The digital world today represents a vortex that engulfs human life relentlessly, threatening human dignity and leading to barbarism, trivialization of values, self-worship, and indulgence in whims and various other things.
The wave of war came to destroy the human meaning of the family, driven by international treaties encouraging people to alter family structures, experience homosexuality, hybrid models, and promote alternative families. This includes resorting to surrogacy, sperm banks, distancing from inner nature by complicating marriage, and facilitating illicit relationships both in reality and in virtual spaces.
Therefore, in this context, we attempt to trace the paths of contemporary humanity's loss in the face of family disintegration. How do we connect the relationship between barbarism and the identity crisis in digital worlds? What are the manifestations of barbarism and its relationship with the ethical question within the contemporary family? To this end, we try to link the phenomenon of savagery with excessive electronic communication and the decline of real communication in the era of the “post-family.”
The Identity Crisis and the Onset of Barbarism
Undoubtedly, family life has significantly disintegrated under the pressure of excessive electronic communication. There are imbalances in real communication between its members, leading to the erosion of human identity. With increasing statistics on rising divorce rates, violence, loss of faith in the importance of family, and unlimited use of digital space to escape the disappointments of reality, transient and ambiguous relationships have replaced permanent ones. With a single click, everything can be deleted, as individuals seek to indulge in pleasures in a secretive world without responsibility.
Zygmunt Bauman, in his book “Liquid Love,” speaks about the fragility of bonds in the era of electronic communication: “For modernity to reach this moment of dismantling the components of human existence, after breaking the link between man and his Creator, between his choices, and the rewards of this world and the Hereafter, it destroyed the family structure as a framework for emotional relationships.” (1) This text confirms that human existence is contingent on the presence of the family, strongly supported by its functional and civilizational components.
In this regard, we must address the issue of identity by linking it to the integrity of relationships within the family. Individuals now have multiple identities, moving between various accounts and platforms, spending their entire lives in deceit and fraud. A man in reality might wear the mask of femininity online, or vice versa, with a woman assuming a male persona and playing male roles while being a female in reality.
This is the looming danger in the identity issue when it opens to multiple perspectives, where transgenders dominate over naturals, making the natural person feel alien in a world full of falsehood.
The fear for our children arises when a young man marries a girl only to discover she is a man who underwent gender transformation, or a girl marries a man only to find out he is neither a man nor a woman but a distorted entity. The contemporary human identity greatly lacks functional and missionary dimensions, living in isolation and rigidity. There is a significant contradiction between what is displayed online and what is done in life. Additionally, there is a noticeable reluctance to comprehend the civilizational meaning driving missionary action among individuals in the digital environment, where the human being becomes merely an executive entity subjected to procedures and programming without spirit, values, conscience, or emotions, nor a civilizational mission. (2)
Barbarism and the Ethical Question in the Digital Environment
We need to reintroduce a new universal awareness, relying on a critical reading of the phenomenon of the exacerbating digital tendency that threatens human nature. All contemporary imbalances are the result of societal transformations towards technology and environment in socialization and communication. All life activities have transformed into a non-kinetic pattern in virtual spaces, capable of being deleted and transformed at any moment, aiming to “accelerate the transformation of the human species and hasten its transition to a new plastic and artificial state at the same time.” (3)
This leads to the loss of humanity and clear identity into multiple digital identities capable of concealment and manifestation without the balance of reason, religion, or values, amidst the growth of the system of triviality and the dominance of whims. This marks a new direction for an electronic world: “compliant, expandable, and preparing for a new independence from Earth. In reality, it should abolish society or at least sculpt it and ultimately replace it with a total world, a world of cellular, neural, and computational devices, a world of synthetic tissues and blood that will be filled with semi-natural and semi-artificial bodies and characters!” (4)
From this, we can understand the exacerbation of misery, despair, and all types of psychological and social ailments in our contemporary lives. Moral standards have become unstable, relative, and stem from mood or material interest. It is the era of creative falsification, professional ideal fraud, necessitating a re-examination of morals. We have lost the true meaning of many virtues, piety and sincerity have vanished, and shamelessness and indecency have spread like wildfire!
Manifestations of Barbarism in “Post-Family” Era
If we consider the significance of “post” here, it relates to the idea of transcendence and disconnection; the rejection of the family institution and the encouragement to experience other forms of relationships away from the natural instinctive form (marriage), and the promotion of deviance as something normal. As we all know, deviant relationships are an attack on the social nature of humans and the ultimate human nature as a final reference. “Homosexuality is no longer merely an expression of mood or personal deviation but has transformed into an ideology aiming to abolish a fundamental human duality; the male-female duality upon which human civilization and human standardization are based.” (5)
The technological world has facilitated communication for the purpose of using pleasures and entertainment without needing real action or bearing any responsibility, away from supervision. It is noticeable that men are retreating from their pivotal role, and patriarchal authority is declining in the face of women's barbarism and dominance in both the real and electronic worlds, leading to increased hostility and violence within the family. The digital environment has contributed to passing satanic schemes, unifying the specifics of masculinity and femininity in everything as a prelude to gender transformation, effeminacy, and electronic indecency!
We also witness a terrifying interplay between the culture of advice and the culture of scandal. On one hand, the dominance of motivational materials for creating a better life provides unnatural satisfaction for direction and guidance, with intensive doses that leave followers living in terrible narcissism. They remain for a long time under the illusion of achievement or live in self-contempt and feel helpless in comparison to influential models.
On the other hand, the dominance of pornographic materials and the image of the naked body, glorifying vices and triviality to achieve profits, fame, and glory. It is as if we are in a large market selling ideas, bodies, everything, and everyone worldwide, summarizing time, place, and people and reshaping them anew.
In the end, we can say: Barbarism is the excessive sanctification of forms, things, whims, and the excessiveness moving through electronic platforms without a plan or method, delving into illusions without considering the importance of rising to real work, and advancing even a step forward. Barbarism is a kind of emotional numbness and lack of empathy with the Ummah's critical issues.
Frankly, the ease and fluidity that accompanied the digital environment is one of the biggest challenges humanity has known; the ease of being in many places, the ease of acquiring vast knowledge and information from many sources at once, the ease of meeting and communicating, the leniency in foundations and constants, and the distance from Allah and divine values.
It is a challenge to human awareness of time, place, values, and ethics, and a greater challenge to the human mind's systems, which know more than they act, as if in a fierce psychological war, where if not killed, one will go mad and become barbaric in a highly fluid, shapeless world that fights identity and foundations and kills humanity and humaneness.
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- Zygmunt Bauman, “Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds,” translated by Hajjaj Abu Jabir, presented by Heba Raouf Ezzat, Arab Network for Research and Publishing, Beirut, first edition, 2016, p. 20.
- Fathi Al-Miskini, “Migration to Humanity,” Hindawi Foundation, 2024, p. 168-169.
- Achille Mbembe, “Brutality (Loss of Human Identity),” translated by Nadera Al-Sunusi, Al-Rafid Cultural Publishers, Beirut, Ibn Al-Nadim Publishing and Distribution, Algeria, first edition, 2021, p. 25.
- Ibid, p. 26.
- Dr. Abdel Wahab El-Messiri, “The Issue of Women Between Liberation and the Focus on the Female,” Nahdet Misr Printing, Publishing, and Distribution Company, second edition, 2010, p. 11.
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