The Age of Discoveries
You’re looking at the view down the road from my mother’s house. In Lebanon, only the seas are calm.
Is it not something that, as the world is making mind-bending technological and scientific leaps, both life-saving and threatening, this very world is throwing to the wind practically all the legal and moral guardrails of the past century?
It’s a dizzying prospect, frankly, experiencing human effort at its most creative and destructive. A mighty troop of what ifs, once inhabiting only our dreams and nightmares, are coming into actual shape, titillating and horrifying our senses as the case may be.
Not so long ago, we, creatures of this region, used to look across the oceans––why be coy? I mean the West––with such pining. The sentiment was basic; simply a function of contrasts. We were wanting, and we thought the West had what we wanted. I allow myself to generalize because the feelings themselves were rather quotidian, no more than run-of-the-mill fancies.
We pined for calm; for a bit of autonomy and freedom; for boredom if only for a little while, as respite from too wild a life. We longed for the absence of fear and heartache, the kind that sweep through entire peoples. We hankered for tenets and laws that offer protection and allow for recourse and redress, even though we knew that justice was not, as the lady insisted, necessarily blind.
In such yearnings, we were more spectators than protagonists, observing the Western stage as an audience would. We implicitly understood, because hard lessons taught us so, that what played out on that stage was strictly for that space. Everywhere else, there would be countless exceptions, some subtle, others glaring, to the ground rules. And we would be one of them.
But now we are witness to a most unusual sight: the West suddenly floating unmoored, as an elaborate body of policies, canons, and norms that had anchored the very substance of it, its modern self-conception, its statecraft and mode of existence, begins to give way to a distinctly Hobbesian mood. Between these old allies, it’s not quite yet reminiscent of the old scramble for empire, nor have their politics approached the capriciousness of tyrannical rule, but one can already glimpse the contours of these features working their way into the vitals of an exhausted Western order.
It’s safe at this stage to connect like dots Trumpian demands for Greenland and Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, detentions and deportations in frenzied European and American metropoles, universities, law firms, and media conglomerates yielding to presidential pressures, travel advisories by Western governments for travel to the US… It’s also reasonable to link these to Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, its land grabs in Lebanon and Syria, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues his assault on what remains of Israel’s democratic conventions.
It feels like a contagion. Certainly the impact on individual lives in the West is discernible. Once very secure lives, I should add for emphasis. Those who believed themselves shielded from the anxieties typical of the more vulnerable citizenry in their midst.
This became apparent to me when I received recently a message from a British acquaintance I had lost touch with. Of South African Jewish descent and in her late seventies, she wrote to offer her condolences for the passing of my sister Iman and to tell me how horrified she is at Israeli horrors in Palestine. She lamented that had much more to say but was traveling soon and didn’t want anything on her social media feed that might get her into trouble.
Her words left a deep impression, all the more so because I remember her as a rather enthusiastic supporter of the Jewish state. When angst begins to agitate the strong much like it does the weak, the sweeping nature of social and political trajectories becomes clear. Who would have thought friends out West would have to get into the habit of the surreptitious messaging we “Easterners” had long ago mastered? We’re brothers and sisters in the trenches, it would appear.
I can’t say that October 7 and its aftermath gave birth to this moment. But I can safely argue that it is one of its ugliest expressions. How else to describe the West’s shameful silence and complicity in Israel’s atrocities. When Israel was incrementally tormenting the Palestinians, the West could pretend to care, admonish, and offer band aids. When Israel decided to abandon all restraints and go for the kill, the West faced the ultimate litmus test. One, as it turned out, it was bound to fail––and did.
In just one year, two of the many dreaded what ifs came to pass and, as if on cue, the rest are unfurling one after the other. I don’t know if we can call it the dawn of a new West yet, but it sure looks like one.
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On Another Note