By Adrian Pabst · Thursday, November 9, 2006 4.
Perhaps most importantly, Benedict sketches the contours of an alternative politics that is beyond the division between the secular and the religious. To this end, he calls for a new form of engagement among the faiths and between cultures and religions. Having argued that contemporary Western conceptions of reason are utterly impoverished as a result of equating rationality with positivism, the Pope goes on to say that his theologically informed critique of modern rationalism “has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age.” Instead, science and religion share the belief in the existence of truth and in the need to use reason rightly. Coupled with the quest for knowledge, science and religion must debate the nature of progress and the limits on new technologically feasible possibilities. More fundamentally, Benedict says that the hegemony of positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it is intellectually dead and politically bankrupt because “the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions”—an implicit recognition perhaps that Islam has resisted the secularisation of religion and culture more consistently than Christianity.
So in order to challenge the dehellenization of the West (and the concomitant separation of reason and faith) and to inaugurate an alternative politics, the first step for Benedict is to recover the whole breadth and depth of rationality, for “this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.” As such, theology is always already public and political and does not need to justify its interventions in discussions on politics or culture.
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By Adrian Pabst · Wednesday, November 8, 2006 1.
To contemporary secular minds, it seems as if the world has entered a new dark age of religious totalitarianism. Islamic terrorists attacked the “free world” on 9/11 and elsewhere thereafter. Christian Evangelical fundamentalists sanctified the neo-con invasion and occupation of Iraq. More recently, violent protests erupted across the globe in response to a series of events: the publication of cartoons of Mohammed in the Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten; the ban of headscarves in French schools; death threats to Robert Redeker, the author of an article on the violence of Islam; the controversy on the veil in Britain.
The resurgence of religion appears to threaten the very foundations of the modern liberal democratic society: the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of choice—in short, freedom from all forms of oppression, above all the universalist and exclusivist claims of religion.
The final confirmation that religion is dangerous seems to have come in September when Pope Benedict’s address in Regensburg sparked outrage and anger across the Muslim world. The Pontiff himself appeared to associate Islam with the practice of violent conversion. In turn, Islamic leaders who condemned the speech accused Benedict of a “crusader mentality” and recalled atrocities allegedly committed in the name of the Catholic Church—not only the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition but also the Vatican’s close ties with Nazi Germany.
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By Russell A. Berman · Saturday, November 4, 2006 Whatever one may think of the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, one can only cringe at investigative journalist Seymour Hersh’s >reported assertion that “There has never been an American army as violent and murderous as the one in Iraq.”
Murderous? Quite a harsh accusation directed against American troops at war. No doubt this message has already been carried back to Iraq where it can only stiffen the resolve of the insurgents as they gun down Americans as well as Iraqis (which may or may not qualify as “murderous” in Hersh’s view). Aside from this likely de facto assistance to the enemy, Hersh’s accusation was distinguished by a poor choice venue: Hersh decided to denounce the allegedly criminal character of American soldiers at an address outside the US, at McGill University in Montreal. There is no accounting for this particular tastelessness: Hersh could have easily pocketed honoraria in US currency at scores of American universities where his denigration of the troops would have been at least as welcome as in Montreal.
Hersh’s blindness to the impropriety of holding this sort of diatribe on foreign soil is stunning. (Or is it the blindness of his booking agent: googling “Seymour Hersh Montreal” to collect background for this blog, I found that the first pop-up ad on the right of the screen directs the reader to the agency that can bring Hersh to your hall. More on the fee structure below.)
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By Vernaccia · Saturday, October 28, 2006 Mr. Prodi has been extraordinarily busy lately. First, he went to Spain to visit with his friend Zapatero, and found nothing better to do there than complain with the local press about things Italian. Airing one’s dirty laundry in public is not the most elegant and diplomatic thing to do, but Mr. Prodi evidently, and in this case, did not care about elegance or diplomacy.
Then, when in his office in Rome, he has been busy drafting the 2007 budget for Italy. It is a budget which, thanks to a huge tax increase, will bring the Italian middle class to its knees and has already prompted both Standard and Poor’s as well as Fitch to lower Italy’s rating to a historic low.
Not content with all these frantic and (de-)constructive activities, Mr. Prodi (also known in Italy as Mr. Mortadella, a nickname which in the English translation reads Mr. Bologna—his hometown—or Baloney!) has found the time to state something seemingly sensible on the issue of the Islamic veil.
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By Benjamin Robinson · Friday, October 27, 2006 1.
Rightly, I think, Julia Hell argues that the RAF has become topical again because of 9/11—but why would Hell want to become part of this particular media construction of an affinity? Why should 9/11 call the left out onto the mat for its presumed past transgressions? What does 9/11 have to do with RAF? Are there any high profile leftists who, like Joschka Fischer and Daniel Cohn-Bendit with respect to the RAF during its period of activity, feel that they are at one with al-Qaeda? Isn’t it left writers like the late Eqbal Ahmad who long ago insisted that Osama bin Laden began as a White House hero fighting the Soviets with the Afghan Mujahideen?
If terrorism refers to a violent political tactic, then the left, like the right, has doubtless made use of it—”terror” was already Edmund Burke’s term for describing the French Revolutionary left in 1790. In 1969, a year before the RAF was founded, Karl Heinz Bohrer’s book Threatened Fantasy or Surrealism and Terror berated the left for reasons akin to Burke’s: its lack of style, its ideological muddling of a “beautiful terror” that is properly left unburdened by any political load. Sure, Burke and Bohrer are ready to concede, terrible violence happens under the auspices of more or less sublime sovereign powers, but political terror itself is, well, disgustingly low brow. A civilized response insists on distance; insists that a populist political vocabulary be shed. Like Bohrer just before the RAF, Hell after 9/11 has the same problem with the unwashed left: it takes terrorism too seriously as referring to the real world.
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By Julia Hell · Thursday, October 26, 2006 The first part of this essay was posted yesterday. It concluded with a characterization of the reluctance to criticize terrorism. “Leaden solidarity is this ‘strange emotional mixture’—as Negt called it—that keeps people, who know that terrorist violence is not a viable form of politics, from distancing themselves from terrorism—unambiguously and politically, that is, by rigorous political analysis.”
One would expect both, unambiguous distance and rigorous political analysis, from Chantal Mouffe, one of the most clear-headed and insightful political theorists, who recently published an article entitled “Schmitt’s Vision of a Multipolar World” (South Atlantic Quarterly 104:2, Spring 2003). Mouffe argues that Schmitt’s geopolitical analysis in his Nomos could be usefully applied to contemporary issues. (Schmitt analyzes the nomos, or geopolitical order of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, the law that regulated relations among European states between 1700 and the beginning of World War I. This inter-state law, while guaranteeing the global hegemony of Great Britain, contained war; that is, this international legal order kept wars among European states from escalating into wars of annihilation—until World War I. With World War I this system dissolved.) Mouffe is interested in Schmitt’s solutions to this collapse and what he considered its most dangerous side-effect, the dissolution of the classical state with its specific form of politics.
Mouffe reads Schmitt not merely as competent analyst of this dissolution, but adopts one of his solutions. In 1952, Schmitt argued that the antagonistic struggle between the Soviet Union and the U.S. might end with a new bipolar arrangement; or, and this is Mouffe’s preferred solution, it might lead to “the opening of a dynamics of pluralization, whose outcome could be the establishment of a new global order based on the existence of several autonomous regional blocks” (Mouffe, 249). Mouffe adopts this multipolar model with a few caveats: this new equilibrium would have some semblance to the earlier Nomos, it would have to be truly global, not only Euro-centric, and it would have to avoid the “pseudouniversalism arising from the generalization of one single system” (Mouffe, 250).
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