• Big Questions

UK journal prospect has a collection of 100 contributions on the big questions. It extends over four long pages but can also be downloaded as a complete 22 page .pdf (128kb).

I've only quickly skimmed the first page (one quarter) so far but strongly recommend a careful read of the whole lot.

Perhaps a good long term project for collectively organizing a collection of resources and systematically presenting (variant and common) views of core participants at this site could be based on responding to and/or just mentioning (within an emergent folder structure) the range of issues that are raised.

It does look like a fairly comprehensive sampling of trends in political thought (at least for the UK) and perhaps initially organizing just a cross referenced brief account and classification of those trends could provide a framework for gradually developing our own ideas and a navigation framework for the site in which to put them.

BTW I find the style in the collection of web pages by John McCarthy about the right level for crisp summary statements of position (both on the issues I tend to agree with him on and on his virulent attacks on marxism).

Had a look at the article and would have to agree with the introduction, on the whole very negative. I imagine the person in the street would have a more positive view of things and consequently doesn't relate well to these people and consequently has become rather apathetic about politics.

I did like what Mark Cousins and Meghnad Desai wrote. They were positive about the effects of globalisation and technology which I assume will lead to the development of 2nd and 3rd world countries and a maturity in advance capitalist countries to the point where people not only are capable of taking responsibilty but also want to. While freedom requires responsibilty, more responsibilty demands more freedom. Quite a number seem to have an idea of this but see it as a bad thing and are afraid of it.

Despite his being a liberal, Oliver Kamm has a better understanding than most of the respondents of the conflicts of the last age and this unfolding one:

The dominant conflict of the last century was not between left and right. It was between open societies and competing absolutisms. In its most enduring form—the cold war—the protagonists were not progressives and reactionaries but different legatees of the Enlightenment: those of Jefferson and Rousseau, respectively. What comes next is less convoluted, because one side in the conflict of our age is explicit in its aims. Critical inquiry, freedom of conscience and the separation of civil and religious authority are the target of a violent theocratic fanaticism born and sustained in the middle east.

That movement’s apocalyptic language is so far outside the conventions of western debate that many are tempted to rationalise its demands as rhetorical code for something else: a plea for the Palestinians; a cry for global justice. But the ideology is atavistic. It is part of modernity only in the sense that its adherents harness technology to millenarian ends. The most potent conflict in the international order—one that makes urgent the task of countering nuclear proliferation—is thus between the Enlightenment and those who seek its repeal.

Within the western democracies, heightened political disagreement is likely and desirable. But this is not about left vs right either. The strangest political phenomenon of our time is a convergence of isolationisms: nativism on the right, allied to identity politics and anti-Americanism on the left. Against such an adversary, liberalism will, I hope, become more militant in its own defence.

If we ignore for the moment the concerning tone of that last line (I rather place my hopes in a commitment to democracy than in militancy), I think he has some interesting things to say.  Too, his overall tone is contrary to the doom and gloom found in so many of the other responses, sensing as he does the clarity which has arisen in the post-cold war conflicts.

Why have so few other liberals sensed this?

Another example of this doom and gloomism can be found in the Guardian's obituary for Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.  It quotes him as saying:

He also feared a return to isolationism in America's relations with the wider world. "If we cannot find ways of implementing collective security, even in the form of preventive diplomacy, we must be realistic about the alternative: a chaotic, violent, and dangerous planet" he commented in one lecture. In an apparently despairing coda he added: "Maybe the costs of military enforcement are too great. Withdrawal may seem a safer rule in an anarchic world in which our power and wisdom are limited. Maybe we should just let the law of the jungle take over".

I haven't read those comments in their original context, but as presented here they seem to suggest something more than fearing a return to isolationism.  There is a clear note of defeatism in that refrain, from one of the leading American voices of liberal engagement.

I think because he is a ("Cold War") liberal Oliver Kamm misunderstands the current struggle in the Middle East as being between the Enlightenment and atavistic violent theocratic fascism.

True enough, that is the way it is being presented and its certainly a better attitude than the united front of nativist isolationists and pseudo-leftists with identity politics and anti-Americanism as their excuse for supporting reaction.

But the real struggle is a democratic revolution aimed at overthrowing all the autocracies of the region.

The US has had to change sides in that struggle because its previous policy of siding with tyranny against democracy resulted in the "blowback" of 9/11 from the atavistic violent theocratic fascists.

In changing sides the US cannot openly proclaim that its targets include such "moderate Arab allies" as Egypt and Saudi Arabia or the Israeli occupation regime.

If it was just a battle with jihadis there would have been no point widening the war to include Iraq, no point getting Syria out of Lebanon and very little point undermining the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. John Kerry's critique of "wrong war, wrong place, wrong enemy" would have been correct and the US would be focussed on chasing jihadis in Afghanistan etc.

My initial response to Arthur’s post was one of agreement mixed with ‘what’s the diff here?”  After having slept on it and reading through Kamm’s link provided by Lupin3 things became a bit clearer.

On the one hand there is little difference between fighting for the Enlightenment and fighting for a bourgeois revolution. 1789 was the Enlightenment’s child and the struggle for bourgeois revolution continued well into the 19^th century in Europe and continues today in backward regions such as the Middle East. It’s also worth remembering that the Industrial Revolution was also a child of the Enlightenment and one that it is more difficult to maintain romantic illusions about.

On the other hand I found his emphasis somewhat misleading. If he is talking about Iraq and the Middle East generally his preference for atavism versus Enlightenment is woolly. It isn’t as though he is wrong – the feudalist, theocratic and fascist forces arraigned against the democratic forces are atavistic (I checked in the OED just to make sure – resemblance to more remote ancestors than to parents, a reversion to an ancestral type; a throwback in other words), and it’s a bit hard to imagine fighting for the Enlightenment in the Middle East without fighting for bourgeois democracy. Its wooliness lies in his failure to say so explicitly and I suspect Arthur is right in suggesting that he doesn’t say so because he is not clear about it himself, instead sliding away toward concerns about nuclear proliferation and the need to defend the Enlightenment world wide.

The tone of Kamm’s piece, his use of words like atavism and Enlightenment, make more sense in a European or developed world context where the main challenge to the historic gains of the Enlightenment, the victory of the democratic revolution, is coming from the historic right (eg the Taliban model). These threats are real and do need to be confronted and fought. But in doing this there is no escaping the fact that after in excess of 200 years, (longer in the case of England), the Enlightenment is no longer an oppositional and aspirational force; it is the ruling force, and its strengths, failings and contradictions have been on the table for a considerable period. Kamm speaks about the Enlightenment as though history, in the sense of future qualitative developments, has ended (I don’t know whether he believes this or not).

Defending the Enlightenment is not just about defending the 18^th century movement but defending what it became once fully in power. This is an altogether more pertinent issue because it cannot avoid the property question; that is, do bourgeois property rights provide us with the only realistic pathway to human economic and social development or does it, to employ contemporary jargon, have a shelf life, and act as a drag on the pace of development? This is a question we need to confront here; it is not a question, other than in a notional sense, that confronts the people of the Middle East. There they don’t have the Enlightenment to defend or its fruits to weigh up; democratic revolution is needed to give them that opportunity and Kamm disappoints in his failure to clearly articulate this.