Terror and Liberalism (Paperback)

"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. Her explanation, that loneliness has become an "everyday experience," seems grossly inadequate. 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? This was the payoff for all that scholarly zeal and industry?

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 are out of power. And so she did, in fact, miss something important.

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 Stalinist,s she never would 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 she has no excuse for missing the role that the Counter-enlightenment plays the writings of the Ba'ath founder, Michael Aflaq, and the Islamist founder, Sayyid Qutb.

So if Berman lacks some background, he does manage to get to the heart of a matter that deflected more scholarly minds. And he stands as the first to make this leap. 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. The insight that man had become alienated from his own nature, whether through the "false consciousness" of Marx or by our "deluded faith in the power of reason," makes virtually the same diagnosis as Qutb. So it's not really that surprising for Arendt to identify loneliness (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.

Liberalism did not evolve as a cure for the condition of man. It evolved as a cure for the tendency of mankind to become dogmatic. Hence it looks nothing like a cure for mankind's inherent ills. It doesn't regard mankind as "alienated" from himself. One side sees the human condition as tragically fragmented, and seeks a remedy in unity. The other sees the longing for a remedy as the problem, a compulsion to worry the patient to death.

Berman reflects this 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 main problem is that he really has no program for calamity. Berman is probably more clear about totalitarianism than liberalism, which may be why his great book ultimately reaches a sort of impasse.

Why is it the Americans who recognize the necessity? Why is the American faith that the sovereignty of others means security for themselves so exceptional? Why are the Americans so uniquely disinterested in perfecting mankind? Perhaps we need to be as canny as those Germans were, about communicating the antidote to their philosophies of "revolutionary nationalism and totalitarianism?"

Ultimately Berman gets it. 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 news.) Thus Chomsky's obsessive unwillingness to be impressed by 9/11, an attitude also affected by Michael Moore, and by Derrida and Habermas recently. And it's only this resistance to 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 such pretense for what it is. We are at last able to perceive clearly the continuity of the beast that replaced chattel slavery as the world's consummate evil, and is destined to one day join it on the ash heap. It is alarming. But not beyond us.

...

Berman also argues that the Left in America has as much at stake in the "War on Terror" as do those on the Right.

Paul Berman's historical research is excellent, following the path of the modern pan-Islamic movement to its roots with Sayyid Qutb (ku-tab) author of "In the Shade of the Qur'an," "Social Justice in Islam" and other works. Qutb attended the Colorado State College of Education in the late 1940's and earned a Masters Degree, but came away thoroughly disgusted with what he saw as "the barbarous West." He was especially disgusted by what the West hailed as "the emancipation of women" and "sexual liberation."

At the same time that pan-Islamacism was growing, pan-Arabism was coming into political prominence behind such figures as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Though the differences between the two camps were subtle - pan-Arabists wanted a return of the old Ottoman Empire, while pan-Islamacists envisioned a world under shariah (the legal code of Islam) - they were also volatile. Berman describes the differences between the two groups as akin to the differences between the Italian fascists under Mussolini who sought to rebuild the Roman Empire and the German Nazis who sought a return to the Roman Empire in a Germanic form. Indeed the Arab world sided with the Axis powers during World War II, which led to England and the U.S. setting up the state of Israel in what was then the Palestine territories.

In 1966 shortly after Colonel Nasser took power in Egypt, several attempts were made on his life. He blamed them on his alienating Qutb's group, the Islamic Brotherhood and had Sayyid Qutb hung in retribution. Still, despite their differences, the two factions have been bound by a hatred of Israel and the West that ignites their common passions.

After delving into the history of pan-Arabism and pan-Islam, Berman takes on what he sees as a misguided view among many Western Leftists like Noam Chomsky, who've rationalized terrorism as the only possible response to Western oppression by less technologically advanced nations. People like Ramsey Clark and Noam Chomsky have defined Islamic fundamentalist terrorism as an appropriate response by a smaller opponent to a bully, while Berman sees it as a cataclysmic struggle between two conflicting ideologies, one rooted in individual liberty, the separation of Church and State, a love of technology and women's suffrage and the other one diametrically opposed to all of these things on virtually every level.

"Terror and Liberalism" is an excellent book that not only gives the reader a broader understanding of the roots of fundamentalist Islam, but an insight into why so many on the American Left reflexively support any movement willing to take on the bully they see as America's "Military-Industrial Complex," and why that view is not only wrong-headed, but dangerous as well.

This is perhaps one of the most rewarding reading I've done lately. I don't know much about Islam and what causes Muslims to declare a jihad against Westerners. Then again, I don't know much about the history of the last fifty years or so. And this book has whetted my appetite to know more and how liberalism is related to the current events going on today, even with the Bush's administration. It is also a great way to learn more about the Islamist movement that is going on in the Middle Eastern countries as well as Arabic countries. It is an eye-opener for me and it does help me understand current events better.

This is one book that I will definitely pass onto my friends and family. I think everyone who is curious about world affairs and likes essay-type writing, will enjoy this book. It will provoke thought and conversation among your friends and family. It will help you see the world in a different light, even if you don't agree with the author's perspective. But he makes his arguments in a convincing way ~~ and the book is easy to read, very well-written and with thoughtful, concise reasoning behind every word.

7-15-04