(2003-11-24) Common Ground Enlightenment

Thomas De Zengotita on "Common ground: finding our way back to the Enlightenment" (from Jan'03). It isn't right to assume that anyone who isn't engaged is somehow impaired, corrupted by Propaganda, distracted by sports and sitcoms. That bread-and-circuses stuff just doesn't cut it anymore. Noam Chomsky's 9/11 book got better shelf position at Barnes And Noble than Dr Phil, and basic information about the rape of the planet has been endlessly disseminated. No, let's face it. People aren't interested. They don't care. That's the truth. It's also important to notice that Political Engagement is not a function of education...

I want to argue that Progressive politics is still, as a matter of fact rather than of rhetoric, based on Enlightenment principles and has been all along. And I want to argue that progressives should acknowledge this basis explicitly and stand together on this foundation once more.... In your heart of hearts, do you in fact hold the West to a higher standard, not just because you live here but because the standard set forth is higher? Isn't the betrayal of humanist principles what gets to you, at bottom? Wasn't that what outraged you initially, in your youth, when you first realized what was going on behind the facade, when you first set out on the path of progressive Political Engagement?... There is a lot of Slavery in Africa and Asia right now. Figures show more slaves there right now than were taken from Africa during the transatlantic Slave Trade... But somehow that doesn't get you that worked up. Maybe in some way you don't--as a matter of emotional fact--blame the slaveholders so much in this case as you blame postcolonial contexts? So, somehow, African slaveholders in Sudan aren't full moral agents? How could that be?... Think of the leverage we lost when we gave up on that simple story of progress, especially in relation to the young, for whom "fairness," embryo of the ideal of justice, is so fundamental... Pragmatists (Pragmatism) like Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish may also decline this proffer. They will say, Sure, let's invoke that Enlightenment principle when it works for us, but not when it doesn't...

Have you actually become (or were you always) just a Liberal after all? Were your pretensions to Radicalism mostly a matter of style, of self-image? Have you been working for the realization of something beyond bourgeois democracy--or have you just been aiming for reform? If what your politics really envisions is Global New Deal meets Respect for Diversity, that's one thing. That means you are a liberal. That means you basically accept a world system of Private Enterprise and technological innovation and Consumer culture, and you want to see it managed so that no one is excluded, the environment is protected, free expression (Free Speech) flourishes, and so on. And you can be very active in all sorts of obvious ways, if this is what you are. If, on the other hand, you are a Radic Al, the ironic implication is this: there isn't much to do right now to distinguish yourself from liberals. Toss a few rocks at a StarBucks during the next WTO meeting if you want, but don't mistake such gestures for genuinely radical responses. What radicals should be doing right now is studying and thinking. You need to put in your ten years at the library, the way Karl Marx did. You need to be figuring out what makes human beings tick and what, if any, direction is to be found in history. And I don't mean some half-assed sci-fi anarcho-Gaia nonsense you cobbled together before you dropped out of Bard; I mean serious study, working toward an alternative to a global Bourgeois democracy. What radicals need most right now isn't action but theory.

(Note I still disagree with his Progressive conclusions.)