Left in dark times
by Robert Philbin
[ bookreviews ]
Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism, French intellectual Bernard-Henry Lévy's highly personal insurgency into the psychological ethos of the Left, makes for a mostly entertaining read, albeit one which raises more tension along the mythic American Left than it will ever likely resolve.
A globalism of the Left exists, we assume - an international point of view aspiring toward a relatively more humane future for all of us, a political vision focused on reducing inhumanity in all its authoritarian forms, but one with starkly different critiques within starkly different cultures.
Any history of expanded political rights is more circuitous than linear, particularly when "progress" and "progressive politics" are defined pragmatically, as opposed to more abstract arguments, like, left vs right, or liberal vs conservative. We Americans are about to surge progressively, or so we like to think.
While M Lévy denies the existence of any abstract "dialectic" - one of many interesting assertions - there is usually a middle way, a synthesis of sorts in most political confrontations, and frequently it is the centrist activist who provides the more pragmatic resolution to social conflict. One agrees with M Lévy, we need demand a more aggressive agenda against what he calls "evil," which means we Americans cannot afford to compromise with a failed status quo, nor permit an exiting, utterly failed Bush administration to extend its influence under the guise of economic crisis management. There is every reason to conclude this administration's economic crisis management will prove no more competent now than it did in New Orleans following Katrina.
Can a French philosopher's reflection on his intellectual journey shed any light on American dilemmas, Bernard-Henry Lévy asks. Well, the answer is both yes and no.
His personal history is interesting, a refreshing narrative covering the last century or so; but it's also limiting, confined to an inescapable cultural gestalt rooted in his past, at a time when progressive Americans are prepared for an adventure of a entirely different sort, namely a bold step into the great unknown of realizing some new, progressive American future.
We have no choice now but to look forward, the past, as we see in the daily secretly shifting "bailout" strategies in Washington and Wall Street, is becoming a distraction, even as American public expectations have become huge, generational, and infused with optimism. The election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will not end racism in America or Europe, but it certainly marks the end of an era in the United States.
Humane political progress is historic, ever-expanding with the species, and global because it is firmly rooted in human nature, human empathy, from which emerges an obvious ethos of human rights - and this is perhaps what Lévy means when he refers to the "universal" even as he raises his fundamental question:
"Are human rights Western or universal? Does their Western birth mean that they are strictly limited to their original home - or are they natural rights that can therefore be called upon to migrate beyond their birthplace?"
This is rhetorical at best. Lévy's concept of the universally humane, well argued in his book, particularly the discourse on Darfur, is also a product of the fundamental human condition, as in natural selection, which is actually closer to Rousseau and Darwin, and not necessarily the prerogative of the Left in any culture on the planet.
One also has to struggle parsing through Lévy's concept of "evil" as a force somehow abstracted from an act of human will. This is one of the difficulties of Lévy's polemic: he argues passionately, eloquently, deploying a highly personal vocabulary, which in translation, can be both brilliant and perplexing, as in this brief, evangelical elucidation of post colonial atrocities:
"How can we keep faith with the memory of the anticolonial movement while still dismissing those fools who, in the name of that same faith, cannot imagine the very idea that decolonized peoples might themselves be dabbling in forms of barbarism, casting those who are shocked by such barbarisms into the abyss of neocolonial ideology and nostalgia?"
Yes, all people are capable of great good and great harm. Lévy writes here from the perspective of the guilty colonizer, while most Americans presume the act of colonization and the offending colonial entity are illegitimate powers to be revolted against. The sins of American colonialism (or neocon imperialism), like the invasion and occupation of Iraq, are viewed by Americans as mistakes, to be corrected as, "the situation on the ground permits." Americans are no different nor less chauvinistic than anybody else.
The American Left has railed long and hard against the war in Iraq, but it is the more moderate, centrist, Obama Campaign which prevailed this November. It remains to be seen how a President Obama will locate the center of the American political maelstrom in the coming year, but expectations run very high among global progressives. America can lead again. Or not.
To this American reader, M Lévy's narrative is highly subjective, flamboyant, moving, yet culturally distant from the personal and historic development of the American Left over the last century or so. There are many points of contact along the parallel histories of the European and American movements, but there are fundamental points of divergence as well. In Lévy's elegant arguments for his "born again" global Left, that mutual history begins with Rousseau:
"It all started with Rousseau," Levy writes. "It all started with that unprecedented book called The Social Contract, whose thesis provoked - first in France and then in Europe - a thrill, a shock, almost a spiritual earthquake... All people needed was a "general will" to create society? All people needed was to say "We want to be joined into a society: we don't have anything in common but we've decided to join together" for such an association to exist and take effect?"
Rousseau's shock in 1763 reverberated right into the heart of the US Declaration of Independence (and later the US Constitution) not to mention the more than 100 declarations of independence written around the world since 1776. The common ground of European Enlightenment becomes Lévy's "universal" because its appeal seems innate to the species, regardless the cultural context, and the American Revolution validated it, gave it political purpose and a reality in a world soon, "to be joined into a society."
Given the confused and weakened state of the American progressive movement in recent decades, however, it's both healthy and informative to be reminded by Lévy that these common Euro-American progressive roots can actually blossom into a new global Left, but it also smacks of a forced intellectual category of thought, uniquely French, slightly nostalgic in this postmodern state of global transition.
Can anything ever be so politically simple again?
The difficulty with Rousseau today is that many social contracts aren't contracts at all, but more gangster dictates or enforced illusions, propaganda machines structured to suppress or pervert the innately humane surge toward anarchy, equality, justice, in the face of fascist attempts to maintain global wealth and power elites.
There is nothing new or subtle about authoritarian injustices; it is obvious and easy to judge the inhumanity of the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, or to recall the Cambodian horrors, even as suppression exists in many guises in warped political, cultural, and religious structures around the planet right now. Progressive politics is always a relative cultural gambit as best. "Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them," Paul Valéry wrote after World War II.
Even at this exuberant moment in America history, it is premature to welcome the end of an era of unprecedented greed and barbarism as prelude to some unclear future of personal, ethical, and national rejuvenation. Is America's current "transition" from one political administration to another an indication of an historic shift to the Left?
Is the American Left ascending or is the current grossly mismanaged governmental infusion of public funds to failed financial institutions, venture capitalists, and second rate manufacturing corporations, indicative of an even more refined American corporatism, something even further to the right of the ruling neocons?
Speaking at a Wall Street Journal CEO seminar last week, Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's chief of staff, asked the business community to work with him to take advantage of what he called "the unique opportunities that crisis brings, the ability to do big things you couldn't otherwise do in normal times." Should we not be reminded of Milton Friedman's alliance with Pinochet in Chile? Or Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and disaster capitalism at work in collapsing New Orleans and Baghdad?
As much as one wants to accept it, Lévy's call to arms among the global Left loses this reader when he critiques American progressives like Klein, Noam Chomsky, even former US president Jimmy Carter. While Lévy doesn't fully articulate his arguments with these dissidents, it appears the nexus of his disdain rests in "irrational criticism of Israel" and "anti-Semitism" - volatile issues for sure, but largely irrelevant to mainstream Americans at the moment.
Anti-Semitism in the European sense doesn't run very deep in American culture - which is not to say that it, like racism, doesn't exist, but rather that such hate crimes simply cannot rise to the level of cultural permeation in America as it did in Europe in previous generations.
It is not useful for Lévy to link these issues to Americans like Carter or Chomsky, because anyone familiar with their work will simply dismisses the argument as emotional, extreme, and unfounded propaganda. Chomsky, for example, has been historically and intellectually clear for decades on his position vis a vis the Israeli right and the Palestinian people, and it is obvious to any observer that Chomsky's opposition to the former has never approached anything remotely racial or religious. On the contrary, his arguments are rooted in progressing humanity, precisely M Lévy's objective in Left in Dark Times.
Chomsky is a consummate intellectual critic of the failures of government, particularly in the American experience, and it is simply preposterous to accuse him of "denying the gas chambers," as Lévy implies when he writes, "there is Chomsky's preface to Robert Faurisson's book denying the existence of the gas chambers - not merely a preface but a defense as well." [p39]
Tangents aside, Lévy informatively explores the larger questions confronting solidarity on the global left - inequity of wealth, human rights, social justice, the challenge to science raised by religious fundamentalism, and lingering racism in the rise of cultural supremacy, a visage of colonialism implied in American neocon imperialism.
There is some opposition to Lévy's "universal" however. Sam Harris, American critic of faith based politics, recently advocated a coming, "scientific justification of cultural moral superiority" - I'm paraphrasing here from memory of his lecture, and Harris said he couldn't prove it yet; but his point is clear, there will emerge scientific proof that one culture is de facto morally superior or inferior to another, which might fundamentally challenge Levy's notion of a global left rooted in a cultural "universal."
Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism is an important and provocative book, from a remarkable thinker and activist.
