Thomas de Zengotita, Common Ground : Finding our way back to the enlightenment
Harper's Magazine, 0017789X, Jan2003, Vol. 306, Issue 1832
[ Have you read this, John? I'd be interested in your thoughts. I found it a little strange to read that this postmodern stuff is actually taken seriously by some on the political front in the first place. Shows what I know.
In full, 2 parts, link not available. ]
The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
--Martin Luther King
First, an anecdote. A friend of mine, very committed and active, a teacher of postcolonial history--he responded immediately and passionately to 9/11. He spoke out loud and clear, holding the United States' support for corrupt and terrorizing regimes historically responsible for the conditions that produced the terrorists and shaped the views of the millions who applauded their action. He insisted on the difference between explanation and justification, but the intensity of his convictions made him controversial--anonymous denunciations to the administration, that sort of thing--and I often found myself defending him.
Now, it happens that my friend had lost a brother to terrorism on Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, something I was quick to point out, since it testified to the authenticity of his convictions. And that's essential, because people inclined to go with the flow want to believe that outspoken critics are striking self-important poses. One woman I talked to, who understood traumatic loss from personal experience, zeroed in on this piece of information: "That's what I don't get," she said. "How could Mr. D. think the way he does after what happened to him? It doesn't seem natural."
"Natural." That's the word to watch.
Like most decent people living normal lives, this woman has no interest in social and economic history. No serious study informs her political opinions. For Ms. S. life is about job and family and friends, and if events in the world occasionally intrude, she takes account of them as best she can, gleaning impressions from media coverage, from chance encounters with persuasive people, from her personal feelings for public figures, and from the mood in her immediate milieu. That's why she could put her finger so precisely on the reason most people don't pay attention to radical critics. It just doesn't seem natural to be so intensely involved with events in distant times and places at the expense of living the way most people do--invested in one's daily surroundings. It seems almost perverse.
Inspired by some passing muse, my reply to her went something like this: "Mr. D.'s core belief is that every human life is as valuable as every other human life, that every mother's loss, every brother's loss, is as terrible as any other. He also believes that, beginning with the conquest of the world by invading Europeans, we have inflicted untold millions of such losses and have continued to do so up through the Vietnam War and, more indirectly, to this day..."
Ms. S. nodded as I went along, but I could see she thought I was evading the issue until I added, "and I am sure that within a few days, maybe a few hours, of hearing the news about his brother, Mr. D. thought about all those millions of anonymous losses, thought about how each one was like this one, the one that happened to be his."
At first she wanted to reject this whole notion, find some way to disbelieve it, call it crazy. But then she said, "I didn't know politics could go that deep."
The more I think about it, the more striking it is that politics does go that deep for some people. As a matter of life habit, they identify intensely with (and against) multitudes of represented strangers--reading about them constantly, hating these, supporting those--while other people, most people, just don't. Except during a crisis, when fear is upon them, when they rally around the obvious rallying point, swept along in whatever direction the powers that be want to go.
Political activists need to think about this. It isn't right to assume that anyone who isn't engaged is somehow impaired, corrupted by propaganda, distracted by sports and sitcoms. That bread-and-circuses stuff just doesn't cut it anymore. Noam Chomsky's 9/11 book got better shelf position at Barnes & Noble than Dr. Phil, and basic information about the rape of the planet has been endlessly disseminated. No, let's face it. People aren't interested. They don't care. That's the truth.
It's also important to notice that political engagement is not a function of education--if only people knew this or that, then surely they would rise up and demand.., etc., etc. Droves of highly educated citizens are indifferent to events unrelated to their immediate concerns, and many a news junkie ranting away on call-in radio never went past high school.
This is all quite mysterious, having to do with hidden confluences of circumstance and character. But this much is clear: deep political engagement is, if not unnatural, at least unusual. It takes something extra to influence people in this way, to cause them to extend their sense of self to encompass multitudes of strangers.
The most extensive such identification possible, the one I attributed to Mr. D., is an identification with all humanity and each human being. In its secular form, that identification is rooted in the ideals of Enlightenment humanism, ideals articulated by Locke and Rousseau and Kant, and brought to bear on historical events in the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man--all familiar, if disputed, territory. However miserably partisans of these principles failed to fulfill them in practice, the principles themselves are unambiguous, and they all depend on that fundamental identification of each of us with all of us, with the sheer human being abstracted in the ideal from concrete contexts of history and tradition.
That's what ideals are. Abstract.
I am using "identity" precisely because it isn't part of the Enlightenment vocabulary. I've imported it from now-dominant postmodern rhetorics e(multiculturalism, gender, sexual orientation) that derive from a critique of modernity in general and Enlightenment humanism in particular. We owe that critique to Adorno and Heidegger, Bataille, Benjamin, Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, Fish, Butler, Haraway, and Said, and to a generation of educators, inspired by them to shape the academy we know today. College graduates since the seventies have learned to associate progressive politics with a deconstruction of concepts such as "natural rights," "natural reason," "human progress," and even "human being." No longer self-evident and universal, they were exposed as self-serving constructions of a dominant interest group (white bourgeois males), and politics was refigured as a struggle for access to power by other groups, by those whom moderates had exploited and marginalized. And all those Others were to propose constructions of their own--"discourses," they were called, in deference to the French--and deploy them against the hegemony of Western, especially modern, ideas and institutional arrangements. Hence, the culture wars of the last thirty years. Familiar ground, again.
On this familiar ground, I want to argue that no matter how justifiable the emphasis on identity, no matter how empowering the turn to specifics of experience that go with being black or gay--that is, in spite of all the undeniable gains we owe to identity politics(A)--I want to argue that progressive politics is still, as a matter of fact rather than of rhetoric, based on Enlightenment principles and has been all along. And I want to argue that progressives should acknowledge this basis explicitly and stand together on this foundation once more--or that'll be all she wrote. Time is not on our side.
It has been possible, even convenient, to deny a foundation in Enlightenment humanism while fighting to establish African-American studies programs and rid the workplace of sexism. It has been easy to imagine that sheer Foucauldian power struggles were being won or lost by this or that constituency. But in the crisis we now face, with the lives of millions at stake, with the United States embracing an open policy of empire--in these desperate circumstances, such renderings seem suddenly parochial. It did and does matter that Jenny feels inhibited in math class because the boys are so aggressive, and it did and does matter that the CEO of AOL Time Warner is a black man. But so many people don't have any schooling at all, and AOL Time Warner is part of the problem, not the solution. The level of engagement demanded of us now is much deeper than the issue of access within the overdeveloped world, and Enlightenment principles are the only conceivable anchor for the cause of human progress in general--the cause we must take up once again.
The foundational priority, the logical and emotional necessity, of these principles should be evident to any progressive willing to admit to some confusion since 9/11, to anyone feeling that it is not enough to nod when Scott Ritter talks, to mock John Ashcroft, and so on down the list of typical Gestures--that is, to any progressive feeling the need for a coherent position in this new context and finding it difficult to fashion one. For we experience the foundational priority of Enlightenment principles, if we are sincerely trying to work out such a position, because these principles are what orient our judgments before we make them.
Before you are informed, before you know what weapons Iraq actually has, before you read up on Pashtun history--what is your attitude ? As you begin to educate yourself, before you have made up your mind, as you look into the histories and commitments of the parties, what guides your inquiry, especially when your customary prejudices don't apply neatly--when, for example, your multicultural impulses and your feminist commitments diverge? What are you looking for when you really have to think and decide, rather than just hit the replay button on your polemic deck?
Doesn't it work this way? One may not know what distinguishes Sunni from Shi'ite at first, but the inclination to progressive politics comes down to one's willingness to find out. But more than that. In the end, when deciding what position to take, you are also prepared to judge those differences according to--let's call it the degree of their humane commitments. That's the criterion. When the big chips are down, identity considerations yield to humanist principles, because, as an articulated value, the acceptance of difference depends upon them, logically, emotionally, and historically. You don't need a philosophical argument to "prove" that humanist principles are real if they are actually at work in you.(B)
And this all holds for diversity practices closer to home as well. When we acknowledge the Other as truly other, it can seem as if we leave the abstract Enlightenment equation of the sheer human being behind. But if we also insist upon access to power for others, it turns out that we have only postponed our dependence on that equation. With the emphasis on groups we added an intervening layer, a very potent layer of concrete signs--race, sex, idiom--and that layer can obscure the underlying, axiomatic conviction, but it still holds: all else being equal, every human life is, by nature--that is, simply by virtue of being human equal in value to every other and therefore entitled to whatever benefits or protections are at issue in the struggle for access.(C)
Everything hangs on the "therefore," on whether or not it actually operates this way in our political thinking. If it does, then we have found what we need--the basis for a coherent ideology that promises unity for progressives at this critical hour.
But isn't that just what postmodern theory, in all its variety, taught us--that all else is never equal? That nobody actually exists outside a context, outside history? That the Enlightenment axiom, the sheer human being, is a figment, a reduction of the socially constructed settings in which real people always already live ? That this abstraction is, at best, a projection of modern Western ideas onto other ways of life? Or, at worst, an expression of an imperial mind-set, a God's-eye view of nature and humanity that may carry connotations of justice but actually serves to rationalize Western domination of the world? So, surely, we can and must do without it?
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. No.
How could the postmodern critique get it right on all but the last question? By misunderstanding the nature of modem abstractions--especially those associated with nature (natural law, state of nature, etc.), to whose authority the Enlightenment appealed for leverage out of Europe's Middle Ages. The reasons for this misunderstanding are complex, but it comes down to this: you don't have to believe in an abstract ideal the way you believe in the chair under your butt in order to believe in that ideal. Ideals are real in a different way from the way chairs are real, and furthermore, in the case of Enlightenment ideals, they are universally real. That is, every human being, consulting what early modems liked to call "natural reason," would come up with something like those ideals, given the opportunity. "National reason" just means what an unbiased person would hold to be the case, where "unbiased" means free of historical conditions and local attachments.
Now, the postmodern critique of such ideals rests on the undeniable fact that there is no such person. Pretty devastating at first glance. But even Enlightenment thinkers (contrary to stereotype) understood this. Natural reason was a possibility--hence, the "would." Possibility is the mode of existence appropriate to an ideal. Did they also tend to reify? That is, to believe that God built natural reason into us and ordained natural laws for this reason to access? Did they sometimes imagine that humanity had fallen away from an historical state in which those laws actually held sway? They did a lot of that, yes -- but you don't have to.(D) You can just say, Okay, people are and always have been thrown into concrete circumstances that determine their evaluations and attachments; people are and always have been shaped by linguistic and cultural structures, etc. And then you can say that it would be a good thing if everyone would try to get over that. It would be a good thing if people got past the relatively superficial differences between them, put them in perspective, and came together on common ground--of which there is a lot, by the way--this common ground being what matters most in the end. Even if it is an abstraction.
It's as simple as that, actually.
Put it this way: If your concrete gayness is sufficient to propel your identificational attachment to millions of gay people you don't know, isn't that an abstraction, too? And likewise for women, ethnicities, etc. Compared with the Enlightenment abstraction of universal humanism, the abstractions of identity politics are middle-range, it's true, and it's very important. It means they are packed with vivid specifics that bind people together, especially in the context of oppression or marginalization. In such contexts, race and sexuality and the life experiences they implicate can turn an out-group into an in-group overnight and motivate collective action with a force that also has to be called natural--in some sense, in some pre- or post-Enlightenment sense.
There was a moment for me, it became iconic, it was at some political conference, years ago. A black woman, a commanding presence, rose to declare by way of closing down the discussion, in the tone of one whose patience is exhausted, that she had tried to read Marx once and couldn't understand what all that verbiage meant--but she knew damn well what being black meant.
A burst of heartfelt applause. It went on and on.
I've been haunted by that moment ever since.
The quasi-erotic power of tangible signs of identity and the mores that accompany them (the ways of gayness) explains the gradual displacement of socialist agendas by diversity agendas over the last thirty years. But the eEnlightenment abstraction is based on some pretty tangible markers, too, if you stop and think about it--as people must if they are to be persuaded to identify with Afghan refugees, for example, or victims of the bombing of Baghdad. Here's a partial list:
Food, dreaming, safeness, humor, the sky, music, greetings, snakes, death, fire, stories, dignity, pain...
Very concrete, and quasi-erotic too, in its own way. And identification with all of humanity by abstraction through markers like these has this add-on: a commitment to universal rationality, to making judgments based on our common humanity in spite of the differences--a commitment that is natural in the Enlightenment sense.
So what's the problem? If the Enlightenment abstraction is in fact operating at the core of diversity politics anyway, why have so many very smart people invested so much in deconstructing, denying, and otherwise undermining these universal foundations?
Here is what it comes down to: Progressives don't want to break with the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment because, if they do, if they explicitly reassert modern principles of a secular and universal humanism, they might have to face the possibility that the modern Western tradition has a real claim--a superior claim--upon the allegiance of humanity after all. Western progressives defined themselves in just this way, of course, for most of the modern era, but not anymore. Few of us want to go there now.
That's what it comes down to.
The price we pay for our unwillingness to face this possibility (and it is only a possibility; there may be other sources for these principles) is high, and getting higher. A case in point: how many people who think of themselves as on the left have lapsed into virtual paralysis in relation to the war on terror because they are privately wondering things about Islam that would be difficult to bring up publicly, for the reason just mentioned?
Besides, such a stance has the feel of a tactical disaster. It feels like it would lead immediately to a break in the coalition of identity groups that has represented progressivism since the rise of access politics. Anyone promoting Enlightenment ideals risks being associated with heirs of Allan Bloom, with Lynne Cheney's cohort. You're haunted by the possibility that you might wake up the next day and find yourself agreeing with Samuel Huntington, find yourself signing up for a war to save Western civilization from polygamous barbarians with dubious dress codes.
But none of this follows logically or ethically or even emotionally -- or it wouldn't, if our political conversation could rise to this occasion. Polygamy matters, the headwear doesn't, the veils maybe. Enslaving children counts, food prohibitions don't, and women eating separately--well, again, maybe and maybe not, you have to assess that on a case-by-case basis. And so on. But the universal wrongness of inhumane coercion is the principle you apply to all of them. Will that sometimes be hard to do? Will it be really hard to know how to proceed toward reform of inhumane customs without seeming to revive the imperial project of "civilizing" others? Sure, but so what? Debate the means, the ends are clear. The principle is still valid.
Face it. You respect difference, but only up to a point.
Distinctions can be drawn and maintained, in other words, but only on the basis of the universal principles. We can't afford to hide from this simple truth just because we might "sound like" some smug elitist at The New Criterion if we admit to such an allegiance openly.
We actually rely on these principles anyway, don't forget--that's the essential claim here. We leave that foundation obscure, but we operate out of it. This has become especially evident with respect to women's issues that have an international or cross-cultural dimension--clitoridectomy being an outstanding example. Every time feminists assert that women's rights are human rights, they are, in effect, overriding cultural contexts on the basis of a universal humanism derived, as a matter of historical fact, from Enlightenment concepts. Why not just say so? |
