Paul Berman's The Flight of the Intellectuals

The recent controversy over Ayaan Hirsi Ali's speech at Yale reminded me of a review I published back in 2011 of Paul Berman's book The Flight of the Intellectuals. I'm posting the review here:

Two criticisms lie at the heart of Paul Berman’s The Flight of the Intellectuals. First, Berman criticizes the work of prominent Muslim philosopher Tariq Ramadan. Second, he criticizes the generally favorable reception of Ramadan by the non-Western press. Throughout the book, Berman tends to move back and forth between these two issues. He clearly regards Ramadan as an attractive but troubling figure. Ramadan, according to Berman, rose to public prominence in 1993 during controversy over the performance in Geneva of a play about the Prophet Mohammad written by Voltaire. Since then, Berman maintains, Ramadan has managed to present himself as a moderate reformer to non-Muslims while retaining support among many Muslims from a range of ideological perspectives. Berman’s main objection to Ramadan is that the philosopher maintains a highly flexible program, supporting moderation or radicalism depending on the audience. Berman sees the central event in the reception of Ramadan by non-Muslim intellectuals as an article by Ian Buruma, published in the February 4, 2007, issue of The New York Times Magazine. 

The British-Dutch author Buruma had recently published a book on the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic radical incensed by a short film Van Gogh had made about the treatment of women in Islam. Despite this background, Buruma treated Ramadan too favorably in the magazine article, in Berman’s view. The magazine did present Ramadan as a complex individual, combining a leftist perspective on issues such as globalization with social conservatism. Still, Buruma found Ramadan to be a sympathetic and moderate spokesman for Islam. Berman asks whether Ramadan is really a moderate, though. If he is not, then Berman wants to consider why Buruma and other intellectuals are so eager to see the Swiss-Egyptian thinker in this way.

The investigation into Ramadan’s supposed moderation leads Berman to Ramadan’s maternal grandfather, Ḥasan al-Bannā՚. He was the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization long at odds with the Egyptian government and one of the most influential groups in the rise of Islam as a modern social movement. Ramadan wrote his doctoral dissertation and a later book on the reformism of al-Bannā՚. In these works, he portrays his grandfather as a champion of anticolonialism and as the humane, visionary leader of a social-reform movement. Ramadan also treats other leading figures of the Muslim Brotherhood, most notably Sayyid Qụtb, a Muslim writer who became an intellectual inspiration for the radicals of al-Qaeda. In Ramadan’s version, Qụtb is also much more moderate than generally portrayed and has been misinterpreted by Osama bin Laden and his followers.

Berman argues that Ramadan’s presentation of al-Bannā՚ and other prominent Muslim leaders is inaccurate and plays to European and American wishes for a moderate Islam. Berman points out actions and statements made by al-Bannā՚ that were utterly inconsistent with Western ideas of liberal democracy and that many of the influences on Ramadan, including al-Bannā՚, have held political values and ideals dramatically at variance with those generally accepted in North America and Europe. In questioning the implications of Ramadan’s intellectual heritage, Berman considers the connections between al-Bannā՚ and Palestinian leader Haj Amin al-Husseini. This last individual opposed Jewish settlement in Palestine, as well as British colonial policy in the area, and allied himself with Nazi Germany. This alliance was not simply tactical, but shared an anti-Jewish ideology with the Nazis. Al-Husseini collaborated in forming troops under the Nazis and in encouraging the mass killing of Jews.

Even apart from a misleading reinterpretation of his own intellectual background, Ramadan has offered questionable views on current international events according to Berman. In his responses to allegations of the mistreatment of women and the denial of women’s rights under Islamic law he has failed to take any definite moral positions. His criticisms of the defenders of Israel have unreasonably dismissed anti-Jewish prejudices, in Berman’s view, and he has been too ready to accuse those defenders of raising anti-Judaism as a false issue. Ramadan’s views of Israel are especially troubling to the author. These views are almost uniformly negative and they tend to lay all responsibility for problems of terrorism and violence in the region at Israel’s door. Ramadan does express disapproval of Palestinian bombings and acts of violence. However, he describes these types of actions as those of an oppressed people who have no other way to strike back at their oppressor. Thus, even when Palestinians kill Israeli civilians the killings have ultimately been produced by Israeli state terror.

The flight referred to in the title of the book is one from the clear position on terrorism of intellectuals in an earlier time. When the Iranian religious authorities issued a death sentence against author Salman Rushdie, Western intellectuals largely rallied to Rushdie’s defense, according to Berman. Later, however, the support for Ramadan by Buruma and others represents desperate efforts to come to terms with radical Islam by looking for someone who can present radical ideas in a mild and moderate form. Berman contrasts the support for Ramadan with the hostility of many intellectuals for the writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who is in some respects a version of Rushdie. Hirsi Ali, the daughter of a prominent Somali political opposition leader, fled to the Netherlands in 1992 to avoid being forced into an arranged marriage. There, she became a prominent feminist and an outspoken critic of Islam and of the treatment of women within Muslim cultures. Hirsi Ali began receiving death threats for her statements of her views. She worked with Dutch filmmaker Van Gogh on the controversial film Submission, which condemned what Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh saw as the oppressed status of women within Islam.

On November 2, 2004, the Moroccan-Dutch Muslim Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Van Gogh and stuck a letter to the filmmaker’s body with a knife. The letter was addressed to Hirsi Ali and threatened her and other supposed enemies of Islam. Since then, Hirsi Ali has had to live under constant guard. Her situation became worse when the Dutch government threatened to take away her citizenship on the grounds that she had given false information when she first applied for asylum. Although she retained her Dutch passport, she left the country for the United States.

Despite Buruma’s book on the Van Gogh assassination, Buruma has been consistently unsympathetic toward Hirsi Ali, even while he has portrayed Ramadan in a highly favorable light. Buruma’s fellow intellectual, the political writer Timothy Garton Ash, joined Buruma in a series of disparaging statements about the Somali-born feminist. In Berman’s view, the persecution of Hirsi Ali has been a clear case of a public figure threatened with death for exercising the right to freedom of thought and freedom of speech. Therefore, Berman believes that all supporters of liberal democratic values should support her, whether they agree with her views on Islam and feminism or not. He argues that modern Western intellectuals have fled to a relativistic multiculturalism.

In accepting the differences of cultural and religious groups, writers such as Buruma have concluded that they must not judge other cultures in universal moral terms. Individuals such as Ramadan, who offer the appearance of moderation, give Buruma and his colleagues a way of avoiding the aspects of Islam that may contradict liberal democracy. Hirsi Ali, on the other hand, presents them with a stark choice: They can either support her and the right to free speech or they can oppose her and abandon liberal democratic values. They avoid doing this, in Berman’s opinion, by describing Hirsi Ali as too strident or too outspoken about her own ideas. In this way, the supposed enemy of Islam becomes the opponent of the intellectuals who are reluctant to criticize Islam.

The Flight of the Intellectuals is clearly a polarizing book and one that will evoke both strong agreement and intense disagreement from readers. This response may depend largely on the preexisting views of readers on relations among cultures and world religions. The book sometimes comes across as a ramble, moving from meditations on Ramadan to more general thoughts on the roots of Islamic radicalism to criticisms of the responses of Western intellectuals. It therefore often falls short of a completely coherent organization or a clear line of argument. In his objections to Ramadan, Berman may obscure the very real differences between this philosopher and more radical advocates of a militant Islam. If there are genuine distinctions between Ramadan and exponents of European and American liberal democracy, there are also distinctions between Ramadan and various other Muslim thinkers and activists. Ramadan’s ambiguity is not necessarily a result of being two-faced or of showing different sides of himself to different audiences but could be the consequence of attempts to tread carefully through sensitive and complicated issues. Readers may also wonder at times whether Berman makes too much out of the single 2007 article by Buruma and a few other published pieces, since in several places Berman also refers to other intellectuals who have been quite critical of Ramadan. Even if the reader accepts the argument that Buruma has let his own reason become tainted by excessive multiculturalism, it does not necessarily follow that this represents a more general flight from liberal democratic principles by twenty-first century writers and thinkers.

While Berman should be read critically, he makes valuable contributions. He brings the work of Ramadan, an influential thinker about the direction of Islam and about the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, to wide public attention. He raises the general question of the problematic relation between a religiously inspired view of human society and secular political values, as well as the more specific question about the consistency between modern Islam as it is practiced and liberal democratic values. Perhaps most important, he causes the reader to ask whether the eagerness to be open and tolerant toward religions and cultures may have led to acceptance of intolerance and persecution. The failure of many intellectuals to protest the persecution of Hirsi Ali and to defend her right to free speech may strike readers as one of Berman’s most significant points.

Fareed Zakaria on the Tension Between Democracy and Liberty

In earlier posts, I've expressed my scepticism about the possibilities for any system of government that Americans would recognize as democratic emerging from the social upheaval of the nations in the Middle East and North Africa. Fareed Zakaria's 2003 book The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad raises interesting questions about democracy and democratization, asking, in particular, if there is a tension between democracy and freedom  that requires a delicate balance.

The idea that democracy and freedom are not the same thing is a fairly old one. The French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville, author of the 1835 book Democracy in America, was interested in the question of why American democracy had not led to dictatorship, as it had in his native country. Part of de Tocqueville’s answer was that effective democracy must rest on an existing social and legal system that is consistent with popular rule and that prevents majorities from becoming tyrannical. Fareed Zakaria restates this line of reasoning in contemporary terms, and he extends it by arguing that even in relatively successful democratic nations, such as the United States, there can be too much democracy.

Fareed Zakaria

Zakaria identifies the present period in history as a democratic age. He points out that more nations than ever before create governments by popular vote and that the support of the people has become the only basis of political legitimacy in much of the world. The age is also democratic because the broad masses of people have more cultural and economic power than in previous times, as well as more political power.  The word “democracy” has acquired the connotation of something that is always good and always desirable and that will always tend to produce free and just societies. Our news media suggest, for example, that the problems of former Communist societies or of authoritarian nations can be cured if only sufficient democratization can be achieved.

As Zakaria sees it, democracy is not the universal solution. He is not opposed to popular rule, but he does see difficulties with the direct rule of the people. Democracy, he maintains, only maintains individual liberty and works properly when it works within a regulated system of elected representatives with limited, legally defined powers.  Further, protections of individual liberty must generally be created first in order to establish a workable liberal democracy.

He begins to support his argument with a quick and rather breathless look back at the history of human liberty. He argues that liberty in the Western world does not spring from Greek democracy but from the split between the Eastern and Western parts of the Roman Empire, which eventually freed the Roman popes from imperial control and made the popes competitors with the secular rulers of Europe. Liberty, then, began in the space created by the struggle between church and state.  Other struggles, between kings and nobility and between the Catholic Church and Protestantism, expanded this space. Conflict limited the powers of central authorities and this led to greater personal freedom.  Capitalism pushed the cause of individual liberty further by eroding the powers of monarchies and feudal aristocracies and by putting in place a system based on individual and property rights.  While this history might seem peculiar to Western Europe and North America, Zakaria asserts that it contains a pattern that may be applied elsewhere. However, he contends societies must first achieve economic liberalization, with strong protections for property rights, and only afterwards move toward popular rule.

There are at least two conditions for the development of liberal democracy in Zakaria’s view. A country must not only have attained a decent standard of living, it must have attained this through trade and industry and not through the sale of abundant natural resources. In fact, natural resources may often be a disguised disadvantage for nation, an easy source of riches that prevents the development of an active and involved middle class. In addition, a nation must have a strong government that can enforce the laws and regulations necessary to protect the property rights and freedoms needed for efficient markets. Zakaria disagrees with those who see government land reform as denial of property rights. Instead, he maintains that land reform moves the ownership of land away from feudal landlords, who merely hold titles, and to those who actually work the land. This can set the stage for industrialization.

Zakaria devotes a chapter to the problem of democracy in the Islamic lands of the Middle East. This chapter will probably draw the attention of many readers because of the American occupation of Iraq and stated U.S. Government intentions to establish democracy in that nation. The author maintains that the general absence of liberal democracy in the Middle East is not a consequence of a cultural contradiction between Islam and liberty. It is also not a consequence of property, since many of the region’s problems are results of sudden wealth, particularly in the form of oil.  Islamic fundamentalism, as a challenge to liberal democracy, has been caused by the failure of the political institutions of the region to face rapid social and economic changes.  Zakaria’s prescriptions are economic and political reform. Among the economic reforms, he would seek to lessen the region’s dependence on oil as a source of unearned wealth. He offers the example of the African oil-producing nation of Chad, which was required by the World Bank to deposit its oil revenues in an offshore bank and spend all but a fraction on investments and building up national infrastructure. Without the source of money, the government will have to encourage its citizens to engage in constructive and profitable activities in order to provide tax revenues. The major political reform he recommends is the encouragement of constitutionalism. He identifies this as systems of checks and balances that will prevent any part of a government or society from gaining excessive power over other parts. Zakaria does not say who should enact these reforms or how people in the West can or should nudge the Middle East toward capitalism and constitutionalism.

Although Zakaria has a high opinion of the United States, he sees the tension between liberalism and democracy in this nation, as well as in the developing world.  He cites evidence that Americans had become increasingly alienated from their political system and distrustful of it, in spite of generally rising prosperity.  His explanation, as one might expect, is that the United States had become too democratic. After 1970, Congress democratized itself by moving decision-making power away from closed congressional committees and into open committees, making government more responsive. This responsiveness meant that legislators would have to answer to their most active and informed observers, who were the lobbyists and special interests. Finance reforms, which sought to limit politicians’ reliance on a few large donors and broaden small contributions, ultimately increased the power of fund raisers and made raising money the main activity of political campaigns. Zakaria finds one of the most destructive forms of excessive democratization in the referendum system, which exists in several states, but which has received the most attention in California. The referendum system allows those who gather enough signatures to place specific issues before the voters, rather than have those issues decided by elected legislators.  California’s referendum system, according to Zakaria, crippled the state’s economic and political system by placing most of its budget outside the control of its legislators.

 Zakaria’s prescription for the United States is to accept less democracy and to delegate more authority. He points out that public opinion polls identify three public institutions as particularly worthy of respect. These are the Supreme Court, the armed services, and the Federal Reserve System. The first and the third are appointed decision makers with decidedly undemocratic powers. The second is a hierarchy of authority that operates on entirely different principles from most of American society. He does not, I think, give sufficient attention to the problems posed by too much undemocratic, uncontrolled authority. Appointed judges may become unelected rulers and the Federal Reserve may become a mechanism for economic cronyism.

Zakaria may  put too much faith in the ability or willingness of authoritarian governments to create the economic and political foundations for democratic societies. He cites Chile as an example of an authoritarian nation that became a relatively successful democracy.  It is true that Chile did achieve a fairly high level of economic prosperity under the government of General Augosto Pinochet and that it did establish a stable elected government after Pinochet’s rule. Chile had a long democratic tradition before Pinochet seized power, though, and it could be argued that this tradition formed the basis for the current government.

Russia and China provide Zakaria with one of his favorite comparisons. Russia, according to his argument, democratized first and only after that attempted to liberalize its economic system. China, on the other hand, has kept power firmly in the hands of the Communist Party, while creating a capitalist economy. China stands a good chance of becoming a workable democracy, while Russia is economically troubled and has been under two presidents (Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin) who have used democratic political institutions to increase their own power. There are several problems with this comparison. First, it compares what Russia is with what Zakaria believes that China might become. The future is notoriously difficult to predict, and it may well be that Russia will be a prosperous democracy in a decade and China will find it difficult to move beyond party rule. Second, one might reasonably maintain that Russia’s problems have little to do with a rush to democratization in the post-Soviet era.  These problems could be seen as the historical consequences of a backward empire suddenly plunged into rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, torn apart by revolution and civil war in the early twentieth, and subjected to brutal mismanagement under Stalin and his heirs.  Third, by the early twenty-first century, the Chinese economy showed some signs of stalling, while Russia began to recover from the economic chaos of the 1990's.

Although one may question Zakaria on these and other issues, the book makes some extremely valuable points.  Democracy may not be an unqualified good.  The rule of the majority does not necessarily lead to harmony and respect for minority rights. A stable and lasting democracy cannot be founded simply by holding elections. Political systems are not products of ideals, but products of concrete social and economic conditions.