Levy: "Left In Dark Times"

So TG found a Barnes & Noble gift card I'd forgotten about and so we went off, stored value burning a hole in my pocket and bought some books.

One of them was Bernard-Henri Levy's "Left In Dark Times" which I'd seen reviewed in the NYT by Hitchens.

And I enjoyed the heck out of the book. It's frustrating - French.

First of all it's in a kind of classic French style: discursive, breathless name-dropping. The arguments are piled on each other in a welter of side comments, historical references, personal sidebars, and erudition that requires frequent trips to Wikipedia to look up obscure names. So it's not a fun read.

(Somehow appropriate and humorous anecdote: I had a professor who studied in Paris. While he was there he was invited to lunch with Habermas, who was just making a name for himself. He drove to Germany to have lunch with him, only to discover a) that H. had a speech impediment; b) that he spoke just like the wrote - impenetrably; and c) that he spoke with his mouth full. My poor professor, having driven 8 hours, sat for two hours trying to figure out what the hell the Great Man was actually saying...)

But it's a very good book, in no small part because Levy is one of those guys who kind was always near the center of the post - '68 French political scene.

The book is roughly divided into thirds.

The first third is a personal memoir of his connection with and struggles with the French Left, opening with Sarkozy hammering him for an endorsement, him replying that he can't break with his 'family' and Sarkozy pointing out that his family had fucked him royally for some time.

The middle third is an accounting of the three ideological failures of the modern Left. The first goes to the rejection of the left of economic liberalism and the market. The second is failure of the Left to get behind the European project, and particularly the silence of the left in the face of Bosnia and the rising nationalisms that threaten Europe. The third is about anti-Americanism.

The chapter on anti-Americanism echoes very strongly with my own feelings about it, so I obviously thought it was brilliant. I have some long quotes from it below.

He rounds off with a discussion of the rise of anti-Semitism among the left, and strips away the notion that it's tied to anti-Zionism. Instead, he connects it to the empty center of the philosophical left, which is simply tied into the rejection of - pretty much everything - and as such ties closely to the roots of the Romantic European right. (Isiah Berlin has a book - "The Roots of Romanticism" which presents a parallel argument).

He wraps up with a constructive argument for universal human rights, and against those who for lack of a better foundation want to oppose universal rights in the interest of particular cultures.

His response is pithy:

European or not, the idea that adulterous women shouldn't be stoned to death or burned alive is an idea worth universalizing.

What's the root of it? He lays it at Solzenitzen, who destroyed the belief that the cruelty of the Communist project led to anything.

There was no longer any talk of Revolution. There was no longer any question of a future Good in whose name people had always been ready to sacrifice present generations, short term emotions, those useless Chinese, Russian, or African dissidents.

The antitotalitarian revolution had left it's mark, the old paradigms had been shattered; the old notion of progress no longer held water; and there was no longer the slightest sign of another world being possible, or a more radiant future, of signing tomorrows - together with a wait-and-see attitude about human rights.

That's the hollowness at the center of the modern European Left, the hollowness that they seek to replace with a generalized "no!" and the failures he recounts above.

Here's a selection from the chapter on anti-Americanism:

The Other Socialism of the Imbeciles

The third trait of the Left's failu1ation of much of the world, and even some part of America, into a zone of disapproval in the same way Spinoza spoke of a zone of ignorance, has made them fall, once again, into the same trap.

I'm not talking about, of course, the legitimate criticism of one American president or another - of Bush the Lesser, for example, whose errors and mediocrity I, in American Vertigo, was not the last to denounce.

I'm not talking about the Abu Ghraib scandal, nor about Guantanamo, those regions of lawlessness, those political and juridical aberrations, which still, as I write these lines, dishonor an American democracy which elsewhere has so much vitality and virtue.

I'm not talking about my own anger when I read that an average of two people are legally killed every week on death row in Texas and elsewhere; or when I see, in a school in Virginia, the concrete result of the notion that it is every citizen's inalienable right to possess assault rifles.

No. I'm talking about that strange hatred that, across the entire planet, focuses not on what America does or doesn't do but on what it is.

I'm talking about that total hatred that attacks not the crimes that America, like any other nation in the world, sometimes happens to commit or to cover up: but of its being, its essence, or at least what people imagine is that essence.
And I'm talking about, in France, this anti-American religion which is like a password that is coming to unite all the neoprogressive churches: I'm talking about the way they have - in alter-globalist, pacifist, agroterrorist, Zapatista, Islamo-leftist, Sovereignist, Critical Communist, Chevenementist circles; the people from ATTAC and the members of the Cercle Saint-Just or the late Fondation Marc-Bloch; the former Reds who have now turned Green and the friends-of-nature type of Greens who have now become greens of the revolutionary jihad variety; those nostalgic for the Grand Soir no less than those reformists who want to place a radical tiger in the tank of their social criticism - I'm talking about how they all, whenever they've run out of things to say, say "it's America's fault" and turn America into a place of the damned, almost a region of Being, which is synonymous with all the crimes and sins of the human race.

Isn't America, for such people, guilty of starving the world and of flooding it with its commodities? Of ruining the climate and of pillaging the planet's resources? Isn't it guilty of fighting terrorism and stirring it up? Of making war on Islamism after having encouraged and nourished it? Of being a country without culture that is flooding the world with its culture? Of being the homeland of materialism that at the same time is the seat of a spiritual revolution that is as grotesque as it is fanatical? Of having been too late to enter the war against Hitler (Long live Pearl Harbor! Thank you, Japan!) - and, when it finally made up its mind, of using methods that could have been Hitler's (Hiroshima, the dishonor of it! The true face of the GIs, our self-proclaimed liberators, who were actually rapists, thieves, murderers - see, for example, a strange documentary recently broadcast on a public television network')? Is there anything, any single thing, that America, has been spared, now or in the past? Didn't France, during the Civil War, manage to be the only country in the world that was both hostile to slavery (that disgrace ... that crime ... unworthy of a democracy, as we've told you so many times before ...) and favorable to a Southern victory (that civilization ... that world ... that admirable aristocracy ... gone with the wind. . )? Wasn't France, once again, the only country that, in Clemenceau's words, dared to think it was odd, and even a bit suspicious, that our "Yankee" allies didn't lose more men in the battles for France? And when, at last, September 11th came along, weren't there plenty of people on the Left, in France as in the rest of the world, who saw the horrifying attack either as a horrifying fraud, or at the very least the result of a horrifying arrogance?

The French listened to Arundhati Roy: Bin Laden is "a dead ringer for the American president," his "interchangeable twin brother."
Noam Chomsky: a planetary "fraud," the mirror image of the "racism" of the Jewish state an"atrocity' that, in any event, didn't "reach the level" of "Clinton's bombing" of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory that was wrongly believed robe a military objective.

The journalist Robert Fisk, on the first day of the war in Afghanistan, wrote that "we are the real war criminals."

Harold Pinter, later, in his Nobel acceptance speech:6 the only, the real problem is the two million men and women locked up in the vast "gulag" that is the American prison system.

Jean Baudrillard - a great mind, in other respects - almost immediately setting the tone by explaining that it's America's "rising power," its "formidable condensation of every function by the technocratic machinery and its single-minded thinking" - in a word, the "system itself" and the way it "keeps all the cards for itself" - which "has created the conditions for this brutal retaliation."

And the battalions of beautiful souls whom we never heard squeak a word in protest against the public stoning of adulterous women in Kabul or against the numberless crimes of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad - but who, when the Americans decided to hunt down the Taliban and dethrone Saddam Hussein, rush to the streets crying "Peace in Kabul" and "Hands off Baghdad" or "Busharon murderer"...

That's the anti-Americanism I'm talking about.

That's the passion because it is a passion - whose genealogy and background I want to recall.

I started to do so a quarter of a century ago, in the last pages of L'Ideologie francaise: and, in light of today's events, that's the reflection I want to build upon here.

It all started with Rousseau.

It all started with that unprecedented book called The Social Contract, whose thesis provoked - first in France and then in Europe - a thrill, a shock, almost a spiritual earthquake.

What?

All people needed was a "general will" to create a society?

All people needed was to say "We want to be joined into a society; we don't have anything in common but we've decided to join together" for such an association to exist and take effect?

Starting with a transcendental purity - an abstract and empty form, whose only principle would be the well-negotiated exchange between each member's freedom and a superior liberty guaranteed by an agreement - a true community of men and women could come about?

People might have nothing in common - nothing, neither heroes, nor great events, nor shared miseries, nor even a common place of birth - and found a nation by a simple act of understanding - by one of the purely mind-based decisions described in the Encyclopedia, in the same terms Rousseau used in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, as reasoning "in the silence of human passions" and of "associations"?

People are never quiet about passions and associations, grumbled the Contract's outraged readers.

Counterrevolutionaries like Burke and Carlyle mocked Rousseau, saying that nobody had ever seen a society come about through such vain and artificial methods.

When, on December 26,1815, Bonald went before the National Assembly to plead for - and obtain' - the abolition of the divorce law that the Assemblies of the French Revolution had voted for, he insisted that

history had never known a society that was not based on this common principle, these primary and natural units, that were, for example, families.

What's all this about the "contract," Lamartine himself wondered, in issues 65 and 67 of his Cours familier de litterature? Societies don't come about thanks to contracts! They can't be decreed! They are "instinctive." They are "inevitable."

How could you possibly imagine - thundered Maurice Barres, once again in the National Assembly, on June 11, 1912, during a session dedicated to celebrating the bicentennial of Rousseau's birth - how could you even conceive that the national congress could wish to glorify this "false spirit," this "extravagant creature," this prince of lies and artifice? I admire "the artist," he allows. I admire "the musician." And "the man himself, that poor and crabbed virtue allied to that lyrical love of nature and solitude, I won't attack him." But as for signing up for "the social, political, and pedagogical principles of the author of the Discourse on Inequality, the Social Contract, and Emile" - as for celebrating the person who "established as a principle the idea that the social order is entirely artificial," and that it is "based on conventions" - as for anointing with the holy republican chrism the big bloated head of someone who preaches everyone's right to "reconstruct society at whim" - as for letting France look ridiculous by celebrating that lunatic, drunk on himself and his own correctness, one whose whole life was dedicated to chasing the pipe dream of "placing all of life on a Procrustean bed" - as for following, therefore, this false prophet in his "detrimental, and moreover powerless, rebellion which advises us to act as if we had to remake everything all over again" - I won't do that: I won't "give him so much credit."

Herder too followed the lead of the French Counter-Revolutionaries; also opposed to Rousseau's bad "Gesellschaft," that abstract entity issued from a contractualism that was obtuse and definitively deaf to the soul (the "volksseele") and to the spirit of the people (the "Volksgeist"), the good "Gemeinschaft "which itself was founded on a community of memory and roots - Herder too, upon hearing the name Rousseau, cried that he was refusing reality, following a figment of his imagination, something arbitrary, and pulls out his naturalistic, and already volkisch, revolver...

I'm simplifying things, of course.

One could object that there are as many similarities as differences between Rousseau and Herder, and that Barres and Fichte disagree more than they agree.

But that is nonetheless the reasoning of the part of the "anti-Enlightenment" that Arendt evokes in her Origins ofTotalitarianism.

That's exactly how, over the course of two centuries, with an inexhaustible rage, the mad hatred of Rousseau and his "contractualism" has been expressed.

If we agree that the leading figures of the anti-Enlightenment share the feeling that contractualism is the apex of the "sin of pride," the "vice" in "all its splendor" (Burke); the image of an illegitimate government whose prince would be "more disgraced than a valet or a laborer" (Carlyle,2); but which, praise God, is all just a big fraud--so big, so enormous then one thing is sure: it will remain irrelevant.

Barres, once again, thought the Social Contract was "profoundly imbecilic." And Renan, in a text from 1869 reproaching Napoleon III for having ceded too much to the American myth of "equal rights for all" and of transforming his government, in so doing, into a simple "public service," without memory, without ambition, and without the ability to elicit in others that elementary political feeling known as "respect": wasn't he already talking about American "impertinence"?

Since this is where we realize that it's not just a fraud.

This is where it appears that Rousseau's construction - a utopia, a whim, a dangerous and criminal fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless - was a bit more than that.

This is where that idea, seemingly so crazy, so devoid of meaning or future prospects, incapable of bearing any relation to the real history of a real people; that idea which nobody ever imagined would go further than the project for the Constitution of a Corsica or a Poland that themselves were figments of the imagination - here's where that flight of fancy takes shape in a place that is neither Corsica nor Poland.

Far, far away, in the New World, a real place, not a dreamland or a paper construction - where, we're told, people have come from every end of the earth, people with different skin colors, different languages, different histories and traditions, different gods, different heroes, have de-tided to come together, to agree on a contract and to gather in a nation there is a country, America, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau's project, that almost unthinkable doctrine that all people needed to do was make up their minds, then say it and swear to it, in order to create a political body, left the skies and descended earthward, where it actually came to pass.

At first, nobody can believe it.

They say it's so absurd that it can't last.

It goes against the grain of things and it will necessarily fail.

They say, they repeat: it's nothing, it's ridiculous, a remake of Glaucon's "City of Swine" in the Republic, an experiment, a flash in the pan--it will fall just as it rose, in a cloud of dust and a burst of laughter, once reality strikes.

But here we are.

Time goes by.

The experiment has staying power.

The country Renan thought was impertinent scoffs at the serious nations.

The impossible state becomes a power, a real one, that in 1898 declares war on a large European country, Spain, and wins.

The country on paper becomes a prosperous nation as well as a political actor of the first importance which intervenes once, and then again, in the affairs of Europe: and which, during World War II, saves it.

In the darkest hours of that dark age, moreover, while a whole segment of humanity is threatened with being washed away in the flood of Hitler's hatred, that country becomes a place of hospitality and asylum unequaled anywhere else on the planet, making the mocked, condescended-to America a gigantic Noah's ark.

Even better: while, as Husserl warned us in his Prague and Vienna lectures, the idea of Europe is about to sink utterly, while in Germany, from the very heart of Europe, a regime claiming to unify the continent under its leadership is busily emptying that continent of its substance, amputating the best of itself, destroying its very soul, it is once again America, that supposedly "soulless" country, drunk on "materialism" and therefore "devoid of spirit," which, in an extraordinary return, like that remainder of Israel that the biblical prophets said saved what it can from the times of catastrophe and holocaust, grabbed from the flames of nihilism the works, the books, what's left of the libraries, the remains of the values and the people who will allow, when the time is right, to reignite the flame, the other one, the unconquered lights of the Europe of Husserl and Kant.

We have to note two things, in other words.

First, all those great minds - all those German and French Romantics, all those who were opposed to the spirit of the Enlightenment and of Rousseau - were terribly wrong, and the very fact of America - the reality of this nation made of men of different origins, of blacks and whites, of Europeans and non-Europeans, of Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Indians, Asians - is the living proof of their mistake.

Second, when traditional nations engage in an apparently unstoppable process of collective suicide; when the disaster is unleashed by those nations that ended up taking most seriously the "natural" and "anti- Enlightenment" program that had been opposed to America for two centuries; when neighboring nations, with their ancient ways of knowing and doing, with their heavy jaws and their bodies so nicely rooted in the supposed soil of their antique and collective history, throw up their hands in the face of the Beast, or frankly take his side, it's the little, fragile, precarious upstart, the one we thought was so congenitally defective that it would hardly be able to walk without crutches - so you think it's going to rush to someone else's rescue! - that little upstart comes to our aid and saves us.

European anti-Americanism is born there.

From that humiliation.

Or, to put it more precisely, from a double and repeated humiliation. First of all, more recently, from the classic resentment of the debtor toward his benefactor.

As Jules Renard so wittily put it: "I don't have any enemies, since I've never helped anyone."

Or as Confucius said: "What do you have against me, since I've never given you a thing?"

...there's a lot more. Get the book.