The Educated Elite vs The Country – Part IV: The Flight of the Intellectuals
At the same time as Codevilla’ s article was riling conservatives, leftist intellectual Paul Berman published a book that greatly upset America’s intellectual elite.
Berman—who writes on politics and literature for places like The New York Times and The New Republic and is journalism prof and writer-in-residence at New York University—has published a controversial new book The Flight of the Intellectuals (which I have not yet read) that basically condemns the folks who’ve been among his fans and readers all these years: liberal intellectuals.
In The Flight of the Intellectuals, Berman asserts that the intellectual elites lack moral, physical and intellectual courage.
The same people who rallied to the defense of Westernized Muslim Salman Rushdie when the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses led to death threats and a fatwa against him in 1989—are afraid to stand up for critics of Islamism today. Worse than that, Berman says, these same liberal intellectuals now attack the Muslims who speak out against Islamism and fawn over Muslims like Tariq Ramadan whom they claim are moderate people that they can work with.
Berman’s book is the outgrowth of his long essay in The New Republic, “Who’s Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?”
There, Berman differentiates Islam from Islamism. The former, he says, is an ancient religion. The latter is a modern political tendency toward fascism and “the idea of heroic death as a political art form.”
Ron Rosenbaum – who encouraged Berman to turn his New Republic essay into a book–has a long review of the book at Slate:
The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman’s new 300-page polemic … a book that is likely to provoke an intense controversy among public intellectuals.
The most contentious assertion in Berman’s book is that some of the most prominent of these—people who rushed to the defense of Salman Rushdie when he was threatened with death for a novel deemed blasphemously irreverent to Islam—have failed to offer wholehearted support to Muslim dissidents today, people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and Muslim apostate, whose lives are similarly threatened.
This failure, this “flight of the intellectuals,” Berman argues, represents a deeply troubling abandonment of Enlightenment values in the face of recurrent threats to freedom of expression.
Rosenbaum notes that while Berman focuses especially on writers and intellectuals Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, his criticism is not limited to them alone.
In any case, Berman’s portrait of the behavior of today’s intellectuals when confronting the plight of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is devastating. I was going to say his portrait of certain intellectuals, because he singles out the well-respected writers Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for their aggressive sniping and snarking at Hirsi Ali when she was (and still is) under threat of death. But in fact the relative silence of the rest of the intelligentsia, when confronted with the threats against her, is almost more scandalous. (An exception is my colleague here at Slate Christopher Hitchens.)
It’s a curious state of affairs, it seems to me, that the liberal intelligentsia condemn someone for being too committed to Enlightenment values — you know things like reason, tolerance and individual freedom. But that is indeed the case. As Rosenbaum explains:
Hirsi Ali’s critics argue that she represents a simpleminded allegiance to the tolerant and libertarian values of the Enlightenment, that she’s an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” pretty much the moral equivalent of an Islamic fundamentalist who supports suicide bombing. Presumably because she doesn’t believe in tolerating an intolerance that kills, maims, and shackles women.
It was Ian Buruma who coined the oxymoronic phrase “Enlightenment fundamentalism,” which was then picked up by Timothy Garton Ash.*
Berman argues that for folks like Buruma, the ideas of the Enlightenment are merely one set of ideas among many. Says Rosenbaum:
… Berman believes that the phrase reflects a deeper misconception among a certain set of Western intellectuals. That although “the enlightenment is one of the great achievements of Western civilization,” these intellectuals “have come to look at the enlightenment as merely a set of anthropological prejudices”—to view a belief in free expression, for example, as merely a parochial Western view.
Which leads him to the most damning moment in his attack: “Buruma and Garton Ash had lost the ability to make the most elementary of distinctions … they could no longer tell a fanatical murderer from a rational debater” like Hirsi Ali.
In The New Republic essay, Berman says:
If there is an intellectual establishment, and I suppose there is, the attacks on Hirsi Ali radiate from its center.
And this, the campaign against Hirsi Ali—this, like the anti-Semitic mob assault during the Paris peace march of 2003, or like the spectacle of millions of Britons marching under the leadership of an Islamist organization, or like the calm discussions in The New York Times of why it would be wrong to condemn with any vigor the stoning of women to death—this does represent something new.
Here is the new development among journalists and intellectuals, the development that Ramadan’s career has served to illuminate. Something like a campaign against Hirsi Ali could never have taken place a few years ago. A sustained attack on an authentic liberal dissident crying out against injustices in remote parts of the world and even in the back streets of Western Europe, a sustained attack that appears nearly to have erased the very mention of women’s oppression and the struggle for women’s rights from discussion—no, this could not have happened yesterday, except on the extreme right. This is a new event.
This is a reactionary turn in the intellectual world..
It’s the result, he says there, of a postmodern way of thinking:
… the intellectual miasmas of the postmodern sensibility, and the miasmas had led, via the errors of relativism and an indiscriminate multiculturalism, to the simplest of philosophical mistakes. This was the inability to draw even the most elementary of distinctions.
In the postmodern idea, the Enlightenment has come to be looked upon as merely one more set of cultural prejudices, no better and very likely rather worse than other sets of cultural prejudices—a zealotry that is unable to control its own excesses. From this point of view, someone like Hirsi Ali, who grew up in an atmosphere of Islamist radicalism and the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and has taken up a new outlook committed to rationalism and individual freedom, has merely gone from one fundamentalism to another—not much different, seen in this light, from [Theo] van Gogh’s murderer.
Although a great deal of the response to Berman’s book has to do with the last chapter—The Flight of the Intellectuals, which is also the book’s title– much of Berman’s book deals with Tariq Ramadan. As Rosenbaum explains:
In the original essay and the book, Berman meticulously dissects both Ramadan’s claim to be a voice of moderation and the Western intellectuals’ little love affair with Ramadan. For Western intellectuals, Berman explains, Ramadan solves a problem. His views allow them to believe both in Enlightenment values and a multiculturalism that can embrace an Islam that is open to the reformation of such practices as the honor killing of women.
The problematic nature of Ramadan’s moderation can perhaps best be illustrated by his call for a “moratorium” on the stoning of women to death in Islamic societies for “honor” violations. The fact that he called for a “moratorium” at all has been hailed by Western, particularly European, intellectuals as a comforting sign for those concerned about women’s rights in the growing Muslim communities of the West.
The fact that he did not condemn the practice outright or call for its outlawing, and instead only called for “debate” with Islamic scholars and theologians on the matter during the “moratorium,” is not entirely reassuring to others.
In The New Republic essay, Berman quotes Ramadan:
“We are indeed dealing with two different universes of reference,” he writes, “two civilizations and two cultures.”
Rosenbaum says—and has told Berman—that Berman has buried the lede. In newspaper jargon that means he hasn’t put the key information first—it’s buried somewhere in the article or, in this case, in the last chapter of the book. The key thing isn’t looking at the way Ramadan has been received, Rosenbaum says:
But it is Berman’s final section—especially Chapter 9, the title chapter, “The Flight of the Intellectuals”—that will make this an old-fashioned “event” … flight from the values they espoused when defending Salman Rushdie in 1989, and their sniping, snarking, and subverting Ayaan Hirsi Ali this century.
Rosenbaum thinks that fear of terrorism is the reason for the noticeable lack of courage among public intellectuals:
What made the difference between the wholehearted response to Rushdie and the cold-hearted response to Hirsi Ali? Berman may disclaim it, but I think the subtext of his critique of Ali’s nitpickers is that, in the two decades since the Rushdie affair, standing up against Islamist death threats requires more physical courage than the intellectuals are willing to muster. They would rather allow pettifogging criticism to be a fig leaf, a way to distance themselves from danger.
But now the threat of murder, the attempted murder, and the actual murder of dissidents from Islam have all become a regular feature of the intellectual landscape of Europe.
Rosenbaum believes that fear is not only the reason for the silence but the reason that public intellectuals aren’t speaking up about the silence:
The fact that we so rarely hear a peep about the cumulative terror experienced by these writers and artists from the likes of these intellectuals while they find time to sneer at Hirsi Ali is the real scandal to me. The fact that theological censorship backed by death threats has been installed on the continent of Europe with just about everyone deciding it would be wiser to keep silent about it is once again burying the lede. But to my mind, printing it [Berman’s long list of Islamic and non-Islamic dissidents who are threatened with death and will have to have body guards for the rest of their lives] at all is a service.
A certain kind of irreverent speech once valued in Europe since the time of Chaucer and Rabelais has been, it seems, powerfully threatened if not silenced, and the heirs to that intellectual tradition are too scared to speak out about that silence.
Berman, in The New Republic essay says:
The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb.
Today the menace to society is declared to be Hirsi Ali and people of similar minds, of whom there are quite a few: John Stuart Mill’s Muslim admirers, who are said to be just as fanatical as the fanatics. During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.
And:
And yet if someone like [French writer and philosopher] Pascal Bruckner mumbles a few words about the need for courage under these circumstances, the sneers begin—“Now where have we heard that kind of thing before?”—and onward to the litany about fascism.
In the Times magazine [piece about Tariq Ramadan], Buruma held back even from hinting obliquely about the fascist influences on Ramadan’s grandfather, the founder of the modern cult of artistic death. Yet Bruckner, the liberal—here is somebody on the brink of fascism!
Berman asks this:
How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women’s rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan’s family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks—what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?
Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.
And this:
What does it mean to be on the left, after all?
