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Strauss in China..(Omar)

An interesting post from the New Republic. Though I think the assertion that globalization has led to "more conflict" since 1950 is empirically false. Armed conflict between great powers has actually declined since world war two .

I am not too interested in Strauss or Schmitt, but I do find myself increasingly interested in the increasing irrelevance of left-liberal academic discourse. It seems like most of it is just mindless repetition of fashionable positions (human rights, gender equality, anti-imperialism, anti-walmartism, identity politics, soft racism, etc) with little or no connection with actual events in the world (maybe there is some connection still with American domestic policies, though even that is open to question, but certainly they seem to have nothing useful to say about the conflicts that do exist in the wider world). 
China must be interesting. I wish I knew more about it. 

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16 responses to “Strauss in China..(Omar)”

  1. narayan

    You’ll have to explain what you mean by soft racism.
    As for the other examples you cite, they are not fashionable, or merely academic, but universally valid ideals to consider where there is a demonstrable absence of humane alternatives. Once you’ve thrown out these babies as irrelevant, you’ll need some pretty fragrant additives in the bathwater. I see no purpose in labeling them as either left or liberal especially while reaping the benefits of these ideals personally. Besides, mindless repetition ultimately serves the cause of mindfulness.

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  2. omar

    Narayan,
    1. I am not disagreeing with the “universal valid ideals”. But their universality is not self-evident. It has to be established/discussed/argued. The postmodern academic left all too frequently acts as if they are self evident in exactly the way its fashionable to look at them within their own echo-chamber.
    2. The reason I referred to “mindless repetition” is that these terms are used without giving a lot of thought to where A is and how it can or cannot get to B. Some simple lists of enemies (imperialism, White people, America, corporations) and equally simple lists of friends (resistance fighters, liberation movements, “the oppressed”) are mindlessly repeated, with little appreciation of what may actually be going on “on the ground”. Inconvenient facts are simply ignored, desirable ones are picked out and exaggerated. The end result is psychologically satisfying, but intellectually lazy. More to the point, it has little relevance or usefulness for the real people living and fighting the struggles that are being used to score points in a stratospheric academic “debate” (more a process of massaging each other’s egos and feeling good about being on the rights side of history/god, “the people”). The net impact on events is close to zero and may be negative.
    3. “soft racism” refers to the tendency to see “third world people” as poor, harmless children, not real living people with agency and agendas. This makes things very simple, but is patronizing and racist.
    To understand what I mean (which, I admit, is not easily grasped…we all argue with imaginary persons), imagine,say, Lenin versus Tariq Ali. In any case, I think my position will become clearer as time goes on and we are on the same side, whatever that means (that too will become clearer with time)…

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  3. Andrew Rosenblum

    Omar, I think you’re treating “the postmodern academic left” and “left-liberal academic discourse” as straw men. It would be more helpful to actually mention specific thinkers and quote from their work to exemplify what you mean.
    For example, some “postmodernists,” like followers of Foucault or Giorgio Agamben, are critical of human rights as a mask for liberal economic advancement. They tend to be more interested in power relations than in arguing for the rights of women or oppressed people. That’s why Nazi-collaborator Carl Schmitt’s neo-Hobbesian critique of Kantianism is attractive to these putatively left-wing thinkers. He doesn’t believe human rights is anything more than a sentimental lie that Westerners tell themselves.
    If you look up the phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion,” you’ll see that this phrase of Paul Ricoeur’s has become something of a theme song for many on the academic left — it means in essence that because of the anti-humanist insights of Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche, and Freud, even positive liberal values such as human rights or due process are often covertly implicated in forms of domination. Therefore, on this view, it is safer to engage in radical skepticism, or “suspicion,” than risk participating in liberal narratives — but “mindless repetition of fashionable positions” like the ones you mention is typically cast by these folks as naive and simple-minded.
    But lastly, and most importantly, there is hardly uniformity of opinion among academic left-liberal thinkers. In writing my dissertation on ethics and literature, I was certainly very influenced by the “communitarian” liberal thinkers Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. Like Taylor, I have a real problem with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” crowd, who never reconcile their supposedly left-wing stance with the conservative, disabling effects of radical skepticism. So perhaps you and I might find agreement there.
    But even more concretely I’m with Narayan in wanting to defend values like gender equity, anti-Walmartism, and human rights — I’m not sure what “facts on the ground” you’re thinking of that render them somehow unrealistic or invalid.
    And I’ve found that if you poke at the “hermeneutics of suspicion” types long enough, you can get them to concede that these values have a lot of appeal to them as well — the reason they are so bleeding “suspicious” of liberal thinkers like Rousseau or Kant is because the loftiness of universal human rights or the categorical imperative doesn’t live up to its own high standards(i.e. Europeans felt entitled to colonize African countries, or Americans felt it acceptable to kill or “remove” Native Americans in the name of progress). But those examples can also be critiqued from a human rights standpoint: just because you see yourself as civilized by human rights, you’re not entitled to deny those values to other people, much less commit horrible violence or theft of property.

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  4. Dean C. Rowan

    Two cliches come to mind. One figures academia as the ivory tower. The other charges well-meaning thinkers with political correctness. Omar’s remarks more or less buy into both of these, but offer little else.
    Andrew opens up the discussion to include concrete particulars, but also to articulate and negotiate ideas more subtle than “mindless repetition” or “fashionable positions” or “the wider world.” If Andrew’s paragraphs are a twenty dollar bill, I’ll add my two cents. First, I applaud the scare quotes framing “postmodernism.” Perhaps they belong, too, with “radical.” Both of these, it seems to me, are academic marketing ploys. The view that skepticism is ineffectual or damaging is selective and post hoc. Sometimes avoidance and quietism are salutary.
    Second, as for thinkers who “tend to be more interested in power relations than in arguing for the rights of women or oppressed people”: Catharine MacKinnon? Andrea Dworkin? They illustrate how an interest in power relations can support sex and gender equity. But their left, if not liberal, attack on pornography unhappily coincided with a similar hard right ambition. They were viewed as academics saying perhaps too much about conflicts that exist in “the wider world.”

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  5. prasad

    Yes, there’s lots of cant from the academic left, but hang on. The problem with the academic left is that it’s too invested in universal human rights and enlightenment talk? Scratching my head, really. If I were making an impressionistic one-sentence summary, I’d have said it wasn’t invested enough; too much self-doubt etc.
    Universal rights talk is what neocons do these days, in the glorious tradition that Ron refers to at the end of his post. I’d like to see names named too. Who’s the representative American university leftist for you? Chomsky?

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  6. prasad

    shouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and use blogging to cure insomnia. Andrew’s comment, not Ron’s post.

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  7. Ruchira

    Omar, you are doing to the liberal left (academic or non-academic) what Razib recently accused us of doing to the libertarian right – painting with a broad brush. I wouldn’t go into why the left is not as monochromatic as you make it out to be. Andrew has already done that succinctly and he has named names. As for the values you dismiss casually, namely universal human rights and the urge to diminish oppression of fellow humans, I join Narayan and Prasad that these are worth arguing for repeatedly like a broken record. There is some foolishness, as also boorishness on the left but that doesn’t make it into an echo-chamber.
    I am actually quite disturbed by the Straussian- Schmittsian trend in China as described by Professor Lilla. It doesn’t hearten me at all that China, with its very ancient tradition of authoritarianism, too much respect for authority, rigid class structure and the recent trauma of Maoism from which it is now emerging as a political entity which is “free” in no other sense except its aspiration to become a voracious consumer society, is studying these two philosophers to shape its world view. Also, drawing inspiration from the Roman Empire? Not surprising at all. China’s unquenchable thirst for territory and natural resources has all its neighbors, big and small, feeling quite jittery. If the west’s recent colonial past was contemptible, China’s imperial ambitions, if any, don’t bode well for anyone either.
    As I had indicated on Razib’s recent post on China to which you had linked here earlier, I am not at all sanguine that China’s potential role at the eastern helm of the next bi-polar world is inevitable. This is what I wrote:

    As for China, I agree largely with Razib’s broader premises, provided of course that China’s economic and political trajectory continues along the current lines. However, China, despite its population and global presence, is still a secretive and authoritarian society. There is much that is inscrutable about the workings of the system within China. The one-child policy and the resultant aging work force is one of the more obvious problems in the future. The stability of a totalitarian society which controls a very large geographic expanse with disparate cultural and linguistic mores is never a sure thing. The religious and cultural centrifugal forces operating out of Tibet and the western Muslim regions may actually prove to be less of a headache (easily quashed) than a possible north-south rift based on language and economic interests. I have often wondered if the south, which too has seen rapid growth, may no longer comply with the current set up where all the shots are called by the mandarins from Beijing and Shanghai. Do the southern Chinese wish for some kind of autonomy or loose federation, with Hong Kong as the center of Cantonese China? Also, given the working conditions and wages in blue collar factory jobs and a very large number of underemployed educated youth, is a massive Chinese labor uprising possible?

    I do not wish China ill. But I am not particularly keen to see it develop into a world power by bullying its neighbors, curtailing human rights and fostering runaway corruption (the same goes for the other emerging power of the east, India). In fact, I am not interested at all in one, two or three superpowers ruling the rest of the world as prescribed and predicted by Strauss-Schmitt. World politics will develop as it will, by the will of the most powerfully armed nations and the best financed corporations and banks. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it and not make a noise just because the “reality on the ground” is not going our way. As a typical liberal, I would much rather see a multi-polar world with an even balance of power throughout than a uni or bipolar world.

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  8. omar

    A couple of quick points:
    1. I am NOT an admirer of Chinese interest in Strauss. But I have never been to China and have not read as much about it as I should have. When I said “I wish I knew more about it”, that is what I meant. No more.
    2. My problem with the Western “academic left” (which I did paint with a very broad brush, but then how else would we kick of this argument?) is a sort of “complaint from within”, which always tends to be a bit bitter and carry flavors of disappointment that do not exist for critics from without.
    3. When I was in middle school I used to read TIME magazine pretty regularly(in Lahore). Very very occasionally, there would be a story about Pakistan. One day, I noticed that when the story was about Senegal or Thailand, I found it fairly unremarkable, but whenever it was about Pakistan it was laughably superficial. That day, I realized that people in Senegal and Thailand may find their stories equally superficial and laughable. Western leftists were not writing much about Pakistan those days, so it took a while longer to break the spell there…you see where I am going with this.
    4. Academic leftists must have many many different strains and types. How can we paint them with one brush? but then, we can turn that around and apply the same logic to ANY group. Are Republicans or right-wingers or non-leftists so homogeneous that they CAN be painted with one brush? Don’t leftists paint with broad brushes all the time? is it wrong to do so? And if it is, why not start the correction from home.
    5. Lets make this more concrete. Tell me the names of a few writers from the “academic left” who YOU think have written something insightful and useful about Pakistan or Afghanistan (remember, my claim that they are mindlessly repeating fashionable phrases was about foreign policy and faraway romantic places; I did concede that they may be more insightful about domestic American politics). Then, when I have the time, I will either tell you why I think they are superficial and wrong, or I will shamefacedly tell you that they are blisteringly insightful and right on target and I will withdraw all my nonsensical comments. I really will.
    6. Even when someone is right, the question of impact may be raised (I am not too sure about this point, this is tentative). Let us say X writes insightful stuff in an American University but it seems to have had zero impact on American policy or even on his own ex-students; and when bits and pieces leak through to, say, pakistan, the readers there use if for entirely different purposes and to entirely different effect than what the writer may have intended. Would it then be accurate to say that his or her impact is either neutral or possibly negative? This is not to blame him or indict him, and I may still believe that the man (or woman) is a wonderful person, very well-meaning, erudite, kind, generous, an amazing drinking companion, etc etc., but still, neutral or negative in political impact..would i have any right to say so?
    Sorry, but I have to run. More later. Inshallah.

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  9. prasad

    Omar,
    – To me there’s something rhetorically weird about your comments re superficial discussion of Pakistani and other problems. Fine, you prefer deep and nuanced portrayals deploying on-the-ground knowledge and solid theoretical frameworks. That’s fine and all, though it’s a bit like calling for bipartisanship or a focus on “real problems.” Your suggestion that the correction start “from home” invites the obvious, only slightly cheap-shot-ish response though. You can play provocateur (that is fine by me; there’s much good in zeroth order argumentation) while making interesting claims like that postmodernists take the universality of human rights and gender equality for granted. Or you can deplore the superficiality of contemporary discourse. What could you be up to doing both in the same thread? Compare your point 3 to your point 2/4, IOW.
    – On point 3/5, I’m scratching my head at the role ‘left academic’ plays in your argument. Are you saying American ‘left non-academics’ have profound things to say about Pakistan? American ‘non-left academics’? American ‘non-left -non-academics’? Aren’t you just saying American commentators aren’t very well informed about Pakistan? (And even then, compared to whom? Japanese? Canadians? Which non-Pakistani nations are up to your standards?) In fact, what does the superficiality of Time Magazine have to with failings of the Academy, left or right? Even the more hackneyed Yale professor is already more nuanced than what Time sees fit to publish. The limiting factor here isn’t exactly the naivete of academic views. What next? Are “postmodernists” and “university marxists” responsible for spreading Hollywood cinema and hamburgers too?

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  10. Ruchira

    I too have read a lot of comical stuff about India and still do. New York Times does it almost weekly. But that is journalistic creme puffery / sensationalism, not academic writing. Academics like Galbraith, Moyinihan and some others have written thoughtfully about India in the past. I don’t know if some others are still doing it. Martha Nussbaum comments frequently about the state of higher education in the humanities and sectarian relations in India. But it is slim pickings. However, I have no quibbles with that. Whether or not American academics on the left or right, want to write about India, Pakistan or Afghanistan depends on their own specialty (after all, academics do focus on their own things) and the general interest in that area. I am sure much has been written about the historic aspects of these places. I am assuming that your complaint is about the lack of commentary on the political state of these nations. I would argue that it is up to Indian, Pakistani and Afghan academics themselves to do justice to that narrative. American academics should rightly focus on policies at home. And by the way, which academics anywhere in the world are commenting accurately about Pakistan’s inner workings? Are American academics the only culprits? Are others in other parts of the world doing a better job? Perhaps one of the many reasons US academics are not chiming in on Pakistan or Afghanistan, provided they are interested in the first place, is because these are treacherous places right now for non-coms to be in. Academics may be brave intellectually but hardly any of them can be expected to put their lives and limbs in danger for professional reasons, unlike the military, intelligence services, journalists or missionaries.
    As for broader policy issues on war and peace, I think plenty of academics from the left and the right have put forward their opinions about the engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. That the Bush regime chose to listen to the Straussians is not a blame we can put on the shoulders of the academic left. Yes, all the opposition from the left was ineffectual in preventing the Iraqi adventure, but that is hardly because they did not let their opinions known. Even this inconsequential blog was launched in order to protest the war although I am not an academic. So, what’s new?
    You said that you are not in support of China’s Straussian world view. Good. But from where did you rope in the American academic left into that discussion? Have any of them suggested that it is a desirable direction for China to take? Your quizzical comment about China followed by the condemnation of the left seems like a non-sequitur to me.
    Anyway, good that you provoked a discussion. Otherwise we would have remained what we appear to be – an echo chamber :-)

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  11. Ruchira

    Just noted after posting my last comment that Prasad has already said pretty much what I did, in fewer words.

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  12. omar

    Prasad, I have lost the thread of para one completely. Maybe next time.
    About para two, I will give you my opinions without any references or supporting documents. Not convincing, but at least you know what I think. Maybe next time with more evidence.
    1. Yes, sometimes non-left-wing academics and non-academics do indeed have more sensible things to say about Pakistan.
    2. Its not about non-American nations being up to my standards. No one may be up to may standards, but who cares? The point is, the academic left seems to think they ARE up to some important standard. They think things would go so much better if people took their advice instead of believing CNN or TIME or the State department or (god forbid) some military blogger. Or at least, they SEEM to think so. They dont go around saying we dont know shit but here is our analysis anyway.
    3. The most hackneyed Yale professor is NOT necessarily more accurate or correct than TIME. He or she may be disastrously wrong even when he or she is very “nuanced”. Why not? Being more academic may mean more references in his article and more complex arguments and sentences, but not necessarily better predictions or better prescriptions.
    Hollywood and hamburgers? i am afraid I just did not get your point.

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  13. omar

    Ruchira,
    Saw your comment after posting my reply. Hmmm, why did i rope in the left in that comment about China? I am not sure, but looking back, I think it was because the story about China reminded me that there seems to be a rather large black hole in left-wing analysis of the world where China should be…something like that.
    As you can see, I am backing off and wrapping up. But, I am sure it will come up again..

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  14. Ruchira

    Here is a view of China from senior Indian journalist Manoj Joshi’s archival blog. The opinion was originally published in the Indian daily Mail Today.

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  15. omar

    Ruchira, obviously this is not an example of left wing academic thinking about China…I think that black hole is real. Slavoj Zizek notwithstanding.

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  16. Ruchira

    No, that piece is just about “China,” not what the left wing says or doesn’t say on the subject. I just wanted you to see how others nearer home view the country, not just in India but also in Japan, S. Korea, Vietnam and of course, Taiwan.

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