I liked what she wrote about the "pro-church" movement during the last election. Excellent piece. That's why I was so taken aback yesterday.
I'm a sucker for fighting secularists, hence my original taste for Hitch, a Free Inquiry contributor. IMNSHO, there aren't enough of 'em, so it's distressing when the best we've got start sounding like vendors for 31 Flavors of Imperialism.
> I agree with her that psychosexual factors are important in politics
> - - but she needs to integrate them with a political economy
> perspective. And I agree that "fundamentalism" is a threat too - but
> the 82nd Airborne should never be confused with a progressive social
> force. To her that's naive.
Ditto on all counts, but isn't this that forced choice between Western democracy versus fundamentalism, where the only acceptable evidence of one's anti-theocrat cred is endorsing US foreign policy, hence the epithets?
She provided an enduring example of the fact that too many Western liberals have become so against fundamentalism (even where it isn't the target) that they're willing to dispense with liberal democracy (i.e. US military occupation of Iraq) to beat it, just like Zizek quoted G.K. Chesterton:
"Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church . . . I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now . . . I have known people who showed that there could be no divine judgements by showing that there can be no human judgements . . . We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred for the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne . . . With their oriental doubts about personality they do not make certain that we shall have no personal life hereafter; they only make certain that we shall not have a very jolly or complete on here . . . The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them."
And Zizek (last cite of the month, promise!) underscores the relevance:
"And is it not true that, in a strictly homologous way, the liberal warriors are so eager to fight antidemocratic fundamentalism that they will end up discarding freedom and democracy themselves, if only they can fight terrorism? They have such a passion for proving that non-Christian fundamentalism is the main threat to freedom that they are ready to fall back on the position that we have to limit our own freedom here and now, in our allegedly Christian societies. If the 'terrorists' are ready to wreck this world for love of the other, our warriors on terrorism are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of hatred for the Muslim other. Alter and Dershowitz love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture -- the ultimate degradation of human dignity -- to defend it."
Doug wrote:
> Lately, though, she's gone a
> bit around the bend with the humanitarian interventionism. I was
> stunned at least twice during the interview - the first time when I
> said that the liberal enlightenment depended in part upon a material
> base of imperialism; she dismissed that as "mechanistic." And the
> other time was when I'd said that the U.S. military was a pretty
> untrustworthy instrument of liberation, because it's one of the most
> violent and repressive mechanisms ever devised. That, she said, was
> "hyperbolic." Of course, neither "hyperbolic" nor "mechanistic" are
> arguments - they're dismissive epithets. I would have like to go at
> this more, but there were three other folks to interview too.
Exactly. "hyperbolic" and "emotional" are, to my ear, close cousins to anti-communist sneers at the "sentimental" or "decadent" commitments to democracy and justice, which had to yield in the battle against the Evil Empire.
-- Shane
________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com