Argument: Liberalism and Multiculturalism
Argument: Liberalism and Multiculturalism
Berman/Stan- ley on Multi- culturalism
The following is a response by Paul Berman to Tim Stanley’s “Muscle-Flexing at Muslims.” Read Stanley’s reply below.
IN A recent contribution to Dissent, Tim Stanley of the University of London has reminded us of a terrible danger just now, which is the rise of nativist bigotries against Muslim populations in Europe and the United States. And Stanley has reminded us that, in a peculiar twist, old-style nativism has, at times, lately adopted a language of enlightened progressivism, such that, in the name of tolerance and advanced views, we are called upon to adopt the most dismissive and retrograde of attitudes toward entire immigrant populations–a rhetorical oddity of our present age.
I applaud Stanley for highlighting these developments. But then, as if between claps, I find myself suddenly struck by a worried suspicion. It occurs to me that, in expounding his well-intentioned analysis, Stanley may have ended up, from time to time, inadvertently exemplifying the very danger that he wishes to warn us against. The problem crops up, or so it seems to me, in the course of Stanley’s discussion of terrorism.
He cites the curious case of the American military psychiatrist, Major Nidal Hasan, who murdered his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood. Major Hasan, as we have learned, is a disciple of the charismatic Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. Stanley writes:
Although he was not a rational man, countless witnesses have attested to Major Hasan’s anger at the invasion of Iraq. Western leaders dismiss foreign policy as a pretext to murder non-Muslims, but there’s a pattern of cause and effect that is hard to ignore. To some Muslims, Western military presence on holy soil, support for Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and blockade of the Gaza Strip, or opposition to Iran is as offensive as Catholics might find a NATO occupation of the Vatican. Their chosen response is culturally conditioned and morally unacceptable, but one cannot ignore the West’s culpability.
The reference to Catholics and the Vatican is somewhat off the point–but I must add that, even so, it strikes me as curious. In 1944 the city of Rome did come under occupation from forces that can only be regarded as precursors to NATO, namely, the Allied armies, whose leaders were, by and large, Protestants. People with Fascist and Nazi allegiances, Catholic and otherwise, must have been terribly upset. But I suspect that, around the world, an overwhelming majority of Catholics felt delighted and relieved to learn that, in the Sacred City, an Allied occupation had replaced the German one. This fact ought to remind us that not every war is a religious war.
Stanley’s argument has to do, in any case, with Muslims–or, as he specifies, “some Muslims” and their “chosen response,” by which he means terrorism. He seems to think that, when a Muslim somewhere responds to events elsewhere in the world by going on a murderous rampage, the rampage reflects the larger culture of the murderer. Or, as he puts it, “Their chosen response is culturally conditioned.”
Now, from my perspective, Stanley in this passage has driven his essay into a ditch. The notion that Muslims, or even the smaller group known as “some Muslims,” are “culturally conditioned” to engage in random murder seems to me not just a self-evident slur, but very nearly the worst and most consequential slur that could possibly be uttered. If Muslim culture calls for random murder every time some untoward event takes place on the other side of the earth, who will not tremble with fear every time a Muslim happens to amble down the street? Untoward events are happening all the time, after all. And if Muslim culture is genuinely so dreadful as to encourage random murder, don’t the nativist bigots have a point?
Allow me to offer an alternative interpretation of the motivations of someone like Major Hasan. There are isolated people who go on murderous rampages because they have lost their minds. Terrorists are not isolated, however. Terrorists adhere to political movements, and they commit their terrible deeds because their movements uphold crazy ideologies that call for doing so. Terrorists, in short, are fanatics in the grip of murderous ideologies. This ought not to be hard to see. Terrorist movements have been a feature of modern civilization ever since the later nineteenth century.
Some of us on the left ought to be able to recognize the phenomenon at a glance. The modern Left largely descends from the nineteenth-century workers’ movement–and the old-time workers’ movement, in one of its anarchist splinter currents, proved to be the grand pioneer of this sort of thing. The classic act was committed in 1894 by a French anarchist named Émile Henry, who threw a bomb at the Café Terminus in Paris and then justified what he had done by remarking, “There are no innocent bourgeois.” Was Émile Henry “culturally conditioned” to throw his bomb? No. Henry threw a bomb because a doctrine had arisen, expounded by intellectuals and artists and sometimes by workers’ leaders, urging the anarchist militants to do this sort of thing–the doctrine of “propaganda of the deed” in the name of the class struggle, the grievances of the proletariat, the crimes of capitalism, the coming revolution, etc. Henry had accepted the doctrine, and his acceptance of it had made him a fanatic. And fanaticism led to crime.
Something similar could be said about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Would anyone be so stupid as to say that people in upstate New York, where McVeigh grew up, are “culturally conditioned” to engage in mass murder? No, McVeigh committed his crime because he had joined a lunatic fringe of the American ultra-right militia movement, and the fringe’s doctrine led him to suppose that, in blowing up a building, he was resisting tyranny, avenging the crimes of Waco, etc.–the elements of his fanatical ideology.
Thus it has been with people like Major Hasan and the dreadful Awlaki today–Arab-American Muslims in both cases. It would be false and offensive to suggest that Arab-American Muslims are “culturally conditioned” to kill their neighbors. Arab Americans are not a weird anthropological tribe akin to rainforest cannibals (if any such people exist), who are driven to acts of indiscriminate violence by irksome news from far-away parts of the world. Hasan and Awlaki are merely the latest incarnation of Henry and McVeigh. They are people who have joined a lunatic political movement and have acted on their beliefs.
Their movement has a name, by the way, which is not “some Muslims,” though “some Muslims” is the only term that Tim Stanley invokes in his essay. Hasan and Awlaki have enlisted as “jihadis” in the violent “Salafi” wing of the larger Islamist movement. Islamism is, like Paris anarchism in the 1890s or militia ultra-rightism in contemporary America, a modern political movement. It was founded in Egypt in 1928 and generally exudes an atmosphere of the 1930s–though Islamism claims to be, of course, seventh-century Islam, revived. And Islamism is a movement that clings to a familiarly modern interpretation of world events–a mid-twentieth-century anti-colonialism, except with a rhetoric drawn from the Islamic Middle Ages. Thus, Western imperialism, in Islamist doctrine, is described as an extension of medieval Christendom, intent on launching Crusades to destroy the religion of Islam. The Islamist idea is, of course, nonsense, even if it is true that, in Florida, Pastor Jones has burned a Koran. The entity called Christendom ceased to exist centuries ago, and not a single government on earth today seeks to destroy Islam.
Still, the Islamists believe their story–which means that, everywhere in the world, the Islamists present themselves as the voice of an aggrieved religion, suffering cruel persecution at the hands of their anti-Islamic oppressors. And the Islamist presentation, in the version that has emerged from the immigrant districts of the Western countries, is precisely what makes for our difficulty.
If only we could agree on regarding the Islamists as a modern and political phenomenon, we would have no trouble at all in identifying the movement’s nature and typology. We would observe that, viewed in a political light, Islamism is a movement of the ultra-right, visibly influenced by a variety of totalitarian inspirations from twentieth-century Europe. Islamism is a movement that aspires to dominate every corner of life; that encourages bigotries and group hatreds of several kinds; that has ended up as the last great heir to the classic anti-Semitism of Europe; that offers the world’s chief organized obstacle to the cause of women’s rights; and that has generated any number of ultra-radical tendencies committed to suicide and terror.
Liberals have confronted movements like Islamism more than once in the past, which means that, by now, we ought to know how to put up a resistance. We might think back on the struggle in America to defeat the Ku Klux Klan–a reactionary and terrorist movement that, with its burning crosses, forthrightly proclaimed a militant Protestant zeal. We liberals confronted the Klan in three complementary ways. We are civil libertarians, and therefore: 1) we called for freedom of speech and assembly even for the reactionary bigots. We are also level-headed citizens who do not think that blacks or anyone else should be lynched and terrorized, and therefore: 2) we urged the police to keep an eye on any potential violence.
And we are people with a vision of a better society, and therefore: 3) we set out to crush the reactionary bigots, and not just to get along with them. We tried to do this by invoking morality and common sense, and we tried to do it, as well, by promoting the kinds of social reforms that might defuse the sense of social grievance. But, in doing all of this, we were never the enemies of the Klan’s social base. We always figured that, on the contrary, if only the Ku Klux Klan could be defeated and its ideas discredited, the poor Southern Christian whites who had fallen under a Klan influence could shake off their own racism and could unite, at last, with the even poorer blacks whom they used to persecute. And, with whites and blacks joining together, people of good will could bring about an improvement in everyone’s condition. We were, in short, enemies of the Klan who nonetheless sympathized, at some level, with the poor people who sometimes succumbed to the Klan’s seductions. Isn’t this the proper way to oppose the Islamists, as well? To oppose the reactionary doctrines and organizations while sympathizing with the poor immigrants?
But my question assumes that Islamism is, in fact, a modern political movement. What if, instead, the Islamists are, as they claim to be, an expression of the authentic culture of the Muslim world–as Tim Stanley’s essay seems to imply? The culture in question would certainly be a deplorable one, committed to behaviors that are, in Stanley’s phrase, “morally unacceptable.” Still, we would face a dilemma. Our commitment to cultural tolerance would require us to treat the deplorable culture with, if not respect, then at least with feigned respect–a patronizing compassion for the poor unfortunates who, owing to their backward and repulsive culture, are incapable of behaving any better than they do. We would pat their heads and urge them not to give in to the immoral impulses that come so naturally to people like them. I worry that, during the last few years, multicultural policies in Europe have ended up taking this sort of position.
In the name of multiculturalism, the Islamists in Europe have been allowed to impose their own doctrines on their principle victims, who are of course the most vulnerable of the vulnerable–their fellow Muslim immigrants. Unobstructed, the Islamists have used intimidation and violence to impose codes of dress and conduct that are intended to limit the freedom of women. They have campaigned against a full-scale modern education, and have taken special measures to limit the access of women to education and health services. They have promoted ideologies of hatred against Jews and other people. On their radical fringe, they have promoted acts of terrorism. Nor has the multiculturalist tolerance for this kind of ultra-right-wing bigotry led to any diminution of the problem.
Stanley seems to think that multiculturalist condescension, which he describes as tolerance, is our only alternative. In contemplating a possible better alternative, a “muscular liberalism,” he writes: “At its best, the active enforcement of ‘traditional Western values’ could be a revival of the Vital-Center ethic of the 1950s–the belief that there’s something innately tolerant about the West that must be protected and promoted […]. At its worst, it is xenophobia dressed up as concern for democracy and liberty. Whatever its motivations, muscular liberalism is contradictory, unworkable, and undesirable.”
Stanley’s phrase about “traditional Western values” seems to me a little tendentious, since liberalism, as I think of it, is a philosophical position and not a folk custom. The phrase about “traditional Western values” makes the championing of liberal principles sound like a parochial prejudice, as if liberal ideas and Islamist ideas were merely two competing anthropological quirks, a case of nose-rings versus lip-rings, neither of which is intrinsically better than the other.
Mostly I have to confess that I do not understand Stanley’s argument. In considering a forceful advocacy of liberal ideas, he contrasts its “best” possible expression (the “Vital-Center ethic of the 1950s”) with its “worst” possible expression (a revival of xenophobia), and he dismisses both with a wave of his hand. But why can’t we have the best, and eschew the worst?
A revival of the Vital-Center ethic would be, in my own estimation, something much to be desired, under our present circumstances–a revival of the principles that Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. laid out in his masterpiece of 1949, The Vital Center. I remind the readers of Dissent that Schlesinger’s Vital Center offers a magnificent defense of the democratic Left, and not of any sort of ethnic or geographical parochialism. Schlesinger argued that, in order to cope with the various totalitarian movements of his time, liberals were well-advised to look to the principles of the democratic Left. He thought that social-democratic trade unions and the political traditions of the New Deal offered a solid alternative to fascism and communism alike. This sort of confident affirmation of principles of the democratic Left is precisely what we need today, in an updated version.
“Islamism” is the leading totalitarianism of our own time. The way to combat it is not by regarding it with a patronizing tolerance but, instead, by promoting the values of the liberal Left–meaning, respect for the immigrants and for their rights as individuals; appreciation for the glories of world civilization and not just the parochial achievements of one’s own tiny culture; insistence on public education and health care for women as well as men; and active defense of the rights of people everywhere who are oppressed and endangered. Gay rights, too, ought to be a principle of the democratic Left. In many places around the world, and in certain of the poorest immigrant neighborhoods of Europe and perhaps even of America, the most immediate oppression that threatens the poor and the humble comes from the Islamist movement–from the Muslim Brotherhood and its various organizational progeny. We should not be afraid to say so, or to come to the defense of the defenseless.
This will not make us the allies of Pastor Jones. Solidarity is not xenophobia. Schlesinger’s whole purpose in coming up with his phrase, “vital center,” was to stipulate that liberalism is bound to engage with two sets of enemies, not just one. In 1949, the liberals who drew on social-democratic roots and the traditions of the New Deal were the enemies of people on both the right and the left–fascists and McCarthyites on the right, and communists and their fellow-travelers on the left. In 2011 we likewise find ourselves with enemies of two sorts. Our enemies are, on one side, the Islamist reactionaries–both the out-and-out terrorists and the not-so-violent Islamists. And our enemies, on the other side, are the xenophobes and Koran-burners. Is it so difficult to be against both at the same time–to be against Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on one hand and Pastor Jones on the other? Why can’t we be pro-immigrant and anti-Islamist? At Dissent magazine, double impulses of this sort ought to be our first instinct.
–Paul Berman is the author of, among other books, Power and the Idealists, with a preface by Richard Holbrooke, on the leftist origins of the modern idea of humanitarian intervention.
PAUL BERMAN makes three sinewy assertions in his response to my attack on “muscular liberalism”: 1) Islamism is a modern political movement, not a “culturally conditioned” response to Western aggression (Berman basically charges me with racism for suggesting the opposite). 2) Multiculturalism permits the tolerance of what we inaccurately perceive to be an authentic culture but which is actually a totalitarian movement forced upon ordinary Muslims. And, 3) Liberals have a history of confronting such movements head-on, and–consonant with the Vital-Center tradition–should do so again.
I did not suggest that Muslims were hotwired to set off a bomb in response to the tiniest slight. Even though he repeats it several times, Berman ignores an adjective in the following sentence that suggests the opposite: “Their chosen response is culturally conditioned.” The word is “chosen,” and it is the “response” that is “culturally conditioned,” not the decision to do it. Let me steal one of Berman’s analogies to demonstrate what I mean. The people of upstate New York were not, as a demographic, culturally conditioned to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in retaliation for what happened at Waco. Timothy McVeigh’s decision to commit murder was his own and he bears sole responsibility for it. But the manner in which he expressed his rage was certainly conditioned by his service in the army and by the network of survivalist groups of which he was a part. You can see that in his testimony and private letters, in the military euphemisms he used as shorthand for cold-blooded murder: “retaliation,” “collateral damage,” “soft target,” etc. Likewise, Major Hasan did not kill the soldiers at Fort Hood because he was a Muslim. But the way he chose to express his anger had much to do with the jihadism in which he had become acculturated.
I do not dispute that Islamism is a recent political invention. But some of the religious conservatism associated with it has been around a lot longer and will not be deterred by state authoritarianism: indeed, persecution is likely to harden it. The liberal state should not tolerate any behavior that directly threatens the lives of its citizens. But if we are to live with the free movement of capital and labor, we have to accept that cultures different from our own will try to share the same democracy. If we value pluralism, it is best to avoid policies that prompt minorities into violent resistance—and we should be keenly aware of the role of state policy in defining community relations. Until the War on Terror began, America was barely aware of the presence of Muslims within its borders. It was foreign policy that politicized the issue of religious conservatism in the United States, not an innate tension between Islamic and Christian cultures.
We could, as Berman suggests, jettison multiculturalism and “oppose the reactionary doctrines” of traditionalist Mullahs, “while sympathizing with the poor immigrants.” But aside from empowering the state to judge the acceptability of religious doctrine, I doubt that would work. Such a statement exposes a dearth of understanding about what motivates religious conservatism. Authoritarianism is not the sole cause of orthodox belief—custom and conviction have a much larger role to play. Traditionalism is comforting, particularly to communities that experience the shocks and challenges of migration. It is reasonable to presume that fundamentalist, poor immigrants hold on to their beliefs because they want to, not because they are being forced into it as part of a political project.
Berman is right that there is a liberal tradition of confronting totalitarianism head-on. But its success rate is up for debate. The example of the KKK actually illustrates that the efficiency of a muscular liberal state is historically dubious. The liberal Reconstruction- ists tried to physically stamp out the first Klan in the 1860s. They failed. It vanished when it was no longer useful (and the white-supremacist Democratic Party had regained control of the South). The second Klan of the 1920s was a hugely popular mass movement that only faded away when sex and money corrupted its leadership and tarred its image. The third Klan of the 1960s was a joke and was reviled as much by conservatives as liberals. The third case better fits Berman’s template of a liberal state rooting out intolerance with the full force of the law. But arresting a handful of racist hoodlums hardly compares to confronting Osama Bin Laden’s global network. The KKK was not crushed but rather faded away. Its support was sapped by some of the forces that are at work within immigrant Muslim communities: materialism, public education, generational change, and social disapproval. Of course, effective enforcement of the law is important too.
I share Berman’s outrage at some of the injustices committed in the name of religion, but I disagree strongly with the method he would take to cure them. Muscular liberalism violates the finest principles of liberalism and threatens to produce more of the illiberalism it hopes to stop. Alas, this truth has been demonstrated in the tragic outcome of Western foreign policy. Where we have used force to bring liberal democracy, we have brought anarchy and driven terrified populations into the arms of religious extremists. We must not repeat that mistake within our own borders.
–Tim Stanley is a professor of history at the University of London and author of Kennedy vs. Carter: the 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul.
