Irrationality at the heart of the Modern World-System

Tariq Ali in his Clash of Fundamentalisms raised the idea that the Middle eastern conflict was one between two fundamentalist views of the world - that of radical fundamentalist Islam - the only survivor after a sustained decades long effort by the west to destroy the secular, leftist forces in the middle east, and the market fundamentalism of neo-liberalism. This idea obviously informed Ali's account, but was not the subject in itself of detailed analysis - it was more a matter of rhetoric, a counter-blast to the nonsense of 'clash of civilisations' that so dominated US media.

The concept of market fundamentalism predates Ali's work, Jospeh Stiglitz in his The Roaring Nineties, being the personal experiences of an ex World Bank executive, shows in detailed eyewitness accounts the slavish adherence to theory over everyday reality, the refusal to countenance any local variation based on history, conditions or social strucutres, the rigid and unquestioning belief in the absolute rightness of their view, of WB and IMF officials. John Mihevc in The World Bank and Economic Fundamentalism in Africa explicitly develops the parallels between the conduct and actions of these people and the missionaries and analyses the operations of the WB as a form of fundamentalist theology.
This concatenation of ideas raises two interesting points that inform the critique and thesis of Saul. Firstly, if the dominant ideology of our time is a form of fundamentalism, and therefore irrational, is it surprising that the other institutions of our era are irrational? And secondly and often overlooked, that rationality and logic are not the same things. Indeed irrational and unreasonable arguemnts can still be presented with the tools of logic, scientific language and mathematical precison and be internally logical, coherent, exacting and consistent, and still be irrational in a larger sense. The apparatus and language and techniques of science are no guarantee of rationality. This is an important point to retain.

Francis Wheen's magnificent and hilarious How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world is a marvellous continuation of this argument. Wheen's targets are a range of irrationalities - market fundamentalism, religous fundamentalism, creationism, new ageism, ufology, the craze for emotional authenticity and public display at for example the death of Diana Windsor, alternative medicine and postmodernism. The book is in many ways a splenetic rejection of all contemporary fads and ideas, and is thus narrow, making Wheen appear as a grumpy old man of the left. Wheen has a very strong old fashioned belief in 'science' and sees this as the touchstone of the Enlightenment legacy. He largely blames the left for this triumph of irrationality, because in his view it has abandoned the Enlightenment tradition, under the combined urging of the critiques of the Frankfurt school and French post 1968 theorists.

Where Wheen is good is in his linking af all his percieved irrationalities into a symptom of some wider unity in the contemporaty world. He actually dates the public triumph of irrationality to 1979, with the election in Britian of the market fundamentalist Thatcher and the return to Iran of the religious fundamentalist Khomeini. After reading Ali's thesis on the 'clash of fundamentalisms', the ensuing conflict looks to have been inscribed at the beginning of the neo-liberal era!

However beyond this very interesting suggestion of the unity of the two opposing irrationalities temporally and spatially (and of course anyone familiar with dialectical reasoning will find this sensible) Wheen does not really have any argument as to what this unity is and how it comes about. Partly this is because he is caught in paradigm of 'objective scientifc rationality', which is itself a product of the world-system in which we live. And this perspective is one that notoriously privilieges empiricism, so for a person like Wheen (or Saul for that matter) simply piling up the empiricial data with some superficial comments, seems adequate. But to discern a deeper dynamic, to progress further in understanding the role of irrationality in the modern world-system, we need to recognise that there is no Archimedean point from which we can ''scientifically' criticise and construct the world, but that all our endeavours are within the totality of the system. Our further progress therefore depends on a critique of our critiques. I will turn to this in my next post, with a discussion of Dan Hind's riposte to Francis Wheen.