THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AT THE END OF

HISTORY
Slavoj Zizek

In a Hollywood story, its rich historical background serves merely as the

excuse for what the film “really is about” - the initiatic journey of the hero or
of the couple. In Reds, the October Revolution is the background for the
reconciliation of the lovers in a passionate sex act; in Deep Impact, the
gigantic wave that inundates the entire east coast of the US is a background
for the incestuous reunification of the daughter with her father; in The War
of the Worlds, the alien invasion is the background for Tom Cruise to
reassert his paternal role… not so in Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men,
where the background persists.

In a typical Hollywood sci-fi, the future world may be full of unheard-of

objects and inventions, but even the cyborgs interact exactly the way we do
– or, rather, did in old Hollywood melodramas and action movies. In The
Children of Men, there are no new gadgets, London is exactly the same as it
is now, only more so – Cuaron merely brought out its latent poetic and social
potentials: the greyness and decay of the littered suburbs, the omni-
presence of video-surveillance… The film reminds us that, of all strange
things we can imagine, the weirdest is reality itself. Hegel remarked long
ago that a portrait of a person resembles it more than this person itself. The
Children of Men is a science-fiction of our present itself.

It is 2027, with the human race rendered infertile - the earth’s youngest
inhabitant, born 18 years ago, was just killed in Buenos Aires. The UK lives
in a permanent state of emergency, anti-terrorist quads chasing illegal
immigrants, the state power administering the dwindling population which
vegetates in sterile hedonism. Are these two features – hedonist
permissiveness plus new forms of social apartheid and control based on fear
– not what our societies are about? Here comes Cuaron’s stroke of a genius
– as he put it in one of his interviews: “Many of the stories of the future
involve something like ‘Big Brother,’ but I think that’s a 20th-century view of
tyranny. The tyranny happening now is taking new disguises — the tyranny
of the 21st century is called ‘democracy’.” This is why the rulers of his world
are not grey and uniformed Orwellian “totalitarian” bureaucrats, but
enlightened democratic administrators, cultured, each with his or her own
“life style.” When the hero visits an ex-friend, now a top government official,
to gain a special permit for a refugee, we enter something like a Manhattan
upper-class gay couple loft, the informally dressed official with his crippled
partner at the table.

Children of Men is obviously not a film about infertility as a biological

problem. The infertility Cuaron’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by
Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilization is moving in
the direction of the Last Man, an apathetic creature with no great passion or
commitment: unable to dream, tired of life, he takes no risks, seeking only
comfort and security, an expression of tolerance with one another: “A little
poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at
the end for a pleasant death. They have their little pleasures for the day,
and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. ‘We
have discovered happiness,’ - say the Last Men, and they blink.”

The Last Men doesn’t want his daydreaming disturbed – this is why
“harassment” is a key word in his mental universe. At its most elementary,
the term designates brutal facts of rape, beating, and other modes of social
violence which, of course, should be ruthlessly condemned. However, in the
predominant use, this elementary meaning imperceptibly slips into the
condemnation of any excessive proximity of another real human being, with
his or her desires, fears and pleasures. Two topics determine today's liberal
tolerant attitude towards others: the respect of otherness, openness towards
it, and the obsessive fear of harassment. The other is OK insofar as his
presence is not intrusive, insofar as the other is not really other. Tolerance
coincides with its opposite: my duty to be tolerant towards the other
effectively means that I should not get too close to him, not to intrude into
his/her space – in short, that I should respect his/her intolerance towards my
over-proximity. This is what is more and more emerging as the central
'human right' in our society: the right not to be harassed, i.e., to be kept at a
safe distance from the others.

The courts in most of the Western societies now impose a restraining order
when someone sues another person for harassing him or her (stalking him
or her or making unwarranted sexual advances). The harasser can be legally
prohibited from knowingly approaching the victim, and must remain at a
distance of more than 100 yards. Necessary as this measure is, there is
nonetheless in it something of the defense against the traumatic reality of
the other's desire: is it not obvious that there is something dreadfully violent
about openly displaying one's passion for and to another human? Passion by
definition hurts its object, and even if its addressee gladly agrees to occupy
this place, he or she cannot ever do it without a moment of awe and
surprise.

This is the case even with the growing prohibition of smoking. First, all
offices were declared "smoke-free," then flights, then restaurants, then
airports, then bars, then private clubs, then, in some campuses, 50 yards
around the entrances to the buildings, then - in a unique case of
pedagogical censorship, reminding us of the famous Stalinist practice of
retouching the photos of nomenklatura – the US Postal Service removed the
cigarette from the stamps with the photo-portrait of blues guitarist Robert
Johnson and of Jackson Pollock. These prohibitions target the other's
excessive and risky enjoyment, embodied in the act of "irresponsibly"
lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply with an unabashed pleasure (in
contrast to Clintonite yuppies who do it without inhaling, or who have sex
without actual penetration, or food without fat) – indeed, as Jacques Lacan
put it, after God is dead, nothing is anymore permitted.

In today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their

malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without
alcohol... and the list goes on. What about virtual sex as sex without sex, the
Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as
warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art
of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant
liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness
(the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically
sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating or incest
rape remain out of sight)?

We from the First World countries find it more and more difficult even to
imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be ready to
sacrifice one's life. It effectively appears as if the split between First World
and Third World runs more and more along the lines of the opposition
between leading a long satisfying life full of material and cultural wealth,
and dedicating one's life to some transcendent Cause. Is this antagonism
not the one between what Nietzsche called "passive" and "active" nihilism?
We in the West are the Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while
the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the nihilist
struggle up to their self-destruction. No wonder that the only place in
Children of Men where a strange sense of freedom prevails, a kind of
liberated territory without this all-pervasive suffocating oppression, is
Blackpool, the whole city isolated by a wall and turned into a refugee camp
run by its inhabitants, illegal immigrants, and, at the film’s end, ruthlessly
bombed by the air force. Life is thriving here, with Islam fundamentalist
military demonstrations, but also acts of authentic solidarity – no wonder
the newborn child makes it appearance here.

In a debate about the fate of Guantanamo prisoners on NBC about in 2004,

one of the weirdest arguments for the ethico-legal acceptability of their
status was that “they are those who were missed by the bombs”: since they
were the target of the US bombing and accidentally survived it, and since
this bombing was part of a legitimate military operation, one cannot
condemn their fate when they were taken prisoners after the combat –
whatever their situation, it is better, less severe, than being dead… This
reasoning tells more than it intends to say: it puts the prisoner almost
literally into the position of living dead, those who are in a way already dead
(their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of murderous
bombings), so that they are now cases of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo
sacer, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law,
his life no longer counts. If the Guantanamo prisoners are located in the
space “between the two deaths,” occupying the position of homo sacer,
legally dead (deprived of a determinate legal status) while biologically still
alive, then the Terri Schiavo case which hold our imagination in March 2005
presents the opposite. She suffered brain damage in 1990 when her heart
stopped briefly from a chemical imbalance believed to have been brought
on by an eating disorder; court-appointed doctors claimed she is in a
persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. While her husband
wanted her disconnected to die in peace, her parents argued that she could
get better and that she would never have wanted to be cut off from food
and water. The case reached the top level of the US government and judicial
bodies, with the Supreme Court and President involved, the Congress
passing fast-track resolutions, etc. The absurdity of the situation, when put
in the wider context, is breath-taking: with tens of millions dying of AIDS and
hunger all around the world, the public opinion in the US focused on a single
case of prolonging the run of a naked life, of a persistent vegetative state
deprived of all specifically human characteristics. These are the two
extremes we find ourselves today with regard to human rights: one the one
hand those “missed by the bombs” (mentally and physically full human
beings, but deprived of rights), on the other hand a human being reduced to
bare vegetative life, but this bare life protected by the entire state
apparatus.

So what went wrong with us? Any attentive reader of Marquis de Sade
cannot help noticing the paradox of how the Sadean unconstrained
assertion of sexuality, deprived of the last vestiges of spiritual
transcendence, turns sexuality itself into a mechanic exercise lacking any
authentic sensual passion. And is not a similar reversal clearly discernible in
the deadlock of today's Last Men, "postmodern" individuals who reject all
"higher" goals and dedicate their life to survival filled with more and more
refined and artificially aroused pleasures? If the old hierarchic societies
oppressed vital forces through their rigid ideological systems and the state
apparatuses that enforced them, today’s societies are losing their vitality
through their very permissive hedonism: everything is allowed, but
decaffeinated, deprived of its substance.

And the same as for our pleasures goes for our democracy: it is more and
more a decaffeinated democracy, a democracy deprived of its substance, of
its political edge. A century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote: “Men who begin to
fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away
freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church.” The first thing
one should add to it today is that the same holds for the advocates of
religion themselves: how many fanatical defenders of religion started with
ferociously attacking the contemporary secular culture and ended up
forsaking religion itself (losing any meaningful religious experience). And is
it not that, in a strictly homologous way, the liberal warriors are so eager to
fight the anti-democratic fundamentalism that they will end by flinging away
freedom and democracy themselves if only they may fight terror? They have
such a passion for proving that the non-Christian fundamentalism is the
main threat to freedom that they are ready to fall back on the position that
we have to limit our own freedom here and now, in our allegedly Christian
societies. If the terrorists are ready to wreck this world for love of the other,
our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of
hatred for the Muslim other. Jonathan Alter, Alan Derschowitz, and Sam
Harris love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture –
the ultimate degradation of human dignity - to defend it…

Today’s predominant mode of politics is a politics of fear, a defense against

potential victimization or harassment: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear
of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive State itself (with too high
taxation), fear of ecological catastrophies, fear of harassment (which is why
Political Correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear).
Such a politics always relies on the frightening rallying of frightened men.
The big event in Europe in the early 2006 was that the anti-immigration
politics “went mainstream”: they finally cut the umbilical link that connected
them to the far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria
to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity,
the main parties now find it acceptable to stress that the immigrants are
guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that
define the host society – it is “our country, love it or leave it.”

This is why the “clash of civilizations” is the Huntington's disease of our time
– as Samuel Huntington put it, after the end of the Cold War, the “iron
curtain of ideology” has been replaced by the “velvet curtain of culture.”
This dark vision may appear the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama’s bright
prospect of the End of History in the guise of a world-wide liberal
democracy; perhaps, however, the »clash of civilizations« IS »the end of
history,« i.e., the ethnico-religious conflicts are the form of struggle which
fits global capitalism. In our age of »post-politics,« when politics proper is
progressively replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining
legitimate source of conflicts are cultural (ethnic, religious) tensions.

So, to quote President Bush’s unforgettable Freudian condensation, do not

misunderestimate Children of Men – Cuaron’s new film strikes at the very
heart of our predicament.