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Finding our way back to the Enlightenment
By Thomas de Zengotita
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Common Ground
Finding our way back to the EnlightenmentBy Thomas de Zengotita |
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The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. —Martin Luther King
First, an anecdote. A friend of mine, very committed and active, a teacher of postcolonial history—he responded immediately and passionately to 9/11. He spoke out loud and clear, holding the United States’ support for corrupt and terrorizing regimes historically responsible for the conditions that produced the terrorists and shaped the views of the millions who applauded their action. He insisted on the difference be-tween explanation and justification, but the intensity of his convictions made him controversial—anonymous denunciations to the administration, that sort of thing—and I often found myself defending him.
Now, it happens that my friend had lost a brother to terrorism on Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, something I was quick to point out, since it testified to the authenticity of his convictions. And that’s essential, because people inclined to go with the flow want to believe that outspoken critics are striking self-important poses. One woman I talked to, who understood traumatic loss from personal experience, zeroed in on this piece of information: “That’s what I don’t get,” she said. “How could Mr. D. think the way he does after what happened to him? It doesn’t seem natural.”
“Natural.” That’s the word to watch.
Like most decent people living normal lives, this woman has no interest in social and economic history. No serious study informs her political opinions. For Ms. S. life is about job and family and friends, and if events in the world occasionally intrude, she takes account of them as best she can, gleaning impressions from media coverage, from chance encounters with persuasive people, from her personal feelings for public figures, and from the mood in her immediate milieu. That’s why she could put her finger so precisely on the reason most people don’t pay attention to radical critics. It just doesn’t seem natural to be so intensely involved with events in distant times and places at the expense of living the way most people do—invested in one’s daily surroundings. It seems almost perverse.
Inspired by some passing muse, my reply to her went something like this: “Mr. D.’s core belief is that every human life is as valuable as every other human life, that every mother’s loss, every brother’s loss, is as terrible as any other. He also believes that, beginning with the conquest of the world by invading Europeans, we have inflicted untold millions of such losses and have continued to do so up through the Vietnam War and, more indirectly, to this day ...”
Ms. S. nodded as I went along, but I could see she thought I was evading the issue until I added, “and I am sure that within a few days, maybe a few hours, of hearing the news about his brother, Mr. D. thought about all those millions of anonymous losses, thought about how each one was like this one, the one that happened to be his.”
At first she wanted to reject this whole notion, find some way to disbelieve it, call it crazy. But then she said, “I didn’t know politics could go that deep.”
The more I think about it, the more striking it is that politics does go that deep for some people. As a matter of life habit, they identify intensely with (and against) multitudes of represented strangers—reading about them constantly, hating these, supporting those
—while other people, most people, just don’t. Except during a crisis, when fear is upon them, when they rally around the obvious rallying point, swept along in whatever direction the powers that be want to go.
Political activists need to think about this. It isn’t right to assume that anyone who isn’t engaged is somehow impaired, corrupted by propaganda, distracted by sports and sitcoms. That bread-and-circuses stuff just doesn’t cut it anymore. Noam Chomsky’s 9/11 book got better shelf position at Barnes & Noble than Dr. Phil, and basic information about the rape of the planet has been endlessly disseminated. No, let’s face it. People aren’t interested. They don’t care. That’s the truth.
It’s also important to notice that political engagement is not a function of education—if only people knew this or that, then surely they would rise up and demand... etc., etc. Droves of highly educated citizens are indifferent to events unrelated to their immediate concerns, and many a news junkie ranting away on call-in radio never went past high school.
This is all quite mysterious, having to do with hidden confluences of circumstance and character. But this much is clear: deep political engagement is, if not unnatural, at least unusual. It takes something extra to influence people in this way, to cause them to extend their sense of self to encompass multitudes of strangers.
The most extensive such identification possible, the one I attributed to Mr. D., is an identification with all humanity and each human being. In its secular form, that identification is rooted in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism, ideals articulated by Locke and Rousseau and Kant, and brought to bear on historical events in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man—all familiar, if disputed, territory. However miserably partisans of these principles failed to fulfill them in practice, the principles themselves are unambiguous, and they all depend on that fundamental identification of each of us with all of us, with the sheer human being abstracted in the ideal from concrete contexts of history and tradition. That’s what ideals are. Abstract.
I am using “identity” precisely because it isn’t part of the Enlightenment vocabulary. I’ve imported it from now-dominant postmodern rhetorics (mul-ticulturalism, gender, sexual orientation) that derive from a critique of modernity in general and Enlightenment humanism in particular. We owe that critique to Adorno and Heidegger, Bataille, Benjamin, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Fish, Butler, Haraway, and Said, and to a generation of educators, inspired by them to shape the academy we know today. College graduates since the seventies have learned to associate progressive politics with a de-construction of concepts such as “natural rights,” “natural reason,” “human progress,” and even “human being.” No longer self-evident and universal, they were exposed as self-serving constructions of a dominant interest group (white bourgeois males), and politics was refigured as a struggle for access to power by other groups, by those whom moderates had exploited and marginalized. And all those Others were to propose constructions of their own—“discourses,” they were called, in deference to the French—and deploy them against the hegemony of Western, especially modern, ideas and institutional arrangements. Hence, the culture wars of the last thirty years. Familiar ground, again.
On this familiar ground, I want to argue that no matter how justifiable the emphasis on identity, no matter how empowering the turn to specifics of experience that go with being black or gay—that is, in spite of all the undeniable gains we owe to identity politics1 —I want to argue that progressive politics is still, as a matter of fact rather than of rhetoric, based on Enlightenment principles and has been all along. And I want to argue that progressives should acknowledge this basis explicitly and stand together on this foundation once more—or that’ll be all she wrote. Time is not on our side.
It has been possible, even convenient, to deny a foundation in Enlightenment humanism while fighting to establish African-American studies programs and rid the workplace of sexism. It has been easy to imagine that sheer Foucauldian power struggles were being won or lost by this or that constituency. But in the crisis we now face, with the lives of millions at stake, with the United States embracing an open policy of empire—in these desperate circumstances, such renderings seem suddenly parochial. It did and does matter that Jenny feels inhibited in math class because the boys are so aggressive, and it did and does matter that the CEO of AOL Time Warner is a black man. But so many people don’t have any schooling at all, and AOL Time Warner is part of the problem, not the solution. The level of engagement demanded of us now is much deeper than the issue of access within the overdeveloped world, and Enlightenment principles are the only conceivable anchor for the cause of human progress in general—the cause we must take up once again.
The foundational priority, the logical and emotional necessity, of these principles should be evident to any progressive willing to admit to some confusion since 9/11, to anyone feeling that it is not enough to nod when Scott Ritter talks, to mock John Ashcroft, and so on down the list of typical gestures—that is, to any progressive feeling the need for a coherent position in this new context and finding it difficult to fashion one. For we experience the foundational priority of Enlightenment principles, if we are sincerely trying to work out such a position, because these principles are what orient our judgments before we make them.
Before you are informed, before you know what weapons Iraq actually has,before you read up on Pashtun history—what is your attitude? As you begin to educate yourself, before you have made up your mind, as you look into the histories and commitments of the parties, what guides your inquiry, especially when your customary prejudices don’t apply neatly—when, for example, your multicultural impulses and your feminist commitments diverge? What are you looking for when you really have to think and decide, rather than just hit the replay button on your polemic deck?
Doesn’t it work this way? One may not know what distinguishes Sunni from Shi’ite at first, but the inclination to progressive politics comes down to one’s willingness to find out. But more than that. In the end, when deciding what position to take, you are also prepared to judge those differences according to—let’s call it the degree of their humane commitments. That’s the criterion. When the big chips are down, identity considerations yield to humanist principles, because, as an articulated value, the acceptance of difference depends upon them, logically, emotionally, and historically.
You don’t need a philosophical argument to “prove” that humanist2 principles are real if they are actually at work in you.
And this all holds for diversity practices closer to home as well. When we acknowledge the Other as truly other, it can seem as if we leave the abstract Enlightenment equation of the sheer human being behind. But if we also insist upon access to power for others, it turns out that we have only postponed our dependence on that equation. With the emphasis on groups we added an intervening layer, a very potent layer of concrete signs—race, sex, idiom—and that layer can obscure the underlying, axiomatic conviction, but it still holds: all else being equal, every human life is, by nature— that is, simply by virtue of being human—equal in value to every other and therefore entitled to whatever benefits or protections are at issue in the struggle for access.3
Everything hangs on the “therefore,” on whether or not it actually operates this way in our political thinking. If it does, then we have found what we need—the basis for a coherent ideology that promises unity for progressives at this critical hour.
But isn’t that just what postmodern theory, in all its variety, taught us—that all else is never equal? That nobody actually exists outside a context, outside history? That the Enlightenment axiom, the sheer human being, is a figment, a reduction of the socially constructed settings in which real people always already live? That this abstraction is, at best, a projection of modern Western ideas onto other ways of life? Or, at worst, an expression of an imperial mind-set, a God’s-eye view of nature and humanity that may carry connotations of justice but actually serves to rationalize Western domination of the world? So, surely, we can and must do without it? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No.
How could the postmodern critique get it right on all but the last question? By misunderstanding the nature of modern abstractions—especially those associated with nature (natural law, state of nature, etc.), to whose authority the Enlightenment appealed for leverage out of Europe’s Middle Ages. The reasons for this misunderstanding are complex, but it comes down to this: you don’t have to believe in an abstract ideal the way you believe in the chair under your butt in order to believe in that ideal. Ideals are real in a different way from the way chairs are real, and furthermore, in the case of Enlightenment ideals, they are universally real. That is, every human being, consulting what early moderns liked to call “natural reason,” would come up with something like those ideals, given the opportunity. “Natural reason” just means what an unbiased person would hold to be the case, where “unbiased” means free of historical conditions and local attachments.
Now, the postmodern critique of such ideals rests on the undeniable fact that there is no such person. Pretty devastating at first glance. But even Enlightenment thinkers (contrary to stereotype) understood this. Natural reason was a possibility—hence, the “would.” Possibility is the mode of existence appropriate to an ideal. Did they also tend to reify? That is, to believe that God built natural reason into us and ordained natural laws for this reason to access? Did they sometimes imagine that humanity had fallen away from an historical state in which those laws actually held sway? They did a lot of that, yes—but you don’t have to.4 You can just say, Okay, people are and always have been thrown into concrete circumstances that determine their evaluations and attachments; people are and always have been shaped by linguistic and cultural structures, etc. And then you can say that it would be a good thing if everyone would try to get over that. It would be a good thing if people got past the relatively superficial differences between them, put them in perspective, and came together on common ground—of which there is a lot, by the way—this common ground being what matters most in the end. Even if it is an abstraction.
It’s as simple as that, actually.
Put it this way: If your concrete gayness is sufficient to propel your identi-ficational attachment to millions of gay people you don’t know, isn’t that an abstraction, too? And likewise for women, ethnicities, etc. Compared with the Enlightenment abstraction of universal humanism, the abstractions of identity politics are middle-range, it’s true, and it’s very important. It means they are packed with vivid specifics that bind people together, especially in the context of oppression or marginalization. In such contexts, race and sexuality and the life experiences they implicate can turn an out-group into an in-group overnight and motivate collective action with a force that also has to be called natural—in some sense, in some pre- or post-Enlightenment sense.
There was a moment for me, it became iconic, it was at some political conference, years ago. A black woman, a commanding presence, rose to declare by way of closing down the discussion, in the tone of one whose patience is exhausted, that she had tried to read Marx once and couldn’t understand what all that verbiage meant—but she knew damn well what being black meant.
A burst of heartfelt applause. It went on and on.
I’ve been haunted by that moment ever since.
The quasi-erotic power of tangible signs of identity and the mores that accompany them (the ways of gayness) explains the gradual displacement of socialist agendas by divetsity agendas over the last thirty years. But the Enlightenment abstraction is based on some pretty tangible markers, too, if you stop and think about it—as people must if they are to be persuaded to identify with Afghan refugees, for example, or victims of the bombing of Baghdad. Here’s a partial list:
Food, dreaming, safeness, humor, the sky, music, greetings, snakes, death, fire, stories, dignity, pain ...
Very concrete, and quasi-erotic too, in its own way. And identification with all of humanity by abstraction through markers like these has this add-on: a commitment to universal rationality, to making judgmentsbased on our common humanity in spite of the differences—a commitment that is natural in the Enlightenment sense.
So what’s the problem? If the Enlightenment abstraction is in fact operating at the core of diversity politics anyway, why have so many very smart people invested so much in deconstructing, denying, and otherwise undermining these universal foundations?
Here is what it comes down to: Progressives don’t want to break with the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment because, if they do, if they explicitly reassert modern principles of a secular and universal humanism, they might have to face the possibility that the modern Western tradition has a real claim—a superior claim—upon the allegiance of humanity after all. Western progressives defined themselves in just this way, of course, for most of the modern era, but not anymore. Few of us want to go there now.
That’s what it comes down to.
The price we pay for our unwillingness to face this possibility (and it is only a possibility; there may be other sources for these principles) is high, and getting higher. A case in point: how many people who think of themselves as on the left have lapsed into virtual paralysis in relation to the war on terror because they are privately wondering things about Islam that would be difficult to bring up publicly, for the reason just mentioned?
Besides, such a stance has the feel of a tactical disaster. It feels like it would lead immediately to a break in the coalition of identity groups that has represented progressivism since the rise of access politics. Anyone promoting Enlightenment ideals risks being associated with heirs of Allan Bloom, with Lynne Cheney’s cohort. You’re haunted by the possibility that you might wake up the next day and find yourself agreeing with Samuel Huntington, find yourself signing up for a war to save Western civilization from polygamous barbarians with dubious dress codes.
But none of this follows logically or ethically or even emotionally—or it wouldn’t, if our political conversation could rise to this occasion. Polygamy matters, the headwear doesn’t, the veils maybe. Enslaving children counts, food prohibitions don’t, and women eating separately—well, again, maybe and maybe not, you have to assess that on a case-by-case basis. And so on. But the universal wrongness of inhumane coercion is the principle you apply to all of them. Will that sometimes be hard to do? Will it be really hard to know how to proceed toward reform of inhumane customs without seeming to revive the imperial project of “civilizing” others? Sure, but so what? Debate the means, the ends are clear. The principle is still valid.
Face it. You respect difference, but only up to a point.
Distinctions can be drawn and maintained, in other words, but only on the basis of the universal principles. We can’t afford to hide from this simple truth just because we might “sound like” some smug elitist at The New Criterion if we admit to such an allegiance openly.
We actually rely on these principles anyway, don’t forget—-that’s the essential claim here. We leave that foundation obscure, but we operate out of it. This has become especially evident with respect to women’s issues that have an international or cross-cultural dimension—clitoridectomy being an outstanding example. Every time feminists assert that women’s rights are human rights, they are, in effect, overriding cultural contexts on the basis of a universal humanism derived, as a matter of historical fact, from Enlightenment concepts. Why not just say so?
This is so simple—maybe that’s the problem. Maybe intellectuals who spent decades in obscure hermeneutical debate over the illusion of Presence just can’t see their way to resolutions this simple. You can align yourself with humanist ideals of modern progress without committing yourself to defending what modernity actually did. What’s wrong with that? You can say that science provides a truer account of the material world than myth does, but you can also say that the dualistic worldview that made science possible is implicated in a devastating exploitation of nature, in a degradation of the earth, that may already be irreversible. In effect, you don’t have to believe that astrology is as good as astronomy to defend the rights of people who believe in astrology. You can say that the Bill of Rights provides a better foundation for a just society than any theology provides but that the selectivity of its application has been a monstrous injustice. What’s wrong with saying these things?
In fact, isn’t a lot of the anti-American feeling you have stored up actually based on the disparity between those principles and reality? Between the noble words and daily routines of slave-holding Founding Fathers? Between saccharine-sweet ads for pharmaceutical companies and their vile patent-profiteering in Africa? Between pious blather about leaving no child behind and the reality of resource distribution in our schools? In your heart of hearts, do you in fact hold the West to a higher standard, not just because you live here but because the standard set forth is higher? Isn’t the betray’ al of humanist principles what gets to you, at bottom? Wasn’t that what outraged you initially, in your youth, when you first realized what was going on behind the facade, when you first set out on the path of progressive political engagement?
You certainly don’t approve of the way China harvests organs from executed prisoners, for example. Ten thousand sentenced to death last year, and some were still alive when the organs were extracted (the fresher the kidney, the more customer satisfaction—and not mainly for Western markets, sorry). Imagine if our privatized prison systems were doing that. Imagine the uproar, imagxine how you would feel. You just don’t feel that outrage when it’s China. Why not? Is it really just because it’s another place, far away, a place in which you have no direct stake or responsibility? Or is it also because that outrage just doesn’t kick in, the way it did, for example, if you read descriptions of Governor Bush mocking a condemned woman to whom he had refused clemency? Or, if you do feel a comparable outrage, isn’t it because China once seemed to represent the socialist experiment, itself derived from the secular humanist principles in question? In that case, the betrayal of those principles is once again a factor. There is a lot of slavery in Africa and Asia right now. Figures show more slaves there right now than were taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. But somehow that doesn’t get you that worked up. Maybe in some way you don’t—as a matter of emotional fact— blame the slaveholders so much in this case as you blame postcolonial contexts? So, somehow, African slaveholders in Sudan aren’t full moral agents? How could that be?
So what’s the answer? Do you or don’t you hold the modern West to a higher standard, and is that standard more or less the classic Enlightenment standard of human equity or not? I’m not saying you shouldn’t do this, by the way—just in case your mind is so pulverized by pragmatist attacks on the idea of ideals that you think that’s where I’m going. My point is that you should start doing it explicitly and affirmatively, because your political convictions are actually grounded in this ideal, no matter how ensnared your rhetoric may be in the intricacies of postmodernism.
Try it this way: If you are a member of an historically marginalized group, doesn’t the outrage that motivates your politics derive from a gut sense of the violation of basic justice inherent in historical arrangements as well as from the harm that you and yours have suffered? It’s hard to distinguish the sources, but try. And if you are not a member of such a group, ask yourself this: Why do you even care? If you are a straight white man with middle-class advantages, why aren’t you a Republican? That would obviously be in your interest, in any Nietzschean sense of the word that might be accepted by postmodern political thought. So what’s the story here? Isn’t it true that your politics are, at bottom, motivated by Enlightenment ideals?
It will only hurt for a minute if you confess.
And the benefits will be many.
For example. Notice that when you confront the right with Europe’s genocidal imperialism and the hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers, and argue for restitutional policies based on that history, then they start up about different historical periods, standards of the time, and so on. But there is no systematic way for progressives to unmask this outrageous maneuver from these supposed critics of relativism, because we have relinquished the principles that would expose this hypocrisy. We have, in effect, allowed the right to abscond with the very categories of political philosophy that have nourished progressive movements since the seventeenth century.
Think of the leverage we lost when we gave up on that simple story of progress, especially in relation to the young, for whom “fairness,” embryo of the ideal of justice, is so fundamental. What a relief it would be if we could once again summarize modern political history by describing it as a struggle to apply the principles of Enlightenment humanism in accordance with their inherent logic. Because isn’t that what we were doing in the movements for civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, and in the labor movements of long ago as well?5 Isn’t that what has been going on all along?
And yet we refuse to describe it that way anymore. No wonder so many of us are reduced, once again, but even more so, to ad hoc mockery and purely negative critique. No wonder those pictures of women shedding their burkas could do so much to dilute a progressive response to Bush’s conduct of that war—even though, as of this writing, and in spite of all the bogus promises, essential supplies are still not reaching untold numbers of desperate Afghans, however dressed. And is that not obviously what should be con-cerning us, according to that deepest principle, the equal worth of every human life?
This appeal will not reach everyone. Some people process every event automatically. Whatever scheme they already have always applies. This argument will mean nothing to them, unless it accidentally supplies some grist for their omnivorous mill. Other people really are locally motivated. Their politics are based entirely on the experience of being gay or the loss of a loved one to handgun violence or empathy for animals in pain, and they really aren’t moved by general principles. So be it.
Pragmatists like Rorty and Fish may also decline this proffer. They will say, Sure, let’s invoke that Enlightenment principle when it works for us, but not when it doesn’t. So be it, again. Welcome to the coalition, whenever it suits you. There is no ontological litmus test.
But this argument is really meant for people who find themselves genuinely troubled by questions—and they are questions—like these:
Is there no progressive figure or movement with mass indigenous support in the Islamic world to serve as a rallying point for Western progressives, analogous to Mandela’s ANC, say? If not, why not?
Why do so many critics of U.S. policy and corporate depredation habitually exaggerate when drawing up their bill of particulars? The truth is bad enough; why the litany of ultimately counterproductive exaggerations?
At the end of the day, what should overdeveloped countries actually be doing in the area of immigration? Can progressives afford to confine themselves to supporting due process against the INS on the one hand and disdaining Pat Buchanan on the other? What should our immigration policies actually be?
What about the utter failure of the Democratic Party to represent the interests of a dwindling middle class, not to mention the poor, in the face of corporate hegemony? Why is there not even one likely candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2004 who can risk the charge of “class warfare” and lead a movement against those malefactors of great wealth? Not one. That gaping void should give pause to progressives who followed Bill and Hillary and Jesse Jackson as they followed the money down their pragmatical path.
Should progressives consider resurrecting their traditional hostility toward religious literalism? Think about it—in Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, Islamic fundamentalism all over the world, Christian fundamentalism at home—this is an horrific force, and the tide is rising. We are talking mass delusion here, aren’t we? Maybe it’s time to say so again.
Similarly for belief systems in general. Have we collaborated too much with irrationality? Has anthropological relativism and philosophical constructivism, once so liberating, returned to haunt us in the form of an indiscriminate pos-sibilism? Are we responsible for the fact that our top graduate schools are now full of people who think, Hey, alien abductions, psychic readings—it’s possible, who knows, who really knows anything? And what about the youthful apathy and irony we so regularly lament? Progressives were running a lot of educational institutions while those attitudes were taking root. Why did our deconstruction of dominant discourses not inspire our students the way it inspired us? Was it because we were taken in by a canon that celebrated Western achievements and marginalized the others of the world while they’ve been exposed to the Other ever since we had them include the Native American point of view in their kindergarten Thanksgiving project and taught them why they shouldn’t say that Columbus discovered America? Was it because, for them, what we have been deconstructing was never really a construct? Because, for them, all constructs have become options on a leveled playing field of optionality, so that after a while—well, who’s to judge? Is that why a group of bright high school seniors of my acquaintance, after twelve years of exposure to emancipatory multicultural curricula, could watch the film Gandhi and then discusswhether or not it was “biased” because it didn’t give the “British point of view”?
Enlightenment principles could inform progressive responses to these questions, and to many more, but they will not provide the deductive certainty to which Bentham once aspired. In fact, the first consequence of a discussion of specifics among people committed to the equity axiom will be to expose what remains of our affirmative agenda for what it is: a shallow and selective laundry list that caters to the short-term interests of various constituencies claiming space under the umbrella, no matter how incohetent the net effect. As when, for example, the largest gay-rights organization in New York cuts a deal to support George Pataki against the first African American in that state ever to have a real shot at becoming governor.
Hopeful imagery involving mosaics and rainbows can no longer mask the truth. Except for undeniable gains made by certain members of certain groups in privileged Western countries, things are getting steadily worse for the wretched of the earth and for the earth itself. In the face of this trend, the response has been—incredibly—to repudiate the very notion of ideological unity, though the cause of progress will surely suffet if only fanatics and imperialists can achieve it. The obvious move is to work out such an ideology, one that embraces diversity and transcends it.
Outlining in any detail what such ideological unity would look like goes far beyond the scope of this essay. Unresolved philosophical issues—essentially pitting sheer material need in some places against customary expectations in other places—would divide progressives at the outset. At the level of policy, judgments about probable outcomes for citizens of the world would have to be made, and very technical disputes would immediately arise. But the commitment in all these debates would be to all those citizens equally. That would be the common ground. That would be the criterion to which all were bound. And that would be a major step forward.
On a tactical level, the advantage of returning to this foundation is immediately apparent. It would allow us to force the bully boys of American Empire to deny the equal value of every human life. They would have to stand up in public forums, in schools and colleges, and explain why the lives of our babies are more valuable than the lives of other peoples’ babies. To take it to the root, they would be forced to admit that, when they call people on the American left “decadent” because they didn’t react “naturally” to an attack on their own country, the “natural” they are invoking is not the natural of The Second Treatise of Government. Quite the contrary. The “natural” they are invoking is the natural of Darwinian selection and tribalism, the natural of passion and vengeance, the natural of what the Enlightenment called "faction."* This "natural" Locke associated with the Fall, and a cosmopolitan Enlightenment explicitly set out to overcome it with modern ideas of rights and reason. Let us force self-appointed defenders of the Western tradition to this admission: it is they who are betraying its highest claim to universality. We remain true to it.
But let us confront ourselves at the same time, along these lines: Have you actually become (or were you always) just a liberal after all? Were your pretensions to radicalism mostly a matter of style, of self-image? Have you been working for the realization of something beyond bourgeois democracy—or have you just been aiming for reform? If what your politics really envisions is Global New Deal meets Respect for Diversity, that’s one thing. That means you are a liberal. That means you basically accept a world system of private enterprise and technological innovation and consumer culture, and you want to see it managed so that no one is excluded, the environment is protected, free expression flourishes, and so on. And you can be very active in all sorts of obvious ways, if this is what you are.
If, on the other hand, you are a radical, the ironic implication is this: there isn’t much to do right now to distinguish yourself from liberals. Toss a few rocks at a Starbucks during the next WTO meeting if you want, but don’t mistake such gestures for genuinely radical responses. What radicals should be doing right now is studying and thinking. You need to put in your ten years at the library, the way Marx did. You need to be figuring out what makes human beings tick and what, if any, direction is to be found in history. And I don’t mean some half-assed sci-fi anarcho-Gaia nonsense you cobbled together before you dropped out of Bard; I mean serious study, working toward an alternative to a global bourgeois democracy. What radicals need most right now isn’t action but theory.
But to any progressive, liberal or radical, inclined to do more than claim that you were right all along, to anyone inclined to rethink politics in a serious way, to anyone for whom the humanist revelation at the heart of the idea of progress still lives—to you I say, if you can’t make a move without support from a French intellectual, put down your Foucault. Take up your Voltaire. ¡
1. To take just the most salient case in point: were it not for identity politics, the degree of xenophobic racism in the American response to 9-11 would have been much worse— more indiscriminate bombing in Afghanistan, more attacks on innocent Muslims in this country, more stereotyping in the press, the whole shebang. We owe what tolerance we did display to institutionalized values of diversity and to the people who have worked for that institutionalization, especially in education. The insistence of the authorities, however condescending, on distinguishing between terrorists and Islam was driven by strategic and tactical calculations, but good old political correctness paved the way.
2. Which is not to say that establishing the ontology of such principles is easy or unimportant. Heavy philosophical lifting will be required. The Enlightenment analysis depended on a no longer credible belief in natural design. Providing an alternative account—perhaps a phenomenological account—should be a primary task for progressive intellectuals. But the question here is not, What are these things we call “principles”? It is only, Are these principles actually at work in us?
3. Commitment to this principle does not entail indiscriminate approval of anything anybody says or makes. Arguments about relativism and objectivism, intellectual and aesthetic standards, etc., can go on quite consistently between people otherwise committed to political equity.
4. Did they also deploy the most outrageous justifications and rationalizations for excluding women and "savages" from the purview of their principles? They did that too, yes, but once again you don't have to. It's the principles themselves to which 1 am appealing.
5. There is a direct line from Locke's natural right to property based on the value of an individual's labor as against the institutionalized claims of monarchs and Marx's evaluation of social labor as against the institutionalized claims of capitalists. The Hegelianized subject of socialism is as modern as the bourgeois individual, and the narrative of progress, rooted in Enlightenment humanism, comprehends bothin spite of the political and philosophical differences between them.
Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine who teaches at the Dalton School and New York University’s Draper Program. His last essay for the magazine, “The Numbing of the American Mind,” appeared in the April 2002 issue.
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February 2, 2008 |
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