Legacies

Madeleine Bunting’s Guardian article from Monday gets better towards the end. It came in for some stick in yesterday’s letters page: one reader saw it as undermining their righteous indignation at “a nihilistically violent and unappeasable strain in Islam”. Apparently it dilutes the reality of the ‘them vs. us’ battle lines which emerged post 7/7. Said reader argues that “the real dead end that many on the left are marching into is in minimizing the gravity of these atrocities in order to brush aside difficult and searching questions about how a liberal, democratic society can function when it contains elements that violently reject liberalism and democracy.”

The implication is of a Left too timid to confront the problem of a ‘them’ objectively (rather than imaginatively) out to get ‘us’. Gravity favours the Right. An interesting view which might have held some water (excuse the pun) pre-Katrina. Today it ignores the reality that liberal democratic states are often the greatest enemy of liberalism and democracy. The primary role of the state, according to even the staunchest of liberalism’s proponents, is to protect the life and property of its citizens. After New Orleans we should rightly be relieved of this misconception.

Bunting’s concern is that ‘muscular liberalism’ with its thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’ has seen only enemies at the gates of liberal Enlightenment values and thereby exaggerated its defence of those values, overlooking the aporia in Enlightenment universalism itself. Quite right, but I’d add a footnote (and a reading list) to what might otherwise seem a rather abstruse point.

Here is a quick list of some of the Enlightenment legacy that we need to keep working on: the relationship of reason to emotion and faith (of all kinds, not just religious, most particularly our faith in humanity); a broader account of human nature beyond the bankrupted belief in the perfectibility of man; more meanings of freedom than the freedom to shop; a much better understanding of what individuality is (rather than the sham version we see lauded today) and its relationship to the collective. From such work, new understandings of progress could emerge.

The difficult relation of reason to emotion and faith is already exhaustively explored in Rousseau’s Emile, Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters, Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, and Goethe’s Faust. Going back to those texts alone will disabuse any reader of a caricature of Enlightenment thinking. More meanings of freedom than the freedom to shop? Rousseau again, this time the Discourse and The Social Contract. And individuality’s relation to the collective? I would mention Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but you’ll think I’m climbing my hobbyhorse.

Comments

[Alain]

YH, you are absolutely right. But in the United States, much of the public debate is centered around the "freedom to shop." Post Katrina, I think revisiting Hegel's remarks on poverty (in the Philosophy of Right) are a good place to start demystifying the self-justifications of Liberalism. In the last couple of weeks I have been thinking about his assertion that the proper functioning of civil society produces an underclass. And as memory serves, he does not really find a satisfactory answer within the logic of either civil society, or the State, to deal with this issue.

[Alain]

Here is one of the passages I was thinking of:

"The lowest subsistence level, that of a rabble of paupers, is fixed automatically, but the minimum varies considerably in different countries. In England, even the very poorest believe that they have rights; this is different from what satisfies the poor in other countries. Poverty in itself does not make men into a rabble; a rabble is created only when there is joined to poverty a disposition of mind, an inner indignation against the rich, against society, against the government, &c. A further consequence of this attitude is that through their dependence on chance men become frivolous and idle, like the Neapolitan lazzaroni for example. In this way there is born in the rabble the evil of lacking self-respect enough to secure subsistence by its own labour and yet at the same time of claiming to receive subsistence as its right. Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another. The important question of how poverty is to be abolished is one of the most disturbing problems which agitate modern society." (Sec 244 Phil of Right)

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prcivils.htm#PRa244

[YH]

Alain,
You're exactly right, and that's how I read 'poverty' in the PoR. More than this, it seems H is suggesting (horreur!) that poverty creates social unrest which then requires police action to control it - a vicious cycle that is endemic to civil society.

[Amie]

YH, I'd love to hear more from you on the texts/questions you mention.
With regard to (re)thinking the Enlightenment, there is another question that is difficult to avoid, which can perhaps be stated in terms of a René Char line that Arendt frequently quoted: "Notre héritage n'est précédé d'aucun testament." (Our inheritance was left to us by no testament.")
Which is to say, the very possibility of legacies, of tradition, of its transmission has been put into question, is no longer (a) given.
So, in order to think the aporias of the Enlightenment, and how liberal democratic states become the enemy of democracy, it is perhaps necessary to think through the texts that test -testify to - this loss of testament?
To quote a famous passage:
"There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another." (WB)

[bat020]

Good points all round, YH. It is quite exasperating how these self-styled "defenders of Enlightenment values" among the pro-war commentariat blithely ignore the constitutive gesture of the Enlightenment, namely critical reflexion.

And you're quite right to note that it is liberal democratic states that are the real enemies of liberalism and democracy. This is the "difficult and searching question" that liberals today brush aside in favour of pandering to racist witchhunts.

Bunting's Guardian articles are typically a little too worthy for my tastes, but this one was sharp. Even more weirdly, the normally idiotic Timothy Garton Ash makes some reasonably sensible points today. Must be something to do with the redesign...

[YH]

Amie, thanks for those points. I'm aware of the Benjamin quote, and a few years back I would have wholeheartedly subscribed to it. Today I'm perhaps a little less sceptical than Benjamin was about the possibilities of a hermeneutics that can rescue past texts from their 'infernal' (Benjamin again) transmission. Might Benjamin have been over-sensitive to the ideological aspect of cultural transmission because of the dark times he was writing in? I tend to believe it's not as difficult as he thought in 1940 to develop a critical hermeneutics. But of course one must be always be wary of how a text is handed down, its cultural baggage, the history of its reception, etc. But there's a lot of good scholarship these days around Enlightenment texts that seems aware of just such issues. I think even reading them oneself without the prejudice of say Chapter One of Dialectic of Enlightenment (which was always my prejudice), is somewhat liberating. I do think the Left needs to take another of Benjamin's bon mots to heart, and read such texts 'against the grain', which today - paradoxically - can include reading them against the grain of an anti-progressivist, historically disillusioned Left, if that makes sense.

[YH]

bat, Critical Reflection is precisely the point. I even find myself having sympathies for Kant these days, having recently read his essay 'On The Common Saying 'This May be True in Theory but it doesn't apply in Practice''. There's some great anticipatory defence of common charges laid against him. You realise how lame was the mid-19thC charge against 'idealism' for being disconnected from 'practice'.