The promises of modernity have always been problematic. The aspiration to draw a neat line between a rosy present and a benighted past, the paradigmatic modern historiography, never adequately gauged the force of tradition. The cultural legacy of the past can be heavy with inertia, but it can also draw on an organic vibrancy that can intrude abruptly into the up-to-date illusions of reason. What modern thought derides as old-fashioned just refuses to disappear—not because modernity has been too weak to expunge it (for it has surely tried hard to do so), but because modernity elicits its opposite, calls it forth, creates its own monsters, and then wonders why they won’t go away.
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Mass Hizbullah demonstrations continue in Beirut, calling for the government to step down and to grant Hizbullah a veto on all political decisions. Meanwhile, the Lebanese government accuses the Hizbullah leadership of planning a coup. On the other side of the globe, the “Iraq Study Group” in Washington has called for US negotiations with Syria, which would likely lead to a return of a greater Syrian role in Lebanon and a blocking of the investigation into the Hariri and Gemayel assassinations. Jay Gupta, an editorial associate of Telos, lives and teaches in Beirut. Russell Berman, editor of Telos, teaches at Stanford. We make this exchange available as an invitation to open up the discussion of the political crisis of the moment and the repressive character of Hizbullah. Much criticism was directed at the circulation of the term “Islamic fascism” when it was used in the White House. Yet it has also been used within the Middle East as a term with which to characterize Hezbollah’s strategy of toppling the democratically elected Siniora government, through a combination of threats and violence and—planned for December 1—mass demonstrations. On July 17, on his Arab reform website, editor Pierre Akel analyzed Hezbollah strategy, and on October 16 he returned to his own previous text because of the pending showdown in Beirut. The analysis from the summer inquired into Hezbollah’s intention in kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, which set off the war. Akel argued that Hezbollah’s point was really to seize power in Beirut through provoking the war with Israel. The assassinations of Pierre Gemayel, the Lebanese Minister of Industry, and Alexander Litvinenko, the former Lieutenant Colonel in the Russian secret police who had found refuge in the West, nearly coincided. Gemayel was gunned down in Beirut on November 21, and Litvinenko succumbed to poisoning by the rare radioactive material polonium on November 23 in a London hospital. Syria and its agents are the primary suspects for the former: killing Gemayel was an obvious attempt to block the investigation into the earlier assassination of Rafik al-Hariri, while also bringing Lebanon one step further toward a recolonization in which Hezbollah would play the role previously reserved for the Syrian army. Meanwhile, there is hardly any doubt that the Kremlin ordered the Litvinenko murder: Litvinenko had become an outspoken critic of the Putin regime. In particular he had accused the Russian government of carrying out the apartment house bombings in Moscow in 1999, which served as a pretext for the war in Chechnya. What links the two events? We know that Russia had been dragging its feet in the United Nations on the Hariri tribunal and would have preferred to stop it there. In fact, that process is by no means over, and there will still be plenty of opportunity for Kremlin mischief to protect the culprits in Damascus who ordered the killings in Beirut—unless of course Hezbollah finishes that job first and stops the investigation on its own. Or the investigation may end up as a bargaining chip in the prospects for the “realists,” who still have some wind in their sails from the US elections. This scenario depends on the dubious hypothesis that by “talking” with Syria and giving Assad something—a pass on Hariri—Syria will somehow play a role in “solving” Iraq. The emerging realist hypothesis plays regional stability off against democratic reform. We’re presented with a choice: Peace or Freedom, i.e., to get to peace, we are apparently supposed to give up on freedom. The policy vision of a democratized Middle East is now relegated to the dustbin of history, dismissed as a Wilsonian illusion strangely in the hands of a Republican president, now to be replaced by the older and wiser formula of a system of stable states, secure in their sovereignty and therefore committed to preserving order. It won’t be democratic but at least (so they promise) it will be quiet. After the revolution: Metternich (which is why we suddenly have to listen to Kissinger again). More specifically—so the plan may go—if the US begins to “talk” with Iran and Syria, the axis-of-evil member and its mini-me might stop making trouble and become engaged in the establishment of order in Iraq. Clearly one important and dubious assumption is that the sectarian and factional war in Iraq (which for a long time has surpassed anything like an insurgency against the US) is primarily a function of Iranian and Syrian policies and not—as is much more likely—a consequence of the nature of Iraqi society itself. The regional version of realism which places the emphasis on an arrangement with neighboring states tends to minimize the significance of domestic Iraqi concerns: which is exactly why it involves dismissing “democracy.” Instead of pursuing the establishment of domestic Iraqi institutions, this strategy implies ceding influence to Tehran and Damascus, in order to “solve” Baghdad. (As if the Yugoslav wars could have been solved by “talking” in Budapest and Athens.) Tomorrow, November 22, Christians celebrate the Feast of St. Cecilia. In the late seventeenth century, the Roman martyr Cecilia became the focus for a strange cult concerning the relation between music and religion. The cult was most manifest in England where it was associated with the foundation of the Three Choirs Festival and a tradition of preaching sermons on Cecilia’s Day in defense of sacred music. What is the significance for us of the saint who sang divine praises in the sudatorium that was being used as her torture chamber? Perhaps it is that worship, or praise of the divine, is the goal of life. The idea that we live in order to worship might suggest a suspension of life for the sake of pious performances. This need not follow, though, since according to the Psalmist the seas and the hills praise God simply by being themselves (Ps. 98). If the point of existence is to worship, it seems that it is equally true that worship is not an extrinsic task we perform, but consists in authentic existence. Prayer is not something other from us which we take up and put down. It is our very incorporation into the cosmos. This perhaps sounds a little individualistic. However, we can only be ourselves in relation to everything else, and our own harmonious living depends always upon the actions and responses of other people. Not only that, but we develop by borrowing and adapting each other’s rhythms. Human history is a kind of perpetual modulation. This does not mean that life is necessarily harmonious or that we simply tune in to the cosmic vibes. To the contrary, the prime tonal mixture of human life constantly blends sorrow with rejoicing. The Gospels tell us that we must accept that sadness and happiness occur for different people at the same time, often with apparent inappropriateness (Mark 14:3–9). It is also true that all rejoicing is haunted by sorrow, while sorrow is sorrowing because it remembers occasions of delight. |
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