A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (23 page)

It will then also be easy to denounce democracy as an illusion, in which the wealthiest concentrate in their hands the powers of informing, distracting, knowing, monitoring, healing, teaching, channeling, deciding, and accumulating. These new ideologues will explain that parliamentary democracy, like the market, is a deception, the instrument of armed forces and big businesses; that it generates disparities, destroys nature, and undermines moral values. They will even argue that it is but a convenient excuse invoked by Americans to hold on to their power without losing their souls — while
they shut their eyes on the development of the pirate economy wherever it is useful to them.

The mercantile order will thus be justly accused of being for many (and by its very nature) a source of wretchedness, injustice, insecurity, disorder, waste, ecological upheavals, immorality, identity destruction, violation of religious rules, and oppression. Many will also denounce with a single voice both market and democracy as machines for manufacturing disloyalty, for annihilating all forms of morality and social organization, and for destroying the freedom they claim to promote. They will complain of having to go and live wherever the market needs their labor, of having to leave the places where their roots were once deep, and of lacking the financial means to acquire the promised freedom. They will rail at no longer being able to influence the world through their vote, of being dominated, monitored, self-monitored, self-produced, and of being forced to comply with norms fixed by the demands of profit.

Others will go so far as to condemn the very principle of an individual freedom that leads to being loyal only to oneself, to no longer feeling bound by an oath or a contract. They will complain that they are constantly required to auction off their obligations, their feelings, their values, their faith, and the fate of their children, always ready to abandon, and at all moments expecting to be abandoned, without the needs of future generations ever being taken into account. Apologia for dictatorship will once again become a respectable subject of conversation.

And finally, many will profit from the progressive weakening of states to let their impulses toward violence develop, freed of all constraint. The first freedom will be freedom to kill, gratuitously and without goal or strategy.

The cities (where every form of alienation will abound, along with all the proofs that market democracy is only — for the overriding majority of humans — a gigantic moral swindle) will become the principal nests of revolt. They will harbor more and more serial criminals, they will breed an infinity of killings.

Unlike the Communist revolutionaries of the past, whose aim was to build another society in place of capitalism, most of these new contestants will propose no system of substitution. Ever since communism failed, no utopia has seemed available either to replace the market or to replace democracy. Except for a handful who will propose a return to theocracy.

If, according to the Judeo-Greek ideal, the mercantile order represents the welcome and successful outcome of progress and individuality, it also constitutes the worst enemy for religious believers — because in it, human freedom comes before God’s commands, and particularly because it endangers the stability of the family on which transmission of faith depends. These believers will make the secular criticism directed at the market and democracy their own.

The two great evangelizing religions, Christianity
and Islam, will be in the thick of this battle. Each in its own way will co-opt the secular arguments, and even find justification for conflict and violence among themselves and against the mercantile order.

Some Christian movements will reproach (they are already reproaching) the market and democracy with secreting frivolous desires, with looking kindly on lechery and infidelity. They will accuse them of commercializing moral values, of letting science think the world differently from what the letter of the holy texts prescribes, of no longer giving a meaning to death, of decreeing a law different from that of the Bible. They will in particular oppose all forms of abortion, of birth control, of euthanasia. They will express regret that materialist concerns distance men from any kind of self-questioning about the Beyond. Some will proclaim the supremacy of Christian values over the laws of men, and even over reason. Some of them will go so far as to consider that the use of force is theologically permitted.

The Catholic Church, the first nomadic, “stateless,” and borderless empire, long used force to oppose reason, science, progress, the mercantile order, the rights of capitalists and those of entrepreneurs and workers — before resigning itself to them. Some of its members will again become increasingly radical, closer to its initial ideals. With increasing vehemence, some Catholics will reproach liberalism with denying the divine order. They will launch more and more attacks on democracy, the market, and Judeo-Greek ideals in order to stand in uncompromising defense of the purity of the faith. Others in the church will continue to stand up for nonviolence, love, and justice.

Protestant churches will be in the vanguard of these struggles, especially the evangelicals. Originating in several southern U.S. states — the Bible Belt — they muster seventy million American citizens, who include several hundred thousand propagandizing ministers. Evangelism already rules over certain departments of many American universities, where it censors teaching of the sciences and other religions. These churches will be more and more influential politically. They will be behind more and more decisions by Congress and the American state apparatus. The speeches and actions of the previous American president were increasingly influenced by them. To hear them, via a slow semantic shift, it will no longer be the values of democracy that the West must defend but those of Christianity. These churches will urge women to return to the home and produce more and more children.

At the moment when the emergence of super-empire seriously threatens the very existence of the United States, some of these churches might go so far as to encourage America to wage war against Islam, and even against democracy and capitalism. The only one among the major democracies not to have known dictatorship, the United States could then (around 2040) fall prey to a theocratic temptation, explicit or implicit, in the shape of a
theocratic isolationism
in which democracy would be no more than a shadowy presence.

In Africa and Latin America the citizenry, whose destitution can only get worse, will be increasingly attuned to the discourse of these evangelical churches, which by now are major financial, ideological, military, and political powers. More than twenty-five million
people in Brazil are already followers of evangelism. They are present in Japan, China, India, and Indonesia. They could well form alliances here and there with secular pirates and traffickers in arms, women, and drugs. They will also stand face to face against Islam — and the struggle will be relentless. They will defend Christians in countries where they are in a minority, as in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine. They will even attempt, with a certain success, to convert Muslims — Kurdish minorities in Iraq and Syria, Berbers in the Maghreb — by offering them social assistance and promising them visas for the United States and Europe as “persecuted Christians.”

In Europe, we shall also see Christian churches speaking out explicitly against capitalism. We shall hear the faithful, Catholic parties, and religious authorities denouncing the burden of the market, freedom of movement, and its institutional translation: the European Union. Religious values will recover political visibility. Already, among European political figures, no one until very recently would have dared frame the problem of Turkey’s adhesion to the European Union in religious terms. Nor would they have made the theological question a key dimension of the European constitutional debate. Far-right parties will draw increasingly on these religious values to defend their own programs. They too will explicitly urge women to return to the home and raise children. Several European democracies might one day enshrine Christianity in their constitutions, and even openly become theocracies. The Vatican will play a central part in this evolution. It could choose to forge alliances with the other monotheisms
or, to the contrary, urge war against them, and in particular against Islam.

Within Islam as well, very diverse forces will increasingly bring democracy, market, globalization, the United States, Israel, Europe, Judaism, and Christianity under their critical lash. If nothing is done, a major divorce will take place between a part of Islam and the West.

In 2008, 1.3 billion human beings were Muslims; in other words, a third fewer than Christians. Although Islam in itself is no more intolerant than the other monotheisms, and although it was Islam that brought Judeo-Greek thought to Europe, the countries where it dominates today are all theocracies or secular dictatorships, with the exception of a handful that are democracies-in-progress: Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Senegal. In all the others, it is almost impossible to build churches or synagogues, to convert to another religion, to live as an atheist, or to marry a non-Muslim unless he or she converts. The dominant ideology consists of believing that any answer to any question is in the Koran, that every intellectual is useless, and that the origin of every problem (from AIDS to poverty) is the work of the “infidels.” Economically, socially, and culturally, these countries are among the world’s least developed (in all the Muslim countries, there are fewer translations of foreign books than in Greece alone), even though the vagaries of distribution of natural resources make some Muslims the wealthiest people in the world.

At the moment, there are few voices within Islam to demand its compliance with human rights laws. Doubtless
one day, under the combined pressure of economic growth and the demands of youth and of women, theologians will lead it along the road to tolerance and democracy. They insist on surats dating from before 622 rather than those that follow, and they are rediscovering the philosophy of Ibn Rushd (better known in the West as Averroes). Meanwhile certain minority elements within Islam (Christianity’s leading adversary and similarly evangelical) yearn to recover its eleventh-century glory, to gather together from Córdoba to Baghdad, then spread across the whole planet — demographically, through conversion, and even, for some, through war.

Besides, the dominant face of Islam is not the believer but the pilgrim, the preacher, the converted, the proselyte. In principle, conversion is individual and without political connotations. It must be carried out in the name of an ideal of purity, of solidarity, of submission to male power. Muslims are forbidden to change religion in general on pain of death. In practice, conversion is (and will continue to be) political. Islam will strive to gather in those who everywhere criticize the mercantile order, and to convert numbers of the secular emerging from what I earlier called the “critical coalition.”

By promising fellowship in a community (the
Umma
), Islam will elicit more and more echoes among the isolated, the weak, the vanquished, the rebellious. It will launch social programs among the critically destitute, promising them what the market does not offer — concrete forms of solidarity, charity, and dignity, allowing them to escape solitude and hope for paradise.

Its capacity to convert is not yet great. In France,
for example, only thirty-six hundred people a year convert to Islam, and in 2008 total converts numbered seventy thousand. That rate is unlikely to rise.

It is demography that will be the main factor in Muslim population growth. There will be more than 1.8 billion Muslims in 2020 (a quarter of the world’s population), and they will probably have surpassed the number of Christians. Their expansion will slow as economic growth slows their birth rate, one of the highest in the world.

The most intransigent thinkers in Islam will demand that the faithful, wherever they might be, should obey no laws other than those of God, and reject any secular constitution. All begins with Ibn Hanbal (780–855) and Ibn Taymiyya, who died in 1328, and who attempted to impose literal obedience to the text of the Koran. Then came Abdel Wahhab (1703–1792), still very influential today, who insisted that a Muslim must obey no other law than that of the Koran, rejected the inter-cession of saints and excommunicated (
takfir
) liberals, thus ushering in the peak of the
salafiyya
(the path of the ancestors). Along the same lines, some today follow the Pakistani theologian Sayyid Mawdudi (1903–1979), who opposed the creation of a secular Pakistani state during the partition of India. He also forbade allegiance to any other legislation than that of the Koran. For all of them, the only sovereignty is the exclusive political sovereignty of God alone. Mawdudi presented Islam as the third way between capitalism and socialism, and wished to make a theocratic state of united Islam.

So that Islamic law should thus be rigorously respected and not challenged by its confrontation with different
value systems, increasingly numerous voices will call for the constitution of a theocratic Muslim empire — which for some of them will come about through war.

For others, this empire must first of all rebuild itself in the lands of past glory, stretching from Córdoba to Baghdad. Some twenty years ago Sayyid Qutb, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and a disciple of Mawdudi, called for an Islamic revolution allowing the passage from the Jahiliyya, the ante-Islamic period, to the Hakimiyya, the sovereignty of God (“total rebellion in every place on earth, expulsion of the usurpers of divine sovereignty who direct men according to laws emanating from themselves”). For him, we must translate surat XII.40, which reads “the
hukum
belongs to God alone,” as “supreme power belongs to God alone,” not by the classic “judgment belongs to God alone.” In other words, a theocracy instead of an individual moral relationship with God. The thrust of his project was the fusion of the Umma islamiyya (the best of the communities to have emerged for men) and the Dar al-Islam, the kingdom ruled by Islamic law. Qutb, whose disciples are still countless, wished to fight against every Muslim not faithful to his vision of Islam, and against every “infidel.” Among many others today, the London-based Hizb ul Tahrir (Liberation Party) also calls for the rebirth of this “caliphate” by war (
harb
).