One subject which is of more or less recurring interest to me is the philosophy of one Sayyid al-Qutb, sometimes identified as the philosopher of al-Qaeda (though he died in 1966), and certainly one of its intellectual forebears. Probably this subject interests me because, and I hope I am not to be misunderstood here, I feel that I can deeply understand its attractions. With my own tendency to romantize the historical, the mystical and “divine certainties,” reading about him is almost like seeing a grotesque shadow of my own intellectual proclivities in some parallel universe. There’s a good article here, excerpted from a book by Paul Berman, himself a writer of whom I am rather fond, partly due to being one of the very few journalists on current affairs and politics at the present with a good prose style.

I will simply note a couple of salient points with regard to al-Qutb at present. I think Berman is very definitely correct that al-Qutb’s philosophy ought to studied and grappled with intellectually, no matter how obscure and even embarrasing it may seem to be arguing about Islamic theological issues after having throughout our lives either no experience with them or being taught that they were nonsense. It is almost like an extremely advanced skier being exiled to the bunny hill to learn snowboarding. But while the initial steps may feel like a pointless indulgence in superstition, no one could argue about the rather dangerous coherence of al-Qutb’s views. It seems to me that, rather than simply dismissing them as nonsense, if one cannot find compelling grounds for dissenting from them and for upholding one’s own views, then one’s own views are not worth upholding.

Coherence is of course not necessarily the measure of the truth, however. I can well appreciate al-Qutb’s attack on the “fragmented” Western world-view, though I have my doubts that anyone’s point of view is not fractured to some extent. Furthermore, I find something rather naive and self-defeating in those, like Karl Popper, who in fact relish the uncertainties and unsettledness of science and a liberal world-view and then are perpetually surprised when people flee from it for the security of some blanketing dogma (the “escape from freedom”). What both they and al-Qutb seem to fail to apprehend is that, among those who cherish freedom, freedom is not, or ought not, be the end-goal of human endeavor, but rather the beginning. No one can really cherish the nebulousness of total uncertainty and wavering, even though space should be allowed for dynamism and the change of values and ideas. Paul Nizan, for example, the communist writer I cited some weeks ago, after deploring the aimlessness and pointlessness of total freedom without any personal drive or motivation, writes: “La liberté est un pouvoir réel et une volonté réelle de vouloir être soi. Une puissance pour bâtir, pour inventer, pour agir, pour satisfaire à toutes les ressources humaines dont la dépense donne la joie” (Liberty is a real power and a real will to be oneself. A force to build, to invent, to act, to satisfy all the human capacities whose use gives us joy). In other words, to counter the alleged emptiness of freedom he means to substitute a new notion, something along the lines of Kantian “positive freedom.” But he confuses the two elements: one may exert a positive constructive force in a condition of freedom, but the freedom remains the conditions under which the action occurs, not the action itself or the force behind the action.

An openness to the possibility of an active, constructive human will operating in a condition of freedom, of the absence of external restraint, is similarly lacking from al-Qutb’s analysis. He diagnoses the split between mind and body, between church and state that characterizes Western society as a whole, but does not allow for the possibility that that split may not necessarily be operant in the individual lives of all its constituent members. It seems to me that one might be entirely in agreement with al-Qutb on the need to heal that rift on an individual and even on a societal level and still not want some particular sect like Islam or Christianity to be imposed by the authority of a government or by him and his “vanguard” of true believers. But then again at that point it all depends on whether you believe the Qu’ran is the word of God or not. But that at least does seem to reduce al-Qutb’s considerable intellectual force to a simple matter of a leap of faith, and that is an achievement not unworthy of the effort. The reason I bring up Nizan and, by extension, the Western critics of the notion of freedom is that I fear that some might feel themselves compelled by the compulsive need to oppose a priori communism or Islamism or whatever else to accept the terms of the debate that these critics impose, to accept al-Qutb or Nizan’s view of Western society as schizophrenic or aimless and then to actually defend schizophrenia and pointlessness! It is only when we open ourselves to the real merits of the case that the seeds of a defense are to be found, and if none is to be found then what, I repeat, is the point of the defense?

Equality as a political philosophy for the so-called “liberal left.” On one level it seems of absurd because equality is obviously impossible in practice, but that’s true of most political ideas, and we can admit it provisionally as a regulative if not a normative ideal. But, on the other hand, I think I can condense my thought as to why equality is fundamentally bad and wrong-headed as a political ideal by making one simple point. The reason I make fun of utilitarians is because they treat an assumption or pre-condition of any social or political theory, that the greatest aggregate benefit for the members of the society should be sought, as itself a socio-political theory distinct from all the others. However, equality cannot be countenanced as the base for a socio-political philosophy precisely because it does not presuppose this need. In other words, a society where everyone has nothing is just as equal as one in which they have everything. The actual good of the members of society does not intrinsically enter the equation. The idea of equality is equally noxious on a moral and even on a selfish level because of the privileged place it gives to envy, but that is not the question here so I can leave the explanation of that aside for now.

p.s. One could even argue epistemologically a la Berkeley about whether the notion of “equality” can even credibly be held to exist between any two things, but I’ll save that discussion for the real die-hard partisans of equality.

p.p.s. It must be admitted that the notion of equality enshrined in American political philosophy from the Declaration of Independence (all men are born equal) is likewise faulty, posited as it is on John Locke’s largely discredited tabula rasa view of the nascent human mind (soul).

Regardless of people’s views on Iraq or whatever else, it is generally taken for granted, everywhere and not just in the U.S., that the finest moment ever in American foreign policy was World War II. Maybe, but I feel that there has been an insignificant amount of sobriety, let alone contrition, among Americans about the incineration of Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg and the other cities in Germany and Japan that were devastated in 1945, not to speak of the atomic bombs, long after any doubts as the outcome of the war had been decided. That’s why it is always good to read articles like this one (by a German). I don’t know why I was so struck by it, since it does not present any general information of which I was previously unaware. But I think it is sentences like this one, which are always chilling especially when they involve popular figures who are generally considered quite admirable:

“Churchill and Roosevelt unleashed with their 3,000 aeroplanes an “around-the-clock-bombing”, which Basil Liddell Hart, the greatest British military historian of his day, termed “the Mongol devastations”. Two thirds of the bomb tonnage of the five year air war fell in February, March and April of 1945, most of it on militarily insignificant targets. The tiniest part of this tonnage, the precision strikes on the 16 major train routes connecting the Ruhr region with the rest of Germany, had the greatest effect.”

This is not to negate the legitimate reasons which were alleged at the time and since to justify these actions; in the eyes of the author, and mine, the primary, and the most justifiable motivation was the idea that these were really the first military actions of the Cold War rather than the last of WWII, and even that they may have stopped the Russian army dead in its tracks, rather than continuing to advance until it ran into the possibly still-inferior (at that time) Allied armies. They may paradoxically have saved both Germany and Japan from Soviet occupation. But even if that, the most favorable and generous interpretation possible, is correct, it still seems that more Americans should acknowledge that the war was far from being an unmitigated moral triumph, especially considering that the military planners of these bombings seem to have had a near-total disregard for the relative military value of their targets. The simple fact is that between 50,000 and 100,000 died in each one of these raids, almost all civilians. We’ve been arguing for decades about whether the rape of Nanking constitutes genocide, and that involved about 300,000. Of course, it probably doesn’t help that the major documentation of these slaughters in the American cultural consciousness is Slaughterhouse Five. Apparently W.G. Sebald wrote a book about the subject before he died that made quite a stir in Germany, so maybe things will change, but I doubt it, at least until such a book is written by an American. And, a point that the author leaves implicit, if Churchill and Roosevelt were willing to authorize that kind of slaughter, the situation becomes even dicier when lunatics like Curtis LeMay are in leadership positions. And it’s pretty hard to disagree with the conclusion regarding the use of the nuclear bombs:

“Its first deployment went without a hitch. The know-how was there, and there was no alternative. Some people are probably still saying that.”

I’m always amazed by Frank Furedi’s Nietzsche-like ability to make perfectly innocuous, even admirable concepts sound like curse words. For example, from this article on our culture’s fetishization of sickness:

“Governments today do two things that I object to in particular. First they encourage introspection, telling us that unless men examine their testicles, unless we keep a check on our cholesterol level, then we are not being responsible citizens. You are letting down yourself, your wife, your kids, everybody. We are encouraged continually to worry about our health. As a consequence, public health initiatives have become, as far as I can tell, a threat to public health. Secondly, governments promote the value of health seeking. We are meant always to be seeking health for this or that condition. The primary effect of this, I believe, is to make us all feel more ill.”

While I’m not sure that I would call examining one’s testicles introspection, it could be justly argued that men over, say, 50 doing so occaisonally may prove more useful than the average afternoon brooding session. I don’t deny that the obsession with physical health does tend to induce the “normalization” of illness, nor that governments, especially (a point my brother has made before) in a system of at least partly government-run healthcare, take the prerogative of intruding themselves more and more on our ability to make decisions regarding our health. However, that by no means entirely negates the value of “health-seeking” in general. Isn’t that, after all, what survival is?

But Furedi is one of these professorial Marxists for whom a single moment lost from re-distributing income in society is a total waste. It is just as extremist a view as that of the health nuts. This is a man that a year ago was bewailing the fact that people no longer identify themselves by their political faction, that they were searching for gasp “personal meaning.” And as intellectually solid as it may seem to moan about moral concepts of right and wrong, good and evil giving way to healthy and ill, I would say that the process is both overstated and, to the extent that it exists, somewhat of a move to re-ground those terminal abstractions in something concrete. For one thing, it’s not like ethics was ever entirely divorced from survival concepts: at least two of the first five books of the Bible, for example, while couched in authoritarian moral-directive language, are pretty much pure health-and-lifestyle manuals (circa 2000 B.C.). I think Plato and Kant have exercised a deceptive influence, because considerations of personal and group well-being have been pervasive in ethics, whether it be hellfire in the afterlife for the Revivalist preachers or some sort of statistical well-offness for the utilitarians. So natural is the urge to connect morals and resultant well-being at some level that I was convinced until the age of 17 that Kant’s categorical imperative was founded on some sort of utilitarian principle.

Perhaps I’m one of the “morally illiterate,” but I find very few a priori moral directives very helpful anymore, and they always seem to be pierced by innumerable valid exceptions. In science, rules are assumed to provisional and subject to revision; in ethics, they tend to override any other consideration. As a result, we wind up with completely deracinated dogmas, and even great minds like Kant deceiving themselves into believing that a utilitarian principle is actually an a priori one. If we actually take the concept of health seriously, but not only in a reductive physical sense, it might restore an element of clarity to our thinking which has been lost in the decline of archaic ethical structures like religions.

And finally, I am quite aware of the role of medicalization in reducing humans to a position of dependency and helplessness. This point has been made, from quite a different extremist angle, by the ultra-libetarian Dr. Thomas Szasz, for example. Then again, people have said much the same thing about, for example, evolutionary psychology. What Furedi, Szasz and Richard Lewontin for that matter don’t seem to realize is that the perceived loss of control over one’s own mind and body (although, as B.F. Skinner pointed out, the results of such a theory, if correct, cannot actually be called either a loss or gain, since they were that way all along) is counter-balanced by the parallel development of technology that allows the manipulation of our biological systems. In other words, maybe someon’s “melancholy temperament” today would be diagnosed as mild schizophrenia, but on the other hard on the heels may come a treatment to cure it. So just like anything else there are two sides to the issue, but it seems to me that if the premises neurobiology are correct humanity in fact has more control over the mind and mental and emotional states today than ever before.

p.s. One might expect that intellectuals of Furedi’s ideological temperament would be more open to this trend. After all, it seems so recently (well, ok, it was 40 years ago, but I discovered it relatively recently) that Michel Foucault published Madness and Civilization to decry the wealthy and powerful élite shutting off and isolating the proles by labelling them as “insane.” Well, these days the élite are much more likely to identify themselves with the plebes by slugging a few Prozac with them. And if that’s not class solidarity, what is?

p.p.s. As evidence of the rather authoritarian and hierarchical basis of ethical norms, I might point out the near-total lack of development of a moral code regulating the interaction of nations, where there is no body invested with supreme authority to impose such a thing and whose behavior as a result frequently, as has been often noted, resembles strongly that of myopic psycopaths. Many people would take this as evidence of the efficacy of ethical norms, at least on a group or general level, which I don’t necessarily disagree with. However, if it is just a matter of my own actions, I generally trust my own instincts more.