“A man who has lectured on race politics for four decades with the passion of a tent-revival preacher isn’t likely to run from critics. Recalling the bumper sticker he’d seen as he entered, Dickson told the people who perked up at the Sevananda confrontation, “You want to save Tibet. I’m in agreement.”

Dickson took the opportunity to compare Tibet – which the communist Chinese government has flooded with non-Tibetans – and America. “I told those who attacked me that the people of Milton and Shakespeare have a right to save themselves, just like what they advocate for Tibet. They were furious at the idea of someone arguing that white people should try to avoid extinction. Which is what is happening.”

Dickson’s message hasn’t changed much since he was a University of Georgia activist with the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom in the late 1960s: The white race must unite to save itself.

But technology has transformed racial politics just as it has the rest of our culture. Today Dickson’s soapbox is no longer confined to small rooms where he addresses handfuls of fellow travelers. His message is amplified and shoots around the planet at light speed, thanks to Stormfront.org, the online bulletin board whose booming growth delights white nationalists and causes anguish among their enemies….”

More at “A kinder, gentler racism,” John Sugg at CreativeLoafing.com

What differentiates a racialist from a racist?

1. A racialist acknowledges the existence of race, racial differences, and the influence of feelings of racial solidarity. He/she might take race into consideration in formulating policies.

Racialists take into account cultural and economic factors in the forming of civilizations/societies.

Racialists do not deny or denigrate commonly acknowledged and subtantiated historical or factual evidence. The do not advocate harm to other races either directly or indirectly.

2. A racist goes beyond acknowledging differences, and makes judgments about inferiority and superiority and worth/value as a whole. Racists commonly find answers to societal problems primarily in terms of genetics and biology. They tend to be deterministic even in that understanding. They may actively propagandize against intermarriage between races. [correction: I think that’s a little broad. You might inveigh against intermarriage and still be a racialist. However, actively penalizing group members would make you a racist]. Their studies are usually confined to scholarship and reports produced by people of their same racial group. They show an inability to weigh alternative arguments or interpretation seriously. They rarely have extensive life experience or interaction with people of a different race….

This is something I haven’t finished thinking through..

And I am going to expand this post over the next two days to include pieces on Asian, Black, Hispanic racism, as well as Zionism …I am curious to see what the comparison might yield and whether the sharp rise in Stormfront’s membership is paralleled in the other groups. (Make that two weeks…)
Is this an off-shoot of immigration policies, the Internet, economic problems, crime….or some combination thereof..?

Hi Josh:

Thanks very much for your detailed critique. Much appreciate it. But may I say that I think there are some things you’re confusing in your language?

1. First – I am NOT opposing any Enlightenment principles I can think of. I am FOR the rule of law, individualism, and intellectual critique. I am accusing some ideologues on the left (I don’t deny they’re on the right too – in general, the ones there, however, get a lot more criticism) of not applying those principles to their own unquestioned dogmas – that are not arrived at as rationally as they think. I listed a number of perfectly historical, stone-cold facts that many Marxist historians in India ignore, making them an easy target of right-wing critics…unnecessarily. But, I appreciate other contributions the Marxists have made. By the way – I didn’t have time to get into it – but we really have to get away from this enlightenment versus post-structuralist binary – it ain’t so. The enlightenment was NOT a simple unitary thing.

2. You write: “How many American Muslims feel so thoroughly dominated by a state that is officially secular and based on universalist principles of the Enlightenment that they’d prefer to go live in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan?”

Hmmmmm…..Where do I make the argument that anyone one would NOT prefer the intellectual freedoms here? –I don’t make it. Strawman?

Next. I AM calling for universalist principles. But, I’m saying that the social engineering of quotas don’t qualify. They’re outcome-based group-preferences and anti-individualist

But even on your own terms, I assure you, I know many critics of American government who don’t live here precisely because of their beliefs. They’ve moved elsewhere – to among others, Japan, France, Canada, Mexico, India, Argentina, and in my case, I am trying to return as well. The standard need not be cutting heads off, I hope. And yes, the libraries here are much bigger, better and more accessible, transportation is better and a host of other things – and prosperity makes it all possible. Thank you very much, America. Sincerely. I deeply appreciate the opportunity to work. Never a day goes by when I don’t. It’s why I write as much as I can on the net, since when I go back, I may not be able to for logistical reasons.

3. Democracy and law are not a good fit by nature – that’s why we have checks and balances and so on….yes? The constitution which is ‘longer-view law’ (not subject to majoritarian desires) is one way we deal with that — which is what I wrote in the piece. A bit different from what you’re reading, no? I probably wasn’t as clear as I wanted to be because I was trying not to go on too long….

At any rate, that’s why I make the point about accommodation in the last line in that paragraph. Meaning, popular voices (that’s the democratic bit) are always calling for the abrogation of law, so it’s natural for them to be always straining AGAINST the rule of law. Nussbaum acts likes that makes for an insuperable crisis. I say it’s natural and can be accommodated.

4. I don’t say that people who kill others or brutalize them shouldn’t be held accountable. I make that point clearly in the line about religious fanatics. But I do say that one shouldn’t draw any untenable iron link between fundamentalism (and even exceptionalism) and violence. I know perfect egalitarians who seem always prepared to kill to push their beliefs on others and know many fundamentalists who are quiet and law-abiding. I even know people who think themselves better than others (a number of cultures do in one way or other, whether they say so explicitly or not), but don’t act to oppress others. And I know racially tolerant societies which none the less find ways to wage unjust wars. I think there’s no necessary connection. I believe Jesus was pretty fundamentalist in his beliefs. He took the voices in his head quite literally. I don’t think he was aggressive to anyone, though.

4. I don’t negate historical fact. I negate – with examples- Nussbaum’s history, because she doesn’t know or doesn’t include salient facts. It’s not any Marxism in the account she gives that I object to; it’s the lack of history. I have read accurate presentations of facts in the writing of many religiously inclined historians whose views inform but don’t distort facts. I don’t see why one couldn’t read, say, Christopher Dawson or Eric Voegelin and find them useful even if one wasn’t a Christian believer. One might find it at least as useful as some Marxist or Whig history.

Anyway, I believe I used the term “not much more” useful – which implies that, of course, we need to weigh the claims of all approaches carefully.. So yes, we have to find a common basis for our studies of history, or they wouldn’t be useful. But I think we could broaden the range of “common basis”.

That doesn’t mean I endorse teaching “Muslim physics” (the hard sciences, you’ll admit are not the social-sciences) – it means how come I can’t read or even hear anyone discuss Austrian economics in any major university in the US?

Yes – theorizing about the decline of the nation state and then arguing for global bureaucracies that are controlled largely by the intellectual outlook (I don’t necessarily disagree with all of it) of certain elites does increase the power of the state — by which I mean government at any level except the local, because those elites are held accountable finally through their own state mechanisms. Eg., you have a UN sanction, but to give it force you need the backing of government powers from various countries, which naturally have their own agendas.

I should have mentioned that by ‘state’ I mean both the ‘nation state’ and ‘government powerl’. I use the term in the general sense.

To make things clearer, I come from a right libertarian anarchist perspective (closer to the Independent Institute, not Cato), which finds the same problem with unchecked corporate power which feeds off of and reinforces the state. I am anti-state — not just anti- nation-state.

And not very fond of the idea of world government.

6. Marxists believe in a lot of things they’ve never seen, I assure you.

7. I sympathize with the view that we are in for a new feudalism (see the article by Martin Hutchinson I have on my blog) intermingled (via power politics) with some version of quasi-civilizational-trading blocs. That might not be bad – as I write – if it pays attention to local communities and doesn’t force itself on people with a religious conscience (say, about abortion or gay rights) — that’s something only decentralization could bring about. But the new trans-national governance will be bad if it counter-poses itself to corporate power as yet another face of the globalist regime.

8. I hope I am making myself clear because I think confused language (intentional or unintentional) is a huge part of the problem. Which is that fundamentalism per se can’t be conflated with chauvinism and chauvinism (I’m better than you) or exclusiveness (I want to be on my own) isn’t always or necessarily violent. I actually tend to think a bit of separatism, when cultures are very different, might be a good thing if it doesn’t carry any oppressive connotation.

For instance, I sympathize with European nations who want immigrants from Islamic countries to assimilate in some ways. Criticism of burqas that cover the face  sounds right to me (for security reasons primarily; I haven’t really thought this out – just citing an example of a trade-off) but eliminating head-scarves sounds NOT right.

However, I’m not happy to talk about politics and countries I haven’t studied closely.

9. Too quick too great social changes in multiethnic empires – like India – invariably create these strains. To ignore the backlash against those changes – which were initiated by the state — and to read violence as a problem solely arising out of some essentialist understanding of fundamentalism as evil is sorely mistaken.

10. I admire Martha Nussbaum. She has ethical concerns and a willingness to get her hands dirty, which I respect. She just doesn’t know her history here and is seeing what she does know through very tendentious glasses.

In the same context, I don’t know how you could read anything I wrote as a defense of the governments of Syria, Jordan and so on. That’s the problem. Unless we are well grounded in historical facts, theoretical juxtaposition of dissimilar things under the rubric of “fundamentalism” is misleading. Islamic fundamentalism is not Christian fundamentalism is not Jewish fundamentalism is not Hindu fundamentalism. They have similarities and differences. Popular unrest in different countries arises for different reasons. Empires are not the same. Caliphates are not the same. I might believe they all need to be rolled back, but might use different approaches and analyses for each. Let’s tackle the problems pragmatically, locally. One of my points is that Nussbaum’s approach to history isn’t particular enough in that way. We need less argument and more supporting evidence. Her account (as previewed) doesn’t quite cut it as is.

I think Hindus (I don’t even want to get into her claim about Hindu identity where she is partly correct and partly quite mistaken) feel encircled, with some justification, given recent history and demographics.

Massacring a crowd in Gujarat – no matter where you stand – is absolutely wrong. And the central government should have intervened much more than it did. I write that too. Please do note my paragraph about equality under the law and respect for individuals.

But ignoring the role of the state in helping to create such situations is simply inaccurate.

We expect better from Ms. Nussbaum.

I remain, as always,
a devoted student of the enlightenment

Lucifer

I got out my piece on Martha Nussbaum’s article in The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning. She slams Hindu fundamentalism for its assault on democracy in a way that I think obscures the excellent points she makes.

I had to cut more than a page and still didn’t get to half my problems with the article.

That’s even though I’ve heard Nussbaum speak and think she’s impressive. I am, of course, naturally prejudiced in favor of striking former opera students turned political philosophers who are interested enough in practical politics to actually get to know something about it. Add to that an interesting Amartya Sen connection, and you’ll see why I thought for a long while that I’d try to write my dissertation under her.

But if there’s anything nastier than politics in the big world, it’s politics in the ivory tower. Scholarly, well- put, soft-spoken (well, at least most of the time)…but nasty nevertheless. Martha was spared knowing me and I was spared further poli-sighing (sic)….And so I dropped out — and back into the great world. No regrets.

The Nussbaum book is going to set off a lot of reverberations, she being who she is. And I wanted to get my perverse two cents in. I was going to be meaner, but Nussbaum gets brownie points for her interest in the condition of Indian women. So I’m critical, but in a soft-spoken sort of way. Check it out (thanks to Joey Kurtzman for allowing me to post the whole piece on my blog):

“In an earlier Shvitz post, Rohit Gupta criticized Martha Nussbaum’s latest piece in The Chronicle for Higher Education, in which Nussbaum positions herself as liberal by taking on Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis of clashing civilizations.

Rohit listed some of Nussbaum’s specific mistakes, but I’d like to dissect her theoretical position, which I think is what lets her make them.

Huntington’s work was taken by a lot of people to justify a clash between the Western and the Islamic worlds. She relocates the clash. It isn’t between Western, Latin American, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese, and the possible ninth, African – (a very loaded ordering, of course) as Huntington claims. Instead, she says, it’s inside each culture — between those who are willing to “live on terms of equal respect with others who are different,” and those who “seek the protection of homogeneity,” who are also (leap of logic here) the ones who want to dominate others. All fundamentalists, purists, exceptionalists and even just the orthodox belong in the Luciferian category, while liberal religions and secular universalists (who see citizenship as based on political entitlements) are cast in the role of St. Michael.

Here I take the part of Lucifer. “Terms of equal respect” begs the question. What equal respect consists of is what’s at the heart of the squabble. Luciferians feel that their many-colored beliefs – are, in fact, not equally respected by an evangelical monotheism of “universalism” and “secularism” that wants to dominate them through the state.
And I don’t believe this throws them suicidally onto the path of the onrushing engine of science either. Nussbaum herself admits that when she anxiously describes a Hindu devotee, who on one hand, claims his guru’s voice comes directly from god, but, on the other, still knows how to get fiber optic cable into his temple.

Nonetheless, this “combination of technological sophistication with utter docility” so terrifies her she thinks it can only be remedied by – (drum roll here) — education in the arts and humanities. Bada-bing!

Still, I take her point. Not knowing history is what frees up a revolutionary to break with the past most totally. Turgenev said the same thing in Fathers and Sons. But, set her theory on the ground today and see how it works. Do four years of women’s studies and French psychoanalysis, maybe with a minor in “conflict resolution,” really make non-technical folk “imagine the pain of another human being” better? If so, why did so many people use feminist language and universal human rights to justify invading Iraq? And how balanced are humanistic studies today, anyway? Are we really better off replacing an unbalanced emphasis on profitable skills, as she calls it, with an unbalanced emphasis on unprofitable skills?

How much more balanced are the perspectives that dominate major Western and Indian universities than, say, the Catholic perspective that dominates a Jesuit university? Marxist (or other) approaches to history are just that – approaches. Useful, enriching, plausible, but not written in stone. That’s what makes Nussbaum’s argument self-contradictory….

The bait she tempts us with is that technical studies need to be supplemented by the “humanities” (defined as interpretative). But what she actually gives us is a bit of a sham — history as pure fact, not interpretation. Nussbaum wants us to believe that facts presented by religious historians are guilty until proven innocent, but facts presented by Marxists historians are prima facie facts. She would have us believe that, since this immaculately conceived history is free of the original sin of hierarchy, it must lead us to a paradise of justice and mercy on earth.

This gnosticism isn’t first obvious because it’s concealed by sloppy language. She talks – without irony – about the “rule of law and democracy” being under assault by Hindu fundamentalism. Presumably, a legal scholar would know that the rule of law is often under assault — by democracy itself. It is democratic values that allow the expression of fundamentalist ideas; it is the rule of law that restrains them. Democracy and the rule of law aren’t usually a good fit. That’s why we have constitutions. For that matter, the public here in the US hasn’t made a flap over legislation dismantling the constitution. This shouldn’t mean that we discard either the constitution, or – though some secularists might prefer it – the population. We just have to keep refining and rethinking the way the two accommodate each other.

Then, Nussbaum tips her hat to the idea of a nation “as a unity around political ideals and values, particularly the value of equal entitlement.” But this is vague too. Why couldn’t political ideals be as exclusionary and chauvinistic as religious ideals? And what does she mean by equal entitlement? Does she mean safeguards of individuals under the law (with which I tend to agree) or does she mean guaranteed outcomes? (with which I tend to disagree). It’s because she doesn’t ever clarify what she means by “state” and “law” that her argument is tenuous.

That’s how she goes off-track, blaming fundamentalism per se for what is more plausibly the result of the way the particular state of India was created and way its history has unfolded since.

To start, she conflates Gandhi’s and Nehru’s attitudes toward the state, although they were hugely apart — Gandhi being in favor of a kind of anti-politics that focused on the level of villages and Nehru going in for central planning and industrialization under the influence of the Laski-dominated socialism of the London School of Economics. She doesn’t tell us that, contrary to the Indians, Jinnah saw Pakistan as a Muslim state, provoking at least some of the anxieties about secularism in the Hindu right. She also omits the British part in hastening partition unnaturally, playing divide and conquer and in exacerbating Hindu-Muslim tensions. She mentions the right’s fascination with European fascism in the inter-war period without mentioning that a swathe of intellectuals from Chesterton to Yeats were too. What about the left’s fascination with Stalin and Mao?

Her entire article is marred by such omissions and errors. She presents her account of the origins of Hindu culture as cold fact, whereas it is quite controversial. She mentions the Muslim emperor’s Akbar’s syncretism in contrast to Shivaji’s Hindu chauvinism without mentioning Shivaji’s foe, the fanatic and murderous Aurangzeb. She fails to mention decades of Pakistan- sponsored terrorism in India that was not only downplayed by the US but abetted by it. It was a useful trade-off to support a Muslim country in one place where its claim was weak but oppose another in the Middle East where its claim was strong. Nor does she mention the ethnic cleansing of former East Pakistan’s Hindu population nor of Kashmir’s, nor Muslim Caliphate claims, nor reports of CIA involvement with some (not all) Western human rights, missionary and aid organizations in India. She dismisses the Hindu right version of history as simplistic but hers is more so. Neither secularism nor liberalism needs such selectivity.

More importantly, as Rohit points out, she ignores the state’s role in the years after independence in the creation of entitlements — quotas and reservations in jobs and universities. Originally meant to rectify gross inequities under law they have now become instruments of social engineering that are widely resented in India, as they are here in the US. Quotas in multiethnic states have usually had broad adverse effects but they continue to be pursued. Why? Because they satisfy what’s been called the new trans-national progressive regime that calls for human rights, environmental and social justice laws (built around Nussbaum’s idea of “human flourishing” that bind nation states to trans-national standards (how’s that for a vague concept you can stuff with anything you want?)

I would have no problem with any of that if the trend was to eventually undermine the state in favor of more and more decentralization. But if the new human rights regimes by-pass traditional communities, sub-national states or religious groups from a bias against religious or cultural identity, what you’re left with is two things: a global bureaucracy whose agenda is set by international elites dominated by Western or Westernized intellectuals, and group-identity politics in which the individual and the local community are gradually erased. At least partly, religious fundamentalism is one way in which people counter this erasure.

From that point of view, both Huntington and Nussbaum commit two versions of the same error. He supports the cultural purification of the state to strengthen it; she supports the cultural mongrelizing of the same state, also for the same reason. Believing herself to be attacking his position (vis-a-vis Islam), she ends up reinforcing it (vis-a-vis) the state. In either account, the state ends up being strengthened.

Now, if that makes it easier for the state to intervene to protect the massacre of Muslims in Gujarat and reinforces guarantees of individual rights and liberties against violation by religious fanatics, I would firmly support her. But, I think Nussbaum has something more than equality under law in mind. As long as that remains the case, the underlying source of much modern violence, not only in India but in most parts of the world, will continue to be ignored – the continual and terrifying expansion of state power itself. But that is the one fundamentalism that liberals don’t take on.

And read Blacklist’s lead singer (check it out) Josh Strawn’s detailed comment at Jewcy

(Thank you, Josh)

He’s calls himself a “vocal signatory” of the Euston Manifesto, which at first glance, seems to belong to the “liberventionist” category, alas.