February 12, 2006

"LIBERALISM IS ALWAYS BEING SURPRISED"

Horsefeathers contributor, Edward Alexander, elaborates on a theme we have touched on repeatedly: Liberalism's view of human nature. It should be read in conjunction with his earlier critique of Judith Butler.

        "If liberalism has a single desperate weakness," wrote Lionel Trilling in 1943, "it is an inadequacy of imagination; liberalism is always being surprised." Although the revelation of human depravity has been one of the chief enterprises of the human mind for over four centuries, its discoveries have never been sufficiently conclusive to dislodge liberalism from its entrenched belief in human and social goodness, its dogmatic attachment to the belief that human wickedness is invariably "caused" by an unjust or unequal or anomalous society. Every modern calamity--German death factories, Soviet gulags, Islamic suicide bombings--that did not fit into liberalism's Marxist categories caught it by surprise.
        The recent horrors of the Palestinian elections that brought to power a Nazi-style regime of crazed religious fanatics and the Cartoon War that has turned the ever combustible Muslim mob against the Danish infidel have also caught liberals by surprise.Liberal optimism, epitomized in the solemn idiocies of the New York Times editorial columns and the sophisticated confusion of the New Yorker, quickly concluded that the electoral victory of Hamas, despite the suicide bandanas and swastika armbands worn by its blood-stained bands of ruthless killers, was really a popular mandate for less graft and more efficient garbage recycling than the Palestinian Authority had delivered. The globe-trotting Jimmy Carter stopped by to pronounce it "a beautiful election" and assured Larry King that Hamas would soon turn from terror: "they told me they want...a peaceful administration."
        Since the liberal view of the world is daily confuted in Iran, in Gaza, in Europe, by the tenacity of Muslim rejectionism--of Israel, of America, of free expression, of women's rights--ever more desperate "explanations" of what is happening must be contrived. Thus the violence occasioned by the "blasphemous" cartoons is being explained by liberals as a reaction to, among other sore grievances and "root causes," the Danish government's having recently (and of course too late) imposed limits on immigration and declared advocacy of terrorism a criminal offense. All over the world, including Israel, the liberal intelligentsia are debating (for the very first time!) whether it is "wrong" to insult someone's religion. Ha'aretz, the Women's Wear Daily for Israeli liberals, wailed about the need to "understand the feelings of insult among Muslims," excoriated the "offensive publications," and insisted that "freedom of expression...requires limits."
        The allliance of recent years between liberals and Islamic terrorists has been likened to the Soviet-Nazi pact of August 1939, in which two ostensibly opposed extremes joined together. By now we are familiar with the paradox whereby liberals who oppose every other "faith-based initiative" give their blessing to distinctly illiberal (indeed fascist) Islamicist suicide bombers acting in the name of religious faith. For the truth is that most liberals do not believe that anybody is motivated by faith; as a result, the more barbaric the actions of terrorists the more certain are liberals to "explain" them as a reflective measure of their mistreatment by--their victims. Thus each new act of terror--beheadings, lynchings, suicide bombings, butchery that would shame animals--is interpreted by liberalism's angelic sociology as further proof of just how oppressive are the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Americans. The more savage the terror, the greater the guilt of its victims. To this precipice has liberal philosophy brought us, and if we do not pull back from it, it will prove as fatal to us as the bombs and bullets of our declared enemies. As the famous liberal John Stuart Mill wrote, "philosophy, which to the superficial appears a thing so remote from the business of life and the outward interests of men, is in reality the thing on earth which... in the long run overbears every other influence."

Edward Alexander

Edward Alexander is co-author, with Paul Bogdanor, of THE JEWISH DIVIDE OVER
ISRAEL, forthcoming from Transaction Publishers.