Hosni Mubarak

The Charisma Deficit

One mystery of the current stand-off in Egypt is the absence of a clear charismatic alternative to Hosni Mubarak. This deficit seems to be the case in much of the Arab Middle-East, where, in spite of long standing authoritarian regimes and longstanding opposition movements, true charismatic leaders have not emerged in the opposition. What is the cause of this charisma deficit?

This was not always an issue. Recall the period of the 1950’s when imperialism was dismantled in much of the Third World. Nasser in Egypt, Sukarno in Indonesia, Nehru in India, Nkrumah in Ghana, Tito in Yugoslavia were charismatic figures whose lives were sources of magical emotions in their countries. These men were the leaders too of the Non-Aligned Movement, themselves in many ways autocratic and imperious, yet were able to draw on deep reservoirs of nationalist sentiment during their lives. What accounted for their appeal? In part, they were part of the best moments of early nationalism, in the first flush of post-colonial independence. They spoke in the names of an unsullied nationalist narrative, before the death of the Soviet Union, the rise of global markets and the birth of internet democracy all conspired to dilute the force of anti-imperial nationalism. These leaders (and many others like Ho Chi Minh, Kenyatta, Bourguiba and Houphet-Boigny followed in their slipstream, spoke for a more innocent period of nationalism.

And we have seen more recent charismatic heroes also emerge in very different circumstances in the later decades of the twentieth century. Nelson Mandela is perhaps the most powerful example, whose standing in South Africa remains unmatched by any of his successors. Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran is today being discussed as the most recent example of a charismatic opposition leader who brought down a dictatorship in Iran in 1979. Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia in 1967 had some of this magic about him as well, and Aung San Kyi in Burma certainly represents anti-authoritarian charisma in Burma today. Even in Latin America, where the end of many military dictatorships has produced some charismatic figures like Lula, Chavez and Evo Morales, many Latin American countries have colorless coalition politicians at their helm.

Still, on a world-wide basis, and especially in the Arab Middle-East, democratic oppositions do not seem to have a charismatic figure at their center. Why are global democratic movements not able to generate iconic and heroic leaders.Iin societies like Haiti, Palestine, Nepal, Tunisia, and now in much of the renascent Middle-East, grass-roots democratic movements appear acephalous, leaderless and without a sacred focal point. Why is this so?

One reason is that many of these movements are dominated by youth. And youth, by its nature, does not throw up recognizable leaders overnight.  The second is that repression may not kill popular aspirations for freedom but it can disperse, dilute and demoralize potential leaders through exile, isolation and fear. The third reason might be the most important. In a world of global markets, social media networks which link locals and their diasporas, and global images of celebrity, the nation does not any more monopolize images of magic, power, glamour and liberation.

In Tahrir Square today, it is clear that Egyptian nationalism is alive and well. But nationalism without a personal icon is hard to organize. This may be Hosni Mubarak’s biggest asset. He harks back to Sadat and via Sadat to Nasser, and thus still has claims on the nation’s charismatic resources. May the Egyptian people be blessed with an alternative source of what Max Weber, building on St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, memorably called charisma.

Related articles

• The Muslim Brotherhood may gain power in Egypt by default | Kenan Malik (guardian.co.uk)
• Egypt may find that orderly transitions are sometimes disorderly | Michael White (guardian.co.uk)

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This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a long feature on the Indian State of Gujarat, which is essentially a PR piece for Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of the State, who has been identified by a series of groups, inquiries and reports to have actively encouraged the killing of hundreds of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, after the mysterious death of 58 Hindu pilgrims in a train fire that year.

The article (by Gita Anand and Amol Sharma) takes up the by now well-worn argument that Modi has helped to open Gujarat for large corporate interests from India and abroad. The article quotes several sources (including my friend Mira Kamdar) who cast doubt on Gujarat’s development “miracle” under Modi’s leadership. India’s Supreme Court is still (all too slowly) investigating his culpability in the 2002 genocide.

My question is: When will we cease to use “economic miracles” to justify the actions of tyrants, hard men and demagogues? General Pinochet was alleged to have done a lot for Chile, Shah Reza Pahlavi for Iran before the Islamic Revolution, and Lee Kwan Yu for Singapore. There is a still lively debate going on about the pros and cons of Hitler’s bizarre form of Keynesian interventionism in Germany. China has obviously done brilliantly over the last decade. Do Mr. Modi’s supporters support the Chinese state?

Genocide against Muslims, inviting global corporations to push through high-profit projects in minimally-regulated special investment regions and making all those who speak for secularism in Gujarat fear for the jobs and their livelihoods, is not a developmental model to be endorsed for India or for any other humane democracy.

Indians do not mind their trains running slow some of the time. But they do not want to be forced passengers on the Tyranny Express.

-Arjun Appadurai is an expert in Globalization, Cultural Anthropology, Media, Cities, and Violence.

Related articles

• Gujarat State Is Indian Test Case (online.wsj.com)
• Urdu poet penalised for anti-Modi remarks (thehindu.com)
• Lashkar militants planned attack on Narendra Modi (thehindu.com)
• Rahul compares Narendra Modi to Mao Zedong (ibnlive.in.com)
• A Glimpse at India, Minus the Red Tape (online.wsj.com)

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I first saw the term “Blood Libel” used in a Wall Street Journal editorial, an early entry in the “it’s-not-our-fault=don’t blame us” response from the American Right to the recent Tucson murders. Sarah Palin, as usual, picked the term up for its color, doubtlessly ignorant of its pathological Anti-Semitic roots.

It’s yet another brilliant piece of idiot-savantry, nonetheless. By using the word ‘libel’, it appeals to the American penchant for litigiousness and also to the American passion for name-calling in public life. By using the word “blood” it does several things at once. It invokes the bloodiness of the Tucson events. It paints the enemy as a blood-shedding carnivore (against a pacifist Palin, no doubt). Deeper still, it appeals to the idea of sacrifice, a favored metaphor for those who like to spill blood (usually the blood of our young people” in the name of the national interest.

The deep stimulation of Anti-Semitic fears is a bonus, for those old enough or religious enough to pick up the symbolism. For the rest of the American public, it will suggest the violence of the liberal left, rare and exceptional as that has been.

These are just the incitements that President Obama urged Americans to leave behind in yesterday’s great speech in Tucson. But Sarah Palin, and her followers, presumably saddened by the dropping of her Alaska reality show, full of blood libel against Alaskan wildlife, can now hunt elsewhere for bloody metaphors.

Words hurt and kill as well. Accusing one’s opponent of blood libel amounts to a call for Tombstone justice: did Ms. Palin mean to invoke an eye for an eye? Or perhaps a Glock for a Glock?  I hope those of Tucson’s citizens who have rushed to the stores to buy multi-round handgun clips in the last few days are not among the libel-hunters!

-Arjun Appadurai is an expert in Globalization, Cultural Anthropology, Violence, Media, and Development.

Related articles

• White House: ‘No comment’ on Palin ‘blood libel’ debate – Washington Post (news.google.com)
• ‘Blood Libel’: Sarah Palin’s Reference Causes Controversy (abcnews.go.com)

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The Arizona shootings are a moment for America to search its soul. The public debate about hate, anger, sanity and public life in the United States is long overdue. We have grown accustomed to thinking of ourselves as a centrist country. We imagine that others, in dark places like Rwanda, Bosnia, Pakistan, Burma and other places unblessed by our freedoms are especially susceptible to propaganda, to political anger, to personalized violence and to suicide bombing and to the random killing of innocents. Today, these issues are part of a generalized ecology of anger, in which the public sphere has become profoundly vulnerable to personal passions, disorders and rage. There is a long list of causes that are already being explored: the shooter’s motivations, the decline of civility in electoral debates, the culture of incitement in talk radio and TV commentary, the growth of take-no-prisoners partisanship, the looseness of gun laws in many states, all these are rightly being discussed. Here are a few more difficult questions for the coming discussion:

1. Have Americans become as susceptible as others throughout the world to propaganda, which is another name for incitement and lies in political life? We tend to think of propaganda as the product of totalitarian regimes, of communists, of fascists, and of theocratic regimes. But propaganda is very much part of our own milieu. Anytime we hear something  short, extreme and provocative, every time a politician stretches the truth to get a vote, every time a lobbyist dumps tons of dubious “facts” on the desks and screens of congressmen and senators, every time an advertisement urges us to sign on to a half-truth, we are in the space of propaganda. In many ways, many skills that the United States has pioneered, such as advertising, public relations and media campaigning, are easily convertible to the goals of propaganda. We have become accustomed to decrying the lies of mullahs, dictators and tyrants the world over. Can we face the presence of political lying in our own midst?
2. Have the social media become a space for the less sane among us to imagine that they have their own constituency? The social media (notably Facebook, YouTube and Twitter) have done a lot of good in fostering long-distance friendships, affinity groups, information-sharing, business development and opinion-sharing. But these very sites also create, for those who are already lonely, alienated or angry, the illusion of an audience, and help in creating a fake public sphere, where one-way postings, tweets and rants can get enough public life to create the illusion of dialogue, conversion and support for even the most insane messages and ideas. Fake sociality is not just a source of boredom, isolation and frustration. It can become a staging ground for action among those who come to treat their cyber-lives as a form of rehearsal of violent actions in public life.
3. Have we encouraged various versions of “reality TV” to define our approaches to anger, making it the subject of comedy, of disaster shows, or of vengeance dramas? It is time we looked more seriously at anger as a cultural fact of American life, and not just as a subject for entertainment and infotainment. Anger is not just a private valve to release toxic internal sentiments. Anger is the membrane between our emotional gyroscopes and our public social environments. American society has made a positive narrative of the cowboy myth, the soldier fantasy, the brutality of extreme cage-fighting and the cyber-violence of a large proportion of our video-games. Anger is now the medium in which we swim and live. Going postal now happens in schools, churches, street-corners and sports stadiums. And, of course, domestic violence continues to be epidemic in American society. In these circumstances, a public discussion of the culture of anger in American life is long overdue. To treat Jared Loughner’s anger with elected officials as totally independent of a wider culture of rage is to deny the most obvious of realities.
4. Have we fully understood how metaphors can shape our political consciousness? For some time now, anthropologists and linguists have urged us to pay attention to the “mission of metaphor”, to the ways in which metaphors are not simply ways to enrich our speech when we choose but are woven into our deepest assumptions about human life, behavior and communication. Every time we celebrate a birth, a marriage, a promotion, a sports victory, or mourn a death, a defeat or a disaster, our metaphors come to our rescue and provide us with ways to make our speech match our feelings. But metaphors also work in the reverse direction and when used carelessly or cynically, they can make our actions literal translations of our words. The great English philosopher J.L. Austin spent a lifetime studying the speech acts he called “performatives”, those words that do something when they say something, like the judge’s words, “I pronounce you man and wife”. When metaphors become performatives, words morph into weapons instead of serving instead of them.
5. Have we lost all respect for moderation in public life? The national debate in the wake of the deadly shootings in Arizona last week has produced a flood of calls for the return of civility, centrism and moderation to American political life. This is highly commendable. But is it realistic? We have become a winner-take-all society, where the top 2% control more wealth then the bottom 98%; where celebrity, however slight, transient or ridiculous, outshines simple decency and ordinary life at every turn; where any sign of caution or concern can be taken as a sign of “wimpiness”. Well, Jared Loughner certainly showed us that he was no wimp. American society needs to rethink the generalized worship of victory at any cost that has come to characterize its sports life, its economic life and its political life.

If we do not focus some of our national attention on these issues, we will continue to live in a make-believe world, where anger, propaganda, violence and lies are seen to be the currency of the public lives of other people in our other countries far from us. We will not understand the power of rage until we see it in our own eyes. This dialogue needs our leaders from the Church, the universities, from legislatures, from communities to join hands so that we can spread tolerance as virally and successfully as we have shown we can do with anger. If not: the fire next time.

-Arjun Appadurai is a Professor at New York University with expertise in Cultural Anthropology, Globalization, Media, Cities, & Society

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Reposted from November 7, 2008 at “The Immanent Frame” at the SSCR:

Something extraordinary happened on November 4. And even those who did not vote for Barack Obama knew that they had entered a new world after 11.00 PM that night, when he was declared the victor and gave a great, short speech. But there was a problem that became apparent in the minutes and hours since that hour, especially for Americans. It was a problem of language. Words like “awesome,” “historical,” and “extraordinary” were made to work harder than they had ever been intended to. Some of us just gave up on words and moved to tears, laughter, hugs, songs, dances. The TV intelligentsia also trolled for analogies and the big winner in the analogy race, of all things, was the moment when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.

And then, on the evening of November 5, David Gregory of MSNBC, grinning from ear to ear because he had just been granted a new name for his own TV hour, “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” came close to saying the unsayable. He latched on to the word “transcendent.” Apparently David has not yet visited The Immanent Frame. But I suspect David was not into immanence yesterday. So he went for it: he kept asking his guests whether or not they felt something “transcendent” had happened, beyond partisanship, personality or even politics. Some of his guests were bewildered, but no one objected. They knew what he was struggling to say. And they knew it had nothing to do with the Reverend Wright, or Sarah Palin’s church in Wasilla, or any one of the other issues involving Islam, Christianity, church and congregation that had frequently inflamed the primaries.

But David Gregory knew that he was in the right zone. In referring to transcendence, he had the verb in mind, though he used the adjective. He meant we had somehow transcended religion, transcended party, transcended nation, and since this was a world-shaping election, transcended politics, and even transcended Barack Obama himself. Other words from the vocabulary of religion quickly followed and surrounded this one: redemption came up on in more than one conversation, especially when Jesse Jackson, Dr. King and the other heroes of the Civil Rights movement were invoked. And, of course, sacrifice. The idea of sacrifice had already been massively in play throughout the campaign, because of the kairotic significance attributed by John McCain’s supporters to his Vietnam experience. What McCain eventually learned was that even Isaac and Jesus could only be sacrificed once. You can be born again, but you can only make one Big Sacrifice per lifetime.

Transcendence, redemption, sacrifice: these key words of Western Judeo-Christian thought are surely in play as well as some humbler ones. But one senses that all these words were circling around another one, about which Americans have grown more suspicious, though it is the word for this occasion. The word is MAGIC.  On the night of November 4, it felt as if something magical had happened, and perhaps there were others, like me, who used that word. But it is not the biggest word in current public use and I wish it were more fully available to us now. So let me ask why it is less used and why I wish it could be otherwise.

Sometime in the seventeenth century, in the Protestant West, the word “magic” became the other to the word “religion.” The burning of the witches of Salem in the late seventeenth century surely marked the moment when magic was still credible but already unacceptable. And in Europe the process had begun earlier, with the Inquisition, as Carlo Ginzburg and others have brilliantly shown us. As in other matters, it always takes social science some time to catch up with the cunning of history and starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, magic was officially declared to be the sign of a world we had lost, and good riddance to it. Max Weber was perhaps the key secular social scientist to preside over this linguistic shift, and though he was concerned about the “disenchantment” of the world we were entering (the dreaded “iron cage” of Ultimate Bureaucratic In-Fighting), he was surely not bemoaning the end of magic. He was remarking the end of religion.

Magic, for Weber, was precisely what had held everyone except the Puritans back from profit-making, saving, thrift and enterprise as signs of virtue. Everyone else in the vast historical drama of the world religions had remained mired in some form of magic, which had reduced their capacity to offer their entire lives to this-worldly enterprise of the capitalist sort. Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Taoists, Catholics all had failed to break out of the web of magical thinking. No question, of course, about the primitives of Anthropology Land, they were not even remotely near the edge of the magical envelope. The closest precursors to the Puritans were the Jews, and they, as Weber sadly noted, remained committed to magical practices, notably the Sacrifice, which prevented them from converting their interest in money into a more ascetical interest in profit. Magic and magicality, for Weber, were fetishes of procedure, irredeemably irrational insofar as they sought ethical ends through technical means, the latter being the best way to define what magic meant for Weber, since he never defined it explicitly or systematically.

I dwell on Max Weber, because he is probably the most important thinker of the last two centuries to try to understand what secularization seemed to mean at the turn of the twentieth century. The rest of the twentieth century proved him wrong, as we now know: religion has come back with the vengeful force of the God of the Old Testament. Intentions be damned, Job is back, even as we moderns dream of jobs. Fire, drought, plagues, floods, and every form of pestilence, with some new ones like derivatives, global warming, nuclear proliferation, genocide and outsourcing, are having their way with the planet. We are indeed insects in the hands of an angry God, as Jonathan Edwards once said, but it is now less clear what he is angry about, other than our presumption that we can yak about  transcendence, redemption and sacrifice without going the whole nine yards.

Others contributed to the diminishment of magic as a force which could contribute to our ways and means as modern world-citizens. Emile Durkheim, who, unlike Weber, understood the joys of collective effervescence and the social rewards of ritual, nevertheless had no real sense that these joys could also do the work of moral order and provide the stuff of the collective conscience in the world of the twentieth century. Marcel Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and disciple, came closest to seeing that magic and religion did not work on fundamentally different principles, but his elegant essays on gift and sacrifice are now mostly read closely by anthropology graduate students and (occasionally) their teachers. The English, always suspicious of anything metaphysical, went the way of ordinary language philosophy (or Anglican homilies), the Germans went “critical” and became increasingly concerned about communicative rationality, and the French consigned magic to their brilliant lunatic fringe, to thinkers like Bachelard, Bataille, the Surrealists and their many descendants, reserving the high ground for the children of Descartes.

Today, among thinkers like Charles Taylor, Robert Bellah, and a less skeptical Jürgen Habermas, there is a new openness to various forms of the numinous in public life. But the vocabulary of the secular tends to pull them into the space of religion (as secularity’s other) with magic still firmly excluded from the discussion. The consequence, in the public discourse of the United States, is that magic is mostly a pariah word. Voodoo economics, satanic cults, Las Vegas legerdemain by professional illusionists, get-rich-quick schemes, telephone spiritual advisors, these are the contexts in which the word “magic” is most likely to occur in our public discourse. In its benign form, magic appears in the soft focus language of greeting cards, romantic soaps, and sappy self-help talk. But is not a word for serious grown-ups.

So what’s my beef? I regret that we are forced to catch the special aura of this election without a deep and serious space for the idea of magic, magic as it used to be. It would help us fill this rhetorical void. It would let us name the un-nameable and it would let us enjoy our means even without certainty about our ends. It would let us enjoy this week without dragging it immediately into boring predictions about what Nancy Pelosi will do, about how many huge headaches Obama will face, about how heavy the coming storm will be, and how fragile our collective sources. We have hardly crowned Obama and we have promptly begun to mourn for him, as if he has already been vanquished by his foes. In the name of hard talk and pragmatism, realistic expectations and balanced judgments, rolling up our sleeves and keen to fix the leaks in the roof and the flood in the basement, we are refusing ourselves the joy of inhabiting what David Gregory called the transcendent, for it is too close to the language of official religion to be acceptable or satisfying for too long.

Magic, anthropologists have always known, is about what people throughout the world do when faced with uncertainty, catastrophic damage, injustice, illness, suffering or harm, while ritual (also magical in its logic) is performed to forestall or prevent these very things. Magic is not about deficient logic, childish mental mistakes, clever priestly illusions or other mistaken technologies. It is the universal feeling that what we see and feel exceeds our knowledge, our understanding and our control. Can we deny that the infusion of 700 billion dollars into our banks is a magical act designed to make our banks rain credit again? Has it worked yet? Are we discarding our belief in banks and credit as a result? Magic is a method for deploying modest technical means to address outsize ethical challenges. Human beings have always done this and always will. We might as well have a grown-up word for this set of practices.

But for us moderns, “magicality” is not about techniques and technologies, means and ends. It is the word we use when we see things for which we have no words and whose significance we do not understand, for events which awe us because of their unlikeness or move us because of their uncanny qualities.  In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor character said, with a measure of cynicism, that religion, the Russian Orthodox tradition in particular, was essentially about miracle, mystery and authority. But being a Romantic and something of a conservative, Dostoyevsky was not yet quite ready to ditch magic for religion. But we have moved on and left ourselves without words for the magical in human life. We have given up awe and settled for awesome. We have given up wonder and settled for wow. We have given up mystery, and settled for weird.

In much of the world, magic is not just about miracle and mystery, it is also about questions and answers, means and ends, suffering and healing. It is not just about “what’s up.” It is about “how to.” And magical practice is primarily about the management of risk and uncertainty.

Even anthropologists, experts in the language of ritual, have lost the forest for the trees. Ritual is not primarily about sticks and stones, about making the fields yield grain and women yield children, about making boys and girls into men and women, and about assuring that troubled elders became contented ancestors. It is not just about boundaries and margins, the cycle of the seasons and the passage of human beings through the stages of life. It is about these moments and rhythms, indeed, but it is mostly about risk management. Magic is humanity’s oldest tool for managing the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. We have reduced magic to ritual and ritual to etiquette, to a set of mechanical procedures for lubricating the traffic of social life. Nothing could be a sillier view of magic, which is not about the big things that govern human life. Magic is the set of techniques that human beings have assembled to manage those risks which appear in the zone where the big things meet the little things, and when that meeting goes wrong.

So the election of Barack is a magical thing in two distinct ways. It is awesome, historical, redemptive, and yes, transcendent too. But it is also magical in a much more serious way. It has been performed and produced by voting citizens at a moment when America and the world face risks of an enormous order. We have named these risks frequently in the media and the public sphere in the last few weeks: risks of total financial meltdown, of global warm-up, of war without end and terror without faces and sources. And our existing tools for risk management have failed miserably. Should we be surprised that the American electorate has rediscovered magic without knowing it? And that we have elected someone special to help us manage these risks and reduce our uncertainties?  Religion may well have divided this electorate in familiar demographic ways (fundamentalists versus liberals, Catholic and Jews, versus Protestants and Hindus, preachers versus laymen), but magic has united it.

Yes, the hard work is yet to come and the risks we face will not necessarily yield because we have done the right thing and performed a magical action by electing a brilliant, young, new and black leader against all odds. Magic does not always work. But America has brought magic back into politics, something that organized religion in this country has become too transcendent to do. Americans have voted for magic and we should be proud of that fact.

-Arjun Appadurai is Goddard Professor at New York University and has written extensively on Globalization, Cultural Anthropology, Media, Cities, & Society

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From October 15, 2008 posted at “The Immanent Frame” at the SSCR:

Last week as I listened, along with many other Americans and others around the world, to President Bush’s most recent effort to reassure us about the current economic meltdown I had a “Road to Damascus” moment.  It happened as I heard Bush repeat the word “faith”: faith in America’s institutions, faith in its workers, faith in capitalism, faith in our capacity to survive other disasters (such as 1929 and 2001). And, of course, the faith we needed to weather the recent crisis and get to the other side, such faith, in Bush’s rhetoric, being not only the need of the moment but the fulcrum for the journey to recovery.

I instantly saw that a great feat in reverse discourse engineering had occurred: we had moved into the era of the “Faith-Based Economy.” Many of us had already developed a certain worry about the place of “faith” in the Bush administration’s weird form of ecumenical evangelism, which had used the idea of faith-based organizations to allow the covert infiltration of a certain brand of religion into American civic life, with a definite bias towards white, Protestant, evangelical forms rather than say, to Muslim, Catholic, Jewish, Hindu or Rastafarian forms.

But now we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else. It is faith in capitalism itself, capitalism viewed as a transcendent means of organizing human affairs, of capitalism as a theodicy for the explanation of evil, lust, greed and theft in the economy, and of the meltdown as a supreme form of testing by suffering, which will weed out the weak of heart from those of true good faith.  We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that the early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination. Not all are saved, but we must all act as if we might be saved, and by acting as if we might be among the saved, we enact our faith in capitalism, even if we might be among the doomed or damned. Such faith must be shown in our works, in our actions: we must continue to spend, to work hard, to invest, and, as George Bush long ago said, “to shop” as if our very lives depended on it. In other words, capitalism now needs our faith more than our faith needs capitalism.

Practically, what does this mean?  It means austerity, chosen or imposed: less insane credit-card acquisitions, less whacky mortgage seeking, less obese cars, fewer happy miles on the road, fewer “business expenses” (unless of course we are senior AIG executives). It means leaving our money in the banks and having renewed faith in the FDIC, for if we race to our banks and take our money home in cash, we shall show our lack of faith in the banks, and the banks will suffer, and if the banks suffer, the world financial markets will suffer, and if the world financial markets suffer, the volcanoes will explode, the rivers will flood, the lightning shall strike, and all of us will be reduced to ashes, along with our melted credit cards, our worthless pension funds and our homes with negative equity.

But Faith, it turns out, is not enough. Capitalism, as a master-belief system, reasonably operates on faith. But markets, especially capitalist financial markets, need something more specific: Trust. And that is the second biggest Revelation of the last few weeks. We have a trade deficit, as we all know, but much worse is our “trust deficit.” No one trusts the (financial) other anymore, we are told, and without trust no one lends and without lending the plastic ceases to work and everyday life comes to a complete halt.  This news will come as a shock to all of us on “Main Street,” who trust our friends, our neighbors, our leaders, our churches and our employers as much—or as little—as we did last year. No, trust is not a Main Street problem, it is a Wall Street problem. In other words, banks won’t lend to one another, and that problem in the high mountains of finance is melting down into the valleys and plains of our everyday lives.

Why won’t the banks, the hedge funds, the investment banks and all the other gentlemen-rogues who are part of the banking business trust one another? Have they lost their faith in capitalism? No, not quite. They still believe in the financial markets and in the rightness of the larger principles of profit, speculation and upside risk. What they no longer trust in is—each other! And they don’t trust each other because they have constructed for themselves a version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby they fear that each party’s self-interest lies in non-cooperation, and hence in suboptimal solutions, solvable only by a large infusion of cash from the outside to prime the Trust Pump.

The major arguments for the recent bailout still do not quite explain why the trust between banks evaporated when just a few weeks ago, the lending potlatch was in full swing, loans were being made to everyone except known felons, deportees or illegal migrants, and each of us on Main Street was receiving at least ten offers to get new credit cards every week. The banks trusted each other to a fault, and loaned money to one another as if there was no tomorrow. They became pathologically trusting of each other and were in an intoxicated haze of downstream trust-based lending. This orgy of trust was based on reversing Frank Knight’s great insight about risk and uncertainty, according to which uncertainty is what lenders should hate and risk is what they should seek to define and quantify, so they can take measurable risks to increase profits. It turns out that our banks have been pretending to know all about the risks they were taking, through devices which were mostly variations on derivatives.

For Main Street readers, let me offer the following definition of a derivative: a derivative is an instrument which is based on the risk of something happening (or not happening) to another risk, and not to another commodity. And once you do this once, you can repeat the transaction more or less indefinitely, as in risks on other risks, which are in turn risks on other risks, etc. The trust involved in these transactions in derivatives was not based on calculated risk, it was based on multiplying uncertainty, while pretending to develop and operate mathematical models that were calculating risks (ideally to the power of n). And as the uncertainties multiplied, more and more financial transactions were enabled, which allowed vast paper profits to be made as well as vast fees on these transactions, all of which were based on leveraging uncertainty rather than risk. In this vast reversal of the core principles of financial leveraging, the ultimate quarterbacks who anchored these risks (oops: these uncertainties) were the insurance companies who discovered the magical word “re,” which allowed them to insure risks on other risks. (The relationship of risk to performativity and trust is the subject of collaborative work-in-progress between Arjun Appadurai and Benjamin Lee.)

Yes, this is indeed a Ponzi scheme, but it is a Ponzi scheme with a few special twists: it required a certain number of arcane changes in the rules of accounting which allowed banks to disguise totally unspecified uncertainties as calculable (and profitable) risks; it required remarkable suspension of the elementary rules of government oversight over financial institutions; and it required a society that did not mind living with awesome amounts of debt at every level of its functioning. In other words, starting sometime in the 1980s we were already living in an FBE (Faith-Based Economy), in which no financial wannasteal really knew what derivatives were or how they worked, and each one hoped that they would be sitting on a secure chair (presumably in the Bahamas) when the music stopped. The music stopped because of the housing market (and the predictable end of the subprime lending orgy) but the game which stopped was a much larger faith-based system based on the radical replacement of risk by uncertainty.

So we are now officially living in a world where faith, risk and trust have completely redefined their relationship to one another.  First, while religious faith is unevenly distributed in our larger societies and worlds, with a band of old-fashioned believers, a big band of social churchgoers, and a significant minority of yuppy Pascalians (including most professional economists), we have been barking up the wrong tree in regard to the problem of secularization.  Max Weber, Durkheim and the other giants of early social science watched with concern as the march of industrial capitalism, science and the division of labor appeared to erode religious belief and we seemed to be well on the way to a “disenchanted world.” But the Iron Cage turned out to be a Pandora’s Box.

In the 1950s, sixties and early seventies, the general social science consensus was that modernization after World War II was sure to replace religion with faith in science, bureaucracy, law and education.  But the world turned out to be a perverse place and, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, it became evident that religion was not on the retreat.  Evangelical Protestantism was born again in the United States, Islam became the very paradigm of an expansive and aggressive religious ideology, Roman Catholicism was quick to fight back in its own favored climates and constituencies, notably in Latin America, Eastern and Southern Europe and in various parts of Asia and Africa. Even Hinduism and Buddhism, normally seen as quiet and sleepy, went global with a renewed energy and pushed their interests into various national and diasporic public spheres with scary effect in many parts of South and South-East Asia. As migrants began to carry their religious affiliations with them through the internet, television, telephone and the press, many world cities, from Detroit, London and Berlin, to Sao Paulo, Cairo and Seoul, began to be the sites of multiple religious movements, conversions, cults and churches, representing every variety of global evangelism and many varieties of indigenous tradition. The story of the Korean Protestant aid workers kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan recently is only the most bizarre in a worldwide drama of leveraged conversions or duelling evangelisms. And quite a large number of people seemed to be interested in being soldiers (and cleansers) in religious wars.

And capitalism itself in the last decades of the twentieth century has been observed to be tied up with numerous forms of hysteria, panic and mystery. Local entrepreneurs in sites as different as Lagos, Taiwan and Guatemala connected new forms of gambling, speculation and scam to the related languages of salvation and millennial profit. These new forms of re-enchanted capitalism have generally been tied to the capitalist badlands, where traditions of fetish, phantasm and spectre have frequently surrounded money and its reproduction. It is hardly news, especially to anthropologists, that the repressed fetishes of the commodity are always part of the lunatic edges of modern capitalism, thus giving rise to many brands of casino capitalism, evangelical entrepreneurship and proletarian life-wagering.

We are now in a position to recognize the convergence of Bush capitalism and bush capitalism. In the very belly of the beast, in the heart of capital’s empire, we are witnessing the complete remaking of the Weberian allegory of the journey from predestination, to election, to proof, to works, to rationally governed bourgeois life, to entrepreneurial risk. This was the allegory of the prefiguring and powering of Puritan risk-taking by Calvinist rectitude.

Now this allegory is repeating itself in reverse. The appetites of the beast require restoring uncertainty to its more calculable form as risk, as a first step in restoring trust between lenders, so that they will move money to yet others, so that in turn the wheels of commerce can begin to turn and our faith in the eternal mysteries of capital can be restored. Among these are the mysteries of debt as the virtuous bride of consumption, money as capable of begetting more money, and profit for the few as the key to the welfare of all. The cardinal mystery of the market, of course, verily its Spirit, is the Invisible Hand. For the Invisible Hand to move again, it needs a Helping Hand from us, the wretched of Main Street. And in lending this helping hand, in the biggest bailout in human history, we are asked to show our Faith in the Economy. For once, and perhaps for the last time, capitalism needs our Faith as much as we need its mysteries. The global economy will never be secular again.

-Arjun Appadurai writes on Cultural Anthropology, Globalization, Urban Cities, Media, Violence, Risk, & Cultural Studies

ArjunAppadurai.org ArjunAppadurai.org - Writings & Reflections on Globalization, Food, Cinema, Design, & Cities

Arjun Appadurai

Welcome to ArjunAppadurai.Org, a site I am dedicating to create a global classroom so to speak by hosting dialog and debate on questions I find particularly stimulating and pertinent to today’s shifting world. I will pose questions that reach back throughout my career in Cultural Anthropology, Globalization, and India, while bringing fresh inquiries to the table. My interests are in cities, public health, design, cinema, and economics. How these seemingly disparate areas intersect is fascinating!

I look forward to our collective dialog! Thank you for joining me.

-Dr. Arjun Appadurai

ArjunAppadurai.org ArjunAppadurai.org - Writings & Reflections on Globalization, Food, Cinema, Design, & Cities