Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House, 2010), 304 pp., $26.00.
In 1927, the French writer Julien Benda, then best known for his formidable critique of the “intuitionist” philosophy of Henri Bergson, published a short, polemical book called La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals). In it, Benda excoriated the leading French intellectuals of the day, accusing them of having forsaken their duty to dispassionate thought in favor of polemics in the service of political passions. His principal targets were thinkers on the French right—figures like Charles Maurras, the leader of the monarchist Action Française movement, and the writer Charles Péguy. But Benda’s polemic was directed at all politicizations of the intellect, and he attacked Marxists and Zionists, whom Benda, a Jew himself, called “idolaters of their blood.” Famous in its own time, his book itself is little read today, but the expression “treason of the intellectuals” as a shorthand for intellectual cowardice is now as embedded in the language as “Brave New World” is for repressive utopian societies or “1984" for totalitarian ones.
Norman Podhoretz staked his claim on Orwell on behalf of his fellow neoconservatives back in the early years of the Reagan administration, writing that had the author been alive, he would have been “with [us] and against the left.” From the opposite shore politically, Patricia Williams, a Columbia law professor and columnist for The Nation, wrote in 2007 that “Orwell would have had no trouble cutting through the cowpokey folksiness and spewed malapropisms of President George W. Bush.” Such exercises are invariably adventures in special pleading. It is wholly impossible to know what Orwell, who died at the beginning of 1950, would have made of the decolonized, U.S.-dominated, far more gender-equal world of our time. The landscape is so different from his own that surely his first challenge, before choosing a political side, would have been to get his bearings.
Benda produces a similar response. A number of European and North American intellectuals—some self-identified neoconservatives, others “reformed” leftists who would of late call themselves antitotalitarians—have found in The Treason of the Intellectuals a template for explaining what they view as the incapacity of their contemporaries to stand up for the Enlightenment values currently under assault by a resurgent Islamism. As Roger Kimball, a coeditor of the neoconservative magazine The New Criterion, put it in his preface to a 2006 edition of Benda’s book, this betrayal has rendered us powerless against the “depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as their truth.” And claims to be the inheritor of his mantle have come from the Left as well. For example, Edward Said, toward whom neoconservative intellectuals bear more animus than perhaps anyone except my late mother, was a huge admirer of The Treason of the Intellectuals and discussed it at length in his 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC. It is by no means clear why polemicists on either the left or the right believe that they can discern what Benda, with his idealization of dispassionate, “universal” thought at odds with political passions of every kind, would have made of the attitudes of Western intellectuals confronted by militant Islamism in their own countries as well as in the Muslim world itself.
Nevertheless, Paul Berman, a writer who, having started on the Democratic left is by now probably America’s best known and certainly its most unrepentant liberal interventionist, clearly believes that he can. For, though he mentions Benda only once in his new book, the title he chose for it, The Flight of the Intellectuals, is such a clear echo of Benda’s own. Berman’s mimicry has the added advantage of being an I’m-assuming-the-mantle-of twofer in that it also echoes, though he mentions neither the book nor its author, the great French political theorist Raymond Aron’sThe Opium of the Intellectuals, published in 1955, which Roger Kimball (again!) accurately summarized as being an indictment of leftist intellectuals who were “merciless toward the failings of democracies but ready to tolerate the worst crimes as long as they are committed in the name of proper doctrines.”
Aron’s theme would be taken up more than two decades later by the so-called French New Philosophers. Although they were mostly former members of the Far Left who had become anti-Marxists, their energies were principally directed not against Communism itself but rather, in Berman’s own apt formulation, the Western intellectuals who had “kept on deluding themselves about the Soviet Union, and then about communist China, Cuba, and other such regimes,” even in the face of “ever-growing mountains of evidence over the course of the twentieth century” about the terrible reality of these societies. In much the same way, Berman’s aim in his book, as he remarked recently in an interview with journalist Michael J. Totten, was to analyze why so many “intelligent people [in the West] are running away from looking at some very influential and pernicious doctrines of our own time.” That doctrine, of course, is Islamism.
BERMAN’S CASE study is an exhaustive—not to say, obsessive—exercise in comparison between the ways two distinguished Western writers, Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, have, in his opinion inexcusably, treated the Swiss-born Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan as an Islamic moderate worthy of respect, while dismissing the Somali-born former–Dutch parliamentarian and feminist activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. By his own account, Berman came to his subject because of his fascination with Ramadan as a figure, whose reputation as “an admirable young reforming moderate in the world of Islamic religious thinkers” had led Berman to think of him as “a good guy.” (Of Berman’s fondness for dividing the world firmly into “good guys” and “bad guys,” more later.) The more Berman read of Ramadan’s work and the more he learned about him, the more convinced he became that he is anything but a moderate. Ramadan, he argues, has beguiled liberal Westerners desperate to find a reasonable interlocutor—a “great Muslim hope"—with pronouncements that seem to suggest that he upholds the classic liberal values of women’s rights, democratic liberties and tolerance. But this, Berman argues, is largely window dressing. In reality, Ramadan “wants us to revere the most vicious and reactionary of Islamist sheikhs—the people who promote violence, bigotry, totalitarianism, and terror.” And yet, Berman laments, too many Western intellectuals refuse to face this, preferring instead “to shut their eyes and hope for the best.”
If the views of a well-known and influential but hardly all-powerful European Muslim intellectual and the reception of those views in the Western mainstream seem so important to Berman, it is because he believes that Ramadan has “become a representative man of our age. . . . a collision point.” The favorable press coverage he has received may have been animated by “earnest good intentions,” Berman allows, but it is inspired at least as much, if not more, “by squeamishness and fear. And by less-than-good intentions.” Berman boasts that in choosing this theme, he has found his way “to a central debate of our moment—the debate over Islamist ideas in the Western countries, and over the reluctance of journalists and intellectuals from Western backgrounds to grapple seriously with the Islamist ideas.” For Berman, just as Ramadan represents a new and important (and, of course, in Berman’s view overwhelmingly negative) trend among pious Muslims in the West, so the favorable treatment he has received in the Western media serves to illustrate an equally negative trend among those Berman describes as “normally impious” Western journalists, who, he suggests, have abandoned their critical faculties, whether out of blindness, postimperial guilt, intimidation, cultural relativism or some combination of all of them.
For all of Berman’s self-infatuation—his book is shot through with braggadocious formulations such as “I have pondered” this, “disentangled” that and “discovered” the other—he is not quite vulgar enough to accuse these Western writers of what in some right-wing circles in the United States, the UK and France is now routinely called dhimmitude (a neologism of French origin that denotes an attitude of surrender, concession and appeasement to Muslim demands). But his bill of indictment amounts to pretty much the same thing. Following in the line of the French New Philosopher Pascal Bruckner, whom he cites often and praises with a fulsomeness verging on absurdity, Berman insists that, where Islamism is concerned, Western intellectuals like Buruma and Garton Ash can “no longer reliably tell black from white.” Berman tends to quote others when he wants to deliver his harshest judgments—an act of “ventriloquism” that, for a man obsessed with the need for intellectual courage, is, well, not as courageous as it might be. And we see this rhetorical tactic employed again and again, as when he refers to the German writer Ulrike Ackermann’s denunciation of Garton Ash as a “fellow traveler” of Ramadan.
But when he is not quoting the fiery pronouncements of like-minded European writers he admires, Berman employs so mild a tone and so curiously convoluted a sentence structure that it is difficult to know where sincerity ends and sarcasm begins. “I have selected Ian Buruma’s journalism as my chosen example of the intellectual atmosphere of our moment,” he writes, “the atmosphere at its most refined and sophisticated, its most admirably engaged.” It is only eighty-four pages later that Berman comes out and says what has clearly been the subtext of his argument all along—that Buruma’s apologia for Ramadan and his criticisms of Berman’s heroine inThe Flight of the Intellectuals, the Dutch Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and her criticisms of Islam, is emblematic of a catastrophically “reactionary turn in the intellectual world.” One that was unheard of in recent European history “except on the extreme right,” it is a movement now being led by people like Buruma, whom, Berman avers, “until just yesterday, I myself had always regarded as the best of the best.”
GOOD GUYS and bad guys again, or rather, a good guy gone wrong: oh, the disappointment! Not that Berman’s hero worship of Ayaan Hirsi Ali is anything new. A previous book of his, Power and the Idealists, portrays its principal subjects, Joschka Fischer, Bernard Kouchner and Daniel Cohn-Bendit—three May ‘68ers turned mainstream European politicians—in quasi-hagiographical terms. Berman rejects, in some cases in defiance of the facts (as he does with Kouchner’s sordid involvement in trying to help the French oil company Total whitewash its activities in Burma), any stain on his chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche. And as with many drawn to idealization, Berman is drawn to demonization as well. That he denounces without fulminating proves little; indeed, it illustrates beautifully Freud’s teacher Jean-Martin Charcot’s clinical description of “the beautiful calm of the hysteric.” Eager to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali against what he believes to be Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s calumnies and condescension (it is not clear which outrages him more), Berman practically turns her into a Joan of Arc–like figure. In his first reference to Hirsi Ali, Berman salutes the fact that here at last was “someone not afraid to proclaim her opinions.” A bit later, he describes her as a “rebel soul,” even if the journalists Berman is bent on exposing fail to appreciate the fact. Further on, she is “a persecuted liberal dissident from Africa.” And further on still, Berman waxes lyrical about her “commitment to the Enlightenment.”
But Berman’s admiration for Hirsi Ali at times seems almost to depend on his distaste for Ramadan—thesis and antithesis, to use the old leftist boilerplate. Thus, Ramadan is the proud grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who, in turn, was an associate of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the 1930s, who, in his turn, was a Nazi sympathizer who met with Hitler and recruited for the Waffen SS in Bosnia. Ramadan is also an admirer of the medieval Sufi philosopher al-Ghazali, who Berman argues is responsible for causing medieval Islam to turn away from ancient Greek philosophy and embrace obscurantism.
Against this festival of ignorance and prejudice, Berman holds up Hirsi Ali as a paladin of the Western Enlightenment. Without irony, Berman writes that Hirsi Ali “nominated herself” for the role of Voltaire and then adds, “even if, as she has made clear, Locke, Spinoza, John Stuart Mill, Russell and Karl Popper have likewise influenced her thinking, not to mention Mary Wollstonecraft, the author, in 1792, of A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” How this influence has manifested itself, Berman does not say. But this rota of the great and the good of Western civilization is presented as if it demonstrated something of significance about Hirsi Ali. It seems unlikely: Voltaire I can believe, and Wollstonecraft too. But Spinoza? Really? And Locke on the nature of reason, Mill on utilitarianism, Russell on mathematics or Popper on historicism? If Hirsi Ali has been “influenced” by them, as Berman asserts, it was almost certainly their political opinions, not the work that made people pay attention to those opinions in the first place. Berman is profoundly indignant that people like Buruma and Garton Ash do not take Hirsi Ali seriously enough, but he does not help his cause with such hyperbole.
THIS HYPERBOLE colors (and to my mind undercuts) Berman’s efforts to impeach Ramadan’s commitment to a moderate, European Islam and to paint him as a secret Islamist hard-liner largely through guilt-by-family-association (and Ramadan’s unwillingness to disown these links). “Tariq Ramadan,” Berman writes, “is nothing if not a son, a brother, a grandson and even a great-grandson—family relations that appear to shape everything he writes and does, and that certainly shape how other people perceive what he writes and does.” To put it charitably, this is a gross oversimplification. It is certainly true that being Hassan al-Banna’s grandson guaranteed Ramadan a hearing in the Muslim world, but then one could say with equal certainty that being born to great wealth guaranteed the best known of the New Philosophers, Bernard Henri-Lévy, whom Berman unsurprisingly praises to the skies in The Flight of the Intellectuals, a hearing in France. Berman’s argument is that by refusing to repudiate his grandfather, Ramadan must be a partisan of what Berman calls “the Islam of fanaticism and hatred.” Further evidence of his guilt: writing what Berman correctly characterizes as an adulatory biography of al-Banna, glossing over or denying that his grandfather’s political legacy leads directly from the Muslim Brotherhood, through the pro-Nazi sympathies and virulent Jew hatred of the grand mufti, to Hamas and al-Qaeda. For Berman, Ramadan is an extremist—no matter what he says to gullible Westerners like Buruma and Garton Ash.
The problem is that it is a conclusion that does not necessarily follow. The friendship between al-Banna and the mufti was real enough, as was al-Banna’s anti-Zionism. Whether this was a case of Judeophobia, as Berman insists, or the old adage in war that the enemy of my enemy is my friend is debatable (a faction within Irish republicanism during World War II not only sympathized but also collaborated with the Nazis without anti-Semitism being a factor, and similar examples can be found in a number of anticolonial movements throughout the British Empire). What is unquestionably true is that from the 1940s on, the Arab media generally, not only those elements of it sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and its descendants, has disgraced itself by conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. For Berman, Ramadan’s refusal to put this exterminationist anti-Semitism at the center of his account of his grandfather, and, worse, his denial of this and most, if not all, of his grandfather’s other racist, gynophobic and Muslim-supremacist views is dispositive.
But is it? Berman himself concedes that Ramadan has condemned Islamism’s violent strain, but in effect insists that this condemnation is not credible because, in Ramadan’s The Roots of the Muslim Renewal, he exculpates his uncle and shifts the blame onto Sayyid Qutb, who became one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood only after al-Banna’s assassination in 1949 at the hands of the Egyptian secret police, or even onto Qutb’s disciples. Berman also remarks in passing that Ramadan’s project is not just to preserve but also to “adapt” his grandfather’s ideas. What Berman refuses to engage with is the possibility that there is more to these ideas than Jew hatred and Islamist totalitarianism. If that is indeed the case, then Berman is right, but apart from pointing to Ramadan’s whitewashing of his grandfather, Berman offers no real evidence that his subject’s condemnation of terrorism and anti-Semitism, and his embrace of democratic pluralism in Europe, are simply a smoke screen.
And sanitizing the biographies of great leaders (and, for that matter, great philosophers) from the past hardly began with Tariq Ramadan or is restricted to the Muslim world. We speak, and correctly so, of adapting Woodrow Wilson’s ideas about global affairs to the present, without believing them to be invalidated—and thus demanding of rejection—because Woodrow Wilson was one of the most racist figures in all of American history and is also responsible for initiating some of the more sanguinary U.S. imperial ventures in the Caribbean. In any case, Berman does not really even have the courage of his convictions on the matter.
AT THE end of a long section in The Flight of the Intellectuals on the fascist influence on the Islamist cause, al-Banna’s fundamental totalitarianism and his friend the mufti’s conspiring with the Nazis to exterminate the Jews of Palestine in the event that Field Marshal Rommel’s Afrika Korps defeated the British in North Africa, Berman quotes Surah 4, verse 22, from the Koran of all things, to the effect that “what is past is past.” Ramadan, Berman writes, “is not his grandfather, and Rommel was defeated, and what are we to think of Ramadan and the meaning of his doctrines and historical interpretations for our own time?”
Good question. It’s a pity Berman chooses to ask it almost halfway through his book, on page 126. If he really believes this, he should have begun there. If he doesn’t, he should stop trying to cover his ass. In fact, for all his accusations against Ramadan, and his endorsement of far more strident ones made by people like Ackermann and Bruckner, Berman actually doesn’t know what he thinks of the man. He admitted as much in a recent panel discussion sponsored by Guernica magazine, saying that Ramadan “remains something of a cipher or mystery to me. . . . On the one hand, Tariq Ramadan is calling for a peaceful and liberal and admirable adaptation of the old ideas. And on the other hand, he promotes the worst of violent sheiks.”
That’s it? Endless reading, endless research, 299 pages of dense, overheated prose, with its tropism toward “logic chopping and Talmudic-style micro-exegesis,” to use Christopher Hitchens’s description in his memoir, Hitch-22, of the intellectual style of the Trotskyism of his youth, and this is the best Berman can do? One weeps for the trees. Hyperbole aside, what is so ridiculous is that Buruma made precisely the point that it is indeed unclear what Ramadan truly stands for in his New York Times Magazine profile of the man that set Berman off in the first place. What’s more, exactly the same question can be found in the writings of those other Western intellectuals, like Garton Ash and George Packer, whom Berman so recklessly and unjustifiably accuses of complacency either bordering on, or spilling over into, cowardice.
The elephant having given birth to a flea, all that Berman really has left is fury over the way in which, as he sees it, Buruma and Garton Ash are more critical of Ayaan Hirsi Ali than of Tariq Ramadan. Buruma’s repeated statements—one of which Berman cites, only to impugn it—that he admires Hirsi Ali “‘and agree[s] with most of what she stands for’” cut no ice with him. Berman knows Buruma was attacking her in Murder in Amsterdam, his book on the assassination of the Dutch filmmaker and critic of Islam, Theo van Gogh, by the Dutch-born Islamist Mohammed Bouyeri (though, again speaking of “courage” and the lack of it, Berman shifts responsibility for such a conclusion away from himself and onto Pascal Bruckner and unnamed other people). And Berman also knows that Islamist intimidation and the fear of terrorism are behind the “string of bumbles, gaffes, timidities, slanders, miscomprehensions and silences” put forward by people like Buruma and Garton Ash in their writings about Islamism.
IN HITCH-22, Christopher Hitchens sums up the sectarian mind-set as one in which “if your opponent thought he had identified your lowest possible motive, he was quite certain that he had isolated the only real one.” This is Berman’s method to a T. Of course, he has a rather different evaluation of what he has done. In his preface, which begins with Berman dedicating the book toThe New Republic‘s longtime proprietor, Martin Peretz, and its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier, Berman praises their long-standing editorial commitment to complexity. While such a commitment is demonstrably and unquestionably true of Wieseltier, it is, with regard to Islam at least, not one often associated with Peretz, who is on record as having compared the Koran toMein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto.1
In any case, it is by no means entirely clear what Berman means by this inscription. It seems as if he views the term “complexity” as synonymous with elaboration, which is part of its meaning but hardly all of it. There is certainly no doubt that Berman is an elaborator of Olympic caliber. The nucleus of The Flight of the Intellectuals was a twenty-eight-thousand-word essay in The New Republic. Now, in book form, Berman has expanded it to more than three times that length, without saying anything in the longer form that deepens or, yes, complicates his argument. Instead, he elaborates, and elaborates, and elaborates. Complexity also implies nuance, and unfortunately in that sense of the word, to begin reading The Flight of the Intellectuals is to enter a nuance-free zone. Hirsi Ali is the book’s heroine; Ramadan is its principal villain—a liar and a closet fundamentalist. In supporting roles, Buruma and Garton Ash are cowards, while Bruckner, Ackermann, French essayist Alain Finkielkraut and Caroline Fourest, the author of a swingeing book attacking Ramadan in much the same terms Berman employs, are people of courage, people who, unlike most of their counterparts, have not sold out because of their fear of Islamist terror or because they are intellectually and morally crippled by Western guilt. And OED to you too.
Does Berman, who is now well over sixty, really believe in the credibility from a human standpoint of the story he has told? In its utter lack of ambiguity, does it conform to any adult reality he has experienced in his private life? And if not, what makes him assume public motivations and actions can be clear-cut in ways that private ones never are? Was he never assailed by the worry that the reality of the situation he wanted to describe was probably far more complex than the morality play he ended up producing? Only Berman can answer these questions (and since he is famous for replying to any criticism of his work, usually at far greater length than the original commentary, doubtless he will). But it is difficult for me to understand how a writer of his intelligence and experience could hew so resolutely to an account so Manichaean that it would make a Parsi blush.
David Rieff is the author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2003) and At the Point Of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (2005). His most recent book,Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008), is about the death of his mother, the novelist and critic Susan Sontag.
