Are you really in favor of the ruthless criticism of all that exists, including, for instance, liberalism and secularism?
> > Liberalism is the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism, and we are
> > all, Muslims or Leninists or whatever our professed belief, are deeply
> > affected by it. The way I look at it, most leftists have come to
> > unconsciously adopt liberalism one way or another without having
> > examined it. Unconscious adoption is more of a problem than conscious
> > adoption like Andie's. The thing to do is to examine liberalism
> > closely and then think carefully about what we want to do with it.
>
> I don't really get what you mean by "liberalism." Is is economic
> liberalism, Manchester style? That's certainly pretty big these days.
> Do you mean the Cold War liberalism of the ADA and Hubert Humphrey?
> Peter Beinart would like to see that revived, but it's not very
> strong now. Do you mean a mild social democracy, as in John Kenneth
> Galbraith? That's dead? Do you mean the reigning ideology of The
> Nation? That has little influence in American political life. So what
> is this allegedly dominant liberalism you keep talking about?
> Corporate multiculturalism? What?
What we ought to analyze is how political liberalism protects capitalism through its public-private distinction. As Stanley Fish* sums it up in his New York Times blog, liberalism is an ideology that
insists . . . on a form of government that is, in legal
philosopher Ronald Dworkin's words, "independent
of any particular conception of the good life." Individual
citizens are free to have their own conception of what
the good life is, but the state, liberal orthodoxy insists,
should neither endorse nor condemn any one of them
(unless of course its adherents would seek to impose
their vision on others).
It follows then that the liberal state can not espouse
a particular religion or require its citizens to profess it.
Instead, the liberal state is committed to tolerating all
religions while allying itself with none. Indeed, Starr
declares, "the logic of liberalism" is "exemplified" by
religious toleration. For if the idea is to facilitate the
flourishing of many points of view while forestalling
"internecine… conflicts" between them, religion, the
most volatile and divisive of issues, must be removed
from the give and take of political debate and confined
to the private realm of the spirit, where it can be
tolerated because it has been quarantined.
Thus the toleration of religion goes hand in hand with –
is the same thing as – the diminishing of its role in the
society. It is a quid pro quo. What the state gets by
"excluding religion from any binding social consensus"
(Starr) is a religion made safe for democracy. What
religion gets is the state's protection. The result, Starr
concludes approvingly, is "a political order that does not
threaten to extinguish any of the various theological
doctrines" it contains.
That's right. The liberal order does not extinguish
religions; it just eviscerates them, unless they are the
religions that display the same respect for the public-
private distinction that liberalism depends on and
enforces. A religion that accepts the partitioning of the
secular and the sacred and puts at its center the
private transaction between the individual and his God
fits the liberal bill perfectly. John Locke and his followers,
of whom Starr is one, would bar civic authorities from
imposing religious beliefs and would also bar religious
establishments from meddling in the civic sphere.
Everyone stays in place; no one gets out of line.
But what of religions that will not stay in place, but claim
the right, and indeed the duty, to order and control the
affairs of the world so that the tenets of the true faith are
reflected in every aspect of civic life? Liberalism's answer
is unequivocal. Such religions are the home of
"extremists . . . fascists . . . enemies of the public good . . .
authoritarian despots and so forth."
Marxism, to be true to its vocation, cannot abide by the "public-private distinction that liberalism depends on and enforces" for the benefit of capitalism. Nor can religion if it is to be a vehicle of resistance of masses rather than a means for their domestication. Nor can even a strong populism of the sort embodied in the Bolivarian process, which is the reason why liberals are increasingly critical of its direction.
* On the same subject, see, also, the "Great Separation" examined by Mark Lilla in "The Politics of God" (New York Times, 19 August 2007, <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/magazine/19Religion-t.html?ei=5090&en=341d1b3853a2d364&ex=1345176000&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1187634122-Z1m/wt5OIk8NX30/EnGFzg>).
Siva Vaidhyanathan says in his response to Lilla: "I just don't see how one can claim that what Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derides as 'liberalism and Western-style democracy' has dominated anywhere for any significant period of time. Heck, this country had a functional democracy (with almost all adult citizens enfranchised and the state generally reflecting the will of the electorate) for a very brief period of time: either from 1965 through 2000 (Voting Rights Act through Bush's unelected takeover) or 1971 through 2000 (starting with the adoption of the 26th Amendment)." (<http://mediamatters.org/altercation/200708200003#1>). That is true: "liberal democracy" _as we think we know it_ came into being only very recently and its time may have already passed. But the problem of the Great Separation, essentially of a piece with capitalism's disembedding of economy from the larger social order that Marx, Polanyi, and so on have clarified, and the conflicts between those who accept the Great Separation on one hand and those who don't, whether they are religious or Marxist or strong populist, on the other hand are real.
> A good friend who reads the archives regularly writes:
>
> > Unbelievable. She has reinvented late SDS ideology all on her own.
> > This was what people like Mark Rudd were saying just before they
> > went off the deep end. The Weatherpeople tried to atone for their
> > sins by emulating the Viet Cong, while Yoshie emulates the Iranian
> > mullahs. Talk about farce after tragedy. Well, maybe farce after
> > farce would be more accurate.
It looks like your good friend Mr. Louis Proyect is having a senior moment, having forgotten that he has already said the same thing (see below). Mr. Proyect, in his zeal for a reverse cult of personality, seems to have also forgotten what the primary contradiction is.
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070528/010459.html> [lbo-talk] dev'ts in world economy and foreign ownership Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com Tue May 29 11:17:18 PDT 2007
Someone wrote me offlist with the observation that your politics increasingly resemble those of the late 1960s SDS
-- Yoshie