The world is in a confused and dangerous state. Russia, a nuclear power, invades Ukraine and threatens the Baltic states, all the while spouting casual nuclear threats. ISIS recruits by posting videos of its brutal murders. Portions of both the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa degrade into failed and weak states. They exhibit what some have called neomedievalism, which is characterized by violence, polycentric governance, and warring ideologies. Camps within the American and European right and left reject science as an authoritative source of truth, accepting only that which accords with their belief systems. It seems chaotic—what American military author and historian Sean McFate calls “durable disorder”—but it has at least one unifying underlying theme: the rejection of the modern, technologically sophisticated, complex, multicultural, and multipolar world.
What ISIS and such groups are responding to is not simply military and sectarian opportunities but a broad cultural malaise. Accelerating technological, social, and cultural change undermines many strong beliefs and practices, which can be particularly damaging to individuals and weak institutions. Those who are unable to keep pace with, or accept the changes inherent in, such a world sometimes retreat to faith, which is an understandable response. Similarly, the ever-greater social and cultural complexity of an increasingly multicultural world may have the same effect, reinforcing the value of mythic cultural stereotypes and “golden ages” of the past as refuges. While the immediate military threat of ISIS and similar organizations can be managed through traditional military responses, the reasons ISIS is there in the first place—the civilizational conflict dimension of ISIS—cannot.
Skepticism about or even violent opposition to modernity is not new, of course. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Luddites violently fought the new technology; less active types dreamt of a far more preferable, albeit imaginary, distant golden age, as they had since Roman times. Romantics such as William Blake fretted over the human costs of technological modernity, the “dark Satanic mills” that polluted England’s landscapes. Marx, Engels, and other socialist revolutionaries, often drawing from the Christian utopian tradition, decried the brutality of unrestricted factory capitalism and built their own mythic golden age in the future to come. Modernity—taken as encompassing the high-technology, market-oriented, progressive, secular state model that has dominated the international stage for the past century—is having a particularly hard time of it these days, though. Fundamentalist movements of all stripes, from religious to environmentalist to cultural to political, reject the compromises, tolerance, and belief in progress that characterize modernity. Significant minorities in the United States reject climate change science and the theory of evolution, while in Europe environmentalists stifle genetic engineering and similar technologies.
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