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What about the apparent absurdity of the ideas of dignity, freedom and reason being sustained by extreme military discipline, including the practice of discarding weak children? This apparent absurdity is just the price of freedom - “Freedom is not free,” as it is said in the film. Freedom is not something given, but rather is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. The ruthless military discipline of the Spartans is not just the opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy”; it is its inherent condition and lays the foundation for it.
True freedom is not freedom of choice made from a safe distance; it is not like choosing between a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake. True freedom overlaps with necessity - one makes a free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence. One does it because one cannot do otherwise. When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, it is phrased not as, “You are free to choose,” but, “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?” No wonder all early modern egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins, admired the Spartans and imagined republican France as a new Sparta. There is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline that survives once you subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule - the ruthless exploitation of slaves, and so on. No wonder Trotsky described the Soviet Union in the difficult years of “war communism” as a “proletarian Sparta”.
Soldiers are not bad per se but soldiers mobilised by nationalist poetry are. There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. Why? Because we live in an era that perceives itself as post-ideological. Given that great public causes no longer have the force to mobilise people for mass violence, a larger sacred cause is needed, one that makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial.
Religion fits this role perfectly, and so does ethnic belonging. There are instances of pathological atheists being capable of committing mass murder just for pleasure but they are rare exceptions. The masses need to be anaesthetised against their elementary sensitivity to the suffering of others and, for this, a sacred cause is needed. Religious ideologues claim that, whether its dogmas are true or not, religion can make otherwise bad people do some good. Yet, as Steven Weinberg has argued, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, but only religion can make good people do bad.
Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. It was rather sensible advice, however, at least when judged from the vantage point of the post-Yugoslav experience, in which ethnic cleansing was prepared by the dangerous dreams of poets. True, Slobodan Milosevic “manipulated” nationalist passions but it was the poets who provided him with the raw material that lent itself to manipulation. They - the sincere poets, not the corrupted politicians - were at the origin of it all when, back in the 1970s and early 1980s, they started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism not only in Serbia but also in other Yugoslav republics.
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LRB Throwback: What do Iran, Kung Fu Panda, Niels Bohr and Silvio Berlusconi have in common?
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’
Berlusconi in Tehran, Slavoj Zizek. From the London Review of Books, July 2009.
"To be around him is to be privy to a gregarious, open-ended address on, well, take your pick: Shostakovich, cloud computing, industrial rock band Rammstein, Malian cotton production, Icelandic crime fiction, the 1,200-page opus on Hegel he’s just finished writing, all punctuated by a supply of dirty jokes involving married couples in the former Yugoslavia."
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Danny Leigh on conversation topics with everyone’s favorite goofball, Slavoj Žižek. [The Guardian]
It’s a fun read.
Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism
Over at Political Language, Ilya discusses whether or not Leftism is a “distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition.”
Anthony Gregory, in an essay purporting to answer the question “Why the Left Fears Libertarianism,” offers this gem:
But libertarianism, however weak its influence today, is a much greater long-term threat to the left than is any form of conservatism, and the leftist intellectuals sense this even if they can’t articulate why. Leftism, whether they know it or not, is a distorted permutation of the classical liberal tradition. The statist left did their deal with the devil – the nation-state, centralized authority of the most rapacious kind – supposedly with the goal of expediting the liberation of the common man and leveling the playing field. More than a century since the progressives and socialists twisted liberalism into an anti-liberty, pro-state ideology, they see that they have made a huge mess of the world, that, as they themselves complain, social inequality persists, corporatism flourishes, and wars rage on. As the chief political architects of the 20th century in the West, they have no one to blame but themselves, and so they target us – the true liberals, the ones who never let go of authentic liberal idealism, love of the individual dignity and rights of every man, woman and child, regardless of nationality or class, and hatred of state violence and coercive authoritarianism in all its forms.
In short, no.
Liberalism is a pluralistic tradition with a long history, containing diverse strands of “classical liberalism” and “high/welfarist/egalitarian liberalism” thinking, and it’s no surprise that there are going to be significant disagreements among thinkers as disparate as Adam Smith, JS Mill, Immanuel Kant, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. Nevertheless, these liberals and their liberalisms adhere to some fundamental principles about the inalienability of basic rights to speech, religion, and conscience, the provision of public goods, the social delivery of a minimum standard of living, and the importance of a public authority that governs for the common good. Liberalism is defined and made intelligible by these characteristics.
By privileging the unfettered right of contract and absolute rights in property above all other fundamental rights, libertarianism stands outside this tradition.
That doesn’t mean libertarians have no right to call themselves liberals. Noam Chomsky calls himself a libertarian socialist and argues for the consistency of the label, so who am I to make taxonomic distinctions for others’ beliefs? US Libertarians can call themselves whatever they want, but it’s incumbent upon people to resist the moral arbitrage that occurs when the good name of liberalism is used to advance an agenda antithetical to fundamental liberal values.
Read Ilya’s original post, complete with pictures…
The bit by Anthony Gregory and Ilya’s subsequent discussion reminds me of this piece by Christopher Beam for New York Magazine. The article explores libertarianism within the United States of America with a sense of bewilderment, awe and trepidation. The following, as an example, is one of Christopher’s criticisms of his interpretation of libertarianism.
At best, libertarianism means pursuing your own self-interest, as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. At worst, as in Ayn Rand’s teachings, it’s an explicit celebration of narcissism. “Man’s first duty is to himself,” says the young architect Howard Roark in his climactic speech in The Fountainhead. “His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.” Roark utters these words after dynamiting his own project, since his vision for the structure had been altered without his permission. The message: Never compromise. If you don’t get your way, blow things up. And there’s the problem. If everyone refused to compromise his vision, there would be no cooperation. There would be no collective responsibility. The result wouldn’t be a city on a hill. It would be a port town in Somalia. In a world of scarce resources, everyone pursuing their own self-interest would yield not Atlas Shrugged but Lord of the Flies. And even if you did somehow achieve Libertopia, you’d be surrounded by assholes.
Keeping in mind what Ilya stated at the end, Christopher draws some observations that liberals may agree with and some conclusions that will certainly cause “true” libertarians to cringe (link to Mises response.) This isn’t to say that Christopher or Anthony are completely incorrect or entirely correct, they’re just kind of in the ballpark depending upon your point of view. Libertarianism, as is also the case with liberalism, encompasses many differing interpretations and as a result, each interpretation has it’s fair share of valid criticisms. However semantics and a strict adherence to an ideology are not what I wanted to discuss, I am much more concerned with the why? problem. Akin to Anthony (the emphasis in the first quote), Michael Lind made a curious observation today,
For their part, progressives have no idea of how to respond to the emergent right’s triple fundamentalism. Today it is the left, not the right, that is Burkean in America. Modern American liberalism is disillusioned, to the point of defeatism, by the frustration of the utopian hopes of 1960s liberalism in the Age of Reagan that followed and has not yet ended. Today it is liberals, not conservatives, who tend to be cautious and incremental and skeptical to a fault about the prospects for reform, while it is the right that wants to blow up the U.S. economy and start all over, on the basis of the doctrines of two Austrian professors and a Russian émigré novelist.
But why? Why is it that libertarianism or fundamentalism poses a long term threat that conservatism did not? Why is is that “leftist” intellectuals seem to know the aforementioned but find themselves unable to articulate the root of this trend? Furthermore, why is is that progressives have no response?
Well an answer for the why’s may be found in a critique of liberalism, fundamentalism and “the Left” by everyone’s favorite Slovenian philosopher,
A true Left takes a crisis seriously, without illusions, but as something inevitable, as a chance to be fully exploited. The basic insight of the radical Left is that although crises are painful and dangerous they are ineluctable, and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, the radical Left and the Right are two forms of the same “totalitarian” excess; while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, the populist “radical” Right being nothing but the symptom of liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat. When today we hear a politician or an ideologist offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, triumphantly asking (purely rhetorical) questions such as “Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want every critic or mocker of religion to be punishable by death?” what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer – who would have wanted that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle in which two opposed poles generate and presuppose each other. Here one should take an Hegelian step backwards, placing in question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. Liberals have long ago lost their right to judge. What Horkheimer once said should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk (critically) about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism. And, even more pointedly, one should emphatically insist that the conflict between the State of Israel and the Arabs is a false conflict: even if we will all come to perish because of it, it is a conflict which only mystifies the true issues.
How are we to understand this reversal of an emancipatory thrust into fundamentalist populism? In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion-to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include within a system all its “symptoms:’ it antagonisms and inconsistencies, as integral parts. In this sense then, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality:’ for their opposition is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite. Where then do the core values of liberalism – freedom, equality, etc. – stand? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save its own core values from the fundamentalist onslaught. Its problem is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice. Liberalism is, in its very notion, “parasitic” relying as it does on a presupposed network of communal values that it undermines in the course of its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction – a false, mystificatory reaction of course – against a real flaw inherent within liberalism, and this is why fundamentalism is, over and again, generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself – the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left. Or, to put it in the well-known terms of 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism will need the brotherly help of the radical Left.
-By Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London/New York: Verso, 2009), 75–77. (via)
Obviously the book goes into greater detail but if anything, consider this quote to be some deliciously red food for thought.
See also: The Liberal Utopia (videos)
