Nihilism, Liberalism and Terror

[Faklon]

A (more than) relevant paper straight out of 2004.

Free to view here:

Nihilism, Liberalism and Terror


Some parts.

SINCE SEPTEMBER2001 a myth has been developing, that terrorismis a threat to liberal democracy. This is a falsehood and a dangerousone at that, for while liberal democracy is indeed under threat thecharge that terrorism is the root cause is misplaced, for it externalizes thedanger and serves to hide a much more endemic and structural threat. Toquestion the myth, however, does not mean that we cannot condemn theactivities of the emergent, global terror network, nor does it signal an inabil-ity to name the indiscriminate killing of people an absolute wrong. Weshould, however, challenge the rhetoric that categorizes these activities asevil, for this reduces any possible comprehension of actions in a way thatcondemning something as wrong does not. The rhetoric of evil automaticallyestablishes sufficient cause by imputing some essential character to theperpetrators. Evil people do evil things. To condemn something as wrong,however, does not carry its own sufficient cause; it rather leaves the causeopen to further analysis, judgement and discussion.

One interesting attempt to understand the cause of Islamist terror isPaul Berman’s Terror and Liberalism, offering an insightful interpretation of current events by tracing a genealogy of terror back to the nihilistic totali-tarianisms whose varying death cults so ravaged Europe in the first half of the 20th century; just as those movements threatened the future of liberaldemocracy, so does the emerging Islamist ‘cult of death’. But what Berman ingularly fails to do is consider the internal threat to liberal democracy,where internal does not refer simply to ‘the enemy within’ – which remainsan externalizing of the enemy – but in the first instance refers to our ownresponses to terror. In an early analysis of the American government’sresponse to the events of September 2001 Andrew Arato warned against thedraconian measures given to the US Executive, and in particular the presi-dent, to clamp down on the new threat. Among these are the 15 September Congressional resolution giving free rein to the president, the military order of 14 November introducing the use of military courts, and the USAPATRIOT Act all of which threaten to radically alter the face of Americandemocracy. ‘We must consider’, Arato wrote, ‘the precise nature of theidentity we wish to defend, and prove that there are forms of protection thatrepresent dangers equal to the explosives of our enemies’ (2002: 50).

...

It is true that liberal democracy and the fascism Berman sees in Islamistterror are diametrically opposed to each other and yet, despite Berman’simportant intervention in making the face of terror less exotic, he never-theless externalizes the threat. Berman, like many other commentators,reifies liberal democracy. They believe that because Western countries havedemocratic constitutions and institutions, that because the law guarantees a formal freedom, then democracy exists; but, while not hiding from the ideathat a form of fascism is alive and well, we must not overlook the fact thatdemocracy in the West is far from healthy.

One theorist who no doubt fits into the category of ‘new Medievalist’,and whose work might be read as an example of transnational realism, isAlain Joxe. In Empire of Disorder he writes: ‘The world today is united bya new form of chaos, an imperial chaos dominated by the imperium of theUnited States, though not controlled by it’ (p. 78). The imperial chaos Joxerefers to is that of an empire premised on the principle of deregulation. Inone sense this is the continuing response to the demise of earlier imperialforms evidenced in the varying processes and products of decolonization,but primarily it is the volatile rule of the ‘headless neoliberal power’ other-wise known as the ‘free market’ (p. 122). It is important to note that theUnited States dominates, but does not ultimately control this situation; for while transnational realism would stipulate that the United States is themost powerful national agent within the TCC and thereby the neo-liberalorder, it is the market itself that is sovereign.

This means that whilenational agents act to ensure and promote the workings of the market, it isthe governance of the market itself that is ultimately controlling. Address-ing the issue of sovereignty in the language of Thomas Hobbes rather thanthe language of the Treaty of Westphalia, the globalizing politicians of theTCC have now ceded the capacity to protect the people and deliver well-being to the ‘free market’. The belief in the curative benefits of trade isnothing new, of course. In many respects this has a long history and isintegral to the utilitarian vision of modernity as presented by Adam Smithand Jeremy Bentham. But where trade was regarded as a pacifying mediation between differing states and their economies, trade is now thesynchronization of differing zones within a single globalized economymanaged by transnational organizations. This is not to suggest that themarket exceeds the realm of human practice, it is simply to note that everynation, including the United States, is prone to suffer from the vagaries of market fluctuations, dictates from transnational organizations like the WorldTrade Organization (WTO), as well as the relocation of capital.

...

Berman argues that liberalism must defend itself against nihilism, inparticular the nihilistic death cult of Islamist terror. However, despitenumerous references to Nietzschean thought, the fact that liberal weaknesswas regarded by Nietzsche as contributing to nihilism, understood as thecollapse of an eternal truth and an absolute standard, is not dealt with inBerman’s book. Nihilism for Nietzsche was understood as a result of thedeath of God, a death institutionalized in the liberal separation of Churchand State. Liberalism, therefore, is anything but a suitable response. Theinherent pluralist and relativist impulses of liberal democratic thought canonly compound the problem of valuing as we might understand it from thewords of Zarathustra. However, according to a relatively recent reinterpre-tation of Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism, Berman may indeed havestumbled upon the requisite solution, even if his failure to question thecurrent status of liberal democratic government means his analysis remainsvery wide of the mark.

In Nihilism before Nietzsche Michael Allen Gillespie sought to showthat nihilism as presented by Nietzsche was actually a reversal of theconcept originally understood. ‘Contrary to Nietzsche’s account’, he writes,‘nihilism is not the result of the death of God but the consequence of thebirth or rebirth of a different kind of God, an omnipotent God of will’ (1995:xii). Gillespie’s analysis begins with the nominalist intervention of Williamof Ockham in the 14th century who argued that the world was contingentto its core, ‘governed only by the necessity that God momentarily impartsto it’ (1995: 17). This meant that there were no species, genera or univer-sals. There was also no such thing as a regular causality, because all causal-ity was simply an expression of God’s will, which could be changed at any time. In order to fully prevent the reduction of God to nature and hence tothe laws of science William of Ockham’s God could change both past andfuture at will, and everything in the universe was at every instant a singular expression of that will. This radical view of God’s freedom also introducedthe possibility of divine deception and a renewal of profound scepticismwith regard to human knowledge. In light of this, modernity can be under-stood as an attempt to re-appropriate this infinite will for man and his world.In particular, Gillespie notes the contributions of Descartes and Fichte here,and the Dionysian will to power is simply one further development of thisidea. For Gillespie, then, nihilism is explicitly tied to willing and is notovercome by it.

Today it is the corporate oligarchy and the market that have assumedthis position of creator, destroyer and redeemer. It is neo-liberalism as aphilosophy that is nihilistic, representing the triumph of the will over reasonand freedom. Nihilism is not so much the loss of value but the ability toimpose value, and, as Gillespie argues, it is the ability to create the worldanew through the application of an infinite will. This is very much inevidence in John Gray’s analysis of modernity mentioned above. Neo-liberalthinking, Gray argues, is deeply indebted to the prototype of secular religions that sprang out of the writings of Saint-Simon and Comte, whobelieved that scientific method would provide the single law for all humanknowledge and deliver humanity from the evils that plagued it. In this regardthe ‘vapid bureaucrats of the International Monetary Fund [...] who labour to install free markets in every last corner of the globe see themselves asscientific rationalists, but [...] are actually disciples of a forgotten cult’.

[Teutone]

Longest TA post I ever read, only because its from Faklon.

To me for my capacities very complicated read.

How Liberal-democracies gotta be defended against nihilistic totali-tarianisms is already a joke, as any authority bases its authority on values and visions therefore also islamism and nationalsocialism. If I understood it right Curtis points out that pure purpose of consumerism as unifing value of liberal-democracies is the real Nihilism.

He was if so ahead of his time.

[Faklon]

Longest TA post I ever read, only because its from Faklon.

To me for my capacities very complicated read.

How Liberal-democracies gotta be defended against nihilistic totali-tarianisms is already a joke, as any authority bases its authority on values and visions therefore also islamism and nationalsocialism. If I understood it right Curtis points out that pure purpose of consumerism as unifing value of liberal-democracies is the real Nihilism.

He was if so ahead of his time.

He mostly disses Bergman's Terror and Liberalism.

He goes deep into the Islamic/religious cause, I just posted the prologue and some things I liked (empire of disorder aka pink crusade, and the nihilistic deception).

It is, then, this conception of Islam as totality that is the key for Berman, for it is this understanding of Muslim faith that places it at oddswith liberalism. In this regard Islamist terror is not attributable to, andtherefore explained by, globalization or something akin to late capitalistimperialism, rather, it is the specific detotalizing of God’s authority, centralto liberalism, that is the chief enemy here. What Qutb sought to rescue wasthe Mosaic code that refused to separate the sacred from the secular, estab-lishing only one ultimate authority. Islam’s advantage over the other Abra-hamic religions was that the truth first revealed by Judaism had lost itsburning spirituality and had sunk into habitual action and lifeless ritual.The great break of Christianity was signalled by a rejuvenation of thespiritual dimension that had withered in Judaism. However, Christianity’sgreatest failure was its success. The conversion of the Roman Empire ledto a separation of practice and faith intolerable to any Muslim. In order tocounter Roman debauchery, Christianity invented the ascetic life and withit created a separation between religious and everyday life. For Qutb, Islamrepresented the renewal of the single authority and presence of God; it brought together the everyday and the divine, the physical and the spiritual, the scientific and the religious. Berman writes that what Islam knew to beone, the Christian Church divided into two. This is regarded to be the fountof Western misery and, one feels compelled to add, alienation; and to returnto Qutb’s variation of the ur-myth of European totalitarianism, it was this Christian schizophrenia that threatened the Islamic faith. In particular it was the separation of church and state, the liberal and Christian West’s highest political achievement, that was the greatest danger to Islam as totality, for such a society, as Qutb argued, ‘suspends God’s sovereignty onEarth’; and in Qutb’s philosophy of sacrifice and martydom in defence of the Muslim faith there is a precursor to the fanatical logic of Bin Laden’s death cult. Furthermore, both men single out Atatürk’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 as the final offensive to exterminate Islam. When BinLaden spoke on video about the September 2001 attacks he spoke of theIslamic world having suffered the same humiliation and disgrace for the last80 years. At first, Berman reports, these comments were incomprehensible,but it is only if we remember the threat noted by Qutb that the time spanof 80 years takes on any significance. Berman concludes his genealogy of Islamist fascism by linking its source to the turmoil that spawned Europeantotalitarianism.


However, his own very partial history of the Arab and Muslim world willonly encourage further ‘rationalizations’ from the left. If we take, for example, Bryan S. Turner’s (2002) five criticisms of American accounts of Islam, we can readily see the problems with Berman’s position. The criti-cisms Turner recounts are the failure to recognize affinities between Islamicand Protestant fundamentalisms; the identity of fundamentalism with tradi-tionalism; the failure to consider the heterogeneity of contemporary Islamicbelief; the failure to recognize Islam’s historical development with the West;and, finally, the persistent production of divisions according to thefriend/enemy distinction. While Berman does redress a couple of thesefailings, namely in relation to the link between Islamism, traditionalism and the role of the West, he signally fails to articulate Islamic heterogeneity,preferring the much more stark rhetoric of mass movements. And even while Berman links Islamist terror to Western philosophical sources, he still produces the division of friend and enemy (exactly like cancel culture today), and condemns the Islamic worldto a failed and perverted modernity that the West has since overcome. Weare asked to believe that the emergent mass movements, or the new deathcults, are full of fascists; that each person subscribing to suicide bombing,to murder and terror, are themselves fascists, nihilists of the highest order.There is no conception that there are very real historical, social, economicand political reasons – material reasons – why people act as they do. Whendiscussing the cruelty of Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, hardlyany mention is made of Western, and in particular US involvement. Nomention is made of the US-backed overthrow of the Iranian government in1953. This partial history is compounded by Berman’s equation of social-ism with totalitarianism, thereby erasing a complex socio-political historyof the ‘Middle East’. Primarily, one feels that his failure to recognize thisother, socialist-informed, non-totalitarian history is precisely because itsdemise was in the main precipitated by the kind of Western interferenceone would be hard pushed to call democratic. However, I do not wish tocover ground already well trodden, instead I wish to move on to Berman’sanswer to the problem.

Having offered a purely idealist assessment of the situation it is notsurprising to find that the War against Terror must be mental as well asmilitary, that is, a war of ideologies. To bring in further presidential supportfor his thesis, he invokes the Wilsonian spirit of getting ‘people to thinkalong different lines altogether – to invest their hopes in building a liberalsociety’ (p. 198), and in George W. Bush’s language of freedom he sees anelement of this ‘radical idea’. Berman writes:

Among the Washington politicians it was Bush, not anyone further to the left,who insisted on postulating women’s rights as a war aim in Afghanistan, andBush who held out the hope for liberal freedom in the Muslim world – thehope for political and social progress.


Of course, everyone on the left would support the cause of women’s rights in Afghanistan, but are we really to believe that the Afghan war was ‘thefirst feminist war in all history’ (p. 195)? The task for the left, according toBerman, is to support the hawks, but also to support and encourage this move in the ideological war in order that the Bush administration might‘turn more convincingly against the “realist” errors of the past’ (p. 208).Berman is resigned here, for he does realize that Bush will do what he willdo, but he calls on those on the left to ‘press, even so’. ‘We are the anti-nihilisits’, he concludes, ‘[i]n the anti-nihilist system, freedom for othersmeans safety for ourselves. Let us be for the freedom of others’ (p. 210).This, then, is the Gettysburg spirit that Berman sees in the language of the War against Terror, and it is this spirit that every democrat must support.

Left still meant more commie than lgbt at the time I suppose.