Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism might very well be the first "great" book of the 21st Century, since it's probably the first book that really captures what the 20th Century was about, and what we have carried over into the 21st as unfinished business. But the book may not get the attention it deserves, because it isn't a very scholarly work. It manages to discuss totalitarianism without referencing Hannah Arendt even once, and it doesn't have so much as a minimal Index. What it has, instead, is a coherent thesis. Consider the following passage:
He [Albert Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and the nineteenth century and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. (p. 46)
This is an enormous insight, and to be frank it does not appear with such clarity in Arendt's work. Toward the end of her massive treatise, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she writes:
What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism derives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality. The "ice-cold reasoning" and the "mighty tentacle" of dialectics which "seizes you as in a vise" appears like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon. It is the inner coercion whose only content is the strict avoidance of contradictions that seems to confirm a man's identity outside all relationships with others. It fits him into the iron band of terror even when he is alone, and totalitarian domination tries never to leave him alone except in the extreme situation of solitary confinement. By destroying all space between men and pressing men against each other, even the productive potentialities of isolation are annihilated; by teaching and glorifying the logical reasoning of loneliness where man knows that he will be utterly lost if ever he lets go of the first premise from which the whole process is being started, even the slim chances that loneliness may be transformed into solitude and logic into thought are obliterated. If this practice is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth.
But this explanation seems grossly inadequate coming at the end of nearly 500 pages that recount the crimes of Nazism and Stalinism. Surely the notion that it's all a matter of loneliness appeals to a sense of profound irony, but couldn't we all just get a puppy? Even though, as I read this passage some 25 years ago, I was inclined to intone it with reverence it still rang a bit hollow. This was the payoff for all that scholarly zeal and industry? This? Somehow I didn't feel that she had quite "got it."
Moreover, Arendt never makes the connection between terror as an organizing principle for a 20th Century form of government, and terrorism as a strategy of totalitarian movements that happen to be out of power. And so she did, in fact, miss a big piece of the puzzle. While it is true that lonely people might be more likely to adopt an ideology of submission, it's a bit thin as an explanation for Auschwitz.
And of course even if Arendt had not completely missed the seeding of the Middle East with the totalitarian ideas of the Nazis and the Stalinists, she still would never have guessed that Islam itself could become the excuse for such a movement. She, herself, had been a product of the German Counter-enlightenment. Her mentor, Martin Heidegger, made a vain bid to become the philosopher of National Socialism, and would have succeeded had not the Nazis been too clever. So the common thread that runs through the writings of the Ba'ath founder, Michael Aflaq, and the Islamist founder, Sayyid Qutb, ought to have been well known to her, and yet she never seems to have perceived the role that this movement played in nearly all manifestations of totalitarianism.
So if Berman lacks some background, he yet manages to perceive a common thread that others missed. And he stands as the first to make this leap. Well, perhaps not the first because I haven't yet read Daniel Pipes. But even today people don't appear to see the connection between Jurgen Habermas' "Lifeworld vs. System World" typology, inherited from Husserl and Heidegger, and the philosophy of Qutb, which simply maps the same concepts into the religious framework of Islam. Like Arendt the philosophers argue that man has become alienated from his own nature, whether through the "false consciousness" of Karl Marx or by our "deluded faith in the power of reason," producing the "tyranny of technology over life." So it doesn't seem strange for Arendt to see totalitarianism as caused by the same sort of malady that Qutb frets over, and to identify loneliness or alienation as the culprit. Of course, it had to be.
There is not such a great distance, philosophically, between Qutb's "hideous schizophrenia" of modern life, and the nostalgic longing for the "Lebenswelt" that drives much of modern European philosophy. The real difference lies mostly in the object of submission, and a certain adolescent permissiveness in the modern European model.
But Liberalism did not evolve as a cure for the condition of mankind. It evolved as a cure for the tendency of mankind to become dogmatic. Hence it looks nothing like a cure for our deepest longings. It is not a way to perfect humanity. One side sees the human condition as tragically fragmented, and seeks a remedy in unity by merging with some transcendent principle or authority. The other sees the remedy as the problem, and seeks to balance the fragments into relatively stable spheres of influence. So ultimately any perspective that sees unity as inherently plural (and minimally "two") must be more or less liberal, while any perspective that can't tolerate the two-ness of unity is probably more or less anti-liberal. Totalitarian ideologies, for all their talk of dialectics, are rooted in a static view of nature and mankind. Liberalism allows that duality must be essential, and natural, and therefore not a source of existential consternation.
Berman reflects this simple insight in his critique of Noam Chomsky, whom he views as "the last of the 19th Century rationalists." But this analysis, though informative, doesn't quite capture the slipperiness of Chomsky, whose philosophy is ultimately counter-rational. While Chomsky does, in fact, tend to see the world in the simplistic terms of a "greed vs. freedom" dialectic, his real problem is that he simply has no response to calamity. To him it's a struggle between good and evil, but the evil is just everyday greed. And, of course, the greedy don't deserve a hearing. Liberalism allows for the fact that humans harbor conflicting impulses within the same individual at the same time. If there were no internal conflicts choice would be unproblematic, and life would be pretty bland.
Berman is probably more clear about totalitarianism than liberalism, which may be why his great book ultimately reaches a sort of impasse.
The whole of the Muslim world has been overwhelmed by German philosophies from long ago--the philosophies of revolutionary nationalism and totalitarianism, cannily translated into Muslim dialects. Let the Germans go door to door throughout the region, issuing a product recall.(p. 208)
But it's not clear that the Germans are even aware of the problem, let alone that they caused the trouble themselves. It isn't the Germans, but the Americans, who recognize the necessity. It's the American faith that the sovereignty of others means security for themselves that's exceptional. And it's their willingness to fight for that principle, that makes a future without either totalitarianism or terrorism even conceivable. And perhaps we need to be as canny as those Germans were, about communicating the antidote.
Ultimately the problem lies in the habit of wishful thinking that afflicts most of America's historical allies, and some of its own deluded clan. Without any capacity to confront calamity the natural tendency is to deny it. Pretend it doesn't exist, or is an exaggeration, and you need not change your worldview, or your mind. (But you may be obligated to hate the bearer of bad tidings.) Thus we find Chomsky's obsessive unwillingness to be impressed by 9/11, an attitude also affected by Michael Moore and even Derrida and Habermas, recently. It's a sort of false bravado that takes refuge in subtly deceptive hermeneutic constructions, or outright lies, and insists that the analysis of text is indistinguishable from the analysis of reality. And it's only this reluctance to lock the horns of the dilemma that represents the impasse. How could there be any problem that can't be resolved by a trick of the tongue, or the eye? Oh, I mean by revealing the tricks, of course. It was all just a trick of the eye that day in early September. Don't be alarmed.
But thanks to Berman's eloquence we are able to see beyond such pretense. We are at last able to perceive clearly the continuity of the monster that replaced chattel slavery as the world's consummate evil, and is destined to one day join it at the top of the ash heap. It is alarming. But not beyond us.
Posted by Demosophist at September 28, 2003 02:41 AM | TrackBackCome now, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky view the analysis of the world as text as supreme to the analysis of the world as reality? Habermas, the materialist, thinks this? Your collapse of the left, were it done to the right, would put Mussolini and Dick Cheney in a great struggle against the same imagined evil, but no one on the left makes these claims - they go for nuanced and valid arguments about what someone like Cheney's interest might be in Iraq.
You have some valid points, especially earlier ones about Chomsky's worldview, and a look into submission and alienation as contributing factors to terror may be valid. But your ideology blinds you in a far worse way than someone like Chomsky, who at least acknowledges that terror is carried out by people other than America; you suggest that terror is a purely Muslim phenomenon in this day and age.
That is pathetic, and amounts to racism.
Posted by: david at November 27, 2003 03:46 PMCome now, Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky view the analysis of the world as text as supreme to the analysis of the world as reality? Habermas, the materialist, thinks this? Your collapse of the left, were it done to the right, would put Mussolini and Dick Cheney in a great struggle against the same imagined evil, but no one on the left makes these claims - they go for nuanced and valid arguments about what someone like Cheney's interest might be in Iraq.
Oh I don't believe Moore even tinks about it. But the orientation came about as a result of the "interpretive turn" in philosophy. I'm pretty sure Chomsky views the text as seminal, although he probably goes back to pretext (signs) in the formation of language. I'm not sure what you're driving it. The interpretive turn was essential, but mixed with romanticism it was also deadly. I don't know what invidividuals think, of course. You'd have to ask them. But as a general rule you can map the left directly onto a Marxist, or Hegellian, nomencalture one for one.
You have some valid points, especially earlier ones about Chomsky's worldview, and a look into submission and alienation as contributing factors to terror may be valid. But your ideology blinds you in a far worse way than someone like Chomsky, who at least acknowledges that terror is carried out by people other than America; you suggest that terror is a purely Muslim phenomenon in this day and age.
I'm saying just the opposite, that terror is a method. Moreover, it's a method of totalitarian regimes, almost exclusively. And even more to the point, terrorism wasn't particulalary practise by Muslims until the 20th Century, so we can see that what we're really dealing with here isn't Islam, but a "flavor" of Totalitarianism that happens to be spiced with Islam. As for Chomsy, as far as he's concerned terrorism is only practiced by the United States and a few other capitalist western powers.
That is pathetic, and amounts to racism.
Oh BS. And you know it. It's an analysis of the continuity of totalitarianism, and has nothing to do with race. It's a "thought virus." What was the racial difference between the Athenians and the Spartans, for heaven sake?
Posted by: Scott (to David) at November 27, 2003 04:21 PMFirst I would like to say that I think your analysis is relevant and eventhough I do not admire Berman I think that his views on the subject are far from superfical. Yet all of this lacks some rigour.
In "The Rebel" (L'homme revolte) Camus,
perhaps wrongly, insists on the fact that this modern impulse to rebel is the intellectual monopoly of the West (he makes a distiction between "la revolte methaphysique" -to rebel despit not against... this has his concept of "l'Absurde" as a prelude- and ancient rebels -spartacus...).
I say wrongly because there are many premices described by Camus that are present in Middle Eastern thought : see Hafiz from whom Goethe borrowed extensivly, Omar alKhayyam, and Abu Nawwas, all poets, and all could be fit into one of Camus (non-exhaustive) categories.
One might think that this adds relevance to Berman's argument (Eventhough we could have done without German thought spreading -which it hasn't- in the Middle East) since the same modern impulse should lead to the same ideal of submission.
I think instead that both analysis share the same natural leaning to "europeomorphism". The East for Camus does not exist (9/11 proved the contrary) or is not relevant because European thought is exhaustive and synthetic. For Berman it exists but it is simply a deformed projection
of the West. This is best illustrated by Paul Berman's table of correspondance (I display it almost as is for Berman's article):
Marx -> Qutb
The Party -> The Brotherhood
Capitalism -> Liberalism
Baathism -> National Socialism
etc...
This is all a legitmate effort to understand fondamentalist Islam by projecting it into a more familiar universe but cannot be taken seriously.
I must say that your assumption about German thought corrupting the arab world and the spread of american liberalism as a recommended cure made me smile. Thought of course does not drive history, it merely testifies for us.
Posted by: Hicham Alhasan at January 1, 2004 04:33 PMFirst I would like to say that I think your analysis is relevant and eventhough I do not admire Berman I think that his views on the subject are far from superfical. Yet all of this lacks some rigour.
In "The Rebel" (L'homme revolte) Camus,
perhaps wrongly, insists on the fact that this modern impulse to rebel is the intellectual monopoly of the West (he makes a distiction between "la revolte methaphysique" -to rebel despit not against... this has his concept of "l'Absurde" as a prelude- and ancient rebels -spartacus...).
I say wrongly because there are many premices described by Camus that are present in Middle Eastern thought : see Hafiz from whom Goethe borrowed extensivly, Omar alKhayyam, and Abu Nawwas, all poets, and all could be fit into one of Camus (non-exhaustive) categories.
One might think that this adds relevance to Berman's argument (Eventhough we could have done without German thought spreading -which it hasn't- in the Middle East) since the same modern impulse should lead to the same ideal of submission.
I think instead that both analysis share the same natural leaning to "europeomorphism". The East for Camus does not exist (9/11 proved the contrary) or is not relevant because European thought is exhaustive and synthetic. For Berman it exists but it is simply a deformed projection
of the West. This is best illustrated by Paul Berman's table of correspondance (I display it almost as is for Berman's article):
Marx -> Qutb
The Party -> The Brotherhood
Capitalism -> Liberalism
Baathism -> National Socialism
etc...
This is all a legitmate effort to understand fondamentalist Islam by projecting it into a more familiar universe but cannot be taken seriously.
I must say that your assumption about German thought corrupting the arab world and the spread of american liberalism as a recommended cure made me smile. Thought of course does not drive history, it merely testifies for us.
Posted by: Hicham Alhasan at January 1, 2004 04:33 PMThis is all a legitmate effort to understand fondamentalist Islam by projecting it into a more familiar universe but cannot be taken seriously.
I don't think that's what Berman is doing at all. I think he's saying that Islamism and "fundamentalist Islam" are not the same. I don't think he sees the latter as necessarily a threat. Fundamentalism is problematic, but it's generally manageable. The emergence of a new form of totalitarianism is something else again. And what is dangerous is the way the Islamic side of the ideology borrows from the flawed ideas of the counter-enlightenment.
And just to be clear, it is tracked by Weber's conception of "legitimation," which has to do with the role of belief, not merely "ideas." In one sense, I suppose, predestination is an idea... but it's the belief in predestination that legitimated the acquisition of wealth and that helped drive the industrial economy in the US. People always had a desire for wealth, but Calvinism made it a virtue. From there on, it ran downhill.
I'm pretty sure that we can't map Islam onto any set of western beliefs. It's like a person with eleven toes. There ought to be ten, but no matter how many times you recount, you keep coming up with eleven. The concern, however, is that concepts from the counter-enlightenment have been grafted into Islamic thought in the 20th Century, and have "legitimated" a form of behavior that was extraordinarily rare in the past: suicide killing, or martyrdom killing (especially of innocents and noncombatants). You can see the legitimation of this and similar practices everywhere you see totalitarianism. It's one of the hallmarks.
Although one may not be able to map Islam onto a set of Western beliefs, it may well be possible to map Islamism (the ideology) with much greater success. And it wouldn't be a bad thing to drive a wedge between those apostacies, and "fundamentalism." No westerner would have the "legitimacy" to do it, anyway. Perhaps it's enough to point out the discrepancy, and observe the fact that it does not derive from Islam.
Posted by: Scott (to Hicham) at January 2, 2004 02:22 AMDerrida on the contrary mocks the left (I don't know if he would put it that way)
``What appears to me unaceptable in the ``strategy''
(in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric, discourse, and so
on) of the ``bin Laden effect'' is not only the cruelty, the disregard for
human life, the disrespect for the law, for women, the use of what is worst
in technocapitalist modernity for the purposes of religious fanaticism.
No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse _open
onto no future and, in my view, have no future_. If we are to put any faith
in the perfectibility of public space and of the world juridico-political
scene, of the ``world'' itself, then there is, it seems to me, _nothing good_
to be hoped for from that quarter. What is being proposed, at least implicitly,
is that all captialist and modern technoscientific forces be put
in the service of an interpretation, itself dogmatic, of the Islamic
revelation of the One. Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized
in even the nontheological form of sovereignty (...), none of this seems
to have any place whatsoever in the discourse ``bin Laden.'' That is why,
in this unleashing of violence without name, if I had to take one of
the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well I would. Despite
my very strong reservations about the American, indeed European, political
posture, about the ``international terrorist'' coalition, despite
all the de facto betrayals, all the failures to live up to democracy,
international law, and the very international institutions that the states of
this ``coalition'' themselves founded and supported up to a certain point,
I would take the side of the camp that, in principle, by right of law,
leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in the name of the ``political,''
democracy, international law, international institutions, and so forth.
Even if this ``in the name of'' is still merely an assertion and a purely
verbal committment. Even in its most cynical mode, such an assertion
still lets resonate within it an invincible promise. I don't hear any
such promise coming from ``bin Laden,'' at least not one in this world.''
``Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides'' _Philosophy in a Time of Terror_ p.1
Posted by: Ron Hardin at January 4, 2004 12:56 PMThat posted as p.1 but should be p.113
extra line in case it loses the last two characters.
Posted by: Ron Hardin at January 4, 2004 12:58 PMRon:
Thanks. I'm never sure where to put Derrida on the political spectrum, frankly. Lipset said that although he hasn't the slightest notion what Derrida is talking about most of the time, he recognizes that there's a Jewish tradition that regards the interpretation of scripture as holier than the scripture itself. But it has never been very clear to me whether Derrida has the slightest pretensions to spirituality. Yes he's very clever and playing with opposition, which can even be a useful endeavor sometimes. And he is often more responisble than those who seem to have adopted his, what, approach? (He refuses to call it a method.)
I guess it makes sense he'd mock the left, since he mocks everyone. But this criticism has a bit more meat on it. Thanks for the cite. Very interesting.
Posted by: Scott (to Ron) at January 4, 2004 07:01 PMBs! Bs! Bs! Berman is a man unable of intellectual honesty, ready to concoct whatever to sell and to look different and intriguing. More than an intelligent man, he sound smart; more than a serious student he talks like a skillfull and subtle propaganda man. Under the stole suite of a liberal, he is basically a dangerous example of a relatively well-disguised arch-reactionary.
Posted by: nicola at March 29, 2004 10:31 PMUnder the stole suite of a liberal, he is basically a dangerous example of a relatively well-disguised arch-reactionary. (sic)
Just how is it "reactionary," as opposed to progressive, to view the Islamist terrorists as a totalitarian movement, unless you feel you have some sort of common cause with them?
From the Belmont Club:
The possible electoral defeat of President Bush by John Kerry raises the question of whether the Global War on Terror ultimately requires a war on the Left. That is to say whether a political defeat of the Left is a prerequisite for stamping out worldwide terrorism. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many in the Left, at least, believes that the GWOT is a war on them. America, not Osama Bin Laden is the putative enemy, and their fire is directed accordingly. Conversely, many conservatives are conditioned by the sight of a de facto alliance between the Left and Islamism to think that both parties are on the same side of the fence.
And this (hat tip Armed Liberal):
"only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy [the United States and its allies]" -- Carlos "The Jackal"Posted by: Scott (to nicola) at March 30, 2004 12:40 PM
Nicola,
Beautiful comment.
Scott,
For more reasons why Berman is wrong (and therefore I must say you are wrong too unfortunately) please read this article. I like it a lot.
Anatol Lieven, "Liberal Hawk Down"
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041025&c=2&s=lieven
Posted by: Abu Noor al-Irlandee at October 27, 2004 10:18 AMorlistat
neuroleptic
temazepam
hydroxyzine
phenylbutazone