Interview With A Thinking Liberal

[Annie]

Of course, he's a jew, jew, jew:

http://www.democratiya.com/interview.asp?issueid=5

It's long, here's some of what caught my interest:

...

Alan Johnson: And what did you find in common between the Muslim totalitarianism of today and the European totalitarianism of yesterday?



Paul Berman: First, an underlying mythology: people of good who are oppressed by a cosmic conspiracy which is external and internal at the same time; an all-exterminating war of annihilation; and after, the arrival of a grand utopia that is going to be a leap forward into the sci-fi future, and, at the same time, a leap back into a lost golden age. This kind of mythology underlies all the totalitarian movements, in one fashion or another. Second, I thought a lot about Camus's insight that the romantic rebellions of the late 18th century and early 19th century were caught up in a frenzy which became a nihilism – a cult of death, of murder and of suicide. Camus described a strange process that has overtaken one movement after another. The movement begins as a conventional rebellion in the name of principles that can be admired and for reasons that can be understood and applauded. Then they are overtaken by a nihilistic cult of murder and suicide.



It is the combination of these two things—the nihilist cult of murder and suicide on the one hand, the paranoid and utopian mythology on the other hand—that has created the great totalitarian movements. Stalinism, fascism, and Nazism offer variations of this phenomenon. But we ought to be able to see that the Ba'athism of Iraq and the more radical currents of Islamism are likewise variations. They arose in the same period – 1920s and 1930s. They were a little slower than their European cousins in coming to power – in 1979 Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini both came to power, in Iraq and Iran respectively. But, once they did establish their power, these people and their fellow thinkers began to bring about in the Muslim world the same phenomenon that we had already seen in Europe, and this was a wave of mass killings. One of the shocking aspects of the modern world is how vast has been the killing within certain sections of the Muslim world within the last quarter century. There appears to be literally millions of people killed. My interpretation in Terror and Liberalism was that the terrorist attacks of September 11—like those in London and Madrid and other places more recently—ought not to be seen as isolated events. They ought to be seen as the foam from a larger wave. The great mass of the wave has swept across the Muslim world. A few flecks of foam have reached New York and London and other places. The really devastated places have been Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Afghanistan, and so on. By looking at these Muslim events with an eye to the totalitarian past of Europe we can get them into focus a little more clearly. At the same time we can begin to recognise some of our own difficulties in understanding what is going on.



Alan Johnson: Why do liberals insist on treating pathological mass movements as normal rational political movements with grievances that can be negotiated? In 2004, Mo Mowlam (the former Labour Cabinet Minister for Northern Ireland, who died tragically in 2005) proposed that the government sit down with Al Qaeda at the negotiating table just as she had sat with Sinn Fein. How do we explain what you call the 'rationalist naiveté that is shared by almost every part of modern liberal society'?



Paul Berman: The 'rationalist naiveté' is built into liberal civilisation and the liberal idea. It's a very deep thing. Liberalism proposes that people should act rationally and that we want to act rationally. Liberalism's first step is to agree that we want to make a division in our own minds and imaginations between the rational and the theological. We agree to say, 'well, we may have religious ideas, we may believe in divine revelation, we may believe anything we want, in one corner of our minds, but in another corner we are going to try to think things through rationally, according to criteria that can be judged and evaluated and contradicted'. We agree to make this division in our own mind. Then we agree to make this division in society as a whole – the church will stay in this corner and the state will remain in that corner, and each institution will try to remain independent of the other. And we hope that by doing this the state will be able to make rational decisions no matter what the advocates of divine revelation may say. The advocates of divine revelation are free to say what they want but they will say it in the church. The state will operate, hopefully, on the basis of rational discussion, analysis, and free and open debate. The whole presupposition is that by allowing there to be a sphere of rational thought and behaviour we will be able to have a more successful society. And, on balance, the ways this has worked out well have outweighed the ways in which it has worked out badly.



The liberal idea makes us very reluctant to believe that anyone is acting in a non-rational way. In the most naïve version it is imagined that really nobody acts in an irrational way. There are two aspects of this kind of naiveté that are worth commenting on.



First, this kind of naiveté is itself one of the sources of the rebellion against liberalism. There is something appalling, or at least deeply unsatisfying, in the idea that men and women are strictly rational. So people are always tempted to rebel against it. The romantic writers were the first modern people to see this and to want to rebel against the rational calculations of liberal society. They rebelled in the form of literature, which is the right way to rebel, but they saw something, and they were right to see it and to rebel.



Second, the liberal idea comes at a terrible cost in political understanding. In the pre-modern age the rational and the irrational could both be understood. It was possible to think and to speak about such things as the soul in political terms, and to think about distortions and perversions of the soul. This became impossible after the rise of liberalism. Political language became impoverished. If you read Plato, his idea of tyranny is very different from a modern liberal idea of tyranny. For Plato, tyranny is not a system based on bad institutions. It's a perversion of the soul. The tyrant is someone who has lost the proper discipline over his soul and so is lost to his appetites and desires. There is even a fleeting passage or two where Plato mentions the tyrant might succumb to an appetite for cannibalism. This is amazing to see because it means Plato has already identified a cult of death as a temptation, one of the possible perversions of the soul that can take place. This is exactly the kind of thing that—after the rise of liberal ideas—it became harder for people to understand. We took all the questions of the soul, and of virtue, and of the perversions of the soul, and removed them to a corner reserved for religion or psychology. In a different corner we assigned political questions. In the political world, just as in the economic world, we wanted to accord everyone rationality, so we took all the questions of irrationality and put them in a different place entirely. It became very difficult to conceive that people might be behaving in irrational ways or might have succumbed to the allure of a cult of death



Alan Johnson: When you talk about the pathological character of mass movements, the cult of death, and, more recently, about Andre Glucksmann's notion of self-sustaining hatred, are you deliberately trying to overcome this impoverishment of our political language and make it possible for us to speak again of the irrational?



Paul Berman: Yes, this is the whole purpose. I want us to be able to say to ourselves that there are other impulses than rational ones, to recognise these other impulses and discuss them. And here, let me discuss the style of my book. I tried to speak about these things in a variety of tones and at different emotional levels. It is necessary to find new ways of writing and speaking, different from the social sciences, and which can express things lucidly but with emotion. I wrote Terror and Liberalism with the very deliberate notion that there was a stylistic question at issue.


Part 3. Interrogating Terror and Liberalism

Alan Johnson: I want to raise five kinds of criticisms that have been made of Terror and Liberalism and invite you to respond....