Thomas de Zengotita, Common Ground ,part 2
This is so simple--maybe that's the problem. Maybe intellectuals who spent decades in obscure hermeneutical debate over the illusion of Presence just can't see their way to resolutions this simple. You can align yourself with humanist ideas of modem progress without committing yourself to defending what modernity actually did. What's wrong with that? You can say that science provides a truer account of the material world than myth does, but you can also say that the dualistic worldview that made science possible is implicated in a devastating exploitation of nature, in a degradation of the earth, that may already be irreversible. In effect, you don't have to believe that astrology is as good as astronomy to defend the rights of people who believe in strology. You can say that the Bill of Rights provides a better foundation for a just society than any theology provides but that the selectivity of its application has been a monstrous injustice. What's wrong with saying these things?
In fact, isn't a lot of the anti-American feeling you have stored up actually based on the disparity between those principles and reality? Between the noble words and daily routines of slave-holding Founding Fathers? Between saccharine-sweet ads for pharmaceutical companies and their vile patent-profiteering in Africa? Between pious blather about leaving no child behind and the reality of resource distribution in our schools? In your heart of hearts, do you in fact hold the West to a higher standard, not just because you live here but because the standard set forth is higher? Isn't the betrayal of humanist principles what gets to you, at bottom? Wasn't that what outraged you initially, in your youth, when you first realized what was going on behind the facade, when you first set out on the path of progressive political engagement?
You certainly don't approve of the way China harvests organs from executed prisoners, for example. Ten thousand sentenced to death last year, and some were still alive when the organs were extracted (the fresher the kidney, the more customer satisfaction--and not mainly for Western markets, sorry). Imagine if our privatized prison systems were doing that. Imagine the uproar, imagine how you would feel. You just don't feel that outrage when it's China. Why not? Is it really just because it's another place, far away, a place in which you have no direct stake or responsibility? Or is it also because that outrage just doesn't kick in, the way it did, for example, if you read descriptions of Governor Bush mocking a condemned woman to whom he had refused clemency? Or, if you do feel a comparable outrage, isn't it because China once seemed to represent the socialist experiment, itself derived from the secular humanist principles in question? In that case, the betrayal of those principles is once again a factor. There is a lot of slavery in Africa and Asia right now. Figures show more slaves there right now than were taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade. But somehow that doesn't get you that worked up. Maybe in some way you don't--as a matter of emotional fact--blame the slaveholders so much in this case as you blame postcolonial contexts? So, somehow, African slaveholders in Sudan aren't full moral agents? How could that be?
So what's the answer? Do you or don't you hold the modem West to a higher standard, and is that standard more or less the classic Enlightenment standard of human equity or not? I'm not saying you shouldn't do this, by the way--just in case your mind is so pulverized by pragmatist attacks on the idea of ideals that you think that's where I'm going. My point is that you should start doing it explicitly and affirmatively, because your political convictions are actually grounded in this ideal, no matter how ensnared your rhetoric may be in the intricacies of postmodernism.
Try it this way: If you are a member of an historically marginalized group, doesn't the outrage that motivates your politics derive from a gut sense of the violation of basic justice inherent in historical arrangements as well as from the harm that you and yours have suffered? It's hard to distinguish the sources, but try. And if you are not a member of such a group, ask yourself this: Why do you even care? If you are a straight white man with middle-class advantages, why aren't you a Republican? That would obviously be in your interest, in any Nietzschean sense of the word that might be accepted by post-modern political thought. So what's the story here? Isn't it true that your politics are, at bottom, motivated by Enlightenment ideals?
It will only hurt for a minute if you confess.
And the benefits will be many.
For example. Notice that when you confront the right with Europe's genocidal imperialism and the hypocrisy of the Founding Fathers, and argue for restitutional policies based on that history, then they start up about different historical periods, standards of the time, and so on. But there is no systematic way for progressives to unmask this outrageous maneuver from these supposed critics of relativism, because we have relinquished the principles that would expose this hypocrisy. We have, in effect, allowed the right to abscond with the very categories of political philosophy that have nourished progressive movements since the seventeenth century.
Think of the leverage we lost when we gave up on that simple story of progress, especially in relation to the young, for whom "fairness," embryo of the ideal of justice, is so fundamental. What a relief it would be if we could once again summarize modern political history by describing it as a struggle to apply the principles of Enlightenment humanism in accordance with their inherent logic. Because isn't that what we were doing in the movements for civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, and in the labor movements of long ago as well?(E) Isn't that what has been going on all along?
And yet we refuse to describe it that way anymore. No wonder so many of us are reduced, once again, but even more so, to ad hoc mockery and purely negative critique. No wonder those pictures of women shedding their burkas could do so much to dilute a progressive response to Bush's conduct of that war--even though, as of this writing, and in spite of all the bogus promises, essential supplies are still not reaching untold numbers of desperate Afghans, however dressed. And is that not obviously what should be concerning us, according to that deepest principle, the equal worth of every human life?
This appeal will not reach everyone. Some people process every event automatically. Whatever scheme they already have always applies. This argument will mean nothing to them, unless it accidentally supplies some grist for their omnivorous mill. Other people really are locally motivated. Their politics are based entirely on the experience of being gay or the loss of a loved one to handgun violence or empathy for animals in pain, and they really aren't moved by general principles. So be it.
Pragmatists like Rorty and Fish may also decline this proffer. They will say, Sure, let's invoke that Enlightenment principle when it works for us, but not when it doesn't. So be it, again. Welcome to the coalition, whenever it suits you. There is no ontological litmus test.
But this argument is really meant for people who find themselves genuinely troubled by questions--and they are questions--like these:
� Is there no progressive figure or movement with mass indigenous support in the Islamic world to serve as a rallying point for Western progressives, analogous to Mandela's ANC, say? If not, why not?
� Why do so many critics of U.S. policy and corporate depredation habitually exaggerate when drawing up their bill of particulars? The truth is bad enough; why the litany of ultimately counterproductive exaggerations?
� At the end of the day, what should overdeveloped countries actually be doing in the area of immigration? Can progressives afford to confine themselves to supporting due process against the INS on the one hand and disdaining Pat Buchanan on the other? What should our immigration policies actually be?
� What about the utter failure of the Democratic Party to represent the interests of a dwindling middle class, not to mention the poor, in the face of corporate hegemony? Why is there not even one likely candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2004 who can risk the charge of "class warfare" and lead a movement against those malefactors of great wealth? Not one. That gaping void should give pause to progressives who followed Bill and Hillary and Jesse Jackson as they followed the money down their pragmatical path.
� Should progressives consider resurrecting their traditional hostility toward religious literalism? Think about it--in Israel and Palestine, India and Pakistan, Islamic fundamentalism all over the world, Christian fundamentalism at home--this is an horrific force, and the tide is rising. We are talking mass delusion here, aren't we? Maybe it's time to say so again.
� Similarly for belief systems in general. Have we collaborated too much with irrationality? Has anthropological relativism and philosophical constructivism, once so liberating, returned to haunt us in the form of an indiscriminate possibilism? Are we responsible for the fact that our top graduate schools are now full of people who think, Hey, alien abductions, psychic readings--it's possible, who knows, who really knows anything? And what about the youthful apathy and irony we so regularly lament? Progressives were running a lot of educational institutions while those attitudes were taking root. Why did our deconstruction of dominant discourses not inspire our students the way it inspired us? Was it because we were taken in by a canon that celebrated Western achievements and marginalized the others of the world while they've been exposed to the Other ever since we had them include the Native American point of view in their kindergarten Thanksgiving project and taught them why they shouldn't say that Columbus discovered America? Was it because, for them, what we have been deconstructing was never really a construct? Because, for them, all constructs have become options on a leveled playing field of optionality, so that after a while--well, who's to judge? Is that why a group of bright high school seniors of my acquaintance, after twelve years of exposure to emancipatory multi cultural curricula, could watch the film Gandhi and then discuss whether or not it was "biased" because it didn't give the "British point of view"?
Enlightenment principles could inform progressive responses to these questions, and to many more, but they will not provide the deductive certainty to which Bentham once aspired. In fact, the first consequence of a discussion of specifics among people committed to the equity axiom will be to expose what remains of our affirmative agenda for what it is: a shallow and selective laundry list that caters to the short-term interests of various constituencies claiming space under the umbrella, no matter how incoherent the net effect. As when, for example, the largest gay-rights organization in New York cuts a deal to support George Pataki against the first African American in that state ever to have a real shot at becoming governor.
Hopeful imagery involving mosaics and rainbows can no longer mask the truth. Except for undeniable gains made by certain members of certain groups in privileged Western countries, things are getting steadily worse for the wretched of the earth and for the earth itself. In the face of this trend, the response has been--incredibly--to repudiate the very notion of ideological unity, though the cause of progress will surely suffer if only fanatics and imperialists can achieve it. The obvious move is to work out such an ideology, one that embraces diversity and transcends it.
Outlining in any detail what such ideological unity would look like goes far beyond the scope of this essay. Unresolved philosophical issues--essentially pitting sheer material need in some places against customary expectations in other places--would divide progressives at the outset. At the level of policy, judgments about probable outcomes for citizens of the world would have to be made, and very technical disputes would immediately arise. But the commitment in all these debates would be to all those citizens equally. That would be the common ground. That would be the criterion to which all were bound. And that would be a major step forward.
On a tactical level, the advantage of returning to this foundation is immediately apparent. It would allow us to force the bully boys of American Empire to deny the equal value of every human life. They would have to stand up in public forums, in schools and colleges, and explain why the lives of our babies are more valuable than the lives of other peoples' babies. To take it to the root, they would be forced to admit that, when they call people on the American left "decadent" because they didn't react "naturally" to an attack on their own country, the "natural" they are invoking is not the natural of The Second Treatise of Government. Quite the contrary. The "natural" they are invoking is the natural of Darwinian selection and tribalism, the natural of passion and vengeance, the natural of what the Enlightenment called "faction."(F) This "natural" Locke associated with the Fall, and a cosmopolitan Enlightenment explicitly set out to overcome it with modern ideas of rights and reason. Let us force self-appointed defenders of the Western tradition to this admission: it is they who are betraying its highest claim to universality. We remain true to it.
But let us confront ourselves at the same time, along these lines:
Have you actually become (or were you always) just a liberal after all? Were your pretensions to radicalism mostly a matter of style, of self-image? Have you been working for the realization of something beyond bourgeois democracy--or have you just been aiming for reform? If what your politics really envisions is Global New Deal meets Respect for Diversity, that's one thing. That means you are a liberal. That means you basically accept a world system of private enterprise and technological innovation and consumer culture, and you want to see it managed so that no one is excluded, the environment is protected, free expression flourishes, and so on. And you can be very active in all sorts of obvious ways, if this is what you are.
If, on the other hand, you are a radical, the ironic implication is this: there isn't much to do right now to distinguish yourself from liberals. Toss a few rocks at a Starbucks during the next WTO meeting if you want, but don't mistake such gestures for genuinely radical responses. What radicals should be doing right now is studying and thinking. You need to put in your ten years at the library, the way Marx did. You need to be figuring out what makes human beings tick and what, if any, direction is to be found in history. And I don't mean some half-assed sci-fi anarcho-Gaia nonsense you cobbled together before you dropped out of Bard; I mean serious study, working toward an alternative to a global bourgeois democracy. What radicals need most right now isn't action but theory.
But to any progressive, liberal or radical, inclined to do more than claim that you were right all along, to anyone inclined to rethink politics in a serious way, to anyone for whom the humanist revelation at the heart of the idea of progress still lives--to you I say, if you can't make a move without support from a French intellectual, put down your Foucault. Take up your Voltaire.
(A)To take just the most salient case in point: were it not for identity politics, the degree of xenophobic racism m the American response to 9/11 would have been much worse -- more indiscriminate bombing in Afghanistan, more attacks on innocent Muslims in this country, more stereotyping in the press, the whole shebang. We owe what tolerance we that display to institutionalized values of diversity and to the people who have worked for that institutionalized, especially in education. The insistence of the authorities, however condescending, on distinguishing between terrorists and Islam was driven by strategic and tactical calculations, but good old political correctness paved the way.
(B) Which is not to say that establishing the ontology of such principles is easy or unimportant. Heavy philosophical lifting will be required. The Enlightenment analysis depended on a no longer credible belief in natural design. Providing an alternative account -- perhaps a phenomenological account--should be a primary task for progressive intellectuals. But the question here is not, What are these things we call "principles"? It is only, Are these principles actually at work in us?
(C) Commitment to this principle does not entail indiscriminate approval of anything anybody says or makes. Arguments about relativism and objectivism, intellectual and aesthetic standards, etc., can go on quite consistently between people otherwise committed to political equity.
(D) Did they also deploy the most outrageous justifications and rationalizations for excluding women and savages from the purview of their principles? They did that too, yes, but once again you don't have to. It's the principles themselves to which I am appealing.
(E) There is a direct line from Locke's natural right to property based on the value of an individual's labor as against the institutionalized claims of monarchs and Marx's evaluation of social labor as against the institutionalized claims of capitalists. The Hegelianized subject of socialism is as modern as the bourgeois individual, and the narrative of progress, rooted in Enlightenment humanism, comprehends both--in spite of the political and philosophical differences between them.
(F) And, it must be admitted, the "natural" to which postmodern identity discourses unwittingly acceded as they jettisoned the very concept. |
