Eve Garrard, has written a comment on this John Gray’s latest piece in the New Statesman. Since Gray got his new post-JG Ballard prose style it is often quite difficult to work out precisely what he is on about, but in this case, he is making the point that “Enlightenment Values” have historically been associated with a hell of a lot of death and destruction (things like the French revolutionary Terror). Garrard’s point is that when she and the Euston Manifesto crowd use the phrase, they use it only to refer to ” universal human rights, equality (in some sense), religious tolerance, scepticism about received dogmas, freedom of speech, a commitment to the use of reason to improve our condition” rather than blood and the guillotine, and that Gray knows this and is just being silly.
I think there’s more to it than that. It would be quite easy for Gray to come back with a cheap shot on this one; that although Eve Garrard claims to only be in favour of the nice bits of the Enlightenment and against all the revolutionary terror, the actual tangible results of her project have been Fallujah, Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.
And it would be not only easy but correct, because she’s dodged the central problem that Gray has been identifying for years; the problem that occurs when you try to bring people the benefits of freedom and democracy and they say “no thanks”. Like it or not (I don’t), there are a lot of people out there in (not just but most urgently) “The Muslim World” who simply don’t want tolerance, equality (in some sense) or freedom of speech. There are genuine democratic movements in most Islamic countries, but it is wishful thinking to pretend that they aren’t small and unrepresentative minorities. The biggest proportion of the population of Islamic states are quite happy about Islam and don’t want the same things we want[1]. There are a lot of them who don’t want these things so much that they are prepared to have a war about it.
At this point you have to either say “well you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink” (which is presumably teh dreaded relativism! oh no!). Or you have to say “Let freedom ring! / eat lead hadji” and admit that a universalised view of our moral obligations to the world like Enlightenmentism is always potentially an open-ended commitment to violence. Or you have to say “I heartily disapprove of this behaviour, why not read my weblog for further hearty condemnations of everyone who isn’t condemning it enough”, which in my view is a bit of a cop out. This third option isn’t really open to those responsible for drafting the new Iraqi constitution, for example; they have had to end up drafting a compromise document with all sorts of ambiguous wording about the status of sharia, precisely because where the rubber meets the road for Enlightenment values, the open-ended commitment to violence is simply too expensive but leaving the Muslims to the society they seem to want has been set up as a betrayal of all we hold dear and a loss of face before the terrorists to boot.
A whole subsidiary strand of Decentism appears to be the complete refusal to accept that, at the highest conceptual level, political philosophy is the study of the proper use of government violence (the libertarians and Max Weber are right on this one; government is the organisation of state violence for the greatest good). I have been tearing my hair out ever since the Euston Manifesto was written, trying to get even one of its signers to admit that “intervention” and “protection” mean war, with surprisingly little success. At the root of it of course is a confusion between ethics (what we think is good) and politics (what we are actually prepared to put people in jail and kill them for), and there is a small book token prize for anyone who can guess which eighteenth-century period of European history this distinction dates back to.
This is not a particularly original analysis to me; Matthew Yglesias has posted many times on the fundamental unseriousness of claiming to have been “expressing solidarity with the best of the democratic elements in Iraq” when what one was doing was observationally indistinguishable from “providing political support for the Bush administration’s declaration of war”, but I think that this is the central problem that the Decent Left can’t and won’t come to terms with. It is of course (as they say) “hardly a coincidence” that this analysis has been so strong among people with a long personal history of pretending that what was happening in the Soviet Union and China wasn’t really anything to do with Communism.
I think this is the real problem here; unless one believes that the simple moral power of our Enlightenment values is enough to change the minds of the Muzzies, we have to (as Gray says) accept that they are, in fact, Muslims, and that whether or not we like their society, there is nothing we can do about it unless we are prepared to have a literally genocidal war. I actually do believe that the moral superiority of Western society is likely to win over the fundie world in the same way it did the Communists, but it is going to take a long time and I would rather not suck in an anthrax spore in the meantime, or watch my government bombing people into the stone age, just because somebody thought there was a short cut.
[1] I would note that it is also very likely wishful thinking to believe that Islamic women aren’t really Islamic[2] and are longing for the decline of Islamic patriarchy too, a version of this hypothesis that I’ve seen.
[2] No really guys, wishful thinking is like cigarettes; there’s no use in trying to cut down a little bit, you’ve got to do the full cold turkey. Nor do these people have “false consciousness” which will fall away like scales from their eyes once they are exposed to the chance of freedom. The whole theory of “false consciousness” ought not to have survived its treatment at the hands of communists and radical feminists but apparently we are determined to repeat this mistake. Give up; Muslims are Muslims for the most part because they believe that Allah is God, Mohammed is his Prophet and the Koran is his divine word. I don’t like it any more than you do but ignoring it won’t make it go away and being nasty about it will only make it get worse.
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I’m losing track of the point here. If the argument is just that trying to impose enlightenment values on ‘unenlightened’ countries is likely to be bloody and counterproductive and generally non-utilty-maximising, then fine, we shouldn’t do it. But that doesn’t mean that we have to suddenly come over all principled about the inviolability of the democratic will of the overwhelming theocratic majorities that oppose us. The correct attitude is one of studied pragmatism: do whatever possible to change the situation in those countries, regarding the majority view as an obstacle rather than a countervailing reason. If it is possible, for instance, to coerce them not to execute people just for being gay, then we should do so when the costs, including costs to us, are not prohibitive. I’m certainly prepared to accept an increased risk of being blown up on the Tube in exchange for some tangible improvement in the lives of gay people in Iran. And if I weren’t so prepared, I should be. The relevance of the fact that the number of Iranians who care about the rights of homosexuals is vanishingly small is purely pragmatic.
Of course, it may be that this kind of cost-benefit analysis is precisely what d^2 and John Gray are arguing for. But then it’s hard to see why they come down so hard on the Enlightenment – isn’t Bentham an enlightenment figure? I should say that I don’t consider myself at all on the side of the Euston manifesto people, who I agree are the Americans’ useful idiots. But their problem isn’t believing in the Enlightenment.
I’ve been arguing recently that the big failure of imposed democracy was in Germany in 1918. And the ultimate consequences were as bad as could be imagined.
Germany had all the objective requirements of democracy that Iraq doesn’t have—economic productivity, an educated populace, and a tradition of public order. Yet liberal democracy never took.
In 1932 the majority of Germans supported one of the anti-democratic parties. Even the moderate Germans who theoretically supported democracy were pretty unenthusiastic about it—e.g. Thomas Mann and Max Weber (who died early on).
Bismarck actually might have been one of the good Germans. “People who like laws or sausages shouldn’t watch them being made”. That’s about as liberal as the Germans got in those days—Germans, after all, do like sausages, so Bismarck was making the best case he could for democracy.
By the evidence, most Germans abhorred the politicking and horsetrading and compromises and fudges and graft visibly involved in liberal democratic politics, and they seemed to prefer a paternalistic government whose workings were invisible. (I’ve recently been reading Strauss and Schmitt recently. Their lesson from 1932 was that liberal democracy was no good. Schmitt became a Nazi, but poor Strauss did not have that option. (In what I read I saw no evidence that in 1932-3 Strauss was an Abraham Lincoln democrat, quite the opposite. I also know of no evidence of a conversion, and to the end of his life, as far as I know, Strauss’s actual endorsements of liberal democracy are lukewarm and evasive.)
Democratization worked better after WWII because both Germany and Japan were in the Soviet shadow, and probably also because those countries had been bled white—most of the young militants had been killed, crippled, or demoralized by then.
I really believe that 1914 was the turning point in Western civilization, and not the Holocaust.
I’ve said it before, but if you want to support secular Iraqi democrats, sponsor their visa applications.
But then it’s hard to see why they come down so hard on the Enlightenment – isn’t Bentham an enlightenment figure?
quite a controversial one, who famously argued against natural rights, which is at the base of my (and I think Gray’s) problem with the EV/EM crowd.
The problem is that we also have to take another of Gray’s points seriously (and I am here I think going quite a long way from the general CT line), which is that certain freedoms aren’t compatible with certain kinds of society. It probably isn’t possible to have a society in which traditional sharia is respected but blasphemy is legal and women have equal rights.
If we were all angels and didn’t have spatial properties this would be no problem; everyone who wanted to live in a sharia society could go and do it and everyone who didn’t could live in our society. Unfortunately, we aren’t angels; we have extension and location, and so a “society” has to be a particular bit of the planet Earth which it is inconvenient to stop living in. So if there is to be a sharia society, then it has to be somewhere.
We can have a generous immigration policy to make the existence of sharia societies less bad for people who don’t want to live in them, but this can’t (practically) solve the whole problem because people have families and other things that are important to them, so there will always be some people who want our freedoms but who, by accident of where they ended up, are located in the territory occupied by a sharia society. If we want everyone to have the freedoms that we enjoy, then we are also committed to saying that there can’t be sharia societies, even if quite a lot of people want them. Let’s also presume that these people really do want them and I am wrong to suggest they will ever change their minds.
If you believe in utilitarianism, you end up saying “tough luck”; lots of people want there to be sharia societies, so this is going to mean that some people have to live in them who would rather have been born somewhere else and had our freedoms.
If you believe in natural rights, though, then you now have the elements of a proof that sharia societies have no moral right to exist; because everyone has a natural right to freedoms which are incompatible with the existence of a sharia society around them.
And naturally (this definitely is Gray’s point) if you start from the philosophical position that some kinds of society have no right to exist (a position which seems to me to be at least in principle enshrined in the Euston Manifesto), then you are in practical terms likely to err on one side rather than another when making decisions about how much violence to use.
Another way to look at this is just to say that the EM/EV crowd are explicitly not framing their endorsements of Enlightenment values as lofty long term goals we should work towards; they’re offering them up as the basic principles of British and American foreign policy. As I argue above, I think I disagree with them even in principle, but the people who are loudest advocates of them render this disagreement otiose, because they are quite specifically recommending them as organising principles for state violence right now.
There’s a distinction between arguing Muslims want, and must have, full-bore 21st century Western liberalism and arguing they have a right to consent to their governments and hold them accountable through periodic elections. The latter is the more fundamental requirement, and I fail to see how it conflicts with any essential tenet of the Muslim faith.
In both Iraq and Afghanistan, constitutions (and the amendments likely to follow in Iraq) have been produced not as incoherent compromises between a monolithic Muslim mindset and a monolithic Western mindset, but as frameworks designed to secure the widest consent possible among diverse groups in those societies, with the hope of a working democratic process takeing root. The fact that if they survive these democracies may not establish the full extent of, say, freedom of expression that exists in the West doesn’t mean they are not distinct advances in basic human dignity. Its also hard to see how they would not be preferred by the populations there. Is it your argument that the Muslim faith inculcates a preference for arbitrary and unaccountable power that elections interfere
with?
In addition, there is a reason that the Taliban and Al Quaeda in Iraq are so violently opposed to elections and prone to kill voters and candidates. They recognize that the principle of democratic accountability and equality is not only incompatible with the pure theocracies they desire, it also contains the seed for a further development of individual rights into something like a more complete liberalism.
Enlightenmentism, huh. I like it, good word to describe these guys.
Is it your argument that the Muslim faith inculcates a preference for arbitrary and unaccountable power that elections interfere
with?
Not the Muslim faith per se, but a particular version of it which is powerful enough in parts of Iraq to be a problem. I don’t think the Iraqi constitution was an incoherent compromise; it was as good a compromise as one could have expected, between genuinely incompatible forces.
I’d note that your position would imply that it was OK for societies to democratically elect sharia governments, which is not AFAICT compatible with the stated positions of lots of Decentists (in particular, Christopher Hitchens).
I agree that the natural rights crowd will be irrationally unconstrained in their determination to rid the world of sharia by any means necessary. Their bad. But it isn’t the view that sharia societies have no right to exist which is the problem. Utilitarians think that too (or can do, e.g. Mill). The mistaken step is the one which goes from that claim directly to the claim that we are obliged to prevent them existing whatever the consequences. On some pure natural rights view that step is trivial, but isn’t for utilitarians. And I don’t think the latter will err on the side of violence (why would they?). Anyway, this is probably just splitting hairs, since it isn’t so important exactly where the EM crowd go wrong. But I don’t think the Iraq war is to be blamed on the Enlightenment, and so the choice between EM and John Gray looks like a false dilemma.
Certainly its OK to elect sharia governments. Introducing the principle that Muslim law owes its authority to the popular will is the best way long term to modify and soften its hold. If your argument is purely against Decentists who would, hypothetically, use armed force against democratic governments that enact illiberal laws, then I have no argument with you at all. But its important to realize that that’s not what we’re dealing with today. The violence in Iraq and Afghanistan is between the Coalition forces, the elected governments and armed minorities who view even illiberal democracy as unacceptable.
There’s a distinction between arguing Muslims want, and must have, full-bore 21st century Western liberalism and arguing they have a right to consent to their governments and hold them accountable through periodic elections.
Yeah, and when the choice is between ‘a government friendly to the West’ and ‘a democracy’ where do you think the Western powers come down? That’s the thing that really annoys me about the Decents – the willed ignorance and gullibility. “Yeah, we’re in favour of liberal democracies, and that nice Mr Blair tells us that Iraq is going to be a liberal democracy once George is finished bombing it. But then they’ll be able to vote for whoever they like!”
I think there is a certain irony here in the fact that a society in some of these places might be pretty much ready to accept some form of these “Enlightenment Values”, but as soon as Enlightenmentist thugs move in with their guns blazing, masses of people understandably change their minds and turn back to tribalism, traditionalism and religion. Oh, well.
comme ils disent .
Introducing the principle that Muslim law owes its authority to the popular will
but this is the problem; it’s contradictory. It’s like saying that we should deal with China by first introducing the principle that Maoism owes its authority to the will of God.
Daniel:
The mistaken step is the one which goes from that claim directly to the claim that we are obliged to prevent them existing whatever the consequences
I think this is what I was trying to get at with the distinction between ethics and politics. It is, IMO a good property of some ethical theories and not others that they can be converted into programs for political action without either massive compromise on their central principles or genocide. I think (or at least Gray thinks and I think I agree) that “Enlightenment Values” scores much less well on this criterion that a lot of its supporters might think.
rassen frassen French speakers. Disent it is then. actually I think I will get rid of the pointless Franglais comment altogether and have “as they say”.
btw, recalling the great-Maddy-Bunting-Enlightenment-debate, wasn’t Our Lady of the Guardian ridiculed by the Decents for pointing out that people in the actual Enlightenment (a) believed all kinds of stuff and (b) did a lot of head-chopping. It now seems that Eve Garrard accepts the line that, historically it was all a bit complicated, but wants to reserve the term “Enlightement Values” for stuff like the UN Declaration. Shurely shome apology to Bunting is called for?
Well of course its contradictiory, but what society has been free of ideological contradiction in its development? Isn’t that in fact how development occurs?
It now seems that Eve Garrard accepts the line that, historically it was all a bit complicated, but wants to reserve the term “Enlightement Values” for stuff like the UN Declaration
Let us give things their right name. They want to reserve the term for the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. With honourable mentions for the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (except for the embarrassing bits in the Bill of Rights).
I’ve been arguing recently that the big failure of imposed democracy was in Germany in 1918.
‘imposed’ is seems a strange choice of words there. Democracy was certainly imposed on Germany (and Japan), but in 1945. In 1918, just as in France after the Franco-Prussian war, or Russia after the fall of the Wall, democracy took over by default, pretty much because the alternative sources of legitemacy no longer wanted the job.
Admittedly, I have no idea if there was any involvement of foreign intelligence agencies in the democraticisation of 1918 Germany – has that ever been claimed? It sounds anachronistic.
Chris: I think a lot of the ridicule had more to do with such statements as “rationality is a social construction – a way of reasoning which we believe to be objective, but never can be.”
So, would Shorter Eve Garrard be:
“I’m in favour of Enlightenment Values, but not in favour of the values of The Enlightenment”
I never had any problem with that statement; cf the way in which as recently as the 1950s the Nash equilibrium concept for a two player zero sum game was introduced into the concept of “rationality” and is now treated as definitionally what it meas to be rational by a lot of people despite the fact that it’s actually not a very good solution-concept at all.
John Emerson, #1;
I really believe that 1914 was the turning point in Western civilization, and not the Holocaust.
Are there people (outside of the occasional Jew and German with relevant complexes) who believe the turning point in Western civilisation was the Holocaust? Who?
d^2: I think (or at least Gray thinks and I think I agree) that “Enlightenment Values” scores much less well on this criterion that a lot of its supporters might think.
Sure, so long as we’re distinguishing between “Enlightenment Values” and Enlightenment Values. I think you’re making the distinction, but I’m not convinced that Gray is. I thought Gray’s point was that we should become sceptical about e.g. ‘Candide’ and ‘What is Enlightenment?’ and ‘Introduction to Principles of Morals and Legislation’ as an ultimate basis for political thinking. The real doctrine which we’re ending up attacking is the natural rights view of Hobbes and Locke, which gets criticised pretty effectively within the Enlightenment itself.
All of this is stuff that d^2 obviously gets, though perhaps not Gray (who seems to think that Humean scepticism is the best political idea to have come out of the Enlightenment). Gray’s idea of attacking the Enlightenment is to point out that Kant was a racist. But it seems more plausible to say that Kant was better at explaining how we should go about thinking than putting his words into practice, and that’s a limited indictment of Kant, not of his idea of Enlightenment. Old hat, I’d have thought.
Little known fact – the gopvernment of the bourgeoisie and the aristo exile returnees killed more rebelling workers (and poor people suspected of being rebelling workers) in less than a year than the French Revolution killed in all the Terror. (Leaving aside the problem of all the peasants killed or let die of hunger/poverty related diseases/inequitable law enforcement in the generations leading up to the Revolution, conveniently forgotten as usual. Of course they were overreacting! Our sympathies, as always, are really with the Sherriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Guisborne…)
trying to get even one of its signers to admit that “intervention” and “protection” mean war, with surprisingly little success
I signed: intervention and protection mean war, or the threat of it.
bellatrys: your point about white terror is well taken. But a link to the Paris Commune (1871) is not a good way of making a point about the Bourbon Restoration (1814/15).
If the principle of the Republic in time of peace is virtue, the principles of the Republic in time of war are virtue and terror!
The real problem with ‘Enlightenment Values’ (as I’ve argued at tedious length elsewhere on this blog that there really are no such things as Enlightenment Values, but let’s pretend there are for the sake of argument) is that they quickly run into not one but two Catch-22s.
1: The first is the famous (or notorious) paradox of democracy: what if people democratically vote for non-democratic parties?
2: What is the relationship between democracy and religion?
The first is self-explanatory and well known. The second is less often discussed which is a shame, because it possibly has even more relevance to our present state. Even the best and most intelligent of Enlightenment thinkers were EITHER religious (in the broadest sense of the word) themselves, or ELSE they tended to think that religion was a sort of confidence trick, thought up by wicked Priests, Immans and Rabbis to bamboozle the populace (there was just a touch of the ‘and the masses are stupid enough to fall for it’ about this). The solution, therefore, thought the Enlightenment thinkers was education, science, and reason. Once the masses had been persuaded of the rightness of the atheistic/secular viewpoint, religion would fade away.
And so, for the 19th and most of the 20th century, it seemed to go. Until incredibly recently. Now, however, we really have to have a loooong hard look at the ‘secularisation’ thesis and see if it holds up. Look at the United States for example. It’s the most ‘advanced’, ‘technologically’ and ‘scientifically’ ‘progressive’ country on earth, it is a democracy, it is wealthy etc. etc. etc….and yet US citizens have become INCREASINGLY religious over the last 25 years: long enough to state that this seems to be a long term trend, not a blip. Of course in the Middle East this is even more pronounced, but the lack of secularisation (au contraire) of Africa and South America is also startling.
It seems that it is the secularisation of Europe that is the outlier, and that it is simply not true that religion will necessarily wither away as science progresses.
So, it seems, therefore, that democracies are going to have to deal with the problem of religion for years, probably centuries to come, and then we end up in the problem of Iraq (and Iran)…what about when people, of their own free will, vote in radical religious parties? (This is clearly related to the ‘paradox of democracy’, point 1, above).
Whatever one decides about this, it is a real problem and a real situation. But the ‘decents’ ‘solution’ is simply to ignore it. For example, they continually OPPOSE theocracy and democracy and argue that the solution to the problem of theocracy is democracy. But what has happened in Iraq is that people CHOSE (democratically) to vote in theocrats. That simply could not happen in the ‘decents’ worldview, and so they spend much time arguing that the Shia death squads, sorry Iraqi police force, are in fact perfectly normal secular security forces, fighting against the ‘sunni fundamentalists’ and seem to be unaware why everyone is laughing at them.
Likewise, ‘democracy’ VERSUS ‘terrorism’. Again, in Northern Ireland, majorities of people voted for parties associated in some way or another with terrorist groups, and this also seems to be the case in Iraq. But again, this simply could not happen in the ‘decents’ view.
The final point about the decents is even more lethal to their case: ignoring the facts of religion about their own leaders. Whatever one might think about Bush and Blair, however one might judge them…they are not secular rationalists. Blair has defended the teaching of Intelligent Design in British schools. He has also said that he belives ‘God’ will judge the Iraq invasion, not any human being. Bush has of course been even clearer. The response of the ‘decents’ again, has been simply to ignore this, and view this (absurdly) as a battle of secularism versus theocracy, even though both sides are religious. And they can only do this because they are under the misapprehension that somehow democracy is intrinsically secular. ‘Tain’t so.
Incidentally…..’And it would be not only easy but correct, because she’s dodged the central problem that Gray has been identifying for years; the problem that occurs when you try to bring people the benefits of freedom and democracy and they say “no thanks”.’
Interesting use of the phrase ‘freedom and democracy’ as though they are synonyms. But they aren’t. Almost everyone (not least in the middle east) wants democracy (‘rule by the people for the people’): that’s very different from saying that they also want ‘Western style’ freedom, or liberty, to choose another word for it. ‘Liberty’ has a number of meanings attached to it, but one specific meaning is its ‘Western style’ ‘Bourgeois’ definition: i.e. ‘An Englishman’s Home is his Castle’, ‘private property’, ‘sexual freedom’ and so forth.
Now, amongst other thinkers, Hayek was very clear that democracy was not the same as liberty, and he also made very clear that if he had to choose, he would choose ‘liberty’: i.e. he thought it was more important to be able to own property, buy goods from private companies and so forth, than that he could vote. And he made it clear that places like Pinochet’s Chile (where they had, according to Hayek, ‘liberty’ but not ‘democracy’) were preferable to the contrary (i.e. Allende’s Chile).
To repeat: in Iraq, Palestine and other places, they seem to want democracy, but not liberty, specifically not sexual liberty. The ‘decents’ assumed that when democracy comes, liberty must surely follow. Again: ‘tain’t necessarily so.
“the fundamental unseriousness of claiming to have been “expressing solidarity with the best of the democratic elements in Iraq” when what one was doing was observationally indistinguishable from “providing political support for the Bush administration’s declaration of war”, but I think that this is the central problem that the Decent Left can’t and won’t come to terms with”
Isn’t this just the same as saying, “you love Bush”, to which they reply, “you fancy Saddam”, and then you get in a “just because I opposed the illegal attack on Iraq, initiated on a false prospectus, it doesn’t mean I like Saddam”, and they come back with a “maybe not, but it is observationally indistinguishable from providing support for the Baath regime”. And from there it’s only a short step to a couple of pages of “you imperialist swine/ Enlightenmentist thug” alternating freely with a few of variations on “you objective fascist “—ie one more run-of-the-mill contribution to the grand project of fundamental unseriousness.
Not really, because as John posted a couple of days ago, there is a fundamental asymmetry here; there were all sorts of possible views that would have had the consequence that you opposed the war, but it’s difficult to support the war without supporting it.
“Not really, because as John posted a couple of days ago, there is a fundamental asymmetry here”
I think Henley’s application of Hayek indicates otherwise. The main point is the uncertainty of outcomes coupled to the badness of most outcomes.
But the point I’m making here is that there are lots of different peaces, sharing only the characteristic of absence of war (you could be in favour of Ba’athism and peace, Islamism and peace, liberal democracy and peace etc) but only one war (so whatever else you’re in favour of, you’re in favour of that particular war). There were people who expressed solidarity with the etc etc and opposed the war, and some of them have even signed the Euston Manifesto. That’s not unserious. However, what is unserious is pretending that you could support the war without supporting the actual war that was fought. Or, on a forward looking basis, supporting abstract “intervention in support of our fundamental values” while pretending that this doesn’t involve supporting the sort of wars that would predictably be fought as a result. Another example would be the clamor of people demanding that we “do something” about Darfur but refusing to say what that “something” might be (usually because they hadn’t bothered to find out what was already being done).
Enlightenment values are associated with violence to pretty much the same extent they are associated with revolution. To attribute the violence to the ideas in isolation and not the process of change and the injustice provoking it seems mistaken and unhelpful.
Failure to recognise that Islamism (or communism or fascism or enlightenmentism before it) is filling a demand for change seems to lead us into a lot of trouble.
“The Muslim World” who simply don’t want tolerance, equality (in some sense) or freedom of speech. There are genuine democratic movements in most Islamic countries, but it is wishful thinking to pretend that they aren’t small and unrepresentative minorities.
I think that’s wrong (and wishful thinking of an another sort—most of ‘them’ don’t really want democracy, therefore we’ve no obligations in the matter). The strong electoral support of Khatami’s reforms in Iran belie that (which, of course, were tragically and systematically stymied by the mullahs). And the present problems establishing democracy in Iraq don’t derive from the fact that only a small minority of Iraqis want democracy, but rather than that a violent, ruthless, well-armed minority are prepared to stop at nothing to prevent it. The situation is very much the same in Afghanistan, by the way—a majority wanting peace and democracy, a violent, anti-democratic minority wanting to take (or, rather, retake) control by force.
And, yes, a majority in both Afghanistan and Iraq probably do want Islamic law to form the basis of the legal code. But that is a far cry from Zarqawi’s assertions that democracy itself is inherently un-Islamic. And even with aspects of Islamic law inscribed in those constitutions, women are likely to end up with greater legal rights (in particular, the right to vote) than they enjoyed in the west in the century after the enlightenment.
However, what is unserious is pretending that you could support the war without supporting the actual war that was fought.
They could denounce the actual war and support a different war. A good, clean war, a war they would have to fight personally, like those who went to Spain in 1936 and fought on the republican side. But for some reason this is a kind of war they don’t support.
The Enlightenment didn’t share a single point of view, and many of its most famous representatives were anything but democrats. Figures like the Emperor Joseph and Frederick the Great, who proposed to rationalize government from the top down, are just as characteristic as Rousseau or Adam Smith. To some extent these people had assumptions in common and agreed about which issues were important to disagree about. Otherwise, there never was consensus—at best an Enlightenment way of being an authoritarian and an Enlightenment way of being a republican.
“there were all sorts of possible views that would have had the consequence that you opposed the war, but it’s difficult to support the war without supporting it”
Of course, supporting the war for whatever reason, whether noble or base, still means that you supported a war that has had, and will have further, specific outcomes, if that’s what you’re saying.
However, if we imagine an alterative history, in which the war was prevented—the wide array of reasons for opposing the war beaming in on the single consequence of making sure no war happened—then that too would have sent certain consequences ricocheting, sometimes in unforeseen directions.
But it seems to me that several of your criticisms, as well as those of some of the commenters, fall wide of the mark because they rest on mischaracterisations of the other side’s position.
My impression—to cite just one example—is that many of the Decents took a somewhat instrumental position with regard to the actions of the Bush administration on this issue, recognising that they had their own (conflicting) reasons for overthrowing Saddam, but that even if the motivations envisioned in a standard anti-imperialist narrative were true (eg to pinch the oil and impose colonial rule)—though this seemed to the Decents unlikely—was in any case unnrealisable in the modern age, not least because of the degree of violence necessary to achieve these goals was not a practical option in the days of near-instantaneous global communications, when the imperial overlords have electorates to face every few years.
That said, the imperial forces, from this perspective, certainly seemed likely to be capable of destroying the Baathist state apparatus—something that would have been much more difficult, and proably impossible in the near term, had it been anti-Baathist Iraqis fighting on their own, as in 1991.
Whereas the Indecents appear to have fallen back on the position that was imminent in their argument from the start: that Muslim societies are not really amenable to democracy and that the Iraqis were better off under Saddam. And, more importantly, we were better off with them under Saddam.
daniel—you are running several different issues together :
1) one is whether Eve Gerrard’s criticism of Gray works or not and here you supprisingly have almost nothing to say accept develop a red herring ( maybe enlightenment values do lead to violence but that is not the issue in her discussion ) by saying that Gray has a cheep shot available to him .
2) claim that ‘Enlightenmentism’ is inherently violent or leads to violence and that that is why there is Gitmo , Falujah etc. This seems to take on board uncritically Gray’s mistaken view that enlightenment outlook is somehow conceptually commited to thinking that there is only one rational conception of good.
Gray is here simply edorsing Berlin’s point that there are incompatitble/incommensurable but conception’s of good and he uses this idea to criticise enlightenment as being utopian. The violence comes in on Gray’s view because you have to force people to subscribe to the liberal ( read enlightenment ) conception of good.
This is a serious mistake easy to see if you consider Rawls’ work which can be seen as fleshing out of Kantian ( i.e. core enlightenment stuff ) ideas and it explicitly accepts and incorporates Berlin’s point about Good.
The point is on this more sensible view we do not have Pavlovian imposistion of values on people but the opposite is the case as should be obvious to anyone familiar with Rawls.
So what has happened in other words is kind of crude caricaturing of Euston position and the way enlightenment enters into our picture.
‘I think that’s wrong (and wishful thinking of an another sort—most of ‘them’ don’t really want democracy, therefore we’ve no obligations in the matter). The strong electoral support of Khatami’s reforms in Iran belie that (which, of course, were tragically and systematically stymied by the mullahs). ’
I disagree, and I think the problem is to do with my differentiation between ‘liberty’ (which is a Western concept) and ‘democracy’ (which isn’t).The problem is that we have had both in the west for so long we see them as being synonyms, but they aren’t. Look at the quote again:
‘“The Muslim World” who simply don’t want tolerance, equality (in some sense) or freedom of speech. ’
But these are not the same as democracy. You can have democracy without any of them, as is shown in the UK. British democracy slowly began to develop just immediately before Magna Carta, but only finally achieved what WE would call democracy sometime in the 20th century (even now it’s far from perfect). For most of that period the UK (or England) simply did NOT have any concept of tolerance, equality or freedom of speech: au contraire.
Khatami DID want to reform the system but he was not in any sense a revolutionary. There is absolutely no evidence that he wanted what we would term a modern Western, secular style democracy, and there is no evidence that anyone in Iran (except a few, Westernised intellectuals) want that. There is much frustration with the Mullahs. (Some) women want to be freer in terms of how they dress. People are upset with corruption, and the sluggish employment situation, and the economy generally. But even Western diplomats admit that if free opinion polls were held tomorrow, Ahmadinejad would probably get 70% approval ratings. In other words, the Iranians want democracy in order that they can vote in anti-liberal (anti-’freedom’) candidates. And ultimately you have to choose: do you respect democracy or liberty? Hayek chose liberty. I would choose democracy. But it’s a devil’s alternative.
Just to back up my point, here’s Major-General Amos Yadlin who lists the major ‘strategic threat’ to Israel.
Number one:
‘(A key) factor was the adoption of the democratic model, which now aids many extremist organizations to seize power positions and be legitimized in their countries – as happened with the Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Hamas in the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood which has gained strength in Egypt.’
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3265380,00.html
There is absolutely no evidence that he wanted what we would term a modern Western, secular style democracy, and there is no evidence that anyone in Iran (except a few, Westernised intellectuals) want that.
One of Khatami’s first acts in office was to follow through on promises of a free press:
“By the end of 1997 the press was growing in confidence and beginning to insist that powerful state institutions should be accountable for their actions and carry out their functions in a transparent manner. After Head of the Judiciary Mohammad Yazdi said publicly in January 1998 that it was none of the media’s business who he sent to jail, the Tehran media protested vigorously. In his speech, Ayatollah Yazdi exploded in anger against the media in general. “What is going on?,” he asked. “We tell those people: What is your business?”
http://hrw.org/reports/1999/iran/Iran99o-02.htm
Sure sounds an awful lot like ‘liberty’ and ‘tolerance’ (not just democracy) to me.
But even Western diplomats admit that if free opinion polls were held tomorrow, Ahmadinejad would probably get 70% approval ratings.
All the unnamed experts agree? C’mon—that defies credulity. Ask yourself—if that’s really the majority opinion in Iran, then why on earth did the Mullahs go to all the trouble of throwing reformist candidates off the ballot (not just at the top, but all the way down).
Do you really want to be in the position of defending the democratic legitimacy of Ahmadinejad?!?
It’s ironical in a sense that Americans tend to view Sharia and Islamic culture in general as non-democratic, when there is a burgeoning evangelical movement in the U.S. that seems keen on introducing a Christian variant of same.
Intolerant attitudes toward abortion, overt prejudice against gays, regressive attitudes toward the role of women and the anti-science mentality that characterizes Christian fundamentalism … arguably demonstrates a mindset that is just as “medieval” (to quote Rummy), as the anachronistic visions of the late Musab al Zarqawi.
The word “sharia” has acquired a host of negative connotations in the west, thanks largely to the exertions of radical Islamists. Aspects of the Christian evangelical lifestyle on the other hand, that are equally incompatible with the values of a free and open society, are seen as de rigueur by some.
Perhaps we need to shift our attention from the Muslim community to the real opponents of free and progressive society – and they don’t wear burqas or sport long beards.
re the claim that Euston M. is ” enlightenmentist” (E) . What is E ? basically it involves 3 claims :
(i) there is only one set of rational values that can be known by reason
(ii) people who do not hold such values are in error.
(iii) force may be used to correct this moral error.
EM is not commited to (i) but to a Rawlsian view which distinguishes between Good and Right and goes on to allow that there are incompatible but equally well justified conceptions of good which Rawls calls ‘the burdens of reason’. This is enlightenment but not ‘enlightenmentist’.
EM is not commited to (ii) since EM rejects (i) and same obviously goes for (iii).
In other words EM is not enlightenmentist .
Zdenek, I am “familiar with Rawls” and I think that Gray is right and Rawls is wrong on this one. You’re going to have to get a lot more detailed if you’re going to convince me otherwise. In particular, my comment #4 above on the empirical fact that societies need a place to exist is the kernel of my argument why Rawls is wrong; I think that too many of his arguments depend on a conceptual definition of a community or society and ignore the fact that there are geographical/topological constraints on them too.
‘All the unnamed experts agree? C’mon—that defies credulity.’
It may well defy (Western) credulity but the named experts do indeed agree on that.
‘”He’s more popular now than a year ago. He’s on the rise,” said Nasser Hadian-Jazy, a professor of political science at Tehran University. “I guess he has a 70% approval rating right now. He portrays himself as a simple man doing an honest job. He’s comfortable communicating with ordinary people.”
While there are no reliable national opinion polls in Iran, western diplomats acknowledged that support for Mr Ahmadinejad is growing, defying widespread predictions after last June’s election that he would not last more than three months.
“An indication of his power is the way he has whipped up public opinion on the nuclear energy issue,” a western diplomat said. “If there was an election today, he would win.”’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1801867,00.html
‘Ask yourself—if that’s really the majority opinion in Iran, then why on earth did the Mullahs go to all the trouble of throwing reformist candidates off the ballot’
The Mullahs did throw most of the reformist candidates off the ballot…but not all of them. And the ones that were left did not do well.
And if Khatami ever had any idea of turning Iran into a Western style more or less secular democracy, he certainly kept those ideas to himself. (Khatami has explicitly denied that he sees secularism as being a model for Iran: ‘Secularism is the experience of the Western culture and thought. Insisting on spreading it to places where the underlying intellectual background, and the political and social reasons for its appearance are lacking, is clearly a mistake, regardless of being desirable or not.’ (from the Wikipedia)).
Khatami did well for reasons that any politician would understand: there is high unemployment in Iran, there is a lot of corruption, and people were bored of the Mullahs and wanted to teach them a lesson. (it’s because he is seen to be dealing with these issues that Ahmadinejad is also doing well…actually better than Khatami ever did). That’s very different from saying that the average working class non-Westernised Iranian actually wanted (or wants) a secular state.
Slocum,
why on earth did the Mullahs go to all the trouble of throwing reformist candidates off the ballot (not just at the top, but all the way down).
Do you really want to be in the position of defending the democratic legitimacy of Ahmadinejad?!?
I don’t remember the exact number, but I think there were at least 6 candidates in that election. Ahmadinejad was the most religious, the most conservative, the most anti-Western of them all – and he won.
How would you explain this fact?
Well, I’ve always been in the “Let freedom ring! Eat lead hadji” category. There’s no point in pretending to be nice.
But I’m not up for a genocidal war, just yet. Like you, I have faith that our superior values can win over the slammos in time. Unlike you, I recognize that
peace in our timepeaceful coexistence won’t be possible in the interim. They don’t pretend to be nice, either.Besides, if we expect to prevail in the competition of ideologies, fighting is a most effective means of communication. Not in the “break their will to resist” sense, but literally, as in “actions speak louder than words”. Inaction speaks, too.
A good, clean war…
Abb1, what planet are you on? There has never been a good, clean war, and there never will be.
The only possible consolation is if the good guys win.
Daniel wrote:
[W]hat is unserious is pretending that you could support the war without supporting the actual war that was fought. Or, on a forward looking basis, supporting abstract “intervention in support of our fundamental values” while pretending that this doesn’t involve supporting the sort of wars that would predictably be fought as a result.
Hitchens, I think, was one of the few who was quite clear on this—-parodying Rumsfeld but also admitting something like (I’m relying on memory here) ‘you have to go to war with the President you have’. Which I’ve always found simultaneously refreshing and ridiculous.
I don’t remember the exact number, but I think there were at least 6 candidates in that election. Ahmadinejad was the most religious, the most conservative, the most anti-Western of them all – and he won.
How would you explain this fact?
It’s not exactly a secret—the reformist candidates were disqualified in large numbers. Reformist supporters mostly decided to stay home rather than turn out to vote for the lesser of the evils (Rafsanjani).
Suppose all the Democrats, for every office from drain commissioner to president, were thrown off the ballot in the U.S.—do you think most Democratic voters would then vote for the least offensive Republican? Or would most refuse to lend legitimacy to the sham result by voting? The question answers itself.
But, of course, if we can persuade ourselves that Ahmadinejad represents the true majority in Iran (and forget about Khatami’s landslide victory in a freer election) then we can reach the convenient conclusion that those backward Iranians mostly want a repressive religious regime and so we have no need to worry ourselves about the situation.
Well, what I mean is that Hemingway, Orwell, Picasso and other volunteers didn’t go there to steal oil or build military bases or get lucrative contracts. In this sense it was clean.
daniel—the idea that EM croud is pro war involves two different kinds of mistakes and you it seems to me make both;
1) it is a mistake to take EM as being pro war because key architect ( S. Lappin ) are against it as are many signers.
2) the other kind of mistake is deeper and it involves what we understand enlightenment to mean to us. You assume ( because you accept Gray caricature of liberalism and the way enlightenment plugs in ) that EM entails going in other countries and changing their culture. This is false and I dont know anyone who holds this rediculous view.
[ Take my own view which is Rawlsian on the justification of the Iraq war . Which is that best case has to see the war as intervention consistent with just war doctrine and conceives the whole effort as some sort of duty ( se Law of the People ). Anyway this is not a view which tries to change anyones culture and is a view typical among the sighners of EM. ]
In other words your criticism is badly off target as is Gray’s.
A lot of people come out and vote for a lesser evil, but fair enough, Slocum. Let’s say it’s inconclusive.
I have been tearing my hair out ever since the Euston Manifesto was written, trying to get even one of its signers to admit that “intervention” and “protection” mean war, with surprisingly little success.
Good for you. But of course they can’t admit this obvious truth since they need to keep up the pretence that the EM’s prime movers are not pro-Iraq War agitators. Similar questions, such as why intervention in Darfur, suffering a vastly greater humanitarian crisis than Iraq in 2003, was not preferable, are equally inconvenient.
However, when you say:
There are genuine democratic movements in most Islamic countries, but it is wishful thinking to pretend that they aren’t small and unrepresentative minorities. The biggest proportion of the population of Islamic states are quite happy about Islam and don’t want the same things we want.
…I’d like to see some evidence. It is arguably more correct, on the contrary, to say that the hardline theocratic ruling elites are the unrepresentative minorities. To speak as you do may be in danger of implying that “Islam”, homogeneously conceived, is somehow inimically hostile to freedom, civil rights, voting and so on. Of course it is not, any more than Christianity is, despite the actions of many anti-democratic Christianists.
Gray’s piece, meanwhile, is simply post hoc ergo propter hoc nonsense on stilts.
‘Reformist supporters mostly decided to stay home rather than turn out to vote for the lesser of the evils (Rafsanjani).’
And how do you come by this information? You seem to be implying that Ahmadinejad was elected in on an unusually low turn out, but he wasnt: actually turn out was unusually high.
You also imply (without saying so) that Khatami was somehow prevented from standing: actually the Iranian constitution prevents more than two consecutive presidential terms.
Yet again, you ignore my main point: there WAS a reformist candidate (Mostafa Moeen): he finished fifth (out of sixth). So your comparison with an election in which ALL Democrats were banned from standing is highly misleading (surely if the Iranians desperately wanted a reformst, they would all rally round the remaining reformist candidate?) The idea that ‘all’ reformist candidates were banned from the 2005 elections is a popular one amongst the American right wing, but it is false. The idea that the elections were a ‘sham’ is also false: no serious allegations of vote rigging have ever been brought forward.
Sorry I’ve just been reading up on the 2005 elections, and as usual, the moral of the story is, never believe a word you read in the Western Press. Actually, not only was it not the case that ‘all’ the reformists were banned, the list of candidates was evenly split between reformers and conservatives . Mostafa Moeen was a RADICAL reformist (people still didn’t vote for him). And while it is true that the Guardian council prevented some ‘liberals’ from standing they also prevented some Conservatives from standing. There was a small scale boycott by ‘reformers’ but it was mainly led by Iranian exiles in Europe and wasn’t representative.
And all the evidence is that if a perfectly transparent, ‘western style’ democratic election was held in Iran tomorrow, Ahmadinejad would still win.
Even though this discussion is primarily about the UK, as an American I would very much like to second Aidan’s comments (#43). Opposition to obscurantism, like charity, ought to begin at home. But here in the US, many of the biggest “sharia”-phobes arrive at that position via their own mirror-image religious bigotry, not via “Enlightenment” anything.
In this time of Guantanamo and the “don’t let me lose face” President, we have much housecleaning to do before we have any business even thinking about lecturing the rest of the world on “values.”
it is a mistake to take EM as being pro war because key architect ( S. Lappin ) are against it
“War” in “pro war” is a plural and thus is not described by “it”. “Pro War” does not mean “Pro the Iraq War”.
You assume ( because you accept Gray caricature of liberalism and the way enlightenment plugs in ) that EM entails going in other countries and changing their culture
I assume this on the basis of point 10 of the Euston Manifesto, “A new internationalism” and point 3 “Human Rights for all”.
Steven: there is a lot of space between “hardline theocratic elites” and anything that could be recognised as being even a little bit like Enlightenment values. It certainly looked like there was genuine popular outrage about those cartoons, for example. I don’t think that there is anything intrinsic to Islam the religion … in fact I’ll pretty much leave it there, because I don’t think there is anything intrinsic to Islam the religion. But in the political culture of Nigeria, Indonesia and the Arab states there is no popular support for civil rights or many (even most) of the freedoms we are talking about here. There is support for democracy but that isn’t the same thing – to take an example upthread, it does not seem very likely to me that gay rights are coming to any Islamic country any time soon, even though I don’t think this is intrinsic to Islam.
I don’t agree on Gray’s piece; it was densely and confusingly written (and it helps to have read a huge amount of Gray’s other stuff to understand it) but it wasn’t nonsense.
Although this is a losing argument, since it is aimed at the impenetrable stereotypes that govern the current state of controversy, I’ll make it nevertheless: the Enlightenment thinkers had much more complicated ideas about the universal and the culturally particular than you would be able to tell from the potted history of the Enlightenment thrown about between the Garrads and the Buntings. A good place to see this—because it is a crucial text in the reaction to the Enlightenment’s cultural relativism—is in James Mill’s History of India. It is a History that has, as its whole point, the barbaric state of India and the necessity of bringing civilization, i.e. British rule, to the subcontinent. To mount that argument, Mills has to knock down a century and a half of sentiment about Eastern ‘wisdom’—and what he takes to be the wild, Rousseau-ist effusions of William Jones, the fad for China of Voltaire and Montesquieu, the myth of Persian wisdom, etc., etc.
Actually, Jones, Voltaire, Montesquieu and the rest of them were simply applying Enlightenment principles in trying to see through ‘eastern eyes’ and using that perspective to criticize the West. A real heir of the Enlightenment would, I think, ask questions about the West such as: why in the world should we allow Weapons of Mass Distruction to be indiscriminately built and stored by the U.S.? Why should we trust any state that claims that it is working solely in the service of the higher moral interests without explaining how those interests are related to the state’s own particular and material interests?
All of which is to say: the Euston crowd are mistaken in claiming to be the heirs of the Enlightenment tradition—they are, instead, the heirs of the early 19th century backlash against the Enlightenment tolerance for other perspectives.
ps—oops. Mills history was published in 1817. I should have mentioned that.
Hi Daniel,
It certainly looked like there was genuine popular outrage about those cartoons, for example.
A belated “genuine outrage” that only became popular once it had been whipped up by members of the hardline theocratic elite.
I still see no evidence for your remarkably broad assertion of “no support for civil rights” in Indonesia (of all places) or the Arab states, etc. Meanwhile, gay rights took their blessed time coming to the West, and are not all there yet. I don’t see what this has to teach us about some insurmountable difference between cultures.
I wasn’t at all confused by what Gray was saying, meanwhile; I just consider that logically it’s nonsense.
And how do you come by this information? You seem to be implying that Ahmadinejad was elected in on an unusually low turn out, but he wasnt: actually turn out was unusually high.
Official turnout was about 60%, but there were call for boycotts and serious charges of irregularities (all of which may be easily found via Google). But for the sake of the argument it doesn’t really matter. The mere fact that Khatami not long ago won a landslide on a platform of reforms very prominently including press freedoms makes it clear that the idea that a majority of Iranians, because of their muslim faith, have no interest in such values is just clearly wrong. Suppose it is true that a majority of Iranians prefer Ahmadinejad in 2005 (I don’t believe it, but for the sake of argument suppose it is true)—even so, it would be clear this is a new and therefore quite likely temporary preference rather than a historically deep-seated expression of their ‘readiness’ for tolerance, personal liberty, freedom of expression & etc.
‘To mount that argument, Mills has to knock down a century and a half of sentiment about Eastern ‘wisdom’—and what he takes to be the wild, Rousseau-ist effusions of William Jones, the fad for China of Voltaire and Montesquieu, the myth of Persian wisdom, etc., etc.’
Absolutely. At the ‘beginning’ ‘the Enlightenment’ was all about importing foreign values, because Western values (theocracy, slavery, ‘backwardness’) were perceived to be so..well..backwards. Instead the ‘enlightenment thinkers’ looked to China.
‘China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.’ (Adam Smith).
’ Even the anticlerical philosopher Voltaire was intrigued by what he read about the Chinese. Since Voltaire was intent on attacking the power of the Catholic church in eighteenth-century France, he cleverly used the information about China provided by the Catholics to disprove their more extreme claims. If, argued Voltaire, the Chinese really were so moral, intelligent, ethical, and well governed and if this was largely attributable to the influence of Confucius, it followed that since Confucius had not been a Christian it was obviously possible for a country to get along admirably without the presence of Catholic clerical power.’
http://www.heritageeast.com/history/qing.htm
etc. Some enlightenment thinkers were trying to stamp out Western Values, not propagate them.
Bellatrys/Chris 24/26,
The white terror that followed the Thermidorian Reaction is probably the relevant comparison. Both revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence show a trend towards increasing bloodiness as history marches on. The interesting question is why. There are simple answers: greater populations mean more people to kill, more sophisticated technology means more efficient killing, but it seems to me that the most important element is an increasing proportion of the population living in mass society and so prone to moral hysteria. The role of radio in Rwanda is a significant recent example.
Perhaps we should regard contrarianism as a memetic immune response compensating for our genetic ill-adaptedness to mass society, and (even at the risk of its tipping over into denialism) welcome it as a complement to the institutional safeguards of liberal democracy.
What mystifies me about this whole thread is that no-one (that I’ve seen) has mentioned that two fairly central Enlightenment values, on any decent account of them, are freedom from arbitrary rule and respect for human life. Invasions tend to neither respect human life nor be particularly accountable to those they are inflicted on. Consequently, you don’t have to go anything like as far as John Gray’s wilful and obscurantist misrepresentation of liberalism to get the conclusion that there’s something wrong with the Euston Manifesto’s willingness to advocate the use of force: there’s a perfectly good case to be made from perfectly respectably Enlightenment values for the badness of the use of force. In fact, I say to the Euston Manifesters, give me back my Enlightenment!
‘Suppose it is true that a majority of Iranians prefer Ahmadinejad in 2005 (I don’t believe it, but for the sake of argument suppose it is true)—even so, it would be clear this is a new and therefore quite likely temporary preference’.
Ipso facto, according to this logic, the fact that Ahmadinejad won by a landslide and is now unprecedentedly popular indicates that it is the Iranian’s desire for ‘reform’ which was a new and therefore quite likely temporary preference. (And in fact, as the 2005 election results show, it WAS temporary).
It is a sort of pointless discussion to pin down what the Englightenment “really” was. The Englightment was a category created after the fact to encapsulate a lot of different thinkers, who disagreed on a lot things.
Today, we typically use the term to refer to those specific views that we think are the best to have emerged from that period: democracy, liberalism, freedom of speech and thought, equality under the law, commitment to empirical science, separation of church and state, the rule of law, etc. In other words, it is simply shorthanded for the views that have mostly triumphed in Western liberal democracies.
That is why is it mostly beside the point to say that these sorts of values are somehow undermined by the past violent actions of revolutionaries or the prestent violent actions of imperialists. The values really stand or fall on their own. Likewise, the best ways for Western liberal societies to encourage devleopment of these same values in other countries is mostly just a pragmatic cost/benefit question.
It shows that these days anti-Western populism beats pro-Western populism, and not only in Iran, for sure. And we all know who to thank for that.
A belated “genuine outrage” that only became popular once it had been whipped up by members of the hardline theocratic elite
But surely a polity in which riots can be whipped up by mullahs over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed is a polity in which there is no underlying support for freedom of speech when it comes to blasphemy. At the very least.
I’m not sure what sort of evidence you’re looking here and suspect that you’re looking for evidence in favour of a stronger claim than I’m prepared to defend. In Indonesia, Nigeria and many Arab states, forms of sharia are the law, and political parties which favour the extension of sharia laws (and the interpretation of sharia in a less rather than more liberal manner) are gaining in power. Sharia, in the forms currently popular in the Islamic Third World, is not consistent with civil rights as understood by (for example, but on topic) the Euston Manifesto. Hence, to this extent, civil rights do not have popular support. This is a different thesis from saying “they’re not ready for democracy” or some such.
I’m not arguing that there’s an “insurmountable gulf” between us and the Islamic third world and in fact I think I specifically said I thought it was surmountable. But it is the case that across a lot of the Islamic third world, political systems which aren’t the same as ours are in place, and they are for the most part in place because they have popular support. I also don’t think that any gulf is “between cultures”; I don’t think we need to bring culture into what is essentially a political question.
Maybe Iranian voters do have a settled preference for theocracy, but the point about the current regime is that we’ll never get the chance to find out. The mullahs are committed to upholding theocracy whatever the results of elections. So Khatemi was rendered utterly ineffectual by Guardian Council vetoes of every single liberalizing piece of legislation. Press censorship and mass disqualification of reformiist candidates actually got more aggresive after Khatemi was elected. Maybe voters would have rejected liberalization, but they never got the chance to actually experience it. All we do know is that after Ahmadinejad got into the runoff with less than 20% of the vote, he won a decisive victory over the almost comically corrupt Rafsanjani. And this is now touted as proof of the deep yearning for theocracy among the Iranian electorate.
But surely a polity in which riots can be whipped up by mullahs over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed is a polity in which there is no underlying support for freedom of speech when it comes to blasphemy.
Can we then assume, for example, that there was no “underlying support” for multiculturalism in Yugoslavia before the hysteria deliberately engineered by a media and political narrative of “ethnic” hatred, revisionist history and so on? How representative of populations as a whole should we ordinarily take some rioters to be? In my view the most notorious of the cartoons was simply racist, anyway. In the West we also ban speech that incites racial hatred or violence. Does that show that our underlying support for the principle of free speech is also compromised and hence that we are not very interested in civil rights?
across a lot of the Islamic third world, political systems which aren’t the same as ours are in place, and they are for the most part in place because they have popular support.
What is this “popular support”? Is it like Blair having popular support in the UK simply because he won the 2005 election? Is the reason for this popular support, if and to what extent it exists, attributable to opinions about Islam or maybe other factors? To what extent are populations seriously being offered civil rights and rejecting them?
I still think the claims are too broad to be defensible, even before you consider counterfactual examples such as slocum’s point about Khatami.
Ipso facto, according to this logic, the fact that Ahmadinejad won by a landslide and is now unprecedentedly popular indicates that it is the Iranian’s desire for ‘reform’ which was a new and therefore quite likely temporary preference. (And in fact, as the 2005 election results show, it WAS temporary).
But the point is that, supposing you accept both election results as legitimate, you cannot argue that Iranians have a settled preference for either a liberal society or fundamentalist theocracy and, therefore, you cannot argue (as you seem to be doing) that Iranians are somehow fundamentally ‘not ready’ for liberal democracy.
As an aside, it’s just bizarre to me that those on the left have conniptions about Florida but are quite ready to put the stamp of legitimacy on elections in Iran where it’s public knowledge that not only did unelected theocrats openly disqualify hundreds of candidates but where there is no independent press or judiciary free to investigate claims of irregularities. If the Mullahs cooked the books last year, how would you know? Who could possibly attempt to investigate and not disappear?
It is impossible to say what type of government the Iranian people would prefer without free and open elections and a free press to report on the elections. The Khatami and Ahmadinejad elections may be some evidence, but ultimately I think they are not particularly helpeful in answering the question because the method of determining preference was so corrupted.
I think it is fair to say that the Iranian people at least deserve the opportunity to choose a more liberal, democratic government in free elections unconstrained by the ruling party’s decisions on who can run and what they can say, and unconstrained by crackdowns on the press.
I don’t think these parallels make sense. Yugoslavia took a long time to break down, and in any case fighting a civil war is not the same thing as protesting within your own country against foreigners. I think there is clearly a qualitative difference between the reason we ban incitement (it’s a public order offence) and the reason why Islamic states have sharia law (it’s the will of God). And I think it’s a category mistake to compare “popular support” for sharia with support for a particular government. I’ve also specifically restricted myself to Nigeria, Indonesia and the Arab Middle East (occasionally using the term “the Islamic Third World” which I would also regard as a term which excluded Iran and Turkey) because I’m only wanting to make a point about specific polities in which I think it’s unarguable that, for historical and economic reasons, Islam is popular and Enlightenment Values ain’t. It’s possible to have all sorts of opinions about why the Muslim parts of Nigeria are the way they are, but still to agree that the way they are is not consistent with anything like the British versions of equality for women, free speech and scepticism about received dogmas.
‘But the point is that, supposing you accept both election results as legitimate, you cannot argue that Iranians have a settled preference for either a liberal society or fundamentalist theocracy and, therefore, you cannot argue (as you seem to be doing) that Iranians are somehow fundamentally ‘not ready’ for liberal democracy.’
Aaaaaaaaaaaargh! My whole POINT was that ‘liberal’ and ‘democracy’ are two different words, with two different meanings. They are NOT synonyms.
And also, spare us the ‘not ready’. That’s a view of history that I’m obviously rejecting, the whig view that all societies are slowly trudging towards American style ‘liberalism’ and that some countries (white ones, mainly) are ‘further on’ this road than others, whereas others are ‘not ready’ for it yet.
The key point about Iran is the same as that of DSquared above, so i’ll repeat what he says: ‘In Indonesia, Nigeria and many Arab states, forms of sharia are the law, and political parties which favour the extension of sharia laws (and the interpretation of sharia in a less rather than more liberal manner) are gaining in power. Sharia, in the forms currently popular in the Islamic Third World, is not consistent with civil rights as understood by (for example, but on topic) the Euston Manifesto. Hence, to this extent, civil rights do not have popular support. This is a different thesis from saying “they’re not ready for democracy” or some such.’
And the key point is the point of the post. You might not like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbollah, etc. etc. etc. and in fact I’m sure you don’t. But they are popular and they win elections. They really really really really really really really do. It’s not false consciousness. It’s not because ‘they’ don’t know any better. It’s not because ‘they’ are stupid or irrational. It’s just that the electorate like the policies of those parties, and we in the West are going to have to get used to that. *
(incidentally I’m not putting a ‘stamp of legitimacy’ on anything: Iran’s elections are clearly not democratic in the sense we would use in the West. My point is much simpler: Ahmadinejad is very popular in Iran. And he is.)
*And despite what Donald Rumsfeld says, these parties are not fascist or Nazi either. Hitler used elections yeah, but once he had achieved power he abolished them. There’s no evidence that Hamas or Hizbollah wish to do that. Islamists have nothing to fear from elections because they tend to win them. ‘Western’ (i.e. American backed) parties have much to fear from elections because they almost invariably lose them.
I’d even add that there are polities like Afghanistan (or at least Kabul) where the reverse is true; that there was no real underlying support for fundie Islam because of their history. I wonder if there was a long-bearded version of me saying to Osama “look it’s no good, it isn’t just a matter of the way that Wahaabism has been presented to them, they fundamentally don’t want to be Talibans and it is going to require an open-ended and ultimately unsustainable commitment to violence for us to keep ruling that territory”. Or indeed, a Somali version of me giving that advice in Mogadishu.
fighting a civil war is not the same thing as protesting within your own country against foreigners
Sure, it isn’t. But the question is whether we can reliably deduce something about underlying popular opinion from the actions of some people deliberately encouraged by demagogues in an atmosphere of moral hysteria. I think it is not so easy.
I think there is clearly a qualitative difference between the reason we ban incitement (it’s a public order offence) and the reason why Islamic states have sharia law (it’s the will of God).
But that’s not the comparison I was making, which was between why we ban incitement, and why some Muslims protested about a cartoon which was arguably itself an incitement to hatred.
I’m only wanting to make a point about specific polities in which I think it’s unarguable that, for historical and economic reasons, Islam is popular and Enlightenment Values ain’t.
Yes, but you are hopping between:
1.) Islamism (Sharia law etc) is in power; therefore
1a.) Islamism must have “popular support”
or, as in this comment,
2.) Islam is popular.
In turn: 1) is a claim about some governments and is true of those governments of which it is true.
The extent to which 1a) is true is highly debatable, and you still offer precious little evidence. Election results are very unreliable evidence either way, as others are arguing here, owing to the circumstances of the elections.
Lastly, 2) is of course true in Muslim countries but has no necessary political implications. We all know there have been very enlightened (arguably Enlightened avant la lettre) and tolerant Islamic polities at various points in history.
Steve Poole: Can we then assume, for example, that there was no “underlying support” for multiculturalism in Yugoslavia before the hysteria deliberately engineered by a media and political narrative of “ethnic” hatred, revisionist history and so on?
Well there wasn’t in either Serbia, or Croatia. That was always the problem with Yugoslavia. Tito kept it under control – Milosevic exploited it. Skillful leaders might be able to exploit and worsen such cultural tendencies, but they can’t conjure them out of thin air.
The part where you are wrong dsquared is the part about the commitment to violence. I am not sure why you think that anyone who wants to encourage the development of liberal democracy in places that do not have such a tradition are forced to resort to violence. It may be a slow, difficult, and piecemeal process (and it may not even be successful within any reasonable period of time) but I just don’t see how the commitment to creating “Englightenment” values requires a recourse to violence.
The use of violence may be justified in certain situations – i.e. to prevent a greater loss of life that may occur – but that is a different question.
Islamism (Sharia law etc)
Not happy with this as a definition of “Islamism”. Saudi Arabia has sharia law but it actually executes Islamists. Islamist in my book means pan-Islamist and revolutionary (I’d regard an even narrower definition, specifically relating to Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood as defensible).
Take the example of Nigeria. It doesn’t have sharia law at the federal level and it doesn’t have an Islamist government in any sense of the term. It does have sharia courts in the Muslim regions, and it has them because the people there wanted them. In fact, they want them so much that Abuja ended up having to give them what they wanted or risk the breakup of the Nigerian state. If there is a risk that the abolition of sharia courts will lead to a secession movement and popular revolution, then I’d say that sharia courts have popular support. It was touch and go for the Nigerian government to overrule the sharia death sentence on that poor pregnant woman a while ago, that’s how popular sharia was.
Or take the case of Somalia and clitoridectomy (a practice which is not in the Koran but which is pretty widely regarded as an Islamic practice in Somalia). That isn’t being imposed on anyone from above.
“I wonder if there was a long-bearded version of me saying to Osama “look it’s no good, it isn’t just a matter of the way that Wahaabism has been presented to them, they fundamentally don’t want to be Talibans and it is going to require an open-ended and ultimately unsustainable commitment to violence for us to keep ruling that territory”. Or indeed, a Somali version of me giving that advice in Mogadishu.”
Or some French general saying the same thing about secular republicanism in Algeria in the 19th century, or Henry Morton Stanley talking about Christianity and civilization in central Africa, or some Soviet general talking to Khrushchev about Hungary in ‘56, or for that matter, some Roman general talking about Germania or Caledonia.
This is my principal problem with the Euston Manifesto ideas: Even if we concede that superiority of their values, how is their propagation going to be any less awful than the propagation of past ideas, both good and bad? Many of the ills they identify come from efforts to impose quite nice ideals on people who didn’t see them that way and couldn’t or wouldn’t comply with them.
incidentally I’m not putting a ‘stamp of legitimacy’ on anything: Iran’s elections are clearly not democratic in the sense we would use in the West.
I’m not putting a stamp of legitimacy on anything either, but the West (at least the US) is not that different.
Slocum says:
the left have conniptions about Florida but are quite ready to put the stamp of legitimacy on elections in Iran where it’s public knowledge that not only did unelected theocrats openly disqualify hundreds of candidates
But it’s also a public knowledge that in the US (where we have only 2, rarely 3 viable candidates, unlike Iran) unelected plutocrats openly disqualify hundreds of candidates by giving huge amounts of money and publicity to selected few and blocking the others – ask Ralph Nader.
Nevertheless, legitimacy aside, you only need 2 candidates with clearly identified positions to figure out what the prevailing popular sentiment is at the moment. In 2005 Iran is was anti-Western nationalism, that’s all there is to it and it’s not surprising at all.
Steve: Studies of Iranian attitudes that I’ve seen seem to support Daniel’s argument that support for Islamic rule as existing is still popular in Iran. I think part of the reason why we don’t believe this, is because the views of educated intellectuals tend to be overrepresented in the western media. That’s not to say that Iranians don’t want change, but they seem to be more concerned over economic problems and some of the more arbitrary aspects of the clerical rule.
In Syria there is obviously an awful lot of support for Islamic political groups (which is one reason why the regime is so repressive), as there is in Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan and indeed the poster child of secular Islam, Turkey.
Islamist in my book means pan-Islamist and revolutionary
In the most general sense it means simply the application of (a particular interpretation of) Islam to the political sphere, so it does cover Sharia law etc. But we’ve been through this elsewhere. ;-)
I’ll ask a previous question again: to what extent are populations in the countries you speak of being seriously offered civil rights, and rejecting them?
Incidentally, walking down any English town’s high street on a friday night, I tend to find myself wondering whether the Muslims might not have a point on this “liberty” thing…
That’s not to say that Iranians don’t want change, but they seem to be more concerned over economic problems and some of the more arbitrary aspects of the clerical rule.
That sounds awfully lot like a concern for civil rights to me, even if they don’t express it in that way. The government doubtless is admired for “standing up to America” and so forth. The idea that the theocratic regime is popular qua theocratic, specifically, is yet to be demonstrated.
‘Or take the case of Somalia and clitoridectomy (a practice which is not in the Koran but which is pretty widely regarded as an Islamic practice in Somalia). That isn’t being imposed on anyone from above.’
As I pointed out in my first post (of about 300 it seems) underneath all the democratic rhetoric, there is something just a tiny little bit snobbish about the Enlightenment/Eustonite commitment to liberalism, secularism etc. By implying that religion and illiberalism are a ‘top down’ phenomenon, that all that is necessary is to get rid of the priests, Immans and rabbis and the ‘masses’ will realise the truth of science, secularism and Eustonism, is to imply that the problem with the masses is that they are just a teensy bit stupid, not quite as smart as clever middle class Eustonites, who have already seen through the lies of the religious bogeymen.
The idea that secularism and Islamism etc. might be ‘bottom up’ phenomena not ‘top down’, that they are actually ‘of’ the masses not ‘against’ them, and that the political leaders we see (like Osama Bin Laden) would be quickly replaced even if the Americans finally got round to finding them, is totally alien to the Eustonite mindset. Hence their bafflement when, after the deposition of Saddam, the Americans found themselves governing not a secular placid nation of aspiring Americans, but an angry, Islamic (and Iranian) leaning group of people who weren’t shy about reaching for the gun.
Nevertheless, legitimacy aside, you only need 2 candidates with clearly identified positions to figure out what the prevailing popular sentiment is at the moment.
Not really. All it tells you is which of the two candidates the people who show up to vote will elect under the given circumstances. It may tell you precious little about what particular policies the electorate will support over the long term.
I don’t think most people come to vote for specific policies. They vote for a brand of rhetoric. Progressive, conservative, humanist, xenophobic, religious – whatever sounds right.
Obviously there are both bottom-up and top-down elements. The problem is that the top-down elements are able to enforce their position with armies, secret police forces, control of the media and so forth. I don’t think even the Eustonites would be much concerned if it were just a few priests.
(And one might wonder why, if they enjoyed such massive popular support, they would require such an elaborate appar