Undercurrent
Just to gather them all in one place. Jonathan Derbyshire has a post about the vexed (especially around here – we vex the damn thing to death) matter of the, shall we say, tender-mindedness of some parts of the left toward Islamism.
There seems to me to be an essential continuity between the stance adopted towards radical Islam by the intellectual left broadly conceived (and not just the SWP), and certain of the attitudes that characterised the so-called ‘New Left’ in the 1960s, and which were brilliantly diagnosed by Irving Howe in a wonderful 1965 essay entitled ‘New Styles in “Leftism”‘…
Yes, I like Howe, and he looks better all the time. He nailed the anti-intellectual aspect of the New Left as soon as it stuck its head over the parapet. I only wish more people had paid attention. Jonathan lists some ‘characteristic attitudes’ (are they Anglo-Saxon attitudes? now cut that out! ed.) that Howe noted then and that are still with us.
Then Oliver Kamm picks up the discussion, quoting from correspondence from Jeffrey Ketland of Edinburgh University:
…it’s hard to say to what extent the anti-Enlightenment features of postmodernism and social constructivism animate the views of current far left groups, including SWP and Respect, and the occasional letter to Guardian. To some extent, there is an undercurrent of relativism and sneering towards allegedly Western notions of truth and objectivity. Alan Sokal described this undercurrent as a “weird zeitgeist” in modern academia and beyond. But I would argue that they are predominantly motivated by simple-minded hatred of the US, rather than direct sympathy for Islamic theocracy. For example, I’ve never seen political leftists directly defending Sharia law, stonings, beheadings, etc., but there’s sometimes a disturbing whiff of apologetics.
Hmm. Not Sharia law and stonings, no, but the hijab, yes. No, of course the hijab is not as bad as stonings, but it is part of the whole system of unequal laws and rules for women and men, so the passionate support for it seems – peculiar. Not to say worrying. Anyway the point about the undercurrent and the weird zeitgeist seems pretty unmistakable. If I’ve seen one sneer at alleged Western notions of objectivity, I’ve seen several. (Often in the same paragraph, actually – I’ve been reading Sandra Harding. She’s like a factory for the output of such sneers all by herself.)
In place of obviously crude biological racism, modern fascism (in the form Wolin calls ‘designer fascism’) has adopted a cultural racism that decries the achievements and principles of the Enlightenment. The astonishing spectacle of the far-Left around the Respect coalition defending the progressive character of – among other aspects of Muslim particularism – the hijab is the ‘left’ variant of the same phenomenon. I stress that we are not talking here of Muslims’ right to adopt the practices and observances of their faith, for religious liberty is an essential principle of the Enlightenment tradition. I mean instead the insistence that the character of those observances is itself a principle to be defended.
Yup. I have huge reservations about the stipulation about ‘Muslims’ right to adopt the practices and observances of their faith’ – because of course that instantly gets right back into ‘defending Sharia law, stonings and beheadings’ territory. Religious liberty covers a multitude of sins, unfortunately, so I just don’t think it’s helpful to give blanket exemptions like that. But that aside, I agree with the rest of it. The insistence that the hijab (and the attitude to women that prompts it) is actually a good thing, is…unfortunate.
And then there’s one at Crooked Timber. Chris takes issue with Ketland’s reading of Foucault:
Foucault was a difficult, obscure, contradictory and often infuriating figure. At his worst he wrote nonsense. At his best he can be profoundly unsettling to the lazier assumptions of the “Enlightenment” (with a capital E) view of the world, in a similar way to the manner in which Rousseau and Nietzsche also can disturb them. What he won’t do is provide an easy example for blogospheric divisions of the world into sheep and goats.
Me, I don’t know. As I’ve said before, I’ve read only a very little Foucault (I think the bit I read was part of the nonsense), so I don’t know if people are getting him wrong. But I don’t take the point about Foucault to have been central, and I do think Ketland is right about that undercurrent. Well obviously; what else are we about, after all.
Eh? But all those posts stipulated in one way or another that the left does not equal the SWP and vice versa. It’s not just the SWP, that’s the point (at least it’s my point). A lot of ‘the left’ seems to think that it’s of the very essence of leftism to be kind to Islam above all else. I say it isn’t. And so do secularist leftists from countries like Iran and Pakistan.
Thanks for the links though, I’ll have a look.
Yes, that pro-Enlightenment one has a good piece by Maryam Namazie.
Its an interesting discussion. I saw your comment at CT – quite restrained!
I tried to understand Foucault by reading primers and I think I get some of it. (I am just a science grad after all.) People are right to focus on his cutting loose from the anchors of ethical grounding. To my limited understanding, he seems to have applied a brilliant mind to extend the premise: “If, as I deem, it were not actually wrong to bugger boys, what does that say about the foundation and structure of our society?”
It is difficault to drop the one moral postulate (eg against sodomy)while maintaining the strength of others (eg those against judicially murdering women), because the grounding in ‘Cause God said so’ has vapourised.
It’s damn inconvenient to lose your moral grounding. For instance, we see the value that violence against women is not just an offense but deserves moral opprobrium. But dissing blacks has even more moral opprobrium, so we find it hard to approach black women’s suffering because its at the hands of black men. And of course, that of Muslim women.
I may have gone off at half-cock above, lumping B&W in with the rest of the feeding frenzy, and in a classic moment of projection, committing the error of which I have accused by opponents. Mea culpa, sorry.
Chris P – I know very little about Foucault’s work in the broadest sense, but what I hear from very clever people whom I know who have read it all is that it’s actually full of contradictions: his intellectual life was a 30-year long handbrake turn. Reducing it to ‘sodomy’ looks like a caricature to me, although I could be wrong. Taking ‘moral grounding’ to be an objective category also looks well dodgy.
Since I’m a historian, with a tendency to use in naive realism and epiricism in my work, I tend to skim _Discipline and Punish_ looking for inspiration. Most of it seems like tales of the bleeding obvious to me, but once in a while I think that MF really cuts to the heart of some of the ways why C19th modernity was different from C18th modernity.
He’s wrong about punishment, though, and as far as discipline goes, his chronology is out. For the kind of holistic view of the arrival of modernity that I’m not competent to write, I prefer those working in the tradition of Norbert Elias rather than MF (Robert van Krieken has done some useful work). But I am strictly a consumer of this stuff, and what explains the bits of society that I’m interested in may not work so well, or even at all, for other bits.
PS Sorry if these sentences are too short – I will come over all Carlyle later to compensate.
PPS Could we do a new Sokal Hoax on postmodern grammarians by writing an article that seeks to rescue the subordinate clause from the power relationship inherent in the sentence? Or has Derrida already done that?
You what? If you want progressivism raised to an excessive degree, you can get it in Hobsbawm on ‘Primitive Rebels’ and ‘Bandits’: the attempt to fit them into some kind of high road from Robin Hood to the CPSU is a wonderful, fantastic and terrific (in the old meanings of all three of those adjectives) example of the triumph of a preconceived theory over the weight of empirical evidence, in which the actual events, and the explanatory categories advanced at the time, are ruthlessly pruned and, if necessary, inflated, in order that reality might fit the mould of a deterministic reading of ‘Capital’, wherein every little thing is analysed purely, simply, and uni-dimensionally, insofar only as it relates to the inevitable emergence of the revolutionary party and thus the historically determined triumph of the proletariat under the tutelage of said vanguard party.
[140 words – is that Carlyle enough for you?]
In short, boys and girls, Wheen is wrong about Hill. If you think that ‘the society that rejected’ the Ranters was obectively saner than they were, I urge you to read Cromwell’s interventions in the case of the Quaker Naylor (or was it Biddle? I forget) pleading for a compromise solution in his blasphemy trial; that he only have his tongue split, rather than being executed. Very sane. Oliver’s position, incidentally, was probably that this was the best he could get away with, rather than a desirable outcome in its own terms.
We should indeed worry if Hill had asked us to consider the Ranters (if they existed – opinion is divided on this point) in their own terms, _without_ extending the same coutesy to other political trends of the 1650s. But he also asked us to consider the Diggers* and Levellers** in their own terms. So that’s alright.
I could go on, but will wait until requested/baited.
* actually ‘True Levellers’
** actually ‘brethren of the sea-green order, falsely called levellers’.
Yes, I was restrained, wasn’t I! A miracle.
Quite all right Chris Wms (dang there are a lot of Chrisses in this thread! takes a lot of letters to distinguish between them). And even if it hadn’t been, the interesting excursus on MF was well worth the price of admission.
I’ve always had kind of a soft spot for Christopher Hill and his view of the ranters – even though I run a mile from contemporary ranters. And I sort of take it for granted that Wheen would get Hill wrong, especially since I’ve read Wheen’s biography of Marx. Thought it was very silly.
New Sokal hoax…hmm…is that maybe what Judith Butler has been doing all this time? (Maybe I should write a playlet instead: Sandra and Judy do lunch. That would be an interesting conversation!)