Peter James Cox – President of SAID –

“Populism poses a danger to the minds of the electorate. However populism is at its most dangerous when employed by elites who believe they are defending the state system.”
Anwar Esslimani SAID Arabic and North Africa Coordinator, 11 February 2023 #anwaresslimani

Moving Forward in a Global Context.
As global problems become ever more apparent electorates accept populist short term solutions for long term global situations. Ignoring the necessary need for dialogue, the right offers insular solutions to problems which intrinsically require global cooperation.

In On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century Professor Timothy Snyder reports that the right in the West is becoming increasingly Nationalist. In specific national contexts Nationalism refers to fictitious former glory. On the other hand in an authentically progressive manner Patriotism looks forward towards what the country can become. In this way Snyder draws a definite distinction between a Patriot and a Nationalist.The United Kingdom Brexit movement was an example of Nationalism. With a zenophobic agenda Brexit engendered a basic distrust of the other. Brexit’s leaders advocated a backward looking mindset – towards what they mistakenly imagined the UK represented in the past. Looking at Snyders definitions through the lens of the global village then we can see that modern Patriotism must be outward looking.

However it is hard to find a concurrently coalescent attitude anywhere on the Western political spectrum. Where the Right is becoming obsessed with the past and imagined former glory the left becomes ever more jingoistic, encouraging the polity to define itself in an increasingly negative manner.One cannot define oneself on what one is not. In Scotland the Scottish National Party encourages Scots to define themselves as distinct from England. In a similar way the late Hugo Chavez tried to define his country Venezuela as anything but America. Nations cannot be predicated on a common enemy, real or imagined, past or present and so in Identity politics the Nationalist project will inevitably struggle.

Basic scholastic philosophy teaches that an entity cannot exist without having good in it. Aristotle believed in the unitive nature of the democratic system – with good coming from different parts of Athenian society. In a holistic manner the Athenian democratic system was predicated on ordinary men choosing good from both the left of centre and right of centre at the appropriate time. Strong modern electoral systems have historically moved forward by selecting pertinent policy from both the left and the right in due time. Athenian political philosophy was also predicated on a definite view of the human person and as such efining the difference between the needs of the people and the wants of the people was rendered capable for the ordinary man. Athens moved forward.

Balance such as this is rendered increasingly difficult in an era when, unlike Athens, we temporise over what the human person is. This lack of substance has a contagion effect for our global system of thought.

In 1978 Jean-Francois Lyotard defined this postmodern malaise. The contemporary French philosopher called postmodernism, ‘The absence of metanarrative.’ The rise of populist Nationalism is an alarming product of the conceptual vacuum that is at the heart of the contemporary postmodernism circumstance. Words like “progressive” have little resonance in the context of postmodernism as the postmodern world has no collective interpretation. Similarly without a shared metanarrative the label ‘conservative’ is outdated as there is nothing in the occidental zeitgeist that represents objective Truth or even a contextual understanding of direction. Ever more confused electorates look to short term, subjective local solutions that are intrinsically inward looking. Populist nationalism creates tragic insularity when in fact the postmodern global village offers the potential for so much more. As a result the postmodern international zeitgeist is fast becoming characterised by Ignorance and parochialism on a national level and paranoid geopolitics in the world.

In this terrifying philosophical context the cult of personality becomes a poor substitute for genuine policy. In recent American elections we have witnessed a step back in terms of genuine sociological evolution.

In postmodern American Elections Tribalism dominates. Truth is the first casualty in this nihilistic arena and as a result the liberal democratic project balances on the brink of irrelevance. In terms of RealPolitik the centering fulcrum that is genuine human dialogue is completely absent from contemporary America.

I would suggest that education is the key to bringing liberal democracy back from the ideological precipice but this proves more and more unlikely in a global context in which pluralism without direction is offered on the left and fundamentalism is offered as a substitute for reflection on the right.

The citizens of the world deserve more than this.

The solution to the world’s problems lies in dialogue.This is the only way to move forward from our current metaphysical standpoint. In a contemporary context respect of custom in a culture of dialogue is the key to understanding what the human person is. This is rendered more and more difficult by political polarisation in which traditional versions of the human person (such as the Imago Dei) are labelled outdated. Nothing ever came from boxing shadows. As nations we must look to the future rather than towards the bluff of an imagined glorious past. The global restlessness that is integral to postmodernism offers a context in which authentic global Patriotism could flourish. The world deserves leaders that understand this and the objective and the subjective systems of thought. Only then will we be able to who are equally able to forge genuine holistic links between the national and the global.

Peter James Cox
SAID President, 22nd February 2023