We are the hollow
We are the stuffed
Leaning together
filled with straw.
Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass ( T. S Elliot- Hollow Men)
During my more intense years of ‘struggle with myself’ in Australia, after I moved from Brisbane to the hedonic den of the Gold Coast, I made an attempt to ‘integrate’.
An American classmate’s ‘Great Escape’, from what I presume was the humdrum monotony of American life, had helped me find accommodation with a Scandinavian couple, both students.
The couple partied wildly. Australia’s sun, beaches, and beer animated them.
One night, as I lay in my bed, sleep eluded me. The Scandinavians had gone even wilder that night. I angrily plodded out of my room and confronted them in the politest possible terms.
The female partner, in response, wearing an outfit that was neither stylish nor classy, posed provocatively. ‘How do I look?’ she asked. I muttered something angrily and slid back into my room.
The next morning, after I woke up, a slew of empty beer cans lay beside my door. The entire flat was plastered with pictures of nude women. It was not art but visuals designed to provoke.
I had obviously offended the Scandinavian girl in the wrong way.
Beer cans around the door and nude pornographic posters pasted on the walls were the ultimate provocation the Scandinavians could offer a Muslim.
Amazed at this hostility, I slid into the kitchen space, made myself coffee, and walked to the smoking zone of the apartment, the space that doubled as a corridor. A sealed envelope that bore my name caught my eye.
I picked it up. It was from a person who I now think has had the most profound and lasting influence on my life.
The envelope had a newspaper clipping in it. Carried by the Australian Financial Review, if memory serves me well, the article was built around one of the greatest figures of modern Islamic history, Dr. Ali Shariati.
The quotes attributed to Dr. Shariati were not about the integration of Islam and modernity. They were about the ‘completeness’, the wholesomeness, of the Muslim self in the modern world, the ‘organic intellectual’.
In other words, how to be of the world and above it.
My interest in it was passing, but enough to ask this great Australian if he would like to be my teacher. The man, who had an incredible presence, not merely charisma, replied: ‘When the pupil’s quest becomes strong, the teacher reveals himself.’
The silence that followed was filled by the man’s remark: ‘Oh, sorry. I speak in riddles.’
All this, at that time, flew over my head.
Now coming back to the late Dr. Shariati, this great scholar delineated three paths for a person. One was that of a mindless consumer who derived his or her sense of self from consuming things and commodities. He or she was because he or she consumed, to vulgarize René Descartes’ phrase.
The other, in a Kafkaesque sense, was an individual lost in a maze, having some sense of being lost but unable to locate its cause. The third was one who recognized the cause but took refuge in retreating from the world.
In Shariati’s schema, all three were broken men and women. Healing and wholesomeness lay in authenticity and a ‘return to the self’, among other things.
Now, the late Dr. Shariati, my Australian mentor, and the corruption of the Western man and woman, the ‘broken dream’ of the West, what thread ties them together?
Here, aspects of the late Herbert Marcuse may provide an answer.
This eminent philosopher took issue with both Marxism and capitalism. Marcuse found the former to be reductive and too materially grounded, and the latter to be an ideology that led to the creation of the ‘One-Dimensional Man’.
Pared to its essence, the One-Dimensional Man meant that humans began to view themselves in commodities and the consumption thereof.
In the affluent consumer society, humans found their souls in their cars, fancy homes, hi-fi kitchen equipment, and so on. Within this whole system, humans became commodities and commodities became extensions of people’s minds and bodies.
The One-Dimensional Man found his ultimate recognition and identity in a technological consumer society defined by mass production and distribution.
The ‘natural’ corollary and predilection of the One-Dimensional Man was the disappearance and occlusion of critical thinking, reflective thought, and the use of philosophy as a sedative and palliative.
This philosophical sedation, from Marcuse’s perspective, was the elevation of Immanuel Kant’s primacy of reason, instrumental rationality, and empiricism.
These features of Kantianism detached philosophy from material, ideational, and social anchors.
This privileging and divorce from aesthetics and values, the former best defined by Theodore Adorno, constituted the pinnacle and finale of capitalism. Immanuel Kant’s abstract philosophy served as a useful handmaiden to capitalism’s march, making a virtue out of so-called necessity.
Philosophical sedateness, allied to capitalism and in turn wedded to the ideology of liberalism, and their historical march, inevitably led to T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’.
These men and women occupy the grey zone of being neither dead nor alive. They exist in a state of emotional and moral inertia, brokenness, and emptiness, more prone to and defined by absence than presence, unable, in the final analysis, to feel and act authentically.
Best captured in the 1989 moment of the so-called ‘End of History and the Last Man’ thesis by the then RAND Corporation salesman Francis Fukuyama, and the voracious foraging of free-market fundamentalism (globalism) across the world, Marcuse’s ‘One-Dimensional Man’ became all too real.
The West, which in material and philosophical terms was a revolutionary creed or idea, gradually, due to the alliance of these forces, became the ultimate ‘Unconscious Civilization’.
Sedate, insensate, and defined by viewing himself or herself as an extension of commodities, the Western man and woman, or T. S. Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’, and Kafka’s lost soul, forfeited his or her will, self, and soul to the machine of capitalism.
He or she became spiritually barren, valueless, relativist, and nihilistic.
By way of an example with real-world implications, Eliot’s ‘Hollow Man’ in the Western ‘wasteland’ perhaps finds its most eloquent expression in the European Union.
In theory, a construct designed to prevent fratricidal wars in Europe, the EU has degenerated into a miasma of valueless relativism, a borderless nihilism, and an anchorless Byzantine bureaucracy. Echoes of Franz Kafka, a great European writer, reverberate across the so-called European Union. Best emblematized by Scandinavia, even if only loosely part of the EU, and Denmark in particular, the region and its peoples project their sedateness, wastelandness, and Kafka’s lost souls through a curious pride in the welfare state, public-good provisioning, and a consensus-defined, though arguably deformed, society.
The pathologies that ensue appear to be sought to be excised by young Scandinavians through their ‘Great Escapes’ to Australia, its beaches, beers, and aspects of freedom. The residual hatred of the Other is projected in states of inebriation and at hash parties.
If the EU is a barren, nihilistic wasteland, spiritually empty, with relativistic ‘lost souls’ crossing borders without passports, does it represent the West?
I doubt it.
The home and cradle of Western philosophy, great thinkers, and men and women of letters is no longer this. It is, to repeat, a bureaucracy that sits atop a society.
This bureaucracy, in many ways, determines and regulates all spheres of European life. This regulation seeps into the ‘private sphere’ too, which is now a ‘privatized space’, not for real leisure, art, craft, or higher pursuits. It is a space of loneliness to be filled by vulgar hedonism, all justified in the name of ‘freedom’.
There is no social contract that defines or holds together the EU, only atomized, cultureless, denationalized individuals held together by the European Commission. The EU is then not the West.
What and where is it?
It may be that the ‘grand experiment of a nation’, the United States, may constitute the West, albeit only as an ideal type.
A flawed construct like any other nation, the United States may have some redemptive features, for itself and by itself. But elite capture of the country by its deep state, allied globalist mercenaries, and globalist peddlers of lies has also altered the ‘essential’ character of the US.
The country still may have redemptive potential. This potential and scope for renewal lie in the people of America, not its institutions.
Occluded and invisibilized by the dark forces of globalism, the real people of America, the stragglers and strugglers, are absent from the US’ representational matrix.
Instead, it is a tiny West Coast liberal elite whose somewhat refined sensibility jostles with an abiding and instinctual quest for profit and self-enrichment.
This smug and detached elite desires the world to be crafted in its image. But this is not the real America and real Americans.
The real ones are ordinary Americans, struggling to make ends meet, their yearnings for a dignified life given short shrift by the West Coast elite allied to globalists.
In the larger scheme of things, it is ordinary Americans who can and must reclaim their country. By aggregating their will and choice through elections onto a ‘Nation First’ paradigm, these Americans did what they could, first in 2016 and then in 2024. But countervailing forces have been very strong.
Is all lost then?
No, not at all.
The major distraction from a ‘Nation First’ paradigm, the ill-conceived and ill-advised war on the Islamic Republic of Iran, has been costly. But all is not lost.
A robust exit from the war, some degree of introspection, a review and course correction, within and without, an economic bargain that redounds to the welfare of all Americans, and the revival of a religiously informed ethic, with due respect to other aspects of the American creed, would certainly help.
This is not a ‘salvage job’. Once the energies of the American people are tapped into and redirected toward both ideational and material welfare, along with a firm ingress of values, America can both redeem and reclaim itself.
People are central, not just institutions. If the proverbial tea leaves are read well, and the equations add up, America can become America in its essence.
For this to come to pass, for all his faults, flaws, impulsiveness, and unpredictability, Donald Trump is and remains relevant, but only when he thinks and acts independently.
This article has been automatically published using a syndicated feed. The content is sourced externally and may not have been reviewed by The Freelancers Team.
