Terror and Liberalism

by Paul Berman

Several people recommended this book, but it took a while for my hold at the library to come through. It was worth the wait.

Before I address the book and its arguments in detail, let me recommend The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer. In it he details the evolution (decay) of modern philosophy and its effect on our culture. His examples are a bit dated but the intervening years have brought even more dramatic illustrations, and his description of trends is even more apt now than it was then. Schaeffer's analysis of the West and Qutb's both look to a religious failure as the core of the decline they percieve in the West, but their interpretations and prescriptions are very different.

OK, why bring up Schaeffer and Qutb when talking about a book by Berman? Because Berman was able to lay hands on English translations of several of the volumes of In the Shade of the Qur'an, and part of his book explains what he found in Qutb--and I think that Schaeffer answers Qutb.

In a nutshell, Berman sees the great struggles of the 20'th century and the present day as mostly coming from a conflict between classical liberalism and the totalitarian cult of death as expressed in such various forms as Stalinism, Nazism, Phalangists, and Qutbists--for he discerns its influence on the nominally pure Muslim Qutb as well. He makes a pretty good case for this too.

Berman's credentials and Bush

He begins by asserting his credentials, describing an editorial he wrote for the Times in opposition to Nixon's "realpolitik" support of the 1991 Gulf War, in which Paul also supported the war, but did so on anti-facist grounds.

I didn't give a damn about the politics of oil, per se, nor about "vital interests"--though I'm sure it was naive of me not to take those things a little more seriously. I didn't spend my days fretting over America's ability to scare its enemies. The very word "credibility" gave me the willies. ... "Credibility" in Nixon's day brought nothing but calamity to America and Indochina alike.

Still, I did worry about Saddam Hussein. I thought that, in Saddam and his government, we were facing a totalitarian menace--something akin to facism. Saddam's regime was aggressive, dynamic, irrational, paranoid, murderous, grandiose, and demagogic. ... He had already fought a horrendous war with Iran, which features poison gas attacks by his own army. ... Saddam was terrifying. Here was credibility.

...

The entire situation had the look of Europe in 1939, updated to the post-Cold War Middle East.

Rebellion, obedience, and death

Berman sketches the history of rebellion in modern thought (frequently quoting Camus), and the eventual mixture of rebellion and a sinister obsession with murder and suicide. "Murder as rebellion, suicide as honor, murder and suicide as the joint emblem of human freedom--those were Hugo's themes" (in Hernani, a play about a Romantic hero conspiring to kill the king). Then Baudelaire goes a step further, with a fascination for murder and suicide not as side effects of an honest rebellion against tyranny, but "for the sake of crime." As Schaeffer pointed out, the change starts with the philosophers, then moves into the artists, and then into the general public. In Russia revolutionaries started "a fad for political assassination," at first with care to avoid unintended casualties and an eagerness to accept the consequences (dying for the cause, accepting punishment for the crime). Dying for the cause showed your commitment, and your nobility, and after a while the link (the cause) seemed to shrink, and dying and nobility were connected imaginatively (as in the Sorrows of Young Werther). It didn't take long before the anarchist revolutionaries moved on to things like the Wall Street bombing and "aesthetic act of terror--'aesthetic' was his {Galleani's} own word--in which the beauty or artistic quality consisted in murdering anonymously. Here the nihilism was unlimited, and the transgression total."

World War I was notoriously a tremendous shock to the West, utterly discrediting the popular notion of inevitable progress.

And now the deepest disaster of all got underway. The old Romantic literary fashion for muder and suicide, the dandy's fondness for the irrational and the irresponsible, the little nihilist groups of left-wing desperadoes with their dreams of poetic death--those several tendencies and impulses of the nineteenth century came together with a few additional tendencies that Camus had never bothered to discuss: the dark philosophies of the extreme right in Germany and other countries, with their violent loathing of progress and liberalism; the anti-Semites of Vienna with their mad proposal to cleanse Vienna of its most brilliant aspects; the demented scientists of racial theory. All this which had once been small and marginal, began to metastasize and spread. ... And the movements of a "new type" devoted themselves to a single, all-consuming obsession, which was a hatred of liberal civilization.

Lenin was the first, and "History with a capitol H was innocent. When Lenin acted, he acted in History's name. He ordered killing en masse; and everything he did was, by definition, as innocent as the lamb." The Facists seemed their opposites; dreaming of the local triumph rather than the universal, nationalists, champions of irrationality ... but Mussolini had been an ultra-leftist to start with.

By a strange change the urge to rebel had been channeled into an urge to submit --as you rebel against the old ways you must gather together with like-minded rebels and follow the example of the most strongminded and rebellious. And so it follows that there must be mass chants, and a uniform (red or black or brown shirts as you please), and an unquestionable theory of mankind.

And here Berman brings in Cohn as the discoverer of the ur-myth of the 20'th century; a "people of God" under attack from the wealthy and corrupt world without and treachery within, but sure to win in the end thanks to the power of the "man on horseback" with the power of life and death in the great battle of Armageddon. (This isn't quite the way I read Revelation, but ...)

Moving to the Mideast

In every country and sometimes in every province the Facist or facist-like movement wanted to show how parochial were its instincts, how deeply rooted in local traditions, how unique and idiosyncratic. A Facist inspiration from Europe that had spread to other places would make every effort not to look like a Facist inspiration that had spread from Europe

Nevertheless the Nazi and Facist roots of the Baathist parties are now well known. The Muslim Brotherhood formed at about the same time, and "The Baathi and the Islamists were two branches of a single impulse, which was Muslim totalitarianism--the Muslim variation on the European idea." The intellectual light of the Muslim Brotherhood was Qutb.

Qutb

Qutb saw that modern culture had reached a crisis, with men alienated from their own nature and searching desperately in alcohol, pointless sex, dark and desperate "doctrines such as existentialism and its disastrous analogous ideologies." In the most materially affluent societies people lead miserable and purposeless lives. Any objections so far? I thought not.

Qutb saw three forces acting to destroy the secular society: Maldistribution of resources (with the usual socialist analysis); "weakening of moral values which leads, sooner or later, to the destruction of moral prosperity" (and eventually physical prosperity, for {though it isn't explicated here} the value of money is trust; and the less you can trust the more lawyers you need and the less you can risk--drying up the investment culture that drives capitalism); and a pervasive fear which hurts the mind and body. That "maldistribution of resources" is necessarily a dangerous thing is debateable--people don't seem to mind so much if they believe they can have a chance at the goodies, but it is obviously bad when people resent it. The rest of the forces he describes pretty well.

His analysis of why the West decayed says the reason was religious. Judaism (which as a Muslim he regarded as coming from a genuine revelation) called for the worship of God and not idols, and demanded that the Jews obey not just a ritual code for worship but also a moral code and a civil code as well. He held that they had degenerated into ritual-only, and Jesus was sent to reform the code and call everyone to a higher spiritual dimension of obedience. Many gentiles followed Jesus, but the Jews largely rejected him, and in the resulting disputes the Gospels were garbled and Paul, in battling the Jews, rejected the civil aspects of Jesus' message and drew instead from Greek philosophy. Thus Christianity began crippled, with authority only over the spiritual and not over the civil part of life. Then Constantine hypocritically "converted" the empire, and the horrified church invented asceticism and monasticism in reaction to the lawless lifestyles of the powerful--denying the nature of man and further crippling Christianity with a schizophrenic split between spirit and body, until the arrival of Mohammed.

There are several problems with this analysis: the synoptic Gospels show no signs of the controversies of the early church (which you'd expect if they were written later or corrupted to suit the times); Paul doesn't actually draw that much from the Greeks, though he does explain things to gentiles using their own language; Qutb's thumbnail description of monasticism doesn't agree very well with the history I read; and I gather he relies on the Qur'an rather than (much older!) histories to discover what Christians believe--the Qur'an is known to be in error on several points (such as what Christians say the Trinity is). In brief, Qutb is wrong.

Schaeffer much more accurately traced the origins of the West's malaise to the Renaissance: which is much more plausible since the philosophies of the West changed direction then.

Returning to Qutb, he held that the Muslim world lost its grip on Muslim principles sometime between the third and fifth Caliphate, even though the empire still spread. Berman doesn't describe what this loss of grip was, but I surmise from Qutb's bete noir that it had to do with the rise of civil power not completely united with spiritual power. The discovery of the inductive method (scientific method) in Muslim Andalusia (shades of the Soviet "we invented it first"ers!) spread to Europe where it caught on and caused the boom in Western power. That power spreading around the world carried the schizophrenic Western split between spirit and the physical world (what Schaeffer calls the "Line of Despair") with it to infect every culture, including the Muslim.

"But, though Qutb was evidently following some main trends of twentieth-centure social criticism and philosophy, he made a great show of referring to European or American thinkers as rarely as possible, except perjoratively or polemically." He rejected the racial parties (like Nazis) and warned against Arab chauvisism. "Marxism itself struck him as the ne plus ultra of every ghastly trait that had developed in Europe," reducing man to an economic animal with neither a human nature or a divine spirit. But his strongest attacks were against liberalism and the notion of the separation of church and state: "such a society denies or suspends Gods sovereignty on earth." He asserted that the foundation of such a society is that the human heart is the final arbiter of right and wrong, when plainly God is. Or is it founded in the more pragmatic worry that while God never misleads, His nominal representatives often do?

He also warned against the Jews.

He explicitly warned against emphasizing the Koran's tolerant expressions of forgiveness of the Jews. Nor did he want to look at the story of Medina as merely an event from the seventh century. In Qutb's interpretation, the sins of the Medina Jews in the seventh centure have a cosmic, eternal quality--rather like the sins and crimes of the Jerusalem Jews in some of the traditional interpretations of the Gospels. In his commentary on Surah 2, Qutb speculated that, during their time of slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt, oppression may have corrupted the Jews, with permanent effects on all Jews everywhere.

He held that the slogan "Culture is the human heritage" was merely a trick by Jews intended to eliminate all limits so that Jews could penetrate the body politic of the whole world to perpetrate their evil designs, chief among which was requiring usury. "Qutb's anti-Semitism was Islamic; but it was not just Islamic. It was classic."

Qutb has been accused of being prudish, but this is in the eye of the beholder. His actual argument was that the appearance of freedom in the liberal cultures really meant that women were "free" to be cogs in an economic machine rather than trainers of human beings, because the culture values money more than people. A society where God's values don't translate into the culture results in people being pressured to ruin themselves and others. He said the liberal society values "love" more than fidelity: the transient feelings of the human heart trump marriage vows. Accurate enough... And this shows ignorance of human nature and God's laws.

Qutb worried that the liberal doctrines about religion would infect the Muslim minds, and destroy Islam. "True Islam would become partial Islam, and partial Islam does not exist." Ataturk had abolished the caliphate, and showed that Islam was vulnerable. So what needed to be done?

First, sound the warning of the assult on the mind from without and the assult on Islam from within, from the false Muslims polluted by evil ideas.

Islam's champions seemed to be few, but numbers were nothing to worry about. ... The vanguard had to form a kind of Islamic counterculture--a mini-society where true Muslims could be themselves. ... The vanguard had to recognize that the false Muslims or "hypocrites" who ruled the Muslim world were no Muslims at all. ... The goal, in short, was to resurrect the pristine Islamic society, from before the period of decline--to resurrect the original model in such a way that everyone could see its success.

The Islamic society means sharia, which Qutb painted in rosy colors: but somehow the "freedom of conscience" he advertised seems less than appealing when the alternative is to be a dhimmi. Jihad had rules (don't kill women and children), but in the end jihad would win the world.

Qutb's doctrine was wonderfully original and deeply Muslim, looked at from one angle; and from another angle, merely one more version of the European totalitarian idea. And if his doctrine was recognizable, its consequences were certainly going to be predictable. Qutb's vanguard, if such a vanguard ever mobilized itself, was going to inaugurate a rebellion--this time, a rebellion in the name of Islam, against the liberal values of the West. (Totalitarian movements always, but always, rise up in rebellion against the liberal values of the West. That is their purpose.) And the rebellion was bound to end in a cult of death.

And so it proved in Afghanistan. To ensure a perfect society, every detail of sharia needs to be inforced, and sharia covers every detail of life--including which direction to urinate.

Back to history

Because the definitions of some of the terms like jihad were a little vague, the Islamists had some flexibility in portraying themselves and taking advantage of situations. Their anti-communism made them more acceptable in Washington, and in Israel (Arafat's first terrorist groups were funded from Moscow), and even in Paris. The two critical events in the rise of Islamism were the rise of Khomeini and the success of the Afghan fighters. Khomeini borrowed a lot of leftist rhetoric, but his revolution was essentially Islamic, and inspired a death cult of staggering proportions: thousands of men eagerly marching out to step on land mines to prepare the way for the regular forces to follow. Saddam's cruelty was also staggering, and strangely popular in the "Arab street." But Khomeini's influence was greater around the world, and one of those influences was the death cult.

Berman looks at Sudan as a "remarkable example of Islamism in practice" in its jihad against the Christian and pagan south, with over a million dead and huge numbers of slaves. This is, unfortunately, not remarkable, but was in fact standard operating procedure for Islam for a thousand years. Africa has always been a source of slaves for Arab Muslims. The Palestinians are the more horrible example: They began initially by more or less fighting the army, but with the second intifada they celebrate mass murder and suicide. More and more radical Islamists groups coalesced, with Al Qaeda being only the most famous. Sheikh Rahman, Abdullah Azzam, Ali Benhadj and many more; all calling for suicide warriors and blood.

The "pathological political movements" seem incomprehensible to the "good-hearted" people who believe in "universal rationality." To deny these movements is to ignore the entire 20'th century. And yet people did, and still do. Berman tells the grim story of the anti-war Socialist of France during World War II, who held so true to their anti-war instincts and distrust of the arms manufacturures that they ended up supporting Petain and his program "for strength and virility, a Europe ruled by a single party state instead of the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves." They ended as facists, though a chain of small adjustments.

Berman calls the 2000 offer to the Palestinians generous, and describes the triumph of Hamas that rejected it. Even uglier than the suicide murders was the reaction around the world: people around the world, from Bove in France to the academic chairs in the US to Latin America, were attracted to the terrorism, and supported it! Hamas did not want a Palestinian state, they wanted murder and death--and the violence attracted support. (When Israel cracked down, and the death rate went down, the support waned.) The measure of their violence was taken to be the measure of the injustice done to them, so the injustice done to the Palestinians is now taken to be unprecedentedly evil (despite the facts of the case). Around the world men believe that Israel is worse than the Nazis, and facts are ignored or twisted to fit this immutable doctrine.

Berman then goes on to ream out Chomsky, whose philosophy had no place for pathological mass movements or evil outside the US. Faced with the facts, Chomsky proceeded to use his considerable skills in the service of denial and lies. (I remember one of his peices written back around 72 or 73. It seemed so plausible, until you started asking questions.) Yet the self-deception wasn't limited to Chomsky. "Everyone, unto the chiefest of Indian chiefs, turned out to be a simpleminded rationalist, expecting the world to act in sensible ways, without mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness. In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky."

Chapter 7 (Mental War) critiques the "end of history" and asks why liberal democracy so often seems to be thought of as a "oh well, let's try this" option, rather than the revolutionary approach it is. He cites Lincoln who fought a war to keep a liberal democracy intact, and notes that the Gettysburg address was in a cemetery--not to celebrate death as good, but to celebrate the devotion of the dead and the goal. Berman has little sympathy for the countries that mouth lofty sentiments and do nothing--like Sweden and Switzerland in World War II, or Mitterand about Sarajevo.

Europe was a society that could not defend the weak, or its own religious minorities, or its own principles. Even in the 1990's The Balkan Wars were Europe's Lincolnian "test;" and Europe could not produce its Lincolns. Still, the French did make their move, and the Brittish soldiers were exceptionally brave, and the Europeans demonstrated an ability to play at least a lively supporting role, so long as the United States played the lead. ... Human rights, humanitarianism, international accords and treaties, the wispy thing called "Europe"-- this language was not entirely hopeless. The ambigous terms could take on specific meanings, if someone insisted.

Then came September 11, and a wave of support for the US--at least nominal support (other sources suggest French popular support was less than profound). Berman believes Bush injured the cause by speaking getting bin Laden "dead or alive;" invoking images of an irresponsible cowboy in some and failing to get across the wide scope of the developing war in others. "And, as the fog of peace rolled away, a huge panorama, the reality of our present moment, appeared across the breadth of Afghanistan. It was the landscape of modern totalitarianism, arrayed in layered seams, perceptible at last." I like the "fog of peace" phrase! And the war went well.

But all is not well

Berman judges that Bush has done a pretty fair job of managing the war so far, but complains that he

failed to take up the larger war of ideas. He did talk about such a war. He announced a war of ideas in his first, brave, spirited speech to Congress, a little more than a week after 9/11. But he himself had no ability of language to articulate the ideas of the modern age, and neither did any of the people around him.

Instead he launched a program to produce Hollywood TV ads about the virtues of America. ... That was laughable--mere ads to counter the most scholarly of doctrines, the most learned of religious authorities, the greatest of modern authors.

He says Bush spoke and even acted on the principles of overthrowing totalitarianism and bringing the benefits of a free society, but had hesitations and cautions that undercut his actions. He dislikes the "old Nixon hands," and thought the "preemptive war doctrine" was irrelevant and only caused trouble. Berman likes the strong emphasis on feminism in the Afghanistan war, as hitting the Jihadists in a weak spot, but he thinks Bush hypocritical for trying "to roll back the legal right to abortion" (as though that were a bad thing). Bush, he says, does not speak the modern "language of liberal democracy" (treaties, international law, and human rights), which make his pronouncements unwelcome even among those who actually agree with him in Europe.

Berman faults Bush for failing to talk about the need for reform in Saudi Arabia. Here I think Berman has brain freeze. We want to reform or destroy the House of Saud, but we can't say so out loud without stirring up a hurricane.

He faults Bush for failing to ask Americans to sacrifice for the war. My mother remembers World War II, and wonders the same thing. I agree, but I wonder if Americans are willing to sacrifice for a low level war that looks like it will last a good 20 years or so--or willing to sacrifice much at all for anything. (We have a brave volunteer Army/Navy/AirForce, but are they representative?) And I'm certain that if we start talking now about our long term aims we will have loyal Muslims around the world fighting us in "defence of the holy places;" no matter that we don't have any plans to capture them.

OK, are we agreed that Berman isn't a Bush partisan?

Philosophy matters

This following quote makes me think of Chesterton who said that the philosopher was the really practical man.

Foreign policy "realism," by my lights, is a specific doctrine, which is why I put it in quotation marks. It is a doctrine from the nineteenth centure. It is a kind of materialism, even if most of its adherents would swear otherwise. Karl Marx, the king of materialists in the field of politics, figured that world history was driven by a single tangible force, namely, the system of economic production. Hippolyte Taine, the king of materialism in the field of literary criticism, figured that world literature was driven by three tangible forces, which he identified as race, time, and geography. In the same vein, the "realists" of today--in my caricature--figure that world politics is likewise driven by three tangible forces. These are wealth, power, and geography. All of the nineteenth century materialist doctrines give off a confident air of hard-bitten sophistication, and that is true of foreign policy "realism" as well. A "realist," like a Marxist, is someone who, no matter what bizarre events may take place around the world, will profess not to be surprised. This is "realisms"s weakness, though. Wisdom consists of the ability to be shocked.

I remember (though I can't recall the source! I think it was in one of "Adam Smith's" books) an economist's bewildered complaint that revolutionary Iran was not behaving in economically rational ways.

And a little warning, taken out of context...

A thousand commentators have pointed out, in retrospect, that Ronald Reagan's policy in Afghanistan back in the 1980s did lead to difficulties in later years, which is indisputable. In Afghanistan, just as in Saudi Arabia, America's beneficiaries turned out to be America's worst enemies. The world is full of back-stabbing sons-of-bitches: such is the lesson of modern history. (It is not a new lesson.)