The Trans-moralists
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota
Preface
Timothy Brennan is Professor of English and Culture Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now and Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation.
This Position Paper was presented at a plenary session on "The State of Globalization Research in the United States of America" at the Fourth MCRI Project Team Meeting at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, 23-25 September 2005.
The Trans-moralists
When I was first approached by the plenary's organizers to
consider the "academic environment for research and debate
on globalization," and how this might differ between the
United States and Canada, I took this to mean not how the
research may differ, but the environment in which the
research is conducted and received. I cannot be certain
that the fear — and I would even say desperation
— that many of us feel in the United States these
days is not itself a global condition, or even an
existential one, so let me concede from the outset that my
observations may be tainted by a personal dimension.
Nevertheless, I think there is a real sense of dread among
US intellectuals who choose to speak out or criticize the
current regimes of knowledge as well as power; but there is
also — and this is just as important — an
anger and clarity of focus that only comes with having one's
feet to the fire.
We, in the United States, operate in a country in the throes
of an undeclared "war" for oil and Mideast geopolitical
advantage. As a result of a well-known act of unofficial
terror on 11 September 2001 — whose links to wings
of the US government are still unclear — meaningful
displays of public dissent have been rendered all but
illegal. The universities — including venerable
older land-grant public research institutions like the one
where I teach — have been largely de-funded by the
state, which now provides only about 15 percent of its
operating costs. The corporatization of the university
extends right down to the level of individual departments
(that "rent" their space from the university's central
administration). University-based intellectuals, at any
rate, are forced to work in an atmosphere of vitriolic
attacks against the freedom of academic expression by
proponents of a self-styled Republican "revolution."
This, I believe it is fair to say, is the general setting:
the landscape of our malaise, so to speak, and its effects
on people's willingness or ability to speak have been
dramatic. I do not mean to suggest that every dissident
intellectual space has been effaced or that there is not a
new daring, even among authors who in earlier decades
maintained an Olympian silence about the relationship of
intellectual inquiry to brute politics as such, or that a
variety of publishing houses have not issued, and even
sought out, critical, oppositional voices. But it is very
difficult for these voices to become a roar, or to acquire
(as they say in that ugly but effective metaphor from
journalism) "traction." And maybe it would be useful for me
to offer, as best I can in the time at my disposal,
something of a diagnosis as to why this might be the case.
The central fact of American political discourse today is a
startling convergence between left and right positions. On
the one hand, the favoured and feted of serious non-fiction
— those rare liberal academics, journalists, and
authors with policy clout and routine access to the major
media — have lately espoused positions that
dovetail with the Bush administration's defense of torture
and the suspension of habeas corpus. On the other, the
so-called "radical" wings of academic theory as well as
dissident subfields like post-colonial studies taught by
professors who calls themselves "Marxists" and even in many
cases "communists," are involved in arguing that empires no
longer exist or that everyone, rich and poor alike, can now
enjoy the fruits of a freewheeling cosmopolitanism exported
by the United States, which is considered genuinely
attractive because of its immense cultural productivity,
inventiveness, and freedom. Here, the story goes,
identities are given free rein, the consumer can luxuriate
in the depthless image, and the "micrological" promises
liberation from the empty and now meaningless terrain of the
macro-political. For some, then, the United States offers
itself up invitingly as a place where true intellectuals
abjure power (and indeed have long since ceased to matter to
power) and who therefore are able to carve out a militant
anarchist space within the invisible pockets of a decimated
civil society. Whether as active defense of imperial
government or merely passive recountings of
"governmentality," there is a daunting convergence so it is
no exaggeration to say that many US intellectuals have lost
their ability to tell the difference between a left and
right position. This fundamental ambiguity is
sought by them, and once found, is taken to be
a great advance in thought.
In its stand on human rights, labour law, and the
environment, for example, the Left can be said to be
traditional and even "conservative" in the literal sense of
seeking to conserve (forests, endangered species,
unionization, or community values). In its stand on human
rights and the environment, by contrast, the Right can be
said to be radical and even "subversive" in that it seeks to
uproot long-established rights and customs in the name of
progress (what Aldous Huxley called a "brave new world" and
what Nietzsche called a "revaluation of values"). Similar
confusions occur in regard to the term "Liberal" —
in which one might well locate the classic avowals of
deregulation, unrestrained trade, and the abolition of
welfare legislation (all positions of the historical Right).
By the same token, the notion of the "individual" that the
cultural Left has, for several decades, updated into its
politics of the "self" and the "subject," have also informed
the Right, since at least the post-Saussurian subject of
history has willy-nilly been regarded in the singular rather
than as a "collective."
The current moment, I want to suggest, represents a
political-discursive watershed, and my own view is that it
has not simply evolved or reached this state as a matter of
an incremental shift in the map of meaning but rather that
it has been forged, much like the term "terrorism" was
crafted deliberately and with purpose for eventual use in
the course of the last two or three decades. The sort of
convergence I am talking about has, of course, been traced
to some of its sources in the program of prolific ideologues
like Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, many of whom
ended up in the Bush administration and the indefatigable
writers of insty-books for the Heritage and Scaife
Foundations. But such a convergence was also shaped by the
aristocratic bohemianism of the radical individualist and
fiercely anti-social sectors of the right-wing lineages of
post-structuralism, seen for example in the Nietzschean
revivalism of Gilles Deleuze and the Heideggerian panegyrics
of Giorgio Agamben. The foreclosure of access to
opinion-making media, a robust new discourse of
revolutionary right-wing populism launched by the New
Christian Right and the collapse of the United States'
historical adversaries abroad have all led, under the
significant pressures of professional ambition in a
discursive environment now "brought to heel," to the current
vectoring of right and left forces.
What I am proposing might be clarified by turning to an
example, which although not the only possible one, is far
from arbitrarily chosen. I am thinking here of the highly
publicized, cross-over intellectuals, often with a foot in
the university but showcased in a variety of media, who
write breezy mass-market books with claims both to
scholarship and philosophical depth, and who enjoy
invitations as consultants to policy think tanks,
corporations, and national governments. They form, in my
opinion, an actual movement, citing each other and
exhibiting many of the same features constituting a
tendency. Writers like Niall Ferguson, Thomas Friedman,
Michael Ignatieff, Alan Dershowitz, and Robert Kaplan have
very effectively set a certain tone, and skillfully crafted
a way of speaking and thinking that has created a public
audience, above all among policy-makers. Our research on
globalization enters this setting, and is to a large degree
contained by it. Having mastered the same colloquial style
characterized by passion and bluntness, these defenders of
American military and economic conquest and expansion from
ostensibly liberal quarters have set a moral tone that
affects our work and its public reception with a strain of
assertive American thinking (even among non-Americans like
Ferguson and Ignatieff, both now based in the United
States). The fact that two of the people on this list are
not originally from the United States but have had close
ties with the country professionally, and lived and worked
there for extended periods of time, is itself part of an
established pattern of imperial influence and statecraft,
with the metropolitan center drawing to itself some of the
best minds from the provinces who express themselves through
the metropolitan imperium where their international
difference has cachet precisely as a reminder of the
empire's reach and its inexorable attractiveness to
foreigners.
I wish we had the time to go through their books
systematically, mapping the highly repetitive motifs,
preference for classical sources, and modes of phrasing in
each. If one were to examine, say Ignatieff's Blood and Belonging (1994) and The Lesser Evil (2004), Ferguson's Empire (2003) and Colossus (2004), Kaplan's Ends of the Earth (1996) and Warrior Politics (2002), or Friedman's
The Lexus and the Olive Tree
(1999), a pattern could be discerned that would make my
earlier claim regarding the deliberate forging of the
discursive environment more plausible. Echoing many of the
Bush administration's stated agendas for the "new world
order," this group distinguishes its programmatic calls for
action under the improbable but ubiquitous sign of
ethics. In the United States today, they are
among the fiercest proponents of the ringing phrases of a
new morality, a new moral vision, a new moral compass for
the proper conduct of states — "new" because it
allows for the suspension of morality in the name of order
and "civilization," and so it is a portable morality that I
would like to call the "trans-moral." In a moment, I want
to examine Ignatieff's mobilization of this language of
trans-morality, but first, let me point to some of the other
features that allow us to characterize this discursive
assault by the trans-moralists.
Needing to establish their philosophical credentials, they
all, first and foremost, turn to antiquity. There is a rush
to Rome and to the British Empire, a theatrical and
liberating embrace of the past. We see a bold march,
à la Nietzsche, into the time-tested
strategies of ancient aristocrats who knew how to keep
subjects in their place without the nagging obstacles of law
or mores. Everything we need to know is already there in
the "best Chinese, Greek, and Roman philosophers." Whether
the lessons of the French revolution, Renaissance humanism,
twentieth-century social welfare legislation, the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, or indeed, the Enlightenment
are supposed to accompany or condition all this wisdom is
never raised. One gets the sense, in fact, that the whole
point of returning to this past is to be free of the lessons
of modernity, and to stamp this freedom with the imprimatur
of the classics.
The attempt to revive the virtues of the British and Roman
empires (Kaplan and Ferguson are pronounced in this respect)
or to deny that empires exist any longer (Ignatieff's and
Friedman's preference) — are positions that appear
at odds, but are in fact complementary in the sense that the
a priori goal in each is to characterize America's global
hegemony, however derived, as troubled, well-intentioned,
but universally beneficial. Each wrestles with the problems
of torture, the killing of civilian populations, pre-emptive
war, incarceration without trial and so on, defending such
practices to various degrees and at various intensities, but
in every case accompanied by an overcompensation (in the
first three pages of Ignatieff's The
Warrior's Honor (1998), for instance, he uses the
word "moral" over a dozen times). And finally, there is in
all of these figures' writings, an almost formulaic
invocation of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi journalist, who
popularized the thesis of the "state of exception"
— that is, the allowable emergencies in which the
sovereign power can suspend liberties in the name of public
safety and "order." And with this move, the attempt is
made, through various pirouettes, to fuse the concept of the
pragmatic and the moral.
What must be said here, again parenthetically, is how
striking it is that these equivocations in the service of
torture and state-sponsored terror actually repeat and
indeed refine the spurious legal briefs of the Bush
administration's Alberto Gonzalez. Equally, and perhaps
more shocking (given our own discursive location in the
academy), is the resemblance between these equivocations
justifying action and, at the other extreme, a
few major currents within radical academic theory today that
fall back on the same propositions about the "state of
exception" to justify inaction. Also reliant
on the scholastic authority as well as relevance of
antiquity conveniently prior to modernity, these putatively
radical thinkers quote the same Machiavelli, Polybius,
Tiberius, and Sun-tzu to similar ends and find their way,
just as often and in the same tenor, to the proposition that
ethics is a new substitute for politics. I am not arguing
that academic theory is identical to these middle-brow
intellectuals of the new Right — there are, by
contrast, subtle and important deviations. But I am arguing
that they are complementary, and that the two ostensibly
different, even oppositional, bodies of thought have
converged. The new morality of the lords of humankind is,
to put it another way, Nietzschean. Accordingly, the truth
is not subject to an external tribunal; it is the rhetorical
act that one can get others to believe. In the American
imperium, both sides seem to say, it is time to wake up to
our true nature, and refuse to be hindered by the call of
the merely human.
I take Ignatieff to be the most persuasive, and ultimately
tragic, member of this group. I understand that he has
addressed the Liberal Party of Canada on at least two
occasions, and may have political ambitions of his own.
For the fair-minded reader, he is certainly easier to like
than the others, pausing at times to destabilize his own
notions, interrogate his integrity, and concede ground to
other positions. He is, in this respect, much more
classically liberal in an older Democratic party sense, and
so his aggressive defense of US Realpolitik in
Serbia, Israel, post-9/11 domestic affairs, and in Iraq, as
well as his pained but clear acceptance of torture as a
viable means to the ends of democracy make him, I would
argue, a more potent stalwart of the larger tendency. His
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in the
Age of Terrorism (2004) is, in my opinion, a
formidable obstacle to our work on globalization, and an
illustrative case for the kind of points that need to be
contested by scholars in the field. In other words I am
saying that the ideology of the trans-moralists is not just
another set of opinions circulating in the free exchange of
knowledge.
Ignatieff's is less an argument than a public sharing of
affections. Much of the writing operates on the level of
the nostrum. For example, he declares that only democracies
have a conscience, that exceptions to the rule of law save
democracies rather than threaten them, that the violation of
rights is allowable so long as there are formal bodies of
adversarial review, and that terrorists do not operate on
behalf of justice, but only exploit injustice for a violence
that is its own end. He assumes without argument that the
United States is a liberal democracy, that it is
characterized by majority rule, and that any evils committed
by democracies come from the "blindness of good intentions."
Perhaps the most revealing nostrum however is his statement
that the constitution is "not a suicide pact." Actually,
that is precisely what makes a constitution. The US
constitution, certainly, confers the right to citizens to
overthrow the government of the United States, by force of
arms if necessary, when the government violates the
constitutional charter. The constitution means nothing if
it is not the supreme law, higher than the government that
would seek for its own purposes to subordinate the
constitution for its interests.
The setting of the new trans-moralism is a new imperial
Machtpolitik in the United States itself
— the re-assertion of right by might, and
consequently release from the formal niceties of contracts,
negotiations, and written standards of behaviour. We can
perhaps see more clearly at this point that trans-moralism
is founded upon the American ideology of the chosen people
(originally derived from a sectarian Christian reading of
the Old Testament) which, as is well recognized, is, older
than the republic itself. The idea of a chosen people in
the American context extends back into New England colonial
times, and has been stoked to a high flame at a moment of
imperial reassertion. The recent theoretical elevation of
the "state of exception" thesis actually inverts the real
relations at work, and is at best tangential to US power
politics. It is not Schmitt's "state of exception" that
should pre-occupy us, but the scriptural conviction about
the exceptional state — "Israel" in
the received Biblical model.
To conclude, there is a good deal more to be said about
trans-moral intellectualism and religious
anti-intellectualism in the American context, as well as
academic ultra-intellectualism. But lest my opening
reference to malaise creates the impression that I am
involved only in a lament, I believe we can respond to these
forces, and in fact, that our work must constitute such a
response. We need, first, to refuse to temporize about the
underlying symmetries of the process known as globalization
and a US-centered imperialism. Second, we need to counter
the fiction that the nation-state system is unrecuperable
and should no longer even be considered an option in
international law. We must reject today's all too common
assertion of tribalist interests in the name of an amorphous
(and always suspect) "stability" and above all, refuse to
let authors with scholarly pretensions get away with
invoking "democracy" as though it were a settled fact in
Western societies.