Amin Maalouf - Disordered World

But I prefer to think that another major attack can be avoided, which fortunately remains plausible. In the countries under the greatest threat, the authorities have reacted firmly and effectively. So as not to be caught out, they are trying to anticipate and detect the smallest risk. It would be irresponsible to reproach them for this. However, it goes without saying that a society which feels the need to protect itself permanently from unscrupulous enemies inevitably moves away from strict respect for laws and principles. As a result, an enduring terrorist threat cannot but disrupt the functioning of democracy in the long term.

One day we will remember these cursed years as those when the most civilised police force in the world pinned a young Brazilian commuter to the floor in the London Underground; he was entirely innocent but his skin was somewhat swarthy. He was summarily killed with seven bullets to the head.

The clash of civilisations is not a debate about the respective merits of Erasmus versus Avicenna, alcohol or the veil, or over sacred texts. It is a global drift towards xenophobia, discrimination, ethnic humiliation, massacres and reprisals. In other words, the erosion of all that gives human civilisation its moral dignity.

In such an atmosphere, even those who are persuaded to fight barbarism eventually succumb to it in their turn. Terrorist violence begets anti-terrorist violence, which feeds resentment, facilitating the task of those who recruit extremists and paving the way for future attacks. Is a given population regarded with suspicion because it plants bombs, or does it plant bombs because it is regarded with suspicion? It is the old story of the chicken and the egg, and there is no point in seeking an answer, for there is none. Everyone will have their own answer, dictated by their fears, prejudices, origins and suffering. The vicious circle needs to be broken, but from the moment the mechanism is set in motion, it is hard to withdraw your hand.

How can one not fear decline in such a context? If the current hostility between the planet’s various tribes were to persist, and the disorder in all fields go on, the world would experience an erosion of democracy, the rule of law and all social norms in the course of this century.

I for one refuse to consider this inevitable, but it is clear that we shall have to deploy the full range of our ingenuity, vision and determination to stand any chance of avoiding it.

Since I began work on this book, an allegorical image has haunted me: a group of climbers is scaling a cliff and, because of some sudden shock, they have begun to lose their footing. I have been trying to understand why these men risk coming unstuck and how they could reattach themselves to the rock face in order to resume their ascent, without dwelling too much on imagining what would happen if they fell into the abyss.

I speak of it in terms of a mountaineering accident, as that is rather how it seems when I reflect on the course of the world. I am not unaware that, in history, the notion of an accident is often deceptive. However, I am not going to abandon it entirely. Whatever contemporary and past moralists have said, humanity does not deserve the punishment that the coming decades might inflict. Nor shall I plead innocence, or put it down to bad luck or the quirks of fate. However, I believe that what is happening to us, rather than being the consequence of our failures and oversights, is in fact the consequence of our successes, our accomplishments, our legitimate ambitions, our equally legitimate freedom and the incomparable genius of our species.

In spite of the things that irritate and worry me, I remain fascinated by the human adventure; I cherish and venerate it and nothing in the world would persuade me to exchange it for the life of an angel or a beast. We are Prometheus’s children; Creation has been entrusted to us and we must continue it. We have undertaken the task of reshaping the universe and if there is a supreme Creator above, we merit His pride as much as His wrath.

Are we not now paying the price for this Promethean boldness and the frantic race to the summit? Probably, but we have no reason to be repentant — not for our inventions, even the craziest, nor for the freedoms we have won. And if the moment has come to wonder much more seriously than in the past and with greater urgency, ‘Where are we rushing to?’, the question should be asked not in a spirit of contrition or denigration, nor with an implication that we are going too fast, departing from the path or losing our bearings, but as a genuine question.

This century resounds with the most backward-looking rhetoric. It could mark the moment of revenge for all those who have always hated man’s liberation and even more so that of woman; for those who distrust science, art, literature and philosophy; for those who would like to return the mass of humanity like docile sheep to the reassuring fold of age-old moral tyrannies. But if we have strayed from the path, it is not from the path our fathers beat, but from the one we should be beating for our children, a path which no generation before us has had the chance to glimpse and which no other has so vitally needed.

I want to underline this here as I did in the book’s opening pages, because reactions to the turbulence of our times may take very different forms. I shall distinguish three, which, to remain with the mountaineering metaphor, I shall call the temptations of the precipice, the rock face and the summit.

The ‘temptation of the precipice’ is characteristic of our age. Every day, men leap into the void hoping to take the whole climbing party with them. This is a phenomenon without any real precedent in history. These people, however numerous they may be, represent only the burning fuse of a giant powder keg of despair. Hundreds of millions of their fellow human beings in the Muslim world and elsewhere feel the same temptation, which the overwhelming majority fortunately resist.

It is not so much the sting of poverty which causes their distress as that of humiliation and insignificance, the feeling of not belonging in the world they live in, of being only losers, downtrodden and excluded. And so they dream of ruining the feast to which they have not been invited.

The ‘temptation of the rock face’ is much less characteristic of our age, but it has taken on a new meaning. What I have in mind here is the attitude which consists of bracing oneself, taking shelter and protecting oneself while waiting for the storm to pass. In other circumstances it would be the wisest option. But the tragedy for our and future generations is that this storm is not going to pass. The wind of history will continue to blow more and more strongly, and at ever greater speed, and nothing and no one will be able to calm or slow it.

I shall not speak of those who hold this attitude as a section of humanity, since the temptation exists in all of us. It is hard for us to accept that the world has to be entirely reconceived, that the road to the future needs to be sketched by our own hands, that our ordinary, peaceful, insignificant behaviour could trigger a major climate disaster and turn out to be just as suicidal as hurling ourselves into the void. And it is hard to accept that our age-old attachments based on identity could compromise the advance of the human species. And so we try to persuade ourselves that there is nothing fundamentally new under the sun and continue to cling to our familiar footholds, our inherited allegiances, recurrent quarrels and flimsy certainties.

The ‘temptation of the summit’ is based on the opposite idea, namely that humanity has reached a dramatically new phase of its evolution in which the old formulas no longer work. It is not the end of history, as was prematurely declared when Communism fell, but it is probably the twilight of a certain type of history and also — I dare to believe and hope — the dawn of another.