Category: books

Over Catherine de Vries en Jesse Frederik

Vooropgesteld: ik zou ook nerveus worden als Jesse Frederik een weekend lang ging checken of ik mijn werk wel goed deed.

Ik hoop dat ik in zo’n situatie eerlijk zou reageren. Ik ben niet geschokt dat er wel eens iets kan schorten aan empirisch-statistisch politicologisch onderzoek – dat lijkt me namelijk een ontzettend ingewikkeld vakgebied. Ik schrijf dit omdat ik teleurgesteld was door de zwakke reactie van Catherine de Vries op Frederiks kritiek op haar boek, De symfonie van onvrede. In haar repliek gingen een heleboel dingen mis die ik hier wil benoemen.

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In Timur Vermes’ best-selling novel Er ist wieder da (‘He’s back’), Adolf Hitler wakes up in Berlin. Somewhat disoriented after discovering the year is 2011, he soon finds his way to the public eye again: he is understandably regarded as a skilled Hitler impersonator, an excellent ironic act for a 21^st-century comedy show. His handlers don’t mind the fact that he never breaks character.

Clips make it to YouTube, and the ‘Führer’ becomes a beloved persona. After humiliating the ineffectual leader of a far-right fringe party, he is assaulted by skinheads. Politicians express their sympathies, a book deal follows. The novel ends with its main character at the head of an up-and-coming party, whose slogan is: Es war nicht alles schlecht – “it wasn’t all bad”.

Vermes puts Hitler in a Germany that believes it is finally able to laugh at him, or at itself through him. Commercial media encourage his popularity, which at first seems tongue-in-cheek but gradually turns out to be more than that. The country is unprepared for his literal-minded and violent racist madness – and for the traction it subtly gathers, the threads in our own discourse that it starts to pull on again. Everyone thinks they know Hitler, but fails to recognize him when he is among us now.

I thought of this story again as I read historian Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. Ryrie’s thesis is that after the Second World War, the Atlantic and European world placed Hitler at the center of the Western value system (as its negative mirror image). This went at the cost of another historical figure, whose return we have similarly stopped expecting: in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jesus had represented a moral authority that was deeply felt not just by Christians, but also by free-thinkers and atheists. In the mid-twentieth century, Nazism became the new moral absolute. This model lasted for decades, but Ryrie discerns a new cultural shift, one that is happening now. With the age of Atlantic hegemony, the ‘age of Hitler’ is coming to an end too. What lies beyond it is still up for grabs.

(voor Over de Muur)

Maarten Boudry’s nieuwe boek, Het verraad aan de verlichting, gaat over hoe progressieven in onze tijd de waarden en idealen van de Verlichting verloochenen. Postmodernisme en westerse zelfhaat zitten volgens hem een betere toekomst in de weg. Zijn kritiek mist echter vaak doel.  

Met Verlichting bedoelt Boudry een houding van vertrouwen in wetenschap, technologie en vooruitgang. Het eerste hoofdstuk is dan ook een veeg uit de pan naar postmoderne relativisten die in de tweede helft van de vorige eeuw het geloof in waarheid, rationaliteit en rechtvaardigheid hebben ondermijnd. Foucault, Derrida, en Bruno Latour bijvoorbeeld. Zij ontzeggen ons de mogelijkheid te appelleren aan een gedeelde werkelijkheid. Zo kreeg Latour nooit de zin over zijn lippen dat klimaatopwarming gewoon een ‘objectief feit’ is, merkt Boudry op. 

Dat is een klassiek bezwaar tegen postmodernisme, dat teruggaat op de science wars van de jaren ’90. Mijn vraag is wel waar al die relativisten intussen gebleven zijn. Progressieven hebben heden ten dage geen enkele moeite met woorden als ‘facts’, ‘science’ en ‘justice’. Boudry is dat niet ontgaan, en zijn uitleg is dat mensen selectief dingen deconstrueren waar ze toch al van af wilden; relativisme over klimaatwetenschap hoeven we van linkse academici (met uitzondering dus van Latour) in de regel niet te verwachten.  

Relativeert dat niet het gevaar van relativisme als geheel? Niet volgens Boudry; reactionaire krachten hebben de kunst van het twijfel-zaaien namelijk met succes afgekeken, zodat we rechtse klimaatscepsis indirect te danken hebben aan linkse sociologen. Als dat klopt is het een aardig staaltje historische ironie, maar blijft onduidelijk wat progressieven nu nog te verwijten valt. De daders die Boudry aanklaagt zijn in elk geval reeds overleden. 

(For 3 Quarks Daily)

I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned that I am rather strongly disposed these days to connect everything to contemporary politics.

Whether the poem explores forms of resistance after the battle to depose a ruthless dictator has been lost, or whether Satan is an opportunistic agitator, campaigning on draining the swamp but in fact only out to be worshipped himself – or both – modern analogies easily suggest themselves. William Empson compared Milton’s God to Joseph Stalin.[1] If I don’t name names, it is out of respect both for you the reader and for the heroes in Milton’s poem, which are more eloquent, less petty, and show more depth than their counterparts in present-day anti-democratic politics.

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

Even after discussing Daniel Chandler’s inspiring application of John Rawls in my previous column, I remain on the lookout for a book that delivers a sweeping, original and sound vision for the future of the liberal and democratic world, saves it from its social problems through policy proposals that are simultaneously transformative and unthreatening (enough for all interested parties to accept and implement them immediately), and provides a sure and painless path to undercutting popular support for illiberal and authoritarian politics. Ideally, it also solves climate change and ends factory farming, and does not require me personally to change too much. Disappointingly, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, only achieves some of these things.

More here

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

In 2015, political scientist Larry Diamond warned against defeatism in the face of what he called the democratic recession. “It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose faith. […] If the current modest recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in the established democracies were our own worst enemies.” A few years later, as the world’s most powerful democracy had decided to play out that darker option, Diamond wrote with more urgency about how to protect liberal democracy worldwide. In Ill winds, he emphasized the need to provide not only a rejection of alternatives, but a positive vision. “Democracy must demonstrate that it is a just and fair political system that advances humane values and the common good.”

Daniel Chandler places his book Free and Equal (2023) in this same context: for fifteen years in a row, more countries have experienced democratic backsliding than improvement, and the threatened state of democracy worldwide makes it “tempting to go on the defensive”. However, just playing defense is not enough; an ambitious vision for improvement is necessary. “In a moment that calls for creativity and boldness, all too often we find timidity or, worse, scepticism and cynicism”. Chandler believes he has found a recipe for combining the values of liberalism with the spirit of progress and reform.

More here