Paul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism
This is a wonderful book. Berman clarifies some of the issues we face today, and elaborates what should be the “liberal” argument for what we should do in the Middle East, even though the principal proponents are neo-conservative/neo-Straussians of the Bush Administration.
Berman argues — and it has been argued elsewhere, primarily on the pages of The New Republic, Slate, The Economist, etc. — that the War on Terror is fundamentally a continuation of the wars liberalism has fought against the totalitarianisms of the Twentieth Century. These totalitarianisms, both secular (such as Ba’athism) and religious (bin Laden’s Islamism), are fruit from the same tree of evil, watered with the blood of 1914 and the romanticism of death that began far earlier. Other fruit from that tree are Nazism, Communism; fascism in its myriad forms, all as a reaction to liberalism.
While the intellectual underpinnings of the Middle Eastern totalitarian movements claim to have arisen separate from Europe — vast bodies of theory have been developed with the specific intent of not coming from the Western tradition — there are recognizably common elements between the movements: these are all cults of death. In all, there is a group of chosen people, be it Aryans, the proletariat or Muslims, and they are under threat by enemies external and internal, be it Jews or class-traitors. And the ultimate fulfillment of their fantasy ideologies requires the deaths of millions and the apocalyptic purging of enemies through the sacrifice of matyrs, all before the pure utopian society is achieved, be it a Thousand Year Reich, the paradise of the proletariat, or the resurrected Caliphate.
But the most startling and compelling chapters deal with liberalism’s response to these cults of death. We liberals embody a particular world view: a belief in freedom, progress, rationality. Because of this, we, at some fundamental level, have difficulty seeing the cult of death for what it is. It’s a “philosophical crisis” for us: we cannot believe that there can be pathological mass movements, fixated by apocalyptic visions, that link paradise with the charnel house. We must come up with a rational explanation for these irrational actions, and will strive mightily to do so, to the point of verging into irrationalism. The French Socalists did this in 1938. The American left did this Lenin and Stalin. And American and European leftists are doing it with the Middle Eastern death cults.
It’s this realization about liberal philosophical panic that informs Berman’s discussion of Palestinian terror and Western sympathy for Palestinian suicide bombers. Because we implicitly rank our responses to the world on rational lines, we have to believe that anyone who would resort to suicide murder must have been driven there by unfathomable oppression. By this logic, the Israelis are worse than South African Afrikaaners, worse than Nazis. For, after all, Nelson Mandela didn’t sink to this level; the Jews didn’t commit suicide murder. What must the Palestinians be suffering if they eschew negotiations (which would have gotten them almost all they could reasonable ask for at Camp David in 2000) and don suicide vests? In this way, the moral standard of Gandhi-esque non-violence becomes, not an admonition for peace, but a fulcrum that elevates the Palestinian cult of death to holiness while sinking Israel’s responses to suicide murder to hell.
And this is the problem we face now. America, as the embodiment of liberal norms and the obvious enemy of the rise of a new totalitarianism, should prepare itself for war. This new war will not require the marshalling of all our material resources, though force of arms will be required from time to time, but it should call for the marshalling of all our intellectual resources, as this will be a war of ideas. We are woefully unprepared for this war because we find it difficult to give any sort of passion to our arguments for liberalism, in part because we can’t comprehend our enemy and understand why we should.
Further, our adversary’s arsenal comes from the rich intellectual history of Islamism. We’re now pitting 30-second commercials against, say, the vast body of writing by Sayyid Qutb, and losing badly. Qutb spent decades coming up with the intellectual foundations of Islamisms beliefs and why the West is the enemy: Western secularism, the horrifying schizophrenia of human nature between the spiritual and the material that comes from earliest Christianity, seduces the Muslim into behaving as if there is a God of the spiritual life and a God of the everyday world, though there is but one God over both spiritual and temporal — God cannot be put into a corner and called forth merely for religious holidays. How does a infomercial counter this? What we need is a second Lincoln, someone to articulate and empassion liberal arguments. Instead, in a historical irony, we have Bush. But this will have to do.