CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
1 Introduction
Notes
2 Universalism and Tribalism
Notes
3 Justice and Power
Notes
4 Progress and Doom
Notes
5 In Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
End User License Agreement
Left Is Not Woke
Susan Neiman

polity
Copyright © Susan Neiman 2023
The right of Susan Neiman to be identi ied as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance
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First published in 2023 by Polity Press
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1
Introduction
What this book is not: a call for bipartisanship, or a screed against
cancel culture. Nor will I speak of the liberal virtue of working to
understand those who do not share your views, though I think it’s a
virtue. But I don’t consider myself a liberal, perhaps because I live on a
continent where ‘liberal’ just means ‘libertarian,’ and a variety of left-
wing positions is always on offer. My own allegiances have always been
partisan: I was raised in Georgia during the Civil Rights Movement and
turned left from there. At a time when even ‘liberal’ is often a slur in
American culture, it’s easy to forget that ‘socialist’ was once a perfectly
respectable political position in the land of the free. None other than
Albert Einstein wrote a proud defense of socialism at the height of the
Cold War. Like Einstein and so many others, I’m happy to be called
leftist and socialist.
What distinguishes the left from the liberal is the view that, along with
political rights that guarantee freedoms to speak, worship, travel, and
vote as we choose, we also have claims to social rights, which undergird
the real exercise of political rights. Liberal writers call them bene its,
entitlements, or safety nets. All these terms make things like fair labor
practices, education, healthcare, and housing appear as matters of
charity rather than justice. But these, and other social rights to cultural
life, are codi ied in the United Nation’s 1948 “Universal Declaration of
Human Rights.” While most member states rati ied it, no state has yet
created a society that assures those rights, and the Declaration has no
legal force. In 530 languages it is the world’s most translated document,
but the Declaration remains aspirational. To stand on the left is to insist
that those aspirations are not utopian.
“It is quite possible to move gradually toward participatory socialism
by changing the legal, iscal, and social system in this or that country,
without waiting for the unanimity of the planet,” writes economist
Thomas Piketty.1 He argues that this can be done via tax increases that
would amount to less than the tax rates in the United States and Britain
during the post-war period of greatest economic growth. Identity
con licts, he concludes, are fueled by disillusionment with the very
ideas of a just economy and social justice.2 Still this book won’t discuss
the view that the left should pay more attention to economic than to
other inequalities. I think this is true, but that position has been
defended before. What concerns me most here are the ways in which
contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the
philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a
commitment to universalism over tribalism, a irm distinction between
justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these
ideas are connected.
Except as occasional targets, they are hard to ind in contemporary
discourse. This has led a number of my friends in several countries to
conclude, morosely, that they no longer belong to the left. Despite
lifetimes of commitment to social justice, they’re estranged by
developments on what’s called the woke left, or the far left, or the
radical left. I am unwilling to cede the word ‘left,’ or accept the binary
suggestion that those who aren’t woke must be reactionary. Instead, I’ll
examine how many of today’s self-identi ied left have abandoned core
ideas any leftist should hold.
At a moment when anti-democratic nationalist movements are rising on
every continent, don’t we have more immediate problems than getting
the theory right? A left-wing critique of those who seem to share the
same values might look like an instance of narcissism. But it’s not small
differences that separate me from those who are woke. These are not
only matters of style or tone; they go to the very heart of what it means
to stand on the left. The right may be more dangerous, but today’s left
has deprived itself of the ideas we need if we hope to resist the lurch to
the right.
The lurch is international, and organized. From Bangalore to Budapest
and beyond, right-wing nationalists meet regularly to share support
and strategies, although each nation thinks its civilization superior. The
solidarity between them suggests that nationalist beliefs are only
marginally based on the idea that
Hungarians/Norwegians/Jews/Germans/Anglo-Saxons/Hindus are the
best of all possible tribes. What unites them is the principle of tribalism
itself: you will only truly connect with those who belong to your clan,
and you need have no deep commitments to anyone else. It’s a bitter
piece of irony that today’s tribalists today ind it easier to make
common cause than those whose commitments stem from
universalism, whether they recognize it or not.
The woke are not a movement in any traditional sense. The irst
recorded use of the phrase stay woke was in the great bluesman Lead
Belly’s 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” dedicated to nine black teenagers
whose execution for rapes they never committed was only prevented by
years of international protests. Staying woke to injustice, being on the
watch for signs of discrimination – what could be wrong with that? Yet
in a few short years, woke was transformed from a term of praise to a
term of abuse. What happened?
From Ron DeSantis to Rishi Sunak to Eric Zemmour, woke became a
battle cry to attack anyone standing against racism, much as the phrase
identity politics was turned inside out a few years earlier. Yet the right
cannot bear all the blame. Barbara Smith, a founding member of the
Combahee River Collective, which invented the term, insists that
identity politics became used in ways that were never intended. “We
absolutely did not mean that we would only work with people who are
identical to ourselves,” she said. “We strongly believed in working with
people across various identities on common problems.”3
Some may argue that the seeds of abuse were present in the original
intentions, but it’s clear that neither identity nor woke politics was
used with the nuance they demanded. Both became divisive, creating
alienation that the right quickly exploited. Universities and
corporations are more prone to woke excess than community
organizers working on the ground. The worst abuses are those of woke
capitalism, which hijacks demands for diversity in order to increase
pro it. Historian Touré Reed argues that the process is calculated:
corporations believe that hiring black staff will allow them to tap into
black markets.4 The seizure is often straightforward and unashamed.
McKinsey’s report on the ilm industry stated that “By addressing the
persistent racial inequities, the industry could reap an additional $10
billion in annual revenues – about 7 percent more than the assessed
baseline of $148 billion.”5 But even without raw exploitation of what
began as progressive goals, woke has become a politics of symbols
instead of social change. Woke capitalism was called the dominant
motif at Davos 2020, but the gathering welcomed opening speaker
Donald Trump with a standing ovation.6 The fact that rightwing
politicians spit out the word woke with scorn should not stop us from
examining it.
Can woke be de ined? It begins with concern for marginalized persons,
and ends by reducing each to the prism of her marginalization. The idea
of intersectionality might have emphasized the ways in which all of us
have more than one identity. Instead, it led to focus on those parts of
identities that are most marginalized, and multiplies them into a forest
of trauma.
Woke emphasizes the ways in which particular groups have been
denied justice, and seeks to rectify and repair the damage. In the focus
on inequalities of power, the concept of justice is often left by the
wayside.
Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal
histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal.
What’s confusing about the woke movement is that it expresses
traditional left-wing emotions: empathy for the marginalized,
indignation at the plight of the oppressed, determination that historical
wrongs should be righted. Those emotions, however, are derailed by a
range of theoretical assumptions that ultimately undermine them.
Theory is such a nebulous and trendy concept that it’s even been used
to launch a fashion line, but if the word today has no clear content, it
does have some direction. What unites very different intellectual
movements bound together by the word theory is a rejection of the
epistemological frameworks and political assumptions inherited from
the Enlightenment. You need not spend years deciphering Judith Butler
or Homi Bhabha to be in luenced by theory. We rarely notice the
assumptions now embedded in the culture, for they’re usually
expressed as self-evident truths. Because they are offered as simple
descriptions of reality rather than ideas we might question, it’s hard to
challenge them directly. Those who have learned in college to distrust
every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood.
The New York Times is a good place to start, since it sets standards in
more than one country. While it still embodies the mainstream
neoliberal consensus it always represented, since 2019 it has been
increasingly, demonstratively woke. In addition to the contested 1619
Project, that turn has led to real progress, noticeably an increase in the
number of black and brown voices and faces. But here’s a sentence the
paper of record printed in 2021: “Despite Vice President Kamala D.
Harris’s Indian roots, the Biden administration may prove less forgiving
over Modi’s Hindu nationalist agenda.” If you read that quickly, you may
miss the theoretical assumption: political views are determined by
ethnic backgrounds. If you know nothing about contemporary India,
you may miss the fact that the iercest critics of Modi’s violent
Hinducentrism are themselves Indian. The bolder among them call it
fascism.
At about the same time, most American media were puzzled by a
surprising feature of the 2020 American election. Donald Trump’s
racism toward blacks and Latinos had been on public display
throughout his administration, yet he received more votes from those
groups than he had four years earlier. Rather than question, for a
moment, the assumption that demography is destiny, journalists
hurried to explain the quandary by telling us that Latino communities
are diverse: Puerto Ricans are not Cubans, Mexicans are not
Venezuelans. Each community has a history, a culture, a set of interests
of its own, and deserves to be respected as such. Apart from the fact
that this hardly explained the rise in black voters, chopping tribes into
tribelets is no solution. People are diverse. Neither black nor white nor
brown communities are homogenous. We do things for other reasons
than being members of a tribe.
Though the presumption that we don’t comes from media that are
hardly friendly to the current Republican party, the assumptions aren’t
far from those that drove Donald Trump’s practice: appointing a
neurosurgeon to head the department of urban development because
he was black; giving his feckless son-in-law one of the world’s greater
foreign policy challenges because he was Jewish; appointing a far-right
Catholic to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsberg because both were woman;
appointing a diplomatic disaster as ambassador to Germany because he
was gay. The fact that Berlin has been a gay-friendly town for most of a
century didn’t prevent its citizens from undiplomatically expressing
shock at Richard Grenell’s serial breaches of political conduct. Britain’s
brief Truss-led government was only the latest to take the same tack:
appointing the most diverse cabinet in British history while promoting
the most conservative policies in living memory. The ig leaves were too
small to cover the shame.
Which do you ind more essential: the accidents we are born with, or
the principles we consider and uphold? Traditionally it was the right
that focused on the irst, the left that emphasized the second. That
tradition has been turned around when a liberal politician like Hillary
Clinton applauds the election of Italy’s irst female prime minister as a
“break with the past,” ignoring the fact that Giorgia Meloni’s positions
are closer to Italy’s fascist past than those of any of its political leaders
since the war. It’s not surprising that theories held by the woke
undermine their empathetic emotions and emancipatory intentions.
Those theories not only have strong reactionary roots; some of their
authors were outright Nazis.
How deeply were the intellectual labors of Carl Schmitt and Martin
Heidegger connected with their membership in the Nazi party? There’s
quite a lot of scholarship on the question, and this book will not wade
into those weeds. Much of the literature is of the “Yes, but” variety,
where ‘but’ signals the fact that the thinker in question did not accept
every bit of Nazi ideology, or voiced some quiet criticism, or left the
party early. Others offer complex conceptual analyses arguing that
some important piece of their thought was incompatible with Nazism.
The complexity serves to repress outrage, as if only bad manners, or
philosophical shallowness, could give rise to shock. The fact that both
men not only served the Nazis, but defended doing so long after the war
is old news. Outrage, today, is reserved for racist passages of
eighteenth-century philosophy.
However you read the relation between their philosophies and their
political commitments, some things are certain: Schmitt rejected
universalism and any conception of justice that transcends a notion of
power, and Heidegger’s anti-modernism and appeals to peasant virtues
were more pervasive and deep-rooted than any of his other convictions.
These attitudes surely in luenced their decisions to throw in their lots
with the Nazis – and their refusal to renounce those decisions after the
war.
Given the facts, it’s puzzling to see the fascination for studying Schmitt
by those who are concerned with colonialism, or to hear philosophers
concerned with labor rights speak of reading Heidegger against
Heidegger. For in fact, many of the theoretical assumptions that support
the most admirable impulses of the woke come from the intellectual
movement they despise. The best tenets of woke, like the insistence on
viewing the world from more than one geographical perspective, come
straight from the Enlightenment. But contemporary rejections of the
Enlightenment usually go hand in hand without much knowledge of it.
This book is written in the hope that philosophy can untangle the
confusions that theory has created – and strengthen our political
practice in the process. You cannot hope to make progress by sawing at
the branch you don’t know you are sitting on.
This is not a scholarly book; I’m well aware that many volumes have
been written on most of the questions I’ll examine. None of my
examinations is exhaustive. Scholarly investigation would complicate
the claims I make about Foucault or Schmitt or evolutionary
psychology. Here I’m less interested in seeking the best possible
reading of these and other thinkers than in understanding their
in luence on contemporary culture. I’ve no doubt there are readings
that would present more generous interpretations of their thought; I
have read some of them. Precisely because they are elaborate and
counterintuitive, they are not the readings that get a wide hearing. Isn’t
good philosophy often elaborate and counterintuitive? Sometimes. But if
you need a Ph.D. and a lot of patience to understand a text – and that in
an age where even writers read less – it’s hard to imagine that this sort
of theoretical work could be as liberating as its intentions. Perhaps the
most important thing that distinguishes practitioners of theory from
Enlightenment thinkers is that the latter had no intention of writing for
a small, select audience; they wrote clearly, without jargon, in the
interest of reaching the widest number of readers. (Even Kant, the most
dif icult of Enlightenment philosophers, wrote ifteen perfectly
intelligible essays for a general audience.) I work hard to follow their
example.

Notes
1. Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).
2. Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2020).
3. Barbara Smith, quoted in Olú fé mi O. Tá ı́wò , “Identity Politics and Elite
Capture,” Boston Review, May 7, 2020.
4. Touré Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Racial Reductionism
(London: Verso, 2020).
5. https://www.mckinsey.com, 2021.
6. New York Times, January 23, 2020.
2
Universalism and Tribalism
Let’s begin with the idea of universalism, which once de ined the left;
international solidarity was its watchword. This was just what
distinguished it from the right, which recognized no deep connections,
and few real obligations, to anyone outside its own circle. The left
demanded that the circle encompass the globe. That was what standing
left meant: to care about striking coal miners in Wales, or Republican
volunteers in Spain, or freedom ighters in South Africa, whether you
came from their tribes or not. What united was not blood but
conviction – irst and foremost the conviction that behind all the
differences of time and space that separate us, human beings are deeply
connected in a wealth of ways. To say that histories and geographies
affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false.
It’s certain that shared experiences and histories create particular
bonds. We all tend to trust those whose codes we needn’t work to crack,
whose jokes we get in an instant, whose allusions we recognize
immediately. It takes an act of abstraction to become a universalist.
Learning languages, and immersing yourself in other cultures, will
make that abstraction concrete, but not everyone is as gifted as the
great artist and activist Paul Robeson. Yet even without his talents,
there are plenty of ways to share, if not to fully enter, other peoples’
cultures. You’ll never have the same relationship to a culture as do
those who fell asleep to its lullabies. But good literature, ilm, and art
can work wonders.
The opposite of universalism is often called ‘identitarianism,’ but the
word is misleading, for it suggests that our identities can be reduced to
two dimensions, at most. In fact, all of us have many, whose importance
will vary in space and in time throughout our lives. As the philosopher
Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us:
 Until the middle of the twentieth century, no one who was asked
about a person’s identity would have mentioned race, sex, class,
nationality, region or religion.1
We are all someone’s children, a fact that recedes in importance if we
are busy raising our own, but you need only step into your parents’
home to shift back to the moment when your primary identity was
‘child.’ It shifts again when you leave your lover in the morning to take
up a professional role at work. Is one of these identities more essential
to you than the other? Always? Those shifts of identity are fairly
universal, but there are many more. A politically engaged person cannot
think of herself as indifferent to politics; a passionate soccer fan cannot
envision her identity without loyalty to her home team. Not everyone
identi ies with whatever they do to make a living, but for those of us
who do, imagining ourselves as ourselves with an entirely different
profession is to imagine a rudderless void.
Depending on the person, those components of identity are at least as
important as the two that identity politics insists we consider: ethnic
and gender identity. A moment’s re lection shows even those to be less
determinate than supposed. The life of a black person is dramatically
different in America and Nigeria, as Chimamanda Adichie so brilliantly
showed in Americanah. And being Nigerian is only an identifying
description outside the country; in a land whose citizens are divided by
fraught histories and more than ive hundred languages, saying you’re
Nigerian means nothing at all. Being a Jew in Berlin and a Jew in
Brooklyn are experienced so differently that I can assure you they
amount to different identities. A Jew in Tel Aviv has another identity
again; but a Jew who was born in Tel Aviv has a fundamentally different
stance in the world than a Jew who moves there later in life. Is there an
Indian identity that holds equally for Hindus and Muslims, Brahmins
and Dalits? Can you identify someone as gay without mentioning
whether he lives in Tehran or Toledo? The historian Benjamin
Zachariah comments:
 Once upon a time, essentializing people was considered offensive,
somewhat stupid, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, but now this is
only so when it is done by other people. Self-essentializing and
self-stereotyping are not only allowed but considered
empowering.2
Those who condemned essentializing not two decades past are now
content to whittle all the elements of our identity down to two. Recent
efforts to increase diversity often appeal to the importance of having
people in positions of authority who “look like me.” It’s a remarkably
childlike expression, but what do children actually see? People whose
heritage is (at least partly) African can have the widest variety of skin
tones and hair textures; nor are skin tone or hair texture the only visual
qualities we perceive. A child told of someone who “looks like her”
might just as well ask: is she taller or shorter? Fatter or thinner? Older
or younger? And what about gender?
No one will deny that visual identities are important. When I was a
child, people considered attractive in America were not only white but
blond. For those of us who weren’t, it was a relief when Barbra
Streisand entered the limelight, even more when attention turned to
Angela Davis. Different as they were, both were beautiful, and neither
looked like Marilyn Monroe. The woke movement has made us aware
that white was not considered to be an identity at all but something
between norm and neutrality, as crayons labelled lesh-colored
suggested that all lesh was pasty pink. Diversity is a good. It just isn’t
the only one. I’m not the irst to point out that diversifying power
structures without asking what the power is used for can simply lead to
stronger systems of oppression. Nor does it stop with conservative
governments appointing the formerly marginalized. At Ian Malcolm’s
suggestion, Canadian comedian Ryan Long interviewed a variety of
bystanders on the question of whether offshore interrogators, which is
CIA-speak for torturers, should become more diverse. The fact that he
was taken seriously is not funny at all.3
The reduction of the multiple identities we all possess to race and
gender only appears to be a question of looks. The focus on two
dimensions of human experience is a focus on those dimensions that
experienced the most trauma. Identity politics embodies a major shift
that began in the mid twentieth century: the subject of history was no
longer the hero but the victim.4 Two world wars had undermined the
urge to valorize traditional forms of heroism. The impulse to shift our
focus to the victims of history began as an act of justice. History had
been the story of the victors, while the victims’ voices went unheard.
This condemned the victims to a double death: once in the lesh, once
again in memory. To turn the tables and insist that the victims’ stories
enter the narrative was just a part of righting old wrongs. If victims’
stories have claims on our attention, they have claims on our
sympathies and systems of justice. When slaves began to write their
memoirs, they took steps toward subjectivity and won recognition –
and slowly but certainly, recognition’s rewards.
So the movement to recognize the victims of slaughter and slavery
began with the best of intentions. It recognized that might and right
often fail to coincide, that very bad things happen to all sorts of people,
and that even when we cannot change that we are bound to record it.
As an alternative to preceding millennia, when the survivor of a
massacre by Roman legions or Mongol invaders could expect no more
than a laconic “shit happens,” this was a step toward progress. Yet
something went wrong when we rewrote the place of the victim; the
impulse that began in generosity turned downright perverse. The
limiting case of this trend is the story of Benjamin Wilkomirski, the
Swiss man whose claims to have spent his childhood in a concentration
camp turned out to be invented. Earlier rogues sought to hide troubled
origins, inventing aristocratic genealogies as a way to climb. Anyone,
after all, might be the son of an errant knight or a wayward pope. Now
that cachet has given way to another: claiming a more miserable birth
than your true one guarantees new forms of status.
Wilkomirski was hardly alone. To escape racist discrimination, light-
skinned African Americans once passed as white, leaving families
behind to live freer if sadder lives in the dominant class. Recently,
however, several white Americans have lost jobs they gained by falsely
passing as black. An African American actor was jailed for staging a
racist attack on himself.5 A Jewish German pop star provoked attention
and outrage by inventing an antisemitic incident hundreds of hours of
police investigations could not con irm.6 Orchestrated victimhood is
per idious because it mocks the victims of real racist attacks, but I’m
less interested now in the consequences than in the fact that they’re
possible at all. What was recently a stigma has become a source of
standing. Where painful origins and persecution were once
acknowledged, as in Frederick Douglass’s narratives, the pain was a
prelude to overcoming it. Prevailing over victimhood, as Douglass did,
could be a source of pride; victimhood itself was not. The rash of
contemporaries inventing worse histories than they experienced is
something new.
Fraudulent claims to status are nothing special; just think how many
embellish war experiences to center themselves in heroic light. But
even without imposters, the valorization of the victim raises problems.
What’s been dubbed the victimhood Olympics has reached
international dimensions. The injunction to remember was once a call
to remember heroic deeds and ideals; now Never Forget! is a demand to
recall suffering. Yet undergoing suffering isn’t a virtue it all, and it rarely
creates any. Victimhood should be a source of legitimation for claims to
restitution, but once we begin to view victimhood per se as the currency
of recognition, we are on the road to divorcing recognition, and
legitimacy, from virtue altogether.
It’s a sign of moral progress that we no longer dismiss victims’ stories,
as we did for so long; they deserve our empathy and, wherever
possible, reparations. (It’s less a sign of progress, though it may be
inevitable, that we have moved from thoughtless dismissal to
thoughtless acceptance.) My question is rather what we mean when we
call for recognition. Jean Amé ry did not even want to erect a monument
to the victims of the Third Reich because, as he wrote, “to be a victim
alone is not an honor.”7 That claim sprang from an assumption that now
seems old-fashioned: monuments should be reserved for those whose
deeds we admire, whose paths we hope to follow.
Jean Amé ry was born in 1912 as Hans Mayer, an assimilated Austrian
Jew. Too poor to attend university, he became one of the more erudite
philosophical writers of his day. Amé ry led Vienna for Belgium after
the Anschluß and joined a resistance group in Brussels, where he was
arrested and tortured by the Gestapo, who sent him to Auschwitz on
discovering he was a Jew. His book At the Mind’s Limits may be the most
searing confrontation with the Holocaust ever written. There he wrote:
We did not become wiser in Auschwitz, if by wisdom one
understands positive knowledge of the world. We perceived
nothing there that we would not already have been able to
perceive on the outside; not a bit of it brought us practical
guidance. In the camp too, we did not become deeper, if that
calamitous depth is at all a de inable intellectual quality. It goes
without saying, I believe, that in Auschwitz we did not become
better, more human, more humane, and more mature ethically. You
do not observe dehumanized man committing his deeds and
misdeeds without having all of your notions of inherent human
dignity placed in doubt. We emerged from the camp stripped,
robbed, emptied out, disoriented – and it was a long time before
we were able even to learn the ordinary language of freedom.
(ibid.)
Amé ry wrote admiringly of Frantz Fanon, whose Black Skin, White
Masks proclaims:
“I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors”
[emphasis added]. More recently, the philosopher Olú fé mi O. Tá ı́wò has
argued that
… pain, whether born of oppression or not, is a poor teacher.
Suffering is partial, shortsighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn’t
have a politics that expects different. Oppression is not a prep
school.8
Tá ı́wò argues that trauma, at best, is an experience of vulnerability that
provides a connection to most of the people on the planet, but “it is not
what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or decide for a
group.” (ibid.) He argues that the valorization of trauma leads to a
politics of self-expression rather than social change.
Amé ry and Tá ı́wò ’s critiques contest important claims of standpoint
epistemology, which emphasize the ways our social positions affect our
claims to knowledge. As philosopher Miranda Fricker argues:
 Feminists have taken from Marxism the intuitive idea that a life led
at the sharp end of any given set of power relations provides for
critical understanding (of the social world, in the irst instance)
where a life cushioned by the possession of power does not.9
Few would dispute this insight, as intuitive as it is important, but two
questions remain. Critical understanding can arise from powerlessness,
but does it always do so? Few champions of standpoint epistemology
would argue that it does. And, if not, can we allow the experience of
powerlessness to be elevated to an inevitable source of political
authority?
I’d prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are
focused on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to
you. This wouldn’t return the victims to the ash-heap of history. It
allows us to honor caring for victims as a virtue without suggesting that
being a victim is one as well. Defending convicted murderers facing
execution, Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative,
argues that everyone is more than the worst thing they ever did. Do you
want to be reduced to the worst thing that ever happened to you?
Those on the left who are uncomfortable with universalism should
consider: there is no more successful example of identity politics,
complete with the appeal to past victimhood, than the Jewish
nationalism of Israeli politicians like Binyamin Netanyahu.10 Identity
politics not only contract the multiple components of our identities to
one: they essentialize that component over which we have the least
control. And though it still refers to a recognizable problem, the words
identity politics have turned toxic, taken up by conservatives unaware
that they are practicing identity politics of their own. I prefer the word
‘tribalism,’ which beckons barbarity, despite the critique of a well-
meaning colleague who expressed concern that the word might be
offensive to Native Americans. But the idea wasn’t invented in the
Americas; it’s as old as the Hebrew Bible. The Bible warns us, again and
again, about what happens when people unite around tribal identities:
envy, strife, and war are the usual consequences. Tribalism is a
description of the civil breakdown that occurs when people, of
whatever kind, see the fundamental human difference as that between
our kind and everyone else.
Tribalism is even more paradoxical today, since we know that the idea
of race was created by racists.11 Through most of the nineteenth
century, neither the Jews nor the Irish counted as white. Concepts need
not be biological in order to have meaning; social constructs are just as
real as social conditions like racism make them. But given the history of
racial categorization, there is no guarantee that the distinctions we
recognize today will have the same meaning for those coming of age in
2050.
The late American sociologist Todd Gitlin’s Letters to a Young Activist
begins by acknowledging the pull of basing politics on tribal identities:
“Your starting point is that your identity has been singled out for
victimhood. You didn’t choose it, but you refuse to walk away from it.”
But the primordial passion that fuels identity politics proves to be its
weakness: “However often it makes the blood race, [identity politics]
often enough glosses over a profound impotence.” For, he argues,
identity politics confuses grand passions with minor irritations, while
mocking broader goals as mere rhetoric.
On this view, the goal of politics is to make sure your category is
represented in power, and the proper critique of other people’s
politics is that they represent a category that is not yours … Even
when it takes on a radical temper, identity politics is interest-group
politics. It aims to change the distribution of bene its, not the rules
under which distribution takes place.
Ultimately, Gitlin concludes, identity politics point backward, anchoring
us in the past.
Nazi jurists who developed the legal theory behind the infamous
Nuremberg Laws studied American race laws. They concluded that the
American “one drop of blood” rule would be too harsh to apply in
Germany and settled for softer criteria of what counted as Jewish;
anyone with no more than one Jewish grandparent could retain German
citizenship, however precariously. The jurists appreciated, however, the
ways in which American legal realism “demonstrated that it was
perfectly possible to have racist legislation even if it was technically
infeasible to come up with a scienti ic de inition of race.”12 Still the “one
drop of blood” rule underwrote American laws against racial
intermarriage and created categories like ‘quadroon’ and ‘octoroon.’
When progressive American pundits claim that the Republican Party is
doomed to disappear as the white population shrinks, they fall prey to
the same shaky thinking that fuels racist ires. Even those who know
about social construction persist in giving those categories more power
than they deserve; indeed, the more the consensus grows that racial
categories have no place in science, the more tenaciously they play a
role in political culture.
No one denies that your life will be different, and probably shorter, if
you were born in Mombasa rather than Manhattan. So, what’s universal
to humanity that is not a sanctimonious lie? Start with pain. Even in a
world saturated with violent images you shudder, for a moment, when
you face a photo of a bomb-torn body. Though it’s beamed from a
foreign country, it could have been your own. You do not make a
complicated inference from another’s pain to your own; the empathy is
instant, though it’s usually leeting. It’s the kind of compassion that
Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued is prior to reason, and found not just in
humans but in many other animals.
And speaking of bodies: they’re composed of many parts. Flesh comes
in a dizzying array of shapes and colors and sizes, just as cultures and
histories do, and it’s as interesting as cultures and histories are. But the
bones are the framework that holds bodies together. Being a
universalist allows you to ind fascination and joy in all the ways that
people differ – and still come back, time and again, to the bones that
build and bind us.
What other common human dispositions can we ind across times and
places? There’s no shortage of candidates, but let’s consider another
that Rousseau thought was basic, though it’s less visceral than
sympathy for physical pain. We are born free, and inclined to resist
attempts to restrict our freedom, – as recent protests from Hong Kong
to Moscow suggest. Moreover, we view it as natural that anyone should
resist such attempts. “The declaration that ‘we too are human beings,’”
wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, “is at the bottom of every revolution.”13 One can
go further: every argument against slavery, colonialism, racism, or
sexism is embodied in the question “Is she not a human being?” The
philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu says the question is as much at home in his
native Akan as it is in Thomas Jefferson’s English. Sekyi-Oto thinks it’s
insulting to suggest the idea of the human had to be imported from
Europe.14
Judith Butler’s question was meant to be rhetorical: “What kind of
cultural imposition is it to claim that a Kantian may be found in every
culture?” Sekyi-Oto’s reply to Butler: “It’s no imposition at all; our
native vernaculars regularly do that work.” (ibid.) Drawing on the best
insights of ordinary language philosophy, he urges us to pay attention
to what native speakers do when they justify a moral claim. “Give
Europe credit,” he continues
… for giving formal and institutional expression to the common
intuitions and dreams of humanity. But do not award the West
exclusive proprietary rights. (ibid.)
Appealing to the humanity of those who are being dehumanized is the
universal form we use to respond to oppression everywhere. That
Jefferson and Kant did not practice what they preached is no argument
against the sermon.
Universalism is under ire on the left because it’s con lated with fake
universalism: the attempt to impose certain cultures on others in the
name of an abstract humanity that turns out to re lect just a dominant
culture’s time, place, and interests. That happens daily in the name of
corporate globalism, which seeks to convince us that the key to human
happiness is a vast universal mall. But let’s stop to consider what a feat
it was to make that original abstraction to humanity. Earlier
assumptions were inherently particular, as earlier ideas of law were
religious, down to the tiny Greek states whose goddesses provided
refuge to people who were hounded by the goddesses of the city-state
next door. (Consider the Oresteia.) Most religious laws had some
provision for members of a different religion, albeit most often honored
in the breach. But the idea that one law should apply to Protestants and
Catholics, Jews and Muslims, lords and peasants, simply in virtue of
their common humanity is a recent achievement, which now shapes
our assumptions so thoroughly we fail to recognize it as an
achievement at all. We should honor that feat of abstraction, even by
those Enlightenment thinkers who were unable to scale the towering
achievement they’d wrought and got stuck on the rungs of local
prejudice.
Let’s also consider the opposite: views like those of the Nazi legal
theorist Carl Schmitt, who wrote that “anyone who says the word
‘humanity’ wants to deceive you.”15 Like many of his claims, this one
was not original. He was echoing the right-wing thinker Joseph de
Maistre, who wrote in 1797:
Now, there is no such thing as ‘man’ in this world. In my life I have
seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks
to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare
I’ve never encountered him.16
Schmitt is considerably more complicated, but rather more appalling.
For Schmitt, not even all members of Homo sapiens are considered
human. His book Land and Sea restricts humanity to those who are
rooted in the earth. Britons and Fiji Islanders are sea peoples, whom he
sometimes calls ish people. (Yes, Fischmenschen.) Without a navy or a
homeland, Jews are neither ish nor fowl but according to this 1942
text, they are certainly not human. Indeed, Schmitt suggests that
universalist concepts like humanity are Jewish inventions meant to
disguise particular Jewish interests seeking power in a non-Jewish
society.17 The argument is perilously close to the contemporary
argument that Enlightenment universalism disguises particular
European interests seeking power in an increasingly non-white world.
Neither Counter-Enlightenment critic recognized that human is not an
empirical concept, the sort of thing like dog, or even Frenchman, that
you can pick out after a moment or two of examining them. Rather than
echoing Schmitt’s famous quote you might say “Whoever says
‘humanity’ is making a normative claim.” It may be concealed by
language like the irst sentence of the German constitution: “The
dignity of the human is inviolable.” As a statement of fact, this is
ridiculous; the words were written just a few years after the Third
Reich had violated human dignity in hitherto unimaginable ways. What
they mean is rather imperative: to recognize someone as human is to
acknowledge a dignity in them that should be honored. It also implies
that this recognition is an achievement: to see humanity in all the weird
and beautiful ways it appears is a feat that demands you go beyond
appearances. In this sense Foucault was right to say that the human is a
recent invention. Like other products of the modern, it was not one he
valued, and he expected it to disappear. “Our task,” he wrote, “is to
emancipate ourselves from humanism” – which requires accepting the
death of the human, as he prophesied in his early The Order of Things.
The abstraction to humanity is precarious, easier to think than to act
on. If recognizing someone’s humanity means recognizing her right to
be treated with dignity, enslaving or annihilating her denies her
humanity. Think of blacks treated as beasts of burden or Jews treated as
vermin. During the war in Vietnam it was common to hear American
commentators solemnly explain that Asians cared less about dying than
other peoples. I still remember the newsmen’s straight faces.
The left-wing turn to tribalism is particularly tragic because the early
civil rights and anti-colonialist movements resolutely opposed tribal
thinking in all its forms. Their strengths were expressed in songs that
claimed: “All men are slaves till their brothers are free.” Tribalism is a
dangerous game, as the right realized very early. If the demands of
minorities are not seen as human rights but as the rights of particular
groups, what prevents a majority from insisting on its own? That
question was impossible to overlook after Trump’s election as well as in
the identitarian movements that have recently grown in England and
France, Holland and Germany. Their members consciously present
themselves as part of a harmless trend: if other groups are allowed to
ight for their rights, why shouldn’t white Europeans stand up for
theirs?
The answer is not, in fact, very dif icult. Shortly after Trump was
elected in 2016, a debate broke out in the U.S.: was liberal support for
identity politics to blame for the results?18 Did minor issues about
subtle forms of discrimination alienate white voters, who went on to
support Trump for more fundamental, economic reasons? The question
is misleading. The anti-black racism which often leads to murder is not
a minor issue but a crime, as is violence against women and members
of LGBT communities. But for those who believe that only tribal
interests are genuine, calls for universal outrage in the face of such
crimes make no sense; only arguments based on the interests of
particular groups will seem like solid ground.
Hannah Arendt thought that Adolf Eichmann should have been tried for
crimes against humanity, not for crimes against the Jewish people. It’s a
distinction that seemed trivial at the time, but its importance is
increasingly clear. My support for Black Lives Matter springs neither
from tribal membership nor from guilt about wrongs committed by my
ancestors, impoverished Eastern European Jews who immigrated to
Chicago in the early twentieth century. I support BLM because the
killing of unarmed people is a crime against humanity. At the same
time, I reject the white countermovement whose members shout “All
lives matter,” because it uses a banal general truth to distract attention
from an important empirical truth, namely, that African Americans are
more likely to be subject to violence than other Americans. It’s an
empirical fact, but you need a concept of truth to see it.
Initially, Black Lives Matter was a universalist movement. Whether
measured by numbers of demonstrators (some 26 million in the U.S.
alone), or numbers of largely peaceful demonstrations (in some 4,446
American towns), it was the largest social movement in U.S. history. The
2020 demonstrations were more racially diverse than any previous
movement against racism. According to research conducted in Los
Angeles, New York City, and Washington, D.C., 54 percent of
demonstrators identi ied as white. More than half said it was the irst
demonstration they had ever attended.
That American rejection of white supremacism reverberated around
the world. Not least because Great Britain outsourced most of its
slavery to the colonies, the British have been even slower than
Americans to remember the histories they’d rather forget. A Guardian
poll taken three months before the 2020 Black Lives Matter
demonstrations showed that merely 19 percent of all Britains felt
shame or regret for the British Empire. Hence the speed of change of
attitude in Britain was particularly astonishing. The statue of a major
slave trader was ceremoniously dumped in the Bristol harbor, the
pedestal of Churchill’s memorial was sprayed with a reminder of his
racism. Symbolic changes have been matched by demands for systemic
ones: to make black and colonial history mandatory throughout the
school system, to examine police practices which, though not as often
deadly in London as they are in New York, are racist nonetheless.
Lloyd’s of London and other corporations announced reparations for
slavery. Statues of King Leopold II, whose policies led to the murder of
some ten million Congolese, were splashed with blood-colored paint in
Belgium, while other statues the world over are being contextualized.
Australians began to offer more than apologies for injustices done to
First Peoples. Listening to voices around the world, extraordinarily
diverse in age, class, and ethnic background, two things were clear:
their well-informed solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement in
America, and their commitments to facing their own racist histories. In
Germany, preoccupied for decades with its crimes against the Jews,
calls to acknowledge its short but brutal colonial history and return
plundered artworks were inally heard. In Japan, far more reluctant to
acknowledge its war crimes than its onetime ally, thousands
demonstrated for a month in sympathy with black Americans and in
protest against ongoing Japanese racism.
None of the protests succeeded in ending police violence, for the
problems, we have learned, are structural. As the retired police chief of
a major southern city explained to me, the hours of training required to
join the police force in his state are fewer than those required to
become a hairdresser. You read that right. In some states it is harder to
get a license to wash, cut, and dry someone’s hair than it is to get a
license to enforce the law with a lethal weapon. Information like this
suggests that slogans like “Defund the police” are misguided. What’s
needed is better funding: for police training to learn to distinguish
problems of crime and problems of mental health, to care for those
whose mental health crises may be misinterpreted as criminal; for
community programs that provide skills, training, and hope for young
people of color whose otherwise hopeless prospects make rage, or at
least drug peddling, the most reasonable of available options.
It’s no wonder the protests began in America. This is not just because,
though racism is an international problem, more people die of it on the
streets of America. (Or in their beds. Breonna Taylor, a young African-
American medical worker, was killed in an illegal midnight police raid
on her apartment in Louisville, Kentucky.) Even more importantly,
unlike other nations, America claims to be founded on a set of ideals.
Historians have long worked to show how far American realities
diverged from American ideals. But the way from archives to public
consciousness is a long one. American exceptionalism still looms large
in public understanding of history. While it may acknowledge that
American history diverged from its ideals, it focuses attention on
attempts to bring them together. Occasionally, even philosophers did
so: think of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s and Henry David Thoreau’s support
not only of the quieter sorts of abolitionist, but their ringing defense of
John Brown, or William James’s denunciation of burgeoning American
imperialism. Signi icantly, African Americans have always played a
major role in holding the nation’s feet to the ire. Very few supported
Back-to-Africa movements. From Frederick Douglass to Paul Robeson
to Toni Morrison, African Americans have been at the forefront of those
who demand that America live up to the ideals it proclaims. The shock
that foreign observers expressed after the 2021 attack on the U.S.
Capitol showed that Americans aren’t the only ones who cling to those
ideals. Friends from Senegal, Egypt, and India called me to express
sorrow: they knew that such things happened in their countries, but
though they know a great deal about its failures, they still somehow
thought that America was different.
Yet despite the universalist character of the 2020 movement, a racist
right was quick to dismiss it as a case of identity politics. Perhaps the
very breadth and diversity of those demanding an end to violence
against black people made them nervous. In June 2020, 77 percent of
all Americans agreed that systematic racism is a major problem. When
did we ever see polls like that? Alas, it wasn’t only the right that moved
toward tribal rhetoric. By the Fall of that year few voices speaking in
defense of Black Lives Matter were universalist. Some explicitly
rejected the idea that it was a movement on behalf of common ideals,
though it allowed that white allies could play a role.
I am not an ally. Convictions play a minor role in alliances, which is why
they are often short. If my self-interest happens to align with yours, for
a moment, we could form an alliance. The United States and the Soviet
Union were allies until the Nazi regime was defeated. When the U.S.
decided its interests lay in recruiting former Nazis to defeat
communism, the Soviet Union turned from ally to enemy. What interest
led millions of white people into plague-threatened streets to shout
“Black Lives Matter”? This was no alliance, but a commitment to
universal justice. To divide members of a movement into allies and
others undermines the bases of deep solidarity, and destroys what
standing left means.
Of course it isn’t just bad theory that feeds the urge to tribalism. Rage
plays a role. It is almost unbearable that the largest social movement in
American history failed to prevent the continuing murder of people of
color. With that knowledge, it must be easy to think that white cops
taking a knee in New Jersey or white vets in BLM T-shirts facing down
troopers in Oregon counted for nothing.
But they count for something, especially for those of us, black and
white, who remember men like Bull Connor. They would count even
more if we resist the roots of tribalism. To do that, we need some
intellectual history.
It’s now an article of faith that universalism, like other Enlightenment
ideas, is a sham that was invented to disguise Eurocentric views that
supported colonialism. When I irst heard such claims some ifteen
years ago, I thought they were so limsy they’d soon disappear. For the
claims are not simply ungrounded: they turn Enlightenment upside
down. Enlightenment thinkers invented the critique of Eurocentrism
and were the irst to attack colonialism, on the basis of universalist
ideas. To see this, you don’t need the more dif icult texts of the
Enlightenment; a paperback edition of Candide is enough. For a succinct
diatribe against fanaticism, slavery, colonial plunder, and other
European evils, you can hardly do better.
My ability to predict intellectual trends turned out to be scant: in the
last few years the Enlightenment has been held responsible for most of
our misery, just as a century ago, the source for contemporary suffering
was called modernity. Something big, after all, must be to blame.
Enlightenment-bashing may have begun in American universities, but
its reach has swept through the culture in much of the Western world.
One of many examples: Germany normally pours millions into national
celebrations of its cultural treasures; in the last two decades we’ve had
an Einstein-Jahr, a Luther-Jahr (Luther’s virulent antisemitism
notwithstanding), a Beethoven-Jahr, a Marx-Jahr. The consensus against
Enlightenment is now so broad that it was extremely dif icult to
organize a year devoted to the 300th birthday of Immanuel Kant.
Enlightenment is a contested concept which means different things
even to those of us who study the subject. Its high point in the
eighteenth century had predecessors, but here I use the word to refer to
an intellectual and political movement that came to lower in 1698 with
the publication of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary and
ended in 1804 with the death of Kant. The Enlightenment was
committed to a number of ideas, but the focus here will be on those I’ve
called fundamental for the left: commitments to universalism, justice,
and the possibility of progress. It’s clear the Enlightenment did not
realize all the ideals it championed, but that’s what ideals are about.
Some of the criticisms voiced today could have strengthened
Enlightenment by showing that, through the restless self-critique it
invented, it had the power to right most of its own wrongs. Instead,
those who might have realized the Enlightenment have been engaged in
attacking it.
They forget that the Enlightenment emerged from a blasted landscape,
on a continent soaked with blood. Those who dismiss Enlightenment
thinkers as naive or optimistic not only ignore their writings; more
importantly, they ignore the history that formed the background to
their thought. It was a history of waves of plague without cure, and
ever-returning religious wars in which countless people died. (Daniel
Kehlmann’s best-selling novel Tyll provides a vivid picture of that
world.) Women were regularly burned alive as suspected witches, men
thrown chained into dungeons for writing a pamphlet. From across the
Atlantic came news of barbarities visited on the peoples of the New
World. Small wonder that no era in history wrote more, or more
passionately, about the problem of evil.
Into this landscape the Enlightenment introduced the very idea of
humanity that its critics, like de Maistre, were unable to recognize.
Enlightenment thinkers insisted that everyone, whether Christian or
Confucian, Parisian or Persian, is endowed with innate dignity that
demands respect. Versions of that idea can be found in Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim texts that claim at least some of us were made in
God’s image, but the Enlightenment based it on reason not revelation.
Whatever you think happened in the Garden of Eden, you can ind your
way to this.
From the idea that all people, wherever they come from, have a claim to
human dignity, it hardly follows that differences between people do not
matter. Individual histories and cultures put lesh on the bones of
abstract humanity. What does follow is a notion of human rights that
should be guaranteed to everyone, regardless of the history they’ve
lived or the culture they inhabit.
The concept of human rights and its implications for practice have been
contested since Jeremy Bentham called them nonsense on stilts in
1796. Yet even without an ontological account of what those rights are,
it’s clear that the expansion of human rights plays an increasingly
signi icant political role. The writer Tom Keenan argues that rights,
especially human rights, are better treated as things we claim
rather than things we have. This may seem like a minor matter of
words but I believe that it has the potential to challenge
profoundly the ways we think about and act with the discourse of
human rights. It does not weaken the force of these claims to admit
that they are only, or just that, claims; in fact it might make them
stronger by making them less essentialist, dogmatic, sacred or as
Michael Ignatieff once put it, idolatrous.19
To claim that someone’s rights have been violated is to understand her
suffering as an injustice, not simply a matter for pity. Following Lynn
Hunt’s now classic Inventing Human Rights, Keenan argues that the
apparently crippling abstraction of human rights and their lack of
metaphysical grounding is a source of their power. “The notion of the
‘rights of man,’ like the revolution itself, opened up an unpredictable
discussion for con lict and change.”
So it’s not surprising that the attempt to ix a canon of human rights in
the wake of World War II’s devastation was controversial. The United
States recognized political but not social rights. The Soviet Union did
not recognize a right to freedom of travel. South Africa wanted nothing
that would limit apartheid, Saudi Arabia objected to granting equal
rights to women. What’s more surprising is that after two years of
discussion between committee members from nations as diverse as
Canada, Lebanon, and China, a document that aimed to transcend
cultural and political differences could be signed at all. With ten
abstentions, the ifty-eight nations that belonged to the United Nations
at the time agreed to the thirty articles that make up the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the
committee, knew it could create no binding obligations, but hoped it
would “serve as a common standard of achievement for all people of all
nations.”20 To be on the left is to uphold that standard, agreeing with
the United Nations that
All human rights are indivisible, whether they are civil and political
rights, such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom
of expression; economic, social, and cultural rights, such as the
right to work, social security, and education, or collective rights,
such as the rights to development and self-determination, are
indivisible, interrelated, and interdependent. The improvement of
one right facilitates the advancement of the others. Likewise, the
deprivation of one right adversely affects the others.21
There are few charges more bewildering than the claim that the
Enlightenment was Eurocentric. Perhaps those who make it confuse
eighteenth-century realities with the Enlightenment thinkers who
fought to change them – often at considerable personal risk. When
contemporary postcolonial theorists rightly insist that we learn to view
the world from the perspective of non-Europeans, they’re echoing a
tradition that goes back to Montesquieu, who used ictional Persians to
criticize European mores in ways he could not have safely done as a
Frenchman writing in his own voice. Montesquieu’s The Persian Letters
was followed by scores of other writings using the same device.
Lahontan’s Dialogue with a Huron and Diderot’s Supplement to
Bougainville’s Voyage criticized the patriarchal sexual laws of Europe,
which criminalized women who bore children out of wedlock, from the
perspective of the more egalitarian Hurons and Tahitians. Voltaire’s
sharpest attacks on Christianity were written in the voices of a Chinese
emperor, and an indigenous South American priest.
In their recent best-seller The Dawn of Everything, anthropologist David
Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow make a fascinating
argument. Enlightenment critiques of Europe from the perspectives of
non-European observers have usually been read as literary strategies:
those writers put their own thoughts in the mouths of imagined non-
Europeans in order to avoid the persecution they would otherwise face
for voicing them. Graeber and Wengrow argue that the non-European
interlocuters were real. Their arguments largely rest on a study of
Lahontan’s Dialogue with a Huron, published at the dawn of the
Enlightenment in 1703, an enormously successful book that inspired
many imitations. The French writer’s book recounts a series of
conversations with a Wendat thinker and statesman named
Kandiaronk, over the course of years Lahontan spent in Canada
becoming luent in Algonquin and Wendat. Instead of assuming, as
many had, that indigenous people were incapable of the sophisticated
political arguments attributed to Kandiaronk, Graeber and Wengrow
present evidence that the historical Kandiaronk was known for his
brilliance and eloquence, and engaged in just the sort of debates with
Europeans that Lahontan recorded.
Their evidence is inconclusive, and some of their theses about the
Enlightenment are questionable. Even if Graeber and Wengrow are
right about the in luence of the historical Kandiaronk, he was only one
example of many indigenous voices that reached Enlightenment ears.
Indigenous critiques of money, property rights, and social hierarchies
had attracted European attention since the sixteenth century. They
surely in luenced Enlightenment critiques; we may never know how
many of the latter were imagined and how many were not. Like most
literary endeavors, they were probably mixtures of both. What the
debates over The Dawn of Everything underline beyond doubt, however,
is that the Enlightenment was pathbreaking in rejecting Eurocentrism
and urging Europeans to examine themselves from the perspective of
the rest of the world.
Enlightenment discussion of the non-European world was rarely
disinterested. Its thinkers studied Islam in order to ind another
universal religion that could highlight Christian faults. Bayle and
Voltaire argued that Islam was less cruel and bloody than Christianity
because it was more tolerant and rational. The Sinophilia that swept the
early Enlightenment was not just a matter of curiosity about a distant
ancient culture; studying the Chinese was part of an agenda. Bourgeois
Frenchmen cha ing under the feudal restrictions that gave government
contracts to the aristocracy praised the Confucian system, where
advancement was based on as much merit as national exams can
measure. The practice of using bits of cross-cultural anthropology to
bolster one’s arguments was so common it was used, or parodied, by
the Marquis de Sade. Sade provided a twist on a trope: most often, the
point of examining non-European cultures was to point out the defects
of European ones. In Sade’s work, lists of non-European crimes, often
accompanied by specious footnotes, are meant to prove the opposite:
you will ind endless cruelty wherever you go.22
Some Enlightenment portraits of non-Europeans will grate on our ears.
Given the limited possibilities for travel, eighteenth-century thinkers
had to rely on a small number of reports that often repeated caricatures
which served colonial interests. But unlike today’s critics,
Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware of the gaps in their own
knowledge. Here is Rousseau, writing in 1754:
Although the inhabitants of Europe have for the past three or four
hundred years overrun the other parts of the world and are
constantly publishing new collections of travels and reports, I am
convinced that the only men we know are Europeans … we do not
know the Peoples of the East Indies, who are exclusively visited by
Europeans more interested in illing their purses than their heads.
All of Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as remarkable in
character as they are in color, still remain to be studied; the whole
earth is covered with Nations of which we know only the names,
and yet we pretend to judge mankind!23
Rousseau was no exception. Diderot warned against making judgments
about China without a thorough knowledge of its language and
literature and the opportunity to “go through all the provinces and
converse freely with the Chinese of all ranks.” Kant pointed out the
dif iculty of drawing conclusions from mutually contradictory
ethnographic accounts, some of which argue for the intellectual
superiority of Europeans and others whose evidence for the equal
natural abilities of Africans and Native Americans was just as plausible.
Aware of the limits of their knowledge, the best of Enlightenment
thinkers urged caution and skepticism in reading empirical
descriptions of non-European peoples. Yet they were iery in criticizing
the self-serving prejudices that fed politically motivated accounts. Here
is Diderot on the Spanish conquest of Mexico:
They fancied that these people had no form of government because
it was not vested in a single person; no civilization because it
differed from that of Madrid; no virtues because they were not of
the same religious persuasion; and no understanding because they
did not adopt the same opinions.24
Those words, like many others, were published anonymously, a
reasonable precaution in order to avoid repeating the imprisonment
Diderot had already suffered for earlier writings. Not every
Enlightenment author was so lucky. Today Christian Wolff’s name is
known only to scholars, but in the early eighteenth century he was the
most famous philosopher in Germany, and a major in luence on the
young Immanuel Kant. Yet in 1723 he was given forty-eight hours’
notice to vacate his professorship at Halle, and the territory of Prussia,
or face execution. His crime? Wolff had publicly argued that the Chinese
were perfectly moral even without Christianity. His experience was no
exception: nearly all the canonical Enlightenment texts were banned,
burned, or published anonymously. However different they were, all
were seen to threaten established authority in the name of universal
principles available to anyone in any culture. Seventy years later, when
the elderly Immanuel Kant was known as Germany’s greatest
philosopher and dubbed the Sage of Konigsberg, he was ordered to stop
writing or speaking publicly about any question of religion. The
Prussian professor obeyed the order until the minister who had issued
it was replaced.
But the Enlightenment was the ideology of colonialism!
Do those who make this claim imagine there was no colonialism before
the Enlightenment? Presumably not, but it’s important to understand
how something so false could come to seem true. (Raise a glass to the
virtue of trying to understand those you disagree with.) Let’s start with
the fact that empires were not invented by the modern European
nations whose advanced ships and guns were more effective in
maintaining them than forced marches and pikes. Stronger nations
have colonized weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history;
indeed, before there were nations in our sense at all. Greeks and
Romans built empires, as did the Chinese, the Assyrians, the Aztecs, the
Malians, the Khmer, and the Mughals. Those empires operated with
varying degrees of brutality and repression, but all of them were based
on an equation of might and right, which amounts to no concept of right
at all. All of them used their power to compel weaker groups to
surrender resources, submit tribute, press soldiers into service for
further imperial wars, and accept commands that overrode local
custom and law. As far as we know, there was one thing they lacked: a
guilty conscience.
Emperors who were particularly cruel might be criticized, though
brutal practices in colonized lands were rarely attacked by those in the
home states. Objections to Nero or Caesar usually focused on their
crimes against Romans. The sixteenth-century Dominican friar
Bartolomeo de las Casas was an early exception. His Short Account of
the Destruction of the Indies denounced the atrocities that the Spanish
conquest visited on indigenous peoples. But Las Casas argued for a
kinder, gentler form of colonization, which included substituting
African for South American slave labor. He never questioned the
imperial project as a whole.
The Enlightenment did. Here is Kant’s stinging attack on colonialism:
Compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of
the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice they
show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to
conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America,
the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc.,
were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilized
intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the
inhabitants as nothing … [they] oppress the natives, excite
widespread wars among the various states, spread famine,
rebellion, per idy, and the whole litany of evils which af lict
mankind. China and Japan, who have had experience with such
guests, have wisely refused them entry.25
Though he was hardly a graceful writer, Kant was usually careful with
words. He rarely used the word ‘evil,’ yet here he is crystal clear:
colonialism creates every kind of evil that affects humankind. And while
he praises the wisdom of China and Japan in closing their doors to
European invaders, his critique of colonialism is not con ined to the
conquest of ancient, sophisticated cultures. At a time when nascent
colonial powers justi ied their seizure of indigenous territories in Africa
and the Americas by claiming those lands were unoccupied, their
peoples uncivilized, Kant decried the injustice that “counted the
inhabitants as nothing.”
Diderot went even further, arguing that indigenous peoples threatened
by European colonizers would have reason, justice, and humanity on
their side if they simply killed the invaders like the wild beasts those
intruders resembled. The Hottentots, he urged, should not be fooled by
the false promises of the Dutch East Indian Company which had
recently founded Cape Town.
Fly, Hottentots, ly! …Take up your axes, bend your bows, and send
a shower of poisoned darts against these strangers. May there not
be one of them remaining to convey to his country the news of
their disaster.26
Update the weaponry and you would be forgiven for thinking you’d
come upon a quote from Frantz Fanon. Nor is this passage unusual: the
eighteenth-century philosopher called for anti-colonialist violence at
least as often, and often more dramatically, than the twentieth-century
psychiatrist.
Enlightenment critics of empire didn’t simply point out its cruelty. They
also deconstructed the theories that sought to justify the theft of
indigenous lands and resources. The most important of those theories
was John Locke’s labor theory of value, which was used to argue that
nomadic peoples had no claim to the lands on which they hunted and
gathered. According to Locke, people only acquire property through
agriculture, mixing their labor with the land they work and thereby
obtaining ownership. Kant disagreed:
 If those people are shepherds or hunters (like the Hottentots, the
Tungusi, or most of the American Indian nations) who depend for
their sustenance on vast open stretches of land, (foreign)
settlement may not take place by force but only by contract, and
indeed by contract that does not take advantage of the ignorance of
those inhabitants with respect to ceding their lands.27
Here Kant not only undercut Locke’s theory of property, but called out
the shameless exploitation of peoples who, having no concept of private
property in land, might cede the island of Manhattan for a handful of
beads. Later critics dismissed this argument against settler colonialism
as proof that Kant was unable to judge cultural or historical matters,
since “primitive peoples” lacked concepts of right and were thus
incapable of entering into treaties.
If the best of Enlightenment thinkers denounced the vast theft of lands
that made up European empires, what did they make of the vast theft of
peoples? Most were unequivocal in condemning slavery. Kant’s
categorical imperative, which expresses the basic moral law, states that
people should never be treated as means. This rules out slavery and
other forms of oppression. These thinkers also lambasted European
complicity in maintaining it, even by those who were not themselves
slaveholders. Voltaire’s Candide portrays an African in Surinam whose
leg was cut off after his attempt to escape from slavery. “That’s the price
of your eating sugar in Europe,” says the enslaved man. Diderot, going
further, thought the enslavers would not be moved by pity or moral
reasoning, and concluded that enslaved Africans must liberate
themselves by violence. His prediction that “a great man, a Black
Spartacus” would eventually arise to lead this liberation inspired
Toussaint L’Ouverture. Kant took aim at religious claims invented to
justify racialized slavery; long before the American Confederacy, it was
argued that black people were descended from Ham, that son of Noah
cursed for uncovering his father’s nakedness. Against such dubious
theology Kant used reason:
 Some people imagine that Ham is the father of the Moors and that
God made him as a punishment which now all his descendants
have inherited. However, one can provide no proof as to why the
color black should be the mark of a curse in a more itting fashion
than the color white.28
Curiously enough, this passage was included in a recent volume of
writings collected to reveal Enlightenment racism. The editor seems not
to have noticed that Kant demolished an argument that White
Supremacist Christians support to this day.29
Like progressive intellectuals everywhere, radical Enlightenment
thinkers were only partially successful. While they changed the
thinking of their contemporaries on many questions, they did not stop
the great European rush for empire that gathered full force in the
nineteenth century. This strand of thought went out of favor as the new
century continued, and even liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill
championed moderate versions of imperialism.
Yet if they did not stop colonialism, they succeeded in giving it a bad
conscience. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote:
A few years ago, a bourgeois colonialist commentator found only
this to say in defense of the West: “We aren’t angels. But we, at
least, feel some remorse.” What a confession!30
The Romans felt no remorse or need to justify their empire. Nor did
they tell their subjects that being colonized was good for them. In
addition to better ships and weapons, nineteenth-century colonizers
had something earlier imperialists lacked: a need for legitimacy. The
nineteenth-century Indian nationalist Aurobindo Ghose put the matter
thus:
The idea that despotism of any kind was an offence against
humanity had crystallized into an instinctive feeling … Imperialism
had to justify itself to this modern sentiment and could only do so
by pretending to be a trustee of liberty, commissioned from on
high to civilize the uncivilized.31
This, sadly, must be the source of the legend that the Enlightenment
sanctioned colonialism. Enlightenment thinkers blasted colonialism
and argued that justice was on the side of those non-European nations
who killed or closed their doors to would-be invaders. A half century
later, when faced with a powerful critique in the name of ideals they
wanted for themselves, European imperialists sought ways to uphold
ideals of liberty and self-determination at home while continuing to
violate them abroad. Their solution was to claim they were bringing
those ideals to those unable to realize them on their own. Empire, they
argued, was a burden undertaken for the sake of the natives. Far from
being in tension with the goods they cherished for their own folk – an
end to famine and sickness and inequality before the law – all the
colonialists sought to do was to bring those goods, plus Christianity, to
benighted peoples who hadn’t yet discovered them. Rousseau and
Diderot and Kant would have seen through the scam – and wept to
watch their own ideals turned into ideology. But the plunder was
tempting, and its critics were dead.
There are scattered offensive remarks about blacks and Jews in the
texts of even the greatest Enlightenment authors. Enlightenment
thinkers were men of their time; most who left us records were men,
and sexist men at that. They were educated by men of earlier times, and
their struggle to free themselves of prejudice and preconception could
never be inal. Kant never noticed the contradictions between his
occasional racist comments and his systematic theory. But it’s fatal to
forget that thinkers like Rousseau, Diderot, and Kant were not only the
irst to condemn Eurocentrism and colonialism. They also laid the
theoretical foundation for the universalism upon which all struggles
against racism must stand, together with a robust assurance that
cultural pluralism is not an alternative to universalism but an
enhancement of it. I like to think their belief in the possibility of
progress would have led them to cheer our steps forward to insights
they didn’t attain. They were champions of reason, and anything else
would be inconsistent.
While it’s easy to ind strongly anti-racist and anti-imperialist positions
in the writings of most important Enlightenment thinkers, hardly any of
them questioned sexism. If they saw no essential differences between
European and non-European men, most of them assumed that
biological differences between men and women determined entirely
different destinies. The assumption seems less gratuitous when we
recall that they lived at a time when childbirth was often fatal, and high
infant mortality meant the average woman had to bear ive children for
the species to survive. Still, their remarks about women are often
offensive enough that some will ask why we should take such thinkers
seriously. But pace Audre Lorde, sometimes you need the master’s tools
to dismantle the master’s house. That reason which most
Enlightenment thinkers denied to women is one tool we cannot live
without. Yet rather than critically engaging with it, reason itself is now
identi ied with oppression.
It’s no surprise you’d defend the Enlightenment and the universality of its
universalism. That’s just what the Enlightenment does: invent white
European concepts and claim they apply to everyone.
What once was called ad hominem is now called positionality. You may
question epistemological standpoints that reduce thinking to by-
products of lived experience. Still I’m happy to state mine. I spent most
of my life in the U.S. and Europe, and I code as a white woman. Though
white nationalists don’t think Jews count as white people, black
nationalists do. For most Jews: it’s complicated. As such I doubtless
have particular biases, if only as frames of reference. The fact that I’ve
written quite a lot about Immanuel Kant could be read as an attempt to
rationalize those biases, or to think through my positions. No argument
will decide that question.
For the sake of argument, then, it’s worth turning brie ly to non-white
and non-European thinkers who share my conviction that universalism
is not a fraudulent European imposition. The following remarks are not
a survey but an invitation to further reading, since the thinkers I will
mention are less well-known than the ones they oppose. Ibram X. Kendi
sells more books than Adolph Reed, Achille Mbembe is more famous
than Ato Sekyi-Otu, Gayatri Spivak better known than Benjamin
Zachariah. Sometimes intellectual trends re lect accidental
circumstances, but I suspect these do not. A preference for tribalism
over universalism is not, in these cases, just a preference for
particularity over generality. More importantly, it re lects the
assumption that the victim’s voice is the most authentic. Initially, the
assumption seems justi ied. People may in late their heroic qualities,
exaggerate their achievements, cover up their cowardice. Heroes, above
all, are contested. But as Wittgenstein said, “Try doubting in a real case
if someone is in pain.”32 The great Austrian philosopher died, however,
as the movement that shifted the historical subject from hero to victim
was just beginning. Could he have imagined the claims of Donald
Trump or Vladimir Putin to be history’s victims?
The valorization of the victim is widespread in contemporary Germany,
the irst nation in the world to begin a thoroughgoing reckoning with its
historical crimes. That reckoning was slow, itful, and often unwilling,
but by the twenty- irst century it produced a national consensus: guilt
for the Holocaust is central to any narrative of German history. There’s
no doubt that this progressive move was an improvement on all the
possible alternatives. Yet, by making the relationship between Jewish
victims and German perpetrators central to Germany’s self-image,
Germans became unable to view Jews as anything but victims.
There are exceptions. But the unstated view that the voice of pain is the
most authentic leads Germans to prioritize those Jewish nationalist
voices focused on Jewish victimhood. The impulse is generous, if
somewhat masochistic; guilt, in this case, is not exactly out of place. But
that guilt has led Germans to ignore the voices of Jewish universalists –
those of us who cannot shake the intuition that Palestinians, being
human, have human rights that should be recognized. It was the
universalist tradition in Judaism that produced the giants of German-
Jewish culture, from Moses Mendelssohn to Hannah Arendt. And,
though Mendelssohn’s tombstone was desecrated, and Arendt was
forced to lee the country, today’s Germany honors such igures with
everything from museum exhibits to postage stamps. (It’s hard to ind a
contemporary German politician who has not quoted Arendt.) Yet
educated Germans are often puzzled and surprised to learn that there
is a Jewish universalist tradition at all, though its roots are in the Bible
itself.
A similar process is at work in the changing relationships between
white people and people of color. Woke movements deserve praise for
making many people aware that even for genuine universalists,
universal was more often colored white than brown, gendered male
rather than female, presumed straight rather than gay. It also brought
the evils of colonialism to the forefront of Western historical
consciousness. Though woke has yet to create the kind of international
consensus around racism that now exists in Germany around the
Holocaust, a growing sense of shame among educated white people is
hard to ignore. Those who long overlooked the presence of systemic
racism or the breadth of colonialism will have good reason to listen
hardest to those who emphasize them most loudly.
If listening hard is always a good idea, listening to one kind of voice at
the expense of others is always a mistake. In these cases, residual if
subterranean racism plays a role. For most Germans, Jews remain the
Other, as people of color remain the Other for most white people. When
you experience every individual as an instance of the Other, it’s hard to
experience them as individuals, easy to view them as representations of
a tribe. This makes it hard to imagine they might hold a position that
isn’t tribalist.
Where Europeans once posed as civilizers for non-European savages,
some now reverse the binary, viewing non-European, especially
indigenous peoples as the source of all the virtues, while Europeans
have none. Don’t take my word for it; here’s the anticolonial theorist
and ighter Amilcar Cabral, assassinated in 1973:
Without any doubt, underestimation of the cultural values of
African peoples, based upon racist feelings and upon the intention
of perpetuating foreign exploitation of Africans, has done much
harm … but blind acceptance of the values of the culture, without
considering what presently or potentially regressive elements it
contains, would be no less harmful to Africa than racist
underestimation of African culture had been.33
White publishers, foundations and universities now often elevate
tribalist voices from the Global South as German cultural authorities
now elevate tribalist Jewish ones, from a lingering sense of remorse. In
both cases, the remorse is understandable, even admirable. But if it
leads to viewing tribalist thinkers as the only authentic ones, it should
not be decisive.
Thinkers like Sekyi-Otu are resolutely anti-tribalist, arguing that
 … ‘race’ obstructs our perceptual horizon, distracts us from
attending to other, foundational questions of human being and
social existence, so we should move on to those other questions,
questions we would still have to address were the domination of
racist culture as a world system ever to come to its long overdue
end.34
There are tribalist writers, like the Afropessimist Frank Wilderson, who
insist that the question of race is the foundational question of human
being. They are unlikely to be persuaded by Sekyi-Otu. This does not
make voices like Wilderson’s more authentic. Cries of pain deserve a
hearing and a response, but they are no more privileged a source of
authority than careful arguments.
The philosopher Olú fé mi Tá ı́wò , who defends the relevance of the
Enlightenment project for contemporary Africa, presents strong
arguments against the current inclination to decolonize everything. Far
from viewing colonization as being the result of modern Western
values, he argues that colonization was problematic precisely because
those values were ignored. Where colonized peoples were concerned,
Europeans discarded their own ideas of liberty, self-determination,
government by the consent of the governed and even humanity itself.
Centering the history of Africa on the history of its colonization makes
that history a narrative of Africa’s invaders. This leads to a denial of
African agency, which was present even in the variety of complex
responses to colonization itself. Tá ı́wò points out that the Moorish
colonization of Spain and Portugal is viewed as merely an episode in
Iberian history, though it lasted much longer than European
colonization of Africa. He urges Africans to consider colonization as one
chapter of their history rather than the center of it, “… unless we grant
that white supremacists are right and we are permanent children
whose will is forever at the mercy of our erstwhile colonizers.”35
While contemporary universalist thinkers of color are ignored,
universalist elements of classic anti-racist and anti-colonialist thought
are downplayed. Frantz Fanon, who heads the postcolonial canon,
wrote mercilessly about European barbarism. Yet statements like these
are rarely quoted:
 All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are
applied against the same object: the human being.36
Sekyi-Otu argues that Fanon championed universalism for the same
reason he supported the purportedly Western idea of individualism.
How could he do otherwise when he was sworn to dismantle racist
systems that simultaneously deny human universality and personal
individuality?37
Amilcar Cabral, who led the ight for Cape Verdean and Guinean
independence, is known for encouraging his compatriots to undertake
“a re-Africanization of our minds.” At the same time he rejected the
apotheosis of indigenous culture by pointing out banalities that many
cultural theorists overlook:
All culture is composed of essential and secondary elements, of
strengths and weaknesses, of virtues and failings, of factors of
progress and factors of stagnation or regression.38
Instead of dismissing every cultural concept suspected as European,
Cabral argued for adopting from other cultures “everything that has a
universal character, in order to continue growing with the endless
possibilities of humanity.”39 It’s a thought that resonates with the inal
sentence of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth:
For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must
turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts and try to
set afoot a new humanity.
What are needed, Fanon argued, are new concepts of humanity, and the
related concept of universalism, to remove the taint of imperialist,
fraudulent versions of those ideas. But, to reject universalism
altogether because it has been abused, is to give Europe “the last word
of the imperial act.”40
It’s the truth of universalism that makes what’s now called cultural
appropriation possible. Take two qualities that I called fundamentally
human: the ability to feel pain, the desire for freedom. We recognize
these feelings instinctively in others as well as in ourselves. Indeed, as
observers have long noted, many mammals recognize them in other
species. We may learn to extinguish the recognition for others, but it
can be reignited. Nothing expresses pain, or the longing for freedom,
more immediately than art in all its forms; this is one reason why the
current suggestion that cultures belong to tribes is so misguided.
Proscriptions on cultural appropriation assume a kind of cultural purity
few objects ever have. Even in ancient times, art was traded and
in luences were blended until it was often impossible to tell which tribe
was the object’s owner – if ownership is the right model for culture at
all. In The Lies That Bind, Appiah argues that it isn’t. We can go a step
further: viewing cultural productions as tribal commodities is a way to
negate culture’s liberating power.
In the antebellum South, slaveholders went so far as to rewrite the
Bible so the story of Moses and the Exodus would not appear. They
knew it was incendiary. As did enslaved African Americans, whose
magni icent song “Go Down, Moses” made up for their restricted access
to texts. Was that cultural appropriation, or what literary scholar
Michael Rothberg calls multidirectional memory? Paul Robeson’s
worldview was grounded in his experience as the son of a man who
escaped from American slavery. What moved him to political activism,
however, was an encounter with striking Welsh miners singing on a
London street. Nothing connects members of different tribes better
than being moved by a cultural product; nothing offers more insight or
stirs more emotion. Most of us know, though we’re able to forget it, that
members of other tribes feel pain and seek freedom just as we do. The
arts can turn a piece of banal knowledge into a truth that has the power
to move us, when a hundred propositions leave us cold.
Of course cultural appropriation should not be confused with cultural
exploitation. Attempts to underpay artists for the work they create
should be resisted like any other form of pro iteering. But woke
insistence on a tribal understanding of culture is not far enough from a
Nazi insistence that German music should only be played by Aryans, or
Samuel Huntington’s insistence on defending what he calls Western
culture against the threat of destruction by other civilizations.41 To
censure cultural appropriation is to sabotage cultural force.
When I bought Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me, with
illustrations by Basquiat, as a third birthday present for one of my
daughters, I wasn’t conscious of giving her a lesson. Decades later,
during the BLM demonstrations that prompted discussions and
activism in so many families, she told me I had – precisely because I
didn’t accompany the gift with a lecture on antiracism or the value of
diversity. The lesson I didn’t give her went something like this: members
of other tribes are not the alien Other, but individuals who have thoughts
and feelings like you. Angelou’s message to face danger without fear
resounded to become my daughter’s favorite story. Some things are
better to show than to tell.
Great adult literature always renders the universal in the particular.
How else could so many of us come to care about Tolstoy’s chronicles of
the intricacies of Russian aristocracy, Achibie’s portrait of a village boy
in war-torn Nigeria, Roy’s tale of love doomed by caste in Kerala? Even
good television can have that effect: who knew that millions of people
could be trans ixed by the struggles of a ictitious Danish politician?
A distinction between culture and politics may help explicate my
metaphor of lesh and bones. Cultural differences can be cherished,
both by members of the culture doing the creating and those who
appreciate them. Those differences are what make us interesting. It’s
not accidental that Esperanto was a failure. Though the intentions of
those who strove to create a universal language were admirable,
Esperanto lacked the rhythms and resonances that bind us to our native
tongues. Even linguistically gifted learners rarely rise to the level of
ease with a language that makes a native speaker feel at home.
Those who make the effort to enter another language or culture do,
however, gain something invaluable: illumination of the world from
another perspective: insight that their own perspective is inevitably
partial; and visceral awareness of our common humanity. But if culture
is particular, politics needs a universal core. Cultural differences can be
treasured without being rei ied. A world without cultural difference
would be as grim as an assembly of skeletons. But when we think and
act politically, cultural categories should not take center stage.
At their best, cultural and political categories can reinforce each other.
Cultural pluralism strengthens political solidarity, for the more you
know of another culture, the more your sympathy for it is bound to
grow. Even walking awhile in the steps of a culture that isn’t yours will
reveal your common humanity, and strengthen your commitment to
universalism. For the best forms of art lead us to what Aime Cesaire
called “a universal enriched by every particular,”42 a universalism
learned with and through difference.

Notes
1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity (New
York: Liveright, 2018).
2. Benjamin Zachariah, After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian
Historiography (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019).
3. YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=3qkOUXkBNS4&ab_channel=RyanLong
4. See Neiman, Heroism for an Age of Victims (New York: Liveright,
2024), forthcoming.
5. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/10/us/jussie-smollett-
sentencing-trial/index.html
6. Gil Ofarim. https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/gil-ofarim-
muss-sich-ab-oktober-in-leipzig-vor-gericht-verantworten-a-
f6996243-62d7-4fd8-af1a-c735ae8af9d0
7. Jean Amé ry, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on
Auschwitz and Its Realities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1980).
8. Olú fé mi O. Tá ı́wò , Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity
Politics (And Everything Else) (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022), p.
20.
9. Miranda Fricker, “Feminism in Epistemology: Pluralism without
Postmodernism” in Fricker and Hornsby, eds., The Cambridge
Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2016), pp. 146–65. See also Fricker, Epistemic
 Justice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
10. For further argument on this score see Omri Boehm, Radikal
Universalismus (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 2022).
11. For a particularly nuanced argument see K. Fields and B. Fields,
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso,
2012).
12. James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and
the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2017).
13. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution” in Literary and
Philosophical Essays (New York: Collier Books, 1962).
14. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (New York:
Routledge, 2019).
15. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996).
16. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France, ed. Richard A. Lebrun
with an introduction by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994).
17. See Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt and the Jews (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2007).
18. See Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics
(London: HarperCollins, 2017).
19. Thomas Keenan, “Or Are We Human Beings?” in e- lux, 2017.
20. Eleanor Roosevelt, On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, delivered 9 December 1948 in Paris, France.
21. United Nations, Of ice of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,
2018.
22. Marquis de Sade, Juliette; see also Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, classics edn., 2015).
23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, First and Second Discourses Together with
the Replies to Critics and the Essay on Language, Victor Gourevitch,
ed. and trans. (London: HarperCollins, 1986).
24. Denis Diderot in Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment Against Empire
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). Anyone interested in
a more detailed development of the claims I make here should read
Muthu’s superb book.
25. Immanuel Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, Third article: “The law of
world citizenship is to be united to conditions of universal
hospitality.” earlymoderntexts.com
26. Diderot in Muthu, op. cit.
27. Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 2017).
28. Kant, in Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A
Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997).
29. Chukwudi Eze, ibid.
30. Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005).
31. A. Ghose, in P. Mishra, From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against
the West and the Remaking of Asia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2013),
p. 223.
32. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 4th edn. (Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
33. A. Cabral, quoted in Tá ı́wò , p. 82.
34. Sekyi-Otu, op. cit., p. 6.
35. Tá ı́wò , Against Decolonialization: Taking African Agency Seriously
(London: C. Hurst & Co., 2022), p. 6.
36. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
37. Sekyi-Out, op. cit., p. 169.
38. A. Cabral, National Liberation and Culture. In P. Williams and L.
Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (London:
Routledge, 1994).
39. Cabralista ( ilm).
40. Sekyi-Otu, op. cit, p. 14.
41. See Benjamin Zachariah, op. cit.
42. Aime Cesaire, Letter to Maurice Thorez (Editions Presence Africaine,
1957).
3
Justice and Power
Imagine a bunch of guys passing time in a rich man’s house. Time is
what they have on their hands: they’re waiting for nightfall, when a
festival performance will begin nearby. It’s the latest foreign thing,
cutting-edge, sound and light. Easy to persuade those who have seen
everything in town to try some new entertainment. Their initial
conversation is innocuous; talk of death, sex, and money creates no
friction. Only when they reach the subject of morality do sparks start to
ly.
The con lict begins when the host names the real bene it of wealth: not
the comfort and pleasure his guests are enjoying, but the fact that
inherited money reduces the temptation to corruption. A rich man has
no reason to deceive or defraud. He always pays his debts, and knows
he can rest in peace.
This leaves an opening for one guest’s favorite sport. He’s smarter than
the others, though he likes to humblebrag. He is happiest when
demolishing other people’s arguments. Speaking of wealth and
corruption: what’s justice, after all? Just speaking the truth and paying
your debts? Is that what we owe everyone? What about a friend who has
lost his mind?
Others step up to offer better de initions of justice, or virtue – it’s never
quite clear which is at issue. Justice, says one, is helping your friends
and hurting your enemies. This is how the world often works, and not
only in American foreign policy, but our know-it-all shows how the
de inition breaks down. He might conclude that seeking de initions of
moral concepts is a mistake, but before he can count the implications
the youngest listener blows up. When the others pause for breath he
rushes at the speaker, wild like a beast.
Bullshit, he roars. How dim can they be? Why waste time debating the
nature of justice when the whole idea is a sham? Don’t they know that
justice is nothing but a mask for the interest of the stronger?
The know-it-all does what he can to demolish that claim. But he’s much
better at attacking others’ positions than defending his own, and his
arguments are hard to follow. Increasingly impatient with pedantry, the
young man resorts to verbal force: he calls the older man a baby. For
only a baby believes that a shepherd feeds his sheep for their bene it.
The rest of us know the shepherd’s care re lects his own interest
entirely: the fatter the sheep, the more the slaughterhouse will pay. The
metaphor is no accident: rulers, he continues, regard their subjects like
sheep. Consider tyranny over nations, or even private contracts: the just
man always loses to the interests of the stronger. Most everyone knows
this, and if everyone condemns injustice, it’s not for fear of committing
it but for fear of becoming its victims. For once in his life, our wise guy
panics. Though he recovers enough to argue the younger man into
blushing silence, he admits he cannot say what justice is.
It takes little effort to imagine such a conversation. Most readers of this
book will have experienced one like it. The arguments should be
familiar. Talk of justice is just a smokescreen; what moves the real world
is power. The claim can be supported with a host of examples, for
nothing is easier than naming a politician who preaches what she does
not practice in order to lull her subjects into silence. Indeed, it’s harder
to ind one who doesn’t.
The claim that the rhetoric of justice has served to legitimate a grab for
power can be part of a demand for justice. You might unmask that
rhetoric in order to reverse the deed it concealed. If it’s too late for that,
you might urge that the perpetrators be called to account for their
crimes, as well as their abuse of moral language, which sows doubt
about its authority. The Iraq war would have been a good place to start.
Among the other things that war has to answer for: its bombastic use of
terms like “moral clarity” to disguise a war undertaken in search of oil,
regional hegemony, and distraction from what was, at the time,
considered the worst presidency in American history. Coming at the
start of the twenty- irst century, its glaring abuse of words like
‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ magni ied doubt that such words can ever be
uttered in good faith. What’s notable about the kind of discussion I’ve
outlined is that it’s not a demand for justice, but rather a claim that such
demands are passé . Nor is it accidental that it doesn’t take place in a
slum or a slave yard, where questions about power and justice are ripe
for the asking. It occurs in a home of wealth and abundance; you can
almost smell the wine. Signi icantly, the indignant young man doesn’t
call for a change of power relations. All he requests concerns his own
interest: he’d like to be paid for his performance. He is, at least,
consistent.
Richard Rorty concluded,
… (this) is exactly the sort of left that the oligarchy dreams of, a left
whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have
no time to discuss what laws need to be passed to create a better
future.1
Rorty was criticizing what he called the Foucauldian academic left. I
was paraphrasing the opening of Plato’s Republic, the irst great
systematic work of Western philosophy. It is written in the voice of
Socrates, who spends the rest of the dialogue trying to answer
Thrasymachus, that postmodern young man who has survived several
millennia. Each reincarnation is convinced that he is offering a bold and
original revelation: human affairs in general, and politics in particular,
are nothing but self-serving strategies to conceal raw power struggles.
Each reincarnation exudes the same mixture of disappointment,
indignation, and self-assurance: having discovered that the world
doesn’t live up to the claims that are made for it, he’s determined to fall
for no claims at all. Like his contemporary heirs, Thrasymachus sounds
hard-headed, but the position is very easy; maintaining it requires no
more than expounding an occasional critique. Isn’t it clear that any
attempt to work for more justice is worse than futile, downright
absurd?
As the Republic shows, this sort of de lationary argument is anything
but new; philosopher Bernard Williams called it ancient.
 It consists in taking some respected distinctions between the
‘higher’ and the ‘lower’ such as those between reason and
persuasion, argument and force, truthfulness and manipulation,
and denying the higher element while af irming the lower:
everything, including argument or truthfulness, is force,
persuasion and manipulation (really). This trope has its uses … But
besides the fact that it soon becomes immensely boring, it has the
disadvantage that it does not help one to understand those
idealizations.2
Still less, Williams continues, does it explain the differences between
listening to someone and being hit by him.
Although both proclaim the primacy of power, Foucault’s account of
power’s mechanisms is very different from that of Thrasymachus. The
Greek sophist lived at a time when the powerful and the powerless
were two clear and distinct subjects, a time that lasted, according to
Foucault, through the eighteenth century. In principle, if seldom in
practice, something like liberation was still possible: cut off the
sovereign’s head and his subjects might, for a moment, escape
subjugation. In the modern era, said Foucault, power is hidden and
diffuse, expressed through a network of structures we rarely perceive.
There is no point we can locate and challenge, especially since we are
implicated in the very networks that constrain us.
Even Foucault’s sharpest critics acknowledge that this portrait
describes something important about contemporary society. Our sense
that we are dominated by a web of institutions that were neither
designed nor controlled by anyone in particular is surely the source of
the willingness to accept Foucault’s wilder claims. As Michael Walzer
wrote:
 For it is Foucault’s claim, and I think he is partly right, that the
discipline of a prison, say, represents a continuation and
intensi ication of what goes on in more ordinary places – and
wouldn’t be possible if it didn’t. So we all live to a time schedule,
get up to an alarm, work to a rigid routine, live in the eye of
authority, are periodically subject to examination and inspection.
No one is entirely free from these new forms of social control. It
has to be added, however, that subjection to these new forms is not
the same thing as being in prison: Foucault tends systematically to
underestimate the difference.3
Foucault’s discussions of how some forms of power work can be
riveting. His readers inevitably hope that those analyses will be not
merely interesting but, like any other critique of power, also liberating.
But such hopes will be dashed by Foucault’s view of what analyses, and
knowledge more generally, can do:
All knowledge rests on injustice (that there is no right, not even in
the act of knowing, to truth or a foundation for truth) and that the
instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous,
opposed to the happiness of mankind).4
Small wonder many have concluded that the man was simply a nihilist.5
Yet “no single analytic framework has saturated the ield of colonial
studies as completely as that of Foucault.”6 This is true, though he never
addressed decolonialization, despite the omnipresence of the French
war in Algeria as he was coming to professional maturity. Still, Edward
Said was but one of many who saw him as “an apostle of radicalism and
intellectual insurgency.”7 Everything in his performance screamed rebel.
He wrote books that glori ied those on society’s margins: the outlaw,
the madman. He often took political stands that supported the
oppressed, be they convicts in French prisons or victims of the military
dictatorship in Chile. And decades before anyone began to imagine
marriage equality, he was openly, transgressively gay. Why shouldn’t
Foucault become the bedrock of left-wing thought, or at least the one
philosopher read by anyone who isn’t a philosopher, as Sartre was for
an earlier generation? Those now teaching students were students
themselves during his heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, and they pass on
the texts they learned as exciting new classics.
Those texts contain fascinating descriptions of the development of
prisons, psychiatric clinics, schools, and other institutions crucial to
expanding social power. Many historians are grateful to Foucault for
opening avenues of exploration that were once consigned to the
margins, if they were studied at all. But, while reading Foucault on the
particular, students are absorbing a philosophical lesson that’s very
general: power, only vaguely tied to the actions of particular humans in
particular institutions, is the driving force of everything. “Power is
everywhere,” he wrote. “Power produces reality, it produces domains of
objects and rituals of truth.” For the late Foucault, power was
embedded in every feature of modern life. Power was woven into the
very fabric of our language, thoughts, and desires. Power even enfolds
resistance, which reinforces power. It’s power all the way down.
If power is so ubiquitous, you may wonder if it serves to demarcate at
all. If everything is power, does the concept have no bounds? Anyone
who hoped that Foucault’s idea of power might prove to be so broad as
to become innocuous will be dismayed by his explication:
I believe one’s point of reference should not be to the great model
of language and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history
which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than
that of a language: relations of power, not relations of meaning …
‘Dialectic’ is a way of evading the always open and hazardous
reality of con lict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and
‘semiology’ is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal
character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and
dialogue. [italics added]8
There is nothing soft in Foucault’s concept of power:
Isn’t power simply a form of warlike domination? Shouldn’t one
therefore conceive all problems of power in terms of relations of
war? Isn’t power a sort of generalized war which assumes at
particular moments the forms of peace and the state? Peace would
then be a form of war, and the state a means of waging it.9
An introductory course in logic could have prevented some confusion.
From the fact that some moral claims are hidden claims to power, you
cannot conclude that every claim to act for the common good is a lie.
But logic is seldom the strong point of Thrasymachus’ heirs. As
Foucault does in this passage, they tend to avoid declarative sentences;
the metaphysics of suspicion is better served by asking questions. And
though they are usually fond of Nietzsche, their writing is suf iciently
obscure to merit one of his better put-downs: “They muddy the waters
to make them seem deep.”
Is there anything, on Foucault’s account, that isn’t power? One concept
is clearly ruled out; power is not justice. More exactly, Foucault insisted
that the idea of justice itself was invented as a weapon against certain
forms of political and economic power. “If justice is at stake in a
struggle, then it is as an instrument of power; it is not in the hope that
inally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded
according to their merits, or punished according to their faults.”10 To
deny the latter is just to deny the essence of justice, whether human or
divine, in any culture: justice always seeks to reward people according
to merit, punish them according to fault. Every time we protest an
injustice, we protest an imbalance between virtue and happiness.
Asked about his engagement in prison reform, Foucault replied that he
was not interested in the banalities of prison conditions but wanted to
“question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and
the guilty.” This is not a distinction that prisoners themselves would
question; rather, they insist on it.11 Anyone who denies the moral
distinction between innocence and guilt denies the possibility of moral
distinctions at all.
The above quotes are taken from a debate between Foucault and Noam
Chomsky that was aired on Dutch television in 1971. The Vietnam war
was still raging, and Marxist ideas of revolution were matters for
serious discussion on European television. Chomsky avowed he would
only support a revolutionary proletariat that promoted a just society;
were a revolution to turn terrorist, he wanted out. Here is Foucault’s
reply: “The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the
irst time in history, it wants to take power. One makes war to win, not
because it is just.” Nor did he linch from implications: When the
proletariat takes power, it may exert violent, dictatorial, and bloody
power toward the classes over which it has triumphed. “I can’t see what
objection one could make to this,” he continued. Chomsky later
remarked that Foucault was the most amoral man he ever met.
Foucault disguised the force of his general views beneath a false
modesty that claimed the age of “general intellectuals” like Sartre had
passed, and that what was required now were the indings of “speci ic
intellectuals,” like himself. He steadfastly refused to give reasons for his
political judgments, claiming that reasons were nothing but self-serving
rationalizations.
The insistence that power is the only driving force goes hand in hand
with contempt for reason. It’s impossible to say which came irst, the
demotion of reason or the promotion of power; they form two sides of
an argument. Twentieth-century thinkers as different as Foucault,
Heidegger, and Adorno were united in viewing what they called
“Enlightenment reason” not merely as a self-serving fraud but even
more as a domineering, calculating, rapacious sort of monster
committed to subjugating nature – and with it, indigenous peoples
considered to be natural. On this picture, reason is merely instrument
and expression of power. Williams’ distinction between being
persuaded by someone and being beaten by them becomes spurious;
reason is a more polite but more manipulative way of hitting someone
over the head. (Amé ry would say that those who ind the distinction
meaningless have never been beaten.) Those assumptions about the
Enlightenment’s conception of reason are no more accurate than the
assumption that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric. My book Moral
Clarity discusses Enlightenment notions of reason at length; here I will
only respond to the most common charges.12
The idea that reason is hostile to nature rests on a binary opposition
between reason and nature no Enlightenment thinker would have
accepted. The two can seem to con lict because reason’s ability to ask
what is natural and what is not is the irst step toward any form of
progress. One major aim of Enlightenment study of non-European
cultures was to question a host of European institutions. Their
authority rested on church and state insistence that they were natural,
hence immutable. Recall what was considered natural in the eighteenth
century: slavery, poverty, the subjection of women, feudal hierarchies,
and most forms of illness. Well into the nineteenth century, English
clerics argued that attempts to relieve the Irish famine would defy
God’s order. Enlightenment thinkers were hardly opposed to nature or
to passion – two topics they explored as fully as any other. But they
knew how often oppression is justi ied by claims of supposed natural
order, and they were determined to use reason to subject those claims
to rigorous scrutiny. Every time you argue that an economic, racial or
gender inequality is not inevitable, you are using your reason to
question those who insist inequalities are natural.
While reason is not averse to nature, it is opposed to received authority
that defends its power by restricting thinking to a small elite. De ining
reason as a matter of courage rather than knowledge was one way to
insist on human equality: every peasant can think for herself, as every
professor can fail. Reason and freedom are connected in more ways
than one: knowledge was meant to liberate people from superstition
and prejudice, instrumental reasoning from poverty and fear.
Enlightenment philosophers were perfectly aware that reason has
limits; they just weren’t prepared to let church and state be the ones to
draw them. We have inherited their ideas so thoroughly that we no
longer recognize how radical they are, nor how sorely they are still
needed. In an era of drastic censorship and widespread illiteracy, the
claim that anyone of any station had a right to think was explosive, and
church authorities used their considerable power to suppress it with
force. Authorities today look different: economic experts proclaim there
is no alternative to neoliberalism and support the alleged naturalness of
their ideology with evolutionary theory. Enlightenment thinkers never
thought reason was unlimited; they just refused to let authorities set
the limits on what we can think.
Reason and logic are needed for the instrumental rationality required
for inding the best means to an end, including technological solutions
designed to prevent and cure illnesses, improve agriculture, save
women and others from lifetimes of senseless toil. (That technology,
like the sorcerer’s apprentice, can run amok is not a problem we can
solve by abolishing it.) But instrumental rationality is just the beginning
of reason’s scope. Reason’s most important function is to uphold the
force of ideals. Unless you can show that reality can be changed on the
basis of ideas of reason, every demand for change will be dismissed as
utopian fantasy. Such demands are often dismissed with
condescension: your ideals are commendable, but the hard facts of
experience speak against them. The claim was already a cliché in 1793,
as Kant showed in his essay “On the Old Cliche: That May be Right in
Theory but it Won’t Work in Practice.” There he turns the claims of
those who call themselves realists on their head. Of course the ideas of
reasons con lict with the claims of experience. That’s what ideas do.
Ideals are not measured by how well they it reality; reality is judged by
how well it lives up to ideals. Reason’s job is to deny that claims of
experience are inal – and to move us to widen the horizon of
experience by providing ideals that experience ought to obey. If enough
of us do so, it will.
Understood properly, reason is a demand: for everything that happens
ind the reasons why it is so and not otherwise. Reason enables us to go
beyond whatever experience we are given, and allows us to think: This
could have been different, why is it like this? The actual is given to us, but
it takes reason to conceive the possible. Without that capacity we
couldn’t begin to ask why something is wrong, or imagine that it might
be better. Philosophers call this the principle of suf icient reason. It is so
fundamental that we can hardly imagine functioning without it, and
we’re likely to take it for granted, but the demand to ind reasons is the
basis of scienti ic research and social justice. Many things count as
reasons, but some things do not: My father told me. I heard it
somewhere. That’s just the way the world is. The child follows the
principle of suf icient reason when she asks Why is it raining? and
continues inquiring until the adult supplies a satisfying answer – or
tells her to stop asking questions. But unless she herself is destitute and
assumes the condition is natural, the child will also wonder the irst
time she sees a homeless person. Why is he sleeping on the sidewalk?
Why doesn’t he have a home? Adults who are serious about giving an
answer must move from explanation to action.
Reason does have the power to change reality, but to view it as merely a
form of power is to ignore the difference between violence and
persuasion, and between persuasion and manipulation. It’s the
difference between saying you should do this because I’m bigger than
you and you should do this because it’s (a) right (b) good for the
community (c) in your best interest (d) choose your own form of
justi ication. This is one of the irst distinctions we teach our children.
As we grow older we learn that most actions are undertaken for more
than one reason, but overdetermination doesn’t undermine the
distinction between reason and brute force. Those who ignore it should
undergo what Amé ry called a banality cure, therapy to overcome the
fear of acknowledging the banal truths that frame our lives. For the
distinction between reason and violence undergirds the distinction
between democracy and fascism, and any hope of resisting the slide
toward fascism depends on remembering the difference.
Even stranger than the progressives’ embrace of Michel Foucault is
their fascination with Carl Schmitt, though little in their styles was
similar. As political scientist Alan Wolfe argued, “Schmitt’s ideas loom
so large over the contemporary left that one need not even refer to him
in order to be in luenced by him.”13 Where Foucault was lamboyant,
courting outrage, Schmitt performed the persona of a conservative
lawyer. His main transgression against the world in which he found
himself was to reject any form of regret for the Nazi regime he’d loyally
served. In writing, Foucault meandered, while Schmitt preferred short
oracular pronouncements. Yet they shared rejections of the idea of
universal humanity and the distinction between power and justice,
along with a deep skepticism toward any idea of progress. What makes
them both interesting to progressive thinkers today is their shared
hostility toward liberalism and their commitment to unmasking liberal
hypocrisies. It’s not clear whether Foucault’s unmasking had a purpose
other than subversion as an art form. What’s certain is that Schmitt’s
demasking of liberal institutions was undertaken for the greater glory
of the Third Reich, both before and after the war.
Schmitt was a reactionary Catholic who rejected the reforms of Vatican
II not only because he was attached to the Latin mass but because Pope
John XXIII withdrew the historical claim that the church was “in
perpetual enmity with Muslims and Jews.”14 For the creator of the hazy
concept political theology, the Catholic Church was the archetypical
political institution. He thought the de ining distinction of politics is the
contrast between friend and enemy, as morality is de ined by the
concepts of good and evil, aesthetics by the concepts of beautiful and
ugly. In Minima Moralia, Adorno argued that Schmitt’s friend/enemy
schema objecti ies the Other, itting Nazi ideology perfectly. Perhaps
even more telling: de ining the political this way is regressive; Schmitt
reduces the political to categories only a child would use.15
In Schmitt’s later writings he sometimes made disclaimers: the
friend/enemy distinction was not individual; it was a formal category,
which could be applied without hatred. (He condemned the Cold War
for introducing “the treatment of the Other as criminal, murderer,
saboteur and gangster” – a claim that would be less incredible were it
not written in Germany four years after WWII.)16 But his attempt to
soften his concept of enemy founders like Foucault’s attempts to
suggest a gentler notion of power. Both wrote too many passages
welcoming the violent associations. Schmitt’s readers today usually
focus on earlier writings like Political Theology and The Concept of the
Political, which are nebulous and portentous enough to imply many
things. Surely he can’t mean ‘enemy’ like the Nazis meant ‘enemy’? But
even in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote that both
… war and politics are a matter of the most extreme and intense
antagonisms … The concepts of friend, enemy and struggle receive
their real meaning especially insofar as they relate to and preserve
the real possibility of political annihilation.17
And, though he argued that his concept of political enmity need not
lead to killing, he also called Cain’s murder of Abel the “beginning of the
history of mankind.”18
“When I battle in resistance against the Jews, I am ighting for the work
of the Lord.” Schmitt praised this quote of Hitler’s in his 1936 essay “Die
deutsche Rechtswissenschaft im Kampf gegen den jü dischen Geist.”
After all, the Jews it the de inition of political enemy he had formulated
ten years earlier:
He is the other, the alien, and it suf ices that in his essence he is
something existentially other and alien in an especially intensive
sense.19
Had he con ined his depiction of Jews as enemies to texts he wrote
during the Third Reich, one might argue – albeit not very plausibly –
that he was under political pressure. That would make him a world-
historical coward, but it could ground a claim that his famous
friend/enemy distinction was something more abstract, and less vulgar,
than anything the Nazis had in mind. Unfortunately for the Schmittians
who make this argument, his pre- and post-war diaries display noxious
antisemitism in vulgar and high- lown terms. Both biological and
religious antisemitism played a role here, but antimodernism was even
more important. Like Heidegger’s notorious Black Notebooks, Schmitt’s
diaries treat Jews as emblems of everything he hated about the modern
world.20 So it’s no surprise that his post-war diaries were full of
comments like “Jews always remain Jews … precisely the assimilated
Jew is the true enemy.”21
In Germany there were Nazis, and there were Nazis. Some were
committed to the ideology, most went along with the regime to advance
their careers. Very few of either kind were genuinely contrite after
1945. They had lost the war, some seven million citizens and a third of
their territory. Their cities were in ruins and occupied by foreign
armies. Some of them, like Schmitt, were barred from practicing their
professions, or even brie ly jailed. The deaths of millions of civilians,
they insisted, were just part of the tragedy of war. Human beings were
born to sin. What about the irebombing of Dresden or the atomic
Holocaust at Hiroshima?
Pernicious attitudes like these were very widespread, but rarely
publicly defended. And though it took decades, many who held such
views came to see they were, well, lacking in perspective. Carl Schmitt
never did. He called denazi ication “terror” and demanded an amnesty
in which Nazi crimes would not only be forgiven but forgotten. He
wrote an essay called “The Tyranny of Values,” which argued that values
are entirely constructed, citing Heidegger, who dismissed values as
“positivistic ersatz for the metaphysical.”22 Echoing Thrasymachus, he
argues that values are inherently engines of political violence. Schmitt’s
goal in that essay, as historian Samuel Zeitlin has shown, was hardly a
general defense of legal positivism, but a defense of the Nazi
propagandist Veit Harlan. If values are empty positivistic categories, on
what basis could Nazis be condemned? “The crimes against humanity
are committed by the Germans. The crimes for humanity are committed
against the Germans. That is the only difference.”
It’s been argued that Celine’s literature can be dissociated from his
support of fascism. It’s been argued that Heidegger’s Nazism should
play no role in evaluating his metaphysics.23 I don’t agree with those
arguments, but they are at least coherent. It’s much harder to contend
that we should take seriously the ideas of a political theorist who
defended his commitment to Nazism forty years after the war was over,
particularly when those ideas are congruent with, perhaps foundational
to, Nazi ideology.
Harking back to the Christian doctrines of original sin which he never
abandoned, Schmitt wrote that “all genuine political theories
presuppose humankind to be evil.” Thus con lict, he held, is the law of
life. It’s a view that Schmitt and his followers like to call realism, while
disdaining every other as naive. It’s rarely acknowledged that this
implies a strong set of metaphysical claims about the nature of reality.
Real things, on a Schmittian view, can be quanti ied and perceived with
some combination of our senses. This leaves no room for ideas like
justice, fairness or equality, but plenty of room for lands and seas, oil
and grain, rockets and tanks. There’s no way around it: this is a political
theory for war. He contrasted the political sphere with the economic
one, which he dismissed as a stale arena of negotiation and
compromise – the sort of thing Anglo-Saxons do. What gives life real
meaning, by contrast, is the distinction between friend and foe. Like
Nietzsche on a bad day, Schmitt argued that the threat of violent death
at the hands of the Other is the source of heroic virtues, and real men,
who scorn the insipid pursuits that create vulgar trader mentalities.
What makes such a noxious worldview appealing? (He couldn’t even
write as well as Nietzsche.) Readers who situate themselves to the left
of liberalism can only be attracted by Schmitt’s stinging critiques of
liberal failure and hypocrisy. He described liberal democratic
parliaments as institutions that do nothing but endlessly talk, while real
questions are decided elsewhere – a description that its the twenty-
irst-century U.S. Congress as well as the Weimar Republic’s Reichstag.
It’s even easier to agree with his critique of colonialism. The key to
modern history, wrote Schmitt, is the European land-grab that took
over the globe. He was particularly scorching about British imperialism:
English pieties about humanity and civilization were nothing but
rhetoric to disguise monumental acts of piracy. Americans fared no
better. Schmitt attacked the Monroe Doctrine: framed as an opposition
to European colonization of South America, it became a declaration that
only the United States would determine what happens on the continent
it considers its backyard. This justi ied critique didn’t deter him, when
writing on international law, from using the Monroe Doctrine as
precedent to justify expanding the Greater German Reich. Note the year
of publication: the book expounding these views was published in
1942, when Germany was at war with Britain and America. Every
argument that undermined their claim to be ighting for justice or
democracy was welcome.
Had we read Mein Kampf we would have seen this sort of thing before.
Hitler himself used European Americans’ genocide of Native peoples
and theft of Native lands to justify his hope to extend German
Lebensraum all the way to Vladivostok. Other Nazis played the same
game when they responded to American protests against the Nurnberg
Laws by posting pictures of American lynching of black people: take
care of your own race problem before you lecture about ours. Neither
Hitler, nor the Nazi lawyers who drew on racist American law were
wrong: Britain and America were often committed to violent racist and
colonial practices that were entirely at odds with their liberal
democratic rhetoric. But Nazi use of these examples was hardly an
effort at simple unmasking, let alone a contribution to liberation. Much
like for Vladimir Putin today, their only interest was in the question: if
the lofty lands of liberty engage in theft and terror, can’t we do it too?
Schmitt avoided answering the simple question Do two wrongs make a
right? by arguing that in a world history saturated with violence,
concepts like right and wrong disappear. Both are merely rhetoric used
to disguise the only force there is: power. Signi icantly, while Schmitt’s
deconstruction of liberal democracies targeted Third Reich enemies,
the Nazis rarely trumpeted his political theories. Even with universal
conscription, it’s hard to convince nineteen million men to risk their
lives for what’s merely an eternal struggle for power without some
moral content. Schmitt was the Third Reich’s leading legal theorist but
not its leading propagandist. Appeals to defend their homeland from
beastly Bolsheviks sustained far more Germans on the battle ield.
The concept of ‘natural rights’ is contested but, whatever else they may
be, human rights are claims meant to curb naked assertions of power.
They insist that power is not merely the privilege of the strongest
person in the neighborhood; it demands justi ication. Remember the
history in which claims to human rights arose: it was unthinkable that
peasants and princes could stand anywhere on anything resembling
equal footing. If the peasant took the prince’s deer, he could be hanged.
If the prince took the peasant’s daughter, that was just the way the
world was. The doctrine of the divine right of kings was less a doctrine
than an assertion of God’s power, and his ability to transfer that power
to his representatives and their descendants. It’s also worth recalling
the theological background in which the doctrine of divine right arose.
Millions of Europeans slaughtered each other in the wars of religion.
Like most wars, those wars concerned territory and treasure, but they
were also fought over theological questions. The most fraught con licts
concerned God’s nature: was his power constrained by his goodness, or
could God do whatever he pleased? Calvinists argued that God’s power
was absolute: if he consigned millions of babies to eternal hell ire, who
were we to question him? Where that conception of God was on offer, it
wasn’t easy to constrain the power of earthly kings.
Universalist claims of justice meant to restrain simple assertions of
power were often abused, from the American and French Revolutions
that irst proclaimed them to the present day. Carl Schmitt wasn’t
wrong about that. He concluded that unvarnished power grabs like
those of the Nazis were not only legal but legitimate. You may think
that’s the best we can do. Or you may go to work to narrow the gap
between ideals of justice and realities of power.
While Foucault may have added to our understanding of power in the
modern world, I’ve argued that neither he nor Schmitt promoted a new
view about the relations between justice and power. In simplest form
their views go back to the Sophists: claims to justice are developed to
disguise power-driven interests. It’s a throwback to a world in which
might – call it power – makes right, which amounts to no concept of
right at all. What’s new is the number of worldviews that take them for
granted today. Because claims of justice have so often been used to
conceal grabs for power, the line between power and justice is
increasingly ignored. Thrasymachus’ assumptions now appear
inescapable, and anything else increasingly quaint. Given two equally
plausible explanations of a piece of human behavior, we’re inclined to
converge on the worst. The more often you’ve been disappointed, the
easier it is to expect disappointment. The more often you’ve been lied
to, the easier it is to suspect manipulation behind everything you’re
told. The consequences of British imperialism and U.S. hegemony are
still present enough to make Schmitt’s critique ring true. Most now
assume it’s simply human nature to further your own interests über
alles, and to disguise those interests with moral rhetoric.
If you ask for an argument, you are answered with history. And history
hardly lacks examples of struggles for power dressed in ine clothes.
Foucault and Schmitt show how many of the clothes are illusions. But a
whole slew of naked emperors would only be evidence for dire claims
about human nature and its possibilities; it wouldn’t amount to proof.
Even for those who believe in essences, proofs about the essence of
human nature should have seemed impossible since 1756, when Jean-
Jacques Rousseau taught us how thoroughly we read our own
worldviews, and political hopes, into the prehistory we can never know.
Then along came evolutionary psychology. It didn’t seem to be just
another philosophy. It looked like hard science and purported to give us
insight into the essence of our preliterate hunter-and-gatherer
ancestors, who were too primitive to formulate rationalizations to
describe their behavior, or at least to write them down. From these
unprovable speculations about what (might have) led human beings to
act (in that environment), evolutionary psychologists concluded that all
human behavior is driven by our interest in maximizing our chances of
reproduction: whatever we do is moved by the urge to perpetuate
ourselves.
The historian of science Erika Milam shows that the theory was
originally considered an advance on the leading evolutionary theories
of the previous decade. Social scientists had failed to explain human
violence during the Cold War, leading some researchers to turn to
biology. They offered what was known as the killer ape theory. It
claimed that humans are distinguished from other primates by a
greater tendency to aggression, and that this aggression is the driving
force behind human evolution. The view was popularized in several
best-selling books as well as successful Hollywood movies, but soon
came under attack for lack of evidence. Edward O. Wilson, the founding
father of sociobiology, reversed the question on which the killer ape
theory was based. If defenders of that theory had wondered how
creatures evolved from a relatively peaceful past to the world-shaking
violence of recent history, sociobiologists began by accepting their
conclusions and assuming that humans had always been aggressively
competitive. “I think Tennyson’s ‘nature red in tooth and claw’ sums up
our modern understanding of natural selection admirably,” wrote
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. The real question, Wilson
argued, was how we learned to cooperate at all when cooperation
sacri iced our own genetic best interests. Sociobiologists were deeply
puzzled by the undeniable fact that individuals sometimes sacri ice
their own well-being to protect others. By asking how such altruism
had evolved, Milam explains, sociobiologists naturalized violence as
essential to human nature.
Taking aggression for granted, sociobiologists sought to
understand why animals ever cooperated, and in sexual selection
and kin selection they thought they had answers. Sex, parenting
and animal families might look like cooperation, but when males
and females sexually unite, each unconsciously follows a
competitive strategy evolved over many generations to give birth
to the next generation and in doing so perpetuates his or her
individual genetic lineage.24
The theory itself soon evolved to offer explanations not only of sex and
family life but virtually everything we do. As anthropologist Clifford
Geertz began one review:
 This is a book about “the primary male–female differences in
sexuality among humans,” in which the following things are not
discussed: guilt, wonder, loss, self-regard, death, metaphor, justice,
purity, intentionality, cowardice, hope, judgment, ideology, humor,
obligation, despair, trust, malice, ritual, madness, forgiveness,
sublimation, pity, ecstasy, obsession, discourse, and sentimentality.
It could only be one thing, and it is. Sociobiology.25
Even its defenders occasionally admitted that “It seems ludicrous to
suggest that all activities of humans derive from the reproductive
strategies of individuals, or more properly their genes.26 But those
committed to inding a single framework to explain all human behavior
pushed blithely on. It was not long before left-leaning critics attacked
the political implications of sociobiology. Stephen Jay Gould, one of the
earliest, wrote that
Biological determinism has always been used to defend existing
social arrangements as biologically inevitable … from 19th century
imperialism to modern sexism.27
Many elements of sociobiology were implicitly racist; since Wilson’s
death, even more explicit ties to racist biology have been uncovered.
Feminist critics were indignant over the ways sociobiologists projected
current gender roles into prehistory, thus implying that those roles are
inevitable. Wilson responded to the critics by claiming he was not a
biological determinist; hereditary traits merely delimit potential
behavior, which may vary according to culture. But his examples of
cultural variation were not very promising: men are genetically inclined
to mate with as many women as possible but, depending on the culture,
this may take the form of marriage plus mistresses, serial monogamy,
or polygamy. Each cultural variation, however, presumes a
monogamous woman at home tending the DNA. Those startled by this
formulation should consider Wilson’s “The organism is only DNA’s way
of making more DNA,” a play on Samuel Butler’s, “The chicken is only
the egg’s way of making another egg.”
Some sociobiologists were careful to distinguish between “pop
sociobiology” and serious studies in the ield, but philosopher Philip
Kitcher, who makes such distinctions, wrote that “The popular
presentations are where the action is.”28 They are also, of course, the
versions which seep into the general culture. Pop sociobiology, Kitcher
continued,
… furthers the idea that class structures are socially inevitable, that
aggressive impulses toward strangers are part of our evolutionary
heritage, that there are ineradicable differences between the sexes
that doom women’s hopes for genuine equality.”29
By the mid-1980s a consensus emerged: sociobiology was unsupported
by evidence, and reactionary to boot. Sociobiologists protested that
they were merely being realistic where their critics were sentimental.
But the criticisms were so widespread that in their aftermath few
wanted to use the name ‘sociobiology’ to describe anything involving
the study of human behavior. Around the turn of the millennium,
however, sociobiology re-emerged in a slightly less offensive form
under a different name. Evolutionary psychologists acknowledged their
debts to sociobiology but argued that their new ield was better
adapted to human beings through the addition of psychological
categories. The revision added a layer of protection against the charge
of biological reductionism, but it’s largely a distinction without a
difference. Kitcher calls evolutionary psychology “pop sociobiology
with a ig leaf.”30 Most importantly, it does not change the fact that the
mechanisms being selected are fundamentally sel ish.
Evolutionary biology is quite clear that ‘What’s in it for me?’ is an
ancient form for all life, and there is no reason to exclude Homo
sapiens.31
As other philosophers have noted, evolutionary psychologists make a
practice of slipping between different uses of the word “sel ish.”
Sometimes they use it to imply exactly what we mean in ordinary
conversation. Richard Dawkins begins his best-selling The Sel ish Gene
as follows:
 The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are
machines created by our genes. Like successful Chicago gangsters,
our genes have survived, in some cases for millions of years, in a
highly competitive world … I shall argue that a predominant
quality to be expected in a successful gene is ruthless sel ishness.
However, there are special circumstances in which a gene can
achieve its own sel ish goals by fostering a limited form of
altruism.
The reference to Chicago gangsters and the use of words like ‘ruthless’
invoke the sort of behavior you’d condemn in anyone you had the
misfortune to meet. Under criticism, however, Dawkins and others
reply they are not using the word ‘sel ish’ in an ordinary vulgar sense,
since genes can’t be said to have motives at all. Rather, they are using
the word to describe a complex abstract property, the tendency to
maximize one’s own gene representation in future generations. Yet the
slide between the ordinary and the technical use of words like ‘sel ish’
occurs again and again – along with elaborations that strongly suggest
evolutionary psychologists intend ‘sel ish’ to mean exactly what we
think it means.
Thus no less than the sociobiologists who spawned them, evolutionary
psychologists are faced with what they call the problem of altruism. For
however many examples of dressed-up struggles for power and self-
preservation history provides, it also gives us countless examples of
people who sometimes do things that are counter to naked self-interest,
even at the cost of their lives. The philosopher Mary Midgley argues
that the claim of universal sel ishness is incoherent: “Had regard for
others really been impossible, there could have been no word for failing
to have it.”32 Such examples pose a problem for the theory, but
evolutionary psychologists work very hard to it them into their
schema. Wilson is clear about the principle:
Altruism is ultimately sel ish. The ‘altruist’ expects reciprocation
from society for himself or his closest relatives. His good behavior
is calculating, often in a wholly conscious way … Its psychological
vehicles are lying, pretense and deceit, including self-deceit,
because the actor is most convincing who believes that his
performance is real.33
Steven Pinker expands on Wilson’s general claims:
Community, the very different emotion that prompts people to
sacri ice without an expectation of payback, may be rooted in
nepotistic altruism, the empathy and solidarity we feel toward our
relatives, which evolved because any gene that pushed an
organism to aid a relative would have helped copies of itself sitting
inside that relative … Sometimes it pays people (in an evolutionary
sense) to love their companions because their interests are yoked,
like spouses with common children … sometimes it doesn’t pay
them at all, but their kinship-detectors have been tricked into
treating their group-mates as if they were relatives by tactics like
kinship metaphors (fraternities, the Fatherland).34
Suppose you ask why, in this account, we care about developing good
character. The evolutionary psychologist will reply: In the small villages
we used to inhabit, your good deeds were noticed and remembered, so
you could be sure of getting a piece of my pie someday if you gave me
some of yours. If you’re convinced that sharing is driven by the desire
for hedging your bets you will ind this explanation convincing – at least
until you ask why they cared about character in London or Beijing. The
behavior that was adaptive for small towns was carried over into large
ones where it continued automatically even after it stopped producing
immediate bene its. Any problem in the theory can be explained by
saying that what no longer serves our sel ish interests once served our
hunter-gatherer ancestors. This is faith-based speculation. It can be
carried on without limit, down to all the times history showed human
willingness to die for a principle. Why would good Darwinians do that?
Because even if they lose their own lives they may be maximizing the
reproductive success of their kin. And soldiers who die for their
countries? In earlier times, country used to be kin. And people who die
for something even more abstract? If you are already convinced that
every bit of altruistic behavior is a disguised form of self-interest, you
will ind a way to argue that it could have been self-interested in the old
days and went on spinning its idle wheels in ours. Surely you’re not the
sort of religious fundamentalist who refuses to believe Darwin?
Evolutionary psychologists often insinuate that any objections to their
views are objections to science itself. They suggest that their critics, if
not closet creationists, are nostalgic sentimentalists unable to accept
Nietzsche’s view that moral values like altruism died along with their
creator. The rhetorical tone, writes Midgley,
… varies between reverence for (genetic) power and contempt for
humans who suppose that any other element in life need concern
them. It is strongly fatalistic, that is not just resigned to evils which
have been proved inevitable but more generally contemptuous of
all human effort.35
And as Kitcher concludes, the ideas being disguised have a long history:
When we examine the pop sociobiological treatment of human
altruism, it is found to dissolve into gratuitous Hobbesian
speculations that have no basis in biology or any other science.36
Kitcher is hardly alone here. Among others, Friedrich Engels, Richard
Lewontin and Donna Haraway note the Hobbesian war of all against all
that sits at the bottom of most evolutionary theory. As Milam showed,
the ubiquity of aggression for which the killer ape theory had argued
became a starting point for sociobiology. While the speculations are
found in Hobbes, they can be found even earlier, for the philosopher
who wrote of natural life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
was an early modern iteration of Thrasymachus. As Midgley writes:
The underlying moral and psychological distortions really have not
changed (since Spencer’s misunderstandings of Darwin). The
world-picture which this rhetoric displays is still the one crudely
projected by those who glori ied free-enterprise capitalism in its
brash expansive stages by depicting both human nature and the
biosphere as framed in its image. It is used now, as it was then, to
justify the character faults typical of this cultural phase by treating
them as universal and inevitable.37
She concludes, “In short, the deity being worshipped is power.”
For the record: Darwin did show that the human species developed
from ancestors we have in common with our evolutionary cousins, the
great apes, but nothing in his work supports the claim that human
action can be understood by examining apes’ reproductive strategies.
Though contemporary evolutionary psychologists usually avoid the
more dramatically reductionist claims, their views work together to
insinuate them. Not even the most passionate evolutionary theorist
denies some difference between our reproductive strategies and those
of a chimpanzee. The man who composes a sonnet for his beloved has
done something other than beat his chest and offer a morsel of meat.
Yet the discussion suggests that the additional value provided by
human activity is super icial. What we really are is the chest-thumping
ape; what sonnets and symphonies provide is just packaging. In the
relationship between nature and culture, it’s nature who’s boss.
Suppose you agree with the most militant supporters of these views:
anatomy is destiny, biology is primary, and whatever joined them later
is of secondary importance. Even this doesn’t commit you to what
primatologist Frans de Waal calls the Veneer Theory: “We are part
nature, part culture, rather than a well-integrated whole. Human
morality is presented as a thin crust underneath of which boil
antisocial, amoral, and egoistic passions.” The word veneer is well-
chosen by de Waal to criticize a number of views that hold that all that’s
natural are biologically determined drives to reproduce ourselves;
culture is the transparent and thin attempt to further, while glossing
over, that reality.
This view has been persuasively questioned by a number of
primatologists who spend their lives studying our closest kin. Frans de
Waal’s work is the most philosophically far-reaching. His research on a
variety of apes and monkeys led him to conclude that “we are moral
beings to the core.” This research is important because it begins at the
bottom. It shows that even if you accept the idea that culture is trivial
(or anyway evolutionarily recent) and that most of what’s essential to
human nature is beastly, we are much better off than supposed. The
emotional responses to others’ suffering, which we share with apes, are
building blocks of the complex structures of human morality. DeWaal
and others have shown that primates have the capacity most basic to
moral development: the ability to put yourself in others’ shoes. The
feeling of sympathy, the capacity for gratitude, the sense of justice all
start right there.
In Darwin’s own era, discussion of human motivation was in initely
richer than in ours. No reader of Dostoevsky or Eliot will suppose that
the nineteenth century was naive about what moves us, or the curious
intermixture of self-interest with other motives that trails through our
actions, large and small. The difference is that until quite recently
human motives were considered to be mixed. It seemed self-evident
that people are moved by the wish to behave according to certain
standards as well as the wish to secure more narrow forms of well-
being. “She did it because it was right” was once, by itself, an
explanatory statement – though whether that was really the reason she
did it was always open to question. By the late twentieth century, such
statements no longer counted as explanatory, but required
deconstruction revealing some form of self-interest as the real driving
force. None of the thinkers who contributed to making this assumption
seem natural has asked the historical question about their own
premise: might that assumption itself be part of a conceptual
framework constructed during the twentieth century? The supposition
that any genuine explanation of human behavior must penetrate high-
lown, idealistic descriptions to reach the self-interested wheels that
turn us is itself a piece of ideology whose history has yet to be written.
Evolutionary psychology is not a product of the left; it began as a theory
that provoked a torrent of left-wing criticism. Reinvented under
another name a few years later, it now provides the default
assumptions about human behavior accepted by most people
regardless of political standpoint. Those assumptions are relentlessly
tribalist: protecting your own is no longer a theory or a piece of advice,
it’s baked into your genes. The presumptions are so widespread we
rarely notice them when they regularly appear in the news or the
cultural media. Unlike the work of philosophers, evolutionary
psychology radiates an air of hardnosed objectivity that makes
speculation look like science. Thus it functions as the backbeat for a
culture in which ever more worldviews take us back to Thrasymachus.
If you accept the philosophical accounts of the pervasiveness of power,
what’s not to like about evolutionary psychology? As the science
journalist Robert Wright wrote in 2004:
 This Darwinian brand of cynicism doesn’t exactly ill a gaping
cultural void. Already, various avante-garde academics –
deconstructionist literary theorists and anthropologists, adherents
of critical legal theories – are viewing human communication as
“discourses of power.” Already many people believe that in human
affairs all (or at least much) is arti ice, a self-serving manipulation
of image.38
Experts in many ields have worked for decades to undermine the
tyranny of self-interest underlying evolutionary psychology and the
worldviews it supports. The model just doesn’t explain much behavior
of human beings (or primates, or elephants, or, according to some
studies, even rats). Unfortunately, the model underlies so many views
that this careful debunking often goes unnoticed. But, even without the
help of science and scholarship, a little self-re lection could convince us
that we do not always act as the reigning ideologies suggest. We care
about asserting truth, not just maintaining power; we often act with
regard for others, from interests that are not material interests; and our
behavior is rarely guided by the impulse to reproduce as many copies of
ourselves (or our images) as possible.
There is, however, a prominent exception: Donald Trump. Unlike the
rest of us, he permanently exhibits the combination of motives we are
told are the true forces driving human behavior. Nor does he appear to
understand any other. Though he recognizes that other people, aka
losers, have norms, he has no idea of how norms work, moving people
to override self-interest in order to honor them. In acting on the
international stage like Richard Dawkins’ ruthless genes, he has
attracted millions of followers, who say they admire his authenticity.
With apologies to Abraham Lincoln, he functions as a license to act
according to the worst devils of our nature. The baleful fascination he
exerts over the many who loathe him is a result of his singularity: it’s
perpetually astonishing to observe a human being who behaves so
differently from the rest of us. By taking the trouble to be a hypocrite,
George W. Bush paid compliments to virtue. No wonder even those who
wanted him jailed for war crimes feel occasional nostalgia.
Might this example function as a reductio ad absurdum of the self-
interested power paradigm? A world in which that model was truly
universal would be a world in which everyone behaved like Donald
Trump.

Notes
1. Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-
Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
2. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
3. Michael Walzer, “The Politics of Michel Foucault,” Dissent, 1982.
4. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History” in Language,
Countermemory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1980).
5. See Walzer, op. cit.
6. Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1995).
7. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), p.
31.
8. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power” in Gordon Colin, ed.,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977
(New York: Vintage, 1980).
9. Michel Foucault, ibid.
10. YouTube, Foucault and Noam Chomsky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=3wfNl2L0Gf8&t=796s&ab_channel=withDe iance
11. Michael Walzer, op. cit.
12. S. Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2010).
13. Alan Wolfe, The Future of Liberalism (New York: Vintage, 2009), p.
141. See also Richard Wolin, “The Cult of Carl Schmitt” in Liberties,
2022.
14. Samuel G. Zeitlin, “Indirection and the Rhetoric of Tyranny: Carl
Smith’s The Tyranny of Values 1960–1967,” in Modern Intellectual
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
15. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1969).
16. Carl Schmitt, “Amnestie – Urform des Rechts,” in Stuttgart: Christ
und Welt, 1949.
17. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 27–8.
18. Carl Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus: Erfahrung aus der Zeit 1945–1947
(Cambridge: Polity, 2017).
19. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 33.
20. See Neiman, “Antimodernismus: Die Quellen allen Unglü cks?” Die
Zeit, 2016.
21. Quoted in Zeitlin, op. cit.
22. Carl Schmitt, Die Tyrannei der Werte (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot,
2020).
23. Against this view see Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between
Philosophy and Ideology (New York: Yale University Press, 2023).
24. Erika Lorraine Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature
in Cold War America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019),
p. 274.
25. Geertz, review of Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality,
in New York Review of Books, January 24, 1980.
26. Richard Alexander, quoted in Philip Kitcher, Vaulting Ambition:
Sociology and the Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1987), p. 274.
27. Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: Re lections on Natural History.
(New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992), p. 258.
28. Kitcher, op. cit., p. 256.
29. Kitcher, op. cit., p. 435.
30. Vickers and Kitcher, “Pop Sociobiology Reborn: The Evolutionary
Psychology of Sex and Violence,” in C.B. Travis, ed., Evolution, Gender
and Rape (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), p. 2.
31. David Barash, quoted in Kitcher, op. cit.
32. Mary Midgley, Evolution as a Religion (London: Routledge Classics,
2002), p. 137.
33. E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature (London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 155–6.
34. Stephen Pinker, “The Moral Instinct” in Hilary Putnam, Susan
Neiman and Jeffrey Schloss, eds., Understanding Moral Sentiments:
Darwinian Perspectives? (New York: Transaction Publishers, 2014),
p. 69.
35. Midgley, op. cit., p. 152.
36. Kitcher, op. cit., p. 403.
37. Midgley, op. cit., p. 152.
38. Robert Wright, The Moral Animal: Why We Are The Way We Are: The
New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Vintage, 1994).
4
Progress and Doom
It’s not accidental that most of those who would have called themselves
leftists a generation ago now call themselves progressives. Fear is a
factor. In a world where residues of the Cold War have yet to be
examined, much less discarded, ‘leftist’ sounds too close to ‘socialist,’
and ‘socialist’ too close to the state socialism of Eastern Europe for
comfort. Fear notwithstanding, the shift to the word ‘progressive’
makes more sense than naming your political standpoint after the
accidental seating arrangements of the 1789 French parliament. For
there’s no deeper difference between left and right than the idea that
progress is possible. It wasn’t an idea found in traditional conservative
thought, which viewed history, at best, as static or circular, and, at
worst, as a sad slow decline from a mythic golden age. On this view,
limited improvement may be achievable, but a truly better world could
only be found in the afterlife.
What’s in question is not technological progress, or what Arendt called
“the relentless process of more and more, of bigger and bigger.”1 To
stand on the left is to stand behind the idea that people can work
together to make signi icant improvements in the real conditions of
their own and others’ lives. It’s an idea that’s often caricatured as the
idea that progress is inevitable. Many passages of Hegel and Marx do
make that claim, and history has not exactly con irmed it. But to deny
that progress is assured is not to deny that it’s possible, if possibility
depends on the free actions of human beings working together. If
progress in this sense is possible, so is regress, and history has seen
both. Give up the prospect of progress, and politics becomes nothing
but a struggle for power.
So how did Michel Foucault become the godfather of the woke left? His
style was certainly radical, but his message was as reactionary as
anything Edmund Burke or Joseph de Maistre ever wrote. Indeed,
Foucault’s vision was gloomier than theirs. Earlier conservative
thinkers were content to warn that all hell would break loose should
revolutionaries contest the traditions that carry societies along, for
better and worse. Here Schmitt was exemplary and explicit: since the
state lost the Lord and the sovereign in the seventeenth century, history
fell into permanent decline. Foucault’s warnings were more insidious.
You think we make progress toward practices that are kinder, more
liberating, more respectful of human dignity: all goals of the left? Take a
look at the history of an institution or two. What looked like steps
toward progress turn out to be more sinister forms of repression. All of
them are ways in which the state extends its domination over our lives.
Once you’ve seen how every step forward becomes a more subtle and
powerful step toward total subjection, you’re likely to conclude that
progress is illusory. How far Foucault believed this himself is an open
question, but it’s certainly the view most have drawn from his work.
If you want to take down hopes for progress, it’s a stroke of genius to
target one of the Enlightenment’s irst and most successful demands:
the abolition of torture. Like most progressive demands, it was never
fully realized. George W. Bush brought torture back to Guantanamo, and
it is used more or less openly in much of the world today. If progress
through the joint efforts of committed people is possible, so is regress.
Still, standard practices like drawing-and-quartering, breaking on the
rack, and autos-da-fé have been banned as barbaric. To appreciate how
revolutionary that ban was you must know that though Voltaire and
Diderot were outraged by many features of their judicial system, it took
them time to get angry over torture. It was such a ixed feature of crime
and punishment that they needed slow convincing. A world where
radical reformers like Diderot and Voltaire were not sure whether it
was legitimate to break a man on a rack in a public square is not the
world we live in. Executions in the U.S. are rarely contested for the
reasons one might rightly contest the death penalty, but on the grounds
that the prevailing method of execution by injection may cause too
much pain.
Clifford Geertz called Discipline and Punish Foucault’s most forceful
work; it’s certainly the one most often taught to undergraduates. It
begins with a horri ic description of the slow death by torture of one
Robert Damiens, executed in 1757 for attempting to kill King Louis XV.
The account goes on for pages, and it remains in memory when the
convoluted argument that follows is forgotten. As Amé ry wrote,
Foucault doesn’t argue; he hypnotizes. And as ancient Greek writers
noted, it’s easy to feel mesmerized by spectacles of violence that also
repel us. Argument or not, by the time we’ve inished reading Discipline
and Punish, we can easily be convinced that modern forms of
incarceration are worse than a system in which six horses and an
executioner’s sword publicly dismember a living human body.
Worse? If it were only that simple. Foucault wasn’t the irst to fudge the
distinction between normative and descriptive claims, but he helped to
make it common practice among legions of theorists who call
themselves critical. In one of his last essays, “What is Enlightenment?,”
Foucault describes the demand to make normative judgments as “the
blackmail of the Enlightenment,” the idea
… that one has to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the Enlightenment. It even
means precisely that one has to refuse everything that might
present itself in the form of a simplistic and authoritarian
alternative: you either accept the Enlightenment and remain
within the tradition of its rationalism (this is considered a positive
term by some and used by others, on the contrary, as a reproach);
or else you criticize the Enlightenment and then try to break from
its principles of rationality (which may be seen once again as good
or bad). And we do not break free of this blackmail by introducing
‘dialectical’ nuances while seeking to determine what good and
bad elements there may have been in the Enlightenment.2
So what, precisely, are we meant to do? The scornful scare-quotes
around the words ‘for’ and ‘against’ suggest we should be ashamed to
raise such a vulgar concern. You may look for an argument; what you’ll
ind is contempt. Foucault makes us feel that judging something as
better or worse is intellectually crude. Only simple minds ask banal
questions; sophisticated thinkers gave them up long ago. So, Foucault
never actually claims that bringing back drawing-and-quartering would
be better, though he does say that the object of eighteenth-century
prison reform was not to punish less but to punish better. “From being
an art of unbearable sensations punishment has become an economy of
suspended rights.” What conclusion should the reader draw?
Nor does he hint toward any proposal that might make the lives of
murderers, or people with severe mental illness, better in any way.
When pushed for a solution, Foucauldians reply that their business is
archaeology, a form of history, a ield notoriously averse to making
normative claims. Yet his vision of history is full of normative
implications. Unlike those of conservatives, Foucault’s histories do not
begin with a golden age from which we steadily decline. There are
simply brutal forms of subjugation which are replaced by more re ined
ones.
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat
until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law inally
replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a
system of rules and those proceed from domination to
domination.3
After reading even a little of this, it’s hard to avoid concluding that any
attempt to improve things will only make them worse. Common-sense
questions such as would Robert Damiens have preferred incarceration in
Bentham’s Panopticon? have no more room in Foucault’s thought than
normative ones. Jean Amé ry, whose own torture at the hands of the
Gestapo was considerably less gruesome than Damiens’, knew what he
would have chosen.
Reviewing Discipline and Punish, he wrote:
Only a fool would deny that prison improvements of the 18th and
19th century were also an expression of bourgeois capitalist
striving for pro it, as if the powers that were didn’t also consider
that a halfway humanely treated prisoner has better working
potential than one who is starving. But it is an aberration to
describe things as if this humanization were only the result of
pro it and production.4
Amé ry re lects the sort of everyday wisdom we expect grownups to
have. Whether you’re thinking of reasons or causes, most events have
more than one. It’s particularly true in cases of progress. Consider
another: American segregation was outlawed in the 1960s because
many Americans, not least members of the Kennedy administration,
were morally outraged by the sight of white policemen attacking black
children with dogs and irehoses. When beginning the reforms later
cemented by the Johnson administration, the Kennedys also knew the
Soviet Union was watching the same television, and using it to attack
American claims to serve as a beacon of freedom. Without the prodding
provided by the Cold War, segregation would likely have lasted even
longer. Knowing this may temper our admiration for the Kennedy
brothers’ moral outrage, but it shouldn’t undermine it entirely. There is
enough historical evidence to show it was real. And even were it not:
how much does it matter what moved them to act? A world where all
citizens have equal rights to eat, ride, and study where they want to is
better than a world where they do not, and no amount of dialectical
sophistication will convince a black Southerner who lived through
segregation to deny it. Are you angry that those rights today are often
merely formal, thwarted by roadblocks erected to prevent citizens of
color from realizing them? So am I. But a world where formal rights to
equal treatment exist is better than a world where we have to start
legislating those rights from scratch.
Foucault doesn’t care for questions of intention: if the subject itself is
on the verge of disappearing, there’s no need to worry about agency.
Nor is he concerned with causes. Did those, like Voltaire, who fought to
abolish torture really care about human suffering and human dignity
and simply fail to notice they were embarking on a venture that would
undermine them? Or was the move from torture to incarceration a
more conscious attempt to establish more enduring control? Foucault
leaves both possibilities open because he doesn’t think it matters.
Whether they were naive or cynical, all reformers wound up
contributing to less brutal but more effective systems of power. Prison,
for Foucault, is just the tip of the iceberg: “The prisons resemble
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons.”5 All
of them are ways in which, through structures that usually remain
invisible, we internalize mechanisms of domination and control more
subtle and sinister than anything the world before Enlightenment had
to offer.
Those inclined to give Foucault the bene it of the doubt will argue that
his work exposes the methods of power in order to prepare the ground
for changing them. Since the reforms of the Enlightenment, power has
become more subtle and anonymous, hence harder to recognize. It’s
easy to rebel against observable tyrants, far more dif icult to deny vast
anonymous structures in which we participate. As the history of
censorship shows, this argument has merit: where information is
clearly censored, bold people will go to great lengths to get it. Where
people believe they live in societies that give them full access to
information, they’re more likely to drown sleepily in its excesses.
This generous reading of Foucault would bring him close to Rousseau,
who also criticized early Enlightenment accounts of progress. The self-
taught provincial burst on the Paris scene in 1750 with a prize-winning
essay, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” which savaged standard
liberal views of the time. Against those who assumed that arts and
science paved a smooth road to progress, Rousseau argued that they
often simply feed authors’ vanity while disguising oppressive power
structures. The arts and sciences, he wrote, “weave garlands of lowers
around the chains that bind us.” It’s a powerful critique that Foucault
might have welcomed. Unlike Foucault, however, Rousseau spent the
rest of his life trying to answer the problems he raised in that irst
essay: how to break those chains? Knowing how hard the problem is,
Rousseau tried several solutions. In The Social Contract he proposed
law for “men as they are and laws as they should be”; in Emile he
proposed education for a man as he should be under laws as they are.
Nowhere did he explain how to bring the two together to create free
citizens in a world without domination. But it may be the hardest
question to answer, in politics or in theory: how can the chains be
broken without doing more damage than the chains themselves? At least
Rousseau tried.
This gives Rousseau’s deconstruction of standard accounts of progress
an entirely different tone than Foucault’s. Foucault preferred
(rhetorical?) questions to assertions, and was happier to suggest than
to stake out a claim. His books are likelier to leave the reader the reader
with a mood than a position. To quote Amé ry once more:
 It’s very hard to speak common sense with men like Michel
Foucault. One always gets the worst of it – if only because his
structural visions are more aesthetically alluring than those of
critical rationalism. But to completely deny progress and to shrug
your shoulders over all reforms is misguided and – I weigh my
words – in the end reactionary.6
Of course, Foucault was disinterested in anything so common as
common sense. He was one of the thinkers for whom Amé ry
recommended a banality cure. (The other was Adorno.) Yet the
reactionary kernel Amé ry recognized in his thought came to fruition
after Amé ry’s own death, when Foucault examined the neoliberalism
that would underpin the prevailing global order. Unlike political
liberalism, neoliberalism is liberalism without humanism:
It offered a compelling terrain upon which his practical aspiration
for freedom might merge with his theoretical conviction that
power is constitutive of all human relationships.7
The philosopher Alexander Nehamas wrote: “He was always able –
indeed eager – to see the dark side of every step toward the light, to
grasp the price at which every advance had to be bought.” Light and
shadow go together; each makes the other perceptible. That’s a very old
trope and, though it doesn’t provide a theodicy, it works as an art form.
If what’s at issue is a question of what’s more aesthetically alluring, you
might say Foucault was drawn to darkness and leave it at that. But here
aesthetics have consequences. At a roundtable discussion with
Foucault, several eminent historians pointed out that Discipline and
Punish paralyzes those who wanted to work for reforms:
If one works with prison educators, one notes that the arrival of
your book had an absolutely sterilizing or rather anesthetizing
effect on them, in the sense that your logic had an implacability
they could not get out of.8
One can only pity the poor reformer who wants to better the lives of the
incarcerated. Any number of improvements would do so: more space,
decent food, educational opportunities, access to books and computers,
improved contact with the world outside prison, not to mention an end
to the corruption that places prisoners at the mercy of guards’ arbitrary
will. For anyone in prison, any of these could be life-changing, but
Foucault explicitly scorned simple advances like the lush toilets or
longer visiting hours that French prisoners demanded.9 Thus it’s hard
to imagine a prison administrator making an effort to improve those
conditions after reading Foucault. Didn’t he just learn that
improvements made in the name of human rights only lead to more
sinister forms of subjection? If the book has another message, only the
initiated can understand it.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s in luential Dialectic of Enlightenment takes a
similarly grim view of progress. The modern world, which they date
back to Homer, seeks to liberate people from the chains of tradition, but
soon leads us to bind ourselves like Odysseus at the mast. I’ve discussed
their argument at length elsewhere10 and mention it here just to
acknowledge that Dialectic of Enlightenment’s defenders make similar
claims as did those who wanted to defend Discipline and Punish. Both,
they argue, are not wholesale attacks on the Enlightenment. Like
Foucault, Adorno and Horkheimer wished to reveal its unintended
effects; after these were uncovered, the ground could be cleared for a
new Enlightenment without the defects. There are passages in both
books which gesture in that direction, but make no effort to point a way
forward. It would be foolish to demand that philosophy provide
answers to all the questions it poses. But if it doesn’t provide a taste of
what Kant called orientation in thinking, what good does it do?
Though Rousseau’s critique of thoughtless modern assumptions about
progress is fairly well known, it’s common to think that other
Enlightenment thinkers were blithely optimistic about the future.
(Indeed, Rousseau’s critique of optimism is one reason many scholars
don’t associate him with the Enlightenment at all – in contrast to
Rousseau’s most famous admirer, Immanuel Kant.) You needn’t read
Kant’s own rather gloomy musings on the subject to be convinced that
the Enlightenment was hardly as sunny as generally supposed. Candide,
the short novel written by Rousseau’s arch-rival Voltaire, will serve
even better. The novel’s subtitle is On Optimism, and its goal is to show
you that optimism is ridiculous. The view is held by the foolish Dr.
Pangloss, who has taught his pupil Candide that all’s for the best in this
best of all possible worlds. Candide clings to the view as he journeys
through a category of mid-eighteenth-century horrors, all of which
actually happened: the brutal and senseless Seven Years’ War, the
Lisbon earthquake and the auto-da-fé which followed it, the multiple
rapes of women, the execution of of icers who lost battles. A voyage to
the New World brings no respite from the Old, for it lays bare the evils
of slavery and colonialism. Education is humbug, and none of the other
engines of progress works: wealth and high culture end in boredom and
gloom. This is Candide’s message, and if its naive hero has learned
anything by the end of the story, it’s to renounce his early optimism.
The belief that the Enlightenment thought progress inevitable has
about the same basis as the belief that the Enlightenment was
fundamentally Eurocentric, namely: none. More exactly, with few
exceptions, Enlightenment thinkers’ views of progress were the very
opposite of the views ascribed to them today. Over and over they
proclaim that progress is (just barely) possible; their passionate
engagement with the evils of their day precludes any belief that
progress is assured. Still they never stopped working toward it.
What explains the persistence of the caricature? Straw men are easy to
vanquish, and those who would convince us that progress is impossible
often argue as if the only alternative is the view that progress is
inexorable. If the only choice is between nihilism and absurdity, most of
us will reject the absurd. But I think the caricatures have deeper
grounds. For all his attention to the savagery the world can offer,
Voltaire didn’t think human nature was fundamentally corrupt. “Man is
not born evil; he becomes evil, as he becomes sick,” he wrote in the
Philosophical Dictionary. Those who say we’re inherently ill are sick
physicians hiding the fact that they can’t cure anything themselves.
Voltaire’s sick physicians are priests, since his goal was not to defend a
utopian view that we are all naturally good, but to attack a Christian
view that we are all naturally evil. Without understanding the religious
context of Enlightenment views of human nature, we cannot
understand them at all. They lived in a world whose institutions were
grounded on the doctrine of original sin. Church views about sin varied
in severity. For Calvinists, our sin is so great and God’s power so vast
that He can condemn any of us to eternal damnation before we’ve done
anything to suggest we deserve it. Catholics could be saved by rituals of
penance, often accompanied by bribes to those dispensing absolution.
But whether redemption was ultimately possible or not, it could only
come in the arms of the church, as change could only come through the
hand of God. The effects of such a worldview cannot be underestimated.
One didn’t need to wait for the gates of hell to be assured of it:
“Abandon all hope” described much life on earth.
Moral progress is only possible if human nature is better than the
church taught. By urging that it wasn’t, and that social conditions were
natural facts, church and state sent the message that progress is
impossible. It’s a good way to discourage people from attempting to
make any. Thus it was crucial that the Enlightenment attack Christian
views of original sin. They did not do so naively. Voltaire once quipped
that it was the only theological doctrine supported by evidence.
Rousseau enraged his contemporaries by claiming they were much
worse than they imagined. He is generally believed to have argued that
human beings are fundamentally good, but he did no such thing. He
thought rather that we, like other animals, are born with two
inclinations: a desire for freedom and compassion for others’ pain. Both
inclinations can be destroyed by the wrong kind of education and social
structures. Given the right conditions, they form the basis of decent
behavior.
His hopes for the possibility of progress rested on a fundamental
insight: “We do not know what our nature permits us to be.”11 In order
to say that where you stand is better than where you stood you must be
able to determine the latter. It would be easy to say (or deny) that
human beings can make moral progress if we could trace human nature
back to an original state that would allow us to measure whether we
were declining or improving. That’s why so many philosophers,
anthropologists and biologists have speculated so often about the state
of nature. Rousseau recognized early what critics of evolutionary
psychology lately argue: we have no access to humankind’s earliest
states. Archaeology and palaeontology give us clues Rousseau never
had, but they will never be enough to dismiss his deepest insight: in
questions concerning the nature of human nature, we are hopelessly
partisan. All the data are iltered through our own hopes and fears.
Rousseau’s vision of the state of nature makes warfare seem perverse;
that of Hobbes makes it seem normal. If you want to establish a
dictatorship, your best chance is to convince your fellows that
humankind is naturally brutal and needs a strong leader to prevent it
from tearing itself to bits. If you want to establish a social democracy,
you will magnify every instance of natural cooperation you can ind.
Even while journeying to the Amazon in the hope of inding tribes who
resembled the inhabitants of Rousseau’s state of nature, Claude Lé vi-
Strauss, the most sophisticated anthropologist who tried to test the
philosopher’s theses, knew that empirical methods wouldn’t decide
them.
This is not to say or to suggest that human nature is entirely
constructed; it is to doubt that any method could determine which
parts are constructed and which are not. In his typically brazen prose,
Rousseau declared: “Let us begin by setting aside the facts, for they do
not affect the matter at hand.”12 Since the facts are not accessible, he
proposed radical honesty. Instead of making up stories designed to
serve a particular worldview as the truth about human nature, why not
lay your cards on the table? Not certainty but plausibility should be the
test for accepting a story, if it supports a view you have other grounds
to defend. We can never know what the state of nature was really like,
and we ought to stop trying. Rather, the idea of the state of nature is a
tool that can be used to think about the most fruitful ways of going
forward.
As Kant extended the argument, we cannot act morally without hope.13
To be clear: hope is not optimism. Optimism (and pessimism) make
predictions about a distant future and an inaccessible past. Hope makes
no forecasts at all. Optimism is a refusal to face facts. Hope aims to
change them. When the world is really in peril, optimism is obscene. Yet
one thing can be predicted with absolute certainty: if we succumb to
the seduction of pessimism, the world as we know it is lost. In an era
when the threats to that world seem overwhelming, pessimism is
alluring, for it assures us there’s nothing to be done. Once we know it is
futile, we can all stop struggling. For solace, or at least distraction,
there’s always self-care or consumption or mind-altering substances.
Whether you see the proverbial glass as half-full or half-empty is more
than a matter of temperament. If you cannot see it as half-full, you’ll
eventually stop trying to ill it. Maybe there was a crack at the bottom
making all your efforts in vain. Following Rousseau, Kant, and Noam
Chomsky, I’ve suggested that hope is not an epistemological but a moral
standpoint. Many philosophers have taken the opposite view. The Stoics
advised us to limit hope and desire if we want true contentment. In a
more dramatic key, Nietzsche wrote that hope was the worst of all the
evils in Pandora’s box, for it ensures we will be eternally tormented. If
all you seek is your own peace of mind they are probably right. And if
that’s the case, no philosopher can convince you otherwise. To care
about the fate of the world you must love at least a piece of it. One
person, perhaps even a landscape, might be enough.
Progressive would be the right name for those who lean left today, if
they didn’t embrace philosophies that undermine hope for progress.
The man who thought original sin the basis of any sound political
theory may have seen salvation in the church – at least for his friends.
Schmitt’s categories of political history are not only childish, as Adorno
noted. Viewing politics through the lens of the friend/enemy distinction
takes us back to prehistory. For Foucault, every attempt to make
progress entangles us in a web that subverts it. And in convincing us
that all our actions re lect our primitive ancestors’ attempts to
reproduce themselves, evolutionary psychology assures us that we will
never really escape from the Stone Age. Most who take evolutionary
psychology for granted today know nothing of the political
controversies that once surrounded it: they weren’t even born when
Wilson, Gould, Lewontin and others were slugging it out in Harvard
Yard and the pages of the New York Review of Books. But despite all the
criticism, evolutionary psychology has metastasized to be treated as
canonical science, regardless of political leanings.
You may argue that theory is secondary: of course woke activists seek
solidarity, justice, and progress. Their struggles against discrimination
are animated by those ideas. But they fail to see that the theories they
embrace subvert their own goals. Without universalism there is no
argument against racism, merely a bunch of tribes jockeying for power.
And if that’s what political history comes to, there’s no way to maintain
a robust idea of justice. But without commitments to increasing
universal justice, we cannot coherently strive for progress.
Most woke activists reject universalism, and stand by discourses of
power, but they’re unlikely to deny they seek progress. It would be
easier to believe them if they were willing to acknowledge what some
forms of progress had achieved in the past. Showing how each previous
step forward led to two twisted steps back can be intellectually
dazzling. There are enough instances of injustice to unmask so that
several lifetimes won’t suf ice to do it. But without hope for putting
something else in its place, such unmasking becomes an empty exercise
in showing your savvy. You won’t get fooled again.
I have spent time debunking standard contemporary readings of
Enlightenment philosophers in the hope of convincing today’s
progressives to reconsider them, for they provide much stronger
conceptions of progress, justice, and solidarity than those which are
dominant today. If we continue to misconstrue the Enlightenment, we
can hardly appeal to its resources. Were I asked to attend to the
principles of a racist, sexist movement that believed in inevitable
progress, I’d surely change the channel. Overturning false cliches clears
the ground for reviewing Enlightenment ideas and, with some
revisions, putting them to work.
Yet one young journalist who was kind enough to read this book in
manuscript raised a question that may occur to others. You’ve
convinced me, she wrote, to give the Enlightenment a chance, and it’s
interesting to learn that Diderot wrote texts that sound like Fanon. But
if Fanon is Diderot without the baggage, why can’t we just read Fanon?
There are many answers to the question, the irst being that Fanon,
who died at thirty-six, didn’t have the time to expand the work he
created. That work is as important as it is limited in scope. Reading
Enlightenment thinkers is one way to broaden thoughts of Fanon and
others to questions of irst principles. Fanon was a universalist who
sought justice and believed in the possibility of progress, all necessary
conditions of belonging to the left. But it’s important not only to apply
those principles but to show how they’re related and grounded, and to
defend them against others which appear to have the same ends in
mind.
A more general answer to the question was given by C.S. Lewis, who
insisted that we should always read, at a minimum, one old book for
every three new ones. Here is his argument:
Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past
ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without
question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny … The
only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries
blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading
old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past.
People were no cleverer then than they are now, they made as
many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. Two heads are
better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they
are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the
books of the future would be just as good a corrective, but
unfortunately we cannot get at them.14
The concept of progress is normatively tinged, one reason why those
uneasy with the normative are suspicious of progress in the irst place.
Here Philip Kitcher’s pragmatic conception of progress is helpful. It’s a
matter of changing direction: rather than thinking of progress as
directed to a particular goal it can be useful to think of progress from a
problematic situation to one that is less constrained. Progress toward
universalism is as vague as it is daunting. Progress from all the
conditions that stand in the way of that goal, moving from chattel
slavery to segregation to systemic racism, for example, holds out more
promise.15
But this, after all, is philosophers’ talk. There’s a perfectly simple reason
to question the possibility of even enough progress to save the world as
we know it. While I sit at a desk with a lovely view, I know the planet is
alternately looding and burning. Anyone with even a glancing interest
in the news can watch disaster unrolling, and those who might prevent
it sit on their hands. Political violence is soaring, and none of the
traditional mechanisms that once restrained it seem to work. The lies
that stood behind institutions we once trusted now stand exposed. New
plagues emerge before the old ones subside. The four horsemen of the
apocalypse haunt even atheist nightmares. Who could hope for
progress at a moment like this?
I have argued that hope for progress is never a matter of evidence.
Nothing would be easier than to join the pessimist chorus if I thought
the question could be settled empirically. It cannot. But sometimes
evidence helps sustain our hope in moments when it threatens to falter.
Let’s return to the abolition of public torture. Banning it required not
just changing opinion but changing sensibilities. You may shudder to
read Foucault’s description of Damiens’ death (though it will likely be
the passage that remains in memory long after reading). Had you been
a parent in 1757, you’d have thought no more of taking your children to
watch it than you’d think of taking them to the circus today. Had you
been able to afford it, you’d have paid money for good seats. Versions of
torture as entertainment have a long history; the Roman Colosseum
was built to display them. It’s a sign of deep and visceral progress that
we shudder at the thought of offering live torture to children as a treat.
That some forms of torture persist in places like prisons, where they’re
largely hidden, is a scandal that must be addressed, along with the
scandal that so many innocent people, in the U.S. as in China, are
incarcerated at all. But those scandals could not even be addressed
were we still in a world where leftists like Diderot and Voltaire were on
the fence about whether torture should be abolished at all. (Please
don’t suggest that this means they weren’t really leftist. People can’t be
situated politically without reference to their place in time.) As for
Foucault’s charge that the aim of penal reforms was not to punish less
but punish better: is there really any doubt about which form of
punishment Damiens would have chosen?
The fact that racism persists into the twenty- irst century is a disgrace
that few who witnessed the Civil Rights Movement half a century ago
would have imagined. What we also didn’t imagine: a black family
gracing the White House for eight years in our lifetime. There hadn’t yet
been a black cabinet member. Those who hoped that racism would
retreat with the election of Barack Obama underestimated the depth of
racism. Bernard Lafayette, a colleague of Dr. King’s during the Civil
Rights Movement, called Obama’s presidency the second
Reconstruction, so he was not surprised when it was followed by a
second reaction in the person of Donald Trump.16 Progress creates
resistance in the form of backlash. As devastating, and often deadly, as
the backlash to Reconstruction was, the Civil Rights Movement that
eventually overturned it did not have to start by abolishing slavery.
However appalling lynching and convict leasing were, there was no
prospect of ending either as long as men and women could be bought
and sold at auction. And, while many forms of racism remain to be
dismantled today, we do not have to start by ending laws that kept
black and white people from eating at the same lunch counters. Banal
truths can be important as complex ones.
When I was a child, black and white children were not only forbidden to
attend the same schools; we could not swim in the same lakes. When I
was just a bit older, I hung a photo of Sidney Poitier in my bedroom. At
the time I was a member of a theater group; the photo, however, was
less a statement about my professional aspirations than my political
sentiments, a radical one in that time (1968) and place (Atlanta,
Georgia). Many years later I stepped into my son’s room and had a
minor epiphany about progress: every poster he’d plastered on the
walls showed photos of black men, but he wasn’t making any statement
at all. He just liked basketball.
What I want to underline is not only the fact of progress, but of visceral
progress. The progress in undermining racism involved changes that
may have begun with intellectual insight, cemented by law, but they
pervade emotional perception: how white and black bodies interact
with each other, from swimming pools to childhood idols to the
interracial marriages which were illegal in many parts of America at the
time when Obama’s parents contracted one. A generation raised on
“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” has no memory of a world in which “Leave
it to Beaver” provided the major model of an American family. The
superstardom of Beyoncé has eclipsed the sense of triumph when the
Supremes became nationally successful; Motown was considered “race
music” to be played on black stations. Seek your own cultural examples.
Here I won’t address the disparity between cultural and political
power; life for Will Smith or Beyoncé is nothing like the lives of black
teenagers in South Los Angeles. But to suggest that racism has hardly
changed in a century dishonors the memory of those who struggled to
change it.
As the right responds to the power of black culture, a similar reaction to
women’s achievements is also underway. The recent American
restrictions on abortion are only the most blatant examples. Had I
somehow failed to notice the persistence of the patriarchy, my
daughters would regularly remind me. But the many ways in which
sexism persists – and in parts of the world they are lethal – don’t
diminish the ways women’s lives have been transformed in a
generation. You need not look to Afghanistan to remind yourself of the
difference. Most any mainstream ilm made a few decades ago contains
enough sexist scenes to make you cringe. Sexual harassment was once
so pervasive a part of the world that we didn’t have a name for it.
Women of my generation viewed it like the weather: we hoped for
supervisors who didn’t sexualize us as we hoped for sunny days, but
were resigned to the squalls we could not prevent. Sexual harassment
hasn’t disappeared, of course, and the continuing presence of sexism in
the workplace is well documented. I encounter it in softer forms in the
re ined realms of science and culture. Still behavior that once raised no
eyebrows is increasingly condemned, and often actionable.
Women have always worked, more often in low-wage positions than in
leading professions. But the number of women in positions of authority
is incomparably greater than it was a generation ago and, while the
wage gap still exists, it has lessened dramatically. Only a generation has
passed since women who combined serious careers with families were
a rarity, and men who supported them derided as wimps. These
changes, like the others, were not just changes of mind. They touch our
deepest private spheres, altering our most intimate assumptions about
the ways men and women structure their relations. What changed in all
these cases was not a particular piece of knowledge, but whole
frameworks that embedded our lives. These are too deep to be
overthrown in a generation, but it’s hard to go further in challenging
those frameworks without knowing how far we have come.
Here’s another kind of progress that’s been widely forgotten. During
America’s war on Vietnam it was common knowledge that the easiest
way to avoid the draft was to pretend to be gay. This was no secret, for
not until Obama’s presidency could gays and lesbians openly serve in
the military. I knew men against the war who moved to Canada, served
jailtime, or even went to Vietnam. Not one was willing to feign being
gay, even for the few minutes it took to face a draft board. All you had to
do was walk in with a caricature of a gesture, avowing you couldn’t wait
to serve alongside those good-looking cadets, and you had a lifetime
deferment. Though jokes about it were made during many a smoke-
illed evening, no one wanted to face an inevitable rumor that the gay
pose wasn’t merely pretence. Today same-sex weddings are celebrated
in conservative countries like Spain, Ireland, and the USA. Do vestiges of
homophobia continue? How could they not? They’ve been alive for
centuries. But there is a vast distance between the demands at
Stonewall and a culture where no one blinks on hearing the phrase “his
husband.” Like other forms of diversity, the acceptance of same-sex
relationships has a darker side, allowing corporations to advertise
LGBT-friendly workplaces as a form of public relations while promoting
the neoliberal policies that drive economic inequality. Nevertheless,
equal rights for gays and lesbians is a major step forward that was
unthinkable a generation ago.
A inal instance of progress is even newer – so new, indeed, that it’s
stumbling like a toddler. Consider historical reckoning. Writing national
histories and, even more, teaching them, was always central to
constructing national identity. The recipe used to be simple: pick the
pieces of the past you are proud of, tie them together into a narrative of
progress, and view anything that doesn’t belong to it as an unfortunate
but minor detour. Students inish school with the feeling of belonging to
the exceptional American project, or the glorious British nation, or the
grand republic of France, or the eternal Russian motherland. Where
history left wounds that cannot be ignored, the heroic narrative is
exchanged for a narrative of victimhood. (Poles and Israelis excel at
combining them.) National narratives oscillate: most countries seek
heroic moments to magnify, though some will dwell on their losses. Till
the late twentieth century, the one thing no national narrative
emphasized was a nation’s history of crime. Who could make an
identity out of that?
The Germans. Starting several decades after World War II, West
German activists, intellectuals, artists and church groups began to
demand that Germany recognize its role as perpetrator of Nazi crimes.
Outside Germany, the demand may look as super luous as an insistence
on recognizing that water is wet, but in the irst decades after the war,
most inside West Germany sounded like devotees of the Confederate
Lost Cause. Few foreigners know how fondly they nursed a litany of
grievance and suffering. Carl Schmitt was one of the few who said it
openly, but he spoke for most of the Federal Republic: Germany was the
very worst victim of the war. It took forty years for a West German
president to declare that while Germans had suffered during and after
the war, other peoples had suffered more, and their suffering was
Germany’s fault. (East Germany’s self-image was very different.)17 In
the decades that followed, the idea that Nazi crimes are fundamental to
German identity has solidi ied. Some Germans even refer to their
country as “the perpetrator-nation.”
No country before ever changed its self-image from hero to victim to
perpetrator. Some will say no other country needed to do so: Nazi
Germany’s crimes were worse than any in human history. There is no
scale that allows us to weigh and compare evils. But even those who
argue that the Holocaust stands alone in atrocity now admit that the
plunder and murder of slavery and colonialism were evils as well.
In 2019 I published Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of
Evil. It argued that other nations could learn from German efforts to
face up to the history no native wants to see. Nothing about the German
historical reckoning was exemplary except the fact that no other
country had ever done it: it was incomplete and imperfect, and only
time will tell if the mistakes it made along the way can be corrected. It
nevertheless opened a direction toward truth. It also showed that
telling the truth about a nation’s foul history need not lead to national
disintegration.
When that book was published, the monument to Robert E. Lee still
stood in Charlottesville, and the Confederate lag was emblazoned on
the state lag of Mississippi. On two different British television
programs, interviewers asked what the devil this had to do with
Britain: after all, “the Germans wanted world domination.” I had just
time to remind them that the sun never set on the British empire before
the next guest came on set. Disconsolate readers who approved the
message asked if America or Britain had the conditions for historical
reckoning that had been present in Germany, a nation occupied by
armies that defeated it. The last time any part of the U.S. was occupied
by victorious armies was when Federal troops ended Reconstruction by
leaving the South in 1877; the last time England was occupied was
1066.
This objection supposes that German historical reckoning was forced,
or at least facilitated, by the occupying armies. It was not. Germans
viewed Allied denazi ication programs with contemptuous humor, part
of a package of what they called victors’ justice. No less savvy political
observers than Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt had no hope that
Germany would ever acknowledge its guilt. Knowing how hard it was to
win that acknowledgment, I hoped that America, perhaps even Britain,
might be willing to face the parts of their pasts they would rather
forget. Eventually. I hardly expected the tidal wave of reckoning that
Black Lives Matter jump-started in the wake of George Floyd’s murder
in 2020.
I welcomed that wave, and still believe it’s a sign of progress.
Repression of national trauma is like a repression of any other trauma:
it allows deep wounds to fester till they infect the rest of the body, or
the body politic, contaminating the present with unexamined pasts. The
fact that America is confronting slavery, and Britain colonialism, is a
step forward toward healthier nations. Fierce backlash to those
attempts should not surprise us. Fifty years after World War II, German
efforts to reckon with Wehrmacht crimes were met with violent
resistance, including mass demonstrations and irebombings.18
For like other forms of progress, historical reckoning doesn’t proceed in
straight lines. In addition to right-wing backlash, the past few years
have seen some reckoning gone awry. Former British Museum director
Neil MacGregor wrote that “The British use their history to comfort
themselves. The Germans use their history to think about the future.”19
It’s a ine form of praise but, as German reckoning becomes ossi ied, it’s
increasingly less true. An excess of focus on the past can make it
dif icult to see the present, much less the future. In Germany’s case,
ixture on one piece of the past, German antisemitism, has become so
zealous that it blocks the view of the present. In particular, it diverts
attention from racism toward other minorities, particularly Muslims,
though some of that racism has been lethal.
There are signs that American focus on its historical crimes is moving
in similar directions. By focusing too much on one sort of crime we risk
losing sight of others. America is in the middle of a racial reckoning, but
there’s been little in the way of a broader political reckoning. One black
artist I met on a panel discussion said it had never occurred to him that
people could be persecuted for their politics. Many who can reel off
sites of once-forgotten racial crimes have no idea how deeply most
American historical narratives suppressed the memory of the political
terror which, from 1946 to 1959 and beyond, destroyed a vibrant,
interracial, socialist movement in the name of anticommunism.20 W.E.B.
Dubois is remembered as the great black intellectual he was; but, as in
the case of his friend Albert Einstein, the great socialist intellectual has
been quietly quarantined. Those who have internalized the view that
communism and fascism are identical cannot countenance the thought
of tarnishing their heroes. Yet we cannot understand America or
Britain’s place in the world, or their possibilities for the future, until we
examine not just our racial but our political histories.
In addition to warning that racial reckoning is not all there is to
historical reckoning, I’m concerned about the ways in which history has
become treated solely as the history of crimes and misfortunes. The
burgeoning academic discipline called “Memory Studies” is almost
entirely dedicated to bad memories. While we earlier neglected to
honor history’s victims, we are now in danger of forgetting her heroes.
Yet nations need heroes. This is the only truth embedded in the
ferocious backlash that has led American school boards to claim that
national unity will be threatened if students read Martin Luther King or
Toni Morrison.
Now every American should be proud to belong to a nation that
brought forth King and Morrison, so they surely belong in any heroic
pantheon. It’s the general point that’s important: no nation can thrive
on a diet of bad memories. Most nations are born in blood, and do what
they can to cover their tracks. It’s hard to ind one that never went sour,
and violent, in the search for treasure and glory. Yet in every nation,
brave people stood up against injustice, often at great cost. The U.S. is
only exceptional because it was born in blood and paradox. Unlike
nations founded when one tribe stopped wandering and decided to
settle on some piece of ground, the U.S. came to life in a fanfare of ideals
it betrayed in the moment of its founding. But if American history is
rooted in conquest and bondage, it’s also rooted in resistance to
conquest and bondage. That resistance should never be forgotten.
Heroes remind us that the ideals we cherish were actually lived by
brave human beings. By showing us justice embodied, they show us
that ideals of justice are not empty phrases, and inspire us to act on
them ourselves. For the history wars are not about heritage but about
values. They are not arguments about who we were but who we want to
be. Current debates over monuments focus attention on the question of
whose statue should fall, but we need to think about the question of
who should replace them.
Those debates should continue with nuance and care. I welcomed the
demise of monuments to Confederate generals and the generic Johnny
Rebs which adorn the central squares of Southern towns. I shuddered
as some called for the demise of monuments to Abraham Lincoln.
Unlike those who were calling, Lincoln gave his life to defend African
American civil rights. (Like most Southerners, John Wilkes Booth hated
Lincoln, but it was Lincoln’s support for black voting rights that led him
to murder.) Was Lincoln antiracist in our sense? How could he have
been? Like all of us, it took time for him to free himself from the
prejudice into which he was born. Were we less suspicious of progress,
we could celebrate the fact that we’ve come further than Lincoln, while
being grateful that he made such a start.
While researching Learning from the Germans I spent half a year in the
Deep South studying early attempts at American racial reckoning. I was
privileged to interview Bryan Stevenson, who was then in the process
of completing the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama,
informally known as the Lynching Memorial. One of his thoughts struck
me hardest:
 There were white Southerners who argued in the 1850s that
slavery was wrong. There were white Southerners in the 1920s
who tried to stop lynchings, and you don’t know their names. The
fact that we don’t know their names says everything we need to
know.21
If those names were known and commemorated, he continued, the
country could turn from shame to pride.
We can actually claim a heritage rooted in courage, and de iance of
doing what is easy, and preferring what is right. We can make that
the norm we want to celebrate as our Southern history and
heritage and culture. (ibid.)
Heroes close the gap between what ought to be and what is. They show
that it’s not only possible to use our freedom to stand against injustice,
but that some people actually did so.
Along with celebrating those heroes we should be wary of claims that
racism is part of American’s DNA. It is surely a larger part of American
history than many once acknowledged, but the biological metaphor has
consequences. Something that’s part of your DNA is something you
were born with, like the color of your eyes or the size of your nose. How
could you help being racist if it’s in your DNA? The metaphor recalls
Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a best-selling book that
tried to explain the Holocaust by claiming that German culture was
always antisemitic. In the 1990s, the book was successful in Germany,
largely because it served as a form of exoneration. If Germans had
always been antisemitic, how could any individual German be
accountable for it? Racists are not born, they are nurtured, as Touré
Reed has argued. When well-meaning liberals claim that racism is not a
historically contingent fact but an inborn law, they can shift the blame
to individuals – usually poor white “deplorables” – rather than political
systems.22
You need not study philosophical debates about the relations between
theory and practice to know at least this: what you think is possible
determines the framework in which you act. If you think it’s impossible
to distinguish truth from narrative, you won’t bother to try. If you think
it’s impossible to act on anything other than self-interest, whether
genetic, individual or tribal, you’ll have no qualms about doing the
same.
There are many things philosophy is good for; one is uncovering the
assumptions behind your most cherished views and expanding your
sense of possibility. “Be realistic” sounds like common sense, but
hidden behind it is a metaphysics that underlies many a political
position, a whole set of assumptions about what’s real and what’s not,
what’s doable and what’s imaginable. You can translate the advice to be
realistic quite simply: lower your expectations. When you take such
advice, what assumptions are you making about reality?
For millions of people, reality changed the moment chattel slavery was
abolished, women allowed to vote, gay couples accorded the rights of
other citizens. If you want a glimpse of reality in places where those
changes are yet to come, take a look at chattel slavery in Mauritania or
India, the rights of women in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, the
criminalizing of same-sex relations in Iran or Uganda. Ideas overturned
reality for people of color, women, and members of LGBTQ
communities lucky enough to live in lands where other ideas resound.
I have argued that the ideas that created those new realities were born
in the Enlightenment. The world changes whenever certain ideas are
established as norms. To deny the reality of progress is to deny reality –
as foolish when thinking of progress as when we think of the ways we
reject it. For anyone who suspects I am blind to the latter: I’ve written
more than one book about evil. There are days when I struggle with
despair.
Perhaps the problem with recognizing progress lies in the concept of
progress itself. By de inition, progress is not whatever we have now. It
isn’t something that has already been attained, but something that
should be attained in the future – preferably tomorrow morning. It’s
hard to acknowledge the previous generation’s achievements as
progress, precisely because the previous generation strove to make
those achievements look as normal as they always should have been. A
generation that grew up without racial segregation will hardly be
inclined to ind its absence an achievement. They’re more likely to be
astonished that it ever existed. And this was the goal of those who
fought to overturn it: that their children should ind the idea of
segregation so barbaric and ludicrous that they wonder how anyone
ever accepted it. Abolishing it now seems as trivial as drawing and
quartering. Can’t we focus on today’s problems?
For the next generation, progress must mean going further to
extinguish subtler forms of injustice. That’s how progress works, and
anger over the slow speed of progress is probably necessary to keep us
ighting for it. Looking down occasionally at the shoulders we stand on
is a way of gathering strength, for if we fail to acknowledge that real
progress has been made in the past, we will never sustain the hope of
making more in the future. But knowing how far we remain from a just
society, the progress attained in the past will never be enough to
sustain us. There are, however, many people struggling for justice today
who receive far less attention than the latest authoritarian demagogues.
Remembering women in Iran, landless workers in Brazil, democracy
activists in Congo or Myanmar, all grappling with conditions few of us
can imagine, is one source of sustenance. “They don’t give up hope,”
says Noam Chomsky, “So we certainly can’t.”23
In an insightful passage, Mary Midgley wrote: “Moral changes are,
perhaps above all, changes in the kind of thing people are ashamed
of.”24 She was writing of moral changes for the better, otherwise known
as progress. The simplest examples are easy to ind: whatever they may
say in private, few are willing to make the racist and sexist excuses for
jokes in public that drew laughs until recently. The internet can serve as
a cesspool only because it permits anonymous attacks. Shame has its
uses: if you’d be ashamed to say in person what you’ve said behind your
Twitter handle, so much the better for hypocrisy.
But if shame can prevent our worst impulses, embarrassment can sti le
our better ones. There’s more than one reason why, given two
unprovable explanations of human behavior and possibility,
contemporary thinkers are inclined to assume “we are a bad lot,” as
Steven Pinker cheerfully put it. I’ve surveyed several views that
contribute to contemporary enthusiasm for doctrines of original sin,
but I want to close with one reason that’s received little attention. I
suspect that our fear of emphasizing the good news stems from a
primitive fear: of being mocked as naive. Economist Robert Frank
described this trend throughout the behavioral sciences:
The lint-eyed researcher fears no greater humiliation than to have
called some action altruistic, only to have a more sophisticated
colleague later demonstrate that it was self-serving. This fear
surely helps account for the extraordinary volume of ink
behavioral scientists have spent trying to unearth sel ish motives
for seemingly self-sacri icing acts.
But the fear of embarrassment should itself be embarrassing, the sort
of thing that haunted your adolescence but ought to be left behind. How
often do we behave like the emperor’s subjects, too spineless to point
out his naked frame?

Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (Oxford: Harcourt, 1970), p. 82.
2. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in P. Rabinow, ed., The
Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
3. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneaology, History,” op cit., p. 151.
4. Jean Amé ry, Werke VI, p. 214.
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
(London: Penguin, 2020).
6. Jean Amé ry, “Michel Foucault’s Vision des Kerker-Universums” in
Merkur (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta), April 1977.
7. Michael C. Behrent, Liberalism without Humanism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. Quoted in Raymond Tallis, Enemies of Hope: A Critique of
Contemporary Pessimism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), p. 67.
9. Michel Foucault, Language, Countermemory and Practice, op. cit., p.
227.
10. In Neiman, Moral Clarity and Neiman, Heroism in an Age of Victims.
11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or: On Education (New York: Basic
Books, 1979).
12. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality in Gourevitch, ed.,
op. cit.
13. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
14. C.S. Lewis, “Introduction” in Athanasius, On the Incarnation
(Kentucky: GLH Publishing, 2018).
15. Philip Kitcher, Moral Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2021).
16. Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).
17. Neiman, ibid., ch. 2.
18. See Hamburger Institut fü r Sozialforschung (HG), Eine Ausstellung
und Ihre Folgen (Hamburger Edition, 1999).
19. Neil MacGregor, Guardian.
20. For a recent exception see Reed, op. cit.
21. Bryan Stevenson, interview in Neiman, Learning from the Germans,
op. cit., ch. 8.
22. Touré , op. cit.
23. Noam Chomsky, interview with David Barsamian, in The Nation,
October 11, 2022.
24. Midgley, op. cit., p. 170.
5
In Conclusion
This is a philosophical book, though it’s not only meant for
philosophers. There are many good books that have tried to understand
the present state of the world by analyzing economic inequality or
geopolitical transitions or social and other media. No sentient being,
even a philosopher, would deny the importance of those factors, but I
have chosen to focus on ideas. The woke call to decolonize thinking
re lects the belief that we will not survive the multiple crises we’ve
created unless we change the way we think about them. I agree that we
desperately need fundamental changes in thinking, but I’ve urged
another direction. For, as I’ve argued, the woke themselves have been
colonized by a row of ideologies that properly belong to the right.
The swelling rage we observe across so much of the globe is partly the
result of very real conditions that seem to have little to do with ideas.
But that rage re lects not just the conditions themselves. You need not
be well informed about alternatives to sense that our present
conditions are not necessary. Things could be otherwise. As Hannah
Arendt wrote:
Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering
as such… Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions
could be changed and are not does rage arise. Only when our sense
of justice is affected do we react with rage.1
Arendt denies that rage over injustice is in itself irrational; in order to
act reasonably, we must be moved. What moves us even more than
injustice is hypocrisy: “It is the semblance of rationality, much more
than the interests behind it, that provokes rage.”2
Rage is particularly acute in America, although those who spend most
of their lives there only notice the explosions: a mass shooting with a
higher than usual body count, an attack on the Capitol. We adjust our
lives to conditions we do not know how to change. For an American
living abroad who returns for a longer visit, the level of everyday rage is
a palpable shock. It begins at the airport, continues on the road, and
permeates the supermarket that is twice as large as any supermarket
has to be. (How many choices of laundry detergent do you need to
con irm that you live in a land of unlimited possibilities?) The rage is
both masked and fed by the music that blares in every restaurant to
ensure you must shout at your dinner partner in order to have what
counts as conversation.
Much of that rage is a reasonable response to conditions that are
profoundly unreasonable, though few Americans can really imagine any
others. That’s because they are missing what other wealthy countries
call rights: health care that pays for the drugs needed to treat diseases,
sick leave that covers the duration of an illness, paid vacations and
parental leave, higher education and childcare. Americans call those
things bene its, granted or denied at the will of their employer – a very
different concept from the concept of rights. The absence of social
rights affects poorest people most: those who produce and prepare our
food, deliver our packages, care for our children and elders. But even
two working parents in a moderately well-off family will see their
salaries eaten by the costs of education and health care, their time
consumed by chauffeuring children in places without public
transportation.
The sense of precarity they feel stems from real changes in the global
economy, but at least as important is an economic system whose need
for relentless growth in consumer spending breeds perpetual
dissatisfaction. You may have a ine apartment, perhaps a home of your
own, but celebrity villas pop up when you’re browsing the news. Why
shouldn’t you aspire to have one too? As any advertising agent can tell
you, corporations devote billions each year to the production of envy.
(Adam Curtis’s brilliant documentary The Century of the Self, available
online, describes the psychological savvy that goes into such efforts.)
Those who resist the temptation to envy will have to spend all the
same. The average computer lasts four years; smartphones implode
even sooner. This is not an accident. Since 1924, capitalism has
depended on planned obsolescence. Back then, an international
association of major electronics companies decided to reduce the life
expectancy of light bulbs from 2,500 hours to 1,000 hours. The
craftsperson’s assumption that products should last as long as possible
began to crumble. Today we expect that most everything we use will fall
apart shortly after the warranty expires. It’s no surprise that even
relatively well-to-do people feel stabs of economic insecurity. Today you
may have a warm home, enough to eat, an internet connection, even the
odd vacation. Do you know how to cope if the boiler, the refrigerator,
and the computer all break down at once?
And however precarious or comfortable we may be individually, few
can deny the urgency of the climate crisis. Political reactions, or lack
thereof, were just barely rational as long as the impact of inaction
seemed far off in the future. As tundra thaws and forests burn and
blocks of Greenland crash to the sea, inaction seems not just irrational
but stark raving mad. The super-wealthy who handle the levers of
power usually have resources to weather the worst storms. But there’s
not enough high ground on the planet to shield all the Davos men and
their grandchildren. As rising seas and roaring ires threaten to destroy
the planet, corporations continue to pro it by convincing us to buy
trinkets designed to self-destruct and thereby wreak more damage on
earth, sea, and sky. At a time when many ten-year-olds can give you a
lecture on carbon emissions, what do the masters of the universe fail to
see? It is so maddening to watch that we turn away as often as we can,
thereby failing to contribute to solutions ourselves.
It isn’t just the absence of social rights or gun laws that makes that rage
burst open so loudly in the U.S., and increasingly elsewhere. It also
re lects the disparity between the realities and the myths of American
exceptionalism that most Americans swallow whole, especially if
they’ve never lived in another country. Any politician running for of ice
will express gratitude for living in the greatest country on earth. If this
happened as often in other countries we would worry about fascist
tendencies. Yet on so many measures of national achievement – health,
poverty, life expectancy, literacy – the U.S. stands behind other
developed nations. It has also more racial violence than any country not
currently enmeshed in an internal war. (And, since I am one of the 40
percent of Americans who now fear the outbreak of civil war, I have no
idea whether it will have exploded by the time these words are
printed.) The millions of white American demonstrators during the
summer of 2020 showed that rage over the continuing murder of black
citizens is not con ined to one tribe. For black Americans, that rage
clouds every day. The most important privilege white people have is
this: we never had to give our children the Talk to prepare them to
avoid becoming victims of police violence.
Though we hear the globe has never been better connected, even well-
connected Americans can be remarkably uninformed about ordinary
life in the rest of the world. In recent debates over parental leave,
American media has reported that the U.S. is one of only six countries in
the world that requires none at all. But it’s remarkably silent, and often
misinformed, about the extent of parental rights in other parts of the
world. Though any starlet’s baby bump may be reported in the news, I
have yet to meet an American who knows that Germany grants new
parents sixteen months of paid leave after every child is born. That’s
the case if both parents share the leave; if only one parent stays home,
fourteen months of paid leave are standard. Europeans, in turn, are not
well-informed about the absence of labor rights in America, largely
because they are so stunned by the savagery of the social system that
they don’t know how to report it. When I explained to German
colleagues that most Americans had no sick leave amid a global
pandemic, their reaction was not merely regret. They would hardly
have been more shocked if I’d said we eat babies for breakfast.
Well-educated Americans will occasionally mention Scandinavia, which
they view as a utopian welfare state – a description which implies
neither justice nor rights. The example reinforces the idea that only
small homogenous countries can afford a system of social rights, or
navigate the con licts it might bring. Even Bernie Sanders never
mentions that Germany, an increasingly diverse society with the
world’s fourth largest economy, has a system of social rights he has yet
to envision.
If rage is most visible in America, it can erupt anywhere when social
rights are eroding. A decade ago, Britons were proud of the free system
of higher education which has now disappeared; the Conservative
government and its Brexit are undermining the National Health Service;
and a combination of in lation and austerity means many Britons may
have to choose between food and heat in wintertime. You needn’t be an
economist to know there are resources aplenty to solve all those
problems, though economists have shown it.3 Consider how quickly a
vaccine was developed when a global pandemic threatened the world
economy: suddenly billions were found for research and development.
Malala Yousafzai computed that the amount spent on military expenses
in eight days each year would fund twelve years of education for every
child on earth. Eight days a year. Do you know how to act on that
information? Does your powerlessness make you angry?
Here Foucault was surely right: the levers of power are invisible, and
we don’t know how to move them. (Where ‘we’ embraces a very large
number of people. Think: Barack Obama.) In his 1979 lectures on
neoliberalism, Foucault argued that power is no longer political but
economic, for neoliberalism has created a new form of rationality that
put the state in service of the economy. Market freedom has become the
state’s foundation, which is why economic growth is the irst thing
mentioned when judging a state’s success or its failure. Did Angela
Merkel know she was channeling Foucault when she called for “a
democracy that conforms to markets” (marktkonforme Demokratie)?
The alternative would be markets that conform to democratic values,
but that’s not what’s been achieved in the decades since the bipolar
world order was replaced by global neoliberalism. This is an order
which is compatible with many kinds of political organization, as
developments in China have shown so well.
It can’t be accidental that evolutionary psychology, which posits
constant competition as the natural standpoint of human action,
became the leading explanation of human behavior after the end of the
Cold War. Evolutionary psychology seemed to provide scienti ic
grounding, or at least buttressing, for the neoliberalism emerging as the
only economic/political theory left standing when the Berlin Wall fell.
More important than particular market policies are its general
assumptions about human nature. Political theorist Richard Tuck wrote
that
Though the founders of modern economics, and their followers in
political science, might have supposed they were engaged in a
“value-free” or “scienti ic” investigation, in fact they were doing
moral philosophy.4
Or as Margaret Thatcher once said: “Economics are the method; the
object is to change the soul.”
Have our souls been changing? Neoliberalism starts from the premise
that we are best understood as “economic man,” or Homo economicus,
“solely as a being who desires wealth, and who is capable of judging the
comparative ef iciency of means for obtaining that end.” John Stuart
Mill, the philosopher who formulated that de inition, quickly added that
no political economist was ever so absurd as to imagine that real
human beings can be captured by it. It may have seemed absurd in the
nineteenth century, but today we’re no longer startled by references to
human capital. Employees are managed by departments of human
resources; we’re blithely encouraged to develop our brand; small
children earn millions by opening toys on YouTube. A Bavarian investor
recently copyrighted the initials Roman soldiers put on Jesus’ cross:
INRI. He plans to develop a product line of T-shirts and soft drinks, and
was surprised that the church hadn’t got there before him. Remember
Marx, whose materialist atheism never precluded a sense of reverence?
5

Foucault argued that neoliberalism made Homo economicus exhaustive.

What was a ictional abstraction for Mill has now obscured every other
idea of human being. Classical liberal economics viewed us as
consumers; we are now fundamentally entrepreneurs. Political theorist
Wendy Brown explains:
… neoliberalism transmogri ies every human domain and
endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a speci ic
image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all
spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms
and metrics, even when those spheres are not directly monetized.
In neoliberal reason and in domains governed by it, we are only
and everywhere Homo economicus, which itself has a historically
speci ic form … the normative reign of Homo economicus in every
sphere means that there are no motivations, drives, or aspirations
apart from economic ones, that there is nothing to being human
apart from “mere life.”6
For Foucault, competition has replaced exchange as the basic market
principle, but he does not think competition is natural. Hence the
government must intervene to encourage or restore competition. As
Brown points out, this has devastating consequences:
Most importantly, equivalence is both the premise and the norm of
exchange, while inequality is the premise and outcome of
competition. Consequently, when the political rationality of
neoliberalism is fully realized, when market principles are
extended to every sphere, inequality becomes legitimate, even
normative, in every sphere.7
But even without the arti icial inequality that a system based on
competition must produce, the in lation of Homo economicus to eclipse
every other sphere of the human leads to rage that is more powerful
the less we are aware of it. You needn’t be a Kantian to resent being
treated as a means – as we all are, every day.
The neoliberalism Foucault describes is less an economic than a moral
revolution, though it masquerades as sophisticated common sense. His
account is all the more impressive for the fact that the reduction of
human beings to human capital had only just begun when he wrote
about it. But nowhere is his refusal to take a normative stand more
infuriating. The analysis of what neoliberalism has done to us is so
critical and trenchant that it’s hard to read without looking for a
barricade to mount. Now Foucault believed that power is no longer the
sort of thing one can resist on a barricade. But Foucauldians are divided
about whether he believed neoliberalism should be resisted at all.8
Some of his comments seemed to welcome it. For neoliberalism, human
capital is both descriptive of who we are and normative of what we
should be. (Develop your brand.) We will never know if Foucault agreed,
but he leaves us with no tools to contest it.
In the ield of behavioral economics, neoliberalism allows that human
behavior often deviates from the model of Homo economicus. The
deviations considered, however, focus on the ways in which passions
and perceptual distortions fail to maximize utility as the model
demands. The model is the ideal; behavioral economics emphasizes the
ways in which we fall short of it. The question of whether the model
falls short of us is rarely raised. We saw a similar move when
evolutionary psychology recast altruism as a problem. Rather than
questioning the model, it explained our failures to act as the model
predicted by declaring that our kinship-detectors get tricked. (Kinship
detectors? Seriously?)
Neoliberalism holds human happiness to be best served by unregulated
markets producing ever-increasing amounts of goods that were
developed to distract us and designed to deconstruct. If you reject this
vision to argue that people are more likely to lourish when engaged in
common productive activities, you’re likely to be dismissed as an old
hippy or a closet communist – although this argument is con irmed by
every serious empirical study in social psychology. Even as we have
come to believe, as Thatcher famously put it, that there is no alternative
to a world ruled by economic rationality, its irrationality is
demonstrated every day. Thomas Piketty summarizes:
When people are told that there is no credible alternative to the
socioeconomic organization and class inequality that exist today, it
is not surprising that they invest their hopes in defending their
borders and identities instead.9
We seem left with a choice between two kinds of irrationality, neither of
which will allow us to lourish – or even survive.
We may be well on the way to becoming Homo economicus, yet our daily
lives occasionally show us that our selves are larger than calculation
can measure. Still we’re blasted with messages that make us forget.
With mantras like “responsibility to our shareholders,” neoliberalism
found gentle moralistic tones in which to dress its conviction that
nothing but pro it matters. Who, after all, could object to responsibility?
The violation of language is so pervasive that even those of us who are
attuned to it only notice when it becomes extreme. You can go mad if
you don’t, occasionally, tune it out. It’s hard to remember that
advertising was not always so central to politics, nor was advertising
itself so extreme. I refuse to purchase the boxes of blueberries my local
grocery store markets as “The berry that cares.” Though I know this will
have no impact on the marketing or sales igures, it saves me from
seething when I open the fridge in the morning. (Berries don’t care.
BERRIES DON’T CARE.) But I cannot avoid a new brand of portable
toilet now installed on the street before my apartment. It’s called
“Cloudlet,” which was harmless enough until the company began a
marketing campaign declaring “Cloudlet = Love.” A cynic might detect a
hidden message: Love is for shit. I suspect the slogan was only a matter
of thoughtlessness. Protest here seems senseless. But can people who
are bombarded by that sort of lunacy every day be expected to question
fake news?
These are uses of language we swallow without resistance, though we
pay attention to others. There’s no simple way to decide when language
rules matter, and when they can be ignored, though it’s important to
know that the Nazis used the term “language rule” to mean “lie.”
“Responsibility to our shareholders” is a language rule that emerged
when neoliberalism elevated the pursuit of pro it until the only thing
that matters is quarterly returns. It’s not exactly a lie, just a distortion
of the truth that makes it harder to raise fundamental questions, and
easier to accept the inanities of advertising.
Meanwhile, the corporations who are busy being responsible to their
shareholders noticed that some of the shareholders care about other
words, and have changed their language accordingly. The homeless
have become unhoused, people who cannot walk are now differently
abled, those who were slaves are now enslaved persons. These
linguistic changes are meant to express respect toward the people they
name. But an unhoused person is no better off than a homeless one; if
anything, the softened language makes the condition sound less painful.
Being homeless is deeper, and worse than being unhoused, and the
hardness of the language re lected that. Similarly, “enslaved person”
takes the edge off the condition of slavery. Though we need no
reminders today, those who bought and sold men and women did not
consider them to be persons. Sometimes language should hurt as much
as the circumstances it denotes; otherwise it is false to the realities it
names. Around the turn of the millennium, English speakers began
substituting the word “issue” for “problem,” as if problems could be
resolved with a softer-sounding word.
Language is always changing, and different languages solve problems
very differently. Gender-inclusive language in German and English
works in opposite ways. While Liz Truss was a prime ministeress in
German, Meghan Markle was an actor in English. As a native English
speaker I’m loathe to accept the current German suggestion, supported
by government decree, that anyone who refrains from locutions like
“citizens and citizenesses” is irremediably sexist. (Writers and
writeresses. Bakers and bakeresses. Ad in initum.) My own linguistic
intuitions fall the other way: if professions are gender-neutral,
gendering someone’s profession leaves a sexist note. It takes effort to
understand that someone who was raised in a different language will
have different intuitions, not only about what’s grammatically right and
wrong but what grammatical forms shade into political rights and
wrongs. Let this stand as one example of many. There are cases where
two people with similar goals, like addressing the sexism built into
language, will differ on the solution. It’s the sort of disagreement that
each side could live with, but for the fact that the line between
disagreement and harm has become hard to draw.10
We’ve long known that the personal is political, but when only the
personal is political, we have given up hope. Changing your pronouns
may feel like radical change, but the vehemence of woke arguments
about the importance of pronouns is the expression of people who fear
they have little power to change anything else. I have argued we have
an obligation to hope for more. The argument is simple: if we do not
hope, we cannot act with conviction and vigor. And if we cannot act, all
the doomsayers’ predictions will come true.
The woke yearn for progress as much as I do, and many of those who
reject the idea of progress get up every morning to work for social
change. They do not realize how heavily they are weighed down by the
theoretical views they hold; largely, I believe, because those views are
framed so obscurely. It’s hard work to wade through the prose but, even
when you’ve put in the work, the claims slip away through repeated
sleights of hand. Attack a normative standpoint, you are told that it’s
merely descriptive. Raise the alarm about Schmitt’s use of the term
‘enemy’ or evolutionary psychology’s term ‘sel ish,’ and you’re
dismissed as simple-minded; surely sophisticated theorists are not so
crass as to use words as we ordinarily do? So it’s worth going back to
Thrasymachus to see the cruder versions of these ideas, unadorned by
misty elegance. When you do, you see a set of positions born from
disappointed hopes.
Because universalism has been abused to disguise particular interests,
will you give up on universalism?
Because claims of justice were sometimes veils for claims of power, will
you abandon the search for justice?
Because steps toward progress sometimes had dreadful consequences,
will you cease to hope for progress?
The disappointments are real and sometimes devastating. But rather
than facing them, theory often reads them into the structure of the
universe, creating a symphony of suspicion that forms the background
music of contemporary Western culture.
It would be silly to claim that everyone who’s heard that music is
versed in evolutionary psychology or the work of Carl Schmitt. But even
those who never opened a book of philosophy swim in the ideological
currents that swirl around us. As Breitbart News put it, “politics is
downstream from culture.” Ideologies lourish because people want
general explanations of how their world works; if they’re simple
explanations, so much the better. The dominant contemporary
ideologies combine to create a fraudulent universalism which reduces
all the complexity of human desire to a lust for wealth and power.
Claiming support from economics, philosophy, and biology, the ideology
of self-interest condemns every other motive of human action as self-
delusion or cynical hype. Right-wing leaders like Andrew Breitbart and
Mike Czernowitz embrace such views openly, which is at least
intellectually coherent. As Czernowitz explained in The New Yorker,
“Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a
narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative.” He
smiled. “I don’t seem like a guy who reads Lacan, do I?” In less than
conscious appropriation, many of the woke have inhaled this ideology,
though it’s completely at odds with their own moral aims.
One warm October morning I took a break from inishing this book to
meet the Indian author and activist Harsh Mander in a Berlin café .
Mander’s tireless nonviolent ight for the rights of marginalized peoples
in his homeland has earned him a place on the Nobel Peace Prize
shortlist, as well as a series of death threats. He compares the silence of
most of the public over the lynching of Muslims in today’s India to
German indifference toward violence against Jews in the 1930s.
Discovering how many convictions we held in common, he asked about
my current writing. I explained that I was writing about progressive
abandonment of three principles essential to the left: commitments to
universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the
possibility of progress.
Mander agreed and suggested a fourth principle: a commitment to
doubt. Marxist colleagues had often asked why he wasn’t a communist,
given his ierce commitment to universal social and economic rights.
His answer was simple: he couldn’t subscribe to any movement that
required him to stop questioning. “Hinduism has enormous problems,”
he continued. For his efforts to stop Hindu oppression of Muslims, the
Modi government has charged him with terrorism. “But it has one thing
the Abrahamic religions don’t: all those gods and goddesses show us
the need for doubt.”
Doubt, of course, was fundamental to the Enlightenment, whose
thinkers would have been amused to learn they shared something with
the polytheistic Hindus. Gottfried Ephraim Lessing famously said he
would prefer the never-ending search for truth to truth itself. No
religion can put an end to violence, as recent events in India as well as
in Buddhist Myanmar have made clear. But tempering commitment to
your deepest principles with doubt about their application could
prevent a lot of harm. Nothing is more senseless, at this moment in
history, than one progressive’s dismissing another over differences
about what counts as discrimination.
It’s often recalled that the Nazis came to power through democratic
elections, but they never won a majority until they were already in
power. Had the left-wing parties been willing to form a united front, as
thinkers from Einstein to Trotsky urged, the world could have been
spared its worst war. The differences dividing the parties were real;
even blood had been spilled. But though the Stalinist communist party
couldn’t see it, those differences paled next to the difference between
universal leftist movements and the tribal vision of fascism.
We cannot afford a similar mistake.

Notes
1. Hannah Arendt, op. cit., p. 63.
2. Ibid., p. 66.
3. For one example see Piketty in ibid. and Piketty, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2013).
4. Richard Tuck, “The Rise of Rational Choice” in European Journal of
Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 587.
5. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto: “All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned.”
6. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
(New York: Zone Books, 2015).
7. Ibid.
8. See Brown, op. cit., and Sawyer and Steinmetz-Jenkins, eds., Foucault,
Neoliberalism and Beyond (London: Rowman and Little ield, 2019).
9. Piketty, Capital and Ideology, op. cit.
10. This formulation was suggested by Emily Dische-Becker.
Acknowledgments
This book began in April 2022 as the Ashby/Tanner Lecture at the
University of Cambridge: I am grateful to my hosts at Clare College,
particularly to George van Kooten and Alan Short, for the opportunity
that forced me to work out thoughts that had troubled me for several
years. Samuel Garrett Zeitlin was one of the commentators on the
lecture, and I’m indebted to him for the important and extensive
comments he later provided for the book.
This book bears the stamp of many conversations with my late friend
Todd Gitlin. In September 2020, disturbed by the developments I’ve
described here, we began meeting once a week via zoom with the
intention of writing a book. This is not the book we would have written
together, which was solely focused on universalism. That book would
have added perspectives from sociology, Todd’s ield, to my own
philosophical ones. Still my thinking about the promise and failures of
the left owes so much to the twenty years of friendship cut short by
Todd’s death. His sane, sound, and tireless voice is sorely missed.
A number of friends were kind enough to comment on versions of this
book in manuscript. Heartfelt thanks go to Lorraine Daston, Wendy
Doniger, Sander Gilman, Eva Illouz, Philip Kitcher, Carinne Luck, Sophie
Neiman, and Ben Zachariah for their many and thoughtful suggestions,
even those I didn’t accept. Writing this book meant seeking forms of
criticism that were clear but constructive, sharp but not cutting.
Whether I have succeeded is for others to judge.
It’s unlikely that I would have expanded a lecture into a book at all were
it not for the chance to work once again with Ian Malcolm, who edited
my Evil in Modern Thought twenty years ago. Ian is simply the best
editor I ever met, who provided both penetrating criticism and
unlimited encouragement in this book as in the earlier one.
As always, the wisdom and steady support of my agent, Sarah Chalfant,
were crucial in keeping me focused and grounded.
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