Suicide of reason: The travails and tyrannies of liberalism

As I write this, two tragedies have struck the free world. In a repeat of earlier attacks, an Islamic fanatic drove a van into a crowd near Las Ramblas, the most popular pedestrian-cum-shopping district in the heart of Barcelona. The driver is still on the run, but two suspects have been arrested. Police have linked the plot to Islamic jihadis based on the Amaq propaganda news agency of the Islamic State, which claimed that “the perpetrators of the Barcelona attack are soldiers of the Islamic State”.

Predictably, the CNN website does not carry the last bit; the word ‘Muslim’ or ‘Islam’ does not figure in their report. Earlier, on Wednesday night, an explosion killed one person in Alcanar, a town 180 km from Barcelona. That is where one of the suspects of the van attack was arrested. The abandoned house, now utterly destroyed by the detonation, had scores of butane cylinders, which the police suspect were planned for use in the van attack. If this line of thinking is to be believed, we were lucky that what might have been a much more horrific strike had failed to take off.

Just a few days before, on August 12, in Charlottesville, Virginia, violent clashes broke out between far-right white supremacists and those who opposed them. A neo-Nazi sympathiser drove a car into a group of anti-racist activists killing a 32-year-old woman and injuring 19 others. Two police officers, patrolling the skies, died when their helicopter crashed. After this incident, President Donald Trump first criticised ‘both sides’. After facing a barrage of denunciation, he somewhat retracted. Then, in another flip-flop, he reverted to blaming both white racists and their critics. Immediately, more anger and denigration followed in the US media and public sphere.

At stake was what many considered not just the place of African-Americans in the US, but what the United States stands for. Civil rights, so hard-won, were under threat once more with the election of Donald Trump. So the liberals argued. But, as an American cultural anthropologist, Gayle Rubin, wondered, why is it that “for calling out White supremacy and violence – you’re brave” but “for calling out Islamist supremacy, violence, slavery, and genocide – you’re a racist and Islamophobic”? This is the question that Lee Harris asked way back in 2008 in The Suicide of Reason. Harris argued that the “fanaticism of reason” of the liberal West was preventing it from clearly seeing the greatest threat to its way of life that was “the fanaticism of Islam”. Both liberals and conservatives failed to understand the latter: “You couldn’t really blame the terrorists, since they were merely the victims of an evil system — for Chomsky, American imperialism, for Wolfowitz, the corrupt and despotic regimes of the Middle East.”

We see a similar blindness in India. Left-liberal journalist-intellectuals, and the periodicals they patronise, train their polemical guns on the Hindu Right but seldom on Muslim and other forms of ‘minoritarian’ intolerance. They soft-peddle the latter as if it poses no real threat to Indian liberalism. If the Sharia is imposed on reluctant Muslims or even on non-Muslims, they are silent. If Kashmiri separatists are actually peddling Islamic theology in the guise of Azadi, they look the other way. If predatory conversion creates demographic destabilisation in certain regions they do not seem to worry. Instead, Marxist-Dalit-anti-Brahminical-minority-feminist ‘anti-Hindu’ alliances meet their approval. In intellectual circles the world over these Left-Liberals shut out not just dissenting voices, but any contaminating contact with the BJP/RSS or Hindu Right. For decades, they have practised such prejudice in the name of liberalism and pluralism.

In his 2011 book The Twilight of Liberalism, Robin Phillips calls this phenomenon “Illiberal Liberalism”. “While liberal totalitarianism’s dogmatic intolerance of dissent has put public debate in a state of paralysis, it has come to us in the package of ‘tolerance,’ ‘equality,’ ‘human rights,’ and even — heaven help us — ‘freedom’.” Not only in the US or India, but in Europe, South America, and other parts of the world, we are living through this dilemma. While there are real dangers in the Right-wing upsurge and resurgence in our societies, what is equally true is that the excessive preoccupation of the Left-Liberal intellectual establishment with this reassertion has made it blind to other forms of intolerance and totalitarianism, including Liberal and Islamic fanaticism. Their selective outrages and outages force us to question not just their intentions but also their competence. Rather than being in denial, liberals must set their own house in order before trying to set right the world.

If liberalism is meant to be the pursuit and promotion of individual freedoms, rule of law, and constitutional government, then most liberals have utterly miscarried in their attempts to defend it. The sad truth is that it is liberals themselves who have failed liberalism. If I criticise Indian liberalism today, it is because I myself believe in its virtues and values. The defeat of pseudo-liberals is the first step towards restoring true liberalism to its rightful place as the guardian of a way of life that most of us hold dear.

The author is a poet and Professor at JNU. Views expressed are personal.