of a people, and Bildung, meaning formation, education, and the self-cultivation of consciousness. When Huntington discusses the clash of civilizations, instead of paying more attention to human self-consciousness, he speaks of various ethnic spirits that stand opposed to one another, engaged in conflict, where one may destroy the other. But in my view, this perspective is not at all correct.

My impression from your treatise was that you locate the beginning of de-civilisation not in the crises of recent years, which have manifested in forms like ISIS, but rather in a much longer and more distant history: the age of colonialism and the very period when the West harboured the ambition of civilising Eastern societies. Where did the problem lie that this so-called civilising process has culminated in de-civilisation?

The project that began with the rise of capitalism, modern science, advanced technology, and modern politics in the Western world was fundamentally in pursuit of domination—domination over the world, domination over nature, and domination over humankind. Colonialism was a part of this project, entering the scene from the seventeenth century, and its concern was domination over the world, because it saw itself as a power capable of being a conqueror and seizing other territories. On the one hand, it wanted to discover these territories, an example being Christopher Columbus's 1492 project, and on the other hand, it wanted to subjugate these territories, like the subjugation and destruction of the North American Indians. Science operates in the same way; it seeks discovery, but in the process, it subjugates nature, and through this subjugation, it drives it toward destruction.

You see this project in two major doctrines of the nineteenth century, which continue to survive in ideological forms in the twentieth century. One is the doctrine of utilitarianism, advanced by Bentham and others, and the other is Auguste Comte's positivism, which says that religion and philosophy must now be set aside because we have a new positivist science in their place, and through it, we view society and the world. Here a contradiction arises that has always existed within the modern worldview.

The modern worldview has given rise to two general perspectives for humanity: one is instrumental rationality, and the other is critical rationality. The most important representatives of instrumental rationality are precisely this modern technology and science on the one hand, and capitalism on the other, which hold sway over our world, and humanity today is captive to this instrumental rationality.

On the other hand, we have had critical rationality, which takes shape with Renaissance thought, the Enlightenment, and finally the critical and philosophical thought of the twentieth century, and it raises the issue of the individual's consciousness of their own freedom and liberation from the yoke of servitude.

All social movements, from the labour movement to the women's movement and the student movement, are the result of this critical rationality. But this process comes to an end after the Second World War. The last great social movement that is the result of European critical thought is the student movement of May 1968, which was not merely about chanting slogans and occupying the streets, but sought to bring about a revolution in values and to change values.

Before that, the most important movement we had in America, which also came to an end, was the Black movement and Martin Luther King, which was considered both a political movement and a value-based one, because Luther King speaks of a revolution of values and wants to change the values of American society.

Both of these movements failed, and today we find ourselves in a situation that I consider de-civilisation, a situation in which, on the one hand, we have succumbed to meaninglessness and thoughtlessness, meaning we no longer question our own social condition; we have no questioning citizen anywhere in the world, and instead we have individuals who, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it, go to vote once every four years and think that this voting is a sign of freedom, and for the next four years they no longer think about their freedom, but only pay attention to their economic issues and social welfare. And on the other hand, we are faced with the rise of hedonistic individualism, which has brought with it an intellectual infantilism. This intellectual infantilism is beautifully articulated by a philosopher like Heidegger, who says that in today's world we no longer have anything called thought and thinking, but only opinions and views. Facebook and other social media are a clear example of this. Everyone has an opinion and everyone gives their opinion, which I call the insolence of thought, meaning it is not thought, but an insolent thing that presents itself as thought and ultimately is no more than an opinion, what the Greeks called Doxa; there is no search for truth in it.

This is the state of de-civilisation we are trapped in, and unfortunately, it is exacerbated by the decreasing sensitivity of citizens to political issues. Politics in our time has become merely a tool for power-seeking and ambition. Even in the past, we had a purpose for our social life that showed which direction humanity was moving, but now we have lost that purpose, and humanity no longer has a moral and political compass for itself.

Isn't this condition of de-civilisation you are describing very absurd and even apocalyptic? A world emptied of all virtues, all those civilisation-building characteristics, where utilitarianism and hedonistic individualism replace empathy and compassion.

It is not apocalyptic at all, because it has no religious or eschatological aspect. Ortega y Gasset, the twentieth-century Spanish philosopher, has a beautiful sentence that I use in this discussion. He says, "We do not know what is happening to us, and that which is happening to us is precisely not knowing what is happening to us." The problem we have today is that we are not aware of what kind of world we live in and how the characteristics of this world are leading us towards meaninglessness and thoughtlessness, and how much this meaninglessness and thoughtlessness has caused our civilisational decline. This civilisational decline has various symptoms. Look at the situation in Turkey, for example, where Erdoğan, purely because of his personal ambitions, puts all the political, economic, and social achievements of a country in parentheses and blocks the path to secularism, modernism, and liberalism.

This is also a kind of meaninglessness, where we no longer describe politics as the art of organising society, but rather politics becomes the personal matter of the people who are in power.

We see this not only in autocratic and totalitarian systems but also in liberal systems, because liberal systems are no longer democratic but have turned into economic and political oligarchies, and with each passing day, they alienate people more from their civic duties and responsibilities, to the point where people in the West do not think much about politics.

Politics has become a party game. I either choose someone from this party or from that party, or I go for a new person and choose them, like the recent presidential elections in France. But this does not answer our problems today. Our problem is to see in what sense politics is being discussed today. Politics does not mean politicking. Today we have reduced politics to the level of politicking and have completely forgotten that art of organising society. The crises that have emerged today stem from this mismanagement of human society and our lack of questioning, crises like global warming and the destruction of nature, which arise from capitalism and advanced technology. In a sense, future generations, meaning our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, will live in a world where a large part of its plants, animals, and many of its lakes have likely disappeared. We humans no longer know how to question the state of our social life.

اما یکی از مصادیق این تمدن‌زدایی داعش و گروه‌های نظیر آن است که شما هم در کتاب خود به آن پرداخته‌اید. این گروه‌ها رویکردهای آخرالزمانی دارند.

داعش دقیقا یکی از نشانگان این تمدن‌زدایی است. اگر به افراد داعش نگاه کنید، می‌بینید که بخشی از آنها مسلمانانی هستند که در غرب بزرگ شده‌اند، چه عرب، چه پاکستانی، چه سومالیایی؛ در کانادا بزرگ شده‌اند، انگلستان، فرانسه، اما آنها به آدم‌هایی نابودکننده و مخرب تبدیل شده‌اند. آنها چه چیزی را تخریب می‌کنند؟ میراث بشریت را. یعنی قبل از آن که آدم‌کش بشوند اساسا با تمدن مخالفند.

پرسشی که من از خودم در این کتاب می‌کنم این است که چرا داعشی‌ها هر جا که می‌روند اول موزه‌ها و بناهای تاریخی را خراب می‌کنند و آنها چرا سازنده نیستند، بلکه فقط مخربند؟

ما در تاریخ داریم که مثلا فلان اقوام مهاجم کتابخانه اسکندریه را آتش زدند یا بخشی از امپراطوری روم را از بین بردند، مثلا اسکندر تخت جمشید را سوزاند یا مغول‌ها ویرانی بسیاری بر جای گذاشتند. اما سلسله‌هایی که بعد از این تهاجم‌ها شکل می‌گیرند، مثل سلسله سلوکیان یا ایلخانیان، همگی سازنده هستند، کشورگشایی برای آنها فقط به معنای تخریب و رویکردی آخرالزمانی نیست، بلکه با خود یک معنای تمدنی هم دارد. و رفته رفته در آن فرهنگی که از نظر استراتژیک و نظامی غلبه کرده‌اند، حل می‌شوند، چنان‌که بخشی از خاندان عباسی با داشتن وزرایی در فرهنگ ایرانی حل شدند یا مغول‌ها در فرهنگ چین و بابری‌ها در فرهنگ هند. مسلمانان به هند می‌روند و چهارصد سال حکومت می‌کنند. میان آنها شاهزاده‌ای به نام داراشکوه را داریم که اوپانیشاد را به فارسی ترجمه می‌کند. این نمونه‌ای از آدم‌هایی‌ست که میان دو فرهنگ قرار می‌گیرند و نقش میان‌فرهنگی خود را بازی می‌کند.

داعشی‌ها اما نشانگان تمدن‌زدایی‌اند به خاطر این که در همان تمدنی هم که بزرگ شده‌اند، یعنی تمدن غرب، هیچ کدام از ارزش‌ها و نمونه‌های آن تمدن را نگرفته‌اند و به جز کینه از این تمدن غربی چیزی با خود ندارند. از آن طرف هم که نگاه کنیم، تنها چیزی که از اسلام گرفته‌اند بخش خشن و آخرالزمانی آن است.

خیلی از هموطنان ما به اشتباه فکر می‌کنند که داعش یک دشمن اسلام‌گراست که با نابودی آن مسئله حل می‌شود. نه، داعش فقط یک نشانه این تمدن‌زدایی است که اگر همین امروز هم نابود شود تا زمانی که آن بی‌معنایی و بی‌فکری حاکم بر جهان ادامه داشته باشد، باز داعشی‌های دیگری سربرمی‌آورند.

بگذارید چیزی را مشخص کنیم. هر آن‌چه را که به تمدن‌زدایی منجر می‌شود، پس به قاعده می‌توانیم نیروهای شر بنامیم. شما از بی‌معنا شدن سیاست در جهان امروز به عنوان عامل این تمدن‌زدایی نام می‌برید، از تمایز بین «ما» و «دیگران» چرا که تمدن محصول با هم بودن است و نه جداسازی، از سیطره فرهنگ فایده‌گرا و نیز جهانی شدن. اجازه بدهید درباره این عامل آخر صحبت کنیم. آیا جهانی‌سازی یکسره شر است؟

شر یکی از مقوله‌هایی‌ست که همیشه با بشریت بوده و الزاما چیزی نیست که با تمدن‌زدایی به وجود آمده باشد.

مسئله‌ای که من مطرح می‌کنم این است که جامعه تمدن‌زدا قابلیت نقد خود را از دست داده و در برابر بحرانی قرار گرفته که فعلا پاسخی برای حل آن پیدا نکرده‌ایم چون اصلا درباره آن پرسش نمی‌کنیم. ما در برابر یک شر سیاسی و فکری قرار گرفته‌ایم که نمی‌توانیم پاسخی اخلاقی برای آن بیابیم. امروز جهانی‌سازی به این مسئله دامن می‌زند چرا که می‌خواهد پاسخ یک بحران را با ایجاد بحران‌های جدید بدهد. جهانی‌سازی یک بینش است که متاسفانه بر مبنای همدلی و همدردی و همفکری قرار نگرفته، بلکه بر مبنای توسعه، تسریع و تسخیر است.

گرایش به توسعه، تسریع و تسخیر از ابتدای امر در سرمایه‌داری و تکنولوژی بوده است. اساسا مسئله تکنولوژی توسعه و تسریع است اما از خود این سئوال را نمی‌پرسد که حد و مرز پیشرفت و توسعه کجاست.

How is this one-dimensional society, or what Marcuse calls one-dimensional man, who has staked his entire life on technology and capitalism, supposed to govern itself, and what importance does the “other” hold for him? My argument is that in a state of de-civilisation, we pay no attention to the otherness of the “other.” This “other” could be plants and animals or human beings themselves. This very indifference of ours is the origin of evil. We no longer care about that Indian peasant who, because of globalisation, may be unable to manage his land and is driven to suicide. In our view, his suicide is not an issue and merely becomes a statistic. In our world today, everything has become statistics, and every day we hear these statistics and numbers on television, and they are meaningless to us—for instance, in such-and-such a part of the world there was a flood and several thousand people were killed, a hundred thousand died of hunger, two hundred children perished in the bombings in Syria. Why are we so indifferent to this matter? And what has caused our indifference?

I would like to return to a part of your book where you quote Gramsci saying that the old order is dying and the new order has not yet taken shape. My question is, why have grand, idealistic ideas like the European Union failed to shape and consolidate this new order?

What Gramsci speaks of is an interstitial situation, where the old is dying and the new has not yet been born. We, too, find ourselves in such a situation. But what I emphasise more in this part of my book is that civilisation in the past was a process, and this civilisational process always distinguished itself from the “other,” and the “other” held meaning for it—like the Greeks, who, when they spoke of barbarians, drew this distinction between themselves and others and thought about them. But today, we do not think about this subject.

As it happens, the European Union is in a way a continuation of the approach held by Greek civilisation. After the Second World War, when Europeans decided to come together politically and economically and establish the European Union, they drew a distinction between themselves and others. In continuing their path, they found a common project, which is, of course, entirely different from what Huntington says, because Europeans in that era had already accepted their cultural plurality and differences. At the same time, they believed and still believe that liberal systems do not go to war with one another, and therefore they can achieve a kind of political coexistence without entering into new wars. These are very important intellectual foundations for the new Europe.

But part of the European project has failed, which is mostly linked to the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the Cold War, Europe was divided into two camps of socialist and capitalist countries, but with the fall of the Wall, these countries merged. Here, their economic integration is not as important as their psychological and spiritual integration becomes. For instance, all the minorities that had been forcibly gathered under the umbrella of Yugoslavia began to clash with one another after the fall of the Wall, and the Europe of the French, Germans, and English had never predicted that these cultures would negate each other. Consequently, the Yugoslav War occurred, which was a devastating war and has still not been fully resolved.

I think that despite the project it had defined, Europe failed to cultivate something called the European citizen—meaning that a French person would not see themselves solely as French and, before even saying “I am French,” would emphasise their Europeanness. Brexit demonstrates the failure of the European citizen project, because that English individual says, first England, then Europe.

Among other crises for which Europe has been unable to find a solution is the migrant crisis, and not just the migrants who have fled the war in Syria, but also the Muslim migrants who have been living in Europe for three generations. Europe had made no predictions about how it was going to integrate them. This is one of the fundamental differences between today’s world and the old world.

In the old world, there was a dominant culture, and anyone who wanted to live within that culture had to dissolve into it, but in these multicultural societies, such a thing does not occur. Everyone is like separate atoms, each going their own way and growing within their own frameworks. An Iranian in Germany remains Iranian, and a Moroccan remains Moroccan. Europe has not given them its culture, only a passport. Do Iranians in Germany read Thomas Mann, or do they know who Schopenhauer was? No, they listen to Googoosh. The same approach can be found at a catastrophic level among ISIS members. ISIS members also only went to the mosque and preserved their own closed, dogmatic minds, yet we see that they were born and raised entirely in Europe. In this regard, I believe the main crisis in Europe today is an identity crisis.

In his Vienna lectures in December 2004, Kapuściński praises multiculturalism and sees it as a great advancement in relations between “us” and “others,” a new condition in human civilization. But you hold a critical stance on this issue. Has multiculturalism today failed to help create an open space and a capacity for accepting differences? So what is happening now in a place like the United States?

In my view, multiculturalism is a completely artificial matter because it is not the product of a single culture, but rather the product of capitalism and technological globalization. People are placed side by side without being aware of or caring about each other’s otherness. Many of these foreigners living in Europe and America are third- and fourth-generation immigrants, but apart from a few specific cases, none of them have been able to represent those societies. That is, the French, German, or American dream has manifested for them only in money, social welfare, and a comfortable life. But societies are not built on comfort-seeking and welfare. If that were the case, all societies would have been destroyed by now.

The triad that sustains any civilization is, on one hand, religion and spirituality, on another, philosophy and wisdom, and on the third, art. But none of these representatives of cultural plurality living in Europe and America are bearers of European and American culture, art, thought, and spirituality. They might become Christians, but they do not necessarily know anything about Christian spirituality; they only know that on Sundays one must go to church or give charity.

I think the major flaw here is that multiculturalism or cultural plurality in these countries never achieves an intercultural state, meaning millions of Iranians, Indians, and Chinese still live in these countries without any cultural exchange with the dominant white race, and none of their cultures matter to the other. This is the failure of multiculturalism, and it is from the heart of such failures that ISIS emerges. It could get even worse than this. One of the clashes feared to occur in North America is a form of tribalism, because the various immigrants who have gone there each live solely within their own cultural community, including Iranians. If such a mentality turns into a tribalism or a fanatical identitarianism, these cultures will stand against each other.

Your book can be considered a deeply pessimistic work, but you have also tried to include some optimism. Your suggestion is a reading of the thought of Tagore and Gandhi. In the conditions you describe, how can Tagore and Gandhi really help us? Gandhi himself is one of the most important critics of modern civilization and the West. What change can he and Tagore bring about in values?

My pessimism is of a theoretical kind, like the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Adorno. But one can be pessimistic and still think of practical optimism, provided that this optimism is not naive or ideological.

My reference to Gandhi and Tagore has a clear reason. A figure like Tagore constantly speaks about these intercultural connections, and in a way, like Gandhi, he is a critic of modern civilization. Of course, his critique differs from Gandhi's. Tagore's criticism of modern civilization is a cultural, artistic, and spiritual one. But when Gandhi addresses modern civilization in his book Hind Swaraj, he says that this civilization lacks ethics, and as long as its concern is utilitarianism and domination over the world, it cannot endure and establish itself as a civilization.

What I take from Tagore and Gandhi is that our world needs a moral compass, and I do not equate ethics with moralism. Ethics is precisely attention to the otherness of the other, whereas moralism is the imposition of one's values upon the other. Through moralism, we constantly dictate to the other how to dress, how to behave, and how to think. But ethics is based on empathy, sympathy, and compassion. In today's world, we have lost our moral compass, and because of this, the balance and equilibrium that existed in human civilization and allowed different cultures to feel empathy toward one another has now vanished. Everyone only pursues their own interests.

But here, my theoretical pessimism is accompanied by a practical optimism. In fact, I am not saying that we have completely lost our capacity for thinking and giving meaning to life; rather, I am saying that if we once again draw upon our classics and this heritage that has been left to us from fifty centuries ago, then an issue like freedom will once again become part of our historical consciousness. But if our concern remains only welfare and the conquest of the world, and we continue to destroy nature in the same way, we too will be destroyed. This is neither an apocalyptic matter nor a sleight of hand. It is a simple rule of cause and effect. If we lose the foundations of our civilization, we can no longer find meaning in life; then we become like the people in Truffaut's film Fahrenheit 451, sitting in front of large television screens, having no connection with one another, not reading books, and at the same time being good conformists because their minds never rebel and they are fundamentally no longer capable of posing any questions.

I will conclude my discussion with this point. Goethe uses a very interesting concept that we greatly need today, and that is "world literature." Why does Goethe bring up the discussion of world literature? So that someone living in Germany can read Hafez, or someone in Iran can read Thomas Mann and Goethe. Now, if we replace this global perspective that Goethe speaks of with globalization, whose only concern is commercial and technological products, we will achieve no constructive result. Whereas what Goethe spoke of is something entirely constructive and has built diverse civilizations for fifty centuries, and in this way, civilizations have influenced one another and helped each other so that this meaninglessness and refusal to think could not overcome us. Freud says that the prerequisite of civilization is justice. One can add that the prerequisite of civilization is questioning and the search for meaning.

* The Decline of Civilization: Why We Need to Return to Gandhi and Tagore

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Radio Farda Interview (Ehsan Abedi) with Ramin Jahanbegloo titled "Us and De-civilisation" in October 2016

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