Culture Talk

Abstract

In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, [c1952]), Leo Strauss, the University of Chicago political philosopher, analyzed the technique of writing under repression. He discussed medieval philosophers who had written under repression – al-Farabi, Maimonides, and Spinoza – but this was not an esoteric exercise. The cold war had begun only three years before, and American officialdom tended to see a communist behind every book. “In a considerable number of countries which, for about a hundred years, have enjoyed a practically complete freedom of discussion,” wrote Strauss, “that freedom is now suppressed and replaced by a compulsion to coordinate speech with such views as the government believes to be expedient, or holds in all seriousness.” Persecution, Strauss noted, “gives rise to a peculiar technique of writing,” one “in which the truth about all crucial things is presented exclusively between the lines.” But what if only some are conscious of the growing repression and thus write between the lines, while most have so internalized the repression as common sense that they translate it into a narrow agenda? Surely, in such a case the most appropriate response is to broaden the parameters of the discussion in order to not just read between the lines, but also beyond the margins. In what follows, I will try to do so by identifying and commenting on the issues driving the debate between participants. Debate One: Culture and Politics One of the most amazing news items I read in the weeks following 9/11 was in The New York Times: Sales of the Qur’an had soared in the United States as more and more Americans sought to read it for clues as to what had motivated the hijackers. In the months and years that followed, I wondered if the people of Afghanistan or Iraq, even Fallujah, were reading the Bible for an explanation for the bombs raining upon them from on high. I doubt that any of them really did. I wondered what explained this difference. I am convinced that the difference lies in how the public debate on 9/11 has been framed by public intellectuals in the United States. Most public intellectuals, especially the quasi-official ones, share assumptions that I call culture talk. The core assumption is that you can read some people’s politics – the politics of those who are not “modern” – from their culture, for culture is not something that they make; rather, it is their culture that makes them. Even those who accept that all cultures are historical assume that cultures grow in separate containers called “civilizations” that talk and exchange, but only do so at the margins. Since they all develop along the same lines, you can tell who is more and who is less developed. In addition, it is characteristic of the less developed that they require an external impulse to get out of a vicious circle. The historical responsibility of the more advanced culture, then, is either philanthropic – to bring “development” or “democracy” to those less fortunate – or that of policing the world by imposing a quarantine on those likely to act out of resentment or anger. Culture talk has a history. It is about taking the moral high ground and is as old as colonialism. Democracies have always had to justify colonialism to their populations as a selfless and philanthropic endeavor. Not surprisingly, the justificatory literature on colonialism typically identifies vulnerable groups in the target countries – those who need to be saved – and turns them into so many proxies. This is how one needs to understand the nineteenth-century British preoccupation with the talk of saving Indian women (by ending practices like sati, polygamy, and the ban against widow marriage) and children (child marriage), or entire populations in Africa from possible enslavement, as well as the contemporary American preoccupation with female genital mutilation. It used to be called “the White Man’s Burden”; now it is called “humanitarian intervention.” ...