3quarksdaily: Seminar on Enlightenment and Disenchantment

September 08, 2008

Introduction to the 3 Quarks Daily Online Seminar on Akeel Bilgrami’s “Occidentalism, The Very Idea”

by S. Abbas Raza

Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got a Bachelor's degree there in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In 1983 he got his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

Akeel Bilgrami is my teacher and my friend. A couple of years ago I had him over for dinner at my apartment in New York one night. Leon Wieseltier had just published what I considered at best a confused hack job of a review of Daniel Dennett’s then new book Breaking the Spell in the New York Times. I was quite outraged by this odium-filled denunciation of one of the living philosophers that I most admire, and even orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to the publishers of the New York Times.

I asked Akeel that night what he thought of the review, and he said that while he agreed with me that Wieseltier’s attack was shameful, he didn’t see too much of interest in Dennett’s book either, because while attacking religious faith in predictable ways (certainly preaching to the choir in my and Akeel’s case), Dennett completely failed to even acknowledge, much less analyze in any meaningful way, the more important cultural, political, and philosophical underpinnings of the much-lamented religious fundamentalist resurgence here in America as well as in the Muslim world.

As I have written here at 3QD in the past, I am sympathetic to this criticism of not just Dennett’s book, but the whole slew of best-selling anti-religion books since then by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, John Allen Paulos, and others, even while I feel that these books have had the tremendously salutary effect of creating, or at least greatly expanding, the space available to atheists in the public sphere.

Akeel then told me that he was writing an essay for Critical Inquiry which addresses precisely the cultural and political contexts of religion that these books ignore, and that he would send it to me when it was done. He did, and I was immediately captivated by his subtle and deeply original analysis. After much late-night discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Akeel’s analysis between Robin Varghese and me, we decided to send the paper to some philosophers, political scientists, and other academics for critical comment. Six of those have now responded. In the next eight posts, you will find first the full text of Akeel’s paper, followed by the six critical responses, and then finally a last essay by Akeel answering his critics. 3QD will not be publishing further replies from the participants as full posts, but additional responses can always be left as comments on the appropriate post.

By the way, I recently spent some hours attempting to distill Akeel’s argument for this introduction, only to realize that it is already very dense (Akeel covers a lot of ground in a relatively short space) and far too intricate to be comprehensibly condensed. (To give you a sense of the rare and admirable concision with which Akeel writes, let me mention that in the essay, during the course of dismissing recent attempts at inverting the argument of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Akeel gives a brilliantly brief summary of the trajectory of the main arguments of that book in one page!) So I strongly urge you to take the time to read Akeel’s essay, which follows this post, in full.

In fact, I should perhaps also add that the material which makes up this seminar is somewhat more academic in tone (and length!) than readers of 3QD may be used to seeing here. I nevertheless encourage them to make the effort to read it as it is a thoughtful treatment of most-consequential topics (as Akeel himself puts it, "There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, eventually, nothing short of the democratic ideal is at stake...") and the contributors make some fascinating arguments.

Robin Varghese and I would like to warmly thank all the contributors for their submissions, and of course, most of all we want to thank Akeel Bilgrami, not only for writing the original paper as well as a response to the critical comments, but much more for his long and affectionate mentorship.

Here, for your browsing convenience, is a table of contents:

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment

by Akeel Bilgrami

It wouldn’t be too lofty to describe the extensive debate in many related disciplines over the last few decades about the inherited ideas and ideologies of the ‘Enlightenment’ as our intellectual efforts at self-understanding -- in particular, our efforts to come to a more or less precise grip on the sense in which we belong to a period, properly describable as our ‘modernity’.

These ongoing efforts on our part, however, gain a specific interest when they surface in the context of a new form of cold war that has religious rather than communist ideals as its target. Since religion, at least on the surface, in some fairly obvious sense runs afoul of the demands of the Enlightenment, our modernity may seem to be much more at stake now than it was in the contestations of the original cold war, where the issues seemed to be more about a conflict internal to the ideals of the Enlightenment.[i] But in the passage of analysis in this essay, I will have hoped to raise one serious angle of doubt about this seeming difference.

A recurring complaint among critics of the Enlightenment is about a complacence in the rough and cumulative consensus that has emerged in modern ‘Western’ thought of the last two centuries and a half. The complaint is misplaced. There has, in fact, always been a detectably edgy and brittle quality in the prideful use of omnibus terms such as ‘modernity’ and ‘the Enlightenment’ to self-describe the ‘West’s’ claim to being something more than a geographical location. One sign of this nervousness is a quickness to find a germ of irrationality in any source of radical criticism of the consensus. From quite early on, the strategy has been to tarnish the opposition as being poised in a perpetual ambiguity between radicalism and irrationalism (including sometimes an irrationalism that encourages a fascist, or incipiently fascist, authoritarianism.) Nietzsche was one of the first to sense the theoretical tyranny in this and often responded with an edginess of his own by flamboyantly refusing to be made self-conscious and defensive by the strategy, and by explicitly embracing the ambiguity. More recently Foucault, among others, responded by preempting the strategy and declaring that the irrational was, in any case, the only defence of those who suffered under the comprehensive cognitive grip of the discursive power unleashed by modernity, in the name of ‘rationality’.[ii]

I want to pursue some of the underlying issues of this confusing dialectic in such disputation regarding the modern. There is a great urgency to get some clarity on these issues. The stakes are high and they span a wide range of themes on the borderline of politics and culture. In fact, eventually, nothing short of the democratic ideal is at stake, though that particular theme is too far afield to be pursued in any detail in this essay.[iii]

A familiar element in a cold war is that the warring sides are joined by academics and other writers, shaping attitudes and rationalizing or domesticating the actions of states and the interests that drive them, in conceptual terms for a broader intellectual public.[iv] Some of this conceptual work is brazen and crass and is often reckoned to be so by the more alert among the broad public. But other writing is more sophisticated and has a more superior tone, making passing acknowledgements of the faults on the side to whom it gives intellectual support, and such work is often lionized by the intellectual elites as ‘fair-minded’ and ‘objective’ and despite these marginal criticisms of the state in question, it is tolerated by the broad consensus of those in power. Ever since Samuel Huntington wrote his influential article “The Clash of Civilizations”,[v] there was a danger that a new cold war would emerge, one between the ‘West’ and ‘Islam’ to use the vast, generalizing terms of Huntington’s own portentous claims. Sure enough since that time, and especially with two or three hot wars thrown in to spur the pundits on, an increasing number of books with the more sophisticated aspiration have emerged to consolidate what Huntington had started.

To elaborate this essay’s concerns, I will proceed a little obliquely by initially focusing closely and at some length on one such book and briefly invoking another as its foil, and then situate the concerns in a larger historical and conceptual framework. The focus is worth its while since the conclusions of the book I have primarily chosen, as well as the attitudes it expresses, are representative of a great deal of both lay and academic thinking on these themes.

The subtitle of Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit's Occidentalism, elaborates its striking title as: “The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies”.[vi] The book’s aim is to provide an account of a certain conception of the West which is named in their title and which they find today in hostile Islamist reactions to the West, a conception which they claim is just as unfair to and dehumanizing of the West as “Orientalism” was said to be of the Orient, in Edward Said’s well-known book bearing that name.[vii]

The book is slight and haphazard in argument and my interest in it is not so much intrinsic as it is to use it instrumentally in the dialectic of this paper’s analysis. It furnishes –in its way-- some of the fundamental theoretical notions needed to present that analysis. Given their various, somewhat unsystematic, claims in the book, it is a little obscure, and perhaps even a little arbitrary, what they mean by the ‘West” and therefore what they have in mind by ‘Occidentalism’. At times they write as if the term ‘the West’ is to be defined by two basic ideals or principles, which had their origins in seventeenth century Europe and settled into what we have come to call ‘the Enlightenment’, principles such as the tenets of scientific rationality and the formal aspects of democracy, including the commitment to basic liberal individual rights. The ‘Enemies of the West’ are said to be opposed to these principles.

But for the most part, the book, in its successive chapters, identifies the targets of the ‘Enemies’’ opposition as much broader cultural phenomena than these principles, phenomena such as permissive and ‘sinful’, metropolitan life in the West that has abandoned the organic links that individuals have to nature and community, such as commercial rather than heroic ideals, such as a mechanistic and materialistic outlook which stresses instrumental rationality and utilitarian values rather than the values of the various romantic and nationalistic and indigenist traditions, and finally, such as a stress on secular and humanistic values which entirely exclude religion from the public realm and therefore invite the ‘wrath of God’ whose domain must be unrestricted.

It is never made clear what exactly the relation is between the defining principles of the West mentioned earlier and these broader cultural phenomena. Both are targets of the ‘Occidentalists’, but what their relation is to one another as targets is never satisfactorily explained. The book’s own response to the two targets is somewhat different. They have some sympathy for the opposition to some of the broader phenomena[viii] (as anyone might, however much they are committed to the goodness of the West) but the final message of the book comes through as a firm defence of the scientific rationality and the political principles that the ‘West’ is said to have ushered in as exemplary aspects of modernity, and upon which it has defined itself. This differential response on the authors’ part makes it particularly important to sort out the question of the relationship between the defining principles and the broader phenomena.

The response leads one to think that the argument of the book is roughly this. The defining essence of ‘the West’ lies in the two basic principles I mentioned earlier but in the eyes of its enemies there is a conflation of these principles with these wider cultural phenomena. Perhaps the conflation occurs via some sort of illicit derivation of these cultural phenomena from those principles. Thus, in attacking the cultural phenomena, the West, as defined by these principles, is also attacked by ‘Occidentalism’. (The authors quite clearly suggest such an interpretation of their argument in frequent remarks describing ‘Occidentalist’ attitudes towards the West: “It was an arrogant mistake to think that all men should be free, since our supposed freedoms led only to inhumanity and sterile materialism.” –p. 38.) The suspicion that anti-Western thought among Muslims is guilty of such an illicit derivation of some of its conclusions from partially justified critical observations regarding the West, is quite widespread in Western writing and thinking on this subject, and their book has the merit of articulating it very explicitly.

Towards the end of the book, they lightly rehearse the by now well-known intellectual antecedents of the contemporary radical Islamist critique of the broader cultural phenomena in Wahabism as well as in the more recent writings of Maulana Maududi and Syed Qutb; but in earlier chapters there are much more intellectually ambitious efforts at finding prior locations for the critique (especially the aspect of the critique that stresses loss of romantic and nationalist and indigenist traditions for the pursuit of utilitarian values and a superficial cosmopolitanism) in certain intellectual traditions in Germany, Russia and Japan ---which then presumably would also count as being anti-‘West.’ The interest of these more ambitious diagnostic efforts are not pursued with any depth or rigour. By the end, one does not quite know what to make of these claims to antecedent ‘Enemies’ since no convincing case is even attempted for a causal and historical influence of these intellectual and cultural movements on radical Islam (though see footnote 9), nor --and this is much worse-- is there any effort to sort out what is implied by this recurring critique of ‘the West’ and the principles that define it. One is, at best, left with the impression of an interesting parallel.[ix]

The sophistication of the book, therefore, lies not at all in deeply exploring the implications of its own ambitious efforts to connect politics with broader cultural issues. Its sophistication lies entirely in the kind of thing I had mentioned earlier, the fact that its cold war voice comes with a veneer of balance: there are parenthetical and somewhat mildly registered remarks about how Islamist groups also target the long history of colonial subjugation as the enemy, including the West’s, especially America’s, continuing imperial presence in economic (and more recently political) terms in various Muslim nations, as well as its extensive support of either corrupt, brutal, or expansionist regimes over the years as in Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, Indonesia…. But no one should go away with the impression that any of this is more than a veneer. The authors are clear that these do not constitute the main issue. The main issue is that the ‘Enemies of the West’ have first of all confused what is the essence of the West --as I said, scientific rationality and liberal democracy —with the broader cultural phenomena discussed in the four main chapters and second, have again unfairly and illicitly extended their perhaps justified anger against Western conquest and colonization and corporate exploitation to a generalized opposition to the ‘West’ as defined by those principles. The West is advised not to be made to feel so guilty by these illicit extensions and derivations that it gives up on its essential commitments to its defining principles. Whether one may conclude that it is also advised to stop its unending misadventures in foreign lands over the centuries is not so obvious from the text, since its focus is primarily on characterizing a confused and extrapolated state of mind called “Occidentalism”.

To now pursue something that this book leaves superficial and incomplete, it is useful to compare its argument with another recent book, Mahmoud Mamdani’s, Good Muslim/Bad Muslim,[x] because its emphasis is entirely elsewhere and it in fact provides something of a foil to Buruma and Margalit’s understanding of some of these issues. Those they call the Islamist ‘Enemies’ of the West are the “Bad Muslims” of his title. Those that support American interests in the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia (the Chalabis, the Karzais, the Mubaraks, and the Musharaffs, to name only leaders) are the (ironically phrased) “Good Muslims”. And he is highly critical of this dichotomy, as being both self-serving and ideological on the part of the West.

He stresses much more than they do the systematically imperialist nature of the US government’s actions in these and other parts of the world. He gives an historical account, first of its many covert operations (described by him as ‘proxy wars’) during the cold war period when it primarily invoked the threat of communism as a justification, and then of its more overt campaigns in the waging of real wars since September 11^th when the justification shifted to combating Islamic terror (though, of course, as Mamdani realizes, this justification did not have to wait till September 11, it was put into place immediately after the cold war ended, and the operations continued in covert form till the atrocities of September 11 gave the United States the excuse for the more overt action in Afghanistan and Iraq.[xi])

His analysis is familiar from a lot of writing over the years which has been critical of the United States government, but there is a useful account of the covert operations in the African theatre that is usually ignored in this critique, which has mostly tended to focus on the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia; and he is also courageous to put on centre-stage the question of Israeli occupation and expansion since 1967 and the successive American governments’ support of it, as a central diagnosis of the legitimate source of anger against the West.

Apart from the sketches of America’s corporate and geo-politically driven wrongdoings in different parts of the world, the book’s intellectual burden is to repudiate those who are evasive about these wrongs by changing the subject to, as he puts it, ‘cultural talk’ about civilizational conflicts or conflicts of broad principles. By his lights the main principles at issue are not those of scientific rationality or of democratic liberalism but rather the principles by which one does not occupy another’s lands and brutalize the people there, the principles by which one does not support corrupt and authoritarian regimes, the principles by which one does not overthrow perfectly honourable leaders and governments such as those in Iran in the 50s and in Chile in the 70s and replace them with monstrous, tyrannical governments that serve one’s economic and generally hegemonic political ends…. Everything else is secondary and a distraction from this main issue. By his lights, then, Buruma and Margalit’s book will certainly count as typical of such ‘cultural talk’, which he dismisses. To the question I put earlier, do Buruma and Margalit think that the West should be made to feel guilty over the litany of self-interested destructive interventions which Mamdani expounds, his own answer is bound to be that they not only do not think so, they want to distract us from thinking so by putting into the air such trumped up culturalist notions as ‘Occidentalism’.

If I am right in placing Occidentalism as a sophisticated cold war intervention, Mamdani would be quite right to have such suspicions of the book. But the issue of culture’s relation to politics is a more general one and this tendency on Mamdani’s part and on the part of much of the traditional Left to dismiss the cultural surround of political issues is a theme that is essential to the argument of this essay. As I said, it is his view that talk of ‘Occidentalism’ and other such notions should be seen as a sleight of hand, a sly, though not necessarily always conscious, changing of the subject. What he fails to see is that the deepest analysis of what goes wrong in this sort of cold war writing will require not merely seeing them as changing the subject from politics to culture, but rather bringing to bear a critique of the integrated position that links their politics to their cultural and intellectual stances. This would require linking his own leftist political stances to an absolutely indispensable cultural and intellectual surround. Mamdani’s failure to situate his subject in a larger set of intellectual and cultural issues reflects a limitation of his own book, one that prevents a proper analysis of the claims of a full and substantial democracy in the mix of Enlightenment ideas that are associated with our ‘modernity’. The book’s failing is the mirror image of the failings of Occidentalism. The latter understands that the politics of so-called anti-‘Western’ thought must be connected with broader cultural phenomena, but its superficial analysis of these connections leaves it as just one more contribution to the new cold war. The former’s politics honourably refuses to play into the cold war understanding of Islam, but its understanding of its own worthy politics remains superficial in that it precisely fails to make its analysis connect with the deeper cultural issues.

In order to reach towards the kind of analysis that both books in their contrasting ways fail to make, one needs to first take a critical (rather than dismissive) look at the eponymous ‘culturalist’ idea of “Occidentalism” and to see what relation it bears to its obvious alter-referent, ‘Orientalism’.

The argument of Said’s celebrated book is now widely familiar, but it is still worth a brisk walk through its main causeway in order to set up a comparison with Buruma and Margalit’s inversion of it. To put it in very rudimentary and schematic terms, it had, among other things, five broad points to make about Western writing on the Orient which, as Said puts it, erected into the “Other’, non-Western cultures in various parts of the world. (His attention was, of course, chiefly on writing about countries and cultures of predominantly Arab and Muslim peoples, so in that limited sense, his title is a suitable one for Buruma and Margalit to mimic since that is their focus too.)

First, and most obviously, the material inequalities generated by colonization gave rise to attitudes of civilizational condescension and the societies and peoples of the Orient were as a result presented as being inferior and undeveloped. Second, a related but quite different point, it stereotyped them and reduced their variety to monolithic caricatures. Third, even when it did not do either of the first two, even when it made the effort to find the Orient’s civilizational glories, its attitude was that of wondrous awe, and so it once again reduced the power and living reality of those civilizations, only this time it reduced them to an exotic rather than an inferior or monolithic object. And fourth, he argued, that all of these three features owed in more and less subtle ways to the proximity of such writing on the Orient to metropolitan sites of political and economic power. This fourth point is absolutely central to the critique and the tremendous interest it has generated. The critique’s effectiveness lay in precisely refusing to see literary and scholarly productions about the Orient as self-standing, by linking seemingly learned and aesthetic efforts to (at their worst) mandarin-like self-interest and (at their best) to a blindness regarding their locational privilege. A scholar who can write a whole book on modern Turkey with a just a few tentatively and grudgingly formulated sentences about the treatment of Armenians and pass off as a man of integrity and learning in metropolitan intellectual circles of the West is a good and well-known example of the worst, and Said is devastating about such shabby work. But he is in fact at his literary-critical best when he half-admiringly takes on the more subtle Orientalist writing, such as Kipling’s, where nothing so shameless is going on. A fifth point that pervaded a great deal of Said’s writing on the subject was that all of these four features held true not just of the ideas and works of fringe or extremist intellectuals and writers, but rather of the most canonical and mainstream tradition. The fifth and fourth points are closely connected. It is not surprising that the canonical works should have the first three features if those features flowed from the deep links that writing has to power. The canon, after all, is often constructed by the powerful, in some broad sense of that term.

It is hard to find anything like the same interest in Buruma and Margalit’s claims for ‘Occidentalist’ ideas. The first feature is not to be expected since, as they themselves say, Occidentalist ideas and hostility emerge in Muslim populations out of a sense of material inferiority and humiliation rather than out of a sense of economic superiority. The second feature is plausibly present.[xii] The third feature, which is one of the more interesting in Said’s critique, is altogether absent and they themselves don’t make any claims to it. The subtitle of their book, as I said, is “The West in the Eyes of its Enemies”. Said’s subtitle, for good reason, is the more general “Western Conceptions of the Orient”. Indeed Said’s ideas could be faithfully summed up in a subtitle, which read “The Orient in the Eyes of Its Enemies and its Friends”. [xiii] Then again, by the nature of the case, the fourth and absolutely pivotal feature in Said’s critique is not present. That is, the ‘Enemies’ of the West who are presented in this book, far from being close to power, are motivated by their powerlessness and helplessness against Western power and domination. Buruma and Margalit themselves point this out repeatedly. Finally, the fifth feature is also completely absent since it is the extremist, fundamentalist Islamic groups and their ideologues who are “The Enemies of the West” invoking the ‘wrath of God”, and they are far removed from the great and canonical works of Arabic, Persian, Urdu and other writing, some of which (Iqbal, for instance) Buruma and Margalit mention in order to exclude from their critique.

So, such interest as there is in their argument and conclusions criticizing so-called ‘Occidentalism’ lies not in anything that parallels these five points and the rich integrating relations between them which constitutes the critique of Orientalism, but rather in a line of argument which goes something like this. Among a colonized and powerless Muslim population, where there is a longstanding feeling of humiliation and helplessness, a fringe of religious extremists has emerged, who out of a deep sense of resentment against the colonizers are blinded to the diversity of the West, to its great achievements of the Enlightenment -- the temper and ideals of scientific rationality and democratic pluralism-- and so by distorted appeals to their religion they have instead focused on the worst aspects of Western life --rampant materialism, shallow commercialism, alienating loss of values and morals-- elevating these latter to a picture of a realm of hellish sinfulness (‘jahiliya’) to be combated by the ‘wrath of God’. Perhaps readers will out of sheer topical interest be drawn to this analysis, but it seems to me to altogether lack the texture and depth and power of the critique of Orientalism.

This absence of the texture and depth in the position taken by the book that it mimics in its title, points in the end to a far more principled weakness in its own position, which needs to be exposed in some detail because it raises issues of a kind that go well beyond the interest in this particular book.

As I said, some interest certainly does lie in the book’s comparisons and analogies with elements of what they call ‘Occidentalist’ or ‘anti-Western’ thought in other intellectual movements, such as the German Romantic tradition and the Slavophile and Japanese intellectual traditions. To take the first of these, Buruma and Margalit contrast the ideal of a certain kind of cultural unity which went deep in some of the German Romantics and led to nationalist casts of thought, with the ideal of political pluralism in Enlightenment thought. There is truth in this contrast but even here the contrast actually integrates more ideas than they notice. Even in an early work of Nietzsche’s such as The Birth of Tragedy, the romantic ideal of a mystical unity of experience is traced by him to the undifferentiated quality of the effect of the chorus on the audience in Attic tragedy, and the ‘Dionysian’ possibilities of this in music and dance are invoked with a view to providing a critique of the Apollonian ideal as it is found in the representational and intellectualizing arts of the late classical tradition. This is then deployed to assert the special status of a non-representational form such as music among the arts, and then German culture is singled out in Europe as the one culture to which music is absolutely central, and from this a broad philosophical argument emerges for a more public and modern revival of such a Dionysian unity in a single German nation, undiluted by the civilities and diversities owing to the shallow cosmopolitanism and pluralism of the French Enlightenment. These heady connections make for fascinating intellectual history, though of course one should ‘handle with care’ when such seemingly diverse regions of human thought and culture and politics are being brought together in an argument.

Buruma and Margalit make the less complex, less philosophical, and more routine point that ideas of racial purity in Nazism grew out of quasi-metaphysical arguments for nationalism of this kind and there very likely is scope for such further intellectual integration of racialist attitudes and metaphysics. But it is equally true that Hitler himself invoked with great admiration the system and efficiency of the extermination of the American Indians by the colonists, and historians such as Richard Drinnon have convincingly elaborated the remarkable metaphysics underlying the racial hatred in that particular holocaust as well.[xiv]

It might be said that it is not quite keeping faith with their argument to invoke the case of these colonists in the West because they are pre-Enlightenment examples of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ideas of racial purity, and the authors are defining the West in post-Enlightenment terms. In fact, of course, the ‘cleansing went on well into the high Enlightenment period and after, but still they may excuse themselves from a consideration of it on grounds that it was relatively distant from the prime location of the high European Enlightenment, which is their subject.

Even if we do allow them to excuse themselves from considering it, and even if we allow the focus to be exclusively on the period of high European Enlightenment, there are very obvious signs of how uncritical they are of their own basic notions. There is a bounty of extremely familiar evidence of European colonial racism based on similar philosophical rationales, in the heyday of the Enlightenment. It is hard to believe that the authors of Occidentalism are not aware of it. Why, then, do they ignore it? Presumably because to invoke it would be to depart from their focus, which is on anti-Enlightenment ideas. That is why the example they cite of German Romantic roots of German nationalism and eventually racism depends on an anti-rationalist critique of the Enlightenment, whereas colonial racism, they would claim, grew (at least partly) out of a desire to actually spread rationality to non-Western lands. This is fair enough: writers can focus on whichever theme they wish.[xv] But there are theoretical consequences of such a claim that are destructive of their own book’s main argument. Let me explain.

If one accepts this understanding of colonialism as being (at least partly) motivated by the desire to make the rest of the world more rational, it has to then be granted that that, in turn, presupposes a moral-psychological picture in which there is a notion of rationality that colonial peoples did not possess, a sort of basic moral and mental lack. If so, a distinction of profound analytical significance in the very idea of rationality is generated by this. By the nature of the case, the lack cannot, therefore, be of a ‘thin’ notion of rationality, one that is uncontroversially possessed by all (undamaged, adult, human minds); rather, it would have to be the lack of a ‘thick’ notion of rationality, a notion that owes to specific historical developments in outlook around the time of the rise of science and its implications for how to think (‘rationally’) about culture and politics and society. But this has the effect of logically undermining the central argument of the book because there is now a real question as to whether there is not a much tighter and perfectly licit derivational connection between such a commitment to rationality which the authors admire, and the harms that Western colonial rule perpetrated in its name, which the Occidentalist with some justification (even according to the authors) resent. Yet this is exactly the derivational connection which, as I pointed out in the exposition of their argument, they find to be illicit and a fallacy. The book’s own implicit assumptions are, therefore, devastating to its main line of thought.

It is really hereabouts, that we can find the more obvious sources for a critique of the Enlightenment that no cold war sensibility such as theirs could possibly acknowledge. I say it is obvious but the exact structure of the critique and its longstanding historical underpinnings are not always made explicit. Let me begin with a locus of this critique at some distance from the West and then present very early antecedents to it in the dissenting traditions of the West, itself.

The anti-Western figure who comes closest to the form of intellectual critique that Buruma and Margalit elaborate in their various chapters under the label ‘Occidentalism’, is Gandhi. He wrote and spoke with passion against the sinful city that took us away from organic village communities; he was a bitter opponent of the desacralizing of nature by science and the scientific outlook; he urged the Indian freedom fighters not to inherit from the British the political apparatus of formal democracy and liberal institutions because it was a cognitive enslavement to ‘Western’ ideas unsuited for indigenous political life in India; and he did all this in the name of traditional religious purity which would be corrupted by modern ideals of the Enlightenment. And to add to all this there is one last point of particularly illuminating fit between Gandhi and their ‘Occidentalist’. If they were looking for someone who took the view that there was indeed a more or less strict derivation from the ideals of Enlightenment rationality and political liberal institutions to the shallow and harmful cultural aspects of modernity (a derivation which, as I said, they are bound to describe as illicit and a fallacy), it is Gandhi rather than Muslim intellectuals and writers, where they will most clearly find it. It is he (much more than the German, Slavophile, and Japanese traditions that they invoke) who echoes in detail the Islamic Occidentalist’s critique of the broader cultural phenomena that Buruma and Margalit expound; and (much more explicitly than they can be said to), he would absolutely resist the charge that it is a conflation or illicit extrapolation to link the ideals of scientific rationality and modern forms of democratic politics with that broader cultural phenomena --of materialism, uncontrolled technology, the alienating, sinful city, etc. He insisted and argued at length that the notion of rationality, which was first formulated in the name of science in the seventeenth century and developed and modified to practical and public domains with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, had within it the predisposition to give rise to the horrors of modern industrial life, to destructive technological frames of mind, to rank commercialism, to the surrender of spiritual casts of mind, and to the destruction of the genuine pluralism of traditional life before modernity visited its many tribulations upon India. As he often claimed, it is precisely because this more authentic pluralism was destroyed by modernity, that modernity had to impose a quite unsatisfactory form of secularist pluralism in a world that it had itself ‘disenchanted’, to use the Weberian rhetoric. Before this disenchantment, which for Gandhi has its origins in the very scientific rationality that Buruma and Margalit applaud, there was no need for such artificial forms of secularized pluralism in Indian society. The pluralism was native, un-selfconscious, and rooted.

Even those who do not agree with every detail of Gandhi’s criticisms (and there are many details that I would certainly resist[xvi]) could not help but notice that, given this almost perfect fit with the subject their title announces, Gandhi is not so much as mentioned in this book. No doubt this is because Gandhi was the great spokesman of non-violence and one of the book’s recurring objections is to the dehumanizing violence of the ‘jihadi’ Occidentalists. (So also, their German, Japanese, and Slavophile intellectual antecedents, discussed in the book, are described as having laid seed for eventually, well-known violent descendants.) But if their ideas and arguments overlap so closely with Gandhi’s[xvii] and it is only the objectionable commitment to violence and the dehumanization of those whom one opposes violently that makes the Occidentalists they are most interested in different from Gandhi, then those ideas and arguments are only contingently related to what is objectionable about Occidentalism. There is therefore no interesting integrity in the doctrine, something one cannot say of the deep integrating links between power, violence, literature, and learning, claimed for the doctrine of “Orientalism” which I briefly tried to convey earlier.

The primary aim of Occidentalism (to quote my own words when I first introduced the book in this essay) is to “provide an account of a certain conception of the West which is named in their title and which, they find today in hostile Islamist reactions to the West, a conception which they claim is just as unfair to and dehumanizing of the mWest as ‘Orientalism’ was said to be of the Orient, in Edward Said’s well-known book bearing that name.” I am stressing the term ‘conception’ in my own words quite deliberately. It is essential to how the book’s aim is formulated. So, if I am right and the book’s characterization of the ‘Occidentalist’ conception of the West is echoed almost perfectly in Gandhi’s critique of the West, and if the crucial mark of difference is that the Islamists have brought to this critique’s conception a contingent element of violence, which Gandhi would deplore, then it is not the conception that they have established to be dehumanizing. The parallel with Gandhi shows, therefore, that they have not met their aim at all.

The subject is deepened and complicated if we notice that Gandhi’s criticisms have antecedents in a tradition of thought that goes all the way back to the seventeenth century in England and elsewhere in Europe, simultaneous with the great scientific achievements of that time. It goes back, that is, to just the time and the place when the outlook of scientific ‘rationality’ that Buruma and Margalit place at the defining centre of what they call the “West”, was being formed, and it is that very outlook with its threatening cultural and political consequences that is the target of the critique.

It should be emphasized right at the outset that the achievements of the ‘new science’ of the seventeenth century were neither denied nor opposed by the critique I have in mind, and so the critique cannot be dismissed as Luddite reaction to the new science.[xviii] What it opposed was a development in outlook that emerged in the philosophical surround of the scientific achievements. In other words, what it opposed was just the notion of ‘thick’ rationality that Buruma and Margalit describe in glowing terms as ‘scientific rationality’.

To put a range of complex, interweaving themes in the crudest summary, the dispute was about the very nature of nature and matter and, relatedly therefore, about the role of the deity, and of the broad cultural and political implications of the different views on these metaphysical and religious concerns. The metaphysical picture that was promoted by Newton (the official Newton of the Royal Society, not the neo-Platonist of his private study) and Boyle, among others, viewed matter and nature as brute and inert. On this view, since the material universe was brute, God was externally conceived with all the familiar metaphors of the ‘clock winder’ giving the universe a push from the outside to get it in motion. In the dissenting tradition --which was a scientific tradition, for there was in fact no disagreement between it and Newton/Boyle on any serious detail of the scientific laws, and all the fundamental notions such as gravity, for instance, were perfectly in place, though given a somewhat different metaphysical interpretation-- matter was not brute and inert, but rather was shot through with an inner source of dynamism that was itself divine. God and nature were not separable as in the official metaphysical picture that was growing around the new science, and John Toland, for instance, to take just one example among the active dissenting voices, openly wrote in terms he proclaimed to be ‘pantheistic’.[xix]

The link with Gandhi in all this is vivid and explicit in the dissenting voices. One absolutely central claim of the freethinkers of this period in the seventeenth century was about the political and cultural significance of their disagreements with the fast developing metaphysical orthodoxy of the “Newtonians”. Just as Gandhi did, they argued that it is only because one takes matter to be ‘brute’ and ‘stupid’, to use Newton’s own terms, that one would find it appropriate to conquer it with the most destructive of technologies with nothing but profit and material wealth as ends, and thereby destroy it both as a natural and a humanitarian environment for one’s habitation. In today’s terms, one might think that this point was a seventeenth century predecessor to our ecological concerns but though there certainly was an early instinct of that kind, it was embedded in a much more general point (as it was with Gandhi too), a point really about how nature in an ancient and spiritually flourishing sense was being threatened. Today, the most thoroughly and self-consciously secular sensibilities may recoil from the term ‘spiritually’, though I must confess to finding myself feeling no such self-consciousness despite being a secularist, indeed an atheist. The real point has nothing to do with these rhetorical niceties. If one had no use for the word, if one insisted on having the point made with words that we today can summon with confidence and accept without qualm, it would do no great violence to the core of their thinking to say this: the dissenters thought of the world not as brute but as suffused with value. That they happened to think the source of such value was divine ought not to be the deepest point of interest for us. The point rather is that if it were laden with value, it would make normative (ethical and social) demands on one, whether one was religious or not, normative demands therefore that did not come merely from our own instrumentalities and subjective utilities. And it is this sense of forming commitments by taking in, in our perceptions, an evaluatively ‘enchanted’ world which --being enchanted in this way-- therefore moved us to normatively constrained engagement with it, that the dissenters contrasted with the outlook that was being offered by the ideologues of the new science.[xx] I say ‘engagement’, and mean it. A brute and disenchanted world could not move us to any such engagement since any perception of it, given the sort of thing it was, would necessarily be a detached form of observation; and if one ever came out of this detachment, if there was ever any engagement with a world so distantly conceived, so external to our own sensibility, it could only take the form of mastery and control of something alien, with a view to satisfying the only source of value allowed by this outlook –our own utilities and gain.

We are much used to the lament that we have long been living in a world governed by overwhelmingly commercial motives. What I have been trying to do is to trace this to its deepest conceptual sources and that is why the seventeenth century is so central to a proper understanding of this world. Familiarly drawn connections, like "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism", are only the beginning of such a tracing. In his probing book, A Grammar of Motives, Kenneth Burke says that

"the experience of an impersonal outlook was empirically intensified in proportion as the rationale of the monetary motive gained greater authority…."[xxi] This gives us a glimpse of the sources. As he says, one had to have an impersonal angle on the world to see it as the source of profit and gain, and vice versa. But I have claimed that the sources go deeper. It is only when we see the world as Boyle and Newton did, as against the freethinkers and dissenters, that we understand further why there was no option but this impersonality in our angle on the world. A desacralized world, to put it in the dissenting terms of that period, left us no other angle from which to view it, but an impersonal one. There could be no normative constraint coming upon us from a world that was brute. It could not move us to engagement with it on its terms. All the term-making came from us. We could bring whatever terms we wished to such a world; and since we could only regard it impersonally, the terms we brought in our actions upon it were just the terms that Burke describes as accompanying such impersonality, the terms of 'the monetary' motives for our actions. Thus it is, that the metaphysical issues regarding the world and nature, as they were debated around the new science, provide the deepest conceptual sources. It is not without reason, then, that Buruma and Margalit, speak of a 'scientific rationality' as defining 'the West'.

The conceptual sources that we have traced are various but they were not miscellaneous. Religion, capital, nature, metaphysics, rationality, science, are diverse conceptual elements but they were tied together in a highly deliberate integration, that is to say in deliberately accruing worldly alliances. Newton’s and Boyle’s metaphysical view of the new science won out over the freethinkers' and became official only because it was sold not only to the Anglican establishment but, in an alliance with that establishment, to the powerful mercantile and incipient industrial interests of the period in precisely these terms, terms which stressed a future of endlessly profitable consequences that would accrue if one embraced this particular conception of the new science and build, in the name of a notion of rationality around it, the institutions of an increasingly centralized political oligarchy (an early version of a certain form of centralized state) to help promote these interests. These were the very terms that the freethinkers found alarming for politics and culture, alarming for the local and egalitarian ways of life, which the radical elements in the English Revolution such as the Levellers, Diggers, Quakers, and other groups had articulated and fought for.

It is a travesty of the historical complexity built into the thick notion of scientific rationality we are discussing, to think –as is so often done-- that it emerged triumphant in the face of centuries of clerical reaction only. That is the sort of simplification of intellectual history which leads one to oppose scientific rationality with religion, (the ‘Occident’ and its ‘Enemies’) without any regard to the highly significant historical fact that it was the Anglican establishment that lined up with this thick notion of rationality in an alliance with commercial interests and it was the dissenting, egalitarian, radicals who opposed such ‘rationality’. It was this scientific rationality, seized upon by just these established religious and economic alliances, that was later central to the colonizing mentality that justified the rapacious conquest of distant lands. It may seem that it is a conceptual leap to go from the seventeenth century conceptions of scientific rationality to the liberal justifications of colonial conquest. But if one accepts the initial conceptual connection between views of nature, God, and commerce that were instantiated in these social and political alliances between specific groups and interests of the earlier period, there can be no reason to withhold acceptance from the perfectly plausible hypothesis (indeed merely an extension of the connections that have been accepted) that the colonized lands too were to be viewed as brute nature that was available for conquest and control. This hypothesis is wholly plausible so long as one was able to portray the inhabitants of the colonized lands in infantilized terms, as a people who were as yet unprepared --by precisely a mental lack of such a notion of scientific rationality-- to have the right attitudes towards nature and commerce and the statecraft that allows nature to be pursued for commercial gain. And such an historically infantilizing portrayal of the inhabitants was explicit in the writings of John Stuart Mill, and even Marx.

There is a fair amount of historical literature by now on this last point about the intellectual rationalizations of colonialism, but I have introduced the salient points of an earlier pre-colonial period’s critique here in order to point out that Gandhi’s and apparently the ‘Occidentalist’s’ social and political attack on the ‘scientific rationality’ that is elevated as a defining principle of the “West”, has had a very long and recognizable tradition going back to the seventeenth century in the heart of the West, and it is this tradition of dissent that seems to keep resurfacing in different forms throughout the intellectual history of the West and elsewhere since the seventeenth century. Buruma and Margalit, as I said, cite later Slavophile, Japanese, and German romantic and nationalist writing as being critical of this notion of rationality, but my point is that it is the writing and thought at the very site and the very time of the scientific discoveries themselves, which anticipate in detail and with thoroughly honourable intent, those later developments

Once that point is brought on to centre stage, a standard strategy of the orthodox Enlightenment against fundamental criticisms raised against it, is exposed as defensive posturing. It would be quite wrong and anachronistic to dismiss this initial and early intellectual and perfectly scientific source of critique, from which later critiques of the Enlightenment derived, as being irrational, unless one is a cold warrior waiting to tarnish all criticism of the “West” along these lines. It is essential to the argument of this paper that far from being anti-West, Gandhi’s early antecedents in the West, going back to the seventeenth century and in recurring heterodox traditions in the West since then, constitute what is, and rightly has been, called ‘the Radical Enlightenment’.[xxii] To dismiss its pantheistic tendencies that I cited, as being unscientific and in violation of norms of rationality, would be to run together in a blatant slippage the general and ‘thin” use of terms like ‘scientific’ and ‘rationalist’ with just this ‘thick’ notion of scientific rationality that we had identified above, which had the kind of politically and culturally disastrous consequences that the early dissenters were so prescient and jittery about. Buruma and Margalit’s appeal to scientific rationality as a defining feature of the West trades constantly on just such a slippage, subtly appealing to the hurrah element of the general and ‘thin’ terms ‘rational’ and ‘scientific’ to tarnish the critics of the West, while actually having the work in their argument done by the thicker notion of scientific rationality, which the ‘Occidentalist’ tradition and the ‘Enemies of the West’ oppose.

As far as the thin conception of ‘scientific’ and ‘rationality’ is concerned, the plain fact is that nobody in that period was, in any case, getting prizes for leaving God out of the world-view of science. That one should think of God as voluntaristically affecting nature from the outside (as the Newtonians did) rather than sacralizing it from within (as the freethinkers insisted), was not in any way to improve on the science involved. Both views were therefore just as ‘unscientific’, just as much in violation of scientific rationality, in the ‘thin’ sense of that term that we would now take for granted. What was in dispute had nothing to do with science or rationality in that attenuated sense at all. What the early dissenting tradition (and its many successors, whether in German, Japanese or Slavophile traditions or in Gandhi) was opposed to is the metaphysical orthodoxy that grew around Newtonian science and its implications for broader issues of culture and politics. This orthodoxy with all of its implications is what has now come to be called ‘scientific rationality’ in the ‘thick’ sense of that term and in the cold-war intellectual’s cheerleading about ‘the West’, it has been elevated into a defining ideal, dismissing all opposition as irrationalist, with the hope that accusations of irrationality, because of the general stigma that the term imparts in its ‘thin’ usage, will disguise the very specific and ‘thick’ sense of rationality and irrationality that are actually being deployed by them. Such (thick) irrationalism is precisely what the dissenters yearned for; and hindsight shows just how honourable a yearning it was.

The point here is so critical that I will risk taxing the reader’s endurance and repeat it. Buruma and Margalit mention only the later Slavophile and German and other ‘Occidentalist’ criticisms of such a notion of the “West”. But if I am right that all of these, including Gandhi’s criticisms which they conveniently do not mention, are continuous with this much earlier critique in the very heart of the West and its scientific developments, then the terms in which Buruma and Margalit dismiss those criticisms must apply to the antecedent critique as well. It is precisely the point, however, that to say that these early dissenters were unleashing an irrationalist and unscientific critique of the “West” as they define the ‘West’, is to confuse and conflate science and its ideals of rationality with a notion of rationality defined upon a very specific metaphysical outlook that started at a very specific historical moment and place and grew to be a presiding orthodoxy as a result of alliances that were formed by the scientific and clerical and commercial establishment in England and the Netherlands and then spreading to other parts of Europe. It is this outlook and its large consequences for history and culture and political economy, which made Gandhi and his many conceptual predecessors in the West anxious in a long tradition of dissenting thought. What this helps to reveal is that while one works with a ‘thin’ notion of rationality and an innocuous notion of the ‘West’, it is absurd to call these freethinkers, either ‘irrational’ or ‘unscientific’, or “Enemies of the West”. But if one works openly and without disguise (in a way that Buruma and Margalit do not) with a thick notion of rationality, understood now as shaped by this very specific intellectual, political and cultural history, it is quite right to call them ‘irrationalist’ and ‘Enemies of the West’ --for those terms, so understood, reveal only the perfectly serious, legitimate and, as I said, highly prescient anxieties of the dissenters. It is only when we make plain that these thick meanings are being passed off in disguise as the thin ones, that one can expose the codes by which an edgy and defensive cold war intellectual rhetoric tries to tarnish an entire tradition of serious and fundamental dissent.

Sometimes this tradition has surfaced in violent activism, at other times in critiques that have stressed more pacifist, religious, and contemplative ways of life. Since colonialism and the West’s reach into distant lands which persists after formal decolonization in revised forms today, this very same dissenting tradition has quite naturally surfaced in those distant lands as well, again both in non-violent forms such as Gandhi’s, and in the violent forms which Buruma and Margalit characterize as coming from the Occidentalist “Enemies of the West” among a fringe of Islamist extremists.

The unpardonable atrocities committed recently by some of the latter in acts of violent terror are in no way absolved by the analysis I am offering. All the analysis does is to show that when the cold warriors of the West try and elevate one’s understanding of these atrocities as deriving from a politics that owes to a certain culturalist conception of the West that they call “Occidentalism”, they have it only partly right. A full understanding of that conception requires seeing ‘Occidentalism’ as continuous with a longstanding and deep-going dissenting tradition in the West itself. That tradition was clear-eyed about what was implied by the ‘disenchantment’ of the world, to stay with the Weberian term. It is a tradition consisting not just of Gandhi and the early seventeenth century freethinkers, whom I have already mentioned, not just the Slavophile, Japanese and German critics that are mentioned in their book, but a number of remarkable literary and philosophical voices in between that they don’t discuss: Blake, Shelley, William Morris, Whitman, Thoreau, and countless anonymous voices of the non-traditional Left, the Left of the ‘radical’ Enlightenment, from the freemasons of the early period down to the heterodox Left in our own time, voices such as those of Noam Chomsky and Edward Thompson, and the vast army of heroic but anonymous organizers of popular grass roots movements --in a word, the West as conceived by the ‘radical’ Enlightenment which has refused to be complacent about the orthodox Enlightenment’s legacy of the ‘thick’ rationality that the early seventeenth century dissenters had warned against.[xxiii] This is the tradition of “Enlightenment” that Buruma and Margalit show little understanding of, though “Enlightenment” is the avowed subject of their book. That should occasion no surprise at all since it is impossible to come to any deep understanding of their own subject while they succumb to the temptations that cold war intellectuals are prone to.

The freethinkers of the seventeenth century, even though they were remarkably prophetic about its consequences, could not, of course, foresee the details of the trajectory of the notion of ‘scientific rationality’ whose early signs they had dissented from, that is to say, the entire destructive colonial and corporate legacy of the alliance of concepts and institutions and material interests, they were warning against. But their successors over the last three hundred or more years, some of whom I have named, have been articulating and responding to these details in their own times.

It goes without saying that not all of these responses are based on a clearly articulated sense of these conceptual, institutional, and material alliances that have developed over the centuries. They are often much more instinctive. And it is undeniable that there are sometimes monstrously violent manifestations in these responses among a terrorist fringe in, among others, Muslim populations (including the Muslim youth in the metropolitan West) who, as Buruma and Margalit acknowledge, feel a sense of powerlessness in the face of an imperial past (and present) in different parts of the world. That some of the political rhetoric of these terrorists appeals confusedly to distortions of their religion, much as talk of ‘Armageddon’ in the heartland of America does, is also undeniable. But if Buruma and Margalit are right that their religious politics and rhetoric is not separable from a cultural understanding of their past and of a certain cultural understanding of the West which has intruded into their past and their present, and if I am right that that cultural understanding has deep affinities with a dissenting Western tradition’s understanding of ‘the West’ and its own past, then we are required to take very seriously, the words of terrorists and of the many, many more ordinary Muslim people who will not always publicly oppose these terrorists despite the fact that they share no ‘fundamentalist’ ideology with them and in fact detest them for the violent disruption of their lives that they have wrought. By ‘take the words seriously’, I mean take the words to be saying just what they are saying and not self-servingly view them as a fake political front for a runaway religious fanaticism.

We will have to take their words much more seriously than Buruma and Margalit do in their passing, lightly formulated acknowledgements of the wrongs committed by the West. The words have been spoken again and again. They are not just on the recordings of Osama Bin Laden’s voice and image, they are constantly on the lips of ordinary Muslims on the street. And they are clear and perfectly precise about what they claim and want: that they are fighting back against centuries of colonial subjugation, that they want the military and the corporate presence of the West (primarily the United States) which continues that subjugation in new and more subtle forms, out of their lands, that they want a just solution for the colonized, brutalized Palestinian people, that they want an end to the cynical support by the West (primarily by America) of corrupt regimes in their midst to serve the West’s (primarily America’s) geo-political and corporate interests, that they will retaliate (or not speak out against those who retaliate) with an endless cycle of violence unless there is an end to the endless state-terrorist actions both violent (in the bombings and in the bulldozing of their cities and their occupied lands, killing or displacing thousands of civilians,) and non-violent (the sanctions and embargoes that cause untold suffering to ordinary, innocent people).[xxiv] To not take these words seriously and see them as genuinely motivating for those who speak them, is as morally cretinous as it is to absolve the terrorist actions that a fringe of those who speak these words, commit.[xxv]

The two books I have discussed, as I said, provide an interesting contrast on just this point. Mamdani, who rightly takes these words seriously but (unlike Buruma and Margalit) is suspicious of ‘culture talk’, quite fails to locate the words in the historical and conceptual framework of a cultural and political critique within the West itself of a very specific notion of rationality that we have been discussing; Buruma and Margalit, who rightly see the need to connect issues of politics with cultural critique therefore correctly situate these words in the broader reaction to such a notion of rationality, yet nevertheless (unlike Mamdani) fail to take the words seriously because they are wholly uncritical of the brutal and inegalitarian political and cultural implications of such a notion of scientific rationality that the ‘radical’ Enlightenment warned against.

But, having said this, it would be wrong of me to rest with the criticism that the two books are symmetrically unsatisfactory in this way. Since we are undoubtedly in a cold war, Mamdani’s is the book that will be unpopular in ‘the West’, not only with those in power but also with the large class of intellectuals and writers and journalists who keep a cold war going and who, as I said at the outset, even when they are often critical of those in power, will not disturb a broad consensus within which those in power can get away with what they have done over the years. Buruma’s and Margalit’s is the book which may, in some passing detail or other, not entirely please those in power, but it will on the whole be warmly received by this intellectual surround.[xxvi] Even if it conveys something about the moral courage of the respective authors, there is nothing surprising in any of this. If you spend your time writing a book criticizing those in and around power and control, you will get a quite different reaction than if you spend your time writing a book criticizing those who are a fringe among the powerless.

The analysis so far has refused to treat the cultural critique of the West (whether accompanied by violence or not) as being wholly unconnected (or fallaciously and illicitly connected) to the dissent from the thick notion of scientific rationality that developed in the ‘West’ and mobilized itself into one underlying justificatory source of the West’s colonizing of other lands. It has, on the contrary, tried to show the connecting threads between them in historical and conceptual terms. It has also acknowledged that sometimes the cultural critique comes with a layer of religious rhetoric and commitment, of a conservative and ‘fundamentalist’ or (a better term) ‘absolutist’ variety. It is often true that those commitments and that rhetoric are the things to which an alienated and powerless people in previously (and presently) colonized lands will turn, and Buruma and Margalit don’t particularly wish to deny this. Like most intellectual cold warriors, their focus is on the religious commitment and rhetoric of the immediate cold war target, Muslims who are the “Enemies of the West”. However, if there really are conspicuous intellectual and critical affinities between the ‘Occidentalist Enemies of the West’ and Gandhi on the one hand and a longstanding and continuous dissenting tradition within the West itself on the other, then we ought to pay some attention to religiosity in the West too, a religiosity which is often (especially in America) a response to the more local rather than imperial consequences of ‘scientific rationality’, in the thick sense of that term.

Earlier I had followed Weber, in describing the cultural consequences of the thick notion of scientific rationality, as a ‘disenchantment’ of the world. The term captures some of what the early dissenters had in mind, as well as what Gandhi much later feared when he saw all around him the eagerness of the elites of the colonized lands to embrace for their formally decolonized nations, the models of liberal democracy with its deep links to a corporate and commercial culture of the West. When he famously quipped, “It would be a good idea” to the question, “What do you think of Western civilization?” he was not expressing something very distant in basic respects from what Buruma and Margalit describe with the Islamic notion of ‘jahiliya’.[xxvii] But quite apart from this distant and outsider’s perspective of a Gandhi or the absolutist Muslim in Arabian and colonized regions of the world, the local experience in the West of the disenchanting consequences of ‘scientific rationality’ in the thick sense, are bound to be very different from what is experienced by the colonized lands. The conquest and the extracting of surpluses from colonized regions of the world may have created feelings of powerlessness and humiliation there, but what ‘scientific rationality’ (in the thick sense) created in the West’s own midst was a quite different form of alienation. Moreover, it is a form of alienation that is not dismissable as ‘jahiliya’ by its own inhabitants. That may be a perspective of the outsider, but in the local habitus of the West itself, ordinary people have to live in and cope with the disenchantment of their world, seeking whatever forms of re-enchantment that are available to them.

In a certain social climate, with either a faded or non-existent labour movement and with no serious tradition of social democracy, the rhetoric and offerings of a conservative religiosity may have just as much confused appeal in coping with such alienation from a disenchanted world as it does (in a quite different and sometimes more violent form) to people who are powerless and humiliated in the colonized lands. Nowhere is this more evident than in the mass of ordinary people living in what has come to be called ‘red state’ America.

It is sometimes said today, as if it is some sort of a peculiarity, that the majorities in the red states present themselves as having the mentality of victims. When one compares their condition to those in sub-Saharan Africa or even to the impoverished inner cities of America’s metropoles, there is certainly something peculiarly ignorant and impervious about it. But if it is analyzed as an almost unconscious grasp of the condition of living in a pervasive and longstanding disenchantment of their world, it is not peculiar at all.

The most sophisticated cold warriors, often voicing elite, Left liberal opinion, who write and applaud books like Occidentalism, would no doubt be prepared to be consistent and despise the electorate of the red states as an anti-Enlightenment anomaly within the West itself. It too is ‘Occidentalist’, they will admit. After all the large majority of the ordinary people of these conservative regions of the country have also explicitly repudiated ‘scientific rationality’. I have heard the conservative Christian, Republican-voting electorate described as ‘vile and stupid’ by liberal, Left opinion in the days immediately after the recent elections, without a hint of awareness of the deeply anti-democratic nature of such a remark. The curiosity of this, coming as it does from those who uphold liberal democracy as one of the ideals that define ‘the West’, needs an elaborate diagnosis, but I will not be able to provide it in detail in this essay,[xxviii] which I must now bring to a close. However, I will say just this to link it with what has already been said here.

The diagnosis turns on the integral relations between the first of the defining ideals of the West that we have been primarily discussing, 'scientific rationality' (which we have exposed as having a very specific culturally and politically ‘thick’ sense), and the second defining ideal, that of a very specific notion of ‘liberal democracy’ that Buruma and Margalit identify. A proper analysis of how the political, economic, and cultural consequences of the former ideal have determined and circumscribed the latter is essential to understanding the insufficiencies and the incompleteness of the liberal democratic ideal as the cold warriors have viewed it, creating ‘Occidentalists’ in their own midst, whom they would consistently (as I said) dismiss as unworthy of the West’s democratic ideals, a whole electorate unworthy of the high and hard-won commitments of the ‘West’, which it inhabits only in geographical terms but not in the values by which it votes. The diagnosis would show just how incomplete this conception of democracy is, how little understanding it has of the yearnings of ordinary people for ‘enchantment’, for belonging, for the solidarities of community, for some control at a local level over the decisions by which their qualitative and material lives are shaped, in short, for the kind of substantial democracy that the seemingly irreversible consequences of ‘scientific rationality’ (in the thick sense) have made impossible to fulfill. It would show too why in a scenario where these consequences are perceived as simply given and irreversible, these yearnings manifest themselves in muddled articulations of and affiliations to a conservative Christianity that is paradoxically in a masked alliance with the very agencies of the thicker ‘scientific rationality’ to which these yearnings are a reaction.[xxix]

It would be a mistake to ignore the fact that I am putting so much weight on -–that it is a reaction to the cultural consequences of the thick notion of’ scientific rationality’—and instead rest in one’s diagnosis with the idea that the scenario to which these articulations are a response is merely the desolation brought about by a ‘market society’. To rest with that diagnosis and to fail to go on to subsume the point about market society in these broader and more longstanding cultural, political and even philosophical alliances, is part of the shallowness of the Left diagnosis I am protesting. It is beginning to be widely understood that the Republican party’s changing of the political agenda in the minds of ordinary people in the red states from issues in political economy to cultural issues surrounding religion, is what has made it possible for them to be so resoundingly victorious in those states. If my account is right, then no matter how repugnant one finds their political stances, one has to acknowledge that the Republicans have, in their perverse way, been less shallow than their opposition (at any rate, one kind of Left opposition) which merely registers, and then rests with, the idea that it is the consequences of the market that are responsible for the cultural and political desolation of the society in which these citizens find themselves. If my account is right, it shows why these conservative religious articulations of the electorate, which the Republicans have so cynically encouraged –even engineered-- and tapped for some forty years, are “the roots that clutch, the branches that grow/out of this stony rubbish”, out of this cumulative effect of something with a much wider and longer reach than market society, something which subsumes market society, viz., the phenomenon we have identified as the thick ideal of ‘scientific rationality’; and the account demands that we ask a large and pressing question: how might we think about alternative and more secular, articulations.

T. S. Eliot, who is recognizable in the quoted words of my last sentence,[xxx] of course, articulated thoroughly non-secular alternatives. Indeed it is a measure of how little he understood of the early and absolutely central role of the Anglican establishment in the trajectory that led to the disenchantment he was lamenting in those cited words, that it was Anglicanism he turned to for re-enchantment.

Since Eliot, there have been proposals of other quite inadequate alternatives. Thoreau, says in his section on ‘Economy’ in Walden: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. …A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind." Writing as if these words were never written, American social scientists, have offered many an apolitical vision of ‘bowling alleys’ and the like, enchanting the lives of ordinary Americans.[xxxi] Apart from failing to perceive what Thoreau did (suggesting as a cure for the malaise what he rightly saw was one of its symptoms), it is a measure of how little American social science understands of what is needed to politically withstand the cultural and political fallout today of the alliances formed in the late seventeenth century under the brave, new, thick, ‘scientific rationality’.

By this I don't mean at all that the ideal of secular forms of re-enchantment to cope with the 'stony rubbish' of which Eliot writes, has to be understood in terms of the replacement of religion by politics. Such talk of 'replacement' is glib and silly, as unsatisfactory as the oft-heard aestheticist slogan: 'Art and literature must have the function that religion once had'. All I mean is that merely proposing recreational forms of association as providing such alternative and secular forms of enchantment misses out on the fact that it is values to live by that are being sought by the vast mass of ordinary people, even if sometimes confusedly in rigidly religious terms (a confusion, which I have been saying, is to some extent quite understandable in the context of the impoverished options they have been allowed); and, therefore, a great deal of moral-psychological resources will have to be summoned in the public realm so that they can get some sense that they are participating in the decisions which affect their material and spiritual lives. The aesthete who stresses art and literature does at least get something about these normative and evaluative necessities right, but proposes something that shares too much with the 'bowling alley' paradigm, where the sites of participation could not possibly be host to the kind of public deliberation and organization that is needed to withstand the political culture of isolation and destruction of solidarities that the long era of 'scientific rationality' (in the thick sense) has wrought, and which Weber was bemoaning. It is not that politics must replace religiosity, but rather that an appreciation of the underlying political ground which prompts the religiosity requires that other more secular sources of enchantment than religion will have to emerge out of an alternative configuration of the underlying political ground. Dewey, who was temperamentally shy of the Weberian rhetoric of ‘enchantment’, which I have been wielding with such unblushing relish, and who preferred the more purely psychological vocabulary of 'consciousness', was hinting at the point that I have made more explicitly, in his marvelously cryptic remark: "Psychology is the democratic movement come to consciousness."[xxxii]

Once we have acknowledged the great and primary claims of global justice, there remains no more urgent intellectual and political task in the West for our times than to frame the possibilities of such alternative, less confused, and more secular forms of re-enchantment that might make for a genuinely substantial notion of democracy, freed from the cold warrior’s self-congratulatory ideals or, if not freed from them, connecting them to the lives and yearnings of ordinary people in the way that the ‘Occidentalist’ dissenters in the West demanded no less than, indeed somewhat more than, three centuries ago.

* I am very grateful to Carol Rovane, Stephen White, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Arac, Adrienne Rich, Eric Foner, David Bromwich, Ira Katznelson, and Jerry Cooper for their detailed and valuable comments on this paper.

[i] It would, I suppose, be an atrocious crudeness and also thoroughly misleading to put the internal tension of the previous cold war as being between the Enlightenment values of liberty and equality. Certainly anti-communist cold warriors would not describe the tension along these lines and would insist on describing it as a tension between the values of liberty and authoritarianism. Even so, their own support of manifestly authoritarian regimes and of their governments’ role in the overthrow of democratically elected regimes with egalitarian aspirations, such as in Iran in the fifties and Chile in the seventies (to name just two) shows that insistence to be mendacious. One can be wholly critical of the authoritarianism of communist regimes and still point this out. On the other hand, there is a parallel mendacity, given how things turned out, in the communist self-description of being committed to egalitarian values. But if the idea here is one of getting right some balance of rhetoric and motives in that cold war, then from the point of view of the rhetoric, liberty and equality were certainly the values that were respectively stressed by each side; and, moreover, there can be little doubt that no matter what their rhetoric explicitly said about being opposed to authoritarianism, the anti-communism was really primarily motivated by an opposition to the egalitarian ideals that might, if pursued and if they gained a wider allegiance than they did behind the iron curtain (where they were getting no serious allegiance at all), they would undermine the corporate interests of Western nations.

[ii] Foucault's specific response is a much more politically focused and historically diagnostic and, it has to be said, stylistically charmless, variation on a response first formulated in the Surrealist aesthetic, whose targets were presented in slightly different, though by no means unrelated, rhetoric -- instead of ‘the Enlightenment’, the target was termed as 'bourgeois' modernity with its 'legitimizing' representational and narrative modes and verisimilitudes.

[iii] This paper is one of a pair. Its sequel “Democracy and Disenchantment” focuses on the more purely local manifestations in the West of the themes of this paper.

[iv] If one is to be scrupulous, one should register a caveat. The concept of a ‘cold war’, though it has had its early versions ever since 1917, really only came to be conventionally deployed in the way we are now used to, after World War II. And in this period, most of the academic and 'independent' writers and journalists that I refer to, were on the side of the West, for obvious reasons. In the Soviet Union, defenders of their governments' actions could not be accurately described as 'independent writers' or 'academics'. And in the West, though there were some who took the Soviet side, they were, except in France, rather peripheral in their weight and influence. In the current cold war too, a similar caveat holds and. that is why I will speak only about the writing on one side of the cold war.

[v] First published in Foreign Affairs, volume.72, Summer 1993.

[vi] Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies, The Penguin Press, 2004.

[vii] Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, The Penguin Press, Revised Edition, 1995.

[viii] “And they were not entirely wrong”, say the authors (see p. 112), after a summary description of the condition of the world wrought by a corporate driven Western society.

[ix] I am merely recording that they do not attempt to provide any evidence of causal influences, but, to be fair to them, causal influences are not required for the parallels they draw to be interesting. That there is only an interesting parallel and not a causal influence would not matter, if the implications of the parallel were pursued in some depth, which they are not by Buruma and Margalit. This essay will try and draw a further parallel from an earlier period with a view to pursuing those deeper implications, but with no particular claim to causal influence. Traditions of thought in politics and culture can emerge without causal links so long as the affinities in intellectual and political responses, even among responses in far-flung regions and times, reflect a deep, common understanding of what they are responding to. Thus, my claims in this essay will be something that Buruma and Margalit could also make for the parallels they cite: that the parallels are interesting, without causal influence, so long as one can see in them a pattern that speaks to a deeper historically recurring phenomenon which has common underlying sources. This essay is motivated by the need for an analysis of the underlying sources of the critique of the “West” that Buruma and Margalit find in contemporary Islamism and in some European and Japanese traditions of thought; and its claim will be that the sources, in order to be properly identified, must go back to a certain metaphysical disputation in the Early Modern “West” itself.

[x] Pantheon Books, 2004

[xi] To say that such justifications were put into place soon after the initial cold war ended is also too late, actually. One heard these justifications as early as 1981, when the Reagan administration talked first of a 'war on terror' --Libyan and Palestinians were particularly targeted, and disgraceful stereotyping generalizations and racial attitudes towards Arabs began to be expressed, even among academics and the metropolitan intelligentsia, who had for some years now not dared to say similar things about African-Americans and Jews.

[xii] However, in my own view, this second feature lacks the interest or the conviction of the rest because it is not obvious that its presence is always a sign of reducing one’s subject of study to the “Other”. There is a real question whether one can make any interesting claims or generalizations about a subject without abstracting, and sometimes abstracting considerably, from the diversity and detail of the subject. A great deal of explanation depends on such abstraction. We do after all ignore the diversity of the West, when we talk of its colonizing mentality or its corporate-driven policies, and it would be absurd to stop talking in this way in fear that one is abstracting away from other aspects of the West which stood in opposition to this mentality and these policies. And if it would be absurd to stop talking in these broadly truthful ways about the West, consistency demands that we should not always react critically or defensively to generalizations made about Islam, despite the fact of diverse elements in nations with Islamic populations. See my “Rushdie and the Reform of Islam”, Grand Street (1989), “What is a Muslim?”, Critical Inquiry, (Summer 1992) and “Fifteen Years of Controversy” in Encounters with Salman Rushdie: History, Literature, Homeland, edited by Daniel Herwitz and Ashutosh Varshney (University of Michigan Press, 2005) for more on these themes.

[xiii] This third feature, though commonly found in much writing, should be deployed more restrictively than Said did. Not to do so would be to miss the remarkable modesty of outlook in some of the most interesting aspects of Romanticism, especially German Romantic interest in the Orient, which was not by any means guilty of always merely exoticizing its subjects. Some of the interest was motivated by the view that the West did not know it all and that one might, in one’s absorption in the Orient, even lose one’s identity and, with luck, acquire new knowledges and identities. In the sequel to this paper, “Democracy and Disenchantment” I will look at the Romantics’ (both German and British) understanding of nature and show how it was very much and very deliberately of a piece with the seventeenth century dissenters’ anti-Newtonian conception of matter that is discussed further below in the present paper. (Blake, for instance, was as explicit and clear-headed and passionate about these philosophical and historical connections as anyone could be.) Through such an understanding, they explicitly raised the whole metaphysical and political aspect of the notion of ‘enchantment’ (as Weber would later describe it) which I refer to briefly at the end of this paper, and of which Said himself did not have much awareness because of his keenness to convict them of “othering” their subject. M. H. Abrams’s book Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (W.W. Norton, 1973) is more knowing and insightful on this aspect of Romanticism, though there too the focus is more purely on the metaphysical themes, and the political issues at stake are not explored in the detail they deserve. It is the large theme of “Democracy and Disenchantment”.

[xiv] Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building, (Shocken, 1980)

[xv] I assume that the authors will admit that, just as with European colonialism, which they don't write of, the Nazis, imperial Japan, and Stalin, who were the statist inheritors of the early Occidentalist conceptions they do write of, also gave lofty rationales for their racial attitudes. Even so, I am accepting some of these grounds they might give for focusing on the latter and not the former. After all the author of Orientalism had his own focus, so why shouldn't they? But still it would have been good to hear just a little bit more from the authors of Occidentalism, about what their view is of the racial attitudes shown since European colonialism. For example, even Israeli historians acknowledge their governments' acts of 'ethnic purification', 'redeeming the land', and so on. Are the attitudes expressed towards the Palestinians in these actions continuous with the German, Japanese, Slavophile antecedents of the contemporary Occidentalists, of which they write, or are they more akin to the colonial forms of racialism? Has anyone ever rationalized this Israeli action in terms of spreading 'rationality'? Or does it owe much more to the romantic German or Slavophile argument they discuss, invoking notions of land and ancient religious roots as the basis of its nationalism? If it does, should the Israelis be counted among the Occidentalists?

[xvi] See my “Gandhi’s Integrity” in The Raritan Quarterly, XXI.2 Fall, 2001

[xvii] If any one is skeptical of this link I am drawing between the Islamic ‘Occidentalists’’ conception of ‘the West’ and what Gandhi has to say about the Enlightenment, all they have to do is compare the four central chapters of Occidentalism where that conception is described and the pages of Gandhi’s text Hind Swaraj (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) to notice the remarkable overlap of responses and opinions to Western culture and imperial attitudes. I have only summarized Buruma and Margalit’s description of Occidentalism and Gandhi’s views at two different points in this essay. The details of the overlap far outrun my brief summaries.

[xviii] As Gandhi’s critique is bound to seem, coming centuries later, when the science is no longer ‘new’ and its effects on our lives, which the earlier critique was warning against, seem like a fait accompli.

[xix] In a series of works, starting with Christianity Not Mysterious in 1696, more explicitly pantheistic in statement in the discussion of Spinoza in Letters to Serena (1704) and then in the late work Pantheisticon (1724). These writings are extensively discussed in Margaret Jacob’s extremely useful treatment of the subject mentioned in Footnote 22. She also discusses a vast range of other figures among the dissenting voices of that period, not just in England but in the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere in Europe. Two important points should be added here. First, though the dissenting response I am invoking which explicitly addressed the new science appeared late in the seventeenth century, the basic metaphysical picture of matter and nature that it was presenting (in more explicitly scientific terms) and the social, egalitarian attitudes it was claiming to be linked with this metaphysical picture, was already firmly being asserted by the politically radical groups of the English Revolution five decades earlier. These are the radical sectaries whose views and writings were memorably traversed by Christopher Hill in his extraordinary book, The World Turned Upside Down (London: Penguin 1975). Winstanley, to pick only the most well-known of the revolutionary figures of the time, put it in terms that quit explicitly anticipated Toland and others: “God is still in motion” and the “truth is hid in every body” (cited by Hill on p.293, from The Works of Gerard Winstanley, edited by G. H. Sabine (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1941). What makes the dissenting scientific position of some decades later so poignant and so richly interesting because much more than merely scientific and metaphysical, is precisely the fact that it was a despairing response to what it perceived to be a betrayal in the name of ‘scientific rationality’ of the egalitarian ideals that held promise during the earlier revolutionary period. The second point that should be stressed is that this metaphysical and scientific debate about the nature of matter and nature should not be confused with another debate of that time, perhaps a more widely discussed one, regarding the 'general concourse', which had to do with whether or not the deity was needed after the first formation of the universe, to keep it from falling apart. In that debate, Boyle, in fact, wrote against the Deists, arguing in favour of the 'general concourse', of a continually active God. But both sides of that dispute take God to be external to a brute nature, which was mechanically conceived, unlike Toland and his "Socratic Brotherhood" and the dissenting tradition I am focusing on, who denied it was brute and denied that God stood apart from nature, making only external interventions. The dispute about ‘general concourse’ was only about whether, the interventions from the outside of an externally conceived God were or were not needed after the original creative intervention.

[xx] I have written at greater length about this conception of the world as providing normative constraints upon us and the essential links that such a conception of the world has with our capacities for free agency and self-knowledge, thereby making both freedom and self-knowledge thoroughly normative notions, in my book Self-Knowledge and Resentment, chapters 4 and 5, (in press, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press). For the idea that values are perceptible external qualities, see John McDowell’s pioneering essay, "Values and Secondary Qualities" in Morality and Objectivity, edited by Ted Honderich (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985).

[xxi] University of California Press, 1969.

[xxii] See especially, Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans, George, Allen and Unwin, 1981, which traces some of the trajectory that gave rise to the Radical Enlightenment from the dissenters in late seventeenth century England that I have been discussing. She is good too on the alliances I have been discussing between the Newtonian ideologues and the Anglicans speaking towards the commercial interests of the time, especially the conceptual basis for these alliances as they were spelt out by the Newtonian ideologues who were carefully chosen to give the highly influential Boyle lectures when they were first set up. (See especially Chapter 3.)

[xxiii] There is, in the sense of the term that I have been presenting, a strikingly ‘radical’ side to Burke too. There are eloquent criticisms of something like the outlook that I have described as forming around the official ideology of the ‘new science’, which can be found in Burke’s diagnosis of what he saw as the massive impertinence of British colonial actions in India. I have no scholarly sense of Burke’s grasp of his intellectual antecedents, but there is much in his writing to suggest that he would be sympathetic to the political and cultural outlook of the earlier dissenting tradition I have been discussing, even perhaps to their metaphysics, though that is not obviously discernable in the texts.

[xxiv] I don’t want to give the impression that these political responses on the lips of Muslims is all that is on their lips. This is not the place to look at all the diverse and complex things that a fundamental commitment to Islam amounts to among Muslim populations in the Middle East and South Asia. I have written about that subject in a number of essays. See for example, “What is a Muslim: Fundamental Commitment and Cultural Identity”, Critical Inquiry, Summer 1992 and “Secularism, Nationalism, and Modernity” in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Oxford University Press, 1997). What I do want to stress in the context of a cold war climate today is that writers and intellectuals are prone to think that all the rest that is on their lips somehow discounts the importance of what I am calling attention to as being on their lips in this essay. (See the next footnote, 25, for a little more on this.) In the other essays by me, which I have just cited, I have been highly critical of Islamist attitudes, though since late 2001, I find it more and more natural and fruitful to save these criticisms for when I am visiting countries with large Muslim populations in South Asia and the Middle East, rather than speak them constantly in a region of the world where they would only feed into cold war attitudes. There is another point regarding this that is worth making quickly. Though, as I have acknowledged, there are obviously other more intrinsically Islamic commitments that Muslims have over and above their political objections to Western governments’ actions, it is very easy to overinterpret the effect and influence of the intrinsically Islamic voices when one is at a distance from them. There is no doubt, as I have already said in this essay, that ordinary Muslims are not overtly critical of the absolutist voices in their midst. This gives the impression that those voices are in some sense a representative voice. But the reason for this lack of criticism on the part of ordinary Muslims has much more to do with a defensive psychology against the West, much more to do with the feeling that one would be letting the side down to be critical of one’s people in the context of a colonial past and present, rather than any intrinsic commitment to Islamic absolutism. Just to give one example, anyone reading American newspapers is quite likely to think (as I have discovered in innumerable conversations) that the popularity of Hamas has to do with its Islamism, thus giving the impression that Islamism is widespread among the Palestinian people. But anybody who is at all close to the scene and is aware of the facts on the ground (that are seldom reported in American newspapers in the routine way that spectacular terrorist acts and flamboyantly fanatical sounding sayings are reported) knows that the popularity of Hamas has much less to do with its Islamism than it does with the fact that it is one of the few groups who provide basic medical and other services and who keep alive the most basic functions of civil society among one of the most brutalized populations in the world.

[xxv] “I don’t accept they really care about these causes, the perpetrators of this ideology.” So says Tony Blair in one of his many incoherent speeches about Islamism, and this quote is a gorgeously explicit example of the ‘not taking seriously’ I am referring to. For a devastating analysis of this speech, see Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s piece “Blair’s Dubious Logic on Islamism and Ireland”, Financial Times, Friday, August 28, 2005, in which he exposes the inconsistency in his positions on the terror associated with the two issues mentioned in his title. The real difference between the two, of course, is that only one of them is a cold war target at the moment. That quite nicely accounts for the inconsistency. It is only to be expected, I suppose, that the leader of a government which has played so central a role in a war against terror based on a sustained deceit of its people, should proclaim such a thing as I have quoted. What shall we say of the intellectuals and journalists who proclaim it? Wheatcroft’s excellent article would have been even more effective if he had exposed some of them too.

[xxvi] I mean this to be a general but obviously not an exceptionless claim. No doubt some books that one would expect to be unpopular with the mainstream of opinion in a cold war climate, might get some good notices from friends and carefully cultivated writers for the press, and other books that one would expect to be warmly received by the generality of conventional opinion, will occasionally be seen through as being the cold war interventions they are.

[xxvii] See footnote 17 for my firm conviction in this similarity.

[xxviii] It is the subject of the sequel essay mentioned in Footnote 3

[xxix] Let me briefly give some more detailed indication of the sort of diagnosis and analysis that is needed here. When I say that the electorate in question is paradoxically avowing something which is in a masked alliance with the very thing that it more deeply opposes, I am frankly admitting that the voting citizens do avow commitments and values that seem to be at odds with some of their own deeper yearnings. And so, there may seem to be a whiff of the idea of ‘false consciousness’ in my description of the religiosity and the conservatism of the ‘red state’ electorate as being a confused manifestation and articulation of these yearnings. In the sequel to this paper, mentioned in Footnote 3. I explain the reasons why such a conviction in the moral strengths of ordinary people, essential to any belief in democracy no matter what the deliverance of their electoral choices, cannot be dismissed as depending on any implausible ideas of ‘false consciousness’. To establish this, one would have to look at evidence of internal conflict in the behaviour and values of the electorate, as it may be found not only in their behaviour in diversely framed contexts but in their responses to polls in diversely framed questions. These conflicting responses and behaviour would reflect both the religious articulations and the deeper yearnings that conflict with them but because they occur in different frames, they are not acknowledged as conflicting. This hypothesis that at bottom there is a problem of ‘framing’ (a central notion in psychology) that hides an internal conflict felt by political citizens from themselves, is absolutely vital to understanding why there is no need to attribute any dramatically implausible notion of false consciousness to the citizens. It is vital too in interpreting the electoral behaviour itself as to a considerable extent issuing from an epistemic weakness engendered by a combination of media distortion and educational indoctrination rather than the moral weakness that the liberal, Left contemptuously attributes to them. This diagnosis would allow us to see our way towards a solution as one of primarily allowing ordinary people to acquire the requisite epistemic strength by making the connections that distinct frames keeps them from making, and thereby to see the hitherto unacknowledged conflict in their own behaviour and responses and to resolve these conflicts by internal deliberation. It is my own view that the sites where such a gaining of epistemic strength is possible and where such internal public deliberation might take place cannot any longer be in the arena of conventional political institutions, but is rather the sites of popular movements. All this analysis requires a very careful elaboration, as I said. But, the point for now is that it is precisely this kind of analysis that is not undertaken by the callow dismissals of the elite, liberal opinion I am inveighing against. In fact instead of undertaking an analysis of this sort, the liberal, Left has consistently defended itself against the charge that its attitudes towards the electorate is incompatible with a belief in democracy, with a whole repertory of sleazy intellectual maneuvers that run counter to any such analysis. These maneuvers invoke notions of autonomy that would justify the ideal of democracy even when the electorate’s moral and political judgements are supposed to be unworthy of it, they cite the Churchillian cliché that despite unworthy electorates, democracy is still better than other bad forms of government, they refuse the partially exculpating explanation of electoral support of war mongering abroad in terms of a supine press that fails to inform them in detail of their government’s actions abroad, saying (a numbing non-sequitur) that ‘people deserve the press they get.’ I respond in some detail to all these disreputable maneuvers in the sequel essay mentioned in Footnote 3 and try to provide the more demanding analysis.

[xxx] T. S. Eliot, "The Wasteland", Collected Poems (London: Harcourt Brace, 1963).

[xxxi] The particular suggestion of bowling alleys, of course owes to Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

[xxxii] See p. 23, John Dewey, The Early Works, 1882-1898, volume 5, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969). Dewey was stressing ‘movement’, as much as he was stressing the other word 'democracy' in this remark, and I believe it is movements alone that can be the sites of the sort of public deliberation that I mentioned as what was needed earlier in the paragraph to which this footnote is attached. "Democratic", the other word in Dewey's phrase is, of course, a description, not a proper name. Heaven knows it is not the proper name of the party, whose learning curve has consistently proved to be flat, and which has long lost the nerve and the will to be such a site, or even to pay heed to be the opinions that emerge as the deliverances of the public deliberation carried out at the site of popular movements.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Colin Jager: Literary Thinking: A Comment on Bilgrami

Colin Jager is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University.

Early in April presidential candidate Barak Obama remarked that “some of these small towns in Pennsylvania…like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them….And it's not surprising that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” The remarks were widely seen as a slip for the normally sure-footed Obama—certainly Hillary Clinton went to town with them, accusing Obama of condescending to working-class voters and being “out of touch.”

Obama’s remarks might be seen as an example of the kind of thinking that Akeel Bilgrami finds lacking. In the essay under discussion here, Bilgrami criticizes the ease with which left-liberal thinkers translate enchantment into its supposedly more worldly (read: economic) causes. Bilgrami argues that there is a wider and more philosophical issue at stake here, namely the disenchantment that attends modernity. That disenchantment has a certain “feel” to it. Consequently, those who see in re-enchantment simply a form of false consciousness miss the cultural dimensions of disenchantment: the transformation or outright destruction of indigenous and local forms of solidarity, the isolation and alienation that trail in its wake.

Bruce Robbins, in his response to Bilgrami, wonders whether this is the right approach. Do the kind of cultural-philosophical interpretations of what ails red-state America that Bilgrami recommends really hit their mark? The beliefs of values voters, says Robbins, may be “less representative of would-be theocrats struggling to free themselves from liberalism’s privatization of religion than of consumer-citizens, whipsawed between consumerism and asceticism, who live a relatively happy inconsistency between public and private” (639).

Now it may be that Robbins has misconstrued his target here. Bilgrami certainly thinks so. That’s something for them to work out. I’m more interested in the fact that Robbins’s remarks might serve as an admirable gloss on Obama’s remarks. Both Obama and Robbins might be understood as suggesting that the modern age has brought with it a distinctive set of tensions, even contradictions, perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom the promises of modernity have not materialized. This way of construing things puts most of its emphasis on getting the description right, and much less emphasis trying to imagine how it might feel to be a consumer-citizen so “whipsawed.” (Thus, right wing media outlets continually mentioned that Obama had made these remarks in San Francisco, implying that elites on the Left Coast just don’t “get” the heartland.)

At the same time, when Bilgrami writes in the original essay that “in the local habitus of the West itself ordinary people have to live in and cope with the disenchantment of their world, seeking whatever forms of reenchantment are available to them” (407), he could also be seen as glossing Obama’s remarks. This would be the version of Obama who pushed back after Clinton tried to exploit his remarks, the Obama who emphasized his Midwestern credentials, assuring people that he was the one who was “in touch,” that he knew exactly what was going on. This would be the Obama who “gets” religion because he is himself religious, who understands the spiritual cost of living in the modern age and sympathizes with those casting around for something with which to blunt its worst effects. There’s a first-person perspective introduced here—and this part of what Bilgrami is after.

The point of the Obama example is not only that there may be less daylight between Robbins and Bilgrami than they seem to think. It is, more importantly, that it can be hard to parse exactly when values are being translated into some material determination and when they are not. I am in complete agreement with Bilgrami that writing off religious traditionalism, say, as a symptom of economics or globalization misses the kinds of commitments—visceral, bodily, disciplinary, communal, and ultimately, historical—that are at stake. But I’m also sure that he would agree with me that acknowledging this is not the same thing as saying that culture (God, guns) and economics (unemployment) have nothing to do with each other. Quite the contrary: they are deeply intertwined, and not only because varieties of enchantment and retreat are often critical responses to material conditions, but also because, for example, religiously-inspired critiques of economic policy are among the most salient in our world today. In this context it’s worth noting that analysis of Obama’s remarks quickly focused on the words “bitter” and “cling,” and those words can be construed in a variety of ways. Obama might have been suggesting that religion is infantile, that people “cling” to God or guns the way a child clings to a parent. But then again, Obama might have been thinking of Psalm 63 (“my soul clings to you; your right hands upholds me”). Hillary Clinton made a big deal out of the word “bitter,” but did she mean to suggest that people shouldn’t be bitter about the loss of their jobs? Prophets—Isaiah, Amos, Jesus—have known that bitterness about the status quo is a powerful motivator for change.

Here’s another way of putting it: Robbins says that Bilgrami wants to read politics off of epistemology, and perhaps he does, but in fact there’s a middle term, namely interpretation, and that’s actually where all the work gets done. What does “cling” mean? What energies does it activate? What cultural histories does it summon? Which modes of being does it welcome, and which dismiss?

The importance of interpretation brings the conversation firmly within the realm of the literary. The debate here is really about how much argumentative power we want to cede to literary thinking. There’s a curious but perhaps not very surprising cross-over in the debate: Bilgrami, the philosopher, finds much to value in literary thinking, while Robbins, the literary critic, is more skeptical.

Let me see if I can clarify the status of the literary here by appealing to an extreme case, one neither Robbins nor Bilgrami would agree with. I take the phrase “literary thinking” from a fairly recent academic article, by Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, entitled “Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left,” published in the Yale Journal of Criticism in 2005. In this essay the authors take aim at what they understand to be the de-politicization of the Left, which they blame (surprise) on the 60s. The New Left’s embrace of the counterculture, partly out of frustration with traditional political channels, has left it hamstrung when it comes to confronting an expanding conservative movement. Why? Because, having abandoned political movements and organizations, the Left is left with “culture,” and with the idea (the wrong idea, according to McCann and Szalay) that working at the level of culture is itself political. Here is now they put their thesis: “Our complaint is against the assumption … that analysis of these [cultural] forms itself constitutes significant political action, or equally, that the ability to affect culture is, independent of other means, also therefore politically efficacious” (441). Perhaps there is not be a whole lot to object to here—though one might wonder why the options have been narrowed only to two, why we have been offered two phrases in apposition that are clearly not identical, and whether there is anybody who would sign on to that “independent of other means” clause. But leave that aside, for McCann and Szalay are only getting warmed up, and as the essay develops, it becomes considerably more tendentious. First, the interest in culture at the expense of politics is, predictably enough, linked to a kind of narcissism: the New Left became “attracted to the idea that performance itself functions as a kind of therapeutic rite aimed at the self-realization of its participants” (444). Second, the personalistic self-realization to which the New Left was already attracted slides into apocalyptic religious yearnings, what McCann and Szalay call “high-minded irrationalism” (451). The chief peddlers of this irrationalism, it turns out, are contemporary novelists (Pynchon, DeLillo, Morrison) and their theoretical enablers. And here we arrive at the real target of the essay. I permit myself a lengthy quotation:

“The deep investment in the therapeutic value of ineffable mystery, like the often knee-jerk disdain for mundane political efforts to work toward imperfect justice, is commonplace. Both are evident not just in the continued vitality of what might reasonably be called America’s Third Great Awakening… but [also] in a pop culture with a seemingly bottomless appetite for stories of vampires, angels, and witches. But the specifically countercultural contention that mystery might prove to be a higher form of politics has taken root nowhere more powerfully than in our universities’ humanities departments and their now long-standing indebtedness to the various crypto-spiritual theories that have combined to form the postmodern lingua franca. For, whether in the messianic visions of Walter Benjamin, the spectral shades of Jacques Derrida, the strangely rapturous optimism of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, or the often apocalyptic antirationalism of post-structuralist philosophy generally, academic postmodernism has turned with increasing earnestness … to the unlikely promise of ‘magical serendipities.’ Professors of literature have been most invested in these serendipities….” (451)

Track the moves here: from an interest in culture as a form of politics, to a belief in self-realization as a form of politics, to apocalyptic religious yearnings, to humanities departments, to academic postmodernism, and finally, to the professional self-interest of literature professors. Whew. (Whenever I read these kinds of indictments of my own profession I wind up thinking, “if only it were true! If only we did have so much power!”)

Now, each of these slips could be queried. (And have been: there’s been lots of bloggy commentary on this essay.) But my feeling is that the best way to come at this question is historically. McCann and Szalay are not interested so much in the New Left as they are in the “literary thinking” that they think is the New Left’s legacy. So they’re making a historical claim. But the essay itself is remarkably ahistorical, for it proceeds as if “literary thinking” is the invention of the 1960s. And it is just here that Bilgrami’s essay does its most important work, for its historical/genealogical method offers a compelling explanation of just why literary thinking has such an enduring appeal.

As I noted above, Bilgrami is impatient with the kind of analysis performed by McCann and Szalay, with its baffled contempt for both popular folk enchantments and the organized enchantments of religion. Bilgrami, by contrast, thinks enchantment does real conceptual work. But he doesn’t want to go over entirely to the side of culture—for him, the specter here is neoconservatism of the kind peddled by Samuel Huntington. Indeed, Huntington’s happy trading in invocations of cultural difference might seem to offer some support to one of the most provocative and interesting of McCann and Szalay’s claims, namely that the “literary thinking” of the current Left actually has a lot in common with the individualism propounded by a resurgent conservatism. There’s a libertarian, anti-statist, anti-institutional impulse in both. That’s probably right, but as McCann and Szalay narrate it, the reason for this elective affinity remains itself mysterious, or is ascribed to a kind of treason of the intellectuals for which no explanation is given. If we recast the question in Bilgrami’s terms, however, and historicize it in the way that he does, then this family resemblance no longer looks magical at all.

Bilgrami is carving out an analytical space foreclosed upon by analyses like that of McCann and Szalay, who offer a stark choice between “organized” politics and cultural pseudo-politics. And he does this, again, historically, by returning to the modern origin of what I am here calling literary thinking. What Left and Right have in common, he argues, is the legacy of enlightened modernity, more particularly scientific rationality. The origin of literary thinking is to be found in modes of dissent and ambivalence within enlightened modernity. The “enlightenment” was not a monolithic entity but rather contained its own internal critique almost from its inception. Bilgrami’s example is the development toward the end of the seventeenth century of a resistance to “scientific rationality:”

The metaphysical picture that was promoted by Newton … and Boyle, among others, viewed matter and nature as brute and inert. On this view, since the material universe was brute, God was externally conceived as the familiar metaphoric clock winder, giving the universe a push from the outside to get it in motion. In the dissenting tradition … matter was not brute and inert but rather was shot through with an inner source of dynamism that was itself divine. God and nature were not separable as in the official metaphysical picture that was growing around the new science, and John Toland, for instance … openly wrote in terms he proclaimed to be pantheistic. (396; emphasis in original)

Now two points need to be emphasized here. First, as Bilgrami rightly emphasizes, dissenters like Toland were every bit as scientific as Newton and Boyle. They opposed not science itself “but a development in outlook that emerged in the philosophical surround of the scientific achievements” (396; emphasis in original). In other words, theirs was a critique not of science but of a certain “scientific culture.” This allows Bilgrami to contrast the orthodox model of the scientific revolution, with its brute materialism, with the more epistemically generous and thickly contextualized dissenting pantheism of the deists. The second and related point is the institutional one: for a variety of reasons, the official metaphysical picture promulgated by the Royal Society found influential supporters in the Anglican establishment, and this in turn pushed the dissenters and pantheists to the margin both intellectually (they were heretics) and institutionally (they were unscientific). It is of course a profound historical irony that the official guardians of Christianity, for pious reasons, colluded in stripping the world of meaning and helped usher into being the disenchanted cosmos where we now reside.

But the point more germane to the present discussion is that, with the origins of the dissenting tradition firmly established as a reaction to the enlightenment from within the enlightenment, Bilgrami then goes on to sketch a dissenting genealogy that threads its way through aspects of English and German romanticism, through Nietzsche, Thoreau, Emerson, and Ghandi, and then lands in the critique of western enlightened modernity sometimes described today as “fundamentalist.” Here is where Bilgrami is able to explain the data that leaves McCann and Szalay mystified: the elective affinity between conservative evangelicalism, Huntingtonian neo-conservatism, Islamic “fundamentalism,” and the literary thinking currently dominating humanities departments. The battle is not, as they seem to think, between rationality and irrationality, between magical thinking and political effectivity. We can’t get away with just indicting the “high-minded irrationalism” of literary thinking, because, Bilgrami shows, the deep and longstanding tradition of thinking under investigation here is not irrational. (Indeed, the complexity of England’s own scientific revolution suggests how partial it is to dismiss critiques of western enlightened modernity as “irrational.”) This is more than a Foucaultian point about competition among different accounts of what gets to count as reason, and what gets to count as modern. It is a historical/genealogical claim about the way rationality (and hence effective political action) has been defined, and it is thus an analysis of the surprising blowback of that definition. For as I read Bilgrami, the indictment is two-fold. First, definitions of rationality that ignored or downplayed its “cultural surround” stripped the world of meaning and thereby created the need for enchantment—a need that sometimes manifests itself in violent, exclusivist ways, other times in forms of retreat and withdrawal. And second, such definitions of rationality have made it impossible for Left intellectuals to understand enchantment as anything other than irrationalism and magical thinking. And so they continue to be surprised by its staying power, for they are unable to understand it as doing cognitive and cultural work.

Now it is a historical fact that the modes and approaches that Bilgrami links up under the headings of “dissent” and “enchantment” have tended to find a home in literature. But this is a fact to celebrated—as I think Bilgrami implicitly does. It certainly goes well beyond the New Left credentials of many literary academics. It was the romantics, after all, who not only gave us our modern definition of “literature,” but who also found in pantheism, in Spinoza, and in deism, an early expression of what they were themselves sensing at the turn of the nineteenth century, with empire and industrialism staring them in the face. And this sensibility issued in a kind of writing simultaneously literary and political. I don’t want to make the romantics into heroes here—like the rest of us, they were mortal. But at their best they helped to create the sensibilities that eventually issued in Gandhi and in the social movements of the 1960s. And the vehicle of that creation was literary thinking, or what Wordsworth called “philosophic song” and that Shelley, in a poem that had a direct influence on Gandhi, called “measured words.” More than that, too: literary thinking, or what Bilgrami calls enchantment, can help us to understand why the energies to which such thinking gives expression don’t always bend to the Left. As I read him, Bilgrami is asking intellectuals to take enchantment seriously as a first step to understanding the world in which we actually live. That’s asking a lot, perhaps—but it’s also, in the end, the very opposite of magical. It’s remarkably realist.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Bruce Robbins: Response to Akeel Bilgrami

Bruce Robbins is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

[Colin Jager's response, which Bruce Robbins's piece refers to, can be found here.]

I’m grateful to Colin Jager for attaching this renewal of the “Occidentialism” conversation immediately and firmly to the upcoming election. Akeel Bilgrami’s Critical Inquiry article (Spring 2006) suggested that the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was in large part the result of the “shallowness of the Left diagnosis,” which saw the red states’ bitterness and turn to religion as “consequences of the market.” The Republicans won, Bilgrami argues, because their analysis was “less shallow.” Looking deeper, they saw, correctly for Bilgrami, that the real problem was “something with a much wider and longer reach than market society, something that subsumes market society, that is, ... the thick ideal of scientific rationality.” The so-called “values voters” who went Republican in the name of religion were very properly turning against the secular/ scientific rationality of the Left, which could not give them “values to live by.”

Where are these values voters today? According to the New York Times/CBS poll reported in the Times on May 5, 2008, voters who were asked “Does the candidate share the values of most Americans?” responded exactly the same for Hillary Clinton and for Barack Obama, 60%. John McCain trailed only slightly at 58%. A sizeable minority apparently feels that the candidates do not share its values (presumably anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, anti-immigrant, and so on), but that minority is not positioned to decide anything. In other words, the strategy of seizing comparative advantage by claiming to speak for “values” has all but disappeared from this year’s political contest. In my earlier reply to Bilgrami, I had proposed that even in 2004 the “values” issue was not in fact decisive. To me at least, the new poll data confirm that this issue was never the deeper and truer reading of long-term American politics that Bilgrami, among others, saw in it. And as the failing US economy has re-asserted its prominence as voter issue #1, it has not become more plausible to think that voters are moved by their repulsion from scientific rationality and hunger for enchantment more than they are by market-generated unemployment, foreclosures, gas prices, food prices, and actual physical hunger. There may be strong arguments for the re-enchantment of the world, but in 2008 political urgencies are not among them.

I’m comfortable talking politics here, which is to say talking at the level of educated common sense, because I have no illusions about my ability to engage with Bilgrami at the level of technical philosophy. In the last sentence of his response-to-my-response (Critical Inquiry Spring 2007), Bilgrami offers a gloss on what enchantment means: “the oughts are there in nature and need no derivation.” I’m told that some philosophers (among them John Searle) have indeed argued that under certain conditions ought can be derived from is. I’m also told that this position has not won anything like general acceptance even among professional philosophers. I can imagine at least some reason for taking this idea on: knowing more about the distant impact of my actions on the natural environment (is) might well change my sense of my ethical obligations (ought). But I don’t think this is what Bilgrami means, or what his argument would mean if taken seriously by the non-philosophers like myself who seem to be the implicit addressees of his original essay. So if I offer this statement as a concise summary of the differences between Bilgrami and myself, I do so on the assumption that we arguing at a non-technical level.

My position is that disenchantment is the wrong diagnosis, and re-enchantment is the wrong prescription. Values come from ongoing collaborative efforts to do justice to the common human social world and not from “nature”– though how nature should be understood would have to be the subject of a longer post than this. Anyone who says otherwise is actually deriving values (falsely) from nature, not happening upon them there by means of a higher attentiveness. I agree with Bilgrami that we need better values than we have. We certainly need better ones than we are in the habit of organizing our societies around. And we can’t expect to get them from what Bilgrami calls scientific rationality–here Bilgrami and I agree completely. But in my opinion, we can’t expect to get our values from nature either. Thinking that nature is suffused with value, as Bilgrami proposes, means a great deal more than that nature has value for us (of course it does). It means thinking nature tells us (tells all humans everywhere, without regard to difference of place, time, or culture) that we should never eat pork or that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. I accept one of these two imperatives. But in doing so I don’t pretend I’m obeying a kind of naturally-inscribed scripture or the same kind of laws that make the planets circle the sun. To think that I was would be the functional equivalent of believing in a deity who has kindly created a meaningful universe for us, pre-adapted to human social arrangements. It’s a sweet thought, and I can understand why so many people over the centuries have been drawn to it. But secularist that I am, I hope more and more people will manage to do without it. This will probably require (here I express my loyalty to Barack Obama’s politically unfortunate remark in April) more small-town Americans having secure jobs and secure housing and, for that matter, more secular-humanist education.

If I’m wrong about this, as I may be– if enchantment and its vision of an animate, value-laden nature is not the pre-schooler’s cartoon world I imagine, one where the animals are cuddly and nice and the planets sing little songs to each other across the solar system– all I can say is that I’m open to instruction. Is it “natural” to think of marriage as between a man and a woman? That’s certainly what those who speak in nature’s name tell us. It would be a genuine step forward in this conversation for Bilgrami to say more about what he thinks enchantment actually looks like, what particular values he thinks do inhere in nature, how we can tell the difference between what nature tells us and what its interpreters tell us. In the meantime, I can only speculate that he might mean what others seem to mean. For example, Charles Taylor. Taylor, like Bilgrami, seems to believe that today’s secular culture has stopped us from taking in the messages that nature is perpetually sending in our direction. The world is disenchanted because we are now “buffered,” unable to enter into dialogue with the dense and eagerly communicative spiritual population that inhabits the natural world.

Taylor organizes his A Secular Age around a very smart question: “what stopped people (that is, almost everybody) from being able to adopt stances of unbelief in 1500?” His first answer is “the enchanted world; in a cosmos of spirits and forces, some of them evil and destructive, one had to hold on to whatever was conceived to be the mainstay of good power, our bulwark against evil.” The enchanted world was a world which everyone believed to be full of spirits and forces. If you didn’t get the good ones on your side, you felt powerless against the demonic ones. This cosmos is now gone, Taylor says, not in the sense that the spirits and forces don’t exist, but in the sense that we have a great deal of trouble recognizing them. “The buffered self begins to find the idea of spirits, moral forces, causal powers with a purposive bent, close to incomprehensible.” Enchantment is not identical with religion. One of Taylor’s brilliant themes is about how the rise of monotheism ironically undercuts the quasi-universal belief in demonic powers, thus preparing the way for a later disenchanting secularism. But with its interventionist spirits hovering around every tree and stone, enchantment clearly falls within the definition of religion to which Taylor subscribes, involving “either supernatural entities with powers of agency, or impersonal powers or processes possessed of moral purpose, which have the capacity to set the conditions of, or to intervene in, human affairs.” To call for a re-enchantment of the world would seem to entail demanding a reprise of this vision of how human affairs are intervened in by outside agents or powers with moral agendas of their own. I can’t see how more belief of this sort would undo any of the world’s most salient forms of misery, except maybe the miserable necessity of looking the causes of misery in the face. Ecology doesn’t need enchantment, and in my opinion would be hurt more than helped by it. (If Bilgrami is playing to the Reagan Democrats, adding spirituality to tree-hugging is probably not the formula he wants.) Perhaps because of the limits of my secular viewpoint, I can’t see what else the re-enchantment of the world might consist of. I await further details.

I note in passing that the decisive element in Taylor’s view of enchantment is power. In the passage above at least, people before 1500 needed to think religiously because they needed to protect themselves from harm. Religion was (and for many obviously still is) about the power to get something desirable. Whether security or (as for so many recent non-European converts to Christianity) modernity. This explains the otherwise strange historical fact, magnanimously noted by Taylor, that religions can be successfully imposed and deposed by force. Force was not extraneous to religion; it was what religion was about. The stronger spirits win. I say this not to claim Taylor as a fellow materialist (there are no thoroughgoing materialists in the foxholes of the English department, and I’m no exception.) I say it so as to return briefly to one further point of difference between me and Bilgrami– namely, power. According to Bilgrami, the crucial difference between Orientalism (“our” negative stereotyping of “them”) and Occidentalism (“their” negative stereotyping of “us”) is that we have power and they don’t. Bilgrami also claims that I made a gross mistake in saying that Gandhi wielded power. If I put these two claims together (I speak again with the heuristic crudeness that seems most useful for such a brief exchange), I get the speculative conclusion that for Bilgrami it’s always the bad guys who have power, and it’s by following the power, so to speak, that you can tell who the bad guys are. The good guys are innocents because, like Gandhi, they are spiritual rather than powerful. For me, this is neither an accurate description of the world nor a productive way of drawing up the political map. Having or not having power cannot in itself be ethically or politically decisive. As we students of culture know, power is always distributed in much more complex and less binary ways. Occidentalism is not a good thing even if it’s the weak who practice it. I myself admire the power Gandhi was able to wield in organizing the movement that overthrew colonialism in India. (That’s of course what I meant, not that he held elected office.) By my lights, throwing the British out was quite an impressive demonstration of power. But of course, circumstances have now changed. It is now Indian capital and the Indian state that hold the preponderance of power in India. Yet there are huge numbers of Indians below the poverty line. It is worth asking again, therefore, as I did in my first response: who stands to gain in today’s India from a repetition of the Gandhian program of merely individual, ethical, spiritual improvement? Who is threatened by its opposite (which Uday Mehta rejects as Western liberalism), improvement sought by means of “politics and power”?

Colin Jager cites Barack Obama’s faux pas about unemployment as a reason why people in small towns “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” As some commentators have noticed, the item in this list that Obama probably cared most about, though it came disguised in a circumlocution, was racism. He was attempting to understand the many white people, especially in small-town America, who simply will not vote for a black man– attempting with a certain generosity of spirit to conceive of race hatred toward people like himself as something that isn’t second nature, hence inaccessible to new evidence or argument, but “cultural” in the sense of being open to change. Obama’s successes thus far offer non-negligible evidence that he is at least partially right about racism, though time will tell. If he turns out to be right, as I hope he does, then perhaps his victory will add a further argument against the proposition that values can or should be read as natural.

Is there a contradiction between the presence of religion on this same list and Obama’s many affirmations of his Christian faith? If you think this is a case of his true secular feelings slipping out in an unguarded moment, then you would at least have to say in extenuation that up to now, there has been no room whatsoever in national politics at the highest level for anyone who did not strenuously affirm his or her religious faith. (I would guess there have been more actual suicides in American politics than politicians of either party choosing the suicidal step of acknowledging non-belief. This ought to give pause to anyone who sees the Democrats as excessively secular.) And you would hopefully then want to add that making such room ought to be one major goal of our efforts– pretty much the opposite of what Bilgrami calls for.

But Jager also shows a way in which Obama’s faith might not after all be contradicted by his secular explanation for the clinging to religion. “Cling” might refer to two different sorts of excessiveness. It might suggest a childish dependency, as if religion were something that grown-ups should have learned to do without. But it might also suggest holding on too tight rather than too long, as if religion was fine in itself, but was something better grasped or held more loosely. What Jager calls literariness could be described, accordingly, as holding onto one’s beliefs a bit more loosely. Holding in one’s mind and heart narratives or images or scenarios that one does not affirm to be true, that one can and does let go of, yet that are good to hold for awhile, to live and think with– this is a traditional way to think of literariness that goes far beyond its embodiment in actual works of literature. There is an enchantment in the literary ”as if” that seems extremely pertinent to the debates about religion and secularism to which Bilgrami and Jager make such notable contributions.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Justin E. H. Smith: A Comment on Akeel Bilgrami's "Occidentalism, The Very Idea"

Justin E. H. Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University.

Akeel Bilgrami has so decisively exposed the weaknesses of the recent attempt to invert the argument of Said's Orientalism that I do not see much point here in weighing the virtues of his essay against those of Buruma and Margalit's book. I would like to focus instead on his essay as a self-standing argument, and to pursue a few problems I see arising from it. In broad outline, these problems stem from two very large aims of the essay: to describe the way things are today, and to account for how they got to be that way.

Bilgrami's broad historical thesis concerning a dissenting indigenous tradition in the West is intriguing but debatable. He does not focus on Spinoza explicitly, but on the notion of a "Radical Enlightenment" that, since the publication of Jonathan Israel's tome of that name, has been primarily associated with the impact of Spinoza on modern history. Now, Spinoza has been recruited of late to do all sorts of things for all sorts of factions. He has become the great hope of some segments of the post-Marxist Left, yet the uses to which he has been posthumously put are part of Spinoza's reception history, not part of Spinoza. The 17th-century philosopher was not a post-Marxist, and was no more sympathetic to Giorgio Agamben than to Paul Wolfowitz.

Spinoza is said to represent a possible alternative modernity because he conceived God as immanent rather than transcendent, and of nature as itself divine. Yet Robert Boyle, too, had compelling reasons to believe that the vision of nature as clockwork, and of God as mechanic who set the world in motion and then absconded, was the only vision that adequately exalted God and thus that was acceptable for a pious natural philosopher such as himself. For Boyle, to have God implicated in the "operose and distractious" workings of nature (Cudworth's phrase), whether through direct implication or through the parting out of motive force to subordinate plastic natures or archaei, would be to render God a lowly custodian, when in fact, he wanted to argue, God is great enough to create a nature great enough to do everything it has to do in accord with a few basic laws. There is no contempt for nature here, and no call to replace piety and awe with hard-headed rationality. There is only a desire to avoid the 'pagan' mistake of conflating God and the world, and of explaining natural processes in terms of the inherence of quasidivinities in the natural landscape of clouds, streams, mountains, etc. There may in fact be nothing wrong with such paganism, but Boyle's desire to avoid it was not a symptom of some nascent disenchantment; it was rather a central feature of the great majority of theological reflection in all three of the great traditions of Abrahamic religion.

Another prominent theory of how nature works, and of God's relationship to nature, was occasionalism, the doctrine defended by Nicolas Malebranche, Louis La Forge, Arnold Geulincx and others, according to which nature is intrinsically inert, and every change that comes about in the world is the result of God's direct causal intervention ("perpetual miracle," Leibniz called it). Reading Bilgrami, the question naturally arises: were Malebranche and his kind early disciples of disenchantment, or were they part of the countercurrent? It is worth noting that in the 17th century occasionalism was consciously and explicitly appropriated from medieval Islamic philosophy: Al-Ghazali, for example, had thought that it was an easy step from "There is no God but God" to "There is no Cause but God." Occasionalism from 11th-century Persia through 17th-century France appears to have been motivated, again, by a form of piety, characteristic of monotheism and not of animism, that seeks to glorify God by attributing direct responsibility for every state of Creation to him. Now, Bilgrami may simply think that belief in a unique transcendent God is unfortunate, and thus may find Spinozan immanentism and animism attractive. But he has not convinced me that the representatives of the "Radical Enlightenment" were resisting what we would later come to recognize as the scourge of scientific rationalism, nor that the Occidentalists have anything in common with the members of this supposed indigenous Western countercurrent. I thus remain skeptical concerning Bilgrami's central thesis, that, in his words, "there really are conspicuous intellectual and critical affinities between the 'Occidentalist Enemies of the West' and Gandhi on the one hand and a longstanding and continuous dissenting tradition within the West itself on the other."

My own sense (and this is a point I've made before in this space, in connection with the theory of "intelligent design") is that it is impossible to determine prima facie which philosophy of nature is more pious than the others, which way of thinking about the role of spirit in the workings of the world is best suited to the decent, virtuous, and, yes, religious life. I am inclined to say that such considerations are afterthoughts, and, with Mahmoud Mamdani, that the engine of turmoil throughout history is material inequality, that, when factions believe they are fighting over competing conceptions of God or the Creation, they are largely mistaken about their own motivations. This is not to say the ideas a culture comes up with ('God', 'cause', 'matter', 'law', 'reason') aren't interesting, but only that they should be deployed cautiously in explaining why the world has ended up the way it has.

In short, it seems to me that any effort to carve up the different camps in the history of modern thought into the goats and the sheep --those who pushed for the disenchantment of the world and those who valiantly resisted-- cannot but fall apart under scrutiny. A bit of care in thinking ourselves into the actual world of concerns of Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Spinoza, Cudworth, et al., rather than resting content with the unlikely roles to which they have been assigned centuries after their deaths, shows that with some stretching any one of their natural philosophies could have served as the official philosophy of a disenchanted world, or an enchanted one, and that to trace the malaises of modernity back to, e.g., the Cartesian definition of matter as res extensa, is assuredly to allow 'culture talk' to explain too much. Certainly, few in 1620 would have thought that there was anything intrinsically more 'rational' about seeing the physical world as a collection of particles exhaustively analysable in terms of mass, figure, and motion than in seeing that same world as consisting in hylomorphic compounds moved along by final causes. Quite the contrary, the mechanical hypothesis was one of the most radical and counterintuitive claims about nature ever made. (It was also one that Spinoza defended, albeit with modifications, which renders questionable the effort to position him as a member of some sort of resistance simply in virtue of his immanentist theology.)

It is Bilgrami's thesis about the West's indigenous countercurrent that enables him to make sense of reactionary Western political trends in just the same terms as his charitable reception of Osama bin Laden's list of grievances. The inhabitants of the red states may indeed be suffering from the disenchantment inherited from their own civilization, and Bilgrami's refusal to dismiss their cries out of hand is commendable and rare. But there is no getting around the fact that the content of these cries is alarmingly wrong, such as, that the world is 5000 years old, that Akeel Bilgrami is going to burn in hell, and that it is not important, as one country song puts it, to know "the difference between Iraq and Iran." Well it's not, he's not, and it is. It has proven much more difficult than once was hoped for the main current of the Enlightenment to compel people to believe things on the basis of evidence, but neither the main current nor the countercurrent, if there ever was such a thing, ever held that we should do anything but that, and so again, I fail to see the genealogical link between Spinoza and the Kansas creationists. Correlatively, when I tune into bin Laden's messages, I do not hear a "clear and precise" statement of concrete political aims. I hear talk at a register I have to strain to understand, stuff about infidels, martyrdom, love of death, etc. Stupid, mystifying, manipulative stuff with no possible constructive political consequences. I would love to see a genuine pole of political authority emerge as a counterbalance to American hegemony in the world. At present, Latin America seems a much more promising place to look for this than the caves of Tora Bora.

Having spent large segments of my adult life in Russia and the Balkans, I have been sharply aware for some time that where one places the boundaries of the Orient has a good deal to do with where one already is. Of course the Christian East, extending from Skopje to Vladivostok, is a region of little interest to the new cold warriors and their academic explainers. Yet it is the Byzantine world that has the deepest experience of anxiety over the "Turkish menace," and it is the Orthodox church that has staked the most politically on the touted spiritual difference of its members from their Muslim neighbors, a difference that from the outside can easily look like a paradigm instance of Freud's narcissism of minor differences. Consider in this connection Dziga Vertov's fine propaganda piece, Three Songs about Lenin (1934). The film has the structure of a triptych, each part a 'song' consisting of images instead of notes. The title of the first song is "My Face Was in a Dark Prison." Shot in Uzbekistan, it recounts how Lenin's teachings and the arrival of the Bolsheviks in Central Asia brought about the liberation of Muslim women from their miserable lives underneath their burqas. It is striking that well into Cold War II, one of the common after-the-fact justifications given by the US for its imperial expansion was also a favorite of our enemies in Cold War I.

The Bolshevik Revolution was the result of a Westernizing swing in Russian history: ideas borrowed from a German writing in London, the fetishization of hydroelectric dams and power lines, and the effort to build a respectable industrial proletariat to the great detriment of the peasantry (unlike later Asian communisms). As Buruma and Margalit point out, it did not have to be this way. That famous question, What is to be done?, could have been answered along Solzhenitsyn's lines through isolationism, xenophobia, and a proud sense of ethnic particularity that would explain, somehow, why Russia is tragically doomed to lag behind the West. As they emphasize, moreover, the national Sonderweg has at various times seemed more attractive in places like Japan and Germany than the sort of complacent integration into the West we see in these countries today. One could add the Balkan peoples, Ozark hillbillies, libertarian Nevada ranchers, etc., to the list of peoples cartographically within the bounds of the West who nonetheless have, or have often had, a tenuous relationship to it. Conversely, not just in the Middle Ages, but well into the 18th century, Muslims were seen by many Europeans as people of the book and, what's more, as guardians of ancient science and philosophy. In 1714 Leibniz wrote in his Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese that Islamic expansion into Central Asia had the positive effect of saving countless souls of formerly idolatrous Turkic pagans.

Where, then, is the West? It is evidently not in Kansas these days, while in recent history it has been spotted in Uzbekistan. It showed up there in the guise of the Muslim conquests, Avicenna's Aristotelianism, the Bolsheviks' polyclinics. The Soviets were Orientalists in relation to the Turkic Muslims in the Eastern part of their Empire; the Americans in turn conceptualized the Soviets as Asiatic despots, and it was only after the end of that Cold War that the Western focus shifted and we picked up where Vertov and his comrades had left off, fighting against the mujahideen and liberating faces from their dark prisons.

It is precisely this ability to reorient so quickly, to pick up where the Communists left off, that ought to cause us to stop and wonder how relevant 'the spiritual' really is to our understanding of what is at stake in the current Cold War. Certainly, it is this feeling that some cosmic Manichaean battle is unfolding that makes it all so gripping, yet our picture of the world is greatly distorted by the persistent media focus on the Muslim/non-Muslim divide. This is a feature of almost all post-Cold War reflections on the broad outlines of geopolitics, uniting Huntington, Buruma and Margalit, and Bilgrami. It may be, however, that the North/South divide is more real, and more important for the future of the world than the East/West one. It may be that the 'spiritual' questions at stake in the showdown between the West and the jihadists --the questions that are not there in the kidnapping and drugging of child soldiers in sub-Saharan Africa, in the 'war on drugs'-- have caused us to see this current scrap as more fateful, as more epoch-making, than it in fact is. Of course one can write on whatever topic one chooses, as Bilgrami notes. But now that he has done such a fine job in exposing Buruma and Margalit's Occidentalism for the faint echo of vested interests that it is, how nice it would be to exit that enchanted forest altogether.

For an extensive archive of Justin Smith's writing, please visit www.jehsmith.com.

Posted by Justin E. H. Smith at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Steven Levine: A Comment on Bilgrami

Steven Levine is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Prof. Bilgami’s make two central claims in his illuminating paper: 1) that certain malignant aspects of Western development and society are internally and not contingently related to the scientific rationality of the Enlightenment, and 2) that it is not science itself that leads to these malignant aspects but rather an interpretation—and the practices based upon this interpretation—of what science requires of us in our thinking about rationality and value. As Bilgrami himself points out there has been a long history of thinking—some of which was contemporaneous with the scientific revolution itself—which makes claims similar to these. Because the particular tradition that I stand in, Left Hegelianism, is part of this long history of counter-thinking, I find both claims very plausible. In our preferred jargon, the point that Bilgrami is driving at is encapsulated by the phrase ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’. The dialectic of enlightenment claims that enlightenment reason is at odds with itself, that while it provides for the possibility of an autonomous form of life, one not determined solely by the contingences of nature and fate, it, in securing this possibility, often expresses itself instrumentally. When instrumental reason is take to be the whole of reason the malignant aspects of Western development and society mentioned above follow, i.e., nihilism and new forms of domination. The left Hegelian does not take it that this dialectic requires the abandonment of enlightenment reason for the irrational or the mute silence of the Other, rather it signals the necessity for undertaking an immanent critique of dogmatic conception’s of enlightenment reason and the practices based upon these conceptions. Dogmatic conception are ones that overlooks the dialectic of enlightenment, taking it—as Buruma and Margalit do—that the principles of the enlightenment are only contingently related to their malignant consequences.

The goal of the left Hegelian is to achieve a higher order type of reflection in which reason reflects on its blind spots and potential one-sidedness. This task is especially important now since a dogmatic conception of the enlightenment and enlightenment reason informs the position of most US policy makers and ideologues who still, post-Iraq, take it to be their duty as Enlightened to maintain US hegemony. The question is whether this charge applies to Buruma and Margalit. While Buruma and Margalit don’t endorse open hegemony (indeed both were against the Iraq adventure), they are still, so Bilgrami argues, ‘Cold War Intellectuals’ who contribute to the ideological underpinnings of Western dominance. How does he make out this claim? To first thing to recognize is that Buruma and Margalit ignore completely internal critiques of the enlightenment—those offered by the early modern radical enlightenment, left-Hegelianism, or more distantly, Ghandi—and instead focus all of their attention on Slavophile, Japanese, and German Romantic and nationalist writing, as well as Islamist Occidentalist writings. In my view, this selection of topics, one very reminiscent of Paul Berman’s influential yet incoherent Terror and Liberalism, is prepared for by a certain imaginary that shapes the views of many if not most current ‘Cold War Intellectuals’. This imaginary posits a simple opposition between the enlightenment universal and the non-enlightened particular, Gesellshaft and Gemeinshaft, the progressive and the reactionary, the Lexus and the olive-tree, etc. Once this imaginary is in place, the affinity between Western romantic and nationalist writings and Islamist Occidentalist writings seems commonsensical. And indeed, there are obvious affinities here. The problem is not in identifying affinities, but in the narrowing of vision in which the positions mentioned above—the early modern radical enlightenment, left-Hegelianism, and Ghandi—disappear from view altogether. In performing this disappearing act, liberal intellectuals like Buruma and Margalit, who otherwise might be one’s political ally, play a key ideological role in the ‘War on Terror’; for now political argument cannot call upon the resources of the excluded positions but can only express which side of the simple opposition one is on. This narrowing of argumentative space is distinctive of our age. One of the virtues of Prof. Bilgrami’s paper is his attempt to reopen this space and let a bit of light shine in.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ram Manikkalingam: Culture follows Politics: Avoiding the global divide between “Islam and the West”

Ram Manikkalingam is visiting professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam.

Bilgrami’s paper is centrally located within the contemporary debate about the global divide between “Islam and the West” that is popularly called “the clash of civilisations”. This debate is motivated by the question - "why do they hate us?" - posed by some (or is it many) westerners looking askance at intensifying negative, if not hostile, feelings in the Muslim world towards the west, in general, and the United States (US), in particular. This question has led to two answers: they hate us/you because of who we/you are? (Buruma and Margalit), and 2) They hate us/you because of what we/you do? (Mahmud Mamdani). Bilgrami's paper links “the who you are” to “what you do.” My comments will try to first unpack this linkage and then re-pack it in a way that I hope will contribute a little more to the effort made by all three works (Buruma and Margalit, Mamdani and Bilgrami) towards linking values, culture, politics and violence in order to better understand the impact of Western policies and (Islamic) terrorism on our lives.

Let me begin with a summary of my take. Bilgrami is sympathetic to the intellectual objective of Buruma and Margalit to link culture with politics. But he is dismissive of their intellectual effort at doing so, as well as hostile to the political motivation behind it. His main objection is that Buruma and Margalit slip too quickly from a cultural critique of the west to the resort to violence on the part of Islamist terrorists. He believes that the step – from culture to violence – is contingent on other political factors. The first step – sharing a set of (cultural) values need not lead to agreement on whether or not (and how) to resort to violence. However, while sympathetic to Mamdani’s effort to view violence as a response to the politics of the West, he disagrees with Mamdani’s dismissal of the cultural elements in such a linkage. But if violence is only contingently linked to politics, then why can’t politics be only contingently linked to the cultural critique.

To put it in Bilgrami’s language, Gandhi and Bin Laden can share a cultural critique of the west (and a set of values – liberal individualism and scientific rationality are bad), but differ in politics (the West may or may not be inherently bad); they can share politics (the West is imperialist), but differ in whether to resort to violence (together with Western progressives and moral suasion the West can be changed according to Gandhi, or it will only change under the threat of force according to Bin Laden); and finally it is possible to agree about resorting to violence (threat of force is necessary to change Western policies – Bin Laden and Fidel Castro), but disagree about how to resort to it (terrorism is acceptable given asymmetries of military power according to Bin Laden or terrorism is morally unacceptable according to Castro). This weakens Bilgrami’s endorsement of the effort to integrate the cultural critique with politics and violence, and appears to place him uneasily between Mamdani and Buruma and Margalit.

But Bilgrami need not sit uneasily between sharing Mamdani’s politics, but rejecting his dismissal of culture talk as tangential to it, and agreeing with Buruma and Margalit’s effort to connect culture and politics, while rejecting their embrace of its determining role in violence. He can, with Mamdani, emphasise the importance of a politics of co-existence for overcoming the “global divide” to get to a global justice. And he can, with Buruma and Margalit, concur that getting their will involve more than suspending one’s cultural values in order to live together, but actually engaging with the reasons that others may very well reject yours, even as you struggle to hold onto your own.

Let me elaborate. Buruma and Magalit believe the following sequence – dissent from Scientific Rationality and individual freedoms, leads to cultural critique of west, leads to violent terrorism. Bilgrami is not happy with this sequence, rightly. First, with the example of Gandhi, he shows that the cultural critique of west need not lead to violent terrorism. Second, he would like to insert opposition to western/US policies between critique of west and violent terrorism: “take seriously what the terrorists say, and not see it as simply a fake political front for a runaway religious fanaticism”. And I would add equally, take seriously what the terrorists say and not see it simply as a fake religious front for political fanaticism.

Buruma and Margalit can defend themselves from Bilgrami’s point about Gandhi with a slight modification of their thesis. Take the Gandhi point. Buruma & Margalit say that bad Muslims resort to violent terrorism against “us” because “they hate us” (cultural critique) and “they hate us” because they dissent from Scientific Rationality. Bilgrami says look at Gandhi. He didn’t like you, he disagreed on Scientific Rationality and he had a critique of your policies, but he did not resort to violent terrorism. Buruma & Margalit can respond, that Gandhi helps make their point. Gandhi disliked what the west did, and he may have even disliked the west (critique of culture). But when he did so, it was because of how who they were was linked to what they did. He did not simply dislike them. But on the terrorism point Buruma & Margalit can respond – just because some people who hated us because of what we did, did not resort to violent terrorism, does not mean that those who resort to violent terrorism, do not do so because they hate us.

So even when they point to some things we are doing that they do not like, the very fact that there are others (Gandhi) who also pointed to things that we did that they did not like but did not kill us, only reinforces our view that they – bad Muslims - are trying to kill us because of who we are, and not because of what we do. Therefore, changing what we do will not have much of an impact on their desire to kill us (not that we must not change what we do for other reasons).

This brings us to Bilgrami’s second response. Just because all people who hate you for what you do, do not resort to violent terrorism, does not mean that those who do resort to violent terrorism do not also hate you for what you do, and link it to who you are. So the sequence in the thesis is then: those who resort to violent terrorism do so because they disagree with western/US policies, and have a cultural critique of the west that emerges from the dissent from Scientific Rationality. It is not as Buruma & Margalit might argue, the other way round, that those who dissent from Scientific Rationality, have a cultural critique of the west, (that may or may not be related to the critique of western policies), and leads to violent terrorism. So the cultural and the political hang together (they are integrated), if you begin from the other end (violent terrorism). But they do not necessarily hang together if you begin from the dissent from Scientific Rationality. This is a key political point.

I think this point is more clear if we look at Bilgrami’s example of the Christian right and its cultural critique. Bilgrami uses this example to show that the dissent from scientific rationality/cultural critique is not just Muslim/Eastern but also comes from within the very heartland of the West. And he uses it to undermine Buruma & Margalit’s effort to link commitment to liberal democracy with Scientific Rationality, by illustrating the disdain with which these dissenters from scientific rationality are treated by their left-liberal co-citizens. I want to make a different point here that I think weakens Bilgrami’s endorsement of Bilgrami &Margalit’s effort to link the cultural and the political, even if he himself disagrees with how they do so.

Consider, the Christian right. Let us say they share with the Muslim radical the dissent from Scientific Rationality and the cultural critique of the west. But they disagree with the Muslim radical about US policy in the Middle East and violent terrorism. They would argue that US/Western policy in the Middle East is not effective enough at combating the violent terrorism of Muslim radicals and that it should go further in protecting US citizens at home and helping good Muslims abroad build democracies. Their political position here would not really allow, them to question US policy. On the other hand, there are plenty of Americans/Westerners who may not dissent from Scientific Rationality and do not share in the cultural critique, who explicitly link US/Western policies to the emergence of violent terrorism. Politically speaking they would like those policies changed. Buruma & Margalit are a good example here of those who need to be convinced.

Buruma & Margalit may disagree with US/Western policies in the Middle East, and want changes made – e.g. US must stop supporting the corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia. But they would say that this has nothing to do with why Al-Qaeda is killing Americans in Iraq. But they may concede that if the US withdrew support from Saudi Arabia, and withdrew troops from Iraq, it would be easier to marginalise and end Al-Qaeda style violent terrorism. So Buruma & Margalit would agree that these US/Western policies need to be changed for its own sake, and in addition this may help in defeating violent terrorism, by exposing Muslim radical disinterest in policy change, and isolating the terrorists from their base.

This change in policy may or may not be accompanied by a serious rethinking of received wisdom on say the West and its superiority in terns of culture and as the repository of Scientific Rationality.

But the problem with this approach implicitly shared by Buruma & Margalit, and Bilgrami - the implication that one must change one’s views on culture and rationality – in order to make the right kind of policy shift on the issues at hand that politically constitute the global divide, (whether Iraq, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, etc.) is that it simultaneously asks too much and too little of political leaders and intellectuals who are taking sides in this new divide. It asks too much because these are not issues on which whole societies, or for that matter individuals, change their minds in years, decades, (or even centuries for societies). It asks too little, because we know that political changes that save lives and prevent political disasters can be made rapidly, without these cultural changes.

So while I agree with Bilgrami that we need to take this opportunity to look at broadening our notions of the Enlightenment (by drawing in part on the radical Enlightenment in the West and critics of it from outside the West) in order to re-enchant ourselves with its possibilities that go beyond the thick form of scientific rationality and the narrow view of liberal democracy, we also need to simultaneously take the left liberals like Buruma & Margalit at their word and challenge them to fashion the policy change that they say is required in the Middle East, irrespective of whether it will have an impact on the presence of violent terrorism. To do this we need to address the particular components that have increasingly come to be seen as manifesting this global divide, even if not constituting it. This is how we may be able to address the divide without necessarily having to take sides in it, initially.

However, for policy changes to stick – for those who have held previously incompatible views – differing fundamentally on Scientific Rationality and individual freedom – to be able to sustain engagement and not just make temporary accommodation with those on the other side of the divide – they will also need to adjust their values/culture in ways that make those on the other side less incompatible with themselves. Again integrating the (non)violent, the political, and the cultural from the opposite side of Buruma and Margalit. So even engagements leading to small political accommodations with those on the opposite side of the divide can overtime work to reduce this tension between “Islam and the West”. But the opposite – engagements between the West and/or Islam that leads to a auto/mutual cultural critique, and a change in politics that enables co-existence – simultaneously expects too much and too little of both.

This political take differs from Mamdani’s avoidance of integrating culture and politics in three ways. First, it does not dismiss the presence of a cultural divide that goes beyond the political—i.e., that the whole of these different political tensions may be greater than the sum of the parts—something shared by Bilgrami and Buruma & Margalit. It only denies that we can easily get a handle on it, or need to do something about it in order to begin resolving the problems that are posed by each of the parts to begin with. Secondly, it agrees with Bilgrami that dealing with the political parts of this divide – over the long term – can only be sustained with a cultural critique that leads to engagement between the protagonists in the global divide. Thirdly, this position resists the impetus to take sides in this global divide. Not because it disagrees with Bilgrami’s articulation of the philosophical problem, but because taking sides politically (as opposed to philosophically) now forces one to choose between George W. Bush and Osama Bin Laden.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uday Mehta: Response to Akeel Bilgrami

Uday Mehta is Clarence Francis Professor in Social Sciences at Amherst College.

In the opening lines of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber declared that the ultimate stakes of the book were not the causal and historical roots of capitalist enterprise but rather the question of what aspects of “Western civilization” “lie in a line of development having universal significance and value.” His answer, which followed in the very next sentence, was: “Only in the West does science exist at a stage of development which we recognize today as valid.” What made this science valid and uniquely Western was its rationality. “Knowledge and observation of great refinement existed elsewhere, above all in India, China, Babylonia, Egypt,” but what they lacked were the rational principles for the very activities that they practiced with great and often surpassing acumen. Indians had geometry, mathematics and the natural sciences but “no rational proof” or “method of experiment.” Chinese “historical scholarship,” though “highly developed,” did “not have the method of Thucydides.” Indian political thought, despite being a predecessor to Machiavelli, lacked “systematic method” and “rational concepts.” And, crucially, given the focus of Weber’s work, India, Babylon and China had merchants, domestic and foreign trade, banks, credit markets and entrepreneurs but “their activities were predominantly of an irrational and speculative character.” Rational capitalism was uniquely a feature of the modern West.

Weber is of course not alone in associating the defining kernel of the West with principles. Samuel Huntington famously identified America with the Anglo-Protestant creedal “principles of liberty, equality, human rights, representative government, and private property” and with the specifically liberal and democratic culture, values and institutions that these principles, on his account, produced. Buruma and Margalit associate the West with the principles of scientific rationality and the formal aspects of democracy. But Weber is ultimately very different from these others with whom he appears to shares an initial impulse. For him, the specific kind of rationality that triumphed in the modern West did in fact produce a form of life. It was a form of life and a culture about which he had a deep ambivalence because it was characterized by the immanence, and not merely the epiphenomenal accident, of an “iron cage.” It was one whose epitaph would be, “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that is has attained a level of civilization never before achieved” and in which, moreover, regeneration might very well turn on the rise of “new prophets” or the “great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.”

In associating the modern West with rational principles, Weber goes on to identify a culture and a set of associated attitudes (what Bilgrami calls intellectual surround) that follow from these principles. To say that they “follow from” is not to say that the culture or the attitudes are “implied by” the principles. The derivation is not analytical in the manner that bachelorhood and being unmarried are. The principles could have generated or supported other accounts or forms of life. That is where the richness and accuracy (or lack of it) of Weber’s historical analysis does the work.

The methodological merit of Weber’s analysis is that the principles, in being the alleged essence of the West, are linked and thus made responsible for the phenomena that are manifest in the West. They do not stand apart in a sort of immaculate immunity from that of which they are the alleged essence. This tying -- again not analytically but historically -- of the principles of the West with the actions and culture of the West helps exempt Weber from the charge that he judges the West by reference to what it believes, or the ideas that it professes, and but not by what it does or the culture that it in fact produces. Weber’s history may be wrong but that is not the point. Weber offers a model of the way intellectual history should be done and of the role that ideas, beliefs and principles can play in history. With Huntington and Buruma and Margalit, the history of American racism, the penchant for violence, the crass commercialism, the awkward relationship between the interests of the West and its commitment to democracy elsewhere, are phenomena that are cited as though they have a mysterious and at any rate inessential relationship with the beliefs, ideas and culture of the West. They just sit there as orphaned facts unrelated to the account being offered, and therefore not surprisingly, not acknowledged with any seriousness. At a minimum, this is a sloppy way of doing history. More egregiously, it is an argument for not taking ideas, beliefs, and principles seriously, because in the end it is not clear that they do any work other than serve as marketing captions or normative decoys.

Bilgrami offers an alternative account of rationality from the standard endorsed by the Enlightenment and taken over by Buruma and Margalit. It is an account he associates with the radical Enlightenment and the view of nature that they held to which ultimately lost out to Newton, Boyle and the Royal Society in which nature was brute and inert. In being inert, it offered no normative constraints on its use and exploitation. Locke also held such a view of nature. The earth, despite having been given to humankind by God, was a wasteland, which was hence materially and in its emotive potential, inert. This view of nature was conceptually crucial to at least two other ideas on which Locke’s influence was decisive: the justification of private property and the inequality that it engendered, and the warrant to colonize those parts of the world in which nature was left fallow or underutilized. As an aside, the alternative account is one which was broadly consonant with Weber’s reading of the modern West, though with him, as with other thinkers like Tocqueville and Tolstoy, there is a tragic sensibility, which accedes to what it laments. The disenchantment of the earth was a crucial step in rationality becoming the defining principle of the West.

There is another feature of the triumphant conception of rationality which strikes me as being equally central to the cultural surround and which receives the same kind of immaculate immunity by those who tout it. It is the relationship of war and violence with rationality and the state. Bilgrami refers to this by way of Gandhi. I want to draw out the point because it is fundamental to Buruma and Margalit’s insistent and all too easy sequestering of the “enemies” of the West from the West’s purported essential identity, and because it helps clarify Robbins’s misreading of my own views and Gandhi’s views on change.

War has a peculiar status in both popular and philosophic opinion. It is almost universally condemned as something to be avoided and as something tinged with profound human tragedy. And yet in the qualifications that are typically attached to such professions of condemnation, the rationale for war is - equally typically, given a latitude that has allowed it to become among the most pervasive features of contemporary political life. War prospers under the constant injunction to be avoided. The logic of its exigent necessity seems always to trump the tragedy of its effects. And so, and especially in modern times, that is to say long after war was associated with intrinsic human virtues, even its most strident pursuit is invariably carried out under the banner of regret, contextual necessity, and ultimately, a higher purpose. In a similar way, violence and especially the violence of war is defended by those who profess to avidly oppose it; never as an end in itself, but only as a means; never in the first instance, but only as a last resort. War and violence are thus supported by the persisting residue of considerations left by the arguments that are proffered in opposition to them.

There is a characteristic, one might even say essential, structure to these permissive forms of opposition to war and violence. The kernel of the normative logic of that structure is one in which the defense of the political community trumps the value of any particular, or group of lives within it -- even to the point of risking the life of the community itself. War, as such, always has a communal rationale; which, of course, is not to say that it cannot be constrained or guided by moral principles. It embodies an idealism that refers to something that exceeds life and which points to a beyond, to a future; at any rate, to a something that cannot be spoken of through merely extant considerations. This is why the language, and so often the practice, of war, -- even under firmly secular dispensations, cannot wholly sequester itself from talk of sacrifice, messianic purposefulness, the sacred; and hence the language of religion. This is true even in theories where there is an ostensible priority given to individual life. Even in such theories, the rationale for war exceeds a concern with the individual, indeed it exceeds a concern with life itself, and instead draws on a communal and more abstract idealism.

In the familiar narratives that Hobbes and Locke, for example, offer for explaining and justifying the origins of politics and the state, human beings are placed in a state of nature. This is an unregulated state with no supervening power or authority. Given human nature and the absence of a supervening power, so the argument goes, this natural state is liable to rapidly descend into a condition of war in which human life and human interests are constantly and inescapably threatened by the imminence of disorder, and ultimately, violent death. It is this dire predicament, which leads individuals, who have a primary interest in avoiding their own death, to contract out of the natural state, to surrender all or some of their natural powers and form political society and authorize the power of the state to regulate the interactions of individuals. When such regulation is successful, i.e., when the state does the job for which it was authorized, individuals can pursue their interests, and via various forms of coordination, the interests of the society as a whole. This is a condition of peace, i.e., where the conditions for the pursuit of individual and collective interests are stable.

What is important to note is that in this classic narrative that encourages and justifies the formation of political society and the state, there is no argument against killing, violence or war per se. The rationale for political society does not stem from a moral disapproval of the fact that human beings in the pursuit of their interests are, or as Rousseau would qualify it, have become, trigger happy and murderous. Violence and killing carry no clear moral opprobrium. They are merely indicators of a condition of disorder, or to use Locke’s term “inconvenience”, which vitiates the pursuit of individual and collectives interests, including crucially an interest in one’s security. There are of course several arguments in both Hobbes and Locke pertaining to how each of us wishes to avoid painful and violent death and those arguments have a crucial force in motivating the rationale for political society. But those are prudential arguments, addressed to individuals with a rational interest in preserving their own lives and interests. War in the state of nature and the absence of peace are simply conditions in which prudence would be denied and for which political society offers a purported redress. But the rationality of that redress need not, and typically among modern political thinkers, is not, part of a general argument against either violence, killing or war per se. The state simply regulates violence in light of the contract that authorizes its power. In an unregulated condition characterized by human equality and other aspects of the state of nature, killing and violence are merely imprudent. The idea being that under conditions where others have much the same resources and the same intensity for a desire to live, the strategy of deploying violence to secure one’s interests, sooner or later, is likely to prove to be self-defeating. This is clearly a conditional argument and not a moral one. It is easy to imagine a risk taker not being moved by it, or conditions under which the rational expectations from violence are better than those from abjuring from violence. Clearly war and violence remain conditionally rational within this tradition of thought.

My point is that violence, killing and war have a deep and even constitutive relationship with the tradition that offers a rational justification for the state, including the democratic state. Of course finer distinctions can and have been made regarding when violent means should be deployed or war declared. The group of thinkers broadly classified under the heading “just war” theorists has done exactly that. But as Michael Walzer has often made explicit, the regulation of war and violence by moral and political principles only makes sense if war and violence are in some sense morally and political permissible. The just war tradition does not challenge the validity of the essential relationship between violence, killing and war with politics, the state and democracy.

It would appear then that the “enemies” of the West in deploying violent means make a perfectly licit derivation from what Buruma and Margalit claim to be the essential principles of the West, except of course in their account of these principles they remain largely immaculate, and hence, untarnished from the culture and the history of the West. Under conditions when the war or crusade on terror is global, and hence no longer tied to Westphalian constraints, the fact that the enemies might not be state actors only further embeds them in the contemporary West, as understood by Buruma and Margalit.

The contrast between Gandhi, and the West and the “enemies” of the West is stark. In my view, it is so stark that one must consider Gandhi as not just having a very different politics; but rather, in some crucial sense as being a deeply anti-political thinker. To understand the full measure of Gandhi’s difference from the West and its enemies, one should be open to the thought (an idea which Robbins’s does not pause to consider) that despite the fact that his actions transformed the political landscape, he may have been a deeply anti-political activist for whom transformation was not to be vested in the power of the state because he understood that power to be constitutionally alloyed with violence. His commitment to non-violence can only be understood by acknowledging that he did not view the world solely or even primarily in political terms. Non-violence for Gandhi is not a cognate of peace. It does not refer, as it does in the tradition of modern political thinking, to a condition of public order of which the state becomes the ultimate guarantor. It is something all together different because it starts by unbraiding the link between personal security, violence, war, peace, public interest and the state. Gandhi like Weber, and the dominant thrust of modern Western and post-nationalist non-Western political thinking, saw the link between the state and violence as being constitutional.

The fact that Gandhi did not think of the state as the assured engine of progress does not make him, as Robbins would have it, “unspeakably complacent”; at least no more so than those who vouch for the progressive nature of the state are to be understood as complacent with every form of state violence. Gandhi’s emphasis on the priority of villages as modes of social organization and personal integrity and self-development as the root of transformation may have been archaic and even anarchic for countries like India. But the jury on the costs of the violence of the state, in both the West and the non-West, is surely not in.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Akeel Bilgrami: A Reply to Robbins, Jager, Smith, Levine, Manikkalingam, and Mehta

I am grateful to the contributors to this web symposium on “Occidentalism, The Very Idea: An Essay on the Enlightenment and Enchantment”, (first published in Critical Inquiry, 2006) for having bothered to read my work and comment on it. I would like to apologize to them (and to Abbas Raza and Robin Varghese, the editors of the excellent website “3 Quarks Daily” who proposed this symposium to me well over a year ago) for being so delayed in my responses.

I have replied to the comments in the order in which they were sent to me. If I spend proportionately more space on the comment by Bruce Robbins, it is only because I feel he continues to drastically misconstrue my views in a way that that I would not like to stand uncorrected.

Reply To Robbins II

There is a cast of mind I find a strain, even a repugnance, which constantly seeks to reduce issues of historical and philosophical depth to a galumphing topicality.

In my reply to Robbins’s first comment on my initial essay, I had pointed to how utterly misplaced his suggestion was that I had some concern in that essay to instruct ‘the Left’ about how to win an election (‘seize power ‘, I believe, was his expression) in America. My refusal to be drawn into this effort to steer the discussion of my work to his own up-to-the-minute political preoccupations has left him frustrated.

In the first sentence of his latest comment, he pounces hungrily on an opening remark in the comment by Colin Jager in this web symposium, saying: “I’m grateful to Colin Jager for attaching this renewal of the “Occidentialism” conversation immediately and firmly to the upcoming election.” But Jager does nothing of the sort. He merely cites Obama’s controversial claim about how some of the political attitudes and the religiosity in working class America might owe partly to certain broadly characterized social and economic deprivations they have suffered in the last few decades with a view to raising the hard questions about false consciousness that I had briefly discussed in my essay, and then proceeds to ideas about disenchantment, community and solidarity that I had presented there in the long genealogical diagnosis I had offered of some of the conditions of advanced, industrial society in the West, especially in America, from its early conceptual and material origins in the late seventeenth century. Jager’s interest is in assessing my account of these things, not at all in the ‘upcoming elections’.

In the next sentence, Robbins writes: “Akeel Bilgrami’s Critical Inquiry (2006) article suggested that the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004 was in large part the result of the ‘shallowness of the Left diagnosis,’ which saw the red states’ bitterness and turn to religion as ‘consequences of the market.’ ” This, too, is false. I mentioned the 2004 election once only to cite an undemocratic Liberal Left response to the ordinary people who were responsible for its outcome. In the brief last section of my essay where the election gets this mention, my canvas is the much bigger one of modern American culture and politics, whose span was delineated by me explicitly with phrases such as “ever since the Goldwater defeat” and ‘for some forty years’. I do believe that the Liberal Left has been shallow in America and I do believe that the Republican Party has been cynically tapping things in the American heartland that metropolitan Liberals have not grasped with any searching historical analysis or psychological sensitivity. But these beliefs were not presented as opinions geared to any recent or future election.

It is a depthless journalist’s tendency to think, as Robbins does, that the latest shifts in poll-monitored percentage points in a given week or month reflect any appreciable difference in the facts, accumulated over the last few decades, about the religious commitments of extraordinarily large numbers of people that have made and continue to make an overwhelming difference to American politics. If this or that politician today (McCain, for instance) does not speak in a campaign with the same religious fervour as his predecessor nor get quite the same response that his predecessor got, that is not a sign that matters of religion and ‘values’ –as Robbins puts it—are not relevant to this country’s politics. Their accumulated relevance is too obvious to deny, and this difference in the behaviour of a particular politician at this particular instant may just be because, over these many years, the Republican alliance with the Religious Right has made more or less certain that the very considerable conservative religious vote is quite secure for the Republicans, and McCain can now focus on the swing voter instead.

I feel embarrassed indulging Robbins’s obsession with yesterday’s headlines and today’s polls and the coming November, in a symposium such as this, given its larger theme --much the same embarrassment someone would feel in having to engage an infatuated man who parades his mistress in a thoroughly inappropriate place.

So let me turn away to the next point he makes: his insistence once again on the relevance of the derivation of ‘ought’ from ‘is’ to my views on value. Here is what he says this time.

“I can imagine at least some reason for taking this idea on: knowing more about the distant impact of my actions on the natural environment (is) might well change my sense of my ethical obligations (ought). But I don’t think this is what Bilgrami means, or what his argument would mean if taken seriously by the non-philosophers like myself who seem to be the implicit addressees of his original essay. So if I offer this statement as a concise summary of the differences between Bilgrami and myself, I do so on the assumption that we are arguing at a non-technical level.”

It needs no technical philosophy, it needs knowledge of English and average intelligence, to understand the following. What he calls the ‘distinct impact of one’s action on the natural environment’ can be characterized in normative terms or in descriptive terms. If it is characterized in normative terms, and some conclusion is derived from it about how one should (again quoting him) ‘change one’s sense of ethical obligation’, then one has only derived an ‘ought’ from an ‘ought’, one normative statement from another normative statement. If it is described in purely descriptive terms, if there is really no normative vocabulary whatsoever in the description of the ‘distant impact of one’s action on the natural environment’ then the derivation, if valid, would be a derivation of an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. Those who doubt the validity of such derivations are sceptical of the idea that there really is no (not even a hidden) normative description in play when one characterizes the impact of one’s actions on the natural environment. So, even though this point requires him to master no technicality, it does require him to think a little harder before he gives glib examples of an ‘is-ought’ derivation, to think harder, that is, about how to characterize the impact that he cites in the premise of his derivation. Can it really be characterized in purely descriptive and non-normative terms? So, for instance, were one to use terms like ‘drought’ or ‘famine’ or ‘pollution’ in the characterization of the impact of one’s actions on the environment, are these really non-normative descriptions? Aren’t these, implicitly at least, normative terms? Can you hear that something is a ‘drought’ or a ‘famine’ or ‘polluted’ without hearing that it is also a bad thing? If you cannot, then the terms are normative. And if they are normative, there is no is-ought derivation. There is no ‘is’, as it were. You could, of course, remove all such vocabulary from the description of the impact, for example by substituting for ‘famine’, expressions that give the average caloric count within a population. This would be a purely descriptive, non-normative premise. If you derived an ethical obligation from such a premise such as, say, “I ought to donate to Oxfam’, then you would have an is-ought derivation. But a question will be raised: Why should a certain number assigned to a certain average caloric count by itself yield a derivation about an ethical obligation. It is a mere number after all. For the derivation to go through, wouldn’t you need a further premise (a ‘major’ premise) over and above the one that specifies the caloric count, a further premise which said that anything (any number) below a certain caloric count amounts to starvation or under-nourishment and therefore famine; but now, all these are normative terms. If so, we have a normative premise after all, and once again no is-ought derivation.

It is impossible to have a serious exchange on this topic of the sort that Robbins seems so keen to have until he formulates his idea of such a derivation with these details addressed. It won’t do to just formulate an abjectly underdescribed example, as he does, and then bustle us to “take this idea on.”

All right, so that is the end of the tutorial, but I want to repeat here what I had said –in English, without any technicality-- in my earlier reply to him. In his first response to my initial essay, he had expressed the opinion: “I do not think we should be deriving any ‘ought’ from any natural ‘is’. “ And my response was: the opinion is gratuitous because such a derivation is of no interest to my view of value. I (and some others –Aristotle, for instance, as interpreted by John McDowell) claim that values are properties of the world (including nature) and are not just a matter of ‘projection’ by us onto the world, to use Hume’s metaphor. So, if ‘values’ suffuse the world, if the world itself often must get normative descriptions, the entire question of deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’, simply lapses. I perceive (not derive) what I ought to do in perceiving and understanding the world itself. This view may be wrong but, whether right or wrong, it takes no position and needs to take no position on the derivation that Robbins wants to foist on me.

I cannot (I doubt anyone can) put things more simply than this.

Once again in this second comment, there is much talk of Gandhi and it rises to new heights of clueless speculation about his ideas.

I had pointed out that -- in the context of a discussion of the form of ‘political power’ that underlay the stance of Said’s ‘Orientalist’-- Robbins was historically wrong to say that Gandhi wielded political power. Thrashing around for some sort of reply to this exposure of ignorance of history, he says this: “According to Bilgrami, the crucial difference between Orientalism (“our” negative stereotyping of “them”) and Occidentalism (“their” negative stereotyping of “us”) is that we have power and they don’t. Bilgrami also claims that I made a gross mistake in saying that Gandhi wielded power. If I put these two claims together (I speak again with the heuristic crudeness that seems most useful for such a brief exchange), I get the speculative conclusion that for Bilgrami it’s always the bad guys who have power, and it’s by following the power, so to speak, that you can tell who the bad guys are. The good guys are innocents because, like Gandhi, they are spiritual rather than powerful.”

I especially like his use of the term ‘speculative’. Just about the only thing in this passage that isn’t comical is the first half of the remark in the last parenthesis, and even that prompts a giggle because of its understatement.

Let me say that I am, as it happens, like Said, given to suspicion of the sort of political power that Said was discussing in his book Orientalism, and also, like Gandhi, of centralized forms of state power. (Gandhi had no objection to decentralized forms of politics and power and in fact theorized them with some sophistication.) But –to be plain about it-- it is lunk-headed to think that this suspicion of mine follows from the two empirical and historical claims I made that Robbins puts together. One could have no suspicion of such political power, one could think it is the most delightful thing in the world, ‘better than sex’, and yet make those two claims quite accurately. It is not just ‘heuristic crudeness’ that the passage betrays, it reveals highly imperfect logical powers.

This passage is followed by some banalities about power, which he presents in a self-congratulatory way as something that is privileged knowledge for ‘students of culture’ such as himself. One of these banalities is that “power is distributed in much more complex and less binary ways”. Since, as I have just shown, the comparatives (“more”, “less”) are targeting some ‘speculative’ interpretative fantasy about what I have written, let’s drop them. Dropping them, yields the banality: power comes in different forms, some good, some bad.” And then, he adds, clutching at a straw that I had offered him to redeem his historical ignorance, “I myself admire the power Gandhi was able to wield in organizing the movement that overthrew colonialism in India. (That’s of course what I meant, not that he held elected office.)”

I will leave it to the reader (who is idle enough to possess the time and inclination to pursue the matter) to decide for himself whether he believes Robbins when he says that that is indeed what he meant all along when he spoke of Gandhi wielding power --since there is no visible evidence for that meaning in what he says on that occasion. But even if we allow that he intended that meaning of ‘power’, what was its point in that discussion? We can put it on record that he admires the mobilizational power that Gandhi wielded. Why are we being told this? Does he want to imply that he does not admire power in the other sense that was my subject and Said’s? If so, we are agreed on something, in which case the only surprising thing is the tone of disagreement in which it was expressed. The fact is that the remark about Gandhi’s wielding power, if it is given this meaning, had no point in that context. Neither Said nor I was discussing the notion of power as a form of anti-colonial mobilization in describing the Orientalist. So, in that context, it makes no odds that power comes in various forms, some good, some bad, and to announce that it does is fatuous. Said (and I) were focused on one specific notion of power and I was sympathetic to his suspicion and criticism of it. To introduce the idea of mobilizational power wielded by Gandhi in that discussion lands Robbins in the very same midden, I had identified. He had simply perpetrated a bad pun and changed his own subject of power in the space of three or four sentences without so much as noticing it.

At the end of this renewed discussion of Gandhi on power in this second comment, a conclusion is pronounced: “Occidentalism is not a good thing, even if it’s the weak who practice it.” This tiresome moralism is directed at me, so he must think that I think ‘Occidentalism’ is a good thing.

Do I?

As you might have come to expect, there is more nuance to the issue than is suggested in Robbins’s conclusion. Even as Buruma and Margalit deploy it, the term ’Occidentalism’ is an omnibus one. There is more than one kind of Occidentalist.

If by “Occidentalists” one means what Buruma and Margalit, for the most part, mean (‘Islamist Jihadis’ seeking to spread terror in the West), then I had said that it was “morally cretinous” to say that they were good. That is on page 405 in Critical Inquiry, 2006, vol.32, no.3. Robbins could not have missed this point, however convenient it is for his polemical compulsions to write as if it was never made. I realize that I am not obliged to display my anti-terrorist credentials to every silly person who demands to see them because he wants to cozy up to an intellectual establishment that is waging a cold war against Islam. He had asked me to display them in his last comment too, when he wondered if I would ‘reassure’ him and others that I didn’t want Occidentalists to have more power. In my response, I had tried to convey my views more subtly than I have here, hoping that he would get the point by inference. But, of course, that didn’t happen, so I thought I should hush his moralistic anxieties here by citing a page reference. I admire many moralists. However, to be a moralist of this predictable kind on this topic in the present context is perhaps better than being a bore, but not by much and it is not very different.

The ‘Islamist Jihadi’ is not the only kind of ‘Occidentalist’, according to Buruma and Margalit, and I myself had extended the reference of their term by arguing that Gandhi was an ‘Occidentalist’ by every conceptual criterion that those authors had laid down. His distinctiveness from some of the dreaded others was that his activism was non-violent.

Robbins, pretending to have understood Gandhi, seems to think that his Occidentalism is not a good thing either. His grounds are mainly these and they are stated immediately after the assertion of his admiration for Gandhi’s wielding mobilizational power against the British imperial state: “But of course, circumstances have now changed. It is now Indian capital and the Indian state that hold the preponderance of power in India. Yet there are huge numbers of Indians below the poverty line. It is worth asking again, therefore, as I did in my first response: who stands to gain in today’s India from a repetition of the Gandhian program of merely individual, ethical, spiritual improvement? Who is threatened by its opposite (which Uday Mehta rejects as Western liberalism), improvement sought by means of “politics and power”?”

Put aside the fact that it is not merely Indian capital but considerable foreign capital that is the source of power in India today. Gandhi is being criticized for being ‘merely’ individual, ethical, and spiritual in his ideal of ‘improvement’. What then does he make of the fact that these very ethical, spiritual, and individual values were stressed by Gandhi in his “wielding of power’ against the British that Robbins admires? They were essential to his ideal of that mobilization. Pick up any page (has Robbins?), any random page, of his writing or his speeches on the subject of resistance to the British and you will learn this. And if you wanted some proof that there was nothing ‘mere’ about the ethical for him, that would come with what you have learnt.

In general, it reveals a great deal about someone’s mentality that he uses the word ‘merely’ as a qualifier of ‘the ethical’; and I would think that someone capable of the expression ‘merely ethical’ is not a reliable source of where the ethical may be found.

Gandhi wrote with insight about the political economy of British colonialism and with prescience about its debilitating legacy for a post-colonial India that was in thrall to the economic apparatus assumed by British or ‘Western’ ideas of ‘development’. I suppose one would have to decide whether it is ignorance of Gandhi or of the idiomatic usage of the term ‘merely’ (and here I grant Robbins privileged knowledge of his own absent states of mind, so he can decide for himself) that someone is described as ‘merely’ ethical who wrote at great length a) about the ways in which the cotton industry in Lancashire was being boosted by the British imperial state precisely in proportion to the imperial state’s destruction of its indigenous counterpart industry in India, and at even greater length about b) how ‘Western liberalism’ (which is not just Uday Mehta’s phrase, but a constant subject in Gandhi’s writings) as a political doctrine (of what I had called the “orthodox Enlightenment”) had been constructed as the ideological support of a notion of economic development that catered to metropolitan elites at the cost of the welfare of ordinary people. Many have said this about Western Liberalism, including, of course, Marx, but none have said it in such clear, civil, and bracing prose as Gandhi.

Robbins’s idea that such a stance on ‘Western Liberalism’ must amount to a rejection altogether of ‘politics and power’ as a path of ‘improvement’ for the ‘huge numbers of Indians below the poverty line”, strictly implies that there is no ‘politics or power’ for improving the conditions of the Indian people that is not countenanced by Western liberalism. The whole point of Gandhi’s ‘Occidentalism’ is that to subscribe to that implication is a form of cognitive slavery to the West and, in the end, a form of economic submission to the corporate, imperial West, a submission that would survive the gaining of formal independence (that is to say, survive what Robbins describes as the ‘changed circumstances’ on the scene of Indian power). His warnings about this are echoed by dissenting political groups of the Left in India to this day. To dismiss them as issuing from ‘mere spirituality’ is to lack any clue about the nature of his form of radical politics.

My own initial essay argued that Gandhi might be placed in another trajectory of Western thought than the liberalism of the Orthodox Enlightenment that he opposed --what I, following some others, called ‘The Radical Enlightenment’ in which ‘politics and power’ were elaborated in terms of ideas that first flowed from popular movements in that remarkable period of the 1640s in England and have surfaced in modified forms in later periods, culminating, as I said, in some of Gandhi’s ideas about more decentralized power and economies than has been adopted by ‘the changed circumstances’ of successive administrations in independent India. I have no reason to think that Robbins is hostile to such a form of radical politics. For all I know, he might wish to applaud it. I really have no idea. But for either of these things, hostility or applause, he would of course have to first recognize it as a form of politics and not (cluelessly, as I put it) sneer at it as some sort of ‘spirituality’. I rather suspect that a recognition of this sort of politics on his part will depend on whether it gets picked up one of these days by the intellectual trends he finds glamorous.

Let me put the point in another – actually, converse-- way. I honestly have no idea whether Robbins does or does not subscribe to the implication I had italicized above. It’s possible that he does and that he is cheerleading for a dominant form of liberalism that Gandhi and the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ have opposed --in much the same spirit that he demands that I declare my position on Occidentalist terrorists. The implication I italicized follows strictly from things he says, but he has such a limp grasp on so many of his own assertions and what they imply, that I will not venture to attribute to him any particular political stance on this specific question. Enough just to register the muddles and misreadings -- when these come so thick and fast, just establishing some clarity feels to me like a moral achievement.

Much of the rest of the latest comment is about disenchantment and re-enchantment. We are told: “What Bilgrami proposes is that nature tells us (tells all humans everywhere, without regard to difference of place, time, or culture) that we should never eat pork or that we ought to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.”

This is just one of several profusely inexact interpretations of what I say. Another is that I want to “make more room” for religion in American politics just because I think that we ought to diagnose with greater depth than is done by the dismissive metropolitan liberals the already existing high (in my opinion, just for the record, much too high) levels of religion in American politics. This last is so childish a fallacy that high school manuals for informal reasoning would include it among howlers to avoid. When it comes from a grown man, it deserves to be ignored with contempt. So let me instead say something about the passage I have just quoted.

I made no universalist, context-free, claims for my conception of value (nor do Aristotle or McDowell) and have consistently said that responses to the evaluative demands from the world (including nature) that prompt our practical agency, may differ among cultures and peoples. Something like variability of response is true even regarding the facts of nature that natural science studies since, as many have pointed out, observation of such facts is pervasively theory-laden; and were that even not true of the facts that natural science studies, I have written repeatedly (as, for example, in my last reply to him) that values in the world are irreducible to the facts in the world that science studies, so there is no question that one’s understanding of them amounts to context-free generalizations such as those aspired to in some of the sciences.

In the face of so much incomprehension, it is impossible to summon the patience to respond to the details of his protests on the subject of disenchantment in the last third of his comment.

Details apart, he declares, “My position is that disenchantment is the wrong diagnosis and re-enchantment is the wrong prescription.” Then, in a curious admission that this criticism is premature and that he doesn’t understand what he is criticizing, he adds, “It would be a genuine step forward in this conversation for Bilgrami to say more about what he thinks enchantment actually looks like…”

That demand is impertinent. In my initial essay, I had promised to write a sequel, specifying in some detail the specific ways in which disenchantment has been a deep factor in the background of contemporary American culture and politics and how some intelligent attention paid to it, would provide for a more democratic and humane politics with a deeper and more integrated understanding of the relations between the economic hardships of large numbers of working people (something that is inseparable from the disenchantment of the world since a predatory form of capitalism arose complicitly with that disenchantment, as my genealogical diagnosis was intended to show) and their yearnings for more solidarity and community in their everyday lives. To develop these themes as I pledged to do in the sequel would be to say more about ‘enchantment’. That paper will be published sooner or later. I see no reason why I should time the rhythms of my intellectual productions to harmonize with Bruce Robbins’s premature articulations.

All I can say to him is that till I do publish it and before he goes off climbing to the beckoning recesses of the solar system, cuddling his animals (this twerpy imagery is his, not mine), he might consider reading something about disenchantment in America in the last century and more (though not about the ‘upcoming elections’) in some of the writings of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, and Whitman,…and reading more generally about the nature of value and ‘enchantment’ in some sections of Aristotle’s Ethics as well as some of Marx’s writing on alienation. It’s not as if I am the first or the only person who has written on these subjects.

Reply to Jager

Colin Jager raises many of the right issues in a sensitive and comprehending comment and explores them interestingly, emphasizing by the end more explicitly than I did, the Romanticist element in the “Radical Enlightenment”.

There are just a few points he makes that puzzle me, though it may just be that I have failed to see something that he has.

I am not quite sure what he means at the beginning of his piece when he says, “In the essay under discussion, Bilgrami criticizes the ease with which left-liberal thinkers translate enchantment into its supposedly more worldly (read:economic) causes.” This is said immediately after citing the remark that got Obama into all that trouble, so I assume that it means that I have criticized these ‘thinkers’ for their account of the religiosity among the working people of the country as some sort of escape from their difficult economic conditions. Whatever one thinks of such an account of someone’s religion, we should be careful about calling what is accounted for, ‘enchantment’. That would be to equate enchantment with religion, something I carefully refrained from doing in the essay that is being discussed. For one thing, I have argued that disenchantment came about as a result of certain orthodox religious positions aligning themselves with certain metaphysical interpretations of the new science as well as with commercial interests. It is quite wrong to think that there is a complete lack of piety in the history of disenchantment, wrong even, to think that enchantment must always be more pious and religious than its opposite. In fact, enchantment is something that one might hope for despite being a secularist and an atheist, as I had declared myself to be. It does not even have to be ‘spiritual’ and is not in my own understanding of it, though I don’t recoil from the word ‘spiritual’ as many, who are keen to be on display with their thoroughly Enlightenment commitments, are.

I can see why Jager might not have bothered to be too careful in his use of ‘enchantment’ in the sentence I have cited --after all, the main point he is making is that someone in certain familiar contemporary circumstances might seek in religion what enchantment, at its deepest, makes possible, especially when there is very little else that makes it possible. I just wanted to make sure that Jager in making a theoretical survey of the issues is not, in his own voice, making the crude equation –a kind of synonymy-- of enchantment with religion and spirituality (in the way that Justin Smith, for instance, does in his comment in this symposium).

Jager is, of course, right that I find the tendency to account for a people’s religiosity simply as some sort of ‘opiate’ in conditions of economic deprivation, too simple. And he is right too that my reason for finding it so is that it does not take seriously enough the first-person or agential point of view of the religious person.

On the other hand, I have not said that social or economic conditions are entirely irrelevant. In fact, in my essay I had said that it is unsurprising that religion and church-going should be so pervasive in American society where for so many years there has been so little by way of an entrenched labour movement, so little by way of community and solidarity that is provided in the ordinary life of working people by union halls, for instance, as is traditionally found in European nations for almost a century. It may well be that his absence of ‘social democratic’ traditions is the most central fact in an explanation of the differential between United States and Europe in the matter of church-going. I don’t really doubt that if I lived in the heart of Nebraska and earned fifty thousand dollars a year and had a wife and three children, and had the upbringing and education of a person in these circumstances, that I would go to church. I certainly wouldn’t go to the opera, as I do. Or read the books I do. There are not likely to be many other places than the church which organized things so as to be a centre for meaningful social relations that I could go to. As I had pointed out in my essay, Robert Putnam was right to say that people by and large do seek meaningful associations and for me that is an essential part of secular enchantment, of finding value in the world which one inhabits, a point that is missed if one takes my appeal to enchantment to be restricted to nature in some self-standing sense and my qualms about disenchantment to be exclusively ecological qualms. Putnam was only wrong to focus on the recreational in elaborating his point, since that is the very sphere, as Thoreau pointed out long ago in a passage that I quoted in my essay, that distracts one from the more genuinely personal and politically far-reaching aspects of community and solidarity, the very aspects that are essential to an unalienated life.

I say all this by way of saying that though economic considerations are important for me in the explanation of religion in American society, they must be filtered through what Jager calls the ‘feel’ of disenchantment, the first personal point of view of agency and experience, for which Marx rightly mobilized the term ‘alienation’ --an aspect of Marx that was deliberately silenced by Marxist theorists like Althusser who stressed the material conditions in just the ways Jager sees as falling into implausible notions of ‘false consciousness’ when it comes to explaining religious life.

There is much more to say on these subjects and I say it in the sequel “Democracy and Disenchantment” which elaborates the ideas presented in long footnotes in the last section of the essay in Critical Inquiry.

In a quick dialectical turn, he then shifts the subject to something not unrelated: the materialist denial of the relevance of culture to social explanation. He describes this as critique of ‘literary thinking’, citing some work that, in his gloss, hysterically inveighs against the intellectual legacy of the New Left. I have not read that work and have no idea whether it is as outlandish as he seems to suggest it is. If how he presents them is what things have come to, then intellect is rather at an ebb.

I suppose, given the views I have expressed in my initial essay and these responses to commentary on it, I should allow myself to be counted as one of the more sober descendants of the New Left. Even so, there are things in his description of this legacy, from which I would firmly demur. One thing he reports them saying is: “Having abandoned political movements and organizations, the Left is left with ‘culture’ and with the idea that working at the level of culture is itself political.”

Well, working at the level of culture is indeed itself partly political (because you can’t separate politics from culture entirely) though it is certainly not all there is to the political.

But why anybody committed to the importance for the political of the themes of alienation and disenchantment and culture, should be seen as having abandoned the need for political movements is hard for me to fathom. I would have thought that in our time and in our place, social and political movements are pretty much alone in offering us public and reassuring sites where one feels one is not daft and always thinking the unthinkable. Certainly the sites of the media, of educational institutions from a relatively early age, of the workplaces one is very likely to find oneself in, make almost any serious form of Left thinking seem unthinkable, dismissed as being from another era to be ridiculed now for its irrelevance.

I wouldn’t want to deny some of what these authors have said --that there are outré post-modernist literary tendencies that may have come out of some aspects of the New Left. But there are also utterly arcane tendencies in my own subject of analytic philosophy, which has sometimes made a sordid, careerist game out of ridiculing post-modernism, just as the authors Jager cites seem to have done. One should never be surprised by nor underestimate the capacity of academics in almost any field of work for raising unnecessary dust, for avoiding the deep and fundamental issues of their subjects by conducting in coteries, endless discussions --ridden with invented jargon -- of narrow and pointless themes.

What I am much more surprised to find is that people are constantly debating and making controversial what seems obvious: that the legacy of the New Left cannot and has not (anymore than the Old Left) abandoned the urgent need for popular political movements. There is no incompatibility whatever between so-called ‘literary thinking’ and movements. The largest political movement in Britain of the last fifty years, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’ was led by an historian who wrote books on Romanticism and on Blake, the very figures that I stress in my initial essay in a roll call of heroes (and which Jager himself stresses even more than I do), the very figures, that is, who shape the ‘literary thinking’ that went into the Radical Enlightenment. All that the legacy of the New Left insists on is that you cannot proceed as if culture and, more generally, ideas (what Robbins strangely has called ‘epistemology’ and Mamdani calls ‘culture talk’) are epiphenomena. The history of what the entire Left, New or Old, opposes is full of cultural and intellectual (‘ideological’) justifications for the wrongs they have perpetrated: predatory capitalism, imperialism, racism, fascism,..have all appealed to cultural notions and yes, even liberal ideals in many cases, to justify what they have done. There is no opposing them in the movements you start or join without confronting them at the level of culture as well as of politics and the economy. It is not even as if these levels can be so easily disentangled. So: I deny the most basic assumptions of this controversy that Jager introduces when he introduces these authors’ extravagant charges against the New Left’s influence and ‘literary thinking’.

Jager says he finds something interesting in those authors’ claim that the New Left legacy as well as contemporary conservatism come together in some sense: in being anti-statist and individualistic. The only reason why this claim is interesting is because it is so wide of the mark. One can be anti-statist for more than one reason, and the reasons may be so different, that it is hardly worth using the same label to describe what they are reasons for. I myself don’t know of anyone influenced by the New Left who would be anti-statist in the sense that she would deny that Bill Clinton was wrong to sign the welfare bill, or who would deny that the United States should have a single payer system of health insurance… And I don’t know of anyone influenced by the New Left who would deny that the state in this country has for decades been perpetrating one of the most scandalous economic crimes in history by subsidizing a vast, bandit corporate sector with public monies spent on the Pentagon. Now, in the first two examples, they are pro-statist and in the third, example they are anti-statist. Equally, I don’t myself know any contemporary conservative who thinks that Clinton should not have signed that bill or that there should be a national health service. Nor do I know any contemporary conservative who thinks that the state should make deep cuts to the Pentagon. Here, in the very opposite direction, there is respectively, anti- and pro-statism. What does this show? That, once you disambiguate what is meant by statism, once you realize that there is no single understanding of what it is to be pro- or anti- the state, there is no paradox of the sort that Jager finds interesting --of contemporary conservatism and the New Left descendants coming together. Things are literally as simple as that. Those authors, if Jager represents them correctly, are so keen to indict the New Left that they haven’t stopped to think about the way they use their own terms such as ‘statism’. Since I feel some confidence that Jager will agree with me about this, I will leave it to him to do a similar exercise with the term ‘individualism’.

It’s gratifying to have in Jager’s concluding pages, such a sympathetic and accurate statement of the sort of genealogical analysis I tried to give in the paper. I hope it won’t come off as too fastidious if I, even so, mention one or two very small points that are misleading in that elegant summary.

The word ‘deists’ is not quite sufficient in marking out the dissenters I had made my late seventeenth century protagonists. There were deists on both sides, orthodoxy and dissent. This continued in later years too. So, for example, Voltaire was a deist and very much on the orthodox side of things on the subjects that I had made my focus. The crucial difference, given my focus, was that the dissenters wanted to resist the forming of a conception of nature that would remove from it all the elements that might prevent it from degenerating into the notion of ‘natural resources’. This, they felt, was the fault-line, the beginning of something that had great fall-out for political economy and culture. To say this is to say something far more specific than the term ‘deist’ or ‘deism’ marked. This is a very small point and things are corrected if Jager simply changes his words from ‘the pantheism of the deists’ to ‘the pantheism of some deists’.

Finally, a somewhat larger correction. Jager says, “For as I read Bilgrami, the indictment is two-fold. First, definitions of rationality that ignored or downplayed its ‘cultural surround’ stripped the world of meaning and thereby created the need for enchantment—a need that sometimes manifests itself in violent, exclusivist ways, other times in forms of retreat and withdrawal. And second, such definitions of rationality have made it impossible for Left intellectuals to understand enchantment as anything other than irrationalism and magical thinking. And so they continue to be surprised by its staying power, for they are unable to understand it as doing cognitive and cultural work.”

There is something both wrong and right in this. It is wrong in that it gives the impression that I have something against a narrow notion of ‘rationality’. I don’t at all. It would be splendid if we could restrict the notion of rationality to deductive, inductive, and decision-theoretic rationality supplemented by a carefully worked out notion of ‘coherence’ for both beliefs and values. Then we could use terms other than ‘rationality’ to laud the other intellectual and cognitive virtues, of which there are many. This would help a lot in unconfusing things. But, alas, historically, things have been much more confused. As I pointed out in that essay, ‘rationality’ was used in much broader senses than these.

Historians of seventeenth and eighteenth century America have written of how some settlers who argued that it might be best to live side by side with the native peoples of the land rather than slaughter them, were said by most of the other settlers, to be ‘irrational’. (Not merely wrong, but ‘irrational’.) Slave-owning racism claimed right for its position by claiming that slaves were not ‘persons’ because they lacked ‘rational’ capacities. Imperialists justified their actions by saying they were partly there to make natives more ‘rational’. And so on, and on. And what I was pointing to was that on their lips and pens this term ‘rational’ in these uses meant something much broader and richer than the narrowly demarcated meanings of ‘rational’ that I would welcome stipulating. The version of the richer notion of rationality that was my particular focus was the ideological claim that ‘natives’ in the colonized lands (of India, for instance) lacked ‘rationality’ because they had not yet been educated out of their primitive prejudices to take the right predatory attitude towards nature and see it as nothing much more than natural resources for indefinite profit and gain. This, of course, came a little later. It was in an earlier period in the late seventeenth century that the ground was cleared for these later justifications of empire by the metaphysical interpretations given to the new science, interpretations which saw these ‘primitive prejudices’ I just mentioned as issuing in part from a metaphysics that they were keen to make obsolete.

So I repeat that I am not against the narrow notion of rationality. I am for it. I am against the rich (or what I called ‘thick’) notion of rationality. And so were the dissenters, the only difference being that for them the opposition came from a point of view that took the world to be sacralized, whereas I would hope in our time that the opposition to such rationality would come from a more secular point of view regarding the world, a point of view that I have tried to describe more innocuously in terms of a world suffused with value, even though there is no divine source of the value.

Despite this correction, I think the general direction of Jager’s passage that I quoted is fine. He sees the point that enchantment, however secular, will always be viewed as magical and unscientific by a certain blinkered intellectual stance. What he misrepresents is why the stance is too blinkered to see that there is nothing magical about enchantment, at least as I have presented it. It is blinkered not because it takes rationality to be too narrow, but because it takes it to be unscientific to say, as I do, that the world contains things that natural science cannot study (value, for instance). That is a narrowness in metaphysical or ontological commitments, not a narrowness in the notion of rationality. As I have said before –in the earlier reply to Robbins-- there is nothing unscientific about saying that there is more that exists in the world than falls within the purview of natural science. It would only be unscientific to say it, if there was some science which contained in it the proposition that science has comprehensive coverage of the world. But that is not a proposition in any science. So denying that proposition cannot possibly be unscientific. It is not good science, but bad philosophy which claims such coverage for science.

Reply to Smith

Justin Smith writes about Spinoza rather than the seventeenth century English dissenters I wrote about. He says that, if Jonathan Israel on Spinoza is anything to go by (and apparently he must be something to go by because his book has the title “Radical Enlightenment” which figures prominently in my essay), the sorts of things I say about my dissenters must be less about their philosophical ideas and more about the reception of those ideas. He is pushing at an open door. He must have skipped the part of my essay where I say, at some length, that the ideal of rationality that was ‘thickened’ in that period was a product of various worldly alliances formed between groups of interests that exploited certain metaphysical ideas, and equally the dissenters exploited opposing metaphysical ideas. It was avowedly, therefore, all about the reception of ideas, about how ideas are used by certain forces that are emerging in a period of history and other opposing ideas that are used by the resistance to this. (Boyle’s case is especially interesting because, if intellectual historians such as J. R Jacob and Margaret Jacob are right, in his case the propounder of the ideas may himself have been involved fairly explicitly in the alliances that I had mentioned. Interesting, though that is, it still does not mean that the point is not a point about reception. After all when one participates in the use of one’s own philosophical ideas for some extra-philosophical purposes, one participates in the reception of one’s own ideas.)

He says that Boyle did not have contempt for nature and tells us of his piety. He must have also skipped the part where I said that religion, piety, faith, and so on were crucial to the thick notion of rationality that was being forged in this period. It was, as I put it, an alliance between religion, a scientific society, and commercial interests. Having contempt for nature or not having contempt for nature is not the point. Seeing nature as making normative demands on you that inhibits a certain systematic form of extractive economy, is the point. Smith says nothing to counter the sorts of things that intellectual historians have said to implicate Boyle on the side that I placed him in this ideological dispute. He merely points to his lack of contempt for nature and his piety, which, as I say, cuts no ice.

He says that he “is not convinced by me that representatives of the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ were resisting what we would later come to recognize as the scourge of scientific rationalism…” He must have skipped the part in my first reply to Robbins (which was, I believe, circulated by the editors of this website to the commentators) where I said that it was an explicitly stated anxiety of the various parties in the worldly alliance of interests, that the metaphysics favoured by the English dissenters’ (the representatives of the “Radical Enlightenment” in my narrative, if not Jonathan Israel’s ) was a central element in their ‘enthusiasm’ (which I there pointed out was a term of opprobrium at the time) that might upset the alliance’s aspirations for a certain culture of the propertied classes and a certain form of political economy that I presented with at least some minimal detail. The articulations of this anxiety are well documented by Christopher Hill in The World Turned Upside Down, and again by Margaret Jacob, as well as others. If Smith is not convinced of the threat and the resistance that the dissenters posed, it would be good to have him offer some evidence that shows this articulated anxiety about the resistance that the ‘enthusiasts’ were posing, to be misplaced. He concludes that these debates about nature were projections backwards on to Newton, Boyle, etc some centuries later, an astonishing thing to say if you know the dates of one of the most fervent debaters, John Toland. The plain fact is that someone like Toland (and there were others) was prescient about just the sorts of things that we describe, in our own much later time, when we speak of the ‘disenchantment’ that first set in in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. That fact is quite sufficient for the purposes of my analysis.

He says “It has proven much more difficult than once was hoped for by the main current of the Enlightenment to believe things on the basis of evidence, but neither the main current nor the countercurrent, if there ever was such a thing, ever held that we should do anything but that…” The scepticism expressed in “if there was ever such a thing” amounts to a scepticism about the detailed evidence provided by intellectual histories one can find in writers such as Jacobs, Israel, and J.G.A. Pockock, to name just three, none of whom are idiots, and until I read something by Smith to match this scholarship, I will stick with the instruction I have gained from my reading of them. As for the rest of this sentence, he must have skipped the passages in which I say that the orthodox Enlightenment and the “counter-currents” were each just as committed to the same scientific method and scientific laws as the other, and the dispute was not about a methodological and scientific commitment to evidence nor to any scientific laws but rather about a very basic metaphysical assumption. The sentence concludes: “…I fail to see the genealogical link between Spinoza and the Kansas creationists”. I too fail to see it. To react to disenchantment with a desperately brittle conservative Christianity is not likely to have an intellectual genealogy in the ideas of Spinoza. If some ideas (which fell out of favour) might have prevented disenchantment (had they not), they do not become genealogical antecedents to reactions to disenchantment --not by logic, not by dialectic, not by leaps of intellectual imagination. Smith must have in mind to criticize some argument other than the one I gave.

He says, “When I hear bin Laden’s messages, I do not hear a ‘clear and precise’ statement of political aims”. Osama bin Laden has said on more than one occasion that Islamists should wage acts of terror against America until there is a just solution in Palestine and until American corporations are out of Saudi Arabia. Smith should say what he finds unclear in this. Bin Laden has said a lot of other repugnant, fanatical things about ‘infidels’ and so on. These may distract one from the political demands he has made, but to be distracted from something is not to have that thing rendered unclear. Some may also find bin Laden’s political demands to be fake (I don’t but people in America who are self-servingly complacent about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians or about the effects of American corporations on foreign peoples, do), they might find his political demands to be a mere front for his other fanatical Islamist interests. Even if, for the sake of argument, we say they are right, to make fake demands is not to make obscure demands.

What I confess to finding obscure myself is Smith’s extemporary excursion about his adult life in Russia and the Balkans.

In his concluding words, he says that we should focus on the North-South divide instead of the East/West divide or the Muslim/Non-Muslim Divide. I didn’t really use the term ‘the East’. And ‘Orientalism’” in the canonical work in which it is discussed so prominently, is not intended to mark the East so much as the Islamic Middle-East. That apart, what he must mean by his remark (though I could be wrong in thinking so) is that issues of global justice which so much define the North-South divide are more important than the issues I was engaging in when I wrestled with Buruma and Margalit. He must have skipped the sentence at the end of my initial essay in which I said that issues of global justice are more important than the admittedly important question of disenchantment. I am said to be united with Margalit and Buruma and Huntington in taking too seriously the Muslim/Non-Muslim divide. It was a central point in and motivation for writing my essay that Buruma and Margalit (and indeed Huntington) had made too much of the Muslim/Non-Muslim divide and that they were cold warriors in that divide, a cold war I found distasteful and dangerous. Curious how opposing some authors for some of their attitudes can be read as uniting one with them on those attitudes.

It’s fine to be a highly critical reader but not if one is a highly skipping reader.

Reply to Levine

There is a very attractive sobriety in Levine’s intellectual diagnosis of Buruma and Margarita’s failings. I wish I could have displayed the same restraint when I wrote about them. The diagnosis is for the most part quite convincing to me.

A couple of things.

The idea of internal or immanent critique that Levine expounds so clearly, whether it comes from his, as he calls it, ‘Left Hegelian’ position or some other (let’s not forget that even someone like Burke preached it), is exactly right for revealing how capacious the philosophical span of the Enlightenment is. That capaciousness for reflexive conflict within the notion of specific elaborations of the concept of reason can be found even within the span of individual philosophers of the Enlightenment. The subversive effect of his own notion of the sublime on Kant’s systematic thought on Reason or the notion of his own notion of alienation on Marx’s materialism, are both examples of this. I’ll say a bit about the latter in a moment.

It is, of course, well known that Horkheimer and Adorno wrote in depth both about disenchantment and about the instrumentalizing tendencies within the concept of reason in the orthodox Enlightenment. Levine has my protagonists, the Early Modern dissenters and Gandhi, line up with Horkheimer and Adorno on these themes. And then, when he faults Buruma and Margalit for ignoring all these figures and directing their criticisms instead on the German romantics, he seems to be keen on placing a great distance between these figures and the German romantic tradition. That, I think, is a failure of nerve in the face of a familiar sort of bullying about German romanticism, typified in the clichéd prejudices that Buruma and Margalit voice against it. I think that there is much in Horkheimer, that is continuous with the German Romantic tradition, if one stepped far back enough to get a large enough perspective and held sturdily and patiently to the task of providing all the necessary qualifications. These continuities with Romanticism hold equally true of Gandhi and the Early Modern dissenters, as Jager observes in his comment.

But there is a peril here that we always have to look at in the face. And when we do, it understandably induces a neurosis. We have all been made so rightly jittery by the ghastly nationalist and fascist outcomes of modern European history that may have had some indirect intellectual origins in some aspects of Romantic thought, that we often lose nerve in just this way; and I must admit that my reason for leapfrogging back to the Early modern period was precisely out of a desire to avoid the clutter of having to deal with this neurosis, a neurosis that afflicts me too. But it is one thing to make one’s argument avoiding the mess in one’s path –that is to say, avoiding the entire German romantic affinity with and mediation of the Early Modern figures with Horkheimer, Adorno, and eventually Gandhi—another thing to deny that there is any such mediation or affinity.

I’d like to take the chance here to say something that I had left hanging in my comment on Jager who had written of how some critics had coupled American conservatism with New Left-influenced “Literary Thinking” for both being ‘anti-statist’ and ‘individualist’. I had said there that there was an exercise of the sort I performed on the term ‘statist’ which needed to be performed on the term ‘individualist’. About ‘statist’, I had claimed that a relatively straightforward disambiguation of the term of the kind that I provided in my comment on Jager, would have the effect of showing that it was too quick to make such a coupling. And I now think that Levine’s comment helps to bring out how a similar disambiguation with a similar effect may be possible for the term ‘individualist’ as well.

The critique of instrumental reason by a certain Left intellectual tradition he expounds, introduces into Leftist thought an experiential dimension that cannot leave the individual out. Two examples: No notion of alienation (a notion central to the critique of instrumental reason) can have an elaboration that leaves out the experience of individuals. This is also true of the notion of ‘creativity’ or ‘making’ as contrasted with ‘use’ or ‘means, (a contrast again essential to making the critique of instrumental reason). Marx understood all this very well and it subverted his materialism from within, a subversion that could only be denied by something like Althusser’s cynical ploy of separating out the so-called ‘Early’ and ‘Late’ Marx. If Althusser is wrong (and it is demonstrable that he is), and existential notions (such as ‘alienation’) pervaded Marx’s corpus, early and late, then there is scope for just the sort of internal critique that Levine presents.

But this means that we have two notions of ‘individualist’. The one that the ‘literary thinking’ that is the legacy of the New Left can embrace as emerging out of this immanent critique or subversion in Marx, the other more familiar one that is embraced by conservative American thought which, because it is so familiar, I won’t take the space to spell out here. The disambiguation ensures that there is no plausible coupling of these two ideologies.

But even though there is no coupling of that sort, what I think is true is that there are individual thinkers in the Enlightenment whose philosophical span was capacious enough to contain both these notions of ‘individualist’. Mill is the most prominent example.

I should just add that if this sort of disambiguation is something that can be so simply done for the term ‘individual’, there ought to be one in the offing for its alter term, ‘community’, too. When one thinks of how Winstanley intended the idea of community and then mines the contemporary communitarian’s idea, it is hard to believe that there isn’t some mirror image of the disambiguation of ‘individualist’ at hand.

In these last remarks I have come some distance from Levine’s particular focus. But it is the stimulus of his comments that have brought me here.

Reply to Mannikalingam

There is a very complicated, unnecessarily complicated, set of dialectical moves in this comment and I don’t have much confidence that I have all the details of the argument in control, or at any rate in as much control as their author has on it, which may not be complete either.

Let me say a few things that struck me as salient.

Mannikalingam has me saying: “…Buruma and Margalit slip too quickly from cultural critique of the West to the resort to violence on the part of Islamist terrorists.” He then comments: “He believes that the step –from culture to violence—is contingent on other political factors. The first step –sharing a set of (cultural) values need not lead to agreement on whether or not (and how) to resort to violence. However, while sympathetic to Mamdani’e efforts to view violence as a response to the politics of the West, he disagrees with Mamdani’s dismissal of the cultural elements in such a linkage. But if violence is only contingently linked to politics, then why can’t politics be only contingently linked to cultural critique?”

From my point of view, this is a bit of a mess. My objection to Buruma and Margalit was not that the resort to violence depends on contingent ‘political factors’. I took no view as to what prompted the resort to violence on the part of Islamic terrorists. I should explain the point I had made about the ‘contingent’ links since it is not visible in this exposition at all.

Buruma and Margalit had critical things to say about a certain conception of the West as well as about the dehumanizing violence of the Occidentalists (especially the Islamist ones). I had pointed out the extraordinarily detailed overlap, virtual identity I would say, of the conception they present and Gandhi’s critique of the Enlightenment. And since Gandhi had deep commitments to non-violence, I wondered if Buruma and Margalit could point to anything more than a contingent link between the two targets of their criticism.

There is nothing in this that was intended to suggest that the violence was contingent upon ‘political factors’ that were independent of the Occidentalist’s cultural critique of the West. In fact, I had said rather clearly in my criticism of Mamdani, which Mannikalingam also discusses, that culture and politics should not be pulled apart and should be seen as more integrated than Mamdani does. I had tried to show how exactly it was more integrated by tracing the role of a ‘thick’ notion of scientific rationality in the justifications of colonization, among other things. Though Buruma and Margalit seemed to me to dig deeper than Mamdani in recognizing the need for such an integration of culture and politics, as contemporary cold warriors of a certain recognizable sort they botched the integration in the particular subject they were writing about when they failed to notice the role of the cultural and intellectual attitudes generated by “scientific rationality” (their own favoured ideal) in the political actions of Western imperial nations. Some considerable part in my diagnosis of why they should have failed to notice this turned on giving the intellectual history by which the notion of scientific rationality was more complicated and ambiguous (and therefore, ambivalent) than they were presenting it to be.

However, despite this inaccuracy, Mannikalingam does raise good questions for me in a morass of dialectic. One such is: might it be that Buruma and Margalit want to say that the Islamists hate the West for what the West is, whereas I present them too much as hating the West for what the West has done to Muslim peoples during colonization and after de-colonization. I think there is a real point to the distinction he makes between hating someone for what someone is and for what someone does. Racism is an example of the former. But it is not the only example. One might also hate someone for some of their fundamental commitments, which is a more agentially conceived idea of what they are, and yet does not collapse into what they do. Not all agency lies in action. It is present too in the judgements and commitments one forms from one’s ethical perceptions and deliberations. A certain kind of religious fanaticism, certainly found in the history of Islam and Christianity, hates the ‘infidel’, the heretic, etc., for their fundamental commitments. This is for obvious reasons very different from racial hatred or hatred of another caste. For one thing, as I said, the hate is for their commitments rather than for the properties that they have by birth and descent. And that is why the latter hatred (found in Hinduism, for instance) does not have any great role for conversion in the way that the former does. To put it in slogans, ‘You can never be my brother’, is the casteist attitude within Hinduism. ‘You must be my brother’ has often been the Christian or Islamic religious fanatic’s attitude. It is an inclusive attitude rather than the exclusionary one that is found in caste hatred. And the ‘must’ has historically sometimes been enforced by violence --though I suspect the terrorist violence of the religious fanatic today, if and when it comes from a hatred for what one is (for one’s commitments), rather than what one has done, is likely to come not due to fantasies of conversion but rather due to a realistic perception that there is not going to be any conversion.

So much for the distinction that he makes, which I think is perfectly useful to have explicitly presented. What I don’t quite get is why I am supposed to be saying that there is something mutually exclusive about Islamists hating the West for what they are committed to (let’s say, freedom and democracy and the louche metropolitan life-style and so on, as the standard portrayal of the terrorist goes these days) and hating them for the harms the West has done to Muslim populations in the colonies and then the ex-colonies and even for the racism it has shown to the migrant Muslim populations in its own midst. I don’t want to deny that there is hate of the first kind and I do want to assert that there is hate of the second kind. Why can’t I say both? Both are true. And, hard though it is to discern, it would be good to get an accurate measure of the extent to which each is true. John Esposito’s and Dalia Mogahed’s recently published Gallup surveys in “Who speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think” (Gallup Press, 2008) is a quite conscientious effort to discern it.

I suspect that some of the great tide of complicated inferential links and distinctions that this comment on me makes would subside once it is made clear that I think that this distinction in the ‘hatred’, though true, is not mutually exclusive. That is not necessarily to say that the hatred must be overdetermined, though it may well be for many. It could also just be that different groups of Islamists respectively hate ‘the West’ for two different reasons: some for what their commitments are and others for what they have done to them.

Though the comment gets me wrong when it has me saying that the violence of a fringe in Muslim populations is dependent on ‘political factors’ that are only contingently linked to their cultural critique of the West, a question does remain whether the violence is intrinsic in some way to their integrated cultural and political critique of the West, in a way that it is manifestly not in Gandhi? On this question, Mannikalingam’s guess is as good as mine. These are very hard questions to decide. All I can say is that I could find nothing in Buruma and Margalit that demonstrated that it is intrinsic. And they (and Mannikalingam) would be reprehensibly cavalier if they simply asserted without argument (without a careful statement of which aspect of the cultural and political critique has intrinsic to it the violence in question). It is one thing to say that an institution, the highly centralized state, say, has violence built into its structures. That too needs careful argument but we all know of some impressive care that has gone into providing such arguments. It is harder to provide anything similar when one is talking about individuals and their beliefs. Of course one could a) say familiar things like: ‘ they feel so desperately helpless in the face of longstanding and continuing oppression, misery, racism, ….that they resort to violence’. Or one could more simply b) quote the spectacular announcements by bin Laden and others that violence should be visited on America or Britain…. The first gives causal explanations of the violence by citing a motive for violence. The second cites avowals and therefore gives expressive evidence of the intention to commit violence. Both are independent of the cultural and political critique of the West, and therefore are perfectly compatible with the claim that there is no intrinsic connection between violence and such a cultural and political critique.

There are some scattered (that is to say, scattered within the specious attempt at systematic dialectic) but genuinely wise remarks in Mannikalingam’s comment about the practical pitfalls of stressing as much as I do the integration of politics and culture; the chief one being that one need not try and change the entire integrated political and cultural set of attitudes that the imperial (and neo-imperial) West shows towards Islam in order to lessen the harmful effects of the cold war against Islam. My own view is that efforts should be made at all levels -- piecemeal, as well as more integrated resistance to the cold war and its effects. And if I said something to suggest that nothing short of a wholesale overturning of an entire integrated ideology is good enough for me, that is just an academic’s or intellectual’s failure to say more practically wise and qualified things in his or her effort to give integrated theoretical accounts of the sort that academics and intellectuals often give. I am glad to be cautioned and corrected on this.

Reply to Mehta

After a very sensible presentation of my efforts to show the ‘licit derivation’ of certain political and cultural outcomes from a properly ‘thick’ notion of scientific rationality, Uday Mehta turns to the question of the intrinsic links between violence and certain principles of the state in the Western tradition of political thought since the seventeenth century. This is a sly inversion of Mannikalingam’s interest (on behalf of the authors of Occidentalism) in the question of whether there is an intrinsic link between violence and the cultural critique of the West by some Occidentalists.

Mehta’s approach to his question is to notice first the role that war (the war of all against all) gets to play in the starting premise of so much social contract theory. To contract into a state so as to subdue the propensity for violence in us, he says, in some indirect sense reveals that the state, so conceived, is constituted by the very concept of war and violence. In such a picture, opposition to violence is merely the pursuit of one’s survival and security. If it were not for our instinct for survival and security, violence and war would be morally permissible. There is no more principled and moral certification of non-violence to be had in this tradition. In fact the term ‘non-violence’ is the wrong one to describe the outcome of such a contractarian argument. ‘Peace’ or ‘peacability’ is better. And this is proof that peace and non-violence are not the same thing. Gandhi, the great advocate of non-violence, rejects this entire framework. Violence for him is wrong on more directly moral grounds. As for the state, the outcome of the framework’s argument, Gandhi rejects that too, in what must therefore be seen as a rejection of politics itself since the concept of a state, so derived, is constituted by a permissible violence (the violence denoted in the originary premise of this contractualist derivation), which is put aside to satisfy the counter-propensity in all of us for peace, but never replaced by non-violence.

This argument is an interesting one. I will say something from an angle slightly adjacent to it in a way that I hope will be useful.

What is the nature of the disagreement between Gandhi and the contractualist tradition that defines the modern West’s political sensibility? Mehta suggests it is the difference between the moral and the merely prudential, the latter lacking the prestige of principle possessed by the former. I wonder if there is not something more underlying than that.

One difficulty with resting where Mehta does is that prudence is arguably not outside of the realm of the moral. As Sidgwick first suggested, there is some symmetry in the consideration that one’s prudence shows to one’s future self (and even one’s other self or side), and the consideration that one’s altruism shows to others. There is principle in both, even if the principle in prudence is not obvious and self-proclamatory. Prudence is not reducible to utility or instrumentality, even if it is at the other end from altruism. Thus, for example, even though it is an abstraction that one appeals to when one argues that a war should be fought today for peace in the future (prudence), a concern of this particular sort for one’s future self and future generations can sometimes be a moral concern.

Now, rotate the angle of vision just a little.

The contractualist framework, as Mehta presents it, begins with a propensity in us (for war and violence), cites a counter-propensity in us (for survival and security) and proposes the contractual outcome of an institution (a state) which is defined by the propensity to subdue the former with force on behalf of the latter.

It is propensities all the way down. Where is the place for morals in a field of propensities?

One may think that the idea that we contract into the state is where we make a moral commitment and go beyond our propensities? But nothing in the picture tells us that we should not treat the contract as Freud treats the idea of conscience: second order drives to curb first order drives which latter would destroy us if the former were not present. Nothing more to conscience but propensities at the second-order, nothing more to the ‘contract’ either.

There is much more to be developed in this argument, which I cannot possibly do here, but my instinctive sense is that Mehta’s argument which turns on distinguishing morality from prudence cannot be his resting point and he must go further to expose these other aspects of the contractarian framework. The real challenge to pose to the contractarian is not how do we go from prudence to morality (that distance may not in the first place be as great as Mehta thinks) but the same challenge we should pose to Freud, how do we get moral commitment in when the premises and conclusion cite only propensities, drives, tendencies.

{Before I leave this subject, an aside: I am following Mehta in his characterization of the contractualist tradition as having starting-points that appeal to propensities and counter-propensities (for war, for survival…). There are late developments in the tradition, such as for instance in Rawls, where the starting points are entirely different. Here the considerations are more complicated, whether you rest where Mehta does or push on further, as I think one should.}

His comment concludes with a defence of Gandhi against Robbins’s charge that to decline modernist development and ‘improvement’, as Gandhi did, is to be ‘unspeakably complacent.’ I would like to briefly explore another somewhat different appeal than Mehta’s to the contrast between the contractarian ideal and Gandhi’s thinking to fortify this defence against this charge.

In my Critical Inquiry essay (and since then in a forthcoming book) I situate Gandhi in an Early Modern radical tradition of the seventeenth century rather than see him, as many, including Robbins, do: an anti-modernist. There is a point in this difference that goes as follows. As I say in these writings, many of the freethinkers of the late seventeenth century that I invoked viewed their scientific dissent as being driven by and continuous with many of the social and political ideas of the radical sectaries of the mid-seventeenth century during the remarkable revolutionary period of the 1640s in England. One way to bring home the parallel between Gandhi’s ideas on what was good and not good for India and the ideas of these earlier radicals, is to see them both as implicitly resisting (in the case of Gandhi) and preempting (in the case of the seventeenth century radicals), a fairly well known and well articulated and well studied intellectual scenario --found in the details of a tradition going from John Locke to Robert Nozick-- in political thought, which goes roughly like this. (I will stress different aspects of the scenario than Mehta does, but it is the same tradition.)

Suppose we start in the state of nature and suppose that there are as yet no policies or laws to live by nor is there any sort of institution of property. Then suppose that some of us join and come up with an agreement with which we resolve to keep faith, an agreement about rules for the private appropriation of property out of the common. We agree that if someone comes upon a stretch of ground, fences it, and registers it with a primitive form of bureau that we set up, then it becomes his or hers. We say to ourselves that this may be only done if, by doing so, no other is made worse off than they hitherto were, on the grounds that if one were to hire them at wages which enable them to live better, they would be better off than they were in the state of nature.

The system of enclosures, which began to set in so deeply in society in the seventeenth century period and led eventually to thoroughly predatory attitudes towards nature and its bounty, is thus theoretically consolidated and justified by a familiar social-contractualist justificatory scenario of this kind. And it is precisely that system and the germ of this political theory that the radicals of that period protested, and these attitudes towards nature which transformed it into the idea of natural resources that the somewhat later scientific dissenters protested. So Gandhi can be seen, then, as implicitly arguing something, again roughly, like this: The economy and incipient liberal ideas of governance thus emerging from the contractualist tradition has an opportunity cost. Because the land is thus privatized we cannot set up a communal system for working the land in common. Thus, even though we agree that we are all better off than we were in the state of nature, it is still perfectly possible for us to say that we are worse off than we would have been had the private economy not been established. That is the reason to situate Gandhi’s ideas in the dissenting thought and the politically revolutionary ideas of an Early Modern period --to provide such a counterfactual form of critique of a longstanding tradition of political thought that consolidates in contractualist theory, notions of governance and political economy, deriving from views of nature and matter, asking us to see them as having a necessity and inevitability, which, if the critique is right, they do not possess. Gandhi precisely insisted that they did not possess it and found the ideas of eager ‘modernizers’ all around him in India, quite uncompulsory. Mehta, with his own work on Locke on the state of nature, would find such a counterfactualist argument for the relevance of Early Modern radicalism and dissent, quite congenial.

Akeel Bilgrami
Mexico City
September 2008

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