5 - 11 July 2001
Issue No.541
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 5 - 11 July 2001 Issue No.541 |
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Reflections
Capital ideas
Elegies of capitalism are nothing new; they go back a long way. Long before the author of Lexus and the Olive Tree was a twinkle in his mother's eye, the 500-year-old socio-economic system was being heaped with acclaim as it "smashed" its way through Chinese and less formidable walls, bringing civilisation (along with opium, slavery, genocide, famine and nuclear waste) to the most remote corners of the globe. "Remote," I might add, if you happen to be living in a dank and musty house in 19th-century Soho, where none other than capital's enemy no. 1, Karl Marx, would occasionally wax lyrical about the revolutionary role of the system he had sworn to see consigned to the dustbin of history -- and from whose idiom the previous sentence is so obviously borrowed.
But whether one's source of inspiration is Marx or Thomas Friedman (call me old-fashioned, but I'd rather be caught dead than writing supercilious pseudo-presidential memos), few elegies of capitalism have spotlighted what I, humbly, consider to be the most unique expression of the system's vigour: its ability to generate tremendous knowledge and colossal ignorance simultaneously. The production of both specific intelligence and generalised stupidity are, to my mind, the most outstanding expression of the genius of capitalism.
Take the United States, the supreme realisation of the capitalist dream if there ever was one. Here's a country that produces more geniuses per capita than any other. It has the largest and most advanced science and technology base anywhere, and is by far the world's largest producer in the fields of the arts, literature, and the natural, social and human sciences. Yet its people (or a good percentage of them, in any case) elect a president who believes Africa "is a great country," to pick just one of the less flagrant faux pas for which the incumbent US president has become famous.
Stupidity is not culturally specific -- divested of its various cultural disguises and degrees of sophistication, it remains plain stupidity. The Taliban taking potshots at giant Buddhas are no different from an American president telling the world that there is yet "no evidence" that the burning of fossil fuels harms the environment (the Taliban, at least, have some excuse). The squalid spread about the sexual peccadilloes of a defrocked monk in Upper Egypt, which has had the country in a frenzy for the past couple of weeks, ultimately involves very similar ingredients and serves purposes comparable to those contained in the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky saga that held the whole world in its grip for months. At the summit of the system's sophistication, presidents (and not mere defrocked monks) can be thrown to the lions to provide the populace with entertainment and distraction.
And this is not done by a committee, though conspirators of various types occasionally hitch wagons of their own onto the stupidity caravan -- which, I might add, may well have been the case in both the Egyptian and American examples cited above.
Far more knowledgeable people than myself have expounded on the dynamics and mechanisms of the stupidity-production industry. Noam Chomsky particularly comes to mind. For a layman such as myself, his work in linguistics seems to substantiate our inherent capacity as human beings to appropriate knowledge, of ourselves and the world; his work as a social commentator and political activist provides solid proof of the maxim that knowledge -- the truth -- liberates. Little wonder then that a great deal of his work has been dedicated to exposing the means by which the truth is systemically and systematically distorted, hidden and falsified.
Capitalism needs knowledge to maintain itself, not just economically (e.g. competition and the rate of profit) but also ideologically and politically (e.g. the requisites of hegemony). But knowledge has a mind of its own -- a "spill-over effect" that is very often not to the system's liking. Knowledge, moreover, is generated also in the struggles against capitalism. To use the Chomsky example: it needs his work on linguistics; it needs to keep it strictly specialised and obscure in order to maintain a monopoly on its "applications;" and it has no need whatsoever for his resistance work, and the knowledge created in its course.
Fragmentation, marginalisation and distraction seem to be among the basic instruments of the stupidity production industry, which is an industry like any other, criss-crossing many others. It has public and private sectors, national and super-national corporations, means of production and those who own them, and, of course, it is market-driven.
Capitalism is a world system. In stupidity production, as in all other industries, the more you move away from the centre and towards the periphery, the cruder and less sophisticated the instruments of production. In the centre we get Bill and Monica, OJ Simpson and Dodi and Di; here, on the periphery, we get those (it is the age of globalisation, after all) as well as the alleged gay cultists of the Queen Boat disco and, of course, the defrocked monk and his 5,000 women.
But whatever its phenomenal form, stupidity is stupidity. And there is nothing more perniciously stupid than religious and racial bigotry.
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