Identities of Stone, a Liquid World, an Intangible Future

There is, admittedly, a strong temptation to regard the re-election of President Lula da Silva on Sunday, October 25, as a check on the nationalist surge sweeping across parts of Latin America.

But beware the comforting picture.

The incumbent president secured just 51.79% of valid votes, while his rival, Flávio Bolsonaro, political heir to his father Jair, the former head of state and emblem of the far right, garnered 48.21%.

Nearly sixty million voters thus chose to continue backing an ultraconservative candidate, notwithstanding his father’s judicial disgrace.

Lula has won, and his victory has undoubtedly brought an immense sigh of relief to a certain class of “moderates” overwhelmed by the extremes.

Yet make no mistake: for all its electoral defeat, Bolsonarism, with everything it embodies, has nevertheless triumphed.

In this respect, Brazil has the merit of bringing into sharp focus the societal predicament confronting the entire world, far beyond the arithmetic of ballots and the succession of political and electoral victories and defeats. For what has emerged from globalization and its much-vaunted “dialogue of cultures” is not a transnational network of moderates, but a many-headed, shape-shifting Hydra of identity politics, spawned by the very abolition of borders.

The Global Village and Its Hydra

Globalization, after all, carried within it far more than an economic program. The circulation of goods, people and ideas was supposed, in principle, to loosen the hold of ancestral allegiances on societies, while the widening of individual horizons would encourage, if not the convergence of cultures, at least the art of living together.

Not a bit of it.

The naïveté of the baby boomers, inherited from the dreams of the post-Yalta and post-Bretton Woods world?

Not quite, either.

This is not to say that openness achieved nothing. Such a conclusion would be grossly unfair. Freedoms were won, reforms enacted, cultures and populations mingled, and transnational solidarities forged. That much is undeniable.

Yet the material interdependence of societies has failed to create a “planetary consciousness,” still less an awareness that only coexistence, sustained by a culture of solidarity and empathy, can enable humanity to overcome the great catastrophes looming on the horizon. Individuals now share the same financial circuits, the same digital networks and, increasingly, the same climatic and public-health anxieties, without that mutual exposure proving sufficient to fashion a world they can inhabit together politically. The mistake may have been to assume that the erasure of certain material distances would bring about the disappearance of symbolic ones.

From Davos to the Rubble of Manhattan

The “savage capitalism” of the Davos elites provoked, in the early 2000s, a first reaction against the systematic expansion of globalization: the revolt of the “wretched of the earth,” the alter-globalization movement gathered at Porto Alegre, emblem of a social resistance waged from the margins by those whom the globalizing dynamic had left behind.

But that was hardly the whole story. By flattening differences in the name of market culture, globalization also generated, through the inexorable workings of mimetic dynamics, another return of the repressed: an authoritarian identity politics whose influence had substantially waned at the beginning of the century. One may reasonably regard September 11, perpetrated by one of the most murderous and regressive offshoots of globalization’s “wretched,” as having dealt the final blow to the globalizing project. In a sense, the collapse of the Twin Towers marked the end of the history of the much-heralded “end of History,” as one of the global village’s most emblematic promises, freedom of movement, found itself severely curtailed, if not altogether torpedoed, by the globalization… of terrorism.

The Shipwreck of Certainty and the Monsters of a Liquid World

Perhaps no one has diagnosed this decline more perceptively than Amin Maalouf. In 1998, In the Name of Identity, a humanist counterweight born of its time, stood against the Huntingtonian Clash of Civilizations. With remarkable lucidity, Maalouf subsequently published Disordered World (2009), Adrift: How Our World Lost Its Way (2019) and The Labyrinth of the Lost (2023). The titles alone trace the magnitude of the descent: disorder, shipwreck, perdition. His latest work, The Century of Our Metamorphosis, published only days ago, seems to warn against the breaking of the final seal before the Apocalypse…

Prophetic.

Modernity demands mobility, adaptability and a perpetual readiness for self-reinvention. Yet this does not necessarily mean that such freedom is experienced as emancipation, or that progress is regarded as an absolute end in itself. How else are we to account for the paranoid collective hysteria of conspiracy theories, ranging from anti-vaccine movements to the questioning of the very laws of nature, which has spread across social media over the past decade like a pandemic? It is almost as though the upward trajectory of scientific progress had acquired an equally vigorous “evil twin”: the repudiation of scientism in its most herdlike and grotesquely caricatured form.

Nor is this especially surprising. Social protections grow more precarious and the institutions mediating collective life increasingly wither, until the future ceases to resemble a promise of life and the disenchantment of the world appears complete, opening a royal road to absolute nihilism, as Franco-Lebanese psychoanalyst Dina Germanos Besson has emphasized… upon the ruins of what was supposed to become integral humanism… And from the rubble of political and social landmarks emerge allegiances of an almost mineral rigidity, recalling the notorious “monsters” lurking in Gramsci’s shadowy interregnum. Such is the reign of what Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity.”

The Puritanism of Enclosures and Girard’s Mirrors

Having witnessed the Salvini wave in Italy in 2018–2019, Pope Francis promptly warned against the pernicious return of the “-isms.” The problem is not the nation, religion or collective memory as such, all of which may, according to individual affinities, offer points of reference in an erratic world. Their political meaning changes, however, when they are invested with a messianic mission to shield individuals or groups from a world that has become illegible, elusive and frightening. The trap then closes gradually, as identity ceases to designate what one belongs to and begins instead to define what one must defend oneself against. Cultural boundaries, once capable of organizing encounters as well as distinctions, become lines of suspicion, even contempt, demonization and ostracism; and the legitimate need for continuity is transformed into a demand for homogeneity. Thus, in place of a borderless globalist mimetism, a source of identity-based violence founded upon equality amid diversity, Benetton-style, authoritarian identitarianism substitutes a mimetic homogenization organized around fortified enclosures. As though, to push the image to the point of caricature, it were absolutely necessary to replace that supposed “abomination,” the European Union, with a return to the fragmented Europe of the pre-Westphalian age… with consequences we know all too well. One could hardly imagine a more inspiring golden age.

Worse still, one of the surviving strains of globalist culture has itself radicalized into an inverted identitarianism, embodied, conversely, by wokeism. René Girard would undoubtedly have appreciated the infernal machinery of this mimetic spiral…

Naturally, it would be absurd to reduce such disparate experiences as Hindu nationalism in Narendra Modi’s India, the fusion of religion and sovereignty in Turkey, Europe’s sovereignist realignments, military regimes in the Sahel or the flamboyant and morbid revival of Lebanese sectarianism in the post-March 14 era to a single mechanism. Such comparisons make sense only insofar as they allow us to discern, beyond the differences, a host of haunting questions that wander from one society to the next: who still protects us, who speaks in our name, and how much power have we retained to determine what happens to us?

The Specter of the State and the Illusions of a Return to Order

The answer cannot be found in cultural anxieties alone. In Brazil, public security, the cost of living, longstanding inequalities and distrust of elites cut across electorates that the convenient categories of left and right are ill-equipped to describe. Even the diagnosis has become liquid… Religious networks may offer tangible forms of solidarity where the state is experienced as little more than a ghostly presence; and nostalgia for an imagined order, fancied as a haven of ease, may attract citizens whose primary concern is not really identity as such, but a sense of vulnerability endured in everyday life. It would therefore be a mistake to reduce Bolsonarism, symbolically, to a single reactionary passion. Equally, to regard Lula’s victory as evidence of an accomplished social reconciliation would owe more to wishful thinking than to a sober reading of reality.

France, caught between Le Pen’s icy identitarianism and Mélenchon’s populist secularism, inevitably comes to mind, as do the United States, the daily theater of the buffoonish posturing of Trump’s Caesarist and imperialist demagoguery.

Old Idols at the Dawn of the Deluge

The post-COVID contagion is not merely para-democratic, anti-democratic or even ante-democratic. It reflects the far deeper existential malaise of societies that sense an era has irrevocably ended, even as new artificial deities emerge, already indispensable to and inseparable from individual identity, in a symbiosis of sorts, while we await the moment when the tool surpasses its master, or the first intimations of the climate wars yet to come. Against such a prospect, the political divisions of the twenty-first century appear laughable and utterly obsolete.

In the medium term, the choice will be between an intelligent, open, reformed and emancipated society, attuned to progress, and a dystopia modeled on Terminator 2, The Matrix or Mad Max.

The very notions of legitimacy and authority must urgently be rethought, for what is changing is not merely the structures of power, but the very framework within which power operates.

This is what French high-school students, leaving aside the rioters and those who, as with every mass movement, seek to infiltrate the crowds and hijack their message, have grasped intuitively. Because they have no other choice.

Yes, Lula has indeed won the Brazilian election. But he represents the survival of a fragile past, painfully struggling to chart an uncertain course toward the future, whereas Bolsonaro, a “strong” loser, embodies a future that can offer nothing beyond a return to the sinister shackles of the past.

But perhaps the victories of the Bolsonaros, Wilders, Fico, Weidel, Chrupalla, Siegmund, Milei, Bukele, Orbán, Le Pen, Modi, Erdoğan, Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, Smotrich, Meloni and Trumps of this world, or of their nemetic cousins, Mélenchon, Wagenknecht, Díaz, Arce, Putin and the rest, are simply necessary to hasten the agony of this decrepit, fissured, indeed shattered world. And to kindle, after the deluge, a genuine awakening of conscience, giving rise to a salutary, neo-democratic culture of empathy, alone capable of creating a future. The very culture advocated, in the final months of his life, by a visionary named Samir Frangieh.