"Eight years ago, I said it was time to change the tone of our politics," said a sardonic Barack Obama at his last White House Correspondents' dinner a few weeks ago. "In hindsight, I clearly should have been more specific."
He was referring to the Trump phenomenon in the US, where demagoguery, toxic populism and appealing to base instincts have made a huge comeback. The movement is snowballing so fast, it's not at all certain that Donald Trump will not be in the White House a year from now.
It's not just in the US. In an article in the NY Times two weeks ago, Sylvie Kauffmann, a former editor of Le Monde, writing on the political situation in Europe, provided an overview of the return of fascism in Austria, France and the UK. Right-wing politicians have been enjoying major electoral successes and populism, nativism, racism and insularity are in ascendance.
The Austrian Green Party candidate, Alexander van de Bellen, in last Monday's election got 50.3 per cent of the vote. His opponent, the far-right, anti-immigrant Norbert Hofer, got 49.7 per cent. That's closer than close. If you telescope this result outside of Europe you notice the phenomenon is pervasive; it's almost as if much of humanity is resisting evolution.
As to the nature of the malaise, Kauffmann quotes Pope Francis who observed that the European project is in need of an update. Europe (like the US) is the product of the Enlightenment, the historical moment where science was placed above superstition and ideas like equality, reciprocity, individual rights were born three centuries ago and have been recoding human consciousness ever since. Unfortunately, Enlightenment 2.0 software isn't ready yet, and 1.0 is disintegrating.
The mental and material infrastructure of Europe is buckling under the weight of refugees, native-born ethnic minorities agitating for civil rights and general social disintegration. But neither Europe, nor anyone else, it seems, possesses the political and cultural technology to reconcile jihadism, millions of refugees and a resurgence of economic inequality, alongside breathtaking progress in science and culture.
A large part of the reason is that anti-progressivism as a primordial human trait has been discounted by cultural critics and activists. As Noam Chomsky observed, US progressives spectacularly failed to anticipate the reactionary pushback after civil rights, gender rights and the New Deal welfare state. These pushbacks have reconfigured the social/cultural landscape to the one per cent vs the 99 per cent topography of today.
Pushback to progress was also visible within newly independent nations and the antipathy to its vulnerable former colonies by Great Britain in the independence era. The phenomenon is visible in the Arab Spring, recently called by NY Times columnist Roger Cohen the "Arab withering."
So Enlightenment, never as stable as it seemed, is in decline. Is this of any import to us here? Are we anything more than ants watching a volcano? The last 50 years of our own progress (regionally, but particularly T&T's) have been fuelled by the West / Metropole. The West has provided a haven for our ambitious, overflowing masses via emigration, aiding the production of the Caribbean's better self, embodied in the millions of emigrants and their children.
Their intangible influence, tangible remittances and our ceaseless consumption of Western culture, drag the region along to the future. From those sources come our attitudes to technology, environment, gender and vaguely utopian ideals which translate in the vulgate to a belief in inevitable progress. Here the secular has blended with the religious, whose guarantee of salvation is fused with the notion of divine intervention, it will all come out right, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. No understanding necessary, just ox-like faith.
That certainty is slowly being supplanted by bewilderment, as we stand on the edge of the Metropole watching it crumble, clinging to the idea that progress is guaranteed, that "it will all work out in the end." But, as discussed by the British philosopher John Gray and many others, no such guarantee exists. Time and again history's seeming progressive evolution has been halted and reversed by its doppelganger: a chimera of random brutality and atavism; Dorian Gray's reflection breaking out of his mirror.
The reason for this repeating dynamic in human history is that somewhere in the human machine is the struggle of the primordial binary: a reality of powerless in the face of nature vs the narcotic magic of imaginary power over nature.
Giambattista Vico, the Enlightenment philosopher, recognised this in his New Science as he proposed our existence as cyclic history. Humankind lives and re-lives the same dramas large and small, on individual and national scales, due to our innate, irresistible urges, to identical tragic results through time. The idea (repeating history) is embedded in Western consciousness.
From pop mysticism (Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat and Illuminatus novels) to pop culture (the Matrix movies) and literature (David Mitchell's novel and movie, Cloud Atlas), the notion of humanity living and reliving the same mistakes over and over has been a monkey on the back of Western civilisation. It's also there in the myth of Sisyphus and the Hindu idea of the yugas.
So what is the denizen of a small island to do when looking at election results in Austria, or a tsunami approaching from a distance? Look away? Run towards it and hope for a speedy end? Keep calm and carry on? Hope a better world will emerge to which we might just make it? It's not hard to fathom that a new world will emerge soon; but its lingua franca will most likely be Mandarin or Cantonese. Read Cloud Atlas.