Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam > Blaise Pascal Instituut > Girard Studiekring > COV&R 2007 > Abstracts Papers 

Stefano Tomelleri

Identity and resentment in the society of uncertainties

Email - Profile - Subtheme # 1 - Abstract

paper

Identity and resentment in the society of uncertainties

My hypothesis is that our planetary society has become increasingly competitive and individualistic: it offers social actors many possible choices, but it is unable to promote the conditions of equal opportunity required in order to achieve them. An increasingly ambitious desire clashes with a selective and competitive reality, which is not, however, meritocratic. Resentment is generated in our daily social interactions, a frustrated desire for revenge. During modernity this feeling was channelled to certain external scapegoats – the enemy nation state – or scapegoats within the community – the adverse social class, ethnic, religious and cultural minorities. In our late modern society, besides the above, new modalities have emerged to sublimate this unease: consumerism, religious fundamentalism and individual psychoses.

I believe that evolutional or involutional metamorphoses of resentment depend on the binds and on the possibilities that institutional contexts place on the individual’s concrete actions. Resentment can assume different modalities of sublimation according to the institutional situations and the political strategies of the social actors. What I am trying to explain is that the dynamics of sublimation and of resentment have changed greatly in relation to the institutional evolution that has occurred with modernity.

The nation state, scapegoat for modern resentment

In modernity, the social identity of an individual was defined starting with the anthropological distinction between “us” and “them”, from the border between inside and outside the group one belonged to (the nation state). In the modern age, social identity was built together with the national identity, through shared traditions, a shared language, a love for one’s country, its heroes, myths and national rites which were regularly celebrated, and a foreign policy based on the principle theorized by Carl Schmitt (1991) of the contraposition friend/enemy. The national state acted as an identity operator, performing the function of social integration and internal solidarity. In this way, it permitted diverging interests of multiple actors (social classes, corporations, workers) and the internal variety of civil society to identify in a political, cultural and social unity. But the feeling of national belonging also nourished bloody nationalisms since it was based on the principle which defined the anthropological distinction between “us” and “them” as the political contraposition between friend and enemy. The frontiers of the national state were the sign of a border between “us” and “them”, which in the opposition friend/enemy defined the individual and collective identity; the nation was a totalising space which was in contraposition to other nations.

The political contraposition friend/enemy had a unifying force because it also performed the function of sublimation for the internal conflicts which started to emerge because of the progressive awareness of the fact that social acting depends on the result of certain historical subjects. When the social actors realise that their socio-economic condition depends on their responsible choices and on those of other actors, and not on a transcendent and unchangeable order, then the conviction also takes shape that it is possible to modify their human and social condition. Social tensions caused by economic or political crises, negative reciprocity - in short, envy and rivalry within a national society, can be projected onto the enemy, or polarized against another national state. The different forms of social unease were often transformed into a legitimate resentment towards the rival nation state or religious or ethnic minorities.

Numerous westerns publications on political theory, anthropological and sociological literature argue in favour of a thesis which claims that the genesis of violence coincides with difference and with antithesis. There is a plentiful sociological literature which reveals the primary importance of the dualistic type of logic which lies at the basis of the distinction between in and out, between the ingroup and the outgroup, on which linguistic, cultural, religious barriers and so on can be erected[1]. And starting with these barriers one constructs the ‘datum’ of the “biologic”[2]  “religious”, “cultural”[3], “ethic” difference, which justifies the hostility versus our adversary, whoever he may be, Jewish, Gypsy, black, and so on; or an unrestrainable “force” of prejudices is unleashed in the minds of the persecutors.

Scientific explanations for violence seen as a contraposition between irreconcilable antithesis collude with popular contraposition between us and them.

What previous theories ignore is that in the dynamics of contraposition between us and them, the enemy nation state also has the role of scapegoat towards which the faults and responsibilities of any national crises can be polarised. When faced with the emergence of social conflict born of a new awareness, the political, economic and cultural elites have made a political use of resentment based on the anthropological distinction between “us” and “them. Thanks to the instrumental use of the enemy to be sacrificed, a strong feeling of national belonging has been nourished which the modern nation state has made use of to achieve its project of civilisation of the social action.

Globalization is the crisis of the thinking of antithesis

The process of globalisation is radically changing the modality of polarization of resentment. The anthropological distinction between “us” and “them” is in crisis. Likewise, many explanations of violence which make use of objective categories of difference are in crisis precisely because of ongoing social transformations which they should be explaining. It is above all the process of globalization which is rendering obsolete two fundamental explicative principles of the theory of difference: the contraposition between us and them and the idea that civilization is a reality which is internally homogeneous.

The political category friend and enemy typical of early modernity is less and less effective because the internal unity of “us” and “them” is less and less homogeneous and reassuring. The division between us and them presupposed a reality characterized by separate human groups, and above all a daily experience where one only rarely met the outsider, and when such a meeting occurred it was rigidly mediated by ritual. In modernity, a citizen was born, grew up and died in a relatively small space, maintaining unchanged the fundamental traits of his own culture. Today, scholars of globalization question whether human populations actually have an internal cohesion, whether identity is the fruit of a multiplicity of interconnected belongings, which are distant in time and space (family, group, community, professional identities, and so on).

In modernity, resentment was polarized against the enemy. One of the effects of globalisation is that the negative reciprocities caused by social injustices are no longer sublimated in a nationalistic foreign policy because the very concept of national state vacillates. Even though localistic and/or neo-nationalistic movements try to re-propose this policy, but as internal politics.

The less visible but institutionally more serious aspect is, in fact, that transnational actors are changing the rules of relationships between democracy and state, between inland revenue and public property. The alliance between state and democracy risks being in crisis because the guarantees for the material security of citizens are disappearing. Economic globalisation weakens the nation state which needs to cope with the social consequences of the new planetary scenarios (migrations, wars, unemployment, poverty) without resorting to the inland revenue from taxes on multinational business concerns. The result is a multitude of individuals who, during their lifetime, are exposed to critical situations (difficult access to the work market, unemployment, career regressions) owing to sudden institutional transformations (bankruptcy of business concerns, reforms in work contracts, deferred retirement age) and often this multitude of individuals is also deprived of institutionally planned opportunities (vocational training courses, traineeship activities, and so on).

In late modernity, and above all during the ‘90s in the 20^th century, resentment polarizes itself against the very institutions within the nation state and against any possible direction. The problem is that resentment does not find the sublimation which guaranteed the policy of distinction between friend and enemy.

The case of Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East as a phenomenon of suicide and the open horizon of human rights

The complexity of social reality and the multiplicity of dynamics, roles, functions which involve human actors at all levels of social living are conceptually opposed to the simplification and explanation of violence starting from dualistic categories of difference.  As we have seen, the process of globalisation has changed the rules of the game.  One of the changes regards the actual division between us and them as the foundation of the social bond of us.  This clear distinction presupposed a spatial reality characterised by well defined local and national boundaries, where any encounter between the host and the stranger was perfectly ritualised and relatively rare.

Breaking the social bond founded on the separation of friend from enemy relativizes the difference between us and them, reducing the internal cohesion of human societies.  The epistemological error, instead, lies in continuing to reason in categories of "difference", when social reality has already been radically transformed.

What many scholars ignore, but others - from Thomas Hobbes to Emile Durkheim, from Robert Merton to René Girard - have explored, is that the roots of violence do not lie in the difference, but in the loss of the difference caused, as I shall explain later, by competitive mimesis.

The case of fundamentalist terrorism of Islamic origin is an emblematic example of how, in foreign policy, one is still trying to sublimate resentment towards a foreign enemy, and of how this form of sublimation is destined to fail.

The historian Gilles Kepel[4] has systematically shown that within the Muslim world, explaining the cause of conflict between radical Islamists and the Christians or Jews as a clash of civilisation simply hides the type of relations Arabs have with America and with the West in general.

In fact, overt suspicion is combined with a very strong attraction, rejection of the American model is mixed with an admiration of democracy - which is still lacking in most societies in the Muslim world.

Laying claim to cultural specificity combines with a desire to be acknowledged and the longing to participate in universal culture on an equal basis. Kepel wrote: «one can touch the paradox of relationships with the West, and with the United States in particular: the families of expatriates who have become rich in the Arabian peninsula enrol their veiled daughters at American universities rather than at the public universities, which are too ‘popular’. America is fascinating, one tries to immerse oneself in its civilization, in its culture, in its consumer ways, it becomes a distinctive feature […]. What we are facing today is not a war of civilizations, but rather an attempt to take part in a dominant planetary civilization and to affect its contents, or even – for militants – to take possession of it»[5].

This desire to imitate or mimetically take possession of American culture, on the part of certain Islamic elites, has a paradoxical nature which inevitably leads the desire to exasperation[6]. Certain realities in Islamic tradition wish to take part in the construction of a planetary identity, which can guarantee the uniqueness of one’s own singularity and culture, but in order to do this they are eliminating their internal variety and becoming homogenized to a fundamentalist model, drastically reducing the plurality which was traditionally specific to Islamic culture, the expression of contamination and miscegenation[7]. If we look deeper into this analysis of integration, we can say that they are indeed in a paradoxical situation with a double bind: Islamic integration converges towards a desire for planetary identity, which is typical of contemporaneity, but at the same time is experienced as causing homogeneity. They fear that planetary identity will annul their specificity, yet to oppose this they are self-destructively annulling the very specificity they wish to defend.

Islamic terrorism and the most radical forms of religious fundamentalism are self-destructive forms since violence tends to annul differences within those forms, as well as alterity, extraneous elements[8], even when they are qualities within one’s own culture. Claudio Magris compares this self-destructive attitude to an individual who would like to decide from the very beginning which part of his body is essential and which is transitory. Perhaps arms, fingers are not essential, so the individual starts to amputate himself, until he dies from an excess of purification. Magris gave this example referring to the Balkan identities, which presented a rich variety of ethnic contributions but which were dramatically impoverished in the Nineties because of this obsessive wish to differentiate oneself from one’s neighbour[9].

The wish to imitate and take possession of American culture expressed by several elites in the Islamic world converges and clashes with the wish of other elites, the American ones, which propose the “American model” as the only model on a planetary level[10]. The absence of a shared supra-national power and the absence of a set of norms which are widely shared on an international level, intensifies the convergence of these desires into an escalation of conflict: the more the terrorist fringes claim their primacy, to the detriment of variety and pluralism in the Islamic world, the greater the pressure exerted by certain American elites to become the only model, feeding a vicious circle[11].

One way to prevent the spreading of this crisis of the nascent planetary civilization would be to start constructing a new common and shared normative ground. For instance, in our age human rights can provide the horizon on which to start new pragmatic political projects on an international level, even though they are still an open scenario in many aspects[12]. Indeed, Christian, Buddhist and liberal traditions which might form the ethical foundations on which a new humanitarian project can be established, are not immune from forms of fundamentalism. Human rights are a perilous terrain, even for those who are quite ready to set out and face it. This means we need to set up a multiplicity of pragmatic (?) ways leading to the achievement of human rights: the Christian way, the Hindu way, the Islamic way, and so on. Only in this way will a horizon of convergence be revealed and dialogue made possible between all the differences and cultures in the world.

One of the limits to achieving a new humanitarian project stems, in fact, from the mimetic obstinacy of those who lay claim to the evidence of their difference, their truth, which imposes itself as such. However, pronunciation of the “truth” which “is imposed” to all because of the evidence of the facts, certainly does not help us to understand the difficulties, the errors, the sudden leaps of human co-habitation. It would be tempting for each of us to delude ourselves that we possess that infallibility, which leads to the discovery (human rights or other issues)  which puts a “full stop” in the matter of  the truth of human acts and of our shared living. We would be wrong to cradle ourselves in this mere delusion. Apart from certain intransigent supporters of the self-evidence of social facts, no one (from the scientific communities to journalists and individual citizens) is disposed to consider the truth of a new point of view as an indisputable fact preceded by nothing and followed by nothing.

In fact, we are all participants in the society of knowledge, willingly or unwillingly, in the great social narratives, some of which develop on a planetary scale. In any social event, from 11 September to the achievement of human rights, we are all involved in giving a “version of the facts”, even when the controversial participation is required of all those present on the planetary scene.

The problem is that we do not yet have the mental and relational habits which allow us to feel at ease in the new social scenarios we are living in. We are still imbued with an epistemology of antithesis and we address social reality like the fundamentalists do, and are amazed when we realize there are no dogmas, only controversies. This type of freedom scandalizes. We experience it as a bond rather than as a possibility.

As a matter of fact, it would be preferable to pose a series of new questions requiring our attention, to everyone: free citizens, researchers. Can two different versions of the same social phenomenon or of its political theory exist? Certainly. Does this mean that we should abandon ourselves to a nihilistic relativism, setting the different versions one against the other? Certainly not, since today it is possible to reconstruct the history of one point of view and acknowledge the credibility of the different versions and the type of relation existing between them. Finally, we can relativize, in the sense of setting up a relation with a point of view, which no longer has the power to impose its diagnosis of reality, simply because it is presented as truth.

The greatness of democracy requires versions of the facts to be fairly debated on, not only by researchers or experts. Indeed, the problem is to set up the conditions (political, institutional, normative and organizational) which can guarantee the necessary free debate between different points of view.

Conclusions

The analysis carried out in these brief critical notes appears to point to the idea that it is not difference as such, with its self-evident power of being irreconcilable with other differences, which generates a social relation of hostility, but, on the contrary, its negation. The motor of the conflict is an exasperated desire for resemblance and convergence, which the various social and cultural narratives share in their way of relating to reality. In the multiplicity of differences and visions of reality crowding our planet, it appears that the obstinate conviction persists whereby contraposition between us and them coincides with absolute truth, which aspires to power as the affirmation of oneself to the detriment of the other.

In the present-day planetary scenario, characterized by a society of global information, by constant and consistent migratory flows, the phenomena of mimesis are multiplied, and the most cogent risk is that differences progressively tend to annul each other following the thrust of a univocal, discordant vision of reality,  and leading to serious explosions of violence.

The resentment internal to social relations has long been sublimated in the policy of contraposition between friend and enemy. The problem is that in a planetary society the distinction friend / enemy no longer works as well as it used to. Resentment towards the enemy is transformed into resentment towards the state and its institutions, which are unable to guarantee the safety of citizens or to eliminate threats of terrorism.

The need emerges for new scientific categories which are able to identify in the relational elements of negation of mimesis the crucial elements of violent drifts which invade our social interactions on a local and planetary level. We need to question ourselves on crucial matters relating to the criteria and methods we should use to objectively judge a range of contradictory views on the same phenomenon; or on how we can manage to link fragments of knowledge, specialist points of view, disciplines which are apparently irreconcilable, in order to start building a thinking of brotherhood.

Personally, I do not have an answer to these questions, but I believe that setting out to search for possible answers is a scientific operation which is necessary in particular for researchers wishing to contribute to the reduction of the risk of planetary conflict, and to promote processes of reciprocal acknowledgement of identity whilst respecting difference.