Dennis Hollingsworth

Flight of the Intellectuals: the linkfest

Here are a few more links on Paul Berman after the release of his Flight of the Intellectuals (mentioned earlier). I appreciate Berman not only because he identifies the totalitarian tendency that arises even with anti-totalitarians, but reading his work is a great way to get a picture of recent intellectual history and its historical antecedents.

The linkfest continues below the fold:

Joel Whitney interviews Paul Berman in Guernica Magazine, Nazi Sheikhs:

Guernica: So to put scriptures on a naked woman?s body in her film was not incendiary or reckless, in your reading, it was merely direct.

Paul Berman: That film is not even one millimeter a violent film. And the purpose of the film is to make the viewer recognize that violence against women is being committed by fanatics in the name of Islam. This should be opposed. And she?s done a brilliant job of opposing that. As a politician, she brought to the Dutch Parliament the issue of honor killings. She proposed to Parliament that the police make records of honor killings, which is the first thing the police department had to do to recognize and solve the problem. She brought about a significant reform. And I?m guessing that quite a few women are alive today as a result of this reform.

Guernica: So she?s not only not responsible for Van Gogh?s death, but she?s saved uncounted lives.

Paul Berman: Yes! And surely she?s making people think. People with backgrounds like her own. Meanwhile we have a bunch of Western journalists running around saying, ?Oh, don?t listen to her. She is the one responsible for bringing the violence.? She?s not. She?s the one making people think for themselves, sometimes more skillfully, sometimes less skillfully. Ramadan is telling people, ?Don?t think. I?ll say all the nice-sounding blather that you want to hear against bigotry, against violence, and on the other side of my mouth I?ll tell you to revere these terrible sheiks and look to them for guidance, and finally I?ll say we can?t even discuss these issues like stoning women in public.? I hope liberal-minded journalists and intellectuals, of which I am one and Ian Buruma is another, will become more alert to these issues and become aware of how easy it is to fall into old patterns that we saw with the Soviet dissidents, and commitment to a kind of solidarity with the people who are persecuted and not their persecutors.

Dwight Garner reviews Flight of the Intellectuals in the New York Times, In Pursuit of Prey, Carrying Philosophy:

Mr. Berman?s book, portions of which first appeared in The New Republic, is a patient overturning of the rocks that, he argues, Mr. Buruma failed to look under. He writes about historical figures Mr. Ramadan professes to admire and notes the tiny degrees of separation that link them to Hitler and the Nazis during World War II. He points out Mr. Ramadan?s ambiguous comments about things like 9/11, the stoning of women in Muslim countries and violence against Jews. Mr. Berman detects a kind of seventh-century barbarism lurking behind Mr. Ramadan?s genial smile.

Mr. Berman branches out in his book?s final third to condemn liberal intellectuals (nearly all of them but especially Mr. Buruma and the British historian Timothy Garton Ash) and their house organs, including The New York Review of Books, on another, related, account. He writes that while they have admired Mr. Ramadan, they have been inexplicably critical of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch intellectual who has become a major critic of Islam and, as a consequence, will probably have a large security detail for the rest of her life. Ms. Hirsi Ali?s critics, who include Mr. Buruma and Mr. Garton Ash, find her personality ?strident? and humorless, he writes, and feel she isn?t as important as she might be because having renounced Islam, she no longer speaks to or is in touch with the Muslim hive mind.

Paul Berman reviews Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth Century Skeptic by Michael Scammell in the New Republic, The Prisoner Intellectuals. There is too much in this review to excerpt easily:

These projects added up to something that Koestler, in his ex-Communist mode, liked to call the ?Deminform??which was a play on the ?Cominform,? or Communist Information Bureau, and, in any case, drew on his experience in the early and middle 1930s as part of Willi M?nzenberg?s Communist propaganda network. Here was a case of fighting fire with fire?of countering the Communist campaign among intellectuals with a liberal campaign among intellectuals, not with propaganda but with true and sincere arguments. An argument for democracy, instead of for communism?which, after a few decades, as we have reason to know today, did make a difference.

Reading Scammell?s account, I begin to grow a little indignant about the intellectual scene in our own moment, a couple of generations after the major achievements of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. It is very odd that nothing like the Congress for Cultural Freedom exists in our time. A tremendous intellectual debate is taking place right now across huge portions of the world, with the Islamists on one side and a variety of anti-totalitarian liberals, Muslim and non-Muslim, on the other. But the kinds of liberal congresses and campaigns that Scammell describes have never taken place in our day, not on a grand scale anyway. We have human rights organizations, but we do not have sustained campaigns on behalf of the persecuted liberals in countries where organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood wield a lot of influence. We do not even have the kinds of congresses or conferences that would allow liberal-minded writers from different countries and speaking different languages to meet each other and discuss their respective experiences and thoughts. Nor do we have any kind of sustained and coordinated effort to translate books and essays from one language to another?not on a truly large scale. On matters such as these, Hook, the old socialists of the American labor movement, Koestler, his comrade Man?s Sperber in France, and their various colleagues of the 1940s were way ahead of us.

Independent journalist Michael J. Totten interviews Paul Berman:

MJT: What's fascinating to me is how some Western intellectuals will praise this guy as a moderate when he is, at best, only half moderate, and yet at the same time they sneer at authentic Arab liberals.

Paul Berman: Yes.

MJT: You provided some examples in your book, and I've some experience with this myself. I was in Beirut when the Syrian military was finally thrown out by a million citizens taking to the streets, and the whole thing was dismissed by some people in the West as a right-wing Christian Gucci revolution.

Paul Berman: Yes.

MJT: It was absolutely appalling, and I will never forget it. To this day I get hate mail from these kinds of people when I write about Lebanon.

Paul Berman: It really is something remarkable. I can understand it intellectually, but not emotionally. It comes from some old and very unattractive currents in Western thought that we can see over the course of the 20th century.

Remember, a lot of people despised the Soviet dissidents, too.

MJT: Right. What do you think causes this? I think I have it mostly figured out, but I still feel like I'm missing something.

Paul Berman: Well, I don't have it entirely figured out either. [Laughs.] But I note it. In regard to the Soviet dissidents of the past, at least nowadays there is a consensus of opinion that, yes, the dissidents were correct and we should have listened to them. So why didn't we? When I say "we," I mean the intellectual community as a whole in the Western countries. And it's for a whole set of reasons.

An outright sympathy for communism and the Soviet Union itself was only one of those reasons. This only accounted for one set of people.

There were other people who dismissed the dissidents for what you might call conservative reasons. They wanted to assume the Slavic world was hopelessly steeped in traditions of autocracy and ignorance and habits of obedience and deference -- the traditions of tsarism. They could see very well that communism in the Soviet Union had replicated the whole tsarist system, in a new version. There was a leader at the top whose rule was uncontestable. There were the masses at the bottom who had to proclaim the wisdom of the leader at the top. And a lot of people looked at this and said, yes, this is what the Slavic world is supposed to be. This is the authentic thing. Slavs are inherently inferior to Westerners. They aren't capable of being free people. They aren't capable of thinking for themselves.

So when the dissidents rushed out and told us that the Soviet Union is crushing individual liberty or doing other oppressive things, our response to them was to pat them on the head and say, well, it's nice that you got out, and you are welcome to say, but you're not talking about the real world. The real world is one where Slavs are destined to remain forever victims of oppressive tyrants, and this is because Slavs enjoy being victims, so we're not going to take people like you, the dissidents, all that seriously.

The logic behind that kind of thinking is very appealing, to some people. It pictures a world that is dominated by cultures that we like to regard as authentic -- cultures with unchanging deep qualities that go back thousands of years, and may be rich with cultural jewels, but will never produce anything more progressive and will certainly never embrace the kinds of freedoms and advantages and dynamism that we celebrate in our own culture. So that's one idea.

Then there's another idea that appeals to many people, which is based not on our own feeling of superiority, but on our own inferiority. We look at ourselves in the Western countries and we say that, if we are rich, relatively speaking, as a society, it is because we have plundered our wealth from other people. Our wealth is a sign of our guilt. If we are powerful, compared with the rest of the world, it is because we treat people in other parts of the world in oppressive and morally objectionable ways. Our privileged position in the world is actually a sign of how racist we are and how imperialistic and exploitative we are. All the wonderful successes of our society are actually the signs of how morally inferior we are, and we have much to regret and feel guilty about. So when we look at the world, we should look at it in a spirit of humility and remorse, and we should recognize that other people have been unfairly treated.

We should recognize the superiority of those other people over ourselves. Money-wise, we may be richer. But, morally, the other people are richer. And so, we should despise ourselves, and we should love the other people -- the people who possess qualities so superior to our own as barely to be human. And then, filled with those very peculiar ideas, we set about looking for messianic figures who might express the superior culture of the other people, and might lead the human race to a higher stage of development. And if someone objects to this analysis, we say, oh, we inferior Westerners are incapable of understanding the mysterious thought-patterns of those other people, so who are you to judge?

MJT: I think you have it pretty well worked out.