The Telos Press Podcast: Ban Wang on the Clash of Civilization and World Community

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Ban Wang about his article “The Clash of Civilization and World Community: The West and China,” from Telos 199 (Summer 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss whether it still makes sense to speak of distinct human cultures; if the very ideas of China and the West need to be discarded, or, if not, what the basis of such distinctions would be and why they persist; whether there is a human commonality that lies below and beyond age-old cultural norms, and if so what is its content and what forms does it take; how both Chinese and Western forms of universalism have converged to form a cosmopolitan unity; how multiculturalism and identity politics have undermined cross-cultural interaction and a universalist vision; and what alternatives there are for affirming both universalism and local culture. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 199 are available for purchase in our online store.

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The Telos Press Podcast: Russell A. Berman on the Commission on Unalienable Rights

In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, Camelia Raghinaru talks with Russell A. Berman about his article “Reflections on Rights,” one of a group of essays from Telos 192 (Fall 2020) on the U.S. State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Purchase a print copy of Telos 192 in our online store.

Listen to the podcast here.

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Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer

This essay appeared in Le Figaro on December 8, 2020, and this translation by Russell A. Berman is published with permission of the author. Hyperlinks are from the original, while footnotes have been added by the translator. Translator’s comments are here.

In the face of a very real Islamist threat that has led to violence and which the proposed law on “separatism” attempts to address, it is interesting to try to raise the level of the debate. It is necessary to inquire calmly into a question that worries those thinkers least inclined to emotional reactions. In contrast to a Christianity drained of its former ambitions, why is it that Islam has not given up its virulent proselytism and instead appears to pose a threat for the future?

This is a threat that de Gaulle already recognized in one of his extraordinary communications to Alain Peyrefitte, when he declared: “We are after all a European people of the white race, Greco-Latin culture, and the Christian religion.” And he considered Algerian independence necessary to prevent his village from being one day renamed “Colombey-the-two-Mosques”—which does not at all mean that he intended to exclude other “races” or religions. He understood France too well to endorse a narrow or xenophobic vision of it.

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Secularism, Islamism, and Christianity in France: Introduction to Jean-Marie Rouart

Jean-Marie Rouart, a prolific French author and, since 1997, a member of the French Academy, published “Secularism is an Illusory Defense against the Islamist Will to Conquer,” in Le Figaro on December 8 and available in English translation here with the author’s permission. While the essay’s starting point is the challenge of Islamism in France and the efforts by the Macron government to address it, it explores a much wider matrix that includes the historical process of secularism, the status of Christianity in France (and, by extension, in the West more broadly), the role of tradition in national identity, and the imperative of the sacred in any culture. This complex array of ideas has implications far beyond France, yet it also indicates how today’s France has become ground zero for the cultural conflicts around secularization, Christianity, and Islam. To understand Rouart’s argument, one needs first to consider this specific context. What makes this topic urgent now?

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We Conspiracy Theorists

There are conspiracies. Many learned of Catiline, the ideal type of a conspirator, in Latin lessons. But even the memory of Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair suffices. The secret agreements by the powerful in back rooms, the hidden workings of the intelligence services, and all forms of secret diplomacy stir in us the suspicion of conspiracy.

As a general rule, we only have knowledge of failed conspiracies. And their failure, as once noted by Machiavelli in his Discorsi, is highly probable, for when more than a handful of people conspire to commit a crime, the danger posed by whistleblowers grows exponentially. Yet it does not naturally follow that conspiracies cannot succeed. We just know nothing about them. The perfect conspiracy remains just as invisible as the perfect murder.

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Kant, the Old Racist

The art of scandalizing is inexhaustible. In Kant’s Anthropology, there are a few remarks familiar to anyone who has studied Kant. According to the standards of the spirit our time, one could characterize those as racist. That media attention can be sparked from this today is known since the leveling of similar accusations at Shakespeare and Mark Twain. Hegel praised war, Nietzsche proclaimed the necessity of slavery, the hypersensitive Walter Benjamin made use of the word “gypsy.” One could endlessly extend the proscription list of scandalous thinkers. For the block warden of thought, there is really not a single great mind before 1968 with whom some racist, militaristic, or misogynistic remark could not be substantiated.

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