Tunisia's revolution and the Islamists posted by Richard Seymour

Now, the fact that Ghannouchi is speaking from exile is not irrelevant here. Most of the leadership of the An-Nahda party is exiled in London, following from a period of repression in the early 1990s. Indeed, there's an article in Foreign Policy almost gloating about the Tunisian revolution being "Islamist-free". So, there's a real question of just how much influence the Islamists can really have. At one time, they were a serious political force in Tunisia. In the 1989 general election, their candidates - standing as 'independents' - officially received 14% of the vote. According to Francois Burgat and William Dowell's study, (The Islamic Movement in North Africa, University of Texas Press, 1993), the real figure was plausibly closer to 30-32%. The regime rigged the elections, of course, so there would no way to know for sure. Subsequent repression, combined with a period of sustained economic growth that diminished the social base for the Islamists among the petite bourgeoisie and the rural poor, reduced the weight of An-Nahda as a serious opposition force so that today it's tempting to dismiss them. But is the revolution "Islamist-free"? Can it be?

Before going any further with this, it's worth saying something about who the Islamists in Tunisia are and how the came to prominence in the first place. The origins of Tunisia's Islamist movement are in the crisis of the Seventies. In that period, a movement among the intelligentsia toward reviving Islam as a basis for politics and culture, against the alienating Euro-secularism of the Bourguibist regime, found expression in a review called Al-Ma'rifa, and at the Zaytuna University. This coincided with a similar sense of dissatisfaction among the rural poor, where Islamic traditions were not as cheerfully downplayed as they were among the regime's elite.

The material background was that Israel's humiliation of Egypt and its allies in 1967 had raised serious questions about Arab nationalism, while economic crisis was de-legitimizing Bourguiba's corporatist progressivism. The state's turn toward economic liberalisation in the same period saw a sudden sharp increase in returns for private capital, while the incomes of the public sector salariat stagnated. For the Islamist intelligentsia, some of whom had been on the Left previously, all of this betokened not merely a material problem that they could struggle over - as the radical Left was doing at just that time. It was a profound spiritual crisis. Somehow the influx of cultural influences form the imperialist world, the economic crisis, the turn toward neoliberalism and its corrupting effects, the defeat of the Arab countries, the authoritarianism of the state, and their own diminished status were related to the decline of Islam in public life. As far as Tunisia went, the root and cause of the problem was that Bourguiba's state was built on an attempt to impose on a Muslim population a template of secular republican nationalism drawn from Europe. Indeed, the convulsions that had engulfed France in the late Sixties and early Seventies proved that its model could hardly be one worthy of emulation.

By the end of the Seventies, a coherent Islamist movement had emerged, the Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique (MTI) - the tendency which Ghannouchi co-founded. It did not seek to bring about an 'Islamic state', if such a thing could exist. This is not to say that such a goal might not come to the fore if the movement acquired a mass base, but it has not been a goal of the MTI, and its successor, the An-Nahda party, since its inception. Rather, it saw its remit as being to effect moral and social change. To accomplish this, it sought to ally with the nationalists and even integrate itself with the trade union movement - unlike the majority of Islamists groups who disapprove of trade unionism as a mode of organisation based on class struggle. This position seems to have been genuine and consistent argued, but it was also forced on the movement to some extent. While the MTI articulated a moral and spiritual argument about the sources of Tunisian decline, the 1978 general strike and riots over straightforward class issues marginalised the tendency somewhat, and compelled them to engage in such issues more forthrightly. Ghannouchi himself was insistent that it was "not enough to pray five times a day and fast ... Islam is activism ... it is on the side of the poor and the oppressed".

Aside from its dialogue with the poor and oppressed, the movement maintained a consistently pluralist approach to Tunisian politics. Nazih Ayubi's study, Political Islam, argues that unlike the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, the MTI did not "put itself in the position of the exclusive actor with the rights of moral tutelage over society at large", and that this approach enabled the tendency to accept a political pluralism that was inclusive not only of secularists but also of communists. The MTI collaborated with socialists in, for example, organising protests against US and Israeli aggression. The movement constantly assailed the lack of political liberty in Bourguiba's regime, and called for "the end of single-party politics and the acceptance of political pluralism and democracy". Later, Ghannouchi called for a mobilisation of civil society against the state:

Ghannouchi has also made an attempt to articulate a version of womens' rights consistent with Islamist beliefs, opposing this approach to the "obscure theories of Sayyid Qutb". However, his criticisms of the Personal Status Code, which includes various rights for women, point to the limits of any claim to gender egalitarianism on the part of the MTI. That stance allowed the movement to develop into a serious challenge to Bourguiba's regime, and it came to occupy a disproportionate amount of the ageing dictator's energies. Repression included arbitrary arrest and detention of MTI activists, but also a wider series of measures to curb expressions of religiosity. Insanely Ataturkist laws were passed banning civil servants from praying, excluding women who wore the 'veil' from universities and workplaces, rescinding the licenses of taxi drivers suspected of being Islamists, and so on.

Repression against the movement was one of the factors which won it sympathy on campuses, so that it overtook the left among students. Indeed, in this period the typical adherent of the Islamists was below the age of 30, and usually below the age of 25. Moreover, this student layer overlapped with the support from the rural poor, as the youths who supported the tendency typically came from the south and interior, away from coastal Sahel and Tunis. As the movement developed, it did pick up support in urban areas of Tunis, and among some of the professional types that the regime considered its core base.

Rashid Ghannouchi was himself to become a target of Bourguiba's drive to "eradicate the fundamentalist poison", as he ended up on trial for plotting with the connivance of the Iranian government to overthrow the Tunisian state. Linda Jones' profile of Ghannouchi for Middle East Report at this time noted that while the MTI was not the "fundamentalist" sock puppet that Bourguiba had demonsied, it had profited indirectly from Bourguiba's war on trade unions and the Left. Nonetheless, Ghannouchi was jailed and sentenced to a life of hard labour on evidence that was persuasive to no one, only to be released by the subsequent Ben Ali dictatorship in its early, liberalising days.

In 1989, the movement changed its name to Hizb an-Nahda (Renaissance Party), and contested the elections staged by Ben Ali as part of his promise of liberalisation. The elections, fixed though they were, did disclose a trend which is consistent with what was happening elsewhere at the time. As Fred Halliday explained, again in Middle East Report: "Despite their failure to win any seats in parliament, the Islamist 'independents' won around 17 percent of the vote, displacing the secular left, who won around 3 percent, as the main opposition. Given that around 1.2 million of those of voting age were not registered, and given the almost complete control which the ruling party has in the rural areas, the real Islamist strength is no doubt considerably greater than 17 percent: in the Tunis area, the figure was around 30 percent." However, the Islamists' support was broader than it was deep. As a movement, it was a relatively new arrival compared to its equivalents in North Africa and the Middle East, and its handling of religious and moral issues, though in one light relatively open and progressive, could also characterised as cautious and timid. A subsequent wave of repression in 1991 and 1992, centred on legal witch hunts for 'terrorism', decimated the Islamists' organisation and sent much of the leadership into exile.

This was followed by a series of economic transformations. Among these was the restructuring of class relations in the countryside. For example, following the advice of the World Bank, the government turned over state-owned agricultural cooperatives to large landowners. While this tended to concentrate wealth among the agrarian rich, it did unleash a wave of capital accumulation and growth that undercut support for the Islamists. The privatization of public services also reduced the scale of the public sector salariat, and profoundly altered the class structure in those newly private industries. The tax codes were restructured to give the bourgoisie a lift, and entice foreign direct investment with the promise of more repatriated lolly. This combination of reforms not only enhanced the power of the ruling class, but it also gave some middle class layers a sudden income boost while also producing sufficient growth to persuade some of those who lost from the process that they had a stake in preserving the neoliberal compact. In other words, the same combination of political repression and ensuing class restructuring, did for the Islamists as had done for the Left.

Contrary to what has sometimes been implied, the An-Nahda did not subsequently disappear as a movement. Its activists continued to be convenient scapegoats, continued to suffer repression and were to be the bearers of the 'Al Qaeda' stigma once the 'war on terror' was under way. But just as the secular left has been almost invisible in Tunisia for a generation, so the An-Nahda's influence has been much diminished, and practically subterranean since 1992-3. The current revolt is not hegemonised by parties of the Left or by the Islamists. At its heart is the trade union leadership, whose outlook is social democratic. But, like it or not, An-Nahda leaders have been returning to Tunisia to participate, and will in all likelihood gain some sort of audience. As they are less sectarian than some of the cretins in this country who denounce them as far right totalitarians, (and whom it is my vocation to wind up when they start woofing and foaming at the mouth), they will probably find willing allies as well. Just as they did when they were able last able to organise as a tendency in Tunisia. To describe the revolt as "Islamist-free", therefore, is almost to miss the point. The revolution, if it advances at all, is going to have to at minimum include a general amnesty toward political exiles, which means the An-Nahda will return. As Marc Lynch points out, it's hard to see what kind of genuine democracy could obtain without this step. And if the regime, entrenched as it has been since 1956, is to be defeated, then in all likelihood it will involve some configuration of the broad coalition that both Ghannouchis, pere et fille, are calling for.

Labels: an-nahda, ghannouchi, islamism, neoliberalism, political religion, religion, sectarianism, socialism, trade unionism, tunisia

The leaders' debate posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: david cameron, gordon brown, liberal democrats, neoliberalism, new labour, nick clegg, religion, tories

A primogenitor of 'Red Toryism' posted by Richard Seymour

Labels: capitalism, conservatism, free markets, red toryism, religion, religious right, tories, tory scum

The pitfalls of tolerance posted by Richard Seymour

Every now and again, I read something like this and have to stop and consider why it is inherently ridiculous and offensive. The Tories are lauded for adopting a new attitude of 'tolerance' toward homosexuals, and one feels an immediate pressure to partake of this cosiness, this idea that something uncomplicatedly benign is happening. Increasingly, moreover, one is apt to hear 'tolerance' name-dropped in respect of racial problems in the UK, in which the absence of 'tolerance' is either a euphemism for racism, or an attitude ascribed to supposedly self-segregating minorities. And in its function as part of a martial ideology, 'tolerance' is what NATO troops defend against 'native fanaticism'. The word and its various significations do a lot of ideological work, obscuring and inverting crucial social relations, and smuggling in a patronising attitude to the subjects of said 'tolerance'. Given this problem, I just wanted to clarify my thoughts by arranging them into a number of simple arguments, as follows:

I. There is a crucial distinction between the narrow terms of religious toleration, a doctrine elaborated in an attempt to manage Protestant schisms in early modern Europe (though the Ottoman Empire's 'millet' system could also be cited as an instance of toleration), and the broader terms of 'tolerance'. The toleration of religious belief is not on the same ontological plane as tolerance for ascriptive attributes. In its ultimate Lockean variant, the former asserted not merely the separation of church and state, but the privatization of ethical belief as such, the decoupling of religious or moral statements from social context. Alasdair Macintyre has useful commentary on this, but it is separate from the contemporary issue of 'tolerance'. The latter implies a model of political communities in which different groups and individuals experience one another as a burden that they have to put up with. It implies a fundamentally competitive model of human behaviour, whose excesses are avoided through tolerance. In this respect, it is deeply misanthropic.

II. Tolerance is an alternative to equality rather than an expression of it. Toleration in its old sense was compatible with bourgeois ideas of equality but, although 'tolerance' has a soft and generous texture to it, it bears a political freight of inequality, subordination and hierarchy. Thus, when American rightists are asked about gay marriage, their answer is that they are prepared to tolerate homosexuals but not dilute the 'sanctity of marriage' by allowing same-sex partners to wed. Even Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, which banned known gays from serving in the military, would serve as a 'tolerant' alternative to legal equality, since it says that homosexuality can be tolerated as a private, or rather secret, affair of the individual.

III. Tolerance displaces social justice, and as such depoliticises intensely political questions. It became a dominant discursive tool in the 1990s precisely in such a way as to displace questions of power, discrimination and social justice. This was a novelty - in previous periods, anti-racist liberals and leftists were fully aware of the basically reactionary nature of racial 'tolerance', especially in US politics where northern elites would contrast their supposed tolerance with southern bigotry. That has to do with the success of the right in parlaying such questions into 'culture wars', in which - say - segregationist schools could assert their right to practise discrimination not by defending principles of white supremacy, but by defending local or indigenous cultural practises against an intrusively egalitarian state. They demanded tolerance for down to earth Christian folk, and railed against what they called 'reverse discrimination'.

IV. Tolerance is an expression of resentment. Historically it has been an attitude that dominative majorities adopt toward oppressed minoritiesm, and so it remains. To be the subject of this tolerance, one must have already been designated a worthy object of aversion by the majority, at best to be indulged on account of the magnanimity of those with power. To be the subject of this tolerance, one must already have been deemed normatively aberrant. That means that some sort of idea of what organically belongs and does not belong to a given political imaginary (community, nation, etc.) has already been stipulated: thus white rule, patriarchy, heteronormativity, etc. are often asserted in the very gesture of 'tolerance'. The subject of tolerance does not really belong, is foreign, and might easily be rejected by a much less tolerant host. As such, should the basis for this maganimity be undermined or threatened, tolerance can easily lapse into its opposite: "zero tolerance".

V. Tolerance has long had an imperial and colonial dimension which is greatly in evidence today. The Dutch empire has been lauded for its supposed tolerant attitude toward colonial subjects, in contrast to Spanish and Portugese rivals. Of course, said 'tolerance' was a pragmatic decision that made more commercial and colonial sense for the Dutch than trying to convert local Islamic sultanates to Calvinism. Puritan settlers in the New World practised 'tolerance' toward heathen Native Americans when they weren't busy wiping them out. Similarly, the British Empire tended to express its own cultural domination over the natives in terms of what may or may not be tolerated under British rule. Thus, William Bentinck, governor-general of the East India Company, wrote in 1829 on the practise of sati that the sole basis upon which it may be tolerated would be if such an attitude were necessary to conserve the many improving influences of the British empire as a whole. The discourse of Anglophone rule in South Africa was also framed in terms of tolerance: Cape Town, the centre of British commercial dominance, was lauded for the 'racial tolerance' practised there, in the context of racist imperial rule. Even when the labour practises of British capital began to stratify workers by race, from the Glen Grey Act onward, the dominant tone of colonial discourse remained that of 'tolerance' of the natives. And it was in stark contrast to the incoherent 'native fanaticism' that contrived false grievances against the empire, and persisted with intolerant cultural practises despite the attempts at education and racial uplift. In the contemporary Huntington/Lewis/Ignatieff school of imperial thought, tolerance is once more a peculiar attribute of Euro-American states, noticeable for its absence in the Orient. 'We' are tolerant because we have mastered our cultural biases, our instinctive narcissism and hostility toward others. We have assayed them and submitted them to the rule of reason. Instead of romantic nationalism and religious devotion, we have civic nationalism and belief constrained by inquiry. 'They' are intolerant because their cultural biases dominate them. Their alleged hostility and self-involvement, their desire to speak their own language and wear their own religous garb, is a sign of their fanatical rejection of tolerance.

All of which is to say that when we hear about tolerance, and it comes with a certain amount of self-congratulation (think of Blair and Major blissfully eulogising about a modern, tolerant England, relaxed and at ease with itself), its more sinister dimensions should come to mind and caution us against luxuriating in that sense of warmth and humanity that the term exudes.

Labels: colonialism, homophobia, imperial ideology, liberalism, racism, religion, tolerance

Consequences posted by Richard Seymour

You know how we've been told that the constant vilification of the hijab and women who wear it has something to do with liberating women? Yeah:

It was while Marwa el-Sherbini was in the dock recalling how the accused had insulted her for wearing the hijab after she asked him to let her son sit on a swing last summer, that the very same man strode across the Dresden courtroom and plunged a knife into her 18 times.

Her three-year-old son Mustafa was forced to watch as his mother slumped to the courtroom floor.

Even her husband Elvi Ali Okaz could do nothing as the 28-year-old Russian stock controller who was being sued for insult and abuse took the life of his pregnant wife. As Okaz ran to save her, he too was brought down, shot by a police officer who mistook him for the attacker. He is now in intensive care in a Dresden hospital.

...

Unemployed Alex W. from Perm in Russia was found guilty last November of insulting and abusing Sherbini, screaming "terrorist" and "Islamist whore" at her, during the Dresden park encounter. He was fined ¤780 but had appealed the verdict, which is why he and Sherbini appeared face to face in court again.

Even though he had made his anti-Muslim sentiments clear, there was no heightened security and questions remain as to why he was allowed to bring a knife into the courtroom.

Labels: 'secularism', hijab, islam, islamophobia, misogyny, racism, religion, women

Ye of bad faith posted by Richard Seymour

Max Dunbar is not a commentator I take all that seriously, but this kind of stupidity deserves to be pointed at. He says:

blogger Richard Seymour (currently valiantly struggling to contort his anti-imperialist narrative around the Obama era) declared faith ‘an enabling narrative for liberation struggles’ and atheism ‘an ideological accessory to empire’.

The first quote comes from this:

Religion can be used as a tool for control, but to reduce it to that function without qualification is both erroneous and, if it matters, profoundly anti-marxist. Religion is a work of labour, a performance by people working in different contexts, deriving meanings that appear to be apt for their circumstances. That means that, while it is open to highly reactionary, patriarchal and authoritarian readings - indeed, it may even have a sort of elective affinity with political authoritarianism - it is also open to democratising, emancipatory impulses. It can, even as it engages people in fictions, also furnish people with a means to obtaining lucid insights about human beings.

To avoid caricature, I should point out that I am not inviting anyone to believe in the scriptures or the Qu'ran or the Torah or the complete works of Deepak Chopra. Nor am I saying that there is no potential harm in religion. What I am saying is that far more important than what is written in religious texts - which are indeterminate - is the way in which people receive, interpret and operate on those texts. Religion does not, on the whole, drive war or exploitation or any of the major evils that the world is experiencing. At most, it is an enabling factor, just as it is also an enabling narrative for liberation struggles.

The second quote comes from this:

The 'war on terror' and the Israel-Palestine conflict are seen as being driven by 'religious extremism' in this purview. Naturally, when discussed in those terms, people like Sam Harris conclude that Islam is the worst religion, the most menacing kind that exists on the planet, mandating all sorts of extreme measures including torture and bombing. Naturally, Amis concludes that the 'extremists' (Muslim extremists, he means) have a 'monopoly on self-righteousness and violence' and produces all kinds of fulminations about Islam and Muslims to accompany this. This is the quite logical result of a culturalist reading of a dense mesh of geopolitical struggles. To this extent, the 'new atheism', where it is not just naive and bossy, is an ideological accessory to empire.

I think I can safely say that in both cases I have been misrepresented. And, weirdly, this is not the first time that comments of mine written for haloscan have been miscited by critics. Johann Hari and Marko Atilla Hoare are both guilty of this. One assumes that these people don't credit their audience with the desire or ability to check their references. As a subsidiary point, Dunbar goes on to cite the conspiracy theorist 'feminist' Caroline Fourest, who remarks that colonists "rarely modified the habits of the occupied countries". Now, this is not strictly germane to the argument that the 'new atheism' (not atheism in toto) operates as an ideological accessory to empire. After all, we are talking of this phase of empire, not any previous one. And secondly, the issue is how such doctrines mobilise opinion in the imperial 'metropole', not whether such doctrines are translated into practise in the 'periphery'. However, I would just like to point out that colonists did indeed go to great efforts to modify the habits of occupied countries. Need I really essay on the 'humanitarian' imperialism of the British in the Pacific, and the prolonged British missionary position? The tirades of Cardinal Lavigerie and the clerical colonialism of the French empire? The Christianising efforts of the Spanish in Latin America and the Philippines? (And while we're on the subject of religion in the Spanish empire, it would be remiss of me not to credit the religious humanism of Bartolomé de las Casas). I have hardly exhausted the list of available examples. Why do these people make it so easy? And why do they give the impression of sniffing around my bins, and listening in on conversations for 'evidence' to submit to imaginary tribunals?

Labels: 'new atheism', christianity, christopher hitchens, imperial ideology, imperialism, religion, the liberal defense of murder

The contrarianism of bores posted by Richard Seymour

Those of little or no faith are back with us again, although I'm not sure they ever went away. They seem at times to be omnipresent, especially when one is in Waterstones. This time they are encouraging us to stop worrying, and love life without God. The weird thing about their smug advertisement is that it appears to be an exercise in pure self-congratulation, just like the preposterous motto that adorns the banner of Richard Dawkin's official website: "A Clear-Thinking Oasis". Unless they are believers in the magical power of the icon, I doubt that they engaged in this trite enterprise on the assumption that some worshipful pedestrian would convert on the spot. And is it really becoming to be so supericilous, purely because one has concluded that there isn't any God? Is it, after all, terribly impressive? And are their talking points so absolutely central to the human prospect? The evidence suggests not. One of the more tedious preoccupations of this conceited confraternity is the taking of offense about the taking of offense. For instance, in a 'debate' some months ago between Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens, Fry remarked - to all round approbation - on how some folks think they have a right to complain if they're offended by what you say. Hitchens murmured that complaining about offense was also 'boring' and 'uninteresting'. As if there was anything less enlightening, or interesting, than middle-aged English liberals working themselves into a spuming frenzy over the religious. Frankly, I find it offensive.

Labels: 'new atheism', atheism, dawkins, hitchens, liberals, religion, secularism, smug

Secularism is a chimera: my posish on the Archbish. posted by Richard Seymour

I've written a piece about this Sharia bullshit for Socialist Worker. It goes without saying that I oppose the Islamophobic tirades, but I hint at a problem with the Archbishop's position. For although Muslims should absolutely have the same rights as everyone else, the Archbishop's call is for a kind of 'integration' that I think enhances the power of the state to interfere in religious life. To expand a bit, I note that New Labour have been rather happy to try and co-opt a version of Islam that is acceptable to them. To give the state any more authority to determine in matters of religion, by separating an Islam that is compatible with "British values" from one that isn't, is to give it the ability to play 'good Muslim' versus 'bad Muslim'.

The liberal response to this is not only based on a misconception of what Williams said, but actually a misunderstanding of what secularism is. Many think that the reformation was fundamentally about separating religion from politics. It is true that Lutheran morality separates secular from sacred power, but the first legal achievement of the Reformation was the Peace of Augsburg, which formalised the non-separation of religion and politics by giving dictatorial power on confessional matters to local rulers. Really, secularism began with the policies of 'tolerance' pursued by early modern 'Enlightened' despots and liberal states, and it hasn't advanced much beyond that. I think the truth is that a complete separation of church and state is a chimera as long as the two exist as potentially competing sources of authority in the same territory. The state will inevitably seek to control religion, and religion will inevitably seek to gain a niche of authority for itself. The question is to what extent and in what way.

And here it becomes problematic. The capitalist state has no basis for choosing between conceptions of the good. It is like asking the phone company to tell you what's right and wrong. Its processes and hierarchies are completely insulated from the spaces in which conceptions of the good might be elaborated and contested, and it will inevitably subordinate such questions to its own drives. The only way that the state will be enacting a conception of the good that isn't entirely arbitrary or subordinate to its own priorities is if it is responding to popular pressure. In the long run, these dilemmas point to the need to move beyond the state, toward a maximally democratised public life. That is what direct democracy means.

Labels: capitalism, islam, islamophobia, religion, secularism

Reason in revolt: two books on enlightenment. posted by Richard Seymour

Little God, Big Hitchens
I can get two reviews in here for the price of one. I'll start with Hitchens' latest, 'God Is Not Great'. Some people, in the wake of an atrocity by religious fanatics that has already been matched several times over in this young century, have taken to taking up atheism as if it were a militant creed. The range of people willing to reduce most of the world's problems to religion include the admirable Richard Dawkins, and the despicable Sam Harris. Hitchens, who has at different times been both admirable and despicable, is not saying much that he hasn't said before. If you look at his writings in the 1980s, he was often explaining the futility of belief, stressing its role as a false comfort for the poor and a source of morality for power. He contemptuously dismissed 'Liberation Theology' as a pathetic oxymoron, reminded readers of what Freud had to say in The Future of an Illusion (that religions are a form of wish-fulfillment), refers to "the mystical element in modern tyranny", specifically Stalinism and Nazism, insists that it is impossible for the religious and irreligious to be at peace, and - in his writings on El Salvador and Nicaragua, generally finds religion either to be a poor ally of socialism or its devout enemy. His latest therefore summarises the arguments of a lifetime, or the life that he has had since he was nine years old and decided firmly that God did not exist, a fact he is given to bragging about. But then, as someone remarked to me, perhaps this only means he still thinks like a nine year old.

God Is Not Great is sometimes witty, or at least half-witty, which is better than average. And it displays some of the author's ostentatiously wide learning with some of the old lapidary skill. It repeats many of his catechisms of old, the Freudian reference, the one-liners and the blunt insistence that not only can there be no peace between the religious and the atheist, but such peace would be undesirable. It is also superficial, error-strewn, and riddled with inconsistency and disavowal. On the error front, one could mention that Victor Serge didn't in fact invent the term 'totalitarianism' (it was Giovanni Amendola, a parliamentary opponent of fascism, who invented the phrase 'totalitaria', and Mussolini who took it up proudly, boasting of his 'totalitarianismo'). Or, his claim that Islam is in need of a Reformation, which suggests that his reading didn't take him as far as the revivalist movements of the 19th Century and that he doesn't recognise the self-evident analogue between salafism and Lutheranism. Equally, it may be that he doesn't really understand what the Reformation in its various manifestations was really about. On inconsistency, one marvels about his references to the Parties of God destroying Iraq without really dallying on the fact that the biggest Parties of God and the most aggressive ones are actually allies of the occupation. He doesn't seem to have noticed, either, that God's soldiers were fighting alongside him in Bosnia. On disavowal, the whole work can be seen as a careful expiation of the sins of imperialism and indeed of capitalism. Religion is blamed not only for the bad deeds of the religious, but also for modern 'totalitarianism', the threat of nuclear war, conflict in Palestine, gender repression (somehow the idea of Hitchens as a feminist doesn't really convince), the destruction of Iraq, the Lebanese civil war and so on. He states, falsely, that Iran is about the bring the world closer to the brink of nuclear war because it is acquiring nuclear weapons - this is the sort of assertion that is made without evidence, so perhaps we should follow Hitchens' motto and dismiss it without evidence. He finds that it is the religious fanatics on 'both sides' of the Israel-Palestine divide that have frustrated the attempts to reach a two-state settlement, an obvious falsehood about which it is safe to say he knows better.

The least useful thing that could be said about the book is that it is not constructive: it is not supposed to be constructive. It has some interesting, if rather old, things to say about different religions (oh, the common patriarchal norms, the sexual repression, the insistence that - as he puts it - "the birth canal is a one-way street", the textual bases for genocide and sectarianism and so on), garnished with the mantra: "religion poisons everything". It brags, repeatedly, that the attitude of non-believers like him is not one of faith, not dogmatic, but relies on free discussion and evidence. For a man who spent a great deal of February and March 2003 explaining that Wolfowitz would definitely bring peace and prosperity to Iraq, that the weapons of mass destruction would definitely be found, that evidence of Saddam's connections to the global jihad would be located, this doesn't sit well. Alright, perhaps it was unreasonable of him to make a claim to 'Twenty-Twenty Foresight' as he put it, but the fact that he persists in believing these things in hindsight despite the abundance of evidence to the contrary doesn't leave one with the impression that he is an avatar of Enlightenment. You can still find him on the Charlie Rose show repeating the gags about Saddam's alleged connections to the Abu Sayyaf movement and the 'hospitality' given Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the alleged WTC bombers in 1993 - and thus, hint hint, the Baathist regime might have been behind it. The former is without substantial evidence (despite allegations rehashed in the neocon Weekly Standard in 2006), and the latter is a discredited thesis advanced by Laurie Mylroie who, before changing her - well, I won't say mind, but before changing her opinion on Saddam, was arguing for a deepening of the relationship between the Reagan regime and the Baath one. In fact, Yasin was an Iraqi who was released by the US government to return to his country of birth. When he arrived in Iraq, he was allegedly imprisoned and the Iraqi government repeatedly offered to hand him over in exchange for sanctions relief. But the US authorities that permitted his release were evidently not interested in prosecuting him - an interesting story in itself.

There are other reasons for doubting that Hitchens has overcome faith. To insist on the superiority of the scientific method against, say, 'intelligent design' is in principle a sensible step, but to serve it up with a blustering scientific realism and a curious combination of sociobiology and genetic reductionism arguably blunts the force of the argument. Similarly, it is one thing to assert religion's role in many of the worst forms of human behaviour, but it is another to reduce religion to that. Here he gets himself into an appropriate muddle: Dietrich Bonhoeffer's resistance to the Nazis is explained away as a victory for humanism, not religion. Okay, but then this - and countless other examples could be adduced - is a tacit acknowledgment that at least religion can coexist with humanism, rationalism, and so on, which mocks his own claim that there can be no peace between religion and atheism. The history of the development of science by the religious doesn't permit any facile opposition between the two (Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Boyle, Newton etc). Nor is there even a complete opposition available between science and the Counter Reformation, in which the Church sought both to crush its enemies and restore its earthly power precisely by learning and spreading the new methods being developed. All of this has become so obvious that it is common wisdom among philosophers of science that its relationship to religion has often been productive, and that the instances of repression (of Galileo, for instance) are the exception rather than the rule.

It is simple enough to cite statements in the holy texts, but he is every bit as literalist as the fundamentalists and salafists. Such a gesture is completely incompatible with Hitchens' noisily avowed materialism, as well. If one only thinks of the millenia during which religions were developed and elaborated and argued over and censored and repressed and rearticulated, it is clear that a religion is not, or is not only, the content of its texts. It is a work of labour, a performance by people working in different contexts, deriving meanings that are apt for their circumstances. How else could there be such disagreement among people of the same faith about when and whom it is permissible to kill, or love, or rule? It may be an alibi of repression, but it is also an alibi of revolt (which raises the earlier prospect, that Hitchens doesn't understand the Reformation, or that part of it that was manifested in 1525). Although Hitchens claims to operate on the basis of Marx's critique of religion, he neglects to note that Marx was also a critic of the critique of religion: that he insisted that social change would come first and then people would abandon their "religious narrowness". He fundamentally misrepresents Marx, therefore, to make a case more befitting Bruno Bauer.

[Update: it has been drawn to my attention that I forgot to mention that - from a contrarian of Hitchens' stature - the title 'God is Not Great' is embarrassingly obvious. As in - "God is Great: Not!"]

God Is Not Great is principally a polemic about current affairs. Secularism and democratic republicanism are metaphors for American imperialism. In his hands they are alibis for repression and not, as one might have hoped, for revolt. Hitchens' long-standing anti-theism has become a means by which he commutes his remaining liberal commitments into support for aggressive American expansionism, nationalism, and accomodation to the claims of Zionism. If it wasn't for this, the book would probably not have been written, for there is not much in the book that was worth saying that hasn't already been said better, without the howlers, the arrogance and the insistence on using provisional scientific research as brickbats.

Defending Reason From Its Defenders
Dan Hind's new book, The Threat To Reason, is a very different kind of book. It too sees reason and Enlightenment values as being under threat, but the author doesn't accept that the main threat comes from New Agers and the religious. The Enlightenment is conscripted for various projects - not only American warfare, but also the corporate assault on environmentalism (or the attempt to coopt it), the capitalist attempt to curb labour protections, and the effort to override consumer and worker concerns about genetically modified foods. Bush cites Locke, The Economist cites Adam Smith, agribusiness cites progress against the forces of unreason, Blair contrasts globalising optimism with parochial pessimism and despair, and so on. A "bowdlerised and historically disembodied Enlightenment" is being used as a form of blackmail: if you are against us, you are with the forces of unreason. It has become a source of immense self-confidence for political and capitalist elites and the American empire, who all claim to be safeguarding that heritage. What Hind refers to as 'Folk Enlightenment' - because we all know the tune, even if the lyrics change sometimes - is reflected in the facility with which neoliberals appropriated the Scottish Enlightenment for their global crusade, matched by the neoconservative affirmation of the need for 'Enlightened' administration of Third World countries. Its use in this fashion has also helped people who described themselves as being on the Left, reconcile themselves to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The current clash-of-civilisations theme of imperialist apologetics often casts America's contemporary Islamist opponents as pre-Enlightenment and mythological (in contrast to America's self-image as confident and progressive). Similarly, the defense of capitalist enterprise against "eco-fundamentalists" who tend to be depicted as preferring to subsist in mud-huts on diets of greens and grains, is a familiar one.

Partially, the roots of this appropriation of the Enlightenment are located in anticommunism, in which a number of thinkers saw the tradition of 18th Century liberalism as the only viable alternative to - well, you probably could have guessed it - serfdom. (For in this outlook, the only alternative to liberal capitalism is something essentially premodern). Hind is very adept at drawing out the ways in which this has been perpetuated institutionally (he is a Lobster contributor after all), and in which it became the handmaiden of tyranny as well as exploitation. There are also some excellent put-downs - of Hitchens, and Wheen and that whole school of unthought. The unaccountability - ethically and otherwise - of corporations, and their private efforts to use Enlightenment methods to bolster their own power is described in some detail, as is that of the state: this, Hind calls 'Occult Enlightenment'. Additionally, the recklessness, moral irresponsibility and irrationality of the 'war on terror' is outlined brilliantly. There is a good discussion of the Enlightenment and various interpretations of it, and Hind also takes on some of the myths about the postmodernist assault on enlightened thought: pomo is thus summarised as not so much a coherent body of thought but as in many respects "a response to the accumulated disasters of Western modernity from the nineteenth century through to the 1960s: imperialism, world war and genocide". I don't think it could be put better than that. It concludes with a way out of the current binds, a gesture toward a truly Enlightened method. For one thing, we need to recognise the state-corporate nexus as the essential source of contemporary irrationalism. The vague, ahistorical histories in which people's ideas are given enormous social weight need to be eschewed in favour of an understanding of the institutional forms that produce knowledge. Hind reminds the indefatigable contrarians and defenders of reason that, far from being fearless conveyors of unblemished truths, they are themselves employees for information industries, some of them private and some of them state-owned. The forms of knowledge that they produce are conditioned by these institutions, and they delude themselves when they imagine otherwise. We need to abandon the illusions of 'disinterested' inquiry and try to overcome the property forms that currently repress common creativity and thought.

A few quibbles. I don't quite understand how Theodor Adorno is cast as a 'postmodernist', much less how Adorno and Horkheimer become the central examples of postmodern thought. Adorno's immanent critique of the Enlightenment doesn't entail a radical scepticism about the possibility of knowledge, and he was nothing if not a rationalist. Derrida and Foucault would surely have been better examples, especially since they are the most hated 'postmodernists', the clercs whose trahison has been most heinous for people like Wheen and Hari. Take, for example, Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World, which characterises Derrida's philosophy in the words of Barbara Ehrenreich, as maintaining that the "world is just a socially constructed ‘text’ about which you can say just about anything". Similarly, take Hari's claim that the bad man wants to attack reason and language. Now, neither of these claims is true. Derrida was astonished to hear that his critique of logocentrism had been misinterpreted in this fashion: "I never cease to be surprised by critics who see my work as a declaration that there is nothing beyond language, that we are imprisoned in language; it is, in fact, saying the exact opposite. The critique of logocentrism is above all else the search for the 'other' and the 'other of language...'". So far from abandoning truth, Derrida insists: "the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writing, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts". He was not, as so often depicted, a textualist: "not that I consider laws, constitutions, the declaration of the rights of man, grammar, or the penal code to be the same as novels. I only want to recall that they are not ‘natural realities’, and that they depend on the same structural power that allows novelesque fictions or mendacious inventions and the like to take place. I have never ‘put such concepts as truth, reference, and the stability of interpretive context radically into question’ if ‘putting radically into question’ means contesting that there are and that there should be truth, reference, and stable contexts of interpretation". It is, in other words, the kind of reasoned and responsible critique of existing forms of institutionalised power/knowledge that is the most characteristic of the radical Enlightenment. Nor is the hatred for Derrida accidental. His Of Grammatology is explicit in connecting the deconstruction of Western philosophy to anti-imperialism. He explained: "the science of writing – grammatology – shows signs of liberation all over the world". By attacking the tropes through which white, European supremacy has been propagated, he has undermined the self-confidence of would-be imperialist intellectuals. Similarly, Hind could have been a bit more unkind to Peter Gay, who is actually partially responsible for the simplistic dichotomy between religious thought and Enlightened thought. Although Gay acknowledges the religious commitments of some of the chief Enlightenment thinkers (Locke, Rousseau, Newton, Ferney), his attempt to recreate the "mind of the Enlightenment" as a pagan throwback, a sort of Francocentric sensuous humanism, reinforces that binary. Similarly, in handling the resonance of the experience of French philosophes for contemporary usurpers, it would have been worth commenting on the inegalitarianism of its leading lights. While, for example, the later utilitarians like John Stuart Mill have sometimes been rightly criticised for their support for colonialism (the view that Bentham himself supported the British colonies has been undermined by Jennifer Pitts' recent work), a lot more could be said about the contempt of people like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and others for the multitude, whom they energetically sought to distance themselves from. While hostile to certain forms of religious superstition, they articulated a fanatical resentment of 'le peuple' as mindless and malleable, that is surely analogous to the current warnings against 'populism'. The discussion of the 'Occult Enlightenment' might have been enriched by a discussion of its relationship to Renaissance and early-modern magical practise, since magical forms of thinking persist in elite doctrines. Those are merely quibbles, however. The author has done something that Dawkins et al have not done, which is to take both the Enlightenment and religion seriously, and to locate the social forces responsible for squandering and diverting its immense resources. He also handles wit, sarcasm and scepticism better than the current militant anti-theists do. And be prepared for the unexpected, too, because he isn't as content with the obvious as the God-botherer-botherers are.

Labels: atheism, enlightenment, hitchens, imperialism, islam, religion

The transubstantiation of the Enlightenment posted by Richard Seymour

Dan Hind's new book is out, and I will have a review for you shortly. In the meantime, he has an article about the conscription of the Enlightenment on behalf of expansionist imperialism:

[A]t the level of perception management, the Enlightenment served exactly the same purpose as the religion that is supposed to be its mortal, defining enemy. "Believe what you like, only do not resist", was the watchword of the White House and of Downing Street. You could take your pick from crusades, democratisation or weapons of mass destruction. If you liked your drama really straightforward, you could even believe it was all about a son's righteous thirst for vengeance. Would-be enlightened intellectuals might want to look more closely at an institutional system that was able to use the Enlightenment itself as just one more theme in its campaign to sell an illegal war. It is the virtuosity of the people who brought us the invasion of Iraq, not the vaudevillian villainy of the evangelical right, surely, that should engross the attention of our paladins for truth and justice.

Faith, it is said, is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. Can the enlightened advocates of war in Iraq now deny that they were lost in the fervour of their hopes, that they were deluded as to the nature and purposes of earthly power? This need not lead us to despair of enlightenment, to imagine, as some do, that the hope of material improvement must always decay into murderous utopianism. That is a cheap kind of worldliness, the philosophical equivalent of Damien Hirst's cows in formaldehyde; at once luminously transgressive and entirely safe.

Labels: enlightenment, imperialism, religion