Sep 30, 2024 8 min read

What I Want (and Why)

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Why?

The question often arises of my motivations.

They seem difficult, strange, challenging. Here I am. There you are. These days, the gulfs between us yawn. The sides we choose. The sides we’re forced into choosing. The choices we have, all so lackluster.

What do you want? I’m asked this in exasperation, with contempt, with suspicion.

Let me come clean with you about what I want, and why.

I think, and it’s no secret, that we live in the twilight of an age.

And what I want has to do with that.

What I Want

Look around the world. What do you see? Violence. Hate. Brutality. Conflict. Greed.

Even today, we’re cursed with these old demons. By them. No exorcism has worked.

What I want is simple, but it becomes complicated.

I believe in the old values. The old ideas. Ideals, perhaps, in this age of decay and decline.

The things I want go like this. An end to war. An end to violence. To hunger, deprivation, want. To illnesses of the body and mind. To the spite and hatred that humankind still ravages itself with.

What else do I want? I want every human possibility to go fulfilled. I don’t believe that anyone deserves a lesser life thanks to the misfortune of fate. Where they were born, how much money they had, whether or not their society will educate them.

Now.

Those things are simple. They might not be easy, but they are not very hard to understand, either.

So why does this question become complicated?

That, to me, is the far more interesting concern.

The Ashes of Modernity

You see, not so long ago, this wasn’t something particularly radical or even challenging to want.

It was just modernity.

This was the paradigm that emerged after the last World War.

Then, covered in ashes, battered, bleeding, the world, stumbling on, tried to put back together the pieces of its broken heart.

And we did something remarkable, beautiful, and impossible. We created a set of institutions to enact this vision, and perhaps the first impossible thing that happened was that this paradigm even became a vision.

Those institutions today have poor reputations, and that’s understandable, but we’re talking about history, ideas, and paradigms. The IMF was created to lend money to countries so that we’d never have depressions again, which led to war. The World Bank was created so that every society could modernize, and every child could be educated, etcetera. The UN was formed, to try to administer the new vision of peace and equality.

And over time, these ideas began to be solidified. The paradigm was turned into actual goals, which today, are still called the “global goals.” In the way that bureaucracies do, they’ve been turned into something more anodyne, little objectives and targets and so forth, and that’s OK, because in this sense, they’re more real, even if it all feels less inspiring, sometimes.

Think of how remarkable that was.

I think that was humankind’s single greatest accomplishment.

Nothing, to me, reached higher.

The wheel allowed us agriculture. The engine, industry. The computer, knowledge.

But of all these, it was something truer, and I won’t say “technology,” because it wasn’t, that made the greatest difference to human living standards in all of history.

That was our paradigm. Our vision. What we wanted for each other, and the world, and futurity.

And so violence did decrease. Poverty and hunger did begin to end. Children did get educated. Middle classes did rise. Peace dawned upon the world, for a time, here and there.

A new world, it seemed, was possible.

The Extinction of Human Progress

Today, I think that I’m a dying breed. What do we call such kinds?

In our intellectual world, we’ve had the equivalent of an Extinction Event.

One day, a meteor struck our planet. And soon, the dinosaurs, and many other creatures besides, were no more. Their world was engulfed by flames and ashes. The oceans boiled. The continents ripped themselves apart.

In the world of ideas and paradigms, we’ve had a similar kind of event, only the curious thing is, nobody much has noticed.

Who believes in these old ideals anymore?

If I say to you that I believe in such things, what do you think of me?

Instantly, I’d bet, your guard goes up. Well, maybe not yours, but let us say, many peoples’.

It raises suspicions. It causes skepticism. It’s concerning, dubious, increasingly strange, uncommon, and above all, odd. Is this person “virtue-signaling”? Are they just…playing a game with me? Are they trying to show off their moral superiority? Are they saying they’re better than me?

What is their deal, anyways? Who cares about this stuff, and why does it even matter?

This person is not like me. This person isn’t like anyone I know. They’re different, and different, these days, as we all know, is bad, in a world regressing to clan and kind.

To even say that you believe in the old ways has become radical in this day and age.

And by old, I don’t mean primitive. I just mean modern.

Inframodernity

So here we are. But where is this, if it’s not modernity, anymore? I won’t use the phrase post-modernity, because of course that’s already taken, and it means something different than what I want to convey. It just means: a multiplicity of lifestyles, really, and that’s not what I’m talking about at all.

Let’s call it: the inframodern.

Infra means “under,” or “below.”

And where we are isn’t modernity anymore. It’s not what comes after it, really either, which implies some form of evolution or progress.

Instead, we’ve regressed, but not in a linear kind of way.

We’re trapped under the rubble. Buried in the ashes. The roots of despair snake around us, trapping us in the soil.

So this is the inframodern, by which I mean all the above: if I say to you that I believe in these things which once defined modernity, an end to war, violence, hate, spite, want, and so forth, instantly, you’ll laugh at me, in a kind of spiteful way, or at least many, if not most people will, and the best I’ll probably get is a kind of blank expression of incomprehension.

That’s a strange place to be, because we’ve gotten there within one human lifetime.

Not so long ago, this was the paradigm that governed the world, and I don’t mean that in an Orwellian way, because of course, these aren’t awful things to want, they’re good things.

This was the paradigm that governed the world in the sense that it was uncontroversial to say, believe in, or want such things. Most of the world’s leaders would agree on them, if they pursued different avenues, and doing that was sort of the bar for entry into the governing class. You weren’t to be a warmonger, a demagogue, a lunatic.

You weren’t to lead the world backwards into hate, violence, spite, conflict, and want. You were a leader and your job was to enact this paradigm, on which there was broad agreement, so much so that it was taken for granted, barely remarked upon. Another year would go by, and there, the indicators all went in the right directions, violence down this much, peace up this much, deprivation down this much, prosperity up this much. Ho-hum.

We took it all for granted, I suppose, in the way that even the noblest and most beautiful things, seen too often, can soon become grating and unwelcome.

But now we find ourselves strangers in our own world, don’t we?

Who Doesn’t Feel Like a Stranger Today?

Who doesn’t have the feeling, today, of being a stranger?

In their own societies: that, of course, is the allure of demagogues, who preach the gospel of blood-and-soil, and so fascism is resurgent again.

But of course, ironically, or perhaps just tragically, the migrants, pouring in from the broken and boiling places—they too, feel, like strangers.

Who among us doesn’t wake up, and feel that this world is becoming something alien? That we’re in a strange place, which doesn’t make sense, that obeys no rules of reason or history anymore, in which the only law now seems to be chaos, disorder, and upheaval?

Who doesn’t feel estranged? From all the old promises and dreams? Your life was supposed to be this way, better than your parents, you were to be lifted by the great tide of history, and here you are, drowning in its undercurrent.

Who doesn’t feel estranged from their own possible selves? If only the job market was working, I could have had the career I trained for, say young people. If only the economy hadn’t stagnated for decades, my life wouldn’t have been a mess, say the middle-aged. If only societies had learned from their mistakes, they wouldn’t be repeating them, say the aged, unseen, made invisible, unheard?

We are all strangers now. To history. To the future. To one another, our spirits broken by predatory capitalism, our minds made playthings of. Strangers, in the end, to the selves we longed and wished to be, one day. Those selves disappeared into the inframodern. There we lie, buried under the rubble of modernity. And we glimpse them, sometimes, ghosts in the night.

So. What do I want? Why have I become this troubled and troubling person, who demands better from us? Who challenges us not to settle for being these broken, feeble things we’ve become? Who asks us to do that most dangerous thing of all, in times like these, which is to remember?

Now we stand on the cusp of humankind’s greatest turning point. I say that a lot, and increasingly, I think, many of you feel it, whereas once, you may have laughed at it, then frowned at it, then wondered at it.

We cannot ford this river as strangers. Think of how absurd that is. There stand a thousand strangers, all trying to ford a river, pretending that none of the others are. Surely, they could work together to build a bridge.

This is our task now. And to accomplish it, we cannot be strangers. I don’t just mean we all have to make friends. I mean it in a more complex way. We can’t go on this way, estranged from all that we are, knew, and had.

We can’t go on, with this pretense.

What Do You Want?

I used to try to explain to people, when they’d ask me, what I wanted.

But now I ask back.

What do you want?

The pretense is that history never existed. That the future never will. That you and I were only made to be aliens in our own world, estranged from life, love, truth, beauty, and goodness. That a blank look should suffice when one is asked: shouldn’t this be a better world? Why not? Isn’t that in our power? Then why have we grown so feeble that we sit here, estranged, in our caves, watching each other, mute, while the twilight falls?

This was Camus’s great insight, of course. It is what “The Stranger” was really about. And it was an truth that many others built upon. Something in us had grown estranged, to the point that we became capable of the most terrible violence in history to each other.

That is the path of darkness. The demons tempt us with the mirage of light. But an abyss is an abyss.

Do you see the world back on that path now? How do we grow estranged? Ignorance. Temptation. The old mantra of I-am-superhuman-but-you-were-never-human-at-all. The harvest fails. A scythe is there in each hand. Hatred glinting in each eye. An eye for an eye. A world consumed.

Do you see all this in our world these days? I do.

What do I want?