In his column, Order vs. Disorder, Part 2, Thomas L. Friedman, of The New York Times, says that, “The Israeli-Arab conflict has become a miniature of the most relevant divide in the world today: the divide between the ‘world of order’ and the ‘world of disorder.’
Friedman’s muse for his sense of order and disorder as defining our world, and reaching back into his Part 1, The World According to Maxwell Smart, which I wrote about here, is Wallace Stevens‘ Connoisseur of Chaos :
I.
A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of Illustrations)
Stevens sees this as “the pretty contrast of life and death” which “Proves that these opposite things partake of one,/At least that was the theory when bishops’ books/Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.” Yet even Steven concedes – and this is what I think Friedman misses completely and thus stops short in his analysis – that, “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind.”
We bump along with minds indeed covered by scales, squamae. Thus we protect our vistas from penetrating horrors; but we’re also prevented from reaching beyond the accepted notion that we live in a world defined by order vs. disorder. “The squirming facts” escape us; we view the world without concern for history or historical development. Our ahistorical reality is caused by the role ideology plays in our confusion.
Friedman acknowledges this confusion, a world, then, of contradictions – which we accept, that we see as normal and amidst cries of horror, we turn away:
Israel faces nonstate actors in civilian clothes, armed with homemade rockets and drones, nested among civilians on four of its five borders: Sinai, Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. And what is most striking about this play is that the traditional means of bringing order seem ineffective. Israel, a mini-superpower, keeps pummeling the ragtag Islamist militias in Gaza with its modern air force, but the superempowered Palestinian militants, leveraging cheap high-tech tools, keep coming back with homemade rockets and even a homemade drone. You used to need a contract with Boeing to get a drone. Now you can make one in Gaza.
Nothing is, in Friedman’s mind, as it should be – “the traditional means of bringing order seem ineffective.”
We see this same confusion – or uncanny consternation – when looking in on the Russia vs. Ukraine, NATO, and Western ideology debacle. We also see this in the Ebola Crisis where now, 2 Americans infected with the virus are heading to Atlanta – the first Americans to be treated of this virus in the States.
What’s going on? What’s lead to a world, in Friedman’s critique, that’s arranged as a destructive binary, order vs. disorder?
“When all the old means of top-down control are decreasingly available or increasingly expensive (in a world of strong people and strong technologies, being a strongman isn’t what it used to be),” argues Friedman, “leaders and their people are going to eventually have to embrace a new, more sustainable source of order that emerges from the bottom up and is built on shared power, values and trust.”
He’s wrong, of course. He’s merely supplanting one ideology for another that, if we look a little deeper into language such as “new, more sustainable sources of order” and that romantically “emerges from the bottom up” and “built on shared power, values and trust,” we see the expected, the politically correct, neoliberal viewpoint that is meant to uphold the current balance – and imbalance – of power by gesturing almost comically to the way things are, which is the world we’ve had a hand in creating. Friedman’s rather comical, even cartoonish solution is also part of the problem because it fails to see the real.
“What to do?” as Friedman asks.
We need to go deeper; we need to dig further, inquiring into our current incapacity to use language to describe what we are and who we are, and why we fall, as Friedman does, into cliché – or bad poetry.
We can begin this inquiry by turning to Stevens, again, and jumping off from here:
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.
V
The pensive man … He see that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
Friedman feigns the “pensive man,” but he’s concerned only with the surface structure of things, an analysis solely of the spectacle. In fact, it is about the spectacle, only; it is the most important reality in our lives because it synthesizes our mysteries, our crises, and our solutions, too. The spectacle, in fact, is hope – the greatest and most profound fallacy. And Friedman is one of the analysts – and mouthpieces – for the ruling ideology of the day that is essential for buttressing the spectacle, arguing, first, that there is a problem – order vs. disorder – and then dissimulating a solution, a “more sustainable source of order that emerges from the bottom up and is built on shared power, values and trust,” which is delivered to us as if it’s viable, though confounding: “Leadership will be about how to cultivate that kind of order. Yes, yes. I know that sounds impossibly hard. But when isolated Gazans can make their own drones, order doesn’t come easy anymore.”
In the spectacle, we are always told – and must embrace – the notion that things are bad and that solutions, the viable ones, are difficult, and because of these difficulties nearly unreachable. The spectacle, then, is a dream – a dreamscape; a place where dreams and nightmares live together.
Infusing this ideology are several gestures that are systemically well organized, so much so that we accept these ideas – and methods – unconsciously; we are thus indoctrinated into a fallacy built on binaries, a vital component of the spectacle: 1. there are a multitude of critical, almost unsolvable problems warring with each other; 2. these crises are both unacceptable but normal; and what’s normal is suffering since not all crises can be addressed – it’s the way of the world, the acceptance of brutality; 3. there are reasonable ways through the crises; 4. these are dependent upon an order that comes through the hierarchical value systems delivered to us from our most powerful institutions – government, finance and its marriage with the military and education.
For Stevens, only the “pensive man” can see this; only we live in a time where compression of experience is essential for maintaining and ensuring our understanding of an order that requires our acceptance of the binary, order vs. disorder. The “pensive man” is obsolete – and if not, then he’s overly romanticized to the point that he’s rendered helpless. This is how ideologies function.
Ideologies are the destructive force of civilization; they blind and bind; they keep us from seeing “that single eagle float.” Ideologies give us an artificial view of the world; give us a prescribed language; and in this artificiality, the only real thing that can exist is materialism as hope and value. This is where the corporation comes in, the major engine behind the spectacle.
As John Ralston Saul says in The Unconscious Civilization, we are a society addicted to ideologies. The most dominant ideology is “corporatism.” “The result,” argues Saul, “is a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good.”
Now, look again at Friedman’s Israeli-Arab conflagration; look again at Russia vs. the Western world, Ukraine as the vessel; look again at the Ebola crisis, the result of this gross imbalance brought about by ideologies consistent with plunder. In short, we live in a symbolic ordering of our world – and our crises – that point in two directions simultaneously: a disordering, a dissolving of our conditions, and likewise a possible rebuilding that’s based on commodity culture, global capitalism, the edification of systems of power that marry finance, the military and education. In essence, and following Slavoj Žižek, “the main point is to see how the reality itself cannot reproduce itself without this so-called ideological mystification.”
That’s Friedman’s solution – and his take on the Israeli-Arab crisis – “ideological mystification”; that’s why, in his own words, his solution “sounds impossibly hard,” which then requires a mystifying, and accepted, cliché, a gesture towards the incapacity of escaping our ruling ideology-creating apparatus, “order doesn’t come easy anymore.”
The world we have today is not a binary, order vs. disorder, wrongly argued by Friedman. It’s a world of little knowledge and, not vs., a world of even less knowledge, all of it hanging by a thread – yet complacent – in the animated, antiseptic and artificial spectacle we call the real.
I’m casting an eye, first on who we were: 9 young women, 6 young men — 15 ambitious first years in all — and me, in a college seminar this past fall, 2015.
The Uncanny 