Over the last week, I have been reading and reflecting on the crisis of liberalism — the threat to liberal democracies, the diminishing prospects for human freedom, posed by the rise of totalitarian regimes and fanatic terrorist sects around the world. Among the books I have focused on are Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism (2003) and Susan Neiman’s Left is Not Woke (2023). I’ve been thinking on the themes explored by these works in relationship to current world events, particularly what’s happening in Israel, but also the Ukraine conflict and what seems to be the new “Cold War” with China, which may eventually become a very hot war over Taiwan. I have a bundle of inchoate, turbulent thoughts that I am going to share. I am open to changing my ideas and I am curious to hear what other people think in the comments.
Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke makes an argument I find compelling, that the tendency toward identity politics, what she calls the “victimization olympics,” and the increasingly factional style of the contemporary Left has forfeited the best of the old Left for a much less effective, far more regressive approach. She finds that many “contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress,” she writes. “All these ideas are connected.” Woke Leftism, instead, “begins with concern for marginalized persons, and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. ”
Traditionally, the old Left is rooted in universal claims (for human rights, opportunity, etcetera), pluralism, and the philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment. Postwar and postmodern Leftist thinkers tend to demonize the Enlightenment tradition as an expression of European superiority and hyper-rationalism: “Twentieth-century thinkers as different as Foucault, Heidegger, and Adorno were united in viewing what they called ‘Enlightenment reason’ not merely as a self-serving fraud but even more as a domineering, calculating, rapacious sort of monster committed to subjugating nature – and with it, indigenous peoples considered to be natural. On this picture, reason is merely instrument and expression of power.”
Neiman argues persuasively that this viewpoint is incorrect. In fact, Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot constantly interrogated their received ideologies and values, critiquing and undermining Euro-centric and Christian views that supported the colonialist and imperialist project. Of course, they didn’t always live up to their ideals.
She reminded me of my excitement when I first discovered Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, early Rousseau, Montesquieu and Diderot in college: I was shocked to encounter minds that were so alive and so free, speaking to me directly from across the centuries. (I admit, at the same time, I also enjoy Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of rationality in The Dialectics of Enlightenment). Neiman notes:
When contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they’re echoing a tradition that goes back to Montesquieu, who used fictional Persians to criticize European morés in ways he could not have safely done as a Frenchman writing in his own voice. Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters was followed by scores of other writings using the same device. Lahontan’s Dialogue with a Huron and Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage criticized the patriarchal sexual laws of Europe, which criminalized women who bore children out of wedlock, from the perspective of the more egalitarian Hurons and Tahitians. Voltaire’s sharpest attacks on Christianity were written in the voices of a Chinese emperor, and an indigenous South American priest.
Neiman looks at postcolonialist thinkers from the developing world, such as philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò, who see the value of the Enlightenment project, respecting its efforts to define universal principles and rights.
Berman is a progressive journalist who became the most prominent “liberal hawk” thought leader with the publication of Terror and Liberalism and its follow up, The Flight of the Intellectuals. In the wake of 9/11, Berman argued that the progressive/liberal West was underestimating the extreme danger posed by the virally spreading ideology of radical Islamic sects such as ISIS and the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organization founded by Islamic philosopher Hassan al-Banna in 1928. In Terror and Liberalism, Berman explored the ideas of Sayyib Qutb, an Egyptian thinker, executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, who influenced Al-Qaeada as well as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and similar movements.
In his books, Berman proposes that this radical Islamic fanaticism is the indigenous Middle Eastern version of other well-known 20th Century totalitarian movements, namely Fascism and Communism, and shares many tropes with them. All of these movements postulate an evil Empire or nemesis (for Fascists as well as Islamic radicals, Jews are often a main culprit, as well as modernism and liberalism, generally associated with the Jewish influence) that caused a “fall from grace” or a corruption. They promised an apocalyptic redemption once the new society arises, cleansed of old impurities. Instead, what they delivered, most reliably, was death:
Those several European movements announced many highly imaginative programs for human betterment, and those imaginative programs were always, in their full-scale versions, impractical—programs for the whole of society that could never be put into effect. But death was practical. Death was the only revolutionary achievement that could actually be delivered. The unity of mankind, the reign of purity and the eternal—those goals were out of reach, in any conventional or real-world respect. But unity, purity, and eternity were readily at hand, in the form of mass death.
The focus of Qutb’s corpus was Islamic Absolutism The basis of this Absolutism was, for Qutb, the overwhelming reality that only God or Allah in fact exists, everything else being not even a vague shadow of this ultimate, unquestionable truth. Berman writes:
The concept of totality, he thought, distinguished Islam from all other worldviews— Tawhid, or the oneness of God. … Every page of In the Shade of the Qur'an can be seen as a commentary on the single affirmation, “There is no God but Allah.” Every new theme and topic offered Qutb a fresh opportunity to demonstrate that nature, man, and man’s obligations come from a single source, which is God. And Islam is the acknowledgment of that one overwhelming reality.
This focus, in Islam, on the Absolute, rather than the relative or contingent pole, of divinity makes that religion, I suspect, particularly susceptible to terrorist fanatics and suicide bombers. Of course, other religions have their fair share of fanatics, but somehow, life is not seen in such utterly negated terms, with martyrdom via self-annihilation the most reliable shortcut to Paradise. Berman calls this fanatical wing of Islamic terrorism, with the ultimate purpose of bringing about a global theocracy, the Caliphate, a “pathological mass movement.” Indeed, it is eminently possible for an entire society or even a civilization to go insane.
That we do, indeed, confront a massive, perhaps insoluble problem on an ideological level was shown, once again, by the October 7 attacks on Israel undertaken by Hama.
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