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investigations, my job was to be an involved intellectual, to ask questions, to invoke something like a human rights point of view, to put some light in the darkest places in the world. Places you don't want to see. To try to escape the petty Hegelian way of seeing the world, which looks exclusively at history in its majesty, in the "developed world" where alone history is supposed to be made. I wanted to look into where the wind of history is supposed not to blow. There you have people dying. You have human flesh pressed to dust and with nobody to care. So this was the first thing I did.
But in my book, I tried also to raise some political and philosophical questions. Among other things, the book is an ideological assault against what I would call the aesthetics of war. We have in France, you have in America, a whole literature which says, like Appollinaire, "how beautiful is war." The first aim of this book was to show exactly the contrary. That war is ugly. That war is never the theater set or stage where humanity becomes higher than itself. It is not the place of heroism; it is not the place where men get bigger than themselves. Sometimes, perhaps, but very seldom. I saw that enlargement sometimes in Bosnia, but it is not the rule. The rule is the contrary. War is a place where mankind is reduced to its lowest level, to cowardice, stupidity, stubbornness, animality. The first intention of this book was to oppose that whole tradition which says that war is an elevating experience, offering even to a peasant or a simple man the opportunity to become like a general or like the great heroes of the French Revolution, to rise above themselves. I think that this is one of the most disgusting ideas in the world, and my book is first of all an assault on that idea.
The second intention of the book, the second hypothesis, had to do with my sense that we are moving out of a time when wars, however horrible, had a hallowed place within the common vision of history. Until recently human history was governed by great narratives and great ideologies, in terms of which we thought we could offer an apology for every event and assign it a special place, a meaning. Suffering existed, of course, but as in the Hegelian dialectic, this suffering was inhabited by or participated in a sort of secret aim. Informing everything was a sort of providential intention at the end of which there was felt to be something better.
But today, I contend, we have wars that mean nothing. Which have no place in the world at all. Wars in which the protagonists have lost the thread which might have seemed to tie them to the universal. Wars devoid of any meaning and all the more horrible. What is the concept of a meaningless war? That is another concept I address in my book. A third question of the book is inspired by the same Hannah Arendt whom Bob Boyers quoted in his opening remarks. The real opposition between human beings, Arendt says, is not between rich and poor, not between religions or races ; the real opposition, says Arendt, comes from people being born-or not born-at the right moment at the right place on earth. At the time of Pericles and Solon what mattered was whether you were Greek or not Greek. At the time of Christianity what mattered was whether you were born a Jew who thus had to face pogroms, or a Christian living in Christian Europe. Opposition is between the damned and the others. This book is a meditation about the damnation of those who are born wretched. The book is about what it means to be born in the most desolate areas of the world. When I speak about the end of history I don't speak about it in the way of Francis Fukuyama who, with Hegel, sees the end of history as a sort of accomplishment. I see it on the contrary as a sort of zero degree of history, where a large portion of the world is written out of history. And that is not a small thing, is it?
Of course we can also ask what is worse, the wars that have meaning, or the wars that do not? Where is the most killing and murder? Are the worst wars the ones where the warriors have the sense that they are defending an idea? Albert Camus thought at the end of The Rebel that ideology is the source of the greatest crimes. Or are the nihilist wars, the ones I witnessed, the worst? So: nihilism or ideology is another opposition I want to confront.
Benjamin Barber: Thank you, Bernard-Henri, for coming here to discuss these issues with us. Of course I admire your boldness and courage not just in writing about these issues but also in going to the places you name and exposing yourself to dangers and horrors that are a part of those landscapes. Few intellectuals do that, and those who do of course provide a good deal for the rest of us to debate. Bob said, rightly, that you tend to raise a lot of questions often without seeming to offer a lot of answers. And yet I do want to suggest that there is a certain way of asking questions that in fact does present answers, even if those answers are not always obvious. Certainly your approach differs from the approach of someone like General DeGaulle who was very certain of his answers and didn't worry much about the questions that others might continue to have. A wonderful story-not true, unfortunately-has it that, after having given a long introductory statement at a press conference, DeGaulle asked: "Are there questions for my answers?" In this case we have to ask instead: are there any answers to the questions that Lévy raises for us?
I've taken as my text for these sessions not just the book on war, evil, and the end of history, but also the recent book that many Americans have been reading and reading about, which is American Vertigo, Lévy's retracing of de Tocqueville's journey to America in the 1830's, which was serialized first in The Atlantic and relates also to a small piece in The Nation called "Letter to the American Left," which is subtitled "why are the progressives in a semi-comatose state while the right takes over?" And that perhaps is also worthy of some attention. So I want to take those as my primary texts and simply raise some questions about the questions.
Lévy tells two very nice stories about Tocqueville. In one, Lévy is stopped by a cop who is very tough on him, asking him why he's stopped on the side of the road, to which Lévy replies that he's a French writer and in America for several reasons. But the cop is not impressed until Lévy says he's retracing Tocqueville's steps, to which the cop says, "Tocqueville! I read him in high school!", so that they then enter into a lively conversation. He even asks Lévy what he thinks is still relevant about Tocqueville. Later in his wanderings, Lévy comes across an honors class that is reading Democracy in America and engages in conversation with them. But throughout his book he says nothing (or very little) of what he thinks about Tocqueville, so that I have to wonder, as I have before, what is still relevant about Tocqueville? Was he right or wrong? You know, he talks about themes that lurk in the background of Lévy's writing, including the question of majoritarian tyranny and, also central, the question about religion and fundamentalism. Those were particularly Tocquevillian themes. My own view is that, where he was generally considered right he was wrong (on the tyranny of the majority), but in the case where many people thought he was wrong he was right: on the necessity of religion to creating and sustaining a stable democracy. My teacher was Louis Hartz, who wrote in one of his books a long time ago that majoritarian tyranny-the idea that the majority is going to take over and make a mess out of democracy and individual liberties and destroy the separation of powers-was exaggerated. The American majority, Hartz argued, has forever been a puppy dog tied to a lion's leash. By which he meant the majority has never done anything very dangerous, but that the fear of the majority has paralyzed American government and made it very hard for the majority ever to do anything. As any president elected by the majority (that may not include the present one) will tell you, presidents can get little done. This was true of Clinton, Reagan, and Roosevelt. They got very little done in this country because their majorities were crippled by the separation of powers and by the varieties of rights talk. Some people would argue, and I am with them, that the real problem isn't with the tyranny of the majority but the impotence of the majority.
On the other point I think Tocqueville was right, though this is exactly where many Americans worry about him. He says, remember, that religion is absolutely indispensable to sustaining a democracy, and the way he explains this is very simple. In a monarchy you don't need religion to hold the country together because you have tyranny. But in a democracy, where you have political liberty, where you have divisions, where you have conflict, you need something to serve as a social glue, and nothing serves better than religion. It's also, he says, another way of keeping popular sovereignty and the majority in check. How can it be, he asks, that a people who deign to govern themselves should not bow before a god? Isn't it a dangerous thing if they have in effect no greater power than themselves to bow before and then take it upon themselves to govern themselves? Such a people will likely become immoderate and dangerous. In that sense Tocqueville made an argument about religion in America that we need to examine carefully at a time when we're so obsessed with fundamentalism and religion and we're thinking (oh my gosh) that the separation of church and state is under attack. My own view is that it is less of a problem than we think and that we want to remember too that the separation of church and state was intended not to protect the state from religion but to protect religion from the state. European forms of established religion had long made it impossible for people to choose and pursue the religions of their choice. And indeed the real danger of establishmentarianism as Locke understood it and as the founders understood it was that once you won the battle to use the state as your enforcer you would soon find that the state would become the enforcer against your own religious values. So that my Tocqueville's a little different from Lévy's, and I hope we get a chance this weekend to hear Lévy engage further with some of the questions he raises in that direction.
In his letter to The Nation Lévy raises the idea of the engaged intellectual and the importance of ideas, and he asks how it can be that the left has so few ideas and that its intellectuals are not engaged and are not out there fighting. My own response is that if you look more closely you find that there are actually many engaged intellectuals on the left. The fact that they're not on CNN or NBC is not their fault. You might ask CNN or NBC why several of the intellectuals in this room, and others who've been with me here over the years, are rarely invited by the television stations. Obviously this has more to do with the media than it does with any failure on the part of people like Jonathan Schell or Martha Nussbaum.
But the more interesting question is whether we really want intellectuals deeply engaged. It may well be that intellectuals actually don't belong in politics and that it can be dangerous when they get there. In American Vertigo Lévy actually praises the political right, with whom he disagrees on many things, for the fact that at least they take ideas seriously and have managed to make their ideas count. That may be one of the best arguments for why intellectuals with big ideas shouldn't be in politics: their success in the Bush white house shows precisely how dangerous they can be. Leo Strauss was a Platonist who thought that good government was the government of good ideas and that philosophers had the good ideas and thus should govern. Most Americans hold that the people have a right to their own prejudices, their own mistakes and their own ideas, and don't need intellectuals or Platonists or people who think they have access to the truth to tell them what to do. And when you get governments principally responsive to ideas rather than votes, you usually get places that look more like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, or maybe some of the places Levy calls "black holes" where very bad ideas tend to dominate. The Taliban certainly represents people who have very strong and clear ideas. They don't much bother to consult constituents but look to the god of Islam and to a particular reading of the Koran to decide how to govern. So maybe it's worth asking if we want intellectuals, even so called good intellectuals, to be engaged, when what we're likely often to get is engagement by guys like the neo-conservatives who have brought us all the very bad ideas guiding Bush and his comrades. This is, after all, part of the discussion we want to have about democracy and the current threat to democracy out there.
Levy clearly rejects that famous thesis of Samuel Huntington on the clash of civilizations, and yet he seems to share Paul Berman's view that in some ways the jihadists and the Taliban are the new totalitarians, the new fascists and that we have to face up to this fact. Certainly there is evidence to support this view, and yet I think that it is false and misleading and leads to some of the political problems that we confront. I am speaking of the moralization of the Iraq war and the Manichaean character of a conflict in which a good America now opposes an axis of evil. I don't want for a minute to suggest that the folks who brought down the twin towers are anything but evil, but I do want to suggest that the more general reaction of fundamentalist Islam to westernization is about something other than merely a new fascism. Why is it that the majority of ordinary citizens in Egypt actually think that Osama is doing a good job? We know that Osama is a terrorist and a force for evil, but what's with all those Egyptians who don't get it? Why are they sympathetic? Are they also evil? All of them? Are they somehow responding to actual policies and tendencies in the west in ways we ought at least to think about? Ought we to think about their fear of secularism, materialism, and imperialism? Lévy identifies a war between ordinary or moderate religion and fundamentalism. I don't see any war at all. I prefer to believe-I do believe-that fundamentalist religion is religion under siege. Fundamentalism is practiced by those who believe that their religion is backed up against the wall. And we don't have to leave this country to find this. There are two million American protestant fundamentalists who school their kids at home because they are terrified of what they see as the materialist, violent, pornographic society that is out there. Often it's the most serious Christians who become fundamentalists, and we who are secularists, who spend some time on the net or in the mall or at the multiplex, can avow that fundamentalists may have a point about the character of our culture. I'm a leftist. I say this as a leftist who is not particularly religious. But it really isn't hard to imagine how people trying to defend their faith in the Middle East or in Asia might feel at least a deep ambivalence about the US and the threat represented by our culture. You know the old joke about what's going on in the Arab street, where someone says "yankee go home...and take me with you." This is a deeply seductive culture and also a deeply dangerous and pernicious culture. Comparable concerns exist also within Israel. Conservative and orthodox Jews worry about the kids dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv, having a great time, enjoying their porn and living their materialist life; they're asking what's happening to Judaism? In this country Jews have begun to say that maybe intermarriage isn't such a good idea, and that's not just orthodox and conservative Jews, but even reform Jews. This may seem to take us far from the burning issues Lévy invites us to examine, but my point is that many of our assumptions about what is going on in the Islamic world can be clarified and corrected when we try at least to understand the roots of what are genuine concerns. Of course, people who feel threatened and aggrieved are often easy prey to manipulate, and there are those who want to try and turn their anger and fear and vulnerability into a readiness to wage jihadic war. And yet I suggest that there may be no more of a war internal to Islam than there is a war between Islam and the west.
Finally the most powerful and interesting and moving part of Levy's work is his discussion of black holes and the manner in which they become invisible to us. No one who has read Lévy will fail to appreciate his efforts to shine some light in places of horror and to show what goes on in places largely invisible to most of us in the west. But let me suggest an alternative interpretation: it's not perhaps that we fail to care about what goes on in these black holes because we don't see them; we fail to see them because we don't care. This is, I think, a fundamental difference because it means that seeing them won't help. The fact is that many of these black holes have been visible. We have looked at the carnage in Africa, in Rwanda, and talked about genocide. The current horrors in Darfur are all too visible on our televisions. It's not their invisibility that would seem to be the problem. Remember that Appollinaire spoke of la guerre de jolie, suggesting that the more you expose the bestiality of war the more its horror might come to seem beautiful. Nightmares are beautiful. The horrific experiences described in those black holes will not seem pretty to the victims of atrocity, but to others they may seem irresistible. The problem of war is how to deal with that part of our nature that finds atrocity - in Africa, or Sri Lanka, or Bosnia - compelling. The black hole is, I suggest, in the human soul. And if that is so, then you can't just shine the light on it and say well, they'll see and stop it, whatever "it" is.
But there is another way of thinking about black holes, an element that is most absent in Levy's work, in which so much else is present. The element I miss is power and the role of power. These black holes don't just open up. They are not natural but constructed. There are reasons for them. In Rwanda, national radio was used by elites bent on certain forms of conquest, used to turn long docile or tolerant populations into mobs. Those are acts of power. We engage in war because we have black holes in our soul, but we also engage in war because we want things. America is in Iraq today because it wants things. You might believe it wants democracy, as some people do; it certainly wants oil, and a presence in the Middle East. In fact, it wants a lot of things. We have war because people with power want things. And the response of the persons opposed to war must be to take power out of the hands of the people who want it and benefit by it. And that's of course what politics is about. Lévy asks the American left to get on with politics, but supposes that they need ideas to do this. I say the problem with the left is that they have plenty of ideas but that their politics absolutely stink. For all of their ideas, they haven't managed to take Bush out of power and get us out of a miserable war. The Americans bent on waging war have to be defeated politically, and if we do that there will be one less black hole. Levy helped end a black hole in Sarajevo because eventually people were roused to action and engaged in politics that actually worked,
But I'm always inclined to think about politics and power in connection with democracy, because our hope has to be that when democracy works and power is shared by large numbers of people, then there will be some way to do something about those black holes. I don't mean to be too optimistic here, but I do mean to offer an alternative to the resignation that comes when you feel that really nothing can be done, either because of what we are as human beings or because certain kinds of evil are bound to defeat our best intentions.
Jean Elshtain: I want to think about Lévy's work on black holes in another way, looking first at a question he himself raises, about the involvement of an author in a terrible situation, and how one understands oneself in that situation. Why is one here? Why come to "this spectacle of looming death"? Why are some people drawn to these kinds of situations? What reasons do they give? One is to witness, to make visible that which is invisible; another is simply to put oneself on the spot. It's something that pilgrims have done historically, insisting that you don't know what it's like unless you are on the spot. You have to somehow be there to really get the fullness of what's going on. It strikes me however that there is also a danger in this determination, the danger of crossing a certain line. I don't know how best to put this, but it strikes me that Lévy has certainly thought about it: when one moves into a situation where the dominant emotion is a kind of pity rather than compassion you may find that pity is a kind of contempt, and that one's stance becomes a kind of voyeurism. You're witnessing awful things and finding that they become grist for your mill. How do you avoid that, when what you intend is to make visible the real sufferings of real people in real places? I think the great strength of Lévy's book on war and evil is its attunement to the particular, the reminder that human beings are fragile and suffer injury easily. And yet I can't help also reflecting on, for lack of a better way of putting it, the ethics of observing horror and writing about the evil things that people do to one another. One quick example from my own life. In the late 1970's and early '80's I made five trips to Argentina just at the end of the reign of the military juntas and the restoration of constitutional government. I was drawn by the spectacle of the mothers of the disappeared, those whose children had been tortured and (many of them) killed by the kind of politics that they were involved in. And I spent a lot of time with the mothers, listening to them, interviewing them and developing friendships. I intended to write up what I discovered but found it was very difficult to do, in part because I was so concerned about not using people to make my own points, contributing to debates I was involved in. I wanted to establish a certain kind of distance that I think permits people their own narrative, that doesn't impose too much on their own experience. So I found this to be a difficult business, and I'd be very curious to hear more about what makes it so.
I know that we're going to talk about wars and whether or not they can lose their meanings, and also about the issue of just and unjust wars. But sometimes I think that the language of just and unjust wars is perhaps too grand a language to characterize some of what's going on in the places Lévy describes. Certainly the people in these situations who are trying to deal with the horrible things that are happening are just trying to stop the terrible stuff from continuing to happen. Nothing theoretical there, just interdiction. I am thinking for example of a woman named Miriam Hussein Mohammed from Somalia whose husband was killed and who lost one child to the child-soldier phenomenon when he was taken from her at the age of nine or ten and she never saw him again. The group she formed was concerned eventually about democracy and human rights, but immediately it was focused on just trying to do something about the child-soldier phenomenon-trying to stop kids from being swept up. There's meaning and purpose in that. It's not grand, but there is plenty of reason to try simply to lower the amount of suffering in a particular place and time. You know, when Augustine was asked what we are supposed to do in this world, he said first try to do no harm, and second give help whenever you can. And preventing harm and helping may best be managed by way of an attunement to the particular stories of people caught up in certain kinds of situations.