How the Left was Lost (pt. 3)

Stalling for time, yesterday I posed the question: "What happens when a mentally unbalanced but brilliant homosexual French intellectual with a death wish finds himself in the middle of an Islamic revolution?"

Let's listen to Foucault's own answer: "It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and most insane." Bear in mind that this was intended as the highest possible compliment.

A recently published book, nicely summarized in this Boston Globe article, argues that the Iranian revolution

appealed to certain of Foucault's characteristic preoccupations — with the spontaneous eruption of resistance to established power, the exploration of the limits of rationality, and the creativity unleashed by people willing to risk death. It also tied into his burgeoning interest in a "political
spirituality"..."Industrial capitalism," he said, had emerged as "the harshest, most savage, most selfish, most dishonest, oppressive society one could possibly imagine."

This last quote firmly establishes Foucault as having had either the most impoverished, or the most expansive, imagination of the 20th Century. And yet, Foucault here does us the favor of making explicit a set of assumptions that have not only seized the "blame America first" Left, but also provide one key intellectual foundation to the post-60's counterculture. While most American leftists and liberals would not agree with such a stark and explicit condemnation of our society, a diluted version is figuratively in our drinking water: the romanticized Che of T-shirt fame (not the sadistic murderer, mind you), the celebrated "authenticity" of hip-hop artists like Tupac Shakur ("Thug Life"), to Oprah Winfrey's website, which urges the reader to Live Your Passion, and exhorts the reader:

Are you screaming on the inside?

Everyone feels it. Get in touch with your ire power!

Now, as pop culture phenomena these trends are fairly innocuous, but they demonstrate why we are intellectually unprepared to meet the challenge of Islamofascist terror. The notion that our bourgeois society smothers our authentic selves, leaving no outlet for our stored-up rage and passion, leads to a simultaneously romanticized and patronizing view of the Other, as expressed in the headline of this NY Times analysis of the 7/7 bombers:

Seething Unease Shaped British Bombers' Newfound Zeal

And how else to account for this humdinger which begins that same article:

[The bombers] ... turned their backs on what they came to see as a decadent, demoralizing Western culture. Instead, the group embraced an Islam ... focused passionately on Muslim suffering at Western hands. In many ways, the transformation has had positive elements: the men live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime.

This romanticized "noble savage"-ism brings us back to Foucault on political Islamism:

a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distrust of legalism seemed to me to be essential, along with a faith in the creativity of Islam.

Here Foucault is equating the rule of law ("legalism") with grim obedience, and contrasting these with the "luminous" creativity of the Islamic revolution. Thus, the far Left's utopianism is no longer focused on economic perfection, which in any case has been rather better achieved in the vast aisles of the local supermarket than in the entirety of the Soviet experiment, but instead on a spiritual redemption. Foucault called this a "political spirituality."

As for the reach of these ideas, ask yourself: What baby-boomer parent today would encourage in their children a faith in legalism and a distrust of creativity? Yet these are essential underpinnings of conservative political thought: certainly the Framers of our Constitution understood that politics was a realm to tame passions, not exalt in them; that spirituality was expressed in houses of worship and in our homes, not in the streets and in the legislature; that creativity was to be expressed in science, literature, and art, not in mass rallies.

Does our society tamp down on opportunities for Dionysian ecstacy of the sort exalted by the late French philosopher? Of course, and sometimes too much so. But better to err on the side of the Apollonian, the rational, the predictable, then to be left intellectually unarmed against the post-modernist worldview of Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer who famously said of 9/11:

"That characters can bring about in one act what we in music cannot dream of,that people practice madly for ten years, completely fanatically, for aconcert and then die. That is the greatest work of art for the wholecosmos."