Militant liberals in need of think

Madeleine Bunting, Guardian News Service, London

Why is it that a significant section of liberal and left- leaning opinion has signed up with such relish to the "clash of civilizations" argument? Its champions in the media may not phrase it as such, but you can hear the creak of the drawbridge being pulled up: They believe they are surrounded by enemies -- Muslims and their dastardly non-Muslim apologists -- and must defend to the last man the checklist of universal Enlightenment values that sustain their mission. Their most ferocious firepower is directed at former allies on the left whom they regard as yet to see the light.

But this is much more than a bad-tempered squabble among liberals and progressives. The clash of civilizations has become a pet project among a part of the political elite to distract from the temper of our time. I'll come to the nature of the project -- and why it's a dangerous dead end -- in a moment, but it's the temper of our time that we have to grasp first to understand what the "muscular liberals" are trying to dodge.

This late summer of 2005 brings into sharp focus the three dominant characteristics. First, in the UK the process of political exhaustion seems to have reached a nadir; eight years into a Labor government, there are no big battles on the horizon beyond the parish-council politics which seems to have migrated to London -- school dinners, licensing hours and bolshie teenagers. Politics has evacuated the core issues of the distribution of wealth and power to preoccupy itself with the minutiae of child-rearing and eating habits.

But the malaise crippling political life is compounded by political disorientation, as the maverick thinker Frank Furedi points out in a book published this week, Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right. Once the dividing line was the left's faith in the future, the right's respect for the past. Neither is any longer true: The left has no transformative project to deliver and the right gave up on the past long ago; as one of the most revolutionary political parties of late-20th-century Europe, what can the Tories claim to be conserving? We are stuck in a timeless present, with no account of political change -- how it happens, what it does and what we can do with it. Change is something done to us; passivity sets in.

The second characteristic is our fatalism. The fascination with the horror of New Orleans is partly because it echoes the innumerable catastrophes that lurk in our nightmares, from terrorism, avian flu and asteroids to global warming. Fatalism was once the charge leveled at peasants because they didn't believe they could transform their lives. Now it's our turn and we don't even have their religious consolations of believing that our fate is God's will and looking forward to an afterlife -- all we have is random chance.

The third characteristic is cultural self-doubt. The louder Tony Blair expounds "our values" and "our way of life", the more vacuous the phrases sound. How do British values look to an African? Perhaps they might see through our illusions quicker than we can, and see the brittle, episodic relationships which constitute many lonely lives; the disconnectedness whereby strangers live together as neighbors, colleagues, even friends and lovers, with little knowledge and less commitment to each other; our preoccupation with things; our ever more desperate dependence on stimulants from alcohol to porn.

Faced with such a bleak landscape, is it any wonder that erstwhile leftwing liberals have floundered -- what cause is there left to believe in? -- and then pounced with glee on the project that has taken shape since Sept. 11 and been successively sharpened by the Iraq war and July 7. Scruples about the unsavory rightwing company they are now uncomfortably lodged with -- such as the American neocons -- have been easily squashed. With curious macho posturing, they are "muscular" or "hard" liberals: Enough is enough, we can no longer tolerate the intolerant, is the battle cry.

They raise their standard on Enlightenment values -- their universality, the supremacy of reason and a belief in progress. The west represents the apogee of civilization and all countries can be measured up against its yardstick (and are, of course, found wanting). It is an ideology of superiority that is profoundly old-fashioned -- reminiscent of Victorian liberalism and just as imperialistic.

But even that explanation doesn't entirely account for the enthusiasm with which these muscular liberals inflate the threat from Islam. Again, Furedi throws up some important insights. His analysis of American politics is that the political elite (particularly the media) have seized on values as a form of cod politics. Put simply, instead of economics, same-sex marriage and abortion become the defining issues. It's a cod politics that suits the political elite because it gives them reasons for an argument and an audience (always important for an insatiable media).

The "clash of civilizations" could become Europe's cod politics. So an elite squabbles about Islam's take on gay rights and gender equality in a charade of moralistic grandstanding. Meanwhile, the objection of most European voters to their Muslim minorities doesn't have much to do with either of these issues (on which they are, at best, pretty indifferent) but is much more prosaic -- it's racism. It's how these parallel objections interrelate that gives ground for worry.

This muscular liberal project is dangerous. We live in a shrunken world and millions of people are on the move; one of our biggest challenges is how we learn to live in proximity to difference -- different skin colors, different beliefs, different ways of life. How do we talk peacefully with people with whom we might violently disagree? Not easy, but essential.

Ken Livingstone's engagement with the Muslim scholar Yusuf al- Qaradawi has proved a thorn in the side of the muscular liberals. But the idea of submitting all potential interlocutors to an ideological approval rating will mean we end up talking only to ourselves. Is a reminder necessary that this is a symptom of insanity?

Furthermore, this muscular liberal project is a dead end. It's a nostalgic grab for old certainties. It abandons the difficult but necessary task of reworking those precious Enlightenment values if we are to shake off our passive fatalism and reinvigorate our political imagination.

Here is a quick list of some of the Enlightenment legacy that we need to keep working on: the relationship of reason to emotion and faith (of all kinds, not just religious, most particularly our faith in humanity); a broader account of human nature beyond the bankrupted belief in the perfectibility of man; more meanings of freedom than the freedom to shop; a much better understanding of what individuality is (rather than the sham version we see lauded today) and its relationship to the collective. From such work, new understandings of progress could emerge.

For the muscular liberals so loudly and so emptily proclaiming their own superiority, it is anathema to suggest that the insights of Islam might have a bearing on many of these issues and could even contribute to a renaissance in western thought. But it's worth reminding them that it's done just that before.