Reappraisals by Tony Judt
If you read one book this year then make it Tony Judt’s Reappraisals – Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century.
John Gray, that other prominent British political philosopher, author and masterful shit-kicker of the neo-liberal consensus reviews it here.
This is Gray on Judt’s assessment of the lotus-eaters that make up American liberal-hawk intelligentsia. A subject on which Judt is willing to take no prisoners, and offers a wide-ranging and unsparing critique of their ill-judged and catastrophic failures:
Judt is especially hard on America’s liberal hawks. These ” tough”, “muscular” liberals have collaborated with neocons in injecting into the centre of politics a type of thinking inherited from the old left, he suggests. “They see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide.” As Judt sees it, left-liberals such as Michael Ignatieff and Paul Berman are not much more than camp followers of the Bush administration. “America’s liberal armchair warriors,” he writes sharply, “are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror.” A few pages later, he hammers the point home: “In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.”
Judt entitles the essay in which he takes American liberals to task “The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America”. This may be a little overdone. A good many American liberals – not least Barack Obama – were opposed to the Iraq war pretty much from the start. But it is true that the organs of the liberal centre in America – the Washington Post and New York Times, for example – colluded with the Bush administration in a grotesquely ill-judged and demeaning way. The job of countering pro-war disinformation was left to investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh and Michael Massing, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The voices of those who were opposed to the war from the start – often old-style conservatives and remnants of the anti-imperialist left – were hardly heard in America’s mainstream media. The continuing carnage in Iraq is as much the responsibility of the liberals who legitimised the war as it is of the neocons who engineered it.
Analysing the motives of the liberal hawks, Judt finds a yearning for lost moral simplicities: “Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose. They are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.” He is surely right about left-liberal moral nostalgia. Though he does not comment on the fact, a similar shift has occurred on this side of the Atlantic where, on some sections of the British left, the US has succeeded the former Soviet Union as the regime appointed by history to bring about a revolutionary transformation in human affairs. Neocons and strong-arm liberals have not lost the taste for bloodshed in faraway places of the fellow-travelling left, they have merely fastened on a different regime as the vehicle for their fantasies of world revolution.
Order the book, you won’t regret it.
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John Gray, the author of Against Progress & Other Heresies, is quite right: Blair’s Labour very much bought into the post-Christian concept of “progress” and Iraq was the utimate faith-based war (faith in this context meaning in the ideology of progress).
Progress is a myth, and Gray identifies the belief in this myth in everything from Marxism to Islamism (see for eg his Al Quaeda and What It Means to be Modern). At the moment I’m reading Stalin: In the Court of the Red Czar, which recounts how the Bolsheviks murdered millions out of faith in a Bolshevik future. Many, including Stalin, were ex-seminarians.
But it is an indiscriminate concept – as much as it is easy to find fault in the liberal supporters of the Iraq war and the US, so too do we have to interogate our own motivations and see if they are based on reality or simply another version of the myth. What does “progressive” mean to you?
Unitalian: “Iraq WAS the ultimate faith-based war…”
Maybe being a bit over-pedantic, but the war isn’t over yet. When all U.S. forces leave the region it may start to be but as that is nearly impossible, the ME is now in a perpetual state of war.
I wonder, how these individuals who believe they can make decisions that kill innocents they have never seen or met, sleep at night. But then this trail of thought normally leads me to a state of irrational anger, so I will stop.
To me, “progressive” means peace after the war, the calm after the storm. Or the handling of a myriad of issues by the SNP since they were elected
According to Kierkegaard, to be a true “man of faith” one had to, like Abraham, put one’s trust in God above any human (earth-bound) considerations of morality. IMHO, this is what Blair, Stalin and Osama bin Laden have in common.
_legitimise_ is an unusual irregular verbs: it only has two forms. They _support_, you _legitimise_, but there is no first person form: noone ever says ‘I hereby legitimise this’.
If anyone, the people actually legitimising the current war in Iraq are not liberal intellectuals, but essentially conservative romantic nationalists who talk of occupation and sovereignty as essentialist concepts that have nothing much to do with the wishes of the people affected, or the outcomes of actual political processes.
Iraq has an elected government with UN and other international recognition, and which absent some additional external intervention is clearly not going to be militarily overthrown in the forseeable future.
There are, currently, various people fighting against that government. You can come up with lots of plausible reasons why they are doing so, based on religion, sovereignty, geopolitics, economics, or whatever. If somone happens to think those reasons are powerful and persuasive, then if the word legitimise has any meaning, surely it should apply to them?
Unitalian:
Progress is indeed a post-Enligtenment myth. Mankind may redevelop or recreate itself in the course of time but whether this ends in progress as such is entirely dubious. I think I stand very much in between Gray’s brilliant but profoundly pessimistic analysis of the western post-Enlightenment thought and “Progressive Liberal” secular optimism. However, call me a thicko, but I fail to see the difference between this grotesque Starussian neo-Liberal authoritarianism and Stalinism. Both are engendered from a disavowal of Trotskyism and a form of displaced religion, which Gray pinpoints so well. You only have to observe Blair’s messianical fervour to invade Iraq and his later quick adoption of catholicism.
Looks like we both appreciate Gray but have developed quite different conclusions. I’ve set up the Fans of John Gray on facebook by the way.
soru:
“_legitimise_ is an unusual irregular verbs”.
The war needed to legitimised in order to be executed. For neo-liberals this meant turining it into a moral crusade which rendered itself, for those who supported it, into a starkly binary battle of good vs evil.
I thank my secular god for people like John Gray and Tony Judt.
nice one sid.
Progress is indeed a post-Enligtenment myth.
Progress (capital P only because at the start of a sentence) is pretty much an observed fact these days. The fact that it was a myth before it was a fact does seem to confuse some people. But that would be both those who believe the mythical, Capitalised version (inevitable progress to a teleological End) and those who, in rejecting that, reject any kind of observation that appears to support the unmythical version (gradual, contingent and evolutionary better adaptation to changing circumstances).
For neo-liberals this meant turining it into a moral crusade which rendered itself, for those who supported it, into a starkly binary battle of good vs evil.
True, if by neoliberal you mean neoconservative, and by starkly binary you mean complicated issue with arguments on both sides, and by good vs evil you mean lesser evil versus greater.
True, if by neoliberal you mean neoconservative, and by starkly binary you mean complicated issue with arguments on both sides, and by good vs evil you mean lesser evil versus greater.
Neoliberals, or intellectuals like Berman, Ignatieff, Hitchens, Steyn, Geras et al, were nothing more than what Judt calls the “useful idiots” to the Bush/Blair axis of Western Messianism, who contextualised and legimitised the neocon’s “good vs evil” framing of the invasion of Iraq.
Nowadays, Berman and Hitchens (and the rest of them) don’t mention the war let alone discuss their support, Neocons have run for the fields and Strauss is exposed as the teleological madman he always was.
I’ve set up the Fans of John Gray on facebook by the way
You’re such a groupie Sid
(goes off to start an Amartya Sen fan group)
Neoliberals, or intellectuals like Berman, Ignatieff, Hitchens, Steyn, Geras et al
None of those are neoliberals, the word has a specific meaning, ‘neo’ does not mean ‘very’ or ‘bad’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberal
In fact, most neoliberals (Milton Friedman, the the Cato Institute and so on) opposed the war in Iraq.
Maybe they should be called “Nintendo Democrats”?
Sid, I don’t understand what you believe we are disagreeing about (force of habit?) although I think Gray would also consider the Enlightenment itself as perpetuating the myth of progress. Wouldn’t he point out that “Enlightenment values” fuelled the first, Jacobin, Terror?
Not particularly catchy: try “Wii Warriors”.
Unitalian, I wasn’t suggesting we had a disagreement on this issue at all. (perceptual conditioning)?
soru;
Nintendo Liberals?
Hello, For more like-minded literature, consider: Anatole Leivin’s ‘America Right or Wrong’, Naomi Wolf’s ‘The End of America’, Dipesh Chakraborty’s ‘Provincializing Europe’, John Ralston Saul’s ‘Voltaire’s Bastards’ and ‘The Collapse of Globalism’ and the Comoroffs’ ‘Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neo-liberalism’.
For those who have readily critiqued the Enlightenment as an ethnocentric European project running 250 years, the 12 volumes of The Subaltern Studies group did a good job unpacking all of that, and William Dalrymple’s work has added much-needed nuance to the strident humanist backlash. Then there’s Sankar Muthu’s rather clever ‘Enlightenment Against Empire’.
As far as the question of what ‘progressive’ means, I’d take any understanding that did not assume that everything happens in a singular or linear way. The cultural assumptions behind western progressivism, much of it good, nonetheless tended to squash alternative notions of time and social order.
The problem is that while the academy and well-schooled types are ready to critique these assumptions, the institutions of state and international relations remain embedded within the modernist framework and have in their thrall many generations of mimics in both the Global North and Global South. We all see the incongruities first hand but it remains an iron cage with a considerable shelf life ahead of it.