The Orwell Temptation

I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I'll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma's Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I'm more likely to take Buruma's word for it than Berman's.

That said, the very fact that Berman wrote such a thing reminded me of Josh Marshall's years-old essay on Berman and "the Orwell Temptation". Josh described the temptation primarily in terms of a tendency to overblow the world-historical significance of Islamist terrorism in order to make intellectuals feel more important, like they're living at really important times. In Berman's case, though, this impulse also exhibits itself in a pretty weird conception of the role of the intellectual in world-historical times. Way back in his March 2003 essay on Sayyid Qutb Berman was saying things like this:

It would be nice to think that, in the war against terror, our side, too, speaks of deep philosophical ideas -- it would be nice to think that someone is arguing with the terrorists and with the readers of Sayyid Qutb. But here I have my worries. The followers of Qutb speak, in their wild fashion, of enormous human problems, and they urge one another to death and to murder. But the enemies of these people speak of what? The political leaders speak of United Nations resolutions, of unilateralism, of multilateralism, of weapons inspectors, of coercion and noncoercion. This is no answer to the terrorists. The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things. Presidents will not do this. Presidents will dispatch armies, or decline to dispatch armies, for better and for worse.

As Brian Weatherson argued at the time there was something very strange about this. 9/11 certainly made the philosophy of Sayyid Qutb a more interesting topic for the intellectually inclined, a more valid subject for New York Times Magazine articles. Nevertheless, it takes a curious frame of mind to believe -- as Berman appears to believe in complete earnestness -- that defeating al-Qaeda requires us to first engage in close reading of the works of a man who died forty years ago, and then for us to muster an army of intellectuals to refute his philosophy.

Here, again, implicit in the essay on Ramadan is the notion that, on some level, for al-Qaeda to be defeated it's necessary for hawkish western left-wing intellectuals to win an internecine argument with other western left-wing intellectuals about the merits of Tariq Ramadan's work. It's just a bizarre idea, a weird picture of how the world works; as if Soviet Communism collapsed because books about the superiority of free markets were really convincing rather than because books about the superiority of free markets were true and therefore societies featuring free markets outperformed the Soviet bloc.

Comments

I read the whole god-damn thing. What a waste of time. I can't freaking figure out what it is about (other than highlighting that Berman is really pissed with his old friend Buruma).

Also, Berman really has a thing for comparing ideological conflicts of the cold war with today's Islamist conflict. Berman uses lines like "Muslims everywhere are born free but live in chains". An utterly un-Islamic formulation that is supposed to highlight Islamism's similarities with Marxism, but actually only highlights Berman's obsession with fighting the ideological wars of his youth. I'd rather Berman just got a Miata and bimbo girlfriend -- the normal, mostly-harmless way old men re-live their youth

If Krauthammer is perpetually living in 1938, Berman is perpetually living in 1968 -- fighting Soviet totalitarianism and defending the true values of the western leftism.

It would be nice to have a public intellectuals and pundits who didn't have a Kaus-like obsession with fighing yesterday's war.

We need more Whippersnappers.

Posted by Ikram | May 29, 2007 11:28 AM

One problem with the analogy is that you can point to empirical evidence that free-market systems are better than communist systems, but you can't point to empirical evidence that moderate Islam is "better" than radical Islam, whatever that would entail.

We often hear talk of winning a war of ideas against radical Islam, but I'm not sure at all what that would entail. Every religion on earth has its crazy fundie segment that just isn't that amenable to persuasion. And it's not like we can seduce the radicals in the Middle East by tempting them with the glories of American-style secular capitalism; the radicals in Arab society largely hail from the privileged classes, not from the ranks of the poor who can be bought off with McDonald's.

Posted by Steve | May 29, 2007 11:36 AM

The idea that you can win a world conflict simply by luckily happening onto a form of social organization that works is a uniquely naïve early 21st century point of view.

Matt has joined some new ultra-extreme form of Marxism. Now he's arguing that even spending money to influence the academy and ideals of society is a waste. Material conditions rule over everything and intellectuals aren't needed even as ideological cover.

Back in the real world imaginary universal money ideology does not ride mankind.

It is imperative to win the battle of ideas in southwest Asia if there is ever to be peace. That means we must have intellectuals that will really engage Islam and modern middle eastern thinking. And modern popular thinking is usually based on the work of philosophers two to five generations back.

I don't know if Berman is facing the right intellectual currents but at least he is involved in the struggle and not pretending it doesn't matter.

It is ideals and ideas and dreams that drive the rational animal, not cheap material goods and petrochemicals. The idea that meaningless pragmatic greed will always win the day is just going to get us into more trouble. The human experience is not just a macrocosm of the MTV marketing department. It truly is a same for America that we are raising a generation that doesn't know that.

Posted by Brian | May 29, 2007 11:46 AM

Of course, which is relevent to this topic in some way I can't quite put my finger on, the thing about Sayyid Qutb is that what he said could have (if fundies of other stripes were more eloquent) come from the mouth of any defender of any faith.

Qutb said "Judaism is too legalistic, Christianity too antinomian and Islam is just right".

Any Catholic apologist can tell you that "Judaism and Islam are too legalistic, Protestantism is too antinomian and Catholicism is just right".

Any Jewish apologist can tell you that "Islam is too legalistic, Christianity too antinomian and Judaism just right".

Any conservative Protestant can tell you that "Judaism, Islam and Catholicism are too legalistic, liberal Protestantism is too antinomian and conservative Protestantism just right".

I do believe "knowing your enemy" is important and a better strategy than demonizing them. But still, isn't all this "we must know what 'those people' are thinking by reading such 'exotic' writers of Qutb" just more distracting and useless Orientalism?

Posted by DAS | May 29, 2007 11:47 AM

You can't help but agree with Mr. Marshall on the relative insignificance (I would add banality and stupidity but I digress) of these times.

But the Twilight Struggle crowd you'll note get huge advances from big name publishers, get to be on tv, and write feature articles for major national magazines in the service of ideas and policies approved by the people running this government.

Orwell was an often brilliant but popularly marginal and poor writer (not to mention an anarchist) for most of his life; his ideas - even late in life - were not for the most part poll tested and elite approved.

The fact that he cozied up to the Attlee crowd toward the end of his not-so-long life says more about his financial position (who wants to go into old age broke?) than his values. But even then he was more of a leftist telling other leftists they look stupid and naive to believe that there is anything good about the Soviet Union than some middlebrow hack for London and Washington and a True Believer in capitalism; he disapproved of capitalism till the end.

Posted by Linus | May 29, 2007 11:55 AM

"It is ideals and ideas and dreams that drive the rational animal, not cheap material goods and petrochemicals."

That's a snappy line, Brian, but it begs the question of whether man is actually a rational animal. Given that nearly the entire history of the post-World War 2 world has been dominated by the explosion of cheap material goods and petrochemicals, and their ability to batter decaying ideals into submission, I'm afraid this doesn't speak very well of humanity.

But considering that ideals, hopes, and dreams sent Europe marching cheerfully into World War One, sent the Japanese off to liberate Nanking, drove the Russians and Germans into the loving embrace of totalitarianism, and eventually brought down the twin towers, there is perhaps something to be said for living among people who possess no honorable ideals and get bitchy when the cable TV goes out.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | May 29, 2007 11:59 AM

Berman is an embarrassing navel-gazer. To be involved in some ideological struggle, people on the other side have to read your work. Considering his obsession with the Euro-American left of his generation, he only has appeal to people interested this particular subculture, which means his readership consists of Euro-Americocentrists and other Kaus-like navel gazers. He's not exactly Reza Aslan or Francis Fukuyama.

Posted by Reality Man | May 29, 2007 12:05 PM

As is well known, Locke stole all his ideas from Hai Ebn Yokhdan by Ibn Tufayl, the 11th century Sufi philosopher who was translated by Locke's friend, Pococke. So the real clash of civilizations is, on the one hand, the Sufis - and the subset of Sufi dominated culture, the West - and on the other hand, the Saalafi faction. Christianity, which has always been an intellectually sterile heresy, doesn't really count here. Surely we should be probing the Hai Ebn Yokhdan for the answers to all our questions today. Perhaps our most brilliant public intellectual, Marty Peretz, could glance, with his Olympian eye, over Ibn Tufayl and tell us what he thinks. It would be awesome.

Posted by roger | May 29, 2007 12:06 PM

Whatever. Jobs and social mobility and rising stds of living in Egypt et al. I don't care how you do it, but it has to be done.

I suspect it will take some "deep philosophical ideas" like the end of I/P, micro-finance, distributed energy & manufacturing. And how to change the kleptocracies without war. I don't think I have heard anything worth listening to about Mubarek.

We need it in Kansas & South America & Africa too.

Posted by bob mcmanus | May 29, 2007 12:18 PM

It's difficult to take too seriously the philosophical ramblings, or the logical connections, of a man (Berman) who once famously argued:

If Osama bin Laden = bad, rhetorically violent leader, and Saddam Hussein = bad, rhetorically violent leader, then Osama bin Laden = Saddam Hussein and we should invade Iraq.

Posted by Alan in SF | May 29, 2007 12:19 PM

Here, again, implicit in the essay on Ramadan is the notion that, on some level, for al-Qaeda to be defeated it's necessary for hawkish western left-wing intellectuals to win an internecine argument with other western left-wing intellectuals about the merits of Tariq Ramadan's work. It's just a bizarre idea, a weird picture of how the world works; as if Soviet Communism collapsed because books about the superiority of free markets were really convincing rather than because books about the superiority of free markets were true and therefore societies featuring free markets outperformed the Soviet bloc.

The idea - not so bizarre in fact - is that the US foreign policy is based on a series of right-wing objectives - colonising and ethnic cleansing the Palestinians, securing rents from oil production, maintaining military bases - and therefore suffers from the weakness that left-liberal forces in the US and Europe will refuse to support it, indeed may actively oppose it. So it's important for those committed to one or more of these projects - oil, Israel or military supremacy - to prevent liberal opinion from seeing any merits in even the most modern/liberal Islamic individuals. Hence Berman in TNR.

The point is not that publishing these books and articles defeats the Islamists, the point is that publishing these books is designed to stunt the formation of a liberal coalition supporting alternative policies in Europe and the US.

Posted by otto | May 29, 2007 12:20 PM

I would add that most of those I am aware of who openly aspire to be like Orwell, or profess a deep admiration for him, seem to think that he is principally some kind of backlash liberal martyr.

Orwell is remembered not because he thought Stalin was a dick (which is more or less an obvious observation, and was at the time too) but because he was a fiction writer of the first order, and a very good essayist too.

Being an artist in politics is a complicated business but Orwell (with the exception of his hackishness for Labour at the end of his life) comes through (like Eliot at the other end of the spectrum) looking pretty good.

But if you want to get specific about it Christopher Hitchens is not an artist at all and while quite bright (this gets repeated so often it starts to sound like "rocker" Tommy Lee; intelligence is a dime a dozen these days) is not an artist and if he isn't by now probably never will be. He's a professional character assassin and demagogue who uses his high profile platform to attack mothers whose kids just got killed in war. I don't doubt that Kissinger is a shit, or that Mother Teresa's charity doesn't give dying people enough pain meds, but book-length hit pieces do not constitute great literary non-fiction.

A few years ago I remember reading some survey online about the best works of non-fiction of all time. Number one was "the Education of Henry Adams". I don't know if this is the best work of non-fiction or not, but I do know it is a beautifully written and self-deprecating work that asks difficult questions about the man's own life, concludes that despite its many accomplishments was a failure. As I recall, Mr. Adams - who spent his young life repelled by slavery and determined to see its abolition - nevertheless comes to find the terms of its abolition (a terrible war in which many of his friends died, and which traumatized the country for some time to come) almost unspeakable. I haven't read Mr. Hitchens' new book about Iraq (he did write one didn't he?) but arrogantly defending a war you didn't fight in, lose any family members in, and don't even have to pay for (he is still a British citizen isn't he?) doesn't strike me as the stuff of intellectual greatness.

Posted by Linus | May 29, 2007 12:25 PM

The part that is missing from Matthew's argument is that during the Cold War, the West constantly was telling the Soviet bloc that our material success was the product of our superior system (democracy plus rule of law plus freedom of speach/thought/religion plus capitalism). We need to continue telling that to the Middle East (and the world).

It would help if the current occupant of the White House actually was a proponent of these things.

Posted by Ephus | May 29, 2007 12:27 PM

That's a good point, Ephus. One thing that has held the Middle East back through the ages is the excessive entanglement between church and state. Islam, like many religions, is anti-progress and anti-change, particularly in its most fundamentalist incarnations. If only we were willing to hold up America as the exemplar of what you can accomplish when you embrace secularism and the concept of separation between church and state; but that wouldn't fit with some people's political agendas.

Instead, the "war of ideas" is fated to be no more than a struggle between Christianity and Islam; and like all religious debates, a winner can never be determined except by force.

Posted by Steve | May 29, 2007 12:34 PM

"The part that is missing from Matthew's argument is that during the Cold War, the West constantly was telling the Soviet bloc that our material success was the product of our superior system (democracy plus rule of law plus freedom of speach/thought/religion plus capitalism). We need to continue telling that to the Middle East (and the world)."

Do we? Who do we tell?

It seems to me that this is where historical analogies get clumsy, and ill-conceived. I didn't read Beinart's book, but apart from the fact that the Cold War was in the broad sense a time of increasing civil liberties (this time seems to be the opposite of that), at least some of the the Soviet Union and most of the countries of Eastern Europe came to "liberal democracy" (if that's what exists in Russia) and capitalism (this I'm convinced most certainly exists in Russia and Eastern Europe) relatively gracefully, and without violence. Yugoslavia was a notable exception, and to be frank the Arab world and Central Asia reminds me more of the former Yugoslavia than of Eastern Europe as a whole.

I don't believe most of that part of the world will go gracefully to "liberal democracy" (they already have some kind of capitalism in most of these countries). It's not some kind of biological deficit, but an historical and political one. You have all these very young nation-states virtually none of which have had time to cohere around a strong set of national institutions or national identity. You have a-hole demagogues in charge who have played different ethnic and religious groups off each other for decades. You have nascent ethnic nationalist movements (among Saudi Shiites, Iranian Azeris, Kurds everywhere there are Kurds, others). What I think this is is a recipe for a generation-long regional civil war liable to end in the breakup of all these petty fiefdoms along sectarian lines, the creation of a bunch of new mini and micro states (forged along sectarian lines), open borders, and a regional bureuacracy to handle things like trade and immigration policy. New conflicts over borders and oil and water will replace all this fuss about Islamism (although I think the American empire will be continued to be troubled by assorted barbarians at the gate for as long as it exists [which I suspect will be several centuries longer]). It will be a kind of postmodern version of premodern Ottoman times.

Posted by Linus | May 29, 2007 1:22 PM

That said, the very fact that Berman wrote such a thing reminded me of Josh Marshall's years-old essay on Berman and "the Orwell Temptation". Josh described the temptation primarily in terms of a tendency to overblow the world-historical significance of Islamist terrorism in order to make intellectuals feel more important, like they're living at really important times.

In defense of those wankers well-meaning but misguided individuals who have given in to the Orwell Temptation, is this a new phenomenon? Or for that matter, is it limited to intellectuals?

I remember reading an article in Time a while ago, discussing some museum exhibit themed around futurism through the ages, if that makes any sense. That is, how the vision of the future has changed over time. We know what people today expect the world to look like in a century, but what did people expect in 1807, or 1607? If I remember the article correctly, the only trend (besides people getting a lot of stuff wrong, of course) was that they thought the future would be very different from the past or present. Both doomsaying and utopianism are about as old as religion itself, for example. For the past 60 years or so, such predictions have been at least somewhat more plausible because of fears of nuclear war and because of how interconnected the world has become, but still, the predictions have been made wrongly a great many times before.

Posted by Cyrus | May 29, 2007 2:16 PM

"It is imperative to win the battle of ideas in southwest Asia if there is ever to be peace. That means we must have intellectuals that will really engage Islam and modern middle eastern thinking. And modern popular thinking is usually based on the work of philosophers two to five generations back."

You should read a little book called "The True Beliver." Or the collected Culture works of Iain M. Banks, which is about the clash of good Culture and bad ones. We won't win this particular war of ideas with shinier, better, big ideas that stir our pride in out way of life. We can't. Others are proud of their way of life as well.

We are witnessing the failure of this culture of the strong idea in Iraq now. It simply cannot come to terms with the limits of strength because strength is the cornerstone of the philosophy.

We are going to win this war with consumer products, fast food and American Idol, and crappy imports from China, like we did in China, Russia, Vietnam, and all across the rest of the world.

We are in a civilizational clash, I agree. We're going to have to engage the war of ideas, I agree. I profoundly disagree as to what this means both strategically in terms of the ideas that will win hearts, and tactically in terms of how these ideas are expressed. We may face as many as a few hundred thousand civilian casualities here in the US, but we will crush the culture of the Middle east with our consumer culture as surely as we bombed Tokoyo into rubble with our superior industrial base. It's simply far too attractive to ignore, like a shiny fishing lure to fish, or a beer to Matt Y.

Paul Berman in TNR isn't winning a single mind to the cause. He isn't waging in the war of ideas, he is simply stating that there is a war. He doesn't understand where the front of the war is. He doesn't understand this is a war between strength and indifference, and that indifference is going to win.

We only need look to the aftermath of the Vietnam war to determine what a future after Iraq might look like. Yes, 20 years from today, Iraq and Iran will begin to shed their Islamic rule, as those old guys die, and then they will join our world, as Russia, China, Vietnam, and the whole world has embraced US style feel good culture.

Posted by mickslam | May 29, 2007 2:34 PM

you're right about revolutionary cultures moving into the mainstream, mickslam...but I wonder too if the US isn't at the same time moving toward their world. Evolving a new authoritarian/fundamentalist/free market synthesis. Or maybe it's just that you always become like your enemies.

Posted by Alan in SF | May 29, 2007 3:11 PM

The danger with Muslim fanatics is that it's often hard for us to take them seriously because often they appear to be idiots (e.g., the Fort Dix Six, Al Qaeda's bizzare ideas for unrealistic weapons unearthed after the fall of Kabul, etc.). The fears of Muslim fanatics reestablishing the Caliphate are an example of going too far in the other direction.

The real danger is of Muslim fanatics graduating to nuclear terrorism. That's the one thing that makes them scarier in some ways than the Soviets: although there were a couple of close calls, mutual assured destruction kept the commies from preemptively nuking us; suicidal terrorists can't be similarly deterred.

Posted by Fred | May 29, 2007 3:32 PM

"Berman uses lines like "Muslims everywhere are born free but live in chains". An utterly un-Islamic formulation that is supposed to highlight Islamism's similarities with Marxism, but actually only highlights Berman's obsession with fighting the ideological wars of his youth."

How does parodying Rousseau highlight Islamism's similarity to Marxism?

Posted by SqueakyRat | May 29, 2007 3:41 PM

Fred is right. One nuclear bomb in an American city will send all hopes of national health care down the drain. Raise in the minimum wage? Bye bye.

To me Richard the "Shoe Bomber" seemed dumb and unthreatening.

The problem is - the catch 22- our "allies" Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan all have authoritarian government which "incubate" these terrorists. (Yeah at least they don't threaten war with Israel, like Iran.)

Spreading democracy and improving the lives of those in the Middle East should be a top concern. Ignore it at your own risk.

Posted by Peter K. | May 29, 2007 4:00 PM

Spreading democracy and improving the lives of those in the Middle East should be a top concern. Ignore it at your own risk.

The consensus among experts is that the chance of a U.S. city going up in a nuclear fireball is 100%. "Spreading democracy" and all that crap isn't going to change that. It's paying the cost to be the boss, and apparently we are willing to pay any price (or think we are).

Posted by Ed Marshall | May 29, 2007 4:04 PM

SquaekyRat -- Whoops. You're right. It doesn't.

But I don't get the point of the parady. Muslims believe we are all born slaves to God. What's Berman's point by using that turn of phrase?

Posted by Ikram | May 29, 2007 4:07 PM

If anything, spreading democracy will probably increase the likelihood of the U.S. getting nuked, assuming that's possible. If Pakistan was actually democratic, we would have lost control of nuclear proliferation years ago.

Posted by AlanC9 | May 29, 2007 4:54 PM

"Of course, which is relevent to this topic in some way I can't quite put my finger on, the thing about Sayyid Qutb is that what he said could have (if fundies of other stripes were more eloquent) come from the mouth of any defender of any faith."

The thing about Sayyid Qutb, if my translation of his book "Milestones" is anything to go by, is that he was a really mediocre thinker and writer. Which shocked me, 'cos Berman in his book Terrorism and Liberalism makes Qutb seem like some kind of groundbreaking Islamic intellectual giant.

Instead, his writing reads like Derivative Standard Whine Against Modernism #34 (Now With Added Quotations from the Koran and Hadith!) One knows fundie Islam is against inoovation (ijtidah), but bloody hell.

Posted by Sock Puppet of the Great Satan | May 29, 2007 5:08 PM

Peter K.:

"Fred is right. One nuclear bomb in an American city will send all hopes of national health care down the drain. Raise in the minimum wage? Bye bye."

That's an impressive combination of snark and silliness.

AlanC9: "If Pakistan was actually democratic, we would have lost control of nuclear proliferation years ago."

Eh, actually it was under the current autocracy that A.Q. Khan was proliferating nuke tech -- though I'm not sure a corrupt democrat like Bhutto would have done a better job containing this.

Posted by Fred | May 29, 2007 5:44 PM

"One thing that has held the Middle East back through the ages is the excessive entanglement between church and state. Islam, like many religions, is anti-progress and anti-change, particularly in its most fundamentalist incarnations. If only we were willing to hold up America as the exemplar of what you can accomplish when you embrace secularism and the concept of separation between church and state; but that wouldn't fit with some people's political agendas."

Outside of Saudi Arabia (our Sunni ally that is also ranked as more developed than neighbors like Yemen) and Iran (our Shia enemy), where have the Islamists of any sect held onto power? Egypt has a shitty economy run by secular, corrupt plutocrats, not mullahs. It was Nasser who set Egypt on such a disastrous course.

"Eh, actually it was under the current autocracy that A.Q. Khan was proliferating nuke tech -- though I'm not sure a corrupt democrat like Bhutto would have done a better job containing this."

True, but the Pakistani military has made this a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Ever since Zia's coup (and maybe as far back as Ayub), the Pakistani military has saved all real foreign policy decision-making power for itself and thrown the civilian and democratic leadership (when there has been one) scraps. For instance, Benazir Bhutto was forbidden to forge her own path on relations with India (ironically, this Nixon-goes-to-China dynamic is one of the reasons Indians often believe Musharraf offers a better chance of peace than anyone in decades). Whenever the Pakistani military screws up, they also make us more reliant on them. Fail to solidify control and democracy along the Afghan border after the Soviet withdrawal? That just means the military needs more power. The military undermines democratic leadership? That just means only the military can really run Pakistan. The military (and the intelligence services) have too many radicals in its ranks? Support Musharraf so he can make sure the other military guys don't come to power. The Pakistani military (with boneheaded assists from Indian militants and incompetent or cruel foreign policy advisers in Washington, Moscow and Beijing) has been brilliant at putting Pakistan, India, the US and the rest of the world in a perpetual catch-22.

Posted by Reality Man | May 29, 2007 7:39 PM

Back to Tariq Ramadam. So where is this great threat to Western Civilization, now? Oxford University, right? Wow, I guess those dumb Brits just let in the ideological Trojan Horse there, all ready to undermine Western resolve to fight the good fight from inside the Academy. The fact that we, as in us Americans, saw this professor as any kind of threat just shows how completely out to lunch our whole political/intellectual discourse is. The U.S. is stuck inside an ideological bubble vis-a-vis the rest of the Western world. Wake up people.

Posted by Warren | May 29, 2007 10:04 PM

Berman is a fool who is out of his depth.

First off, why does he think anybody in the Islamic world cares what he has to say? Nobody's (in the Islamic world) listening to him and perhaps even unconsciously he even knows it.

Secondly, he foolishly thinks the current climate is similar to the Cold War. I can see the superficial similarity, but even getting beyond the relative threat of communism vs. Islamism (I think communism was greatly more threatening), the big problem is that Islamism is not a political discourse that comes from the west in a way Communsim did, which is a direct product of the western/Christian philosophical tradition. People in the Islamic World - specificially the Arab world - simply don't share the same intellectual, cutlural, historical, and political referents. The way they see the world, as such, is just different - and the writings of an underinformed, well-connected writer in New York will not do anything to change that, as that writer is simply not engaging in them in an intellectual relevant context.

Finally, even if Berman could find interlocutors that he desires, he's hindered by the fact that he doesn't know any of the region's languages and he doesn't have any real knowledge about the relevant fields he trying to engage - Islamic thought, Middle Eastern/Arab history, Developmental Economics, International Relations, etc.

Posted by Ben P | May 29, 2007 10:41 PM

In Orwell's 1948, a fair number of important people were either converts to Communism or highly sympathetic to the Soviets -- Alger Hiss, Kim Philby, Harry Dexter White, Klaus Fuchs, Henry Wallace, Pablo Picasso, and on and on. In contrast, the number of converts to Islam today among influential people in the West is miniscule. It's largely restricted to African-American athletes and entertainers and most of them do it for personal and/or racial reasons. It's implausible to imagine that Dave Chapelle or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar are taking orders from abroad to undermine the West.

So, while Orwell played an important role in demonstrating the evils of Communism to Western intellectuals susceptible to its charms, it's hard to say who Paul Berman or Christopher Hitchens think they are converting.

Posted by Steve Sailer | May 29, 2007 11:06 PM

One thing that has held the Middle East back through the ages is the excessive entanglement between church and state.

I'm not spending my own time detailing why this is a fatuously ignorant statement. I'll just suggest that, before pontificating about 'the Middle East . . . through the ages', it would be good to learn something about the subject.

Posted by David Tomlin | May 29, 2007 11:20 PM

Ikram:

Muslims believe we are all born slaves to God.

No. They believe we should choose to be slaves of God. The primary meaning of 'islam' is 'submission', and of 'muslim', 'one who submits/surrenders'.

What's Berman's point by using that turn of phrase?

Qutb maintained that true freedom is obedience to God's law (Sharia) even if compelled, while people are unfree when they live under laws made by mere humans. It was one of his favorite points. He returned to it repeatedly in Signposts. (This book is available on-line, in more than one version.)

Posted by David Tomlin | May 30, 2007 4:12 AM

Paul Berman revealed himself as a dishonest propagandist, and a sloppy thinker, in Terror and Liberalism.

I haven't finished reading 'Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?', but I'm pausing to point out what appears to be a brazen lie.

In 'Tariq Ramadan Has an Identity Issue', Ian Buruma writes: 'A month before the television debate, Ramadan posted an article on a Web site named Oumma.com, titled “Critique of the (New) Communalist Intellectuals.” . . . Ramadan’s main argument was that “French Jewish intellectuals” — like Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard Kouchner, André Glucksmann and Pierre-André Taguieff (in fact not Jewish at all) — who used to be “considered universalist intellectuals” had become knee-jerk defenders of Israel and thus “had relativized the defense of universal principles of equality and justice.” Ramadan was trying to turn the tables on those who accuse Muslims of obsessing about their victimhood by accusing “Jewish intellectuals” of doing precisely that, thinking of just their own tribal concerns, while Ramadan’s pursuit of justice for Palestinians was supposedly part of a universalist project.'

Berman writes: 'In Buruma's summary of the affair, Ramadan complained that the various intellectuals had abandoned universal principles by becoming, in Buruma's phrase, "knee-jerk defenders of Israel." . . . Such was the account in the Times magazine. It was not accurate. In his polemic of four years ago, Ramadan's chief complaint about the people he grouped together as Jewish intellectuals did not boil down to calling them "knee-jerk defenders of Israel." Ramadan complained that his group of intellectuals had abandoned what he called universal values in order to advance their narrow community interests as Jews.'

That is exactly what Buruma said, but Berman claims Buruma's account is 'not accurate', presumably for failing to say it.

Posted by David Tomlin | May 30, 2007 5:19 AM

David Tomlin wrote:

No. They believe we should choose to be slaves of God.

No. Muslims believe everyone is born a Muslim. (everyone is born a "submitter" to God). People who convert to islam are often called "reverts", as they are reverting back to the original faith they were born in.

(Which is better than what Canadian protestants used to call converts to Catholicism -- "perverts").

Posted by Ikram | May 30, 2007 9:49 AM

Berman is kidding himself if he thinks high level intellectual arguments will win this struggle. If anything won the Cold War it was Levis, the Beatles, and the overwhelming appeal of Western youth culture. Ask Vaclav Havel.

I'm not sure if a similar formula would work in the Islamic World. But I'm pretty sure that whatever Berman writes in Marty's old rag won't mean a thing in the scheme of things.

Posted by Klein's tiny left nut | May 30, 2007 8:27 PM

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Posted by uibjn mqbhf | June 7, 2007 11:42 AM

Here is the definitive Paul Berman Ramadan piece takedown.

Or here:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/06/09/paul-berman-should-not-fear-tariq-ramadan/

Posted by Mikey | June 9, 2007 10:40 PM