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.

soru;
Nintendo Liberals?

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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?