I’ve been saying since the beginning that liberal humanism is a whole, and it is. But it is a whole because we have made it a whole, and it can only continue to be a whole if we go on doing it. That’s the liberal task, the liberal project, the liberal preoccupation. Humanism may historically precede liberalism—but liberalism can’t mechanically produce humanism. It’s a task of mental effort, adjusted to new circumstances. The reality of science doesn’t guarantee the primacy of love. What science shows us is the world as it is. We choose to make the world as we want it.
Like the civil discourse approach, this psychological-rhetorical persuasion strategy for building political agreement is also well-meaning. But in practice it can quickly become condescendingly manipulative and even disturbingly Orwellian in its implications. Because of its inherent deviousness, this approach is ultimately misguided. Increasing sympathy for a wider spectrum of values requires a persuasion strategy that is fundamentally transparent and sincere.
N.B. I find this too pejorative toward the rhetorical tradition. Rhetoric, to succeed, depends on building bridges, via logos, ethos, and pathos. It can be unethical, but not necessarily so.
The population of the Eternal City itself fell by three quarters in the space of just five decades. Archaeological evidence from the rest of Western Europe—inferior housing, more primitive pottery, fewer coins, smaller cattle—suggests that “the end of civilization” came within the span of a single generation.99 And all this was long before the Plague of Justinian, in the mid-sixth century.
With similar suspicion Wittgenstein may have heard, by the time of his stay in Vienna on holiday in August 1923, that his Tractatus was now also beginning to inspire seminars and discussion groups (later known as the “Vienna Circle”) at the city’s university. The Vienna group wanted to save and heal society by adhering to a strictly scientific view of the world. This certainly did not correspond to Wittgenstein’s approach, since he saw the purely scientific worldview as yet another wrong track that his era had placed itself upon, and one that was, in its supposedly value-free and enlightened clarity, based on particularly stubborn misunderstandings.
Each generation has to learn anew the importance of Aristotle and the Scholastics in the history of ideas. Each generation is as surprised as the one before, for everyone approaches the Aristotelians through certain myths. Even now, the only factoid “known” to many people about the medieval theologians is that they debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.
Because, Morgenthau answered, there was no such thing as an international community. Domestic disputes could be resolved—not solved—through discussion and negotiations, or when negotiation failed, by appeals to the sovereignty of the state and the authority of the law.
In every human case, identity turns out to be porous and inconsistent rather than fixed and discrete; and prone to get confused and lost in the play of mirrors. The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations – the Nazi reverence for Atatürk, a gay French philosopher’s denunciation of the modern West and sympathy for the Iranian Revolution [Foucault], or the varied ideological inspirations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) – reveal that the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Grove Press edition, 1968, p. 61. I am using this work because of its great influence on the present student generation. Fanon himself, however, is much more doubtful about violence than his admirers. It seems that only the book’s first chapter, “Concerning Violence,” has been widely read. Fanon knows of the “unmixed and total brutality [which], if not immediately combatted, invariably leads to the defeat of the movement within a few weeks”
