Anarchies in Collision

The debates concerning global terrorism focus on “radical Islam” and the way it can be “moderated” or pacified by appeals to its peaceful side. These debates include the discussion of the clash of civilizations, tolerance and its limits, and military means to defeat the perpetrators. Such cultural clashes appear in various parts of the globe, including India, Pakistan, and even among sects of the same civilizations. This monograph explores the nature of these cultural clashes and the resurgence of global terror to look at a more fundamental set of issues, including the misguided search for truth, resulting in Western post-modernism and “post-truth,” spanning the globe in the guise of multi-culturalism. The analysis of this context leads to questioning the basic composition of civilizations, their compatibility, and radical differences, leading to a dimension of awareness that has not been addressed by scholars studying civilizations. What is at issue is the inevitable “anarchistic terror,” which includes most unpredictable acts by “unsuspected” individuals, not only from Islam, but also by those emboldened by a specific mode of awareness. This level “dissolves” the various claims that the fundamental clash is among civilizations and points to two, modern, Western levels of this dissolution: literature and theory. The former calls for the collapse of anything resembling features of the world that are accessible to human awareness. The second level places the world at an arbitrary service for human “needs.” The result is made manifest by the claims from anarchistic terrorists that the modern West is “Satanic” and destructive of the created order of all things, which is a totally anarchistic point of view, while the answer from the modern West points to the fundamental anarchism of those who terrorize “Western” ways. The analysis of this context shows that both sides are anarchistic and face an inevitable collision without any possible justification. The collision is designed to unfold into a final domain that requires an “ontological” account of how such a collision in human life is possible, without relying on previously inadequate explanations. The text includes contemporary “turmoil” in global relationships, the various trends toward “autocracy” and “strong man” solutions to our predicaments. Such tendencies appear in the phenomenon of the conjunction of state and religion, so well pronounced in Russia, in Confucian China, the Middle East, the United States, and in European nations. It is to be noted that such solutions do not depend only on personality cults, but above all, on “legitimating” their stories. The point is that such stories are equally anarchistic.