Well, so much for the resolution to blog more regularly – I think that has as much chance of success as the one about cutting down on self-medication for stress with cake and gin. A partial explanation for this failure is that, as someone who is engaged with political issues and occasionally comments on them (albeit almost invariably through the prism of Thucydides), not to blog about issues of freedom of speech and Islam, despite my obvious lack of expertise on either of those topics, has felt problematic over the last week and a half. This has been one of those times where silence feels like complicity, but speaking out in a way that remains true to the complexity of things, rather than just loudly picking a side and damning the consequences, feels equally risky. There was a great deal of truth in the Twitter snark that Charlie Hebdo was overtaking Thomas Piketty as the French thing Anglophone commentators were writing the most words about without having read; and I was also reminded of the aftermath of 9/11 and the furious reaction to Mary Beard’s attempt at providing a bit of nuance. And yet I still felt the pull to say something, or at least a reluctance to blog about anything else for a bit.
I felt rather sorry for at least some professional commentators, who weren’t really given the option of staying silent (of course it’s clear that plenty of others wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment). I have read some excellent pieces, some offering context, some analysis and some a more personal response – and this has been an occasion where the brevity and punchiness of Twitter – the #whythecharliehebdomassacremeansweshouldsupportmypolitics hashtag aside (thanks to @chrisbrooke for that one) – has definitely lost out to the subtleties of longer-form, multi-layered commentary. On the whole, though, I think that Jedediah Purdey put it best in ‘The Dangers of Clarity’ (thanks to David Grewal for the link); it’s a thoroughly human reaction to try to reduce these and other terrible events to something comprehensible, even at the expense of complexity, but sometimes it’s better and more appropriate to refuse this temptation.
So, at least for the moment, I’m going to limit my contribution on this theme to a couple of fragmentary comments, with no proper sense – let alone a coherent case – of what they might say about the whole. The first relates to the German Pegida movement – which I was planning to write anyway before the Paris murders. While in Germany over Christmas and the New Year I was encouraged by the response of German politicians to the growing demonstrations in Dresden and (to a much smaller degree) other cities, with Angela Merkel expressly warning against the undercurrent of hate and suspicion motivating the crowds. It’s all too easy to imagine that in similar circumstances, at least before the murders in Paris, British politicians from all the mainstream parties would in contrast have been lining up to express sympathy with the very real concerns of ordinary hard-working people who blame everything on foreigners.
I’m fascinated by the ideological work going on in the name ‘Pegida’ – which to a large extent is aimed at disguising the hardcore racist element and toxic Nazi associations within its organisation in order to win over (and/or provide cover for) a much broader spectrum of the generally discontented and angry. Compare and contrast with the name ‘UKIP’, which almost does what it says on the tin apart from the claim to represent the UK rather than mostly the English. Patriotic Europeans Against The Islamisation of the West; not Germans concerned about Germany and so not nationalist in any crude old-fashioned sense, but heirs of the great European cultural tradition that harks back to classical antiquity. Echoes not only of Spengler but also the ill-fated draft European constitution, which was undermined in part by arguments over whether the Christian tradition should be put at heart of European identity. Maybe they should have stuck with the Thucydides quote (“our constitution is called a democracy”) so roundly mocked in the UK parliament (see Liz Sawyer’s chapter in the appearing-imminently Handbook to the Reception of Thucydides, edited by Lee and Morley). This disavowal of nationalism is somewhat undercut now by the appropriation of the specifically German rallying cry from 1989, “Wir sind das Volk”, but we can never expect ideological coherence from this sort of enterprise.
And then there’s the term ‘Islamisation’ which of course means anything remotely connected to Muslims and Islam that ‘we’ don’t like. The claim is that society is being taken over and culture undermined by alien values, from the serving of halal meat in McDonalds without a big “Special Food for Animal-Torturing Foreigners” label to, of course, the idea that Islam is given a special status when it comes to whether people are allowed to say what they think about others. This seems to be a quite different set of fears from the better-grounded concern that small numbers of fanatics are plotting violent acts against a society and culture that they regard as utterly alien and hostile to their own values – but again, there’s not a lot of point in hoping for intellectual coherence here. This attitude feeds from and feeds into an all-embracing hostility towards Muslims, as a vast conspiracy that is simultaneously taking over society from within and plotting its violent overthrow – the tropes of twentieth-century anti-semitism being recycled for a new target.
My second thought relates to the one comment piece that really annoyed the hell out of me, Slavoj Zizek’s ‘Are the Worst Really Full of Passionate Intensity?’. Yes, I know he only does it to annoy because he knows it teases, but still… Zizek starts by setting up a dramatic contrast in Nietzschean terms between the ‘last men’ of a decaying Europe, apathetic creatures dedicated to lives of material comfort, and the passionate, committed fundamentalists dedicated to the defeat of this decadent, wishy-washy civilisation – not an argument that I actually recall anyone making – and then asserting that really these are two sides of the same coin, locked in a self-destructive embrace, and the only people capable of rising above this are those of the New Left. Liberalism will fail because it’s too liberal and still believes in democracy, tolerance and the like; fundamentalism will fail because the fundamentalists are not fundamentalist enough, lacking the absolute conviction in their rightness of certain Slovenian philosophers.
To think in response to the Paris killings means to drop the smug self-satisfaction of a permissive liberal and to accept that the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. What Max Horkheimer had said about Fascism and capitalism already back in 1930s – those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about Fascism – should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.
#whythecharliehebdomassacremeansweshouldsupportmypolitics with bells on, and the equation of the undeniable relationship between capitalism and fascism and the relationship between liberal democracy and Islamic fundamentalism is so gormless that it makes sense only as deliberative provocation. There are some unremarked but uncomfortable parallels between Zizek’s analysis of the liberalism-fundamentalism dynamic and the relationship between liberalism and his own radical revolutionary rhetoric, the latter being ever more infuriated by the Laodicean indecisiveness of the mainstream, and between the ‘liberalism will perish by being too liberal’ argument and the ‘freedom will be lost unless we restrict freedom’ claims of the securocrats demanding ever more powers and restrictions.
Rather than Nietzsche and Horkheimer, I find myself reminded – not just by Zizek, but by much of the less thoughtful commentary over the last week and a half – of Thucydides’ critique of the rush to extremes of rhetoric and action when a society falls into factionalism.
What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action… Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect… If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition.
Easy to read this as an analysis of the fanaticism of those who plot to kill cartoonists, Jewish shoppers and schoolchildren, policeman and off-duty soldiers – but equally applicable to some of the demands of the self-appointed defenders of freedom of speech and western values, and of course the marchers of Pegida. What is most disturbing about this parallel is that Thucydides shows us clearly how fragile social unity and stability are – without offering any clear advice on what to do when things start to fall apart.
Sphinx 
Could you expand on the “echoes of Spengler” you see? Spengler, as far as I know, expected that “Western Civilization” (the long aftermath of creative Western Culture – quite different from the Classical) would go the way of other such Cultures/Civilizations – increasingly regimented, uncreative, centralized – and that some new Great Idea or Image would animate incoming generations. As far as I recall he thought of Islam as a Magian Culture/Civilization deformed by coming to be within lands dominated by the Western. And Russia was another thing entirely.
I was thinking in very general terms of Spengler’s conception of das Abendland as a cultural unity, subsuming individual peoples and nations and clearly differentiated from other such cultural unities; and of the general sense of this culture as being under threat. Not his specific analysis of the dynamics of the process, but rather the general tone.
OK – though it’s Civilization (the relic of Culture) that is “under threat”, and for internal reasons. He reckoned that Western Culture was already well past its peak, and heading – inexorably and blamelessly – towards its ossification. His main contribution was to see that this did not mean the end of Humanity, only of one particular notion of the human. In detail, the “cultural unities” aren’t fully differentiated – Magian and Classical are mixed together in the history of the Mediterranean lands (I should have said that the Magian was deformed by the Classical, at least at first, not by the Western – my slip!).
Fair point – Spengler’s ideas are much more complex and interesting than the crude caricatured image of them. Would “echoes of ‘Spengler'” be better.
In my defence, Timothy Garton Ash has similar thoughts in this morning’s Grauniad… http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/18/germany-xenophobic-anti-islamic-pegida-france
In this context another couple of parts of Thucydides’ Corcyraean analysis may also be of interest/relevance:
3.82.8 (end): ‘The moderate element among the citizens, either because they did not fight on their side, or through jealousy of their survival, were destroyed by both parties.’
3.83.4: ‘Those, however, who contemptuously thought that they would in fact detect any move against them, and that it was unnecessary for them to achieve through action what was within their capability through intellect, were to a greater degree caught off guard and destroyed.’
Not so much ‘relevance’ as ‘scariness’ – I think our hope has to be that we’re not yet this far down the road…
I think the silence = complicity is a disastrous cliche and so totally absurd in this particular instance that I am baffled that so many have paraded it rhetorically to justify their own statements (not Prof M here, or at least not in order to justify, rather in passing).
Seems to be especially prominent at the moment in demands for all Muslims to make public declarations that they really are not in favour of murdering people.
One of the things I (and I imagine it is only me) find interesting about the Charlie Hebdo debate is the lack of any reference to the French Revolution. Before the attack it appeared, to me at least, that many commentators were drawing the equivalence between ISIS, Islamic Fundamentalism, and Robespierreist terror. It was as if the Guardian had suddenly read Isiah Berlin and seen Adam Curtis. However, in the wake of the attack emphasis suddenly shifted back in time to Voltaire and an imagined genealogy of French free speech in the face of religious extremism. No-one I note, recorded that Voltaire saw Grub Street ‘hack’ writers as little better than prostitutes (but that is beside the point)
Yet it was during the Revolution, at precisely the moment when people like Desmoulins were attempting to create free speech that it was under its most intense pressure. For Robespierre et al. one was either for virtue, for Revolution, or against. There was no staying quiet, or holding one’s tongue. That was taken as complicity and led to the guillotine. As soon as Robespierre was beheaded the first French translation of Thucydides for one hundred and thirty years appeared. It was intended, I believe, as an invocation of the fundamental need for reasoned debate in politics, and one’s right to hold one’s tongue rather than join in the mass of voices. The translator, Levesque, notes that the manuscript had laid beside him throughout 1782-4, that he had dared not publish it. For Levesque, Thucydides was the historian of political turmoil (the conflict of people against people) whose lesson was an eternal call for restraint. For that reason, Levesque believed, scarcely a matter came before the British parliament on which Thucydides did not throw some illumination. Perhaps Levesque’s Thucydides is a figure that all sides could take a lesson from at the moment.