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Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Freedom I had overlooked Paul Berman’s book, Terror and Liberalism until Steve Forbes recommended it. When I conservative calls attention to a book by a leading voice of the left, I wanted to understand why. It didn’t take long to find out: Berman does an outstanding job of bashing other leftist intellectuals, especially Noam Chomsky, and provides an alternative view. Having gotten that curiosity out of the way, I was able to read the rest of Terror and Liberalism, and came away from it with a deeper understanding of the current conflict between radical Islamists and the West. Berman’s premise is that Islamism is another totalitarian response to what threatens it: the liberalism of the West. Berman traces the history of liberalism and makes his case with precision and clarity. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 2, “Armageddon in Its Modern Versions,” pp. 22-26: In the years around 1950, writers from several parts of the world set out to produce a new literature of political analysis, different from any political literature of the past, with the goal of describing and analyzing the totalitarian political passions of the twentieth century—the topic of the hour. There were a lot of those writers—Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Sidney Hook, C. L. R. James, Alejo Carpentier, Czeslaw Milosz, David Rousset, Arthur Koestler, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Richard Wright and the other contributors to Richard Grossman’s anthology The God That Failed, and many others. Their new literature came packaged in every shape—philosophical inquiry, science fiction, historical fiction, literary criticism, journalism, historical research, and autobiographical confession. The writers disagreed with one another. These people were not a faction. Still, their tracts and essays and novels did share one very noticeable quality. It was a tone of voice. And the tone expressed a shared emotion, which was this: astonishment. Every one of those writers had started out as an enemy of fascism and the extreme right in the 1930s and 1940s; and every one of them, glancing over his shoulder, had begun to notice after a while that communism in the age of Stalin was pretty scary, too. And each of those writers made one additional observation, which was positively alarming. Fascism and communism were violent enemies of each other—bitter opposites. But, caught in a certain light, the bitter opposites looked oddly similar. And visible similarity led to an anxious worry. Was it possible that fascism and communism were somehow related? Mightn’t both of those movements have evolved out of some other, deeper, primordial inspiration? Mightn’t fascism and communism be tentacles of a single, larger monster from the deep—some new and horrible creature of modern civilization, which had never been seen and never been named but was, even so, capable of sending up further ghastly tentacles from the sinister depths? In Europe, and not just there, a new kind of politics did seem to be stirring, which sometimes called itself left-wing and sometimes right-wing—a demagogic politics, irrational, authoritarian, and insanely murderous, a politics of mass mobilization for unachievable ends. Mussolini had embraced the word “totalitarian” to describe his own movement; and “totalitarian” in its stuttery sharp syllables seemed to fit the new kind of politics in each of its versions, right-wing and left-wing alike. The implications did seem fairly obvious. During the whole of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth, a great many enlightened and progressive thinkers had supposed that a main danger, perhaps the principal danger, to modern civilization came from a single political tendency, which was the extreme right, and mostly from a single country, which was Germany, the sworn foe of the French Revolution. But that sort of outlook seemed hopelessly antique by 1950. In the new era, no one doubted that political movements on the extreme right could still make you worry. No one felt much confidence in Germany and its political traditions. But the midcentury writers saw all too plainly that a danger to civilization had meanwhile cropped up in Russia and among the hard-bitten Stalinists, and among other people, too. The writers worried about the many mush-headed liberals and fellow travelers all over the world who, without being Stalinists themselves, managed to admire the Stalinist enterprise. The writers worried about totalitarian advances even in regions where the Red Army was unlikely to send in its tanks. They worried that hidden flaws had cracked open across the whole of civilization, and the danger was universal. But this fear raised and still raises a question, which the writers of half a century ago tended to evade. It is the same question that Huntington has posed in his theory about clashing civilizations—and, along with Huntington, many other people as well. There is, to cite a notable example, Tariq Ramadan, a philosopher of contemporary Islamism, who has written a book called Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modernity, which the Islamic Foundation brought out in English translation in 2001. Ramadan poses the question with considerable nuance. What do we mean when we use the word “civilization,” he wants to know. Is there such a thing as universal civilization? His eye runs along the bookshelf of fifty years ago, and he picks out one writer for critical interrogation on this point. It is Albert Camus, whose book on totalitarianism, The Rebel, came out in 1951. Camus wanted to identify the precise traits in modern civilization that had led to totalitarianism and its horrors. He looked for those traits in ancient mythology and in modern literature. He found them, too— the cultural traits, anyway. But Ramadan observes that, in looking for the roots of totalitarianism in mythology and literature, Camus confined himself to the myths and literary classics of the West. Civilization, to Camus, meant Western culture, and did not mean Islam. But then, if Camus was right about the roots of totalitarianism, which ran through the unique and flawed culture of the West, how can anyone say that totalitarianism poses a universal danger? The West is not the universe and Western traditions have nothing to do with the Muslim world. Ramadan thinks that, if we wish to understand the special problems and promise of the Muslim world, we should not, in fact, glance westward, nor at Albert Camus and books like The Rebel. Ramadan says, “We are indeed dealing with two different universes of reference, two civilizations and two cultures.” The profoundest mentality and emotions of the Muslim world, the cultural memories, the intellectual instincts—these are not only different from those of the West, they are nearly incomprehensible to the Western mind. And the implication of this analysis is plain enough. Anyone who agrees with Tariq Ramadan would have to conclude that, in looking for a general cause of the dangers facing modern civilization, Camus and the writers of half a century ago wandered down the wrong road entirely. Modern civilization does not exist—only civilizations, in the plural. A general cause of modern problems, operative around the world, will never be found. That is a plausible argument, and widely shared, too. Still, I would like to make an observation. It is the same observation that I have made about the suicide army of bin Laden and his comrades—a biographical observation, applicable to any number of people in our present age. Tariq Ramadan is a prestigious figure among Islamist intellectuals today. He explains in Islam, the West and the Challenges of Modern ity that he is the son of a persecuted militant of the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt—which is to say, Ramadan’s prominence in the Islamist movement comes to him by birthright, as well as through his own achievements. He doesn’t even mention that he is, to boot, the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, a martyr to the cause, assassinated in Egypt— one of the most influential figures in the history of modern Islam, all over the world. Even so, the promotional copy on the back cover of Ramadan’s book does mention, by way of affirming his authority, that he teaches philosophy and Islamic Studies at the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland—an excellent credential, which any publisher would invoke. But let us pause over that credential. Why shouldn’t we regard Tariq Ramadan, the Islamist philosopher, as, at bottom, a Swiss professor? He has written a book which takes issue with Albert Camus. Nothing could be more natural—a Swiss professor who quarrels with a Parisian philosopher. Allow me, then, to raise a skeptical eyebrow over the purity of Tariq Ramadan’s cultural identity And having done so, I would like to raise my other eyebrow over Camus and the purity of his own reflections on civilization and its Western roots. Who was Albert Camus, after all? An Algerian. He left Algeria and made his home in Paris. Yet even in The Rebel Camus paused for a moment to bathe himself in Algerian nostalgias, reminiscing about the beaches of his youth and the girls on the beaches—his Mediterranean soul, radiating African sunbeams long after he had moved to the chilly North. So Ramadan disputes Camus. Fine. It is a quarrel between a Swiss and a Parisian, which, seen from another vantage point, is a quarrel between two North Africans. In the modern world, we are all hyphenated personalities. “Nobody is anything,” said C. L. R. James. And the distinction between Western civilization and non-Western civilization looks blurrier and blurrier the more you try to get it into focus. I agree with Ramadan on one issue, though. We hyphenated moderns have good reason to dwell closely on Camus and The Rebel. Something about that book does cry out for attention, in these troubled days. Among the many commentators from half a century ago, the philosopher from Algeria was the single one who intuitively recognized a crucial reality. He recognized that, at a deep level, totalitarianism and terrorism are one and the same. He recognized that, if only we could discover the roots of totalitarianism, we would have discovered the roots of terror as well, and vice versa. Readers come away from Terror and Liberalism with a renewed sense of what’s important, and why the current environment is fraught with conflict. Berman’s take on Islamism will make sense to many readers, especially those who are able to separate the political from the religious. Another bonus is an increased understanding of classical liberalism and its contributions to our current society. Steve Hopkins, October 25, 2004
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