Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), November 14, 2003.
In my second semester of college, I began writing letters to the editor of the Spectator; it was and is a wonderful way to express one’s ideas without the usual complements of introduction, body, conclusion, etc. I soon turned to all-campus e-mails, an even less-demanding medium. Using my privileges as president of the Objectivist Club, I would preface our meeting announcements with short hooks to Hamilton. Yet I never really acted on my love for my writing—until now.
A few weeks ago, in my European Intellectual History class, I raised an objection to a point Professor Al Kelly had just made. He responded with characteristic wit: “Watch your straw men, Jon.” In elaborating, Professor Kelly explained that enlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, setup only to be summarily confuted. Still, we all resort to such recourse from time to time, since straw men are far easier to tackle than the ambiguities and contingencies and qualifications that make up reality.
Yet felling straw men says more about the feller than the felle. After all, you can judge a person by the enemies he not only makes but chooses, and if one addresses only the weakest arguments, one betrays the weakness of one’s own arguments. For instance, some hold that all feminists dismiss science as a male attempt to rape nature. But this notion simply upholds the most vocally irrational aspect of modern feminism, and reifies it as if it were the whole. Only dogmatists and demagogues waste time with such caricatures.
Scholars, on the other hand, refuse to engage in what the philosopher John Stuart Mill, in 1859, declared the gravest injustice of discourse: “to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion.” Scholars, as political theorist Chris Matthew Sciabarra remarks, “use an intellectual scalpel, rather than an ideological bludgeon,” to engage honestly and thoroughly with the most forcible criticism. As Aristotle counseled, “The fool tells me his reasons; the wise man persuades me with my own.”
Notes
* We “would do better to raise serious, as opposed to spurious, questions . . . and to formulate our responses on the basis of meaningful knowledge and verifiable evidence rather than fantastic speculation and vacuous generalities.” [1]
* “He covers virtually every aspect of the issue, and does so in a way that conveys both a firm commitment to his own conception of justice as well as a resolve to do justice to opposing views.”[2]
* “[Cicero] has left it on record that he always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than ever his own. . . . He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. . . . If he is unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”[3]
* “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side . . . he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts . . . the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form; he must feel the whole force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of; else he will never really possess himself of the portion of truth which meets and removes that difficulty. . . . . All that part of the truth which turns the scale, and decides the judgment of a completely informed mind . . . is [only] . . . ever really known . . . [by] those who have attended equally and impartially to both sides, and endeavored to see the reasons of both in the strongest light. So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects, that if opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them, and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skilful devil’s advocate can conjure up.”[4]
* “Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test.”[5]
[1] Mouin Rabbani, “Head in the Sand,” in Brian Klug et al. “Debating a World Without Israel,” Foreign Policy, March-April 2005, p. 59.
[2] Irfan Khawaja, [Review of An Eye for an Eye? The Immorality of Punishing by Death, 2nd ed., by Stephen Nathanson], Teaching Philosophy, June 2003, p. 200.
[3] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University, 1991).
[4] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 4th ed. (1869), in David Wooton (ed.), Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996), p. 626.
[5] C.S. Lewis.
Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), November 14, 2003; the Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY), January 22, 2004 (noted on the Hamilton College Web site); and in What We Think: Young Voters Speak Out (College Tree, 2004) (noted on the Hamilton College Web site).
On Monday in Beinecke, the Hamilton chapter of Amnesty International asked me for money to buy a water buffalo for a farmer in Nepal. The scene reminded me of a comparable event I wrote about last year. “So, we donated spare change in water buckets at the dining halls, we fasted, we volunteered for Utica’s soup kitchen. But something was missing—an ingredient so implicit in our bounty that we overlooked its necessity. That manna is capitalism. For capitalism, in contrast to the quick fixes of Hunger and Homelessness Week, is a long-term panacea.”
Indeed, world hunger is not a problem of redistribution. As psychotherapist Michael J. Hurd observes, people don’t go hungry “because you throw out half a stick of butter or an unfinished Coke.” In the same way, malnutrition does not develop into abundance when you donate one of those shiny new $20 bills to some charity. As they say, Give a man a fish, and feed him for the week. Teach a man to fish, and feed him for a lifetime.
To wit, though the specifics vary from country to country, the root cause of hunger is always the same: not lack of handouts, but lack of a market economy. Consider sub–Saharan Africa. Echoing Julian Simon in The Ultimate Resource 2, philosopher Andrew Bernstein argues, “Africa has the identical natural resource fundamentally responsible for the West’s rise: the human mind.” Yet the continent lacks the social system that allows the mind to flourish, which liberates it to invent and innovate. What Africans, like other starving people, desperately need, therefore, is to marry the mind to the market.
For to the extent that it has existed, the free market has enabled abundance unmatched in human history. When was the last time a famine occurred in any capitalist nation? It is no coincidence that the hungriest countries—Somalia, Afghanistan and Haiti—are the most averse to economic and political freedom.
Now, I don’t doubt the sincerity of my fellow students. But if your heart bleeds for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free to whom Emma Lazarus dedicated our Statue of Liberty, then give them the gift of capitalism and watch their cups runneth over. We can debate the details later, but let’s call a spade a spade. To paraphrase Ayn Rand, the haves have capitalism; the have-nots have not capitalism. To rephrase President Clinton, It’s capitalism, stupid. To rephrase Karl Marx, Workers of the world unite for capitalism; you have nothing to lose but your hunger.
Published in the Spectator (Hamilton College), November 21, 2003; in the Free Radical (New Zealand), April-May 2004; and by the Liberal Institute, March 2003.
“Armies are in motion,” observes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism (2003), “but are the philosophers and religious leaders, the liberal thinkers, likewise in motion? There is something to worry about here, an aspect of the war that liberal society seems to have trouble understanding—one more worry, on top of all the others, and possibly the greatest worry of all.”[1] That worry is deeply ideological, and as we engage in what Daniel Pipes calls a “cosmic battle over the future course of the human experience,”[2] we ignore it at our peril. Specifically, our so-called war on terror is one of ideas. We still need armies of course, but since culture undergirds politics, in the long run certain ideas, if unchallenged, will only breed more 9/11 kamikazes.
Some say these ideas evince an epochal antipathy between militant Islam and the West, a “clash of civilizations” in Samuel Huntington’s formulation, which shapes the essence of their mutual alienation. Yet what is this essence? What is it that we, as Americans, stand for? Who hates what we stand for? And what do they stand for? If the answers have been ambiguous—for one, “terrorism” is a tactic, not an enemy—Berman brings them into focus.
His most useful contribution is his commentary on the philosophy of the Egyptian theologian Sayyid Qutb (1906-66). A member of the Muslim Brotherhood, the prototypical terrorist organization that politicized a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, Qutb violently opposed Gamal Nasser’s secular régime; in return, Nasser imprisoned or executed many members of the brotherhood. But the organization remained active underground, and 35 years later Qutb’s poisonous legacy shot up in four Boeing 767s, by way of a new brotherhood, known as Al Qaeda. (In fact, Qutb’s younger brother Muhammad taught Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia, where one of his students was Osama bin Laden.)
Qutb denunciated all things modern and lamented the dualistic “schizophrenia” of the secular and the sacred. He took greatest umbrage at the separation of church from state. Yet rather than seeking transcendence in a way that would allow both to exist within a larger context, he sought to erase secular life by engulfing life itself in religion. Indeed, his acutest quarrel was not with America’s failure to uphold its principles; his quarrel was with the principles.[3] Scorning our materialism, capitalism, individualism, humanism, rationalism, decadence and moral laxity, Qutb cherished austerity, self-sacrifice, collectivism, faith or feeling above reason or science, and self-denial. In Qutb’s view, the former traits not only induce mental confusion and spiritual corruption; they also graft those sins onto the pure Islamic soul.
But why the sword and not just the pen in response? Why do Qutb’s disciples furiously beat back discotheques and Big Macs in Bali and Iran? Why do they try to stone women to death for adultery in Nigeria? And why did they knock down those “tower[s] of Babel,” in Norman Mailer’s description, in downtown Manhattan?[4] To the Qutbian mentality, anything this-worldly lacks moral value; only a supernatural paradise awash with virgins has meaning. Hence, employing force, in this life, to achieve one’s ends cannot be immoral. Moreover, as Dinesh D’Souza argues in What’s So Great about America, freedom entails the freedom to choose one’s virtue—to wear a burka on Monday and a miniskirt on Friday. To a Qutbian, such freedom is in fact slavery. And in a world of unending temptations, coercion must accompany, in effect co-opting, the exercise in philosophical cleansing.
And yet, our enemy is not coextensive with any particular religion, like Islam, or any particular region, like the Arab or Muslim world. Rather, the enemy is wider—the enemy is an idea, a political ideology that revolts against the liberal world order. For instance, consider the following passage: “Man is made of mud and ashes. . . . Why are you proud, O mud? Wherefore art thou exalted. . . . O the vile ignobility of human existence! O the ignoble condition of human vileness.”[5] The author is not Sayyid Qutb oor Osama bin Laden, but Pope Innocent III, who wrote these words in the 12th century. But would Qutb or bin Laden disagree? No, for whether they are American Evangelical Christians living in the Bible Belt, ultraorthodox Jews in the West Bank, or Islamists in Pakistani madrasas, our enemies all merely spin variations on the same basic rejectionism. (The latter are more consistent than their brethren, who have and continue to adapt their beliefs to modernity and its midwife, liberalism.)
To concretize this revolt, recall the image of two passenger jets smashing into the Twin Towers. Explains philosopher Harry Binswanger: “First, observe the target: the World Trade Center. What does the World Trade Center symbolize?. . . . It is the core of Wall Street, which is the base of New York City. New York is the [cultural and economic] dynamo powering America—the so-called Great Satan.” Next, recall “the images of Osama bin Laden and his primitive, bearded barbarians squatting in the dirt around their campfires in Afghanistan.” Now juxtapose that primitivism with the image of a skyscraper, wherein free men and women were hard at work on their computers and cellular phones. The difference: whereas our attackers seek to destroy, Americans seek to develop. For America stands for “individual freedom, the freedom to use one’s independent mind to produce material prosperity, a rising standard of living, and individual happiness on this earth. Freedom, wealth, happiness”—our values are absolute anathema to our enemies.[6]
Is this hyperbole? Do some people really, as President Bush declared, “hate our freedoms”?[7] Heed the words of Ayatollah Khomeini: “We are not afraid of economic sanctions or military intervention. What we are afraid of is Western universities.”[8]
There is just one last problem. “To arrive at a situation in which Nazis have conquered Europe,” Berman writes, “you not only need to have the Nazis themselves, you need to have all the other right-wing movements that look on Nazis in a friendly light, and you need to have left-wing opponents like the anti-war French Socialists, who cannot see that Nazis are Nazis.”[9] Applying this pearl to our new world war, we must recognize that to defend America—to defend Western civilization—we infidels need the proud, moral confidence and certainty of our enemies. We must recognize that our ideas uphold life, that ours is the morality of liberalism and hence liberty. Likewise, we must recognize that our enemies’ ideas uphold death, that theirs is the morality of terror and hence tyranny. As two writers for the Ayn Rand Institute put it, “We cannot combat . . . fanatical faith with timid self-doubt, no matter how many bombs we possess.”[10]
Footnotes
[1] Paul Berman, “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,” New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003.
[2] Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (New York: Norton, 2003 [2002]), p. 260.
[3] Chris Matthew Sciabarra, “Understanding the Global Crisis Reclaiming Rand’s Radical Legacy,” Free Radical (New Zealand), May-June 2003.
[4] As quoted in [Unsigned], [Untitled], New Republic, November 26, 2001.
[5] Pope Innocent III, “On the Misery of Man,” in Bernard Murchland (trans.), Two Views of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), pp. 5, 9.
[6] Harry Binswanger, “America vs. Death-Worship: The Moral Meaning of the Coming War,” Lecture, Columbia University, October 2, 2001.
[7] As quoted in Elisabeth Bumiller, “Bush Pledges Attack on Afghanistan Unless It Surrenders bin Laden,” New York Times, September 21, 2001.
[8] As quoted in Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984), p. 122.
[9] Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 206.
[10] Stephen Siek and Tore Boeckmann, “America’s Battle with Moral Uncertainty,” Ayn Rand Institute, September 24, 2001.
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