The New Islamists

 

From Olivier Roy’s article:

The longstanding debate over whether Islam and democracy can coexist has
reached a stunning turning point. Since the Arab uprisings began in late
2010, political Islam and democracy have become increasingly
interdependent. The debate over whether they are compatible is now
virtually obsolete. Neither can now survive without the other.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/04/16/the_new_islamists?page=full

 

From: Lawrence

Olivier Roy’s ideas have been much discussed here. I read his Globalized Islam, the Search for a new Ummah, back in 2006. His name comes up often because he is among the most optimistic of the experts on Islam. He is probably the most famous of the optimistic commentators.

Also, Francis Fukuyama in his America at the Crossroads invoked Roy as representing his personal view about the condition of Islam, Islamism, etc. This isn’t surprising, although most people would place Fukuyama on the Right because Fukuyama argued in his The End of History that Liberal Democracy had defeated its rivals Communism and Fascism and there was nothing else out there but dibs and drabs that would be swept up by Liberal Democracy in the course of time. His The End of History was written in 1992 and at the time he saw no reason to take the Islamist threat seriously.

Of course if Fukuyama did take the Islamist threat seriously he would have to revise his “end of history” thesis and move a bit closer to the theory (Clash of Civilizations) of his mentor Samuel P. Huntington.

The “Islamism is a threat” versus the “Islamism is not a threat” debate does not break down cleanly into Left and Right camps. Olivier Roy and Francis Fukuyama argue that Islamism is not a (strategic) threat, but notice that they are both concluding that Islamism is not a threat to Liberal Democracy.

If we were to construct a spectrum of the views regarding Islamism, we would put “threat” at one end, quantified let us say as 10 and “not a threat” at the other, quantified let us say as “0.” Many earlier commentators (close to the “0” wing) wanted to see Islamists as just another “wretched of the earth” group, i.e., to view it in Marxist’s terms. Others thought that while it isn’t a serious threat, Liberal Democracy deserves some abuse for all the evil it did to its opponents over the years.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who believe we are in a life and death struggle. There is an international conspiracy involving dedicated groups bent upon the destruction of the West. Oriana Fallaci and Bat Ye’or are examples of that extreme.

In my own case I have fluctuated between, perhaps, 5 and 7, arguing that Roy and Fukuyama may be right but it is too soon to tell. Also, it is never prudent to assume that a declared enemy is in reality either benign or inept. Prudence demands that a nation’s leaders take declared threats seriously.

In Roy’s article we see “liberal” indications in the Islamic world, e.g., the advancement of women’s rights, but notice that he also says that the Xenophobia against the West has not abated. Throughout the Islamic world, hatred against the West, especially the U.S. and Israel has not diminished. So there is no reason to believe quite yet that a cornerstone of the Liberal part of Liberal Democracy, “tolerance,” is under construction. After all, the Soviets marshaled their women as did the Fascists. Granting equal rights for women does not necessarily make a nation more liberal.

Hayden White and his Tarkegger trope

Back on May 20, 2010 in a fit of frustration over Heidegger’s Nazi involvement I wrote a little poetic fable called “Tarkegger’s Culpability”: http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/tarkeggers-culpability.html

Two days later I wrote “Tarkegger, Heidegger, Foucault, Hayden White, etc.”: http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/tarkegger-heidegger-foucault-hayden.html At the end of which I wrote “. . . I began wondering what sort of "trope" White would call "Tarkegger." I rarely consider such things as tropes, but White would have. Would White call it "irony"? Perhaps, but I wasn't feeling ironic when I wrote it. But had history developed as portrayed in "Tarkegger's Culpability," its reflection upon Heidegger's "infantile hopes for the future" and "faith in a benign [German] human nature" might have seemed ironic to the survivors -- although by that time some other trope might seem more appropriate, something more malign and involving a ravenous pack of wolves.”

Hayden White read those two articles and commented,

“Tarkegger? It is an anacolouthon.”

I wondered what trope White would apply to Tarkegger the person, but on a first reading I took White to be applying “anacoluthon” to the fable and not the person. Given that reading, any fable would be an anacoluthon in that it isn’t going to follow logically from the concept that gave rise to it. It will jump into another sphere which will have a connection, hopefully not too tenuous, to the jumping off place.

On the second reading I took White to be applying “anacoluthon” to both Tarkegger and Heidegger in the sense that there is no logical connection between them and the conclusions critics have drawn about them. To draw the conclusion more clearly he would be saying that there is a disconnect, an anacoluthon, between the evidence that exists about Heidegger’s Nazi involvement and the conclusions his critics have drawn. If that is what White intends then he would be interpreting my fable as I intended.

On a third reading and with the Deconstructionists in mind White might be saying that there is a disconnect between what Heidegger actually thought and did and my interpretation of what he thought and did. My fable in this sense would be an anacoluthon because it didn’t follow from the historical evidence. I can’t be sure that White didn’t intend this third interpretation – I hope he didn’t, but if he did I would in my own defense refer him to my earlier articles on Heidegger in which I accuse his critics (with better evidence I will assert) of this very thing.

On a fourth reading I wondered whether White was referring more generally to the difficulty of interpreting history based upon not-fully-understood culture. Those who comment upon Heidegger’s Nazi associations make assumptions about the cultural influences that inspired Heidegger. Some of those who assert the worst imagine those cultural influences to be not dissimilar from those that inspired the Nazis themselves. Those willing to view Heidegger’s politics as being similar to Thomas Carlyle’s, engage in a more benign interpretation. All these interpretations whether favorable or unfavorable are anacoluthons in the sense that there is a disconnect between the existing evidence and what is concluded about Heidegger’s character and politics. The gap is bridged by the prejudices of his critics.

On Sartre and the French Resistance

For someone who hasn’t read recent works on Sartre, the Resistance, and the aftermath of the Vichy period, a few quotes might be helpful:

Michael Curtis in his Verdict on Vichy, Power and Prejudice in the Vichy France Regime written in 2002 wrote “The Myth of a heroic Resistance movement, cultivated by the media and intellectuals in post-war years, has been dispelled in many works over the last two decades. Relatively few, such as the writers Rene Char and Paul Eluard, were courageous in defying the Occupation in their work. On the part or prominent writers – Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, Jules Romains, Roger Martin du Gard, even Andre Malraux until nearly the end of the war – the rule was silence or inaction. This silence was even more deafening in the case of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvior, who so strongly influenced the climate of intellectual opinion after the war, because of their claim not only that they took part in the Resistance in a significant way, but that their courageous defiance inspired their conduct in peacetime.”

On page 232 Curtis writes, “In view of Sartre’s well-constructed self-image as a courageous fighter for freedom against oppression and discrimination . . . [Curtis then discusses some of Sartre’s works].

On page 235 Curtis writes, “One of Jean-Paul Sartre’s magisterial utterances is that ‘the writer is situation in his time: each word has its reverberation, each silence also. I hold Flaubert and Goncourt responsible for the repression that followed the Commune because they did not write a line to prevent it. Balsas, many great writers were silent about Vichy: Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, Jules Romains, Roger Martin du Gard, Andre Malraux until the eleventh hour, and Jean-Paul Sartre.”

On Page 236 Curtis writes, “Barely leaving his table at the Café de Flore in Paris, Sartre began assuming his various mantles; popular author, admired intellectual, sponsor of avant-garde literature, formulator of a new French form of philosophy and potential endorser of resistance. He wrote in Comoedia, a collaborationist weekly backed by German money. His play Les Mouches and his book Being and Nothingness were approved by the German censors. He even, acccording to one critic, drank champagne with the Nazis at the opening of his play. He was blind to Auschwitz.”

Tony Judt on page 46 of Past Imperfect, French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 wrote, “The initial postwar myth claimed that although fighting Resistance may have been a minority, it was supported and assisted by ‘the mass of the nation,’ united in its desire for a German defeat. Only Laval, Petain, and their henchmen felt or acted otherwise. This was the official Communist position. It was largely echoed by the Gaullists, who insisted in their turn that the Resistance had been the natural reflex of a nation faithful to its historical traditions; the ‘insurrection’ of the summer of 1944 was singled out as a ‘popular tidal wave surpassing in its dimensions all such uprisings in the past.’ Although there were from the start those who acknowledged how small and isolated resistance had been, their voice was drowned by the chorus of mutual admiration. In a book published in 1945, Louis Parrot would write of the ‘pure heroism’ of Aragon and his wife Elsa Triolet, the ‘audacious courage’ of Paul Eluard, and the ‘subtly dangerous game’ played by Jean-Paul Sartre, practicing ‘open clandestinity’ in the face of the occupying authorities. This is drivel of course, but it is at least ecumenical drivel: everyone was good.”

Earlier Judt (on page 32) wrote “After the fall of France . . . when excuses for collaboration or compromise became harder to find, intellectuals would find themselves discovering in the very act of political disobedience the freedom they would later defend. The dilemma between ‘being’ and ‘doing,’ which had seemed so significant before the war, collapsed. To do was to be: no longer a universal consciousness vested in a singular self, the intellectual was bound within the organic community and there presented with apparently simple choices, all of which entailed action of one sort or another. Being part of the common purpose, accepting as one’s own the meaning given to a collective action, offered certainty in place of doubt: the intellectual resister took on a mantle of confidence and shed the cloak of insecurity that had shrouded the previous generation.

“Why did some intellectuals find this confidence and others not? For some people, the explanation lies in their disillusion with the initial expectations placed in Vichy; others never harbored illusions in the first place but could only be brought to defend what became the values of the resistance once they had recovered from the shock of defeat and had been sufficiently moved to protest the policies and practices of occupiers and collaborators alike. Third category, which should include men such as Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, seem to have been waiting for some such moment all their lives, so enthusiastically did they welcome the chance to be part of a romantic commitment whose scope and meaning would transcend, transform, and give practical effect to their earlier writings. The chance was welcomed mostly in theory, however, in practice only a minority of intellectual resisters saw real action of any sustained sort, whether in the Free French armies, the armed resistance, or clandestine networks of all kinds. For most of the rest, it was the association with the community of resisters that counted, the sense of being part of something larger than oneself – a circle of dissenting writers, a resistance group, a clandestine political organization, or History itself.”

Antony Beevor in his Paris After the Liberation, 1944-1949 references Judt (although I can’t tell which of Judt’s books he has in mind) when he writes “On the subject of Politically engaged intellectuals in France – whether Drieu, Brasillach, Malraux or Sartre – Professor Judt has observed that their fascination with violence contained a ‘quasi-erotic charge’. It underlines the fact that while it has long been long been easy to mock Hemingway, the posturing of French intellectuals, although more sophisticated, demonstrated an arrogant irresponsibility which was far more dangerous and dishonest. Sartre tried to reconcile existentialism with his new phase of revolutionary commitment, but predictably it failed to be anything more and an exercise in verbose sophistry. By the end of his life he even began to justify terrorist action.”

A book I haven’t read is Quiet Moments in a War, a collection of letters written by Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir which Amazon.com describes as “A collection of letters by the author of Being and Nothingness depicts Sartre as a soldier, a prisoner of the Germans, and a man of Resistance and charts his path to fame with the publication of his major works.”

Jonathan Fenby in France on the Brink on page 269 wrote “. . . one French literary historian remarked acidly of the country’s most famous post-war couple; ‘On 11 August 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir entered the Resistance, at the same moment as the Paris police.’

The Western Canon and the Politically Correct

In the past people educated in the West were confronted by the "classics," whether painting, music, literature and told that the critical consensus of the past declared them to be "good art, great art, works of genius" and the like. I spent a lot of time in my early years determining for myself whether I agreed with this assessment, and while I took exception to a novelist here and a poet there, I took the Western "Standard" seriously. Harold Bloom and others argue that ongoing art must measure up to the standards of the past. His Western Canon is in pursuit of that goal. He presents his view as to which works of art are good enough. He disparages, as do some of the rest of us, writings that modern-day students are being subjected to because someone considers them politically relevant, important, and therefore in a sense that doesn't correspond to "good art" good.

Bloom and others (Thomas Hart being among them) have examined some of this Politically relevant (and therefore "correct" and "good") art and argues that students are being "brain-washed" into thinking these writings are "good" because someone argues that they are "relevant to modern circumstances and that "right and wrong" need to be addressed, and, it goes without saying "right" is good and "wrong" is bad. And "art" can be anything anyone says it is (all of us being equal and no one better than anyone else). Therefore, What "right," do narrow-minded, bigoted, white-Anglo-Saxon male authority figures of the past have to tell us that Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Milton, Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, or anyone else in their "canon" has created "good art"? We will decide for ourselves what good art is. And so they do. They emphasize Women's Rights, Gay Rights, Minority Rights, and teach students about the value of representative writers in each of these categories.

In case someone reading this has already been brain-washed, we (Thomas Hart, Harold & Alan Bloom & I) aren't saying that Women's Rights, Minority Rights, and Gay Rights shouldn't be argued. We just don't think they should be argued under the heading of Literature, Poetry, Painting, Music, etc. If they can't measure up to, or at least approach the great artists of the past, then they shouldn't be presented to present-day students as artists worthy of consideration. Edmund Wilson's essay on "Marxism and Literature" addresses this principle.

In the days when I was taking issue with everything anyone said, I didn't automatically accept the Western "Canon" as being as exclusive as some said it was. I wanted to find writers that weren't in it that I thought should be. I recall spending a lot of time reading Jack London. I came across his Iron Heel, which lived up to the Marxist "politically correct" standards favored by Stalin and Granville Hicks. It was indeed Politically Correct. It held to the Communist "Party Line" quite well, but if we ask the question, which apparently isn't being asked as often as it once was, how does "The Iron Heel" measure up as a work of art, even if we are Marxists, if we are also honest we will admit that it is pretty poor.

Better than London's The Iron Heel and Weatherwax's Marching, Marching, were some of the "Muckrakers." My time was a little past theirs, but I could appreciate the "political correctness" of them nonetheless. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Frank Norris' The Octopus were perhaps the best. I very much agreed with the sentiments expressed, but couldn't argue that they were great or even good novels, although Bloom includes The Octopus in his Western Canon collection.

If the Western Canon excluded women, gay, and minority writers because they were not Anglo-Saxon-White males, that would be unjust and no credit to artistic excellence. On the other hand if artists are being erased from the Western Canon because they are Anglo-Saxon-White males, then surely that is equally unjust.

Re, Marxism and Political Correctness

I used what Wilson wrote about Marxism to infer that literary excellence cannot be made to order by a system (or an ism).  Wilson admired what Marx, Engels & Lenin said about literature.  But their followers in attempting to make a Party-Line System (as the American Communist Granville Hicks did) to guarantee great literature had  the opposite effect and not only that discouraged writers potentially capable of great literature from pursuing such a goal. 

Wilson was sympathetic to Marxism and the USSR until the Stalin Show Trials; which occurred in 1936 & 1937.  I previously said this essay was published in 1948 based on the copyright info in the front of my book (the Library of America), but Wikipedia says this essay was first appeared in 1938.  I’m inclined to think Wikipedia correct.  Wilson was contemptuous of the Literary “party line” mandated by Stalinism and Granville Hicks, but not of the views of Marx, Engels or Lenin.

No ism can mandate great literature.  The writer must be free to write whatever he wants, and if a writer has written something great (for “great” consider the classics or the lists appearing in Bloom’s The Western Canon), the greatness judges the critic, not the other way around.  Critics don’t make great literature.  If the critics are worthy of that title, they will recognize greatness when they see it. 

Wilson’s point back in 1938 can be seen as an apology for the direction Communism had taken Marxism on the subject of literature.  Marx, Engels and Lenin (Wilson tells us) knew better than to try and force Political Correctness down the throats of Russian artists, but Stalin hadn’t the sensitivity or cultural acumen to follow suit.  Stalin and the critics that answered to him, having the power, mandated political correctness and the result, Wilson tells us, was ludicrous.  Mandated Political Correctness didn’t produce great literature in Stalinist Russia nor the Third Reich.  It isn’t likely that it will do any better in 21^st Century America. 

Marxism and Political Correctness

In 1946 Edmund Wilson published an essay entitled “Marxism and Literature.” It appeared in the collection entitled The Triple Thinkers. It is worth considering whether modern-American “Politically Correct” English professors are prone to errors similar to the ones Wilson criticizes. He writes, “. . . Marxism by itself can tell us nothing whatever about the goodness or badness of a work of art. A man may be an excellent Marxist, but if he lacks imagination and taste he will be unable to make the choice between a good and an inferior book both of which are ideologically unexceptionable.”

Wilson hastens to add that it is good to throw light on the origins and social significance of works of art. “The study of literature in its relation to society is as old as Herder – even Vico. Coleridge had flashes of insight into the connection between literary and social phenomena, as when he saw the Greek state in the Greek sentence and the individualism of the English in the short separate statements of Chaucer’s Prologue. . . But if Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky are worth listening to on the subject of books, it is not merely because they created Marxism, but also because they were capable of literary appreciation.”

Wilson writes that “Marx and Engels, unlike their followers, never attempted to furnish social-economic formulas by which the validity of works of art might be tested. They had grown up in the sunset of Goethe before the great age of German literature was over, and they had both set out in their youth to be poets; they responded to imaginative work, first of all, on its artistic merits.” Surely we should be doing the same thing today. We should first of all strive to appreciate imaginative work on its artistic merits. Secondarily we can study these imaginative works “in relation to society.”

Wilson warns, “. . . the man who tries to apply Marxist principles without real understanding of literature is liable to go horribly wrong. For one thing, it is usually true in works of the highest order that the purport is not a simple message, but a complex vision of things, which itself is not explicit but implicit; and the reader who does not grasp them artistically, but is merely looking for simple social morals, is certain to be hopelessly confused. Especially will he be confused if the author does draw an explicit moral which is the opposite of or has nothing to do with his real purport. Fredrich Engels, in the letter to Margaret Harkness . . . in warning her that the more the novelist allows his political ideas to ‘remain hidden, the better it is for the work of art,’ says that Balzac, with his reactionary opinions, is worth a thousand of Zola, with all his democratic ones. . . When Proust, in his wonderful chapter on the death of the novelist Bergotte, speaks of those moral obligations which impose themselves in spite of everything and which seem to come through to humanity from some source outside its wretched self (obligations ‘invisible only to fools . . .’), he is describing a kind of duty which he felt only in connection with the literary work which he performed in his dark and fetid room; yet he speaks for every moral, esthetic, or intellectual passion which holds the expediencies of the world in contempt.”

Wilson writes, “The Leftist critic with no literary competence is always trying to measure works of literature by tests which have no validity in that field.”

Attacking Iran -- moral implications

My first note presented some controversies but didn’t take sides in order to imagine a time when all has been resolved, much as Fukuyama says that one day it will be.

Perhaps it would be helpful to consider both why we ought to attack Iran and why we should not. Matthew Kroenig argues (all the while considering the alternatives) that we should. Kroenig’s article, “Time to Attack Iran, Why a Strike is the least bad option” appears in the January/February 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs. Matthew Kroenig is “Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons. From July 2010 to July 2011, he was Special Adviser in the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, responsible for defense strategy and policy on Iran.”

While you can’t read Kroenig’s article online, you can read opposing responses to it on the Foreign Affairs web site, e.g., http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/137036/alexandre-debs-and-nuno-p-monteiro/the-flawed-logic-of-striking-iran

The controversy bears a resemblance to war vs. antiwar arguments prior to World War Two. Certain French Generals can in retrospect be seen to have gotten it right. France should have poured more money into defense. French leaders were arguing that France couldn’t afford to, just as there are those today arguing that we can’t afford to do anything about Iran. But in retrospect, if we go a short way up the mountain, we can look back at the cost to France and say without fear of disagreement, that the cost would have been far less to France if they had beefed up their military and dealt with Hitler in the early days of his violations of Germany’s post-WWI agreements. But France dithered as Hitler became stronger and stronger.

We in the U.S. are going to do one thing or the other. We are going to attack Iran or we are not, and we cannot know in advance which option will be the least expensive. Yes, we can say with the pre-WWII French leaders, the cost of arms is expensive, but will we after our opponent (in this case Iran) does whatever it is going to do, decide that we have made the right decision, and are taking all possible expenses into consideration? In France’s case it is clear that they did not make the right decision. If we do nothing will we have to say the same thing later on? Or will a new, mini-cold war, seem preferable and indeed have its benefits?

If we do nothing, as Kroenig argues, and Iran develops nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia is sure to want them as well. We are going to have to step up and either dole them out to Saudi Arabia and our other Middle-Eastern allies, or promise we will guard such states with permanently deployed ship-board and airborne nuclear weapons. It might in the long run cost far more to keep a fleet permanently in the region than it would be to knock out all or most of Iran’s nuclear capability in a single strike.

Do we have moral arguments for a preemptive strike against Iran? Iranian leaders have threatened Israel and Britain. Are these and similar threats sufficient to warrant a preemptive strike from a moral standpoint? A case can certainly be made. Iran engages in human-rights violations. Such violations are intrinsic to Islamic Fundamentalism. Iran is guilty of intolerance against non-Islamic religions and has vowed to destroy both Christianity and Judaism, especially the latter. Hitler voiced similar threats in his Mein Kampf, but they were discounted as meaningless bluster until he actually carried them out. Are we justified (or more importantly is Israel justified) in discounting the words of Ahmadinejad?

There will be many in the military who realize that more money will be pumped into weaponry and maintenance if we do not strike Iran preemptively and Iran is allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. A preemptive strike would use a minimum amount of weaponry during a limited time. But if we do not strike Iran preemptively and have instead to guard the region indefinitely with our war ships and planes, the Navy and Air Force will be assured of ongoing congressional support for new weaponry and military forces indefinitely.

In our Liberal Democracy there are many agendas besides the moral one that we might consider. And one can by no means assume that the current democratic president will be less likely to conduct a preemptive strike against Iran the Republican he defeated. One can imagine Obama’s advisors weighing the options and telling him that the voting public isn’t going to want to unseat him if he is in the midst of a military action – a strike against Iran at the right time might be the surest path to reelection.