Creating Community: Reflections of a BCA Senior

Community exists at BCA, but it’s hard to spot under the piles of homework and intense pressure to perform. The task of the BCA student must be to unearth it.

There is a whole host of phrases someone like me – a senior with his eyes towards college – could recite to students who have another couple of years to go at BCA. Phrases like “hang in there!” Or “learn for the sake of learning!” Or “take the classes you enjoy!” And while all of these phrases are partly true, there is something else that gets lost amidst the platitudes: community - to give and teach as well as to receive and learn.

At a highly competitive school it is hard forge a sense of solidarity with fellow students. We are told, even before we know if we’ll be attending this school, to approach our peers as challengers. From the morning we walk into the auditorium to take the entrance exam to the evening we celebrate our graduation, the educational model in which we learn teaches us to think of our classmates as adversaries. This logic permeates every aspect of school life. Students begin to think: my acceptance to the college of my choice is predicated upon the rejection of my classmates by that college. Yet, it isn’t just the sinister college process that pits students against each other. The hyper-competitive ethos declares: getting an A on a test means that my peers cannot get As too. Praise of a student from a teacher must come with the censure of another student. Such an educational environment makes community impossible and construes collaboration as anathema, or even something subversive.

This kind of educational environment is oppressive, not because it is coercive or limiting, but because it demands from students constant vigilance. Every moment, every test, quiz, or project is a competition – one small battle in the fight to obtain the treasured acceptance letter from an Ivy League school. These stakes are high, so we are constantly desperate and always striving to outdo even our closest friends.

It is true that the teachers and administrators do not want us to live with such rivalry. And I’m sure they frown, just as anyone would, when students refuse collaborate out of malice – like when someone refuses to tell a friend who has just been absent what the homework was. I know the administration shudders to think that on occasion, students attempt to sabotage their peers out of fear that cooperation will limit their chances for academic success. But only the students can really change the school environment; all teachers and administrators can do is help.

For those of you with time left at BCA, the opportunity to create an intellectual community still exists. I encourage you to reject the educational paradigm that forces us to work against our peers and I urge you to promote the values of cooperation and camaraderie instead. If I knew what I know now about the college process and the rigors of BCA, I would have worked harder, not on my studies, but on cultivating a sense of community within my grade and in the broader school environment. It turned out, after all I was told by college emails, parents, test-prep books, and teachers, that my success was not at all contingent on my classmates’ failures. We all, especially this year’s senior class, did quite well. If anything, imagine what could be accomplished with greater cooperation between students. Just think: working together on homework would provide us with a ready-made social forum and a better understanding of the lessons taught in class. Study groups would make large, high stakes tests seem lest daunting and the process of studying less isolative. Sharing information about due dates for assignments and questions would alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with taking a rigorous course-load. Discussion groups for readings would enliven class time, and sharing notes would make difficult subjects less mystifying. There would be more time for wonder, research, and independent inquiry – the pillars of an intellectual community.

We achieve more, not less, when we work together. We are happier when friends and classmates aren’t enemies or teammates on an opposing team. When you are in class, look at the student next to you – friend, acquaintance, or stranger – not as an obstacle or challenger on your path to success but as a potential intellectual partner of even a confidant. Think of your fellow student as someone who can share in your journey through high school. I no longer have the ability to make this happen. But you still do.  

***

This post was originally published in the school newspaper, at http://www.academychronicle.com/opinion/creating-community-bca-senior-reflects. BCA stands for the Bergen County Academies, a public magnet high school in New Jersey.

Quotes of the Day - March 24, 2012

The next book on my reading list is A Bed for the Night by David Rieff. While I'm really enjoying the content of the book so far, I don't find his writing as smooth as, say Paul Berman's. The sentences tend to be a bit long, verging on clunky, and there are occasional Latinate flourishes that make it difficult to read. His tone is serious, perhaps even somber. Though this adds gravitas to the points he makes, it sometimes feels overdone.

Or I could simply be trying to make up excuses for why I've been reading at such a slow pace. In any event, there are a number of noteworthy passages and points Rieff makes. His insight into "humanitarianism in crisis", as he calls it, is particularly relevant given all the (digital) ink spilled about the Kony2012 campaign and Invisible Children.

Within the first five pages, Rieff tackles one of the most difficult challenges of life in a globalized time: the challenge of balancing particularism with universalism.

"But what of the Western journalist, photographer, or writer for whom, willingly or unwillingly, the dead of the World Trade Center carry more emotional and symbolic weight than the dead of Kigali, Aceh, or Kabul? We may all reject this logic of the double standard emotionally, but if we really are being honest, that includes all of us" (pg. 4). 

Given the events of the past week - the killings of innocent Afghan civilians by an American soldier and the murder of Jewish school students by an Islamic fundamentalist - the above passage is particularly resonant. The massacre in Afghanistan weighs heavily on my conscience. I feel a sense, not of responsibility, but perhaps complicity. After all, my tax dollars fund the continuing occupation of the country - an occupation that facilitated this mass murder of civilians. And I feel almost a sense of guilt for not, to paraphrase Mario Savio, throwing my body upon the gears of the machine to stop a brutal and imperialist war from continuing. Have I done enough to voice opposition to U.S. presence in Afghanistan? Could I be doing more to challenge the expansion of American military influence overseas? But at the same time, I don't viscerally mourn for the Afghan citizens the way I think I should. In terms of pure numerical significance, their deaths should weigh heavier on my conscience. But they don't. I don't feel as though I know, or that I could have known them. More importantly, I think, I simply cannot empathize with them. I cannot say, "that could've been me." But with the dead French children in Toulouse, I feel a much more emotional kind of solidarity. Rationally, I shouldn't. I know those children no better than I know the Afghanis. I have no more connection to the Jews of Toulouse than I do to the Muslims of Kabul. Yet, there is a deep, tearjerking pain that I feel when I think about the murder of those French children. They were students at a Jewish day school, just like I once was. They were killed for being Jewish, just like me. I could be them, I was them. I am them.

Rieff seems to recognize the challenge of universal solidarity, and he attempts to address the questions of: how can we feel empathy for those with whom we have nothing in common other than the fact that we are all human? Or, is the basic fact that we are all human enough for me to through off all ideological and arbitrary distinctions? Rieff responds to the questions somewhat pessimistically.

"After all, it has never been my experience that people in Somalia inquired after the fate of people in Bosnia, or people in Angola worried about people in Nagorno-Karabakh. Wounds breed self-absorption; that is simply human" (pg. 5).

He puts into two sentences what would've taken me at least an entire page to get at.

Part of what makes Rieff's critique of the current humanitarian model so trenchant is the bluntness and even cynicism of his statements.

"...[W]hat thinking person can take seriously the idea that there is any such thing as the international community? Where are the shared alues uniting the Untied Staes and China, Denmark and Indonesia, Japan and Angola that make such talk anything more than an exercise in self-flattering rhetoric?" (pg. 8).

Apart from taking another stab at the kind of universalism that has come into style among international policy elites, Rieff challenges the very value of the United Nations. The UN and the broader "international community", he seems to argue, is little more than a puppet court of which the United States is the judge, jury, and executioner. Unfortunately, such a view is a pretty accurate depiction of the truth.

"Of course there is an international order, dominated by the United States, and there are international instituions, like the United nations, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. But the reality is that the international community is a myth and a way to conceal the bad news about the present in septic sheets of piety about the future. This should be clear to anyone who considers the question of force. As Sir Brian Urquart, one of the key figures of the first four decades of the UN's existence on put it, 'if there is a world community, then who is the sheriff?' Does anyone imagine that the United Staes will act in the altruistic way such a mandate implies? And if not the United States, then who?

"The reality is that the moment one taps on the idea of the international community it falls apart like a child's broken toy" (pg. 9).

The growth of the Occupy movement inspired a debate about the role of American workers in the broader global economy. I remember hearing a teacher, or maybe it was a parent, remind everyone who would listen that though they might be part of the 99 percent in the U.S., they were certainly part of the global 1 percent. The Wall Street Journal jumped on the same idea, as I recall, publishing a link to a website that would calculate an individual's global income percentile based on the dollar value provided. My bet is that David Rieff would feel similarly about the rhetoric of the Occupy movement.

"While the best minds in the liberal West have focused on new rights and new international norms, struggled t create international tribunals and urged an end to impunity for tyrants and warlords, a 2002 World Bank study has shown that the income gap between the rich and poor worlds has been widening steadily" (pg. 15).

Charity and free medical care may address the developing world's health problems in the present. The problem is that today's conditions most certainly will not exist tomorrow.

Austerity and Dependence

Welcome to the era of the gerontocracy. Nearly all political energy is exhausted in dealing with the ramifications of the growth of one demographic: the elderly. Such a political climate was predicted a decade ago. But, now that the call for austerity measures has been issued, the American public has been asked to reckon with the facts. 

"Today the ratio of working taxpayers to nonworking pensioners in the developed world is around 3:1. By 2030, absent reform, this ratio will fall to 1.5:1, and in some countries, such as Germany and Italy, it will drop all the way down to 1:1 or even lower. While the longevity revolution represents a miraculous triumph of modern medicine and the extra years of life will surely be treasured by the elderly and their families, pension plans and other retirement benefit programs were not designed to provide these billions of extra years of payouts" (Peterson, G. Peter. Grey Dawn: The Global Aging Crisis. Foreign Affairs. Jan/Feb 1999). 

Faced with the financial crisis on one hand and this demographic crisis on the other, neoliberalism presents us with a false choice - cut education and social services for the young and the most in need and leave Medicare and Social Security untouched, or cut entitlement programs for the current generation of retirees. The choice is a false one; agreeing to any kind of cuts affirms the logic of neoliberalism and its arsenal of moral conceptions regarding debt and deficits.

The generational conflict must be acknowledged. The youth of today are going to foot the bill the profligacy of the ruling generation - a generation that includes the Baby Boomers, the first cohort of which is about to retire. Students and recent graduates already drowning in debt are being asked to pay for the continued State support of their parents, whether through taxes or cuts to public education. Yet this generational politics described by Connor Kilpatrick in this essay at Jacobin and Malcolm Harris in this essay at the New Inquiry will not be solved by fighting the elderly for the last scraps of government assistance. Such an argument does not break from the logic of neoliberalism. In fact it uses the very language of neoliberalism to make its case. To truly fight austerity and the economic order it rationalizes, we must throw out the market-based conception of "dependence". 

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of successfully fighting austerity is the continued use of "dependence" by the left. Declarations such as, "batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while" are characteristic of a reactionary argument. Indeed, Reagannites and Thatcherites provided this same rationale provided during for cutting social services during the 1980s. 


The reasoning behind portraying the elderly as dependent is as follows: since the elderly, like the unemployed, do not participate in the productive process they are not entitled to any kind of support. And, because those populations do not participate in productive life, the rest of the able-bodied population is forced to subsidize their indolence. A serious challenge to the rationale for austerity rejects the idea of dependence completely and reframes government assistance as an issue of freedom.  In an essay for the Nation last year, Corey Robin discussed how this might be done:

"We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job."

Social Security and Medicare do not abridge freedom by way of government intervention. Instead, these social welfare programs expand freedoms for the members of a polity. Social Security allows the elderly to live free from the threat of starvation, provides the elderly to move about freely despite living on a fixed income, and frees the elderly from the threatening vicissitudes of post-employment life. This kind of reasoning must be extended to all corners of economic life. Austerity measures, contrary to what Democrats and Republicans say, do not expand freedom. Placing the fates of those citizens most in need - students, the poor, and the elderly - at the mercy of the market does not enhance individual freedom; it limits it.

This mode of thought can even be extended to explain the relationship between the youth and the retired. Asking the younger generation to pay for the care, in the form of cuts to healthcare and education, absolutely constitues a curtailment of freedom. Yet, the way to prevent this state of unfreedom is not to in turn cut social services and entitlement program for the elderly. That, too, is a curtailment of freedom. The State, empowered by a democratic polity, can instead expand support for at-risk populations, in turn expanding freedom. This idea, that an expansion of social services is the answer to the problem of intergenerational conflict, is the real challenge to neoliberalism and austerity.

***

There is another component to the popular picture of generational conflict. The irony of living in a gerontocracy is that when the government is run by old people in possession of fantastic wealth - Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, John McCain, to name a few - it is easy to forget that the many older Americans are not so fortunate. Baby Boomers, from the union-shop manufacturer to the school teacher, have been also been fleeced and exploited. They, too, have seen wages stagnate, houses foreclosed on, savings wiped out, and debt increased. The response to the crisis and concomitant calls for austerity measures should not be a cry of "eat the old." It should be the cry of "eat the rich", accompanied with a hearty shout of "no one is dependent!" 

Don't fight the elderly simply because, after years of wage slavery, they finally get to step off the unceasing economic treadmill. Fight those who argue that anyone deemed "unproductive" does not have the right to a basic level of social security. Challenge the idea that people are only of value to society when they have productive potential. If neoliberalism is an economic model that awards power to those with the fattest wallets, fight for an economic paradigm that insures everyone has an equal ability and equal resources to engage in the political process.

It is true that the young have been made to bear a disproportionate burden of the austerity measures that have come out of the financial crisis, and that they will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Students and recent graduates are paying for the profligacy of the bankers  and the ruling class in the form of cuts to public education. These same students, in the event that they find a job, will then pay for those same profligate bankers to retire, while the students, when they grow old, will not have the luxury of that same kind of safety-net. All of this is tremendously distressing and reason enough to take to the streets. But, at the same time, the pensioned factory worker or school teacher is not the enemy; they are partners in the fight to alter the status quo that forces us to make the false choice - to side with either the youth or the aged. When you face off with the police in during the next occupation, remember to stand side-by-side with your parents, not face-to-face against them.

A Brief Foray Into Religion - Ritual Without Belief: What is it Good For?

A teacher once told me that my refusal to pray was childish. My insistence on believing in the literal meanings of the word I said when I prayed, he argued, was immature. The ability to say the prayers and recognize their inherent contradictions, but still say them was, for him, the mark of maturity. A child cannot live with contradiction; he or she demands complete logical and moral consistency. Yet an adult - a mature and reasonable person - can live with contradiction and cognitive dissonance. Yes, a contradiction arises when one observes ritual without believing in god. However, a truly mature person has the capacity to deal with that contradiction, and thus practices ritual anyway.

At the time, this sounded reasonable. It made the case for practicing ritual without belief fairly well. But I soon wanted something more certain, something more purposeful. If I wasn't going to engage in ritual observance for a deity, I wanted to do it for a reason. Ritual observance, I decided, would only be worth practicing if it was responsible for the genius of the "non-Jewish Jew." To this end, I found counsel in an article by an old socialist writer and historian.

In Isaac Deutscher's "Message of the Non-Jewish Jew", he defines the "non-Jewish Jew" as someone who transcends Jewry, and in many instances rejects it, while still belonging to a Jewish tradition. Deutscher argues that major thinkers of Jewish descent - Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxembourg, and Trotsky - were able to revolutionize the fields of philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics because of their special positions on the margins of society.

"They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs...They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respsecive nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thoguht above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons far into the future."

This unique place of the Jew in society that Deutscher describes is attained through ritual observance. Jewish ritual observance in the diaspora is a kind of self-ghettoization - a form of separation from surrounding society. The Jew is part of society, as he participates economically and socially in the country and community in which he lives. Yet, at the same time, the Jew is recognized as different and separate from the dominant religious group or even nationality. He is set apart by the laws of kashrut and by the obligation to keep the Sabbath, among many other things.  This allows Jews to be "each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it." By virtue of this in-and-out dualism, the aforementioned "non-Jewish Jews"  had all this in common, "that the very conditions in which they lived did not allow them to reconcile themselves to ideas which were nationally or religiously limited." Ritual observance is what places the Jew on the borderlines of civilizations- part of one society, but at the same time not truly part of that society.

The separateness of the Jew from society allows him to critique and challenge, and perhaps even alter society and its institutions."Those who are shut in within one society, one nation, or one religion tend to imagine that their way of life and their way of thought have absolute and unchangeable validity and that all that contradicts their standards is somehow 'unnatural,' inferior or evil. Those on the other hand, who live on the borderlines of various civilizations comprehend more clearly the great movement and the great contradictoriness of society." The Jew who transcends his Judaism is thus perfectly equipped to comprehend and reorder society.

The rationale for ritual practice without belief and continued Jewish text study is that it is necessary for the creation of future social critics and figures who are willing to challenge and eventually alter the status quo. I now have reason to observe religious tradition without believing in a word I say when I daven. But more curiously, I now have reason to be concerned about Jewish continuity. If knowledge of tradition, texts, and ritual is eroded, from where will the next great "non-Jewish Jewish" thinkers come?

Quotes of the Day - March 16, 2012

I read Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler, today. It was a nice change from my usual focus on non-fiction, and I thoroughly enjoyed the philosophical debates so neatly incorporated into the book's prose. That said, there were a few clunky metaphors here and there, and one or two instances of hyperbole taken too far. I recommend reading the book in a single day or sitting, since it is short enough to get through in a single sitting and since it's power is best felt when one is immersed in the text. Being a work of fiction, Darkness at Noon has fewer passages I want to highlight on philosophical or political grounds, but there are a few. There are also a few passages so well written I could not resist highlighting them.

As a likely history major in college (when I finally escape from the doldrums of high school), I've always found the description of History (yes, capital "H" in the Marxist sense) as a science strange. The explanation of history is a matter of interpretation, not a study of scientific fact. Koestler's comparison between history and astronomy points out this strangeness.

"That was probably the reason that history was more of an oracle than a science. Perhaps later, much later, it would be taught by means of tables and statistics, supplemented by such anatomical sections. The teacher would draw on the black board an algebraic forumla representing the conditions of life of the masses of a particular nation at a particular period: 'Here, citizens, you see the objective factors which conditioned this historical process'" (pg. 17).

I mentioned this before in one of my posts on To the Finland Station - what attracts me to Marxism is the idea that one can interact with history. It is possible to fuel the engine of historical change.

"'Certainly,' said Rubashov. 'A mathematician once said that algebra was the science for lazy people - one does not work out x, but operates with it as if no knew it. In our case x stands for the anonymous masses, the people. Politics mean operating with this  x without worrying about its actual nature. Making history is  to recognize x for what it stands for'" (pg. 85).

With such an uplifting and inspirational tenor, this passage reminds of me of a song that seems to embrace the idea of making history. (Make Your Own History, by Stray from the Path)

I recently had a discussion with a friend about the obligations of the currently existing, living generations to the generations of the future. He asked, is it worth making the world better for a generation that has yet to be born if this entails making life for the living generations more difficult? We went back and forth for a while, and I was reminded of Natasha Lennard's piece in the latest issue of the New Inquiry. In it, she discusses how certain strands queer theory challenge the child- and future-centric nature of policy and all forms of society. In Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, too, weighs in on this issue through his character of Rubashov, the aging revolutionary now put on trial for betraying the revolution.

"Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that it's average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. The people's standard of life is lower than it was before the Revolution; the labour conditions are harder, the discipline is more inhuman, the piece-work drudgery worse than in colonial countries with native coolies" (pg. 162).

Not only does the above passage assert that no, it is not worth immiseration of the living generations in order to provide the potential of a better life to the generations to come. For Rubashov, and other revolutionaries, the Revolution represents the promise of that better life for future generations; it has not yet been realized, and in order to realize it, significant sacrifices must be made. Rubashov's heresy - just one of many - is that he rejects the idea that the present must be made miserable in order to make the future better.

One of the remarkable things in Koestler's writing is the way he captures the brutal logic of the State establishment. Ivanov, Rubashov's initial prosecutor, lays out the chilling moral calculus that underlies the foundation of the totalitarian state.

"Yes, we liquidate the parisitic part of the peasantry and let it die of starvation. It was a surgical operation which had to be done once and for all; but in the good old days before the Revolution just as many died in any dry year - only senselessly and pointlessly. The victims of the Yellow River floods in China amount sometimes to hundreds of thousands. Nature is generous in her senseless experiments on mankind. Why should mankind not have the right to experiment on itself" (pg. 165)?

An orthodox adherent to the faith of the Revolution, Ivanov believes that death, if achieved with the purpose of furthering the Revolution, is more meaningful than death due to natural causes. Thus, those who die due to political experimentation should be considered lucky; they died for a reason rather than at the hands of indifferent Nature. This kind of reasoning is dangerous, as thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Sir Isaiah Berlin have noted. The glorification and worship of death characteristic of totalitarian regimes, be it Nazi or Stalinist, make stopping tyranny difficult; adherents to the governing ideology are ready and willing to die to protect the cause. Likewise, there is no cost too great if there is an objective moral goal. If the Revolution and the realization of emancipatory existence is the end, all means are justifiable, regardless of cost or impact on other people. An ideology that imbues death with a sense of purpose therefore justifies endless suffering.

To address philosophical matters in the novel, Koestler employs a nice, though not necessarily original technique. He begins several chapter with excerpts from Rubashov's prison diaries; these writings provide an intellectual backdrop to the plot. In one of these excerpts, Koestler appears to address the problem of revolutionary politics - democracy has a tendency to retard revolutionary progression.

"The maturity of the masses lies in the capacity to recognize their own interests. This, however, presupposes a certain understanding of the process of production and distribution of goods. A people's capacity to govern itself democratically is thus proportionate to the degree of its understanding of the structure and funding of the whole social body" (pg. 170). 

A vanguard, then, is needed until the people attain the proper level of consciousness to understand the processes of production and distribution. The need for the vanguard, or some variant of a dedicated intellectual revolutionary cadre (maybe an epistemic community), is compounded by the constant change in conditions of the post-industrial age.

"Now, every technical improvement creates a new complication to the economic apparatus, causes the appearance of new factors and combinations, which the masses cannot penetrate for a time. Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses as a step behind and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer" (pg. 171).

A more apt way to descrive the "political-maturity thermometer" is to view it as a measure of mass-political elasticity. How significantly does political behavior given a change in the conditions of production. Of course, such a metric could not exist, but it certainly is interesting to think about. For Rubashov, once the measure of mass-political elasticity is perfectly inelastic, the masses are mature enough for democracy.

"When the level of mass consciousness catches up with the objective state of affairs, there follows inevitably the conquest of democracy, either peaceably or by force. Until the next jump of technical civilization...again sets back the masses in a state of relative immaturity and renders possible or even necessary the establishment of some form of absolute leadership" (pg. 171). 

During an exchange with another prisoner, in which messages are tapped in a form of code on the walls of prison sells, Rubashov challenges the reactionary and aristocratic conceptions of honor with a simple and perhaps admirable phrase:

"Honor is to be useful without vanity" (pg. 177).

If only we could all incorporate even just a small sense of that sentiment into our daily lives. Things would be much different.

Quotes of the Day - March 8, 2012

I finished Power and the Idealists last night, but I didn't have time to write about my favorite passages and  quotes. The second half of the book is fantastic (the book itself has become one of recent favorites). I found myself dog-earring nearly every page, so at one point I chose to highlight only the very most noteworthy or important passages, which, of course, turned out to be nearly half the book.

One of things I like so much about Paul Berman is his ability to see across ideological divides and recognize the similarities between ideologies that at first glance seem opposed to each other. In the chapter "The Muslim World and the American Left", Berman points out the similarities between religious social conservatism and tiers-mondiste Marxism.

"But Nafisi's description of classroom debate suggests eomthign else. The diatribe by this one student, holding up his copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald criminal text, is not at all a seventh century speech, nor a speech by a peasant from the hills, herding his goats...This speech enunciates some of the principles established by the extreme right in Europe long ago - the notion of an authentic culture under insidious attack by evil cultural forces from abroad" (pg. 162). 

"Then again, these ideas have sometimes made themselves perfectly at home on the Marxist left, in a different version. Mike Gold was F. Scott Fitzgerald's contemporary and rival, and in the early nineteen thirties Gold used to issue literary interdictions in precisely this condemnatory spirit on behalf of the American Communist Party - to maintain the proletarian purity of the slum-dwellers and factory workers, and to rescue revolutionary ideas from bourgeois contamination. Even the sexual imagery in the Iranian student's classroom speech - 'a rape of our culture' strikes a familiar note" (pgs. 162-3).

In the same vein, Berman points out the ideological parochialism in which the students of the New Left found themselves immersed during their infatuation with Maoism.

"American New Leftists cited Mao Zedong's 'taks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art', a much-thumbed essay in its time. (This is the essay where Mao asks, 'Literature and art for whom?' and ends up by calling for the destruction of 'feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualistic, nihilistic, art-for-art's sake, aristocratic, decadent or pessimistic, and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and the proletariat.')" (pg. 163).

Maybe this puts me off because of my affinity for "bourgeois" art or because I want so desperately to see a revived version of Socialisme ou Barbarie. But, I really have a hard time getting behind Mao's statement. Without waxing philosophical about the inherent beauty of art, I think it's sufficient to say that a world in which all art is directed towards the singular task of "revolution" would be a very monochromatic world.

Berman again takes a shot at certain segments of the radical Left when he discusses the similarities between the Left's fetishism of insurrection and the Right's fetishism of the glory days of yore. That is, both the far Left and Right have the tendency to become violently infatuated with fantasy.

"Fantasy role-playing, it occurs to me, is the defining quality of all totalitarian movements and systems - role-playing by totalitarian militants who feel entirely justified in liquidating everyone who fails to have a proper role in the grand tableau of the reigning mythology" (pg. 164).

Burrowing deeper into territory covered by Hannah Arendt in the Origins of Totalitarianism, Berman even hints at the problems of vanguardism - it is predicated upon a kind of condescension that implies the ignorance or weakness of the general population. It's a violent kind of elitism, in short.

"That is why the totalitarians always end up slaughtering masses of people - out of frustration at the huma race's stubborn refusal to be anything but the human race, and out of the lust for thrills, and out of a realization that only in death can the mythic universe be fully achieved" (pg. 170).

 Through his discussion of the work and thought of Kanan Makiya, Berman nicely points out the value of the Enlightenment.

"Makiya went on, 'We in the Middle east had taken over certain themes from the West wholesale - Germanic nationalism, Marxism, the imperative toward industrialization - but we'd never experienced the Enlightenment, in which these themes needed to be grounded if they were going to make any real sense" (pg.178).

I always get a big frustrated when certain Leftists attempt to argue that the Enlightenment was just another page in the book of bourgeois, patriarchal domination. Whether or not the title of heirs to the Enlightenment has been taken by opponents of progress and an egalitarian society, it's still necessary to acknowledge the intellectual heritage of today's flavors of Leftism.

Slavoj Zizek often refers to (like in this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpAMbpQ8J7g) Soviet communism as the greatest moral catastrophe - greater than Nazism, because at least with the fascists you knew things were going to be horrific. With the Soviets you were told there would be utopia, but in reality there was exactly the opposite. Since I feel a kind of personal connection to left-wing history, it always upsets me when atrocities are committed in the name of ideals to which I am sympathetic. Berman, again while discussing Makiya's Republic of Fear, neatly describes this feeling" (pg. 182).

"So here again...was a book by somebody who had enlisted in the left-wing student movements of circa 1968 in order to fight against imperialism and capitalism - only to stumble on the existence of another kind of oppression, which was even worse, and which he knew from his own experience and not merely from his readings."

I typically describe myself as a libertarian leftist - opposed to both the tyranny of the market and the tyranny of the state - so I've always been sympathetic to the work of Socialism ou Barbarie. That Sartre thought it necessary to disparage them is certainly disappointing. There is a tendency on the Left, as there is in most ideological camps, to limit the diversity of thought and criticism. Sartre's behavior is a perfect example.

"Sartre attacked the libertarian left of the nineteen-fifties as 'dirty rats,' referring to the Socialism or Barbarism comrades, who were busily trying to reveal Stalinism for what it was; and Sartre's reading public, which was vast, turned away from the dirty rats" (pg. 183).

It's fairly common for Americans to consider Islamic fundamentalism to be an antiquated notion, one that conjures up images of Saladin and the defeats of the crusades. For those in more Jewish milieus, like the one in which I've been raised, Islamic fundamentalism carries with it a similar old-world connotation. So, I was totally surprised to see Berman, by way of Azar Nafisi (here's the article he quotes: http://www.tnr.com/article/muslim-allies-septmember-11-taliban-islam ) describe Islamic fundamentalism as a modern conception.

"In that same February 2003, Nafisi published an essay in the New Republic making a simple observation: 'What we call Islamic fundamentalism, for lack of a better word, is a modern phenomenon, in the same way fascism and Communism, both products of the West, are modern'" (pg. 190). 

A significant portion of the anti-imperialist Left exploded when Christopher Hitchens used the phrase "fascism with an Islamic face" to describe Islamic fundamentalism, but I think it's a remarkably apt description; it puts Islamic fundamentalism into the proper context and "deorientalizes" it. Islamic fundamentalism, then, no longer appears as a caricature of traditional Islam taken to the extreme. Rather, it is seen as it it truly is - a synthesis of totalitarianism with the theocratic currents of Islam and as an unequivocally modern construction.


The other insight that, when revealed, nearly made me exclaim out loud, was the description of Daniel Cohn-Bendit's comparison between the U.S.'s Bush Doctrine and the grandiosity of the Bolsheviks.

"'You want to change the whole world!' he said. "Like them, you claim that history will show that truth is on your side. You want the world to follow the American dream, and you believe that you know what is best for ... all other countries.' Here was arrogance. 'Because you are Americans, you have the biggest army in the world - you can do anything you want. This is revolutionary hubris'" (pg. 195).

With all the mendacity and veiled imperial aspirations, Bush Doctrine era U.S. rhetoric and the rhetoric of the Bolsheviks do indeed seem remarkably familiar, not to mention the fact that many of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration owed their intellectual foundations to the work of ex-Trotskyites like Irving Kristol.


Perhaps it is just the exalting tone in which Berman discusses Kouchner, but I found myself genuinely admiring the former French foreign minister. I'm certainly not a fan of Kouchner's preference for hierarchy, but I somehow associate with his former self a kind of pragmatic leftism that is sorely needed right now.

"But Kouchner remained a little skeptical on some other outcomes of the uprisings and the countercultural spirit. Maybe his own leftism always retained a few habits and assumptions of a slightly earlier age, pre-'68 - a leftism that insisted on being practical, more concerned with measurable consequences, less interested in mere attitudes and styles" (pg. 226).

I also chose to highlight the above quotation because it seems to me to be a subtle criticism of the "lifestylism" that resulted as the revolutionary momentum from '68 waned. Though maybe not the what Berman means by describing Kouchner's leftism as practical, I see it as the reasonable but still radical counterweight to the old maxim of "turn on, tune in, drop out" - which brought nothing constructive to the campaigns for socioeconomic justice during that time.


Lenin famously slandered Left-communism as "an infantile disorder." I think the same can be said for left-wing tribalism and left-wing sympathies for Arab nationalism in particular; it completely defies the corner stone of the Left - internationalism.

"The ancient left-wing principle that used to go under the name of internationalism showed no concern at all for the integrity of duly constituted states. 'Workers of the world' meant workers without borders" (pg. 244).

Internationalism desperately needs to be reemphasized. Leftists marching alongside Islamic fundamentalists or locking arms with totalitarian nationalists is, if anything, a sign of a very "infantile disorder." In recounting the debate between Cohn-Bendit and Kouchner, Berman puts this pointedly.

"The mass marches against the war, the placards, the slogans, the chanting crowds - every last aspect of this movement reminded him of the grossest errors of the left-wing past. 'In our generation,' [Kouchner] told Cohn - Bendit, 'antiwar marches used to offer protection to the worst Stalinist regimes, the most frightening massacres, and because of this, I wouldn't let myself take part anymore - nor would you, Danny. God knows how often we heard people shout, "Down with Bush!" But I didn't hear even the tiniest cry, "Down with Saddam!" And let's not even mention - or rather, we had better mention - the anti-semitic incidents" (pg. 265).

From now on, every mention of ANSWER will remind of the above passage.

I shall close this post with the words of Joschka Fischer, who so eloquently explained the necessity for alter-globalization, rather than anti-globalization. Anti-globalization carries with it a sense of opposition to progress and a rejection of the need to expand civil liberties for all people. And, after all, we cannot halt globalization, we can only attempt to change it; anti-globalization promises us nothing, while alter-globalization promises the co-option of the very mechanisms that seek to co-opt expressions of liberty.

'"It depends,' he said at Princeton, 'even more on the globalization of fundamental values, such as human rights, respect for life, religious and cultural tolerance, the equality of all human beings, of men and women, the rule of law and democracy and a share of the blessings of education, progress and social security...positive globalization is the real strategic response to the deadly challenge of a new totalitarianism" (pg. 285).

Quotes of the Day - March 4, 2012

The next book on my reading list is Power and the Idealists, by Paul Berman. I decided to read it after a debate with an uncle of mine about humanitarian interventionism. I argued that while well-intentioned, humanitarian intervention has tended to exacerbate conflicts rather than end them and that, more often than not, humanitarian intervention is used a pretext for the expansion of military power. My uncle framed the debate in purely ethical terms; if you have the ability to stop a massacre you are morally obligated to do so. So, I had a general idea of what the book was going to be about. That said, now that I'm halfway through the book, Berman covers a lot of material that I did not expect to see. With a fast-paced, journalistic tone and occasional humorous flourishes, Berman deftly describes the transformation of the radicals of '68 and the New Left into the champions of liberal intervention on the world stage. And, over the course of the first two chapters, he provides a stinging critique of left-wing anti-Zionism and a humorous take on contemporary American conservatism among other noteworthy points that I have highlighted below.

Berman characterizes well the conservative fear of the moral bankrupting of America by spooky academic liberal elites. For the Right, and probably for for David Brooks, too,

 "The American public seemed to have sunk into a swamp of moral indifference, even depravity. Right and wrong had disappeared into a marshy haze. And the conservatives grew wide-eyed in astonishment and horror."

Berman's description of the non-terrorist New Left is harsh. It paints the activists of '68 as silent accomplices in the wave of left-wing terror that gripped Europe in the 1970's. His description also verges on a criticism of lifestylism.

"They were not entirely resistant to the terrorist argument. So they dithered....they labored at building their communes, kindergartens, food co-ops, new gender relations, and other elements of the new Left utopia in its countercultural version. Or else they followed the retro-Marxist example and colonized the factories in search of proletarian followers. They mooned nostalgically over the anarchosyndicalist vision of a revolutionary general strike" (pg. 52).

The last line jumped out at me. As May 1st grows nearer and talk about a general strike seeps into the mainstream media (See this Salon article). Berman's mocking tone frustrates me. A general strike, however unrealistic it is to hope for a complete halt to all business on a single day, could have intense localized effects. Even if only one factory is taken over, or one business shut down, that is a small victory that can propel the movement forward.


As much as I try to avoid Israel nowadays, it always seems to find me. I've argued for years now, with friends and family, about the distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Yet, in describing the Left's post-1967 backlash against Israel, Berman shows that there is, regrettably, an often blurry line between the two.

"The 1967 war, in which the Israelis seized a lot of land, seemed to confirm Israel's imperialist nature. The Soviets became fierce enemies of Zionism. Palestinian Marxists stepped forward. Soviet resources poured in. And, under those circumstances, the New Left came up with one more interpretation of the Middle Easter conflict, in which the New Left's vision of a lingering Nazism of modern life was suddenly reconfigured, with Israel in a leading role. Israel became the crypto-Nazi state par excellence, the purest of all examples of how Nazism had never been defeated but had instead lingered into the present in ever more cagey forms. What better disguise could Nazism assume than a Jewish state" (pg. 54).

Of course, to describe Israel as a Nazi state is utterly preposterous. It is not possible to compare the actions of the Nazis to the occupation of the West Bank. Israel may be an oppressive, even apartheid state, but it is certainly not a reincarnation of Hitler's Germany. The great irony of left-wing sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and thus opposition to Israel, is that by opposing Israel for being Nazi-like, the Left puts itself quite literally in the same camp as people who themselves are Nazi-like - Islamic fundamentalists (or Islamofascists) and even Neo-Nazis themselves.

"He found himself in a military training ground where, in one part of the camp, European leftists singing left-wing songs received their anti-Zionist military training, and, in another part, European fascists singing fascist songs received their own anti-Zionist military training" (pg. 55).

I have no love for the French New Philosophers, but Glucksmann's attempts to create a new and coherent set of political ideas out of the antiquated Marxism of both the old and New Left is certainly something admirable.

"[H]e set about trying to construct a new set of political ideas. That was his project. He did this in three big steps between 1975 and the early nineteen eighties. His first step, in the mid-seventies, was to give up on his old-fashioned anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, the fundamentals of the left, in favor of what he began to call antitotalitarianism" (pg. 67).

Today, the Left is in need of revitalization more than ever. The resonance of Occupy Wall Street has provided a certain spark to segments of the political left, but it remains as disparate and factionalized as ever. Every ideological subgroup, from the insurrectionary anarchists to the social democrats, compete for scraps of political power. As much as I loath to admit it, a strong and well organized party, well-grounded in theory, might be the antidote to the Left's chronic disorganization.