Like all my friends and colleagues I am appalled at the events in Paris and thankful that everyone I know there seems to be safe. It is in moments like these that it is most important to keep thinking and to find creative ways to respond to events that are designed to overwhelm our capacity for rational action, to reduce us to fear. In that spirit I'd like to explain my view that the entire strategy of Islamist groups is based on a false premise and offer some suggestions about why they may have come to their conclusions.
Islamists are trying to start a war because they think they can't lose. The point of events like last night is to polarize, to divide global society and escalate tensions and problems into hostility and conflict. The Islamists share the pessimistic analysis of modern late capitalist society put forward by many commentators on the left and the right. In their view there are no moral or normative commitments grounding our shared life in politics and society in the countries across the Western world. Countries in Europe and the Americas may enjoy tremendous political, economic and military power, but there is no cause or ideal that could sustain those countries through a struggle that was costly and difficult. We believe nothing, so when we come under pressure we will crumble. Negative liberty generates tolerance and pluralism but also narcissism, disengagement, and isolation.
In my view this analysis completely misunderstands the relationship between capitalism and democracy and how that relationship has developed since the Enlightenment. The most astounding feature of that period is the global democratic transformation. By this I mean two really specific things. The almost complete triumph of egalitarian norms and the near complete mobilization of humans into self-organizing societies. One of the great gifts given to us by global history has been to explain that risk societies emerged everywhere, and did not disseminate out of Europe. New forms of collective action and co-ordination, based on the willingness of families at first, and then individuals, to take on new kinds of risk. emerged everywhere. Self-organizing societies are the base of democratic transformation.
The rise of "society" is hardly news, but the relationship between society (in this sense) and political values has not been fully explored. It is a commonplace among historically-minded political theorists to remark that the only new political virtue to be enunciated since Aristotle is egalitarianism and much discussion in political theory turns on whether or not that is real political virtue or rather an anti-political notion. A capacious idea of citizenship can easily comprise egalitarianism because it so clearly underpins so much of the actual public and civil experience of modern societies. Moreover egalitarianism spawns most of the ethics that are recognized not as heroic or aristocratic, but demotic, of the people: kindness, mercy, fairness, justice. I'm not proposing a silly and romantic view of the people, rather observing that there are a set of demotic virtues and we, in the sense of modern late capitalist societies do believe in them. The view that our societies are morally hollow is unfounded.
It would take a lot more than a blog post to argue persuasively that capitalism does not produce "society" but is parasitic on it, and that the cultural misunderstanding that informs Islamism (and much modern conservative thought) is to collapse one into the other. What I do want to end with is a reminder that lots of groups have had success attacking liberal states and even disrupting capitalist economies. However, mobilized democratic peoples are astonishingly successful at warfare. Islamists are like slave-holders or other kinds of late-nineteenth-century elites, clinging to a culturally pessimistic vision of modern life in order to persuade themselves they can create a future. Everything they do is futile and cannot succeed.
Machines and tools
2 days ago
