Terror and Liberalism

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Summary: *Terror and Liberalism*: A Great Book for the Century
Review: Paul Berman's *Terror and Liberalism* might very well be the first "great" book of the 21st Century, since it's probably the first book that really captures what the 20th Century was about, and what we have carried over into the 21st as unfinished business. But the book may not get the attention it deserves, because it isn't a very scholarly work. It manages to discuss totalitarianism without referencing Hannah Arendt even once, and it doesn't have so much as a minimal Index. What it has, instead, is a coherent thesis. Consider the following passage:

"He [Albert Camus] had noticed a modern impulse to rebel, which had come out of the French Revolution and the nineteenth century and had very quickly, in the name of an ideal, mutated into a cult of death. And the ideal was always the same, though each movement gave it a different name. It was not skepticism and doubt. It was the ideal of submission. (p. 46)"

This is an enormous insight, and to be frank it does not appear with such clarity in Arendt's work. Her explanation, that loneliness has become an "everyday experience," seems grossly inadequate. Surely the notion that it's all a matter of loneliness appeals to a sense of profound irony, but couldn't we all just get a puppy? This was the payoff for all that scholarly zeal and industry?

Moreover, Arendt never makes the connection between terror as an organizing principle for a 20th Century form of government, and terrorism as a strategy of totalitarian movements that are out of power. And so she did, in fact, miss something important.

And of course even if Arendt had not completely missed the seeding of the Middle East with the totalitarian ideas of the Nazis and the Stalinist,s she never would have guessed that Islam itself could become the excuse for such a movement. She, herself, had been a product of the German Counter-enlightenment. Her mentor, Martin Heidegger, made a vain bid to become the philosopher of National Socialism, and would have succeeded had not the Nazis been too clever. So she has no excuse for missing the role that the Counter-enlightenment plays the writings of the Ba'ath founder, Michael Aflaq, and the Islamist founder, Sayyid Qutb.

So if Berman lacks some background, he does manage to get to the heart of a matter that deflected more scholarly minds. And he stands as the first to make this leap. Even today people don't appear to see the connection between Jurgen Habermas' "Lifeworld vs. System World" typology, inherited from Husserl and Heidegger, and the philosophy of Qutb, which simply maps the same concepts into the religious framework of Islam. The insight that man had become alienated from his own nature, whether through the "false consciousness" of Marx or by our "deluded faith in the power of reason," makes virtually the same diagnosis as Qutb. So it's not really that surprising for Arendt to identify loneliness (alienation) as the culprit. Of course, it had to be. There is not such a great distance, philosophically, between Qutb's "hideous schizophrenia" of modern life, and the nostalgic longing for the "Lebenswelt" that drives much of modern European philosophy.

Liberalism did not evolve as a cure for the condition of man. It evolved as a cure for the tendency of mankind to become dogmatic. Hence it looks nothing like a cure for mankind's inherent ills. It doesn't regard mankind as "alienated" from himself. One side sees the human condition as tragically fragmented, and seeks a remedy in unity. The other sees the longing for a remedy as the problem, a compulsion to worry the patient to death.

Berman reflects this insight in his critique of Noam Chomsky, whom he views as "the last of the 19th Century rationalists." But this analysis, though informative, doesn't quite capture the slipperiness of Chomsky, whose philosophy is ultimately counter-rational. While Chomsky does, in fact, tend to see the world in the simplistic terms of a "greed vs. freedom" dialectic, his main problem is that he really has no program for calamity. Berman is probably more clear about totalitarianism than liberalism, which may be why his great book ultimately reaches a sort of impasse.

Why is it the Americans who recognize the necessity? Why is the American faith that the sovereignty of others means security for themselves so exceptional? Why are the Americans so uniquely disinterested in perfecting mankind? Perhaps we need to be as canny as those Germans were, about communicating the antidote to their philosophies of "revolutionary nationalism and totalitarianism?"

Ultimately Berman gets it. The problem lies in the habit of wishful thinking that afflicts most of America's historical allies, and some of its own deluded clan. Without any capacity to confront calamity the natural tendency is to deny it. Pretend it doesn't exist, or is an exaggeration and you need not change your worldview, or your mind. (But you may be obligated to hate the bearer of bad news.) Thus Chomsky's obsessive unwillingness to be impressed by 9/11, an attitude also affected by Michael Moore, and by Derrida and Habermas recently. And it's only this resistance to the horns of the dilemma that represents the impasse. How could there be any problem that can't be resolved by a trick of the tongue or the eye? Oh, I mean by revealing the tricks, of course. It was all just a trick of the eye that day in early September. Don't be alarmed.

But thanks to Berman's eloquence we are able to see such pretense for what it is. We are at last able to perceive clearly the continuity of the beast that replaced chattel slavery as the world's consummate evil, and is destined to one day join it on the ash heap. It is alarming. But not beyond us.

...

Rating:
Summary: Weapons of Mass Delusion
Review: Paul Berman's attempt to make a case for war on Iraq is based on anecdotal evidence that so far has not been borne out.

The first part of the book is his attempt to 'prove' he is a liberal.

Sir, I really don't care if you are a zebra. You were co-opted by the conservatives you so despised. What a fool!

Berman's arguments for war are based on discursive 'facts' and hearsay. His arguments for a liberal regime in Iraq are also faulty. And his discussion of 'terrorism' fails to convince.

Right now, you are probably very disconcerted how things have turned out (no WMD) but your rationale ('but Sadam was a WMD.') is a weak case for a first strike.

Leave this book for the political science class of 2053 as they try to make 'sense' of the Iraq War and how 'rational' people could have supported such a lark.

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Summary: Very edifying and thought provoking, but not convincing
Review: Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism is a wonderfully written little tome. The prose is poetic and emotive and makes for an engrossing read.

Berman's thesis is that contrary to what Fukuyama has said, the Twentieth Century is decidedly not over. The Western totalitarian regimes that took root after World War I in Europe may all have been vanquished, but their Eastern counterparts-namely radical Islamism and Baathi pan-Arabism-are still around and becoming more dangerous. He draws striking parallels between the different ideologies and finds that their main intersection is a rejection of liberal thought and society.

Apart from this interesting idea, the great value of this book is its brilliant explanation of radical Islamist philosophy and its origins. Less inspiring is one of Berman's key premises: that all totalitarian systems-including Islamism-incorporate a cult-like mass death wish. Although this behavior might be self-evident from history, he doesn't seek to explain it. He merely chalks it up to human irrationality and proclaims that liberalism's failure is not accepting that masses can act outside of reason.

Perhaps I'm just too liberal, but he didn't convince me. I also find it ironic that after criticizing liberals for desiring neat, little explanations for everything, it is in fact such a tight package that he presents in this book. But Berman must be given credit for being an honest (and consistent) leftist. Unlike his pacifist brethren, once he spies an illiberal, nihilistic, totalitarian menace half-way around the world, he wants to destroy it with government's might.

Berman applauds the invasion of Iraq, but not its justification. He prefers preemptive war in the name of Wilsonian internationalism over a realist response to an actual threat. To me this seems like pax Americana under another name. We can invade and impose our values abroad, Berman seems to say, as long as we impose the "right" values.

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Summary: Brilliant
Review: Paul Berman, a gifted essayist and intellectual historian who could be justly described as a social democrat (or democratic socialist), has provided one of the best, most carefully considered, and powerfully written post-September 11 books with Terror and Liberalism. Shortly after 9/11, the Village Voice published a collection of comments by leftish intellectuals on the terrorist attacks and the looming American counterstrike in Afghanistan. Of all the respondents, only Berman came across as truly sane, insightful, and unreflexive. His analysis here follows up on that promise.

The first of two key ideas that Berman wishes to convey in this book is that the Islamist terrorism we witnessed on 9/11 only the latest manifestation of a very familiar phenomenon, that of totalitarianism. Islamism and its proponents, Berman argues, are not medieval, but very modern, having much in common with communism and Nazism--from its myth of the Golden Age to the "cult of death" that arises from utopian absolutism. In this general approach, Berman is in agreement with Bernard Lewis and Daniel Pipes, who also argue that Islamism is better understood as a modern political ideology than as an expression of traditional Islam.

That is not to say that Berman sees nothing unique in Islamism. To the contrary, he finds much that is original and even profound in its seminal thinkers, discussing the work of the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb at length. Berman's willingness to take the Islamists' ideas seriously, rather than dismissing them offhand as medieval, bears much in the way of understanding.

Make no mistake, however; Berman's "understanding" is not, as is the case with so many misguided liberals, a path to exculpation and self-disarmament. Berman's second key idea is that many western thinkers, both left and right, have fallen into a certain conceptual trap that cripples what should be our proper, vigorous, and militant response to these new totaliatarians. This trap, in Berman's analysis, is the assumption that such extremism is rationally explicable, usually based on a few key factors. For "realist" thinkers of the right (he singles out Nixon in the opening chapter), these factors are material: geography, resources such as oil, etc. "Realist" thinking, Berman observes, is what helped us get into our current mess. Although he does not state this explicitly (and he should have), Berman suggests that the "realist" approach only confirmed for Islamists what they already suspected: that America and the west were in decline, spritually degraded, in love with their creature comforts, and ultimately unwilling to sacrifice for their dessicated ideals. (Recall, for example, the Pakistani fighting for the Taliban who said, "The Americans love Pepsi Cola, we love death").

On the left, the factors which explain all are American (or western, or Israeli) power and the evil interests and pathologies which it serves. By this argument, of which Berman holds up Noam Chomsky as the exemplary proponent, no act, no movement, no sentiment directed against the United States is too extreme or violent to defy American guilt as the cause. American guilt increases, pari passu, with the craziness or violence of the acts and ideas that are directed at America. Berman provides a fascinating recounting of the intellectuals' response to the Israeli-Palestinian violence of early 2002 as a demonstration of his argument.

Berman insists that yes, irrational, totalitarian mass movements do exist, and their "root causes" do not lay at the feet of the liberal democracies. Facing up to Islamism, or any other form of totalitariansm, requires an appreciation of the darker depths of the human psyche. Camus is a better guide than Chomsky. Human societies do not operate like Newtonian physics, in action-reaction fashion. Terrorists are humans too, with free will; they are not just amoeba responding predictably to our stimuli.

Berman's brief book is one of the best written post-9/11. His argument is powerful and convincing, and deserves an audience across the political spectrum. Only rarely does he stumble, mostly in the last chapter where his partisanship comes to the fore (for example, he repeats the myth that John Ashcroft ordered a nude statue at the Justice Department to be covered; this legend became popular not because it was true, but because it fit liberal elites' judgment of Ashcroft as a dangerous zealot). As a right-of-center fellow, however, I was deeply impressed and affected by Berman's trenchant essay.

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Summary: A passionate wake-up call for liberals
Review: Phenomenal book!! Berman explores the failure of the left to recognize totalitarianism throughout the twentieth century and believes that the failure continues to the present day. Once again, the European left and the American left refuse to recognize the existence and threat of totalitarianism (the Arab version) in both its Islamic and Baathist forms.

Berman notes that Bush has failed to articulate a case for war in Iraq (because he is fundamentally inarticulate), but insists that liberalism itself requires that we defeat totalitarian mass murderers including Sadaam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, because of our commitment to freedom and tolerance for all people, not simply for ourselves.

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Summary: Left's confusion
Review: Probably the reason Paul Berman doesn't write about good "Third Force" alternatives is because there aren't any. It's just a dirty deal that probably won't get done.

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Summary: What's A Free-Thinking Lefty To Do?
Review: Saddam Hussein was a despot. War is never pretty and should always be a last resort. The current president has trouble stringing together a sentence. Some folks in the executive branch of the U.S. government think the end of the world is near. Communism is dead, but a lot of folks on the left don't get it. My wife is a Quaker and a pacifist. I dont believe in ISTs or ISMs. What's a free-thinking left-of-center guy to do?!? I strongly recommend the thoughtful reader start with the learned musings of Paul Berman in his extended essay Terror and Liberalism. Berman finds himself in a position where he can't agree with a lot of what he hears from either the left or the right. After a detailed examination of many of the issues that impact the current war on terror and America's effort to extend liberal democracy around the world both directly and peripherally, Berman calls for a liberal American interventionism. I didn't agree with everything Berman says and at times the book seemed a little too stream-of-consciousness, but it made me think in ways that I had hoped for. Jump-start your thinking with Paul Berman's Terror And Liberalism.

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Summary: Good analysis .. what to do about it lacking
Review: Terror and Liberalism is a very interesting book. The author starts out by citing his leftist credentials in a chapter attacking Nixon, Kissinger, and George Bush (the elder) for their treatment of Iraq in the first Iraqi war. Then he goes to provide an analysis of the rise of a series of nihilistic popular mass movements that are a direct attack against the liberalism of the western civilizations. In this series he places Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and the current version: Islamism.

The book provides a chilling description of how easy it is for liberals to fall under the sway of such movements by pointing out the ominous parallels between France's descent into supporting the Nazis during World War II and Europe's currenct descent into blaming Israel for the Islamist problem.

Whilst the book's analysis is first rate and is measured in tone and backed up by formidable research, I was left a bit dissatisfied. The vast majority of the book is taken up with the analysis but I would have liked to have seen, and expected, some sort of reasoned approach to a solution. And that, is sadly lacking in this book. There are a few paragraphs that airily talk about having a "third way" but not anywhere near the substance of how to create it to combat the current evil.

So, that is why I slightly downrated this book. However, it is a very thought-provoking read.

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Summary: A must read for all liberals
Review: Terror and Liberalism is a well written book which highlights how totaliterianism in the form of islamic religous extremists dtill poses a threat to the world. This book should be read by all liberals even if they opposed the war to show them how this extremism is a threat to liberal society. Berman is a skillful writer who makes his points very eligantly,he even successfully cuts noam chomsky down to size and points out how his views of the world which are shared by many left-wing people are fundamentaly flawed. This book is a must read.

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Summary: A rare masterpiece
Review: Terror and Liberalism is one of the best books i have read in regards to what is going on in the world today. It skillfully highlights that the current global war is actually yet another war between liberal society and its totalitarian enemies. Paul Berman is a very skillful writer and makes a very convincing case for this idea. This book describes the work of the islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb whose teachings are followed by the followers of al qaeda and other islamic groups today.
Qutb believed that liberal societies which although had many benefits were still completely incompatible with islam for liberalism allowed all forms and beliefs to function together in a society and that no individual or belief should have complete dominance over the other, but Qutb believed that islam was the devine truth and the idea that it should exist in a society where it was nothing more than another belief which could not dictate the society was something even worse than heresy for it belittled islam,islam for him was sent by god and without its complete dominance over society,society was doomed to failure,islam therefore for the worlds sake should take over.
Berman then goes on to explain that the groups which follow Qutbs ways of dominance of a belief of oneness over liberalism and individuals are no more than ideological cousins of the 20th century totalitarian regiemes which like the islamists believed in the idea of totalitarianism and the rejection of liberalism.
They also believed in reviving empires of the past and the idea that there beliefs would lead them to an utopean society. Berman also highlights how people with this state of mind need to find an enemy whom they hold responsible for holding their people back and plotting against them such as the jews or freemaisons.
Having read a lot on the subject of foreign affairs i found this book to be the most insightful. By focusing more on the people who founded and added to the islamist ideals we learn much more about it than we would have if Berman just focused on figures who just carry out the idea like bin laden. Berman is also completly correct to point out that jihadism and nazism are at ther roots the same basic thing just from different viewpoints and anyone who says different is no more than a common jackass! Even though have said that this is a short book i still felt that it was the perfect length for it told me exactly what i needed to know with sufficient proof and knowledge to back up its claims without going on for too long like other books which try to drag out their ideas.
This book highlights the dangers of totalitarianism and in the end Berman who although supported the war in Iraq believes that a war of ideas should be waged to empower the many muslims liberals in the middle east to the support the ideas of a liberal society so that they can develop their own ideas of freedom and with some well placed western help develop their own societies from the inside-out. This way the fasists will lose control and power and will be unable to expand their ways. Overall this is a very thoughtful and intelligent book that teaches us that facism is facism whether the wearer is wearing a swatstika or an islamic headscarf.