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by Katrina Gulliver

Amitav Ghosh (Photo by David Shankbone, released under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Licence/Wikimedia)

River of Smoke follows Sea of Poppies, as the second instalment of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy. We arrive on the eve of the Opium Wars in a story that began not in Canton, but in India, where the poppies were grown. Sea of Poppies showed us the world of the growers in Bengal, and the social order built upon its profits. Local landowners profited by keeping the growers in a state of indebtedness, and the British traders ran factories and shipped the drug to China.

Ghosh illustrated the rich details of opium production, from its harvest to its packaging in earthenware balls for shipment. The sailors transporting it introduced us to life at sea, and to their other cargo: the people who had been sold (or offered themselves into) indentured servitude. The characters were all connected by the ship Ibis, having been on board during its voyage from Calcutta to Mauritius—as crew, indentured servants, or in the case of two characters: as convicts being transported.

River of Smoke begins perhaps fifty years later, then backtracks to take up where Sea of Poppies left off. Two of the primaries in the first novel, Deeti and Zachary, are barely mentioned in this book: I hope they return in the third (and there are hints that they will). In this volume, Neel, the deposed-raja-turned-convict of Sea of Poppies, comes to the fore, along with a new character—a Parsi trader from Bombay. But the maelstrom of characters means that there is no single protagonist.

This second book follows the path of the opium to its trade in Canton. The heterogeneous world of the Indian Ocean trading community is again clearly illustrated, with discursions into botany, painting, and the varied food available in each port. The subaltern can indeed speak in these books: characters who are of the “elite” are not the focus, rather those lower on the ladder, more directly affected by all aspects of the drug trade.

In River of Smoke, Ghosh’s style is varied, with some of the narrative in epistolary form. These changes of register are a little odd at times, and seeing only one half of a correspondence (for reasons that are explained in the narrative), still leaves the recipient, Paulette (a major figure in Sea of Poppies) little more than a cipher here. (With the changes of viewpoint and language, I was reminded of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas).

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Opium smokers in China, c. 1900. Illustration from Mrs. Archibald Little (=Alicia Bewicke): The Land of the Blue Gown, London 1902. Reproduction: Wikimedia/public domain.

In Canton, we see the politicking of the traders on the brink of the First Opium War, in which some of them come off as unapologetic drug pushers, like those on The Wire. (They even talk the same way as those dealers, with at one point, a character saying “It’s all in the game”). In the previous sixty years, demand for opium had skyrocketed in China, indeed doubling just between 1800 and 1820. In the late 1830s, the Chinese authorities decided to start enforcing the laws against opium trade in the country, and banning its importation. Faced with their trade being shut down, the traders included men of conscience willing to abandon the trade as well as blatant profiteers. Caught in the middle were the smaller traders, who —whatever their misgivings—were bound to their investors and would be ruined if unable to sell their narcotic cargo.

Ghosh also highlights the (suggested) homosexuality of the male-only world of foreign traders in Canton (since foreign women are not permitted into the city). The men dance together at parties, and gay relationships seem to be acknowledged if not widely accepted. Of course, these men also form relationships with local women, or flower-boat girls. Long-distance trade that could keep men away from home for months at a time also resulted in more serious liaisons than prostitution: a mistress and children in one city with a wife and family in another seems to have been a common arrangement.

In Sea of Poppies, the fate of almost all the women seemed to involve sexual violence or enslavement, and scenes of cruelty were particularly affecting. The sadistic exploitation of the disempowered was perhaps a parallel of the exploitation of the opium trade and colonial system as a whole. In the second book, female characters are less prominent, and we see fewer examples of brutality, which was something of a relief.

We do encounter the details of opium intoxication, which seems to be indulged, furtively or openly, by members of all races and classes. Indeed, people at all stages of the trade seem to be enslaved to the drug. Opium had developed its own culture, its rituals—the fancy pipes, the varieties of opium, the techniques of ingestion. As Julia Lowell, in her new book The Opium War, (Pan MacMillan, 2011), comments, “A way of burning money, smoking was the perfect act of conspicuous consumption” (p.23).

As Lowell points out, the rulers of British India, through their monopoly on the production of opium in Bengal, had enforced quality control: consumers were getting a pure product. A product that was fashionably illicit. By the time of River of Smoke, opium use had shifted from being an elite pastime to one reaching all layers of society.

In an accurate depiction of the cosmopolitan diversity of colonial ports at this time, the white characters are much in the minority. Paulette Lambert the only “European” of the principals in this book, and she is somewhat unusual. She represents the cultural go-between position of the European child raised in India, speaking as her first language the Bengali of her wet-nurse. She—and her childhood friend, Robin, who appears in this novel—are members of a kind of empire culture that was fading by the 1830s. That period, which was described in William Dalrymple’s White Mughals (Viking, 2003), was marked by cultural assimilation, with some European men (whether colonial officials or private traders) adopting local costume, and taking local wives.

This changed, however, with the “arrival of the Memsahibs”—when white women started arriving in significant numbers in colonial Asia. Once the British men started taking their white wives and families to live in their colonial postings, the goal was to maintain an image of respectability, and a European life-style. The idea of “going native” was regarded with disdain. The British started dressing as they would in England, and more crucially abandoning the local wives/mistresses that had been tolerated by the East India Company. But that could not erase the Eurasian community that had developed, and the liminal position of such individuals is a recurrent theme among Ghosh’s characters.

As in Sea of Poppies, much of the dialogue is in various dialects—in this novel the pidgin of the Canton trading port. A glossary was provided at the back of the first novel, which may still be required to understand much of the what is said. (I would also have appreciated a list of dramatis personae to keep track of some of the more peripheral figures). But even without fully understanding them, the rhythms of the language evoke the whirl of life in a trade port. The narrative is so absorbing, that here Ghosh builds too on the hints at the supernatural that first appeared in Sea of Poppies: these characters are all linked socially, by blood, or by an apparent psychic force. They experience reincarnation—literal and metaphorical—as they take on each other’s roles in the social hierarchy.

Some of the coincidences add to the almost fairy tale element of this novel. Two characters wind up explaining the Canton trade to Napoleon, when their vessel happens to pass St Helena and they are granted an audience with the exiled emperor. Paths cross and lives are entwined, just as romantic encounters seem to take place when characters get tangled in unfurled turbans or saris.

The many descriptions of sumptuous clothing had me reaching for an encyclopedia to identify the various garments:

‘In Zadig’s case, these consisted of a sumptuous burumcuk caftan, trimmed with ermine, and an embroidered Yerevan waistcoat; for Bahram they were a silver-grey ‘Mughalai’ pyjama with an ornamental izarband drawstring; it was worn with a knee-length outer garment, worn in the fashion of a coat—a choga of blue silk, with a raised collar made of strips of golden kinkhab ribbon.’

Through their clothing, Ghosh tells us much about these figures and their lives, which is not explained in the narrative. We come to know them by their costumes, and what these costumes mean, socially and culturally.

At two volumes, each of 500 pages, this trilogy will indeed be an epic. I do not know if the intention with the final volume is to focus on opium’s end consumers, but I look forward to seeing how these intertwined lives are resolved.

Amitav Ghosh: River of Smoke
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2011.
ISBN-13: 9780719568985
Hardcover, 528 pages, US$28.00 

Katrina Gulliver is a cultural historian and postdoctoral research fellow based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current project examines the development of four colonial port cities, Malacca, Havana, Pondicherry and New Orleans, from the early sixteenth century to 1900.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

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by Mohammed Khallouk

The place of Islam in the European public sphere

Nilüfer Göle (source: EHESS, original photo: IHS; thumbnail image is considered 'fair use').

The  Turkish-born sociologist Nilüfer Göle, currently director of studies at l’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris is the author of a number of books in Turkish, German and French, in which she investigates the identity conflicts of young Muslims, especially women, in European society. Several of her books have since been translated into English. Her latest book, an essay with the original French title “Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe”, first published in 2005, was issued in an English version last year by Markus Wiener Publishers; as the title for the English edition, translator Steven Rendall and the publisher chose the phrase “Islam in Europe: The  Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism”. In a somewhat fragmentary way, the author claims for young educated Muslims in Europe to be a part of this continent, although – or maybe because –  Islam with its own value system is a basic element of their identity. The attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent debate were a decisive turning point in the consciousness of Muslims, who realized that they had to find a workable arrangement with Western modernity. The word “Interpénétrations” in the original title was meant to show the non-Muslim majority in the most important European countries that they could no longer continue to ignore the fact that Islam had become part of their civil societies and that, instead, they would have to come to an arrangement with Muslims living among them. Moreover, they would have to accept Muslims as European citizens with their own values and opinions that differ  from those shaped by Christianity as well as those of secular-minded Europeans.

Turkey’s “Third Way” between Islam and European Modernity

A main theme of Göle’s essay is the difficulty for Europeans to define themselves and the European Union as a pluralistic project that includes Islam in a modern interpretation. Europeans need to rid themselves of the thought, promoted by Samuel Huntington’s theory of a ‘clash of civilizations’, that Islamic civilization is a hostile opponent to their own civilization. What is needed is the realization that one can be member of the same civilization, even if one holds on to divergent religious beliefs and value categories. For Göle, the young veil-wearing Muslim women of the third immigrant generation in European cities like Paris or Berlin constitute evidence for her thesis. On the one hand, these women identify with a conservative female role as well as with traditional ethical codes  and sexual morals. On the other hand, they opt for a career of their own and pursue university diplomas and academic positions. As Göle sees it,  Islam, for a whole generation of young women in Central Europe, as well as in Turkey, is a means of becoming part of modernity and of finding their individual way of life in the world of modern Europe. They confront both the non-Muslim majority in Europe and the traditional Kemalist elites in Turkey with a new understanding of secularization – one that does not intend to hide religious symbols, but instead bring them out into the open, without thereby forcing others to submit to them.

In this context, both the ongoing tension between a (self-professed) Islamic-oriented government and the Kemalist elite in Turkey and the European debate about Turkey’s application to join the EU, in Göle’s eyes are equally significant. Indeed, with the help of Göle’s concept of “Interpénétrations”, a ‘Third Way’ between Political Islam and Secularism may be within reach, as may be a Turkey that is a member of a truly multireligious European Union, in which Islam has long been  represented by Muslim immigrants in Western European countries, where they share the public sphere with non-Muslim natives.

Cosmopolitanism as an alternative to radical Islamism and intellectual Islamophobia  

For Göle, the movie “Auf der anderen Seite” (English title: The Edge of Heaven, 2007) by Fatih Akin, a son of Turkish immigrants in Germany, illustrates how the envisaged interpenetration of Turkish Muslim culture with Western European urban culture can work in practice, and how classic European attitudes can likewise become part of the Turkish value system. However, the best example of a  modern European Islam, interpreted as a foundation for a new symbiosis of Islam and Europe, are the young Muslim women mentioned earlier. Although they believe in conservative Islamic values, with many of them wearing a headscarf  and adhering to traditional sexual morals, these women, according to Göle, pose the  most formidable challenge to radical Islamists, since their way of life is evidence of the fusion of the West and Islam – that is, of their own female individuality and religious spirituality, as well as of Oriental tradition and European modernity. Islamist terrorists are their enemies because the latter deny any possibility of finding an arrangement within Western modernity that does not require giving up  their own (“non-Western”) religion.

In summary, one can state that Göle’s essay shows, at many levels, what cosmopolitanism amounts to and in which direction lies the future of a Europe where Islam is a basic ingredient. The book is a stimulating read and presents a wealth of new aspects in the debate about the integration of Muslims into European society with its Christian roots and its basis in secularism. What is missing, unfortunately, is a common thread that would connect the various theses discussed – one that would offer a coherent answer to the question of how all these different aspects might be integrated. Nevertheless, Göle’s essay is recommended reading for anyone in search of a dissenting voice to the image of Islam and Muslim immigrants conveyed by such authors as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Oriana Fallaci, and, most recently, the former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin. Göle’s essay in no way glorifies Islam – least of all of political Islam, which she characterises as a very real danger; instead, she offers the prospect of an Islam that has arrived in the modern world: an Islam that is compatible with European democratic pluralism.

Nilüfer Göle: Islam in Europe. The Lure of Fundamentalism and the Allure of Cosmopolitanism.
Translated by Steven Rendall
Markus Wiener, Princeton 2011.
ISBN-13: 9781558765269
Paperback, 320 pages, US$26.95

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg and the University of the German Federal Armed Forces in Munich. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, which was the topic of his doctoral work. Another research theme of his is the history of the Jewish community in Morocco, which he is writing his Habilitation thesis on. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Bruce Fleming

Two newspaper-headline-grabbing incidents from early 2011 involving words created storms of protest from the political left, which in the last few decades has emerged as more interested than the American right in policing public speech. One incident was criticism after the Tucson, Arizona, shootings of Jan. 8, 2011 (in which Democratic congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was severely injured) of Sarah Palin’s earlier use of gun language and cross-hair imagery to speak of politics. The other was Capt. O.P. Honors’s shipboard movie about sexual issues using terms and images the press called “lewd” that led to his removal, on Jan. 4, 2011, as skipper of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Screenshot of controversial crosshairs map on Sarah Palin's website (Source: Wikimedia/fair use).

The criticism in both cases was that the language or images used had so a close connection to reality that their use constituted a punishable, or at least reprehensible, action. Speaking of Congressional seats or Congress(wo)men as “targets,” as Palin did, and issuing her famous “Don’t retreat, RELOAD!” Tweet seemed to critics connected to the subsequent shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who had earlier warned that those who use images of crosshairs “have to realize that there are consequences to that action.” Palin, in many people’s estimation, then made things worse: she labeled the suggestion her language was in any way involved with the Tucson shootings a “blood libel,” a phrase used for the malicious fiction that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to make Passover matzos. Palin’s camp seemed to find ridiculous the idea that words could be causal: criticism of this later phrase was rejected as “obscene” by an aide.

News reports about Capt. Honors’s videos (made from 2005-2007 for shipboard use when he was the second-in-command) found offensive the fact that the word “fag” was used, as was the euphemism “f-bomb,” and that the word it replaces appeared on the screen. Further, there were scenes of people (undoubtedly real sailors, but for the purposes of these videos, actors) pretending to be same-sex pairs interested in staying in the shower longer than necessary for necessary for hygiene alone.

Capt. Honors, as a military officer, was prohibited from making a response to the criticism, but in an op-ed for the Washington Post (“Capt Honors and the crude videos the Navy needed,” Jan. 11, 2011), I argued that such theatrical and between-quotation-marks use of terms was not the same as using them as part of social interaction, and that the context of a movie offered a useful way of addressing hot topics that everyone was thinking about but were afraid to articulate.

In brief, the relationship between these words and the world was more complex than that implied by correctly noting that Honors or Palin said X or showed image Y. Proposing anal sex to someone, for example, is not the same as using the words “anal sex” in a classroom discussion as one topic of publicly unacceptable jokes—such as I did in my classroom at the U.S. Naval Academy, where I’ve taught for more than two decades. I was “counseled” by our Division Director Marine Colonel for uttering these words and warned to avoid a “hostile working environment” Later I was told I could not explain the medical details of a sex-change operation in response to a student question as this had the same effect. (I had proposed that Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, who is clearly unhappy being a woman, might have fewer problems if she were a man: discuss.)

How do words relate to the world? What’s characterized the political left in recent decades is a general acceptance of the stance of linguistic  idealism: at its extreme, this view— formed by analogy with the philosophical position of idealism that holds our minds make the world rather than existing in it—means that words are the world.  This in turn has led to the insistence on what we call “political correctness,” associated with the political left, with its emphasis on what is said rather than what is thought or done. If words are the world, it’s of utmost importance to police them.

Sarah Palin, then Governor of Alaska, at Fort Richardson in August 2008. (Photo by Capt. Guy Hayes, Alaska National Guard Public Affairs; released into public domain by U.S. Army)

The right, by contrast, tends to see a distinction between what you say and what you do—words are just words. For the right, the world exists independently of our minds, and we, as individual actors, exist in the world. The greatest interest of Palin’s defense of her gun language is her denial of linguistic idealism—even if she doesn’t put it like that—in favor of an underlying view that professional philosophers would call “naïve realism.” This holds that people are agents that act with each other and an independent world using words. Why criticize words? They’re just words.

In Order of Things, Michel Foucault dates the modern age to the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. The defining characteristic of this modern age for my purposes is its general acceptance of the primacy of the mind over that of the world, its common thread of idealism. At least this is true of the educated classes, which, as a result, separated from people who didn’t have the luxury of believing this idealistic dogma, but were stuck with the day to day grind of realism. So the left-right divide is merely one single, political, instantiation of a much larger phenomenon, a separation of sophisticated/educated from the rest that, ironically, mirrors that of the ancien régime that the Modern Age overthrew.

Linguistic idealism as an ideology of the educated classes took off with Romantic artists, usually seen as rebelling against the Industrial Revolution and all the upheavals that characterized their time: for this reason Romanticism was addicted to the myth of a golden pre-Industrial past, the Medieval world.  Romanticism is a rejection of the world as it had become. How could the Romantic artists, such as Baudelaire, be surprised when non-artists interested in making money through industrialization (his hated “bourgeoisie”) hated artists back? The artists of two centuries have found valorization in just how misunderstood they were. And the common-sense men of action, as they increasingly saw themselves in contrast, preened themselves on just how little they were like these effete artists.

According to the Romantic poets, words make the world; poets make words; ergo poets make the world.  Shelley, in his “Defense of Poetry,” held that the language in the “youth of the world” is “vitally metaphorical”; now, however, that we are no longer in this youthful phase of the pre-historic past, language is “dead.”  That, according to Shelley, is why we need poets, who “create afresh the associations which have been thus disorganized”; poets thus remake not only language but the world and thus are the “unacknowledged legislators” of that world. “Poetry . . . makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” This insistence that we need language to (re-)create the world was a primary tenet of the Russian Formalist movement almost a century later, as it is to virtually all post-Romantic theory, even today: according to Victor Shklovsky, the movement’s most skilled polemicist, “art makes the stone stony.” Without art, there would be no perception of the world; the world is made of art. It’s hardly coincidental that this doctrine comes from artists. Do butchers believe the world is made of slabs of animal flesh, which they produce? Perhaps, but they produce meat, not words, so no one is aware of this belief.

The notion of artists that they are essential to the very existence of the world for non-artists is, of course, ludicrous. To believe it, you have to accept the premise of linguistic idealism, that words create the world, or at least that without artists, the world ceases to exist, or to be perceived (Shklovsky held just this). Most people think the world gets along just fine without artists. This fact is the source of the split between “high” and “low” arts after Modernism. “High” arts after Romanticism emphasize medium rather than the message. And for this reason most people have abandoned them in favor of popular music and People magazine.

Modernism is learned, esoteric art: hardly anybody reads Joyce’s Ulysses outside of a college class and few people “get” academic cubism without the critical apparatus. Modernist painting departs from the realization that a painting is a flat surface with square corners and then realized that anything the artist did was art: art is its own end. The average footsore tourist hates the result, as well they might: Modernist art is something done, rather than something to be seen. Many will have encountered holiday-makers who take the time to stroll through the contemporary art museum in the metropolis, only to dismiss its contents with the flip assertion that “my dog/three-year-old could do that.” The educated classes roll their eyes at this: what philistinism!

But the tourists have a point. What they say isn’t correct, of course: the dog may be capable of swishing the canvas with a paint-laden tail, but it wouldn’t put the result in a museum, and this is the definition of contemporary art: art relates to other art. Contemporary art gets its point not from something the uninitiated can see about its relation to a common world—the foundation of the popularity of nineteenth-century  representative arts—but by the historical trail of references to other artworks it drags behind it. The artwork is a relational thing, not something to be perceived head-on. This is sometimes called the “dematerialization of the work of art”: art is gesture, not thing.

As twentieth century painting became abstract, about shapes and forms that expressed the artist’s sensibility, so too twentieth century literary criticism insisted that books were about books, not a world of breathing people. In literary theory there was first  Jacques Derrida (“there is nothing outside the text”) and then Foucault, with his insistence, echoing Nietzsche, that there was no such thing as objective use of language, and that any consideration by a more powerful entity of a less powerful one was an act of domination.

Foucault, in books such as Madness and Civilization, famously set the stage for the conviction of virtually all recent academics in the humanities and social sciences, popularized by Edward Said’s influential Orientalism, that any consideration by the rich West of the relatively penurious and formerly colonized East (or indeed, by extension, any non-Western country) was intrinsically an act of domination.  Words were themselves oppressive; objective consideration was impossible.  What was presented as the enlightened attempt to cure madness in the early nineteenth century was in fact malign, founded on an act of domination: the rounding up of formerly free “village idiots” and incarcerating them under the label of “the insane.” Naming controls, held Foucault. Note, once again, that this is a theory of writers, not soldiers. Soldiers might sooner accept Mao’s “power comes from the barrel of a gun.”

According to the educated, therefore, who generalized the dogmas of Romantic poetry, language makes the world, is the world. This is the class-based linguistic idealism of our day. But it is the reason that the educated go ballistic at the use of words they don’t approve of. And it’s the reason why Palin (see below) rails so shrilly against the educated and powerful, and seems to think that she can speak of “blood libel” without anyone taking offense.

The left-right political split is an instantiation of the split between idealism and realism, that has coalesced into a contrast—a false, absolute, contrast, as I insist— between thought and action. The left insists that individuals are part of a more complex fabric, the right that individuals are the foreground and the primary actors.  Words don’t kill people, Palin might say, people do—and the gun lobby’s insistence that it’s not guns either that do so, but rather people, is yet another working-out of this world-view.

Linguistic idealism leaves me cold. It’s a self-aggrandizing dogma of wordsmiths, which is to say professional thinkers, rather than non-intellectuals, people who work with their hands. Elsewhere [1] I have argued that this focus on a world of texts taught as if they composed an objective manifold like the physical world has destroyed the literature classroom too. We’ve substituted the professor for the literature, with his or her narrow view that got him or her the position and then tenure. And most professors are less interesting than the novels that have become the raw material for their own act of domination in the classroom. Students have noticed, especially the men, who have abandoned it in droves. Besides, critics are less interesting than writers; yet Gerald Graff suggested famously that literature professors “teach the conflicts” rather than the works—which is to say, the critical tail produced by professors quarreling about the work, rather than the work itself.

Politics, according to Foucault, is really most fundamentally textual, words. The dominant theme in twentieth century philosophy was, similarly, its medium: language, taking its impetus from first the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus with his (later abandoned) “picture theory of meaning” and then later from his notion, expressed in the Philosophical Investigations, that meaning was found in use.  Whichever tack we took, the assumption was that if we could just understand language, we’d understand the fundamental issues. It isn’t true, of course: however we say language “means” it’s going to go on doing that, as it has for millennia. If it’s this fundamental, we don’t have to figure it out.

Wittgenstein’s legacy, therefore, was less his specific doctrines than the conviction he articulated that words exist at the intersection with the world. This was true both in his early insistence that words somehow show their meaning –which left a problem for the many words and propositions for which this was not the case, a problem he solved by calling them “meaningless”—and also in his later notion that words were actions that constituted the world of the mind. Intention, for example, isn’t an internal thing but a social one, expressed in words, which are at the social nexus—there is no such thing, according to Wittgenstein, as private languages; mental states are their linguistic expressions. Mental and physical fuse for Wittgenstein, as they do for the parallel twentieth century school of phenomenology: Heidegger, for example, insisted that we live in motion, what he called “thrownness”—rather than sit on the sidelines and think about it. For the whole twentieth century of academic philosophy, words reach out and fuse with the world—albeit in a variety of ways.

John Searle at Berkeley, December 2005 (Photo by Matthew Breindel, released under the GNU Free Documentation License; Source: Wikimedia Commons)

One thinker who inherited this legacy of Wittgenstein, a man who focuses most clearly on the place where words and actions fuse and hence expresses the linguistic idealism of our day in an interesting way, is John Searle. Thus his thought is susceptible to the same problem that beset the early Wittgenstein: what he’s focusing on is quite a small subset of language, and even there it’s not so clearly the case as he thinks. In his early work Speech Acts, Searle, following J.L. Austin, focuses on cases of what he calls “illocutionary acts,” words become actions of which the strongest example are things the “I do” that, in  his view, gets you married or the “I will” that binds you to an oath. (In fact, it’s not the words alone that do this: you could say these words but in so odd a way the judge would stop the proceedings.)

Searle’s most recent application of his underlying this interest, based on the claim that institutions are created by minds through words, is Making the Social World. Words create the world: linguistic idealism rather than a realism that holds that words mirror, express, or at least exist in the world rather than being identical, or are just things people say. Gentler but related theorists like George Lakoff point out that we become prisoners of our own metaphors (Metaphors We Live By) and that they can control us: Lakoff sees himself as elucidating psychological discoveries about the mind and how it functions to create the categories that determine our world.

Postmodernism, now all but dead, expresses this linguistic idealism with a vengeance. Postmodernism held sway during the last few decades of the twentieth century and is the end of the Romantic emphasis on medium rather than content, the notion that outside of words there is nothing. Postmodernism is characterized by a fin de (vingtième) siècle weariness: all has been said, all done; we are merely adding footnotes to footnotes. Pastiche, as in the works of Walter Benjamin, was held to be the most profound artistic expression; doing literature in the voices of others (espoused by the Russian theorist Bahktin and exemplified in the ingenious fables of postmodernism’s patron saint,  Jorge Luis Borges) was all we had left. Some of the postmodernists, to be sure, give the sense they’d like to be direct and fresh again, but can’t forget what they know: so academics tried unsuccessfully to blow up the walls of their ivory tower through the Marxist “cultural studies” of the 80s and 90s, focusing on Barbie and Princess Di instead of Tolstoy and King Lear.  Yet making Barbie academic just brought Barbie inside the ivory tower and displaced the things already there, classics of art and literature (written, it was pointed out as if this were the deal-breaker, by dead white males); the meat changed but the smothering sauce of academic jargon, the lingua franca of the educated classes, made it all taste the same as before.

There’s no way out of postmodernism in words because it uses words to guard the exits. Still, though we have to cut the Gordian knot to get out, we can exit. This may be easier to do nowadays because the financial bases of the world that allowed a dogma of outsider Romantic poets to spread among the educated classes in general (much as abstract art is the language of the Upper East Side in the twentieth century) have been so shaken by the crash of 2008. Waking up after the party holding our heads, we may be able to accept the possibility of an alternative.

The alternative involves action, rather than talk. Not action as an absolute contrast, but as part of a symbiotic whole with talk: we use words to articulate actions, and actions to carry out words. Unfortunately, nowadays when the right wants to criticise the linguistic idealism of the left, it goes too far. Blind action is opposed by the right to the too-great involution of the dogma of linguistic idealism of the left. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended her boss, George W. Bush, famously inept with words, as being a “man of action.” What he did wasn’t important, the important thing was that he was acting. Midshipmen at the Naval Academy, who generally disapprove of ‘liberals’ (in the peculiar American sense of the word),  love a speech by Theodore Roosevelt usually called “The Man in the Arena” that contains this much-quoted passage: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.” Words are nothing, action is all.

As an English professor at a military institution, I insist that we can use thought to justify action, that brain and brawn must work together. And that is my position here: that words are not identical with actions in the world, but rather exist in varying distances from it, and that we cannot privilege either words or actions but must be successful in interweaving the two. There are many possible connections of words to world, a whole panoply of relations exploited by art—tellingly, ignored by both the left and the right wing, in their maddeningly absolutist stance, a black/white either/or vision of words either being the world, or being nothing compared to action. The whole realm of metaphoric language, of art and fiction, lies in this middle area that has been turned into a No Man’s Land between the trenches of left and right that ravage it daily. Sarah Palin’s utterances as well as the Capt Honors videos are far less literal than they have been held to be—as indeed most language is. Lighten up, I say to both sides. Art has a purpose, a place in the world that is not merely that of rejecting it—though this is the way it’s typically been perceived since the Romantics.

As I’ve argued in Art and Argument: What Words Can Do and What They Can’t, art is based on literal truth (the sky is up and people eat with knives and forks in both novels and the world). So too metaphoric or poetic language has a literal component: if we speak of a Congressional seat being a “target” we mean we aim (metaphor) at “hitting” (both). But this also means that metaphors have other qualities we don’t mean to emphasize, and that can later be emphasized (targets = guns). And metaphor is all around us: “all around us,” for example, is yet another. Thus there are many degrees of language use between the stonily literal and the purely incendiary. We have to be supple in negotiating between them, something the polarization of the current world into the left and right has made extremely difficult. Both left and right wing are famously intolerant of art, as it fails to advance either agenda. The critics of Palin’s gun language and Honors’s movies are left-wing critics, apparently holding that words make the world, and so need to be rigorously controlled: metaphoric or figurative language that can be understood in a way that someone can find offensive must be eliminated.

Palin is right – if we can attribute such a view to her – that linguistic idealism the dominant ideology of the ruling class, that it’s taken as an unquestioned dogma. What’s unfortunate about Palin, however, is that she couches her criticism the only way she logically can, having aligned herself with the naïve realists rather than with the linguistic idealists: as an attack on groups of people, rather than on their words or ideas. This is what makes her recent screed America by Heart: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Flag so full of bile. Nobody but she and her supporters qualifies as person at all, much less a patriotic American, and what characterizes her supporters is lack of power. The “meaning of America” has been forgotten “by the people who make the big laws, run the big corporations, write for the big newspapers and make the big movies.” These, of course are the educated elite, the “inside the Beltway” types Palin heaps scorn on. To this are contrasted “real people,” the Americans who “grow our food, teach our children, run our small businesses, help out the less fortunate, and fight our wars.”

Of course, the problem of the “government is the problem” right wing that campaigns against “inside the Beltway politicos” is that these are just the people the right wing hopes to become. Once they’ve assumed power, presumably, they’ll hand power back to the powerless (which sounds contradictory) and the state will wither away. It didn’t work for Marx, and it won’t work for Palin.

Reject the dogma, by all means. Please. But don’t do it by attacking the people who hold it. Love the sinner, hate the sin. Palin has presumably heard that one before.

Sarah Palin: America by Heart : Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag
Harper, New York 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-0062010964
Hardcover, 304 pages, US$25.99

John Searle: Making the Social World. The Structure of Human Civilization
Oxford University Press, New York 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-0195396171
Hardcover, 224 pages, US$24.95

Bruce Fleming is Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, having previously held teaching positions at Vanderbilt University, the University of Freiburg, and the National University of Rwanda. His most recent books are Running is Life: Transcending the Crisis of Modernity (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America 2010) and Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide (Fairfax, Virginia: Potomac Books). In addition to his scholarly work, he has contributed opinion pieces to the New York Times, Wahington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books. 

by Katrina Gulliver

Crawford Market, Mumbai. (Photo by Greg Younger, used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

In this book, Gyan Prakash offers not a traditional history of a city, but rather a portrait of the city’s culture and image. By using its popular culture, he reflects the kaleidoscope of this multiethnic community. From the grand colonial architecture to more recent land reclamation projects, he traces the spatial dimensions of the city and their cultural meanings. In so doing, he emphasises the ways in which history, particularly urban history of a still-changing community, is made up of the myths we choose to remember, or the fables of his title. Like all great cities, Mumbai has more than one fable in its story. As he describes:

“The nostalgic ‘tropical Camelot’ and the dystopic city of slums appear as compelling bookends of Mumbai’s story because they seem to have the force of historical truth. In fact, it is a trick of history, inviting us to believe its Bombay-to-Mumbai tale as an objective reading of the past when it is a fable.” (p. 23)

The Bombay Chronicle, January 26th, 1931. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain)

Prakash links the real city to its many depictions in popular culture. Bombay’s rapid growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and diversity of religion and language, meant it developed a multiplicity of communities within the city. Prakash argues that the act of reading the newspaper served as the secular version of morning prayer, and in this multicultural society, newspapers could serve to link readers together. However, as he points out, this world — in the mid twentieth century – was still largely limited to those who could read English. Nonetheless, popular culture in the form of tabloid press, such as Blitz newspaper, which offered a downmarket popular option in the English-language press. Through such media, celebrity scandals and other tales of the city were promulgated. As Prakash describes, the cues Blitz offered about the lives of the rich and (in)famous informed the residents of the rest of the city about how the other half lived, and bound many readers in fascination with their lurid stories.

Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is particularly drawn to the creators (writers and film makers) who made Bombay their home in the twentieth century and the ways they presented the city’s many layers in their work. In demonstrating this, he expends many pages summarising the plots of short stories and films created in or about Bombay – the creation of these “fables” becoming part of the city’s narrative.

Eros Movie Theatre, Mumbai. Opened in 1938, exemplifying the late Art deco style. (Photo: Colin Rose. Used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

From the creative to the theoretical, Prakash uses the analyses of Henri Lefebvre and other urban theorists to discuss the use of space, and the ways that urban planning, with its focus on abstract “efficiency” failed. He also acknowledges the effect of political corruption, with the assignment of land and contracts for new development schemes. He also discusses at length the architectural style of Art Deco, which flourished in Bombay in the interwar period. Its acquistive, eclectic nature — taking on motifs from other styles — meant it offered a bridge to modernity in the machine age. The glamour of this period is clearly part of Mumbai’s visual heritage, as well as being the point — before independence and partition — when the city shone for many of its nostalgic fans.

But for all the glitz of the Marine Drive denizens, the situation of shanty-town dwellers is not overlooked here. As he describes the cycle, poor people arrive in the city, and build their own makeshift housing. Although the settlement is illegal, the municipal authorities are forced to provide some civic facilities. But once the land has thus become habitable, it is valuable, and the residents will be evicted so the land can be sold for development. (p. 310) Prakash draws on the plot of the comic book Doga, a hero of the slums, to illustrate these issues and their popular presentation. (While this is interesting, spending over 30 pages on the plotline of a comic book seems perhaps a little indulgent.)

The book contains some unfortunate repetitive phrasing (which looks like some cut and paste) and some rather infelicitous colloquialisms — people “get on like a house on fire”, noses are “thrown out of joint” — which are somewhat jarring in the context. There is also a small glitch in his passing account of the Sassoon family tree (p. 41), as part of his discussion of David Sassoon, one of a number of merchants who were influential in the city’s industrial development.

Mumbai Fables is an engaging narrative, and offers a different way for urban historians to write the biography of a city. But it will have more to offer for those familiar with the city, for whom the gleam of recognition will be a benefit.

Gyan Prakash: Mumbai Fables. A History of an Enchanted City
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 9780691153179
Paper, 424 pages, US$19.95

Katrina Gulliver is a cultural historian and postdoctoral research fellow based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current project examines the development of four colonial port cities, Malacca, Havana, Pondicherry and New Orleans, from the early sixteenth century to 1900.

Interview by Sophie Roell  

Leading Arabic-English literary translator Humphrey Davies, who has lived in Cairo for the past 35 years, paints a picture of contemporary Egypt through words and graphic narratives. Speaking to Sophie Roell, co-editor at FiveBooks and contributor to The Browser (which commissioned the interview), Davies explores the political dimension of everday life in pre-2011 Egypt by looking in depth at five recent books by Egyptian writers: Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Ahmed Alaydi’s On Being Abbas El Abd, Khaled al-Berry’s Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise, Khalid Al Khamissi’s Taxi, and Magdy El Shafee’s Metro.  

Demonstrators on Cairo's Tahrir Square, February 2011. (Photo: Ramy Raoof; used under Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence)

Are many members of the expat community spending time in the Square?  

Some of them are. I’ve been down once, not more than that. I personally feel a little awkward pretending to be an Egyptian, even though I’ve lived here for 35 years, to the degree of actually shouting slogans that concern Egyptians and only an Egyptian can say with true sincerity. Meanwhile I entirely support what they’re doing and I try and support it by doing what I can do, which is being a translator.  

I love your choice of books, and especially liked the phrase you used in your email to describe them — that they ‘may help the non-Egyptian reader to understand where Egyptians are at’.  

Yes. They’re all recently written; the oldest was published in Arabic in 2002. They all deal with or reflect some of the main themes in present-day Egyptian society and life.   

Your first book is Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.  

The Yacoubian Builiding is celebrated, possibly even notorious, for being a real bestseller — originally in Egypt and the Arab world and subsequently in the West, in English and in many other languages. It tells the story of a building in downtown Cairo, and the changes that have affected the building and its inhabitants. So it encapsulates the last 80 years of Egyptian history and it provides a series of extremely sharply drawn sketches of what you might call archetypal figures of our day. You have the aging aristocrat; you have the doorkeeper’s son who becomes a terrorist when his career ambitions are thwarted by the system. There’s a corrupt mega-businessman who winds up trying to battle the government when it wants to take what he considers too big of a bite of his business — and a whole range of other poor and middle class characters who are adapting to the situation as best they can. It’s beautifully written; it’s incredibly readable; it’s often very funny — and I suspect it will go on being read for many years as a kind of portrait of Egypt on the eve of the events that are taking place now.  

So it rings true? These are people you do actually meet?   

I find them incredibly recognisable people, yes.  

One of the reviews said it was ‘gripping’, which seems like a good sign.  

Oh yes. I don’t suppose this was in the author’s mind, but it almost feels like a soap opera. Each new story, each thread, is taken to a certain point — and then he leaves it just at the point when you’re really, really keen to know what happens next and moves on to a different thread. It’s very deftly written.  

Next you’ve chosen On Being Abbas El Abd, by Ahmed Alaydi.  

This book is totally different, conceptually and in style, from the one we were just talking about. It’s a wickedly complex tale. People debate what actually takes place in the book. It’s about a terminally grumpy twenty-something negotiating Cairo’s shopping malls and high-rises. The book as a whole reflects a culture that will be familiar to anybody in Egypt, who sits, as so many here do, at that meeting point between global culture — the internet and the cellphone and so on — and Egyptian street life, the general craziness (and, in the case of this book, the literal craziness) of Cairo. I’ll use a word that will only reveal my age and total squareness when I say it’s very hip. I’m sure there are better words than that now. It’s funny and very smart and fairly weird.  

Is it all about madness? What’s the opening line?  

The introduction is entitled, ‘An Introduction You Can Suck or Shove’, and it starts off with: ‘She wasn’t a corpse yet.’ But yes: the main protagonist, Abbas El  Abd, meets somebody at a psychodrama therapy session that he is attending for reasons that are gradually revealed during the book. (They have something to do with his uncle, who was an experimental psychiatrist who rather overstepped the bounds when he raised his nephew.) So madness is very much at the heart of the book, and there’s a wonderful, several page long list of phobias at one point – most of which, it would seem, the protagonist suffers from himself.  

How does the protagonist fit with the stereotype that seems to feature in every newspaper article about Egypt – the disgruntled youth?   

I wouldn’t go too far down that route, because the hero, or the anti-hero, is not exactly suffering from serious socio-economic problems. He’s not poor; he’s not unemployed. He works in a video store — which is, of course, slightly dated already. He’s disgruntled, but more in the sense of an underlying anger, which is dealt with in a very non-didactic, non-stereotyped way. But there’s a very strong tension running through the book, which perhaps reflects precisely the class to whom the mobilisation of people today is attributed. This is the class of young people who are savvy with the internet, with global communications, and who are totally disenchanted with almost everything about the system in which they’ve grown up. However, you could never call this, on the face of it, a political book. This is a very personal book, though the politics is there in the texture of it.   

On to your next book: Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise [by Khaled al-Berry].  

This is a very interesting counterdose to On Being Abbas El Abd. It’s not fiction, but the autobiography of a young man who grew up in a city in Upper Egypt. His parents are middle class and he drifts into joining one of the most important Islamist groups, the Jama’a Islamiya. A few years later, after spending six months in prison, he drifts out again, as he becomes acquainted with, and attracted to, a humanistic, secular world view. But he explores, from the inside, many of the issues that we in the West never gets to grips with about the Islamist movement: the sorts of things that really matter to them, the sorts of debates that they have. Some of it is almost abstruse. But these issues are vitally important to those people, and make it clear why, for example, the Jama’a Islamiya is at daggers-drawn with other Islamist group[s]. It shows the internal debates and jealousies and tensions that exist there. But despite being a very straightforward, insightful exposition of that sort of material, the book never loses sight of the fact — and this is really interesting and nice — that this was a rebellious, grumpy teenager who really cared about what he looked like and the way he wore his hair.  

So do you often feel, when you read Western media stories about these groups, that journalists just don’t get it?  

Absolutely. They don’t get it because, first of all, they look at them simply as actors on a political stage, and in relationship to the non-Islamist world view. They don’t ever bother to try and get inside the Islamist world view and see what that is. It’s very different, but it’s not without its logic, and it’s carefully elaborated.  

Can you give an example from the book?  

For me as a non-Islamist it may be difficult to summarise. But there’s a rather interesting passage in which Khaled al-Berry recounts how, one day, he was sitting on his own in the mosque, and a stranger came and sat down next to him and got into conversation with him. The older man raises a very complex issue of theology, and the young man, who is only 14 or 15, realises that he’s swallowed the whole of Jama’a Islamiya’s — his particular group’s — thinking. He’s been told what their stands are on various issues, but he’s never had to think it through, he’s never been subjected to debate. And he doesn’t know how to answer this guy, who, as it turns out, represents a different group and is fishing for new adherents. Then a person from Jama’a Islamiya is furious with him, and says, ‘Don’t ever let yourself get into conversation with a stranger again. If someone comes along you tell me and we’ll deal with them…’  

The other thing that’s interesting about this book, and the insider view it gives, is the way the group deals with quite ordinary issues. For example, one of the members of the group turns out to be gay, or is discovered in a compromising situation. How does an Islamist group deal with a gay member?  

How does it?  

How can an Islamist group even have gay members? Well, life is life, people are people, and some people are gay. And even in Islamist groups some people are gay. So what do you do about it?  

Are they able to adapt?  

No-oo. Not adapt. No, definitely not. Though they don’t actually finally expel the guy from the group. But they do subject him to very vicious punishment. But how exactly that is handled is really interesting. The author himself asks, ‘But I thought we were all saints, we’re all good — otherwise we wouldn’t be in this movement. So how can somebody break the rules to do something so taboo?’ And he has to deal with that. All the way through it’s a teenager’s voice, and it’s very authentic.  

One of the other nice things about this book is that the author scrupulously avoids demonising the Islamists. Right at the beginning, he says, ‘I’m not an Islamist, but some of the best people I knew and ever met in my life were members of that group.’ He has immense respect for some of them, even though he has totally rejected their actual point of view.   

What about your next choice, Taxi [by Khalid Al Khamissi]?  

Khalid Al Khamissi (Photo: Asma Al Khamissi, used under Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Licence)

Taxi is a delightful book. It’s 58 short passages each of which is a taxi ride during which the author gets into conversation with the driver. These conversations range over just about every aspect of Egyptian life,  but with a very strong political flavour too — which is the way that conversations with taxi drivers tend to go. It’s very much the view from the street. Obviously the writer is a sophisticated person — he’s a journalist, and he doesn’t try to come off as anything else. But the taxi drivers are taxi drivers, and they represent a wide range of opinion and some are very admirable and some are absolute shits. It’s written largely in Egyptian colloquial, rather than the literary language, and that gives it a lot of the flavour of real life. It rings very, very true – and it’s deceptively easy reading. It’s fun to read but covers a lot of very important subjects in Egyptian society.  

There’s a sweet review on Amazon.com that calls it ‘a book that’ll make you feel guilty you ever tried to bargain down a cab fare in any poor country.’ But is this fiction or non-fiction?  

They’re based on real conversations. I’m sure he’s tidied them up and presents them to make them as cogent as possible, but they’re based on real conversations.  

Your last choice is a graphic novel, Metro [by Magdy El Shafee].   

Yes. This is the first graphic novel in Arabic. It’s almost uncannily prescient. Its hero is a young computer engineer who is gypped out of his rightful earnings by collusion between corrupt businessmen and foreign companies. He’s initially very against the activism that his girlfriend is involved in. His girlfriend goes on marches and takes part in demonstrations. But, by the end, the hero also feels himself pulled into it. He feels finally convinced of the need to do something.  

One thing people have said quite often about the recent demonstrations is that people seem to have lost their fear. And this is one of the things that Magdy wrote about in this book, in 2007. One of the characters says: ‘We’re all in a mousetrap, but no one realises that all we have to do is walk out.’ And elsewhere the hero says something along the lines of, ‘everybody is afraid and that’s what he would most like to see an end to’.  

Magdy deals with corruption, street demonstrations, frustrations of young people — not only of the bright middle class, but other characters too. There’s a blind shoeshine man, a young guy in the slums who wants to be a singer, who ends up being killed when he is hired by the police to be a thug to rough up and molest demonstrators…  

So really very prescient.  

Yes, a very timely book. It was confiscated when it was published. It’s not available in Egypt. Its author was tried and found guilty of offending public morals.  

On what grounds?  

There is one frame in which a woman’s breasts appear. Of which there are a fair number in the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, but never mind. They needed an excuse because the real motives were political; that’s fairly obvious. At one point in the book, for example, the hero decides that he is going to rob a bank because he can’t think of any other way to get on in life. When he gets inside the bank, he finds a corrupt politician just about to walk off with a suitcase of cash in an unsecured loan —and the politician bears an unfortunately close resemblance to a known public figure… This almost guaranteed that it would be confiscated. It’s not yet published in English, but it has been translated. The author does have an agent, Will Lippincott, and we hope that it will find a publisher.   

This interview was conducted on 9 February 2011, two days before the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It was commissioned by The Browser, on whose website it was first published on 16 February 2011. It is here reproduced with permission.  

(c) 2011 by   

by Francisco Klauser

Peter Sloterdijk’s sociopolitical essay Rage and Time tells a compelling cultural history of the mediations, exploitations, and translations of rage through (and into) the great religious and political ‘cosmologies’ of Western civilisation. Rage and Time is a powerfully written book about the sociopolitical ordering, coding, and accumulation of rage; a book which, in sum, acknowledges and investigates the role of rage as one of the driving forces of human history.

Comparable with Sloterdijk’s earlier work – amongst which Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) and the 2,500-page long Sphären (‘Spheres’) trilogy (1998; 1999; 2004) are but the most acclaimed examples – Rage and Time captivates through its multifaceted and at once strident and joyful style of writing. Divided into four main sections, the book not only makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the constitutive role of affects in world politics – which is still dramatically underexplored by political theorists, despite important recent work, for example by Chantal Mouffe – but also provides a solid historical contextualisation of the most recent violent eruptions of anger, from 9/11 to the 2005 French riots.

Hand-coloured etchings, "Vessels of Wrath", from Francis Barrett's "The Magus" (1801). (Source: Wikimedia Creative Commons; public domain.)

“Of the rage of Achilles, son of Peleus, sing Goddess…”: Sloterdijk starts his ambitious world history of ‘rage and time’ with the opening line of Homer’s Iliad, the first words of the European tradition. For Sloterdijk, Homer’s epic poetry not only highlights that in Europe literally everything began with rage, but also exemplifies the antique roots of the critical question – to which the sociopolitical and religious ‘cosmologies’ are constantly responding – of how to relate collectively to the affect of rage. Sloterdijk’s reading of the Greek heroic epos, the imaginary space of gods, half-gods, and divinely chosen angry heroes, underlines that in ancient Hellenistic mythology the origins of rage and anger are neither located in the earthly world, nor attributed to individuals’ personalities. Rage is rather understood as a possessed, divine capacity, a god-favoured eruption of power. Hence the birth of the hero as a prophet, whose task is to make the message of his god-given anger an immediate reality (pp. 8-9). For Homer, to sing the praises of Achilles’ heroism also – and ultimately – means to celebrate the existence of divine forces, which are releasing society from its vegetative daze, through the mediation of the godly chosen ‘bringer of anger and revenge’.

It is from the Greek mythological relationship with rage and anger that Sloterdijk derives his own conceptualisation of rage through the figure of Thymos. Originally denominating both the Greek hero’s specific organ for the reception of god-given rage and the bodily location of his proud self, Thymos later with Plato, and following the general transformation of the Greek psyche from heroic – belligerent to more civic virtues, stands for the righteous anger of the Greek citizen as a means of defence from insults and unreasonable attacks (pp. 22-25).With the figure of Thymos set against the psycho- analytical focus on Eros, anger, for Sloterdijk, is not only a vent for frustrated desires, but also, and rather, a reactive manifestation of offended pride. Yet, and in the tradition of both Sloterdijk’s earlier (1985) novel on the birth of psychoanalysis and of his critical study of psychoanalysis in the first volume of Spheres (1998, p. 297), Sloterdijk does not per se negate the merits of psychoanalysis for an understanding of the affective realm of human existence. Rather, Sloterdijk’s critique focuses on the limitations of the libido-centrist psychoanalytical vocabulary and thinking.

In conformity with its basic erotodynamic approach, psychoanalysis brought much hatred to light, the other side of live. Psychoanalysis managed to show that hating means to be bound by similar laws as loving. Both hating and loving are projections that are subject to repetitive compulsion. Psychoanalysis remained for the most part silent when it came to that form of rage that springs from the striving for success, prestige, self-respect, and their backlashes. (p. 14)

From this standpoint, a theory of rage, for Sloterdijk, is primarily a theory of the politico-religious mediations of the processes of overcoming offended pride and of longing for revenge.

As we move from the ancient Hellenistic to the monotheistic Judaic world, the politico-religious coding of rage is fundamentally altered, as Sloterdijk shows in the second section of his analysis. In the Jewish faith, the angry hero becomes the metaphysical, wrathful God. Rage is thus conceived as the exclusive privilege of God, the very condition of his absolute sovereignty and power, which is directed in punitive form against his own people or against his chosen people’s enemies. As Sloterdijk subsequently shows, this cosmology of wrath of the Old Testament undergoes another set of structural changes in the medieval rage-conception of Catholic teaching, based on the double process of the earthly demonisation and of the metaphysical suspension of rage.

Had Europeans not heard about pride – or likewise rage – from the days of the church fathers, when such impulses would have been taken as signs pointing to the abyss for those cast away? (p. 17)

Based on the Christian axiomatic association of rage and eternity, God thus becomes the location of a transcendent repository of suspended human rage-savings and frozen plans of revenge.

What is important to note in this context of the Christian depictions of the Inferno is that the increasing institutionalization of hell during the long millennium between Augustine and Michelangelo allowed the theme of the transcendent archive of rage to be perfected. (p. 97)

In this light, and relating to the theorisation of human affects more generally, Sloterdijk’s analysis of ‘rage and time’ points towards the need to consider the world of affects not only in its fleeting and intimate, but also in its relational, resource-like, dimension, as the object of specific rage-administrating projects. Hence the possible reading of Rage and Time as a theory of the accumulation of affect.

This problematisation of anger and resentment as the objects of politico-religious accumulation and regulation is further developed in the third section of Rage and Time, relating to another ‘thymiotic’ revolution in Occidental civilisation with the emergence of the communist ‘World Bank of Rage’. Unlike the Christian referential of a metaphysical archive of rage, Sloterdijk shows that the communist ‘rage economy’ offers an earthly rooted programme for the canalisation and sociopolitical actualisation of individual rage-investments. The communist code of rage thus implies another project for the suspension and delegation of anger (to the earthly instance of the professional revolutionary) as a means to concentrate and maximise the power of individually deposed rage-investments, linked with the promise of substantial interest payments in the form of a better, newly created society. In Marx and Engel’s words, “all history is the history of making wrath productive”.

As the counterpoint to the communist doctrine of a party-led collectivisation of rage, Sloterdijk discusses the bourgeois-biased individualisation and romanticising of rage, exemplified by Alexander Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, as yet another exemplary ‘instruction manual’ of how to deal with rage. This individualist-capitalist approach to rage is further explored in the last section of Rage and Time, referring to the contemporary world of mass culture and consumerism, which is interpreted by Sloterdijk as a general transformation of rage-dynamic into greed-dynamic and lust-dynamic systems. Sloterdijk argues that in the aftermath of the Western rage-projects in their red, white, and brown colours, the figures of the resolute warrior and the prolific mother are substituted by the ambitious lover and the luxury consumer.

Yet, if consumerism conceals and redirects individual, pent-up rage towards new civic duties of enjoyment and desire, it also creates an explosive ‘multiegoistic situation’, which is deeply shaped by rather unarticulated and unregulated manifestations of disappointed rage communities. Pointing to the remarkable lack of political collection and administration of the thymiotic energies erupting in the 2005 French riots, the contemporary world, for Sloterdijk, is also a world of multiple decentralised movements of disoriented rage-holders. It is in a sense a postmodern world, in which no theory or project of global meaning prevails as a unitary mediator for the suspension, accumulation, management, and goal-directed increase in value of entrusted, individual rage investments. “Neither in heaven nor on Earth does anyone know what work could be done with the ‘just anger of the people’.” (p. 183) We hence rediscover one of the leitmotifs in Sloterdijk’s oeuvre, referring to the causes, modalities, and effects of the Enlightenment-induced destruction of unconditional, absolute truths in respect of both ontology and morality. For example, in Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk addresses this problematic through the notion of ‘cynicism’, as a diffuse, generalised attitude of discontent, following the loss of the great ideals and truths of older cultures. In Spheres, this theme emerges somewhat reformulated, in the opposition between the globalising spatialities of classical holistic thought and the foam-like spatialities of modernity.With Rage and Time, Sloterdijk further pursues this investigation through the discussion of the contrasting politics of anger in the past and present world.

On the last fifteen pages of Rage and Time, Sloterdijk asserts the potential of political Islam – based on its missionary dynamism, battle-centred cosmology and demographic strength – as an alternative ‘World Bank of Rage’ in the contemporary sociopolitical context. On the one hand, Sloterdijk acknowledges the actual and future power of political Islam to reunite parts of the disappointed Muslim world; on the other hand, he questions the ability of political Islam’s creative forces to develop an alternative oppositional movement of global meaning to the current capitalist mode of existence. In this, Sloterdijk stresses the current technological, economic, and scientific shortcomings of political Islam and thus its general limits in creatively shaping the socioeconomic conditions of humanity in the 21st century. Sloterdijk’s reading of political Islam thus focuses more on its high-risk potential in the form of intensified Muslim civil wars, or further amplified conflicts with Israel, than on its oppositional role within the Western world itself.

However, whilst Sloterdijk’s analysis of communist and Judeo-Christian anger-semiotics expands on a broad body of historicocultural insights, the investigation of current mediations of anger in the Middle Eastern world and in the context of post-9/11 Western politics appears to have been somewhat slighted. Readers of Rage and Time may search in vain for a more profound analysis of the differences and parallels between the historical and the contemporary sociopolitical coding of anger and revenge, which could have resulted in a more substantial prospective examination of the upcoming sociopolitical challenges in the 21st century. In this light, Sloterdijk’s open-ended conclusive consent of a general need for a morally based “education program” and a “great politics” of “balancing acts” (page 229) remains relatively vague, resembling a well-intended, yet somehow unrealistic, wish.

The main strengths of Rage and Time certainly lie in its very rich, cultural-historical approach and in its immense suggestive power for further analytical and empirical research into the complex role of rage and anger in contemporary politics – from the current semiotics of the war on terror to the Western imaginaries of modern forms of heroism, for example. Sloterdijk’s analysis strongly confirms the critical importance and high potential of such a research agenda. From this perspective, and in addition to Sloterdijk’s exclusive focus on the various forms and mediations of rage, one of the central challenges for future analyses will be to undertake detailed and comparative investigations into the ways in which political and religious semiotics and practices are combining and mediating different human affects simultaneously. This will – for example – allow a more substantial engagement with the widely developed body of empirical research on fear and hope. Rage and Time provides the perfect starting point to address these questions and to further elaborate upon the complex relationships between the political and the intimate (affective) dimensions of social existence.

Peter Sloterdijk: Rage and Time. A Psychopolitical Investigation.
Columbia University Press, New York 2010.
ISBN: 978-0-231-14522-0
Cloth, 256 pages, US$34.50.

Francisco Klauser is assistant professor in political geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His work focuses on the relationships between space, surveillance/risk and power; he also has research interests in urban studies and socio-spatial theory.

An earlier version of this review, based on the German edition of Zorn und Zeit, was first published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vol. 27 (No. 1/2009), a publication of Pion Ltd., who have given kind permission to reproduce part of the material in the present review of Rage and Time. Reproduction of the present version requires permission from all the copyright owners concerned. (c) 2010

by Ulrike Guerot

The long, hot German summer managed to drain the energy from the vivid debate that had preceded it regarding Germany’s role in Europe. But the related questions that had dominated the early months of 2010, highlighted in particular by Greece’s debt crisis – what happened to German leadership, and (more broadly) why has Germany fallen out of love with Europe – have not gone away.

Germany’s extreme reluctance to aid Greece, and its visible retreat from its former role as committed leader of the European Union, had led many foreign observers into the unfamiliar stance of charging Berlin with not being European enough.

German flags on houses in Berlin, during the 2010 football world cup. (c) 2010 BRB.

In many EU states, the anxiety about the direction of Germany’s European policy turned towards the sharp criticism that Germany had benefited from the eurozone and the ability to export to other members of the single-currency – thus basically living on the back of its partner economies, without giving them a chance to grow. This reproach was most pointedly articulated when France’s economy minister Christine Lagarde (among others) complained about the asymmetries of intra-European trade relations and Germany’s low domestic demand.

Most German publications took a very different line: not only did they support the policy of the chancellor, Angela Merkel, but they continued to promote the view that the German economy is simply the best and that nothing fundamental needed to change. If other countries have a problem with the euro – too bad; Germany has none! Moreover, if everyone would only follow the German example, especially with respect to debt-management, there would be no crisis.

Such was the dominant attitude on both sides during the weeks of the Greek crisis between February and June 2010. At the height of mid-summer, a hot autumn was expected in which pressure from financial markets would likely bring another EU country (Spain, Portugal, even France?) near to financial collapse; test the huge euro-aid package of 8 May 2010; and force the EU to reveal how real is its political commitment to improve Europe’s governance structures and “economic government”.

The huge gap between what other countries expect Germany to do and what Germany is ready to do has left its mark. But it looks now as if the real autumn scenario will be different from the anticipated one. There are three reasons for this.

A cool autumn

The first is a change in the economic weather. Germany at least is in full recovery mode. The annualised growth-rate is back to 3%, in comparison to 2.2% in the first quarter of 2010 (and Deutsche Bank even forecasts 3.5% for the year); this would be the highest rate since German reunification in 1990, and is already enough for some local hyberbole (the press entitled the moment the “up-turn XL” [Aufschwung XL], and economy minister Rainer Brüderle referred to “a second German economic miracle”. 

The job-creation and unemployment figures are also hopeful: the number of unemployed people is predicted to remain below 3 million for the rest of the year, which would be the lowest figure for a decade. Germany’s famous exports are strong, especially of the automobile industry (Volkswagen alone sold 4 million in May 2010). The overall figures for June 2010, at €86.5 billion ($110bn), were an increase of 28.8% over June 2009; and exports for the first half of 2010 are 11%-12% up. German-Chinese and German-Russian trade and export figures are as good as ever.

These figures have dissipated the fear of another financial meltdown. The mood in Germany is already post-crisis – to the extent that people take pride in German economic instruments such as Kurzarbeit, and even wonder if the crisis ever really shook the country.

The second reason is a change in the political weather. The economic recovery has ended the speculations about the end of Angela Merkel’s government. The defeat of the Christian Democrat Union (CDU)-Free Democrat Party (FDP) coalition in the North-Rhine-Westphalia regional elections on 9 May 2010, and its poor performance over the election of a successor to Horst Köhler as the country’s new president (with Merkel’s favoured candidate, Christian Wulff, needing three election-rounds finally to be elected on 30 June), created widespread doubts over the government’s ability to lead and even survive. The criticism of Angela Merkel herself also increased. That moment too has passed.

The third reason is a new clarity about German national ambitions or at least the perception that they exist. At best, it became a little clearer that Germany has no ambitions at all to lead the European Union any longer; but that, as much as any other state, it seeks to benefit from its international links without caring overmuch about European politics. The New York Times has even characterised Germany’s real aim as to become a great Switzerland: wealthy and not politically responsible for Europe.

A huge transition

This combination of economic revival and international clarity confirms that there is indeed, no German national “masterplan” – but there is a definite tendency towards what might be called “going global alone”. This leaves other European countries with a key choice – which is no longer a German problem, as many in Germany think that ultimately Germany can do its own business in the world. To be sure, this is more a policy by default than a strategic vision; and if it is probably good for Germany, it is not necessarily so for Europe. In short: Germany is outgrowing Europe!

The implication of this shift is that Germany is replacing foreign policy – including European – by trade policy. The export dependency of Germany means that the German heart goes where the export goes. A German civil servant, asked why developing a common European policy towards China is so hard – and why the existing German position is so different from the average European one – simply replied: “Because our trade figures with China are so different from all the other EU states’”. More precisely: because Germany is the only European country that has a real trade (and therefore strategic) interest with China.

If the German economy moves increasingly beyond the borders of Europe, then the German heart moves away from Europe. And this is not by any anti-European intention, nor according to narrow national ambition – but only because Germany needs to “go global” to secure its economic future. “Europe”, by contrast, is not a political project that can be pursued or held against economic trends.

The argument, therefore, is more subtle than that Germany is no longer European; rather that it is becoming more truly European (more “normal”, more like the other European countries, no longer “over-European”) – and will probably remain so. A realistic way of characterising the new Germany is that a European Germany is going global with or without its fellow Europeans, and that the choice of whether to follow will be theirs and not Germany’s. So Germany can and will be the engine to drive the EU economy into the world market, but only on condition that the other EU countries want this to happen and are ready to make their own national effort.

The huge transition that is occurring is that Germany (or more precisely, the German role in and for Europe) is shifting from geopolitics to geo-economics. During the cold war, Germany was the tipping-point country between east and west, the buffer-zone for Nato, the most sensitive border in Europe, and the junior partner of the United States; it is now the tipping-point country in the economic orientation of the European Union, one that (nolens volens) will determine the path the European economy will take.

A new chapter

But this still leaves a question that will only be answered when it becomes clear how sustainable and solid the German recovery is. After all, if things are going so well for Germany, why should it even bother with Europe; if its economic model is still a shining example for the European economy, why should it engage with (for example) French ideas about economic government?

Here, there are four reservations about the German success-story. First, the German banks’ “stress-test” on 23 July 2010 was less than convincing, with its criteria and various last-minutes changes to the questionnaire leaving markets unsatisfied with the results; the state-bonds (and trash-assets) apparently held by the regional Landesbanken remain of especial concern, with many saying that the number of Landesbanken needs to be reduced.

Second, the G20 summit in Toronto on 26-27 June 2010 was disappointing. The serious regulation of financial markets repeatedly promised on both the G20 and the European Union levels after the global financial crisis of 2008-09 has not been consistently pursued or implemented; and beyond the rhetoric, no coherent effort to improve the “economic governance” of the eurozone has been undertaken. 

Third, the German government does not yet have a convincing strategy for what the French call la rentrée. The key internal coalition dispute about tax-reform between the conservative CDU and the liberal FDP is ongoing, and a clear vision of what this government stands for is still missing.

Fourth, there isn’t a glimpse yet of a real “European revival”, in the sense of a bold discussion on what comes next for Europe and on what is needed. There is no sign of new and greater energy from Germany for Europe on any of the levels needed: the eurozone’s governance, the union’s enlargement (regarding the Balkans or Turkey); the use of the new European external-action service; and critically, the question of the next (2014) financial framework of the EU.

There will be fierce battles over payments in the coming period, especially among the big member-states. The fear is that a German public that has already lost its love for Europe will become even more alienated when the price-tag of its contribution to the EU budget becomes clear. This outcome is all the more likely since no one in Germany has a strategic conception for that same budget.

It’s not that the Greek and eurozone crises of the first half of 2010 are over. It’s not even that much has been done or will be done on the European policy level to solve them. And it does not seem as if there will be much talk about the question of economic convergence.

It’s more that Germany is getting used to feeling comfortable in its position as the biggest elephant in the zoo, in its indifference to its European partners, and in its certainty that nobody is likely or able to ride roughshod over it; without Germany even needing to move  too much. And that the European idea may be squeezed under Germany’s new weight. Once all that is fully registered, the consequences will be momentous.

Ulrike Guerot runs the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). She previously worked at the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), where she was in charge of the European Union division, and held a senior transatlantic fellowship at the German Marshall Fund (GMF).

This article first appeared in the independent online magazine openDemocracy.net ; it is here republished under a Creative Commons Licence.

By Stephen John

Martha Nussbaum’s latest book opens with a chilling warning: we face “a worldwide crisis in education” of “massive proportions and grave global significance”. The crisis is that the arts and humanities are losing their place in the curriculum at all levels of education. Indeed, even “the humanistic aspects of science and social science – the imaginative, creative aspect and the aspect of rigorous critical thought” are being lost. This is to be lamented, according to Nussbaum, because the proper goal of education is the cultivation of citizens who can play a full and active role in democratic societies, and such cultivation requires exposure to the arts and humanities. Such concerns are, she thinks, not reflected in contemporary thinking about education, which stresses the teaching of narrow technical skills, and associated “thin market norms”, in the name of economic growth. Nussbaum proposes an alternative to the market paradigm, according to which education should be child-centred, and include a full and proper understanding of global history and economics, training in Socratic reasoning skills, and creative engagement in artistic activities. Such an education will create citizens who can feel compassion for others, whom they also respect, while making wise judgments about political issues which reflect a broader understanding of global interconnectedness without an exaggerated respect for tradition. As a side effect, such citizens will also be more economically productive.

Clearly, no-one could reasonably hope to prove all of these claims within a book of 170 pages. This volume is, I assume, intended more as a political act, rather than as a scholarly tract. Furthermore, I find myself more-or-less in agreement with what I take to be Nussbaum’s key political aim: to ensure a place for the humanities and arts in schools and universities. As such, it is tempting to overlook this book’s deficiencies in the name of political expediency, or to defend Nussbaum by stressing that her book is polemic, rather than careful study. Unfortunately, the entire point of this book is to defend an ideal of “Socratic critical inquiry”, where “only the nature of the argument counts”. Even taking into account issues of genre, Nussbaum’s arguments are bad. They rest on sweeping sociological generalisations, confuse different concepts, and fail to engage with possible criticism. 

A liberal arts education -- good for those who can afford it, but does it save democracy? (Photo: ECLA, used under a Wikimedia Creative Commons Licence)

One key flaw is Nussbaum’s tendency to speak ex cathedra on extremely complex empirical topics. For example, at one point, she describes the Indian state of Gujarat as “well known for its combination of technological sophistication with docility and group-think”. Not content with stereotyping fifty million people, she later asserts that the deadly anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002 were the result of “no critical thinking in the public schools and a concerted focus on technical ability”, combined with “propaganda purveyed … in state history textbooks”. To be fair, this extremely tendentious causal claim is supported by a single reference (to her own earlier work). However, it is surely an egregious simplification of an extremely complex social phenomenon. The sweeping generalisation mentioned above is not, it should be stressed, a slip into Orientalism; we also read, for example, that European academics (all?) “have no training” in teaching and so, “would be horrible” at small group teaching. Similar examples abound in the text. I suppose that such exaggeration might be justified by saying that Nussbaum’s examples are not intended as literal truths, but as vivid summaries, designed to illustrate, rather than support, her more theoretical claims. These more general claims about the declining prestige of humanistic education, and about the proper role and value of education are interesting, and of more general import. In the rest of this review, then, I shall resist the temptation to list implausible claims and focus on two key issues: precisely what Nussbaum thinks the current crisis is and her account of why we need the humanities. 

Nussbaum seems to diagnose three threats to humanistic education: first, an emphasis on the teaching of narrow technical skills in the name of maximising GNP; second, attempts to twist the teaching of history and social science to stoke nationalist and ethnic agendas; third, an increasing emphasis on standardised testing. I agree that a narrow, economically-driven curriculum, a desire to stoke nationalist sentiment and a focus on bureaucratically tractable outcome measures each poses a potential threat to humanistic educational ideals. I was far less convinced by Nussbaum’s apparent assumption that these three threats are all, somehow, inter-related. There might be Marxist arguments that capitalism survives best when the workers are stoked up to their eyeballs on religion and their energies focused on ethnic, rather than class warfare. However, on the face of it, inculcating rampant ethnic nationalism in workers seems in tension with creating workers who will play a docile role in multi-national corporations. Furthermore, it is unclear how either the neo-liberal or ethnic-traditionalist trends which, according to Nussbaum, threaten humanistic education relate to her real bugbear: standardised testing and quantifiable measures of educational “output”. Whether hatred has been inculcated is rather hard to measure; it may be easier to measure whether people have marketable skills, but it is unclear that the market itself demands excessive testing. Distinguishing different trends which might threaten humanistic education is not merely of theoretical interest. Rather, even if Nussbaum’s book is part of a political struggle, it is important to recognise that different societies face different problems: Indian academics who lament the BJP-driven rewriting of textbooks face different challenges to UK academics who wish to resist proposals for allocating research funding on the basis of “impact”. 

Furthermore, in in . Nussbaum herself notes that those who value economic growth might often have reason to value humanistic education. However, she seems to overlook deeper grounds of agreement. Nussbaum draws a very sharp boundary – between an “old”, “growth-based” model of development and society with an associated narrow technocratic model of education – and her proposed alternative, which sees the promotion of capabilities “ranging from life, health, and bodily integrity to political liberty, political participation, and education” as the goal of a good society. One obvious worry about this distinction is that it seems to overlook alternative mixed models of development, which, arguably, actually motivate many policy-makers. Furthermore, and more seriously, Nussbaum also seems to overlook why people might adopt a growth-based model of development, and, in particular, how such a model might be compatible with her own concerns. Even if the main goal of education is to promote citizens who can contribute to political debate, and this requires exposure to the humanities, such citizens might democratically agree on the value of economic growth. Conversely, full democratic participation might be a dream in a country where all are extremely poor. Nussbaum writes as if we are faced with a stark choice, but it is unclear that the choice is as stark as she paints it, and even that we have a choice to make at all. Along similar lines, Nussbaum seems to ignore the fact that even if actual bureaucracies have adopted stupid and self-defeating measures of educational attainment leading to what she calls a “pedagogy of force-feeding for standardised examinations”, there are excellent democratic reasons to seek to measure and assess the success of publicly-funded education. 

In short, even if, as a matter of fact, humanistic education is under threat from a variety of directions, and even if, as a matter of principle we think that growth-based models of development are incomplete or problematic, the threats to humanistic education are not all necessarily motivated by concerns which are deeply incompatible with humanist or democratic values. Again, I stress, these claims are not solely of scholastic interest; rather, they point to a serious problem with using this book for the political purpose of defending the humanities. On the one hand, Nussbaum tells us that training in the humanities produces citizens who “understand other traditions from within” and who can “think well about political issues affecting the nation”. On the other hand, her own arguments seem ill-suited to forming political alliances based on an understanding of others’ concerns. Not only does this tension rather undercut Nussbaum’s own assertions, but it makes it unclear who Nussbaum believes will be convinced by her arguments; were I a supporter of increased technical education, of the BJP or of standardised testing, I would find nothing in this book which spoke to my concerns. 

One resolution of this tension is that Nussbaum is preaching to the converted: rousing humanists to fight their corner, and providing them with tools with which to do so. The tool Nussbaum provides is an argument that the arts and humanities are valuable because their teaching is part of an education for “a more inclusive type of citizenship”. This is an interesting proposal, because many humanists seem tempted to defend teaching and research in their subjects by appeal to something like the intrinsic value of a humanistic education, and, as such, to resist attempts to justify curricula and research programmes in terms of “impact”. Nussbaum seems to suggest, however, that, rather than resist talk of impact, humanists should, instead, challenge prevailing conceptions of what constitutes impact. In general, this strikes me as an excellent proposal: given that continued teaching and research in the arts and humanities depends to a large degree on taxpayers’ money, it seems incumbent on humanists that they can provide a justification for their subjects which clearly relates to political concerns and demands. What worries me, however, is that Nussbaum seems to confuse two different issues. The first issue is whether we should conceptualise the good society in narrowly economistic terms or in broader terms, which include a concern that citizens are able to make reasoned contributions to debate. The second issue is what we should teach in Schools and Universities. Nussbaum’s argument seems, often, to run together these two questions, because she seems to assume that there is some very strong relationship between what we teach and the health of democracy. While I agree that there might be some relationship here, I was uncertain precisely what Nussbaum sees this relationship as, and without further specification of the precise relationship between curricula and democracy, it is unclear how best to use Nussbaum’s argument. 

An obvious worry here is that it seems that we have excellent inductive evidence that those highly trained in the arts and humanities can, often, fall very far short of Nussbaum’s ideal citizens. This is a point she herself notes in a brief aside on the anti-semitism of Wagner and Humperdinck. Furthermore, to choose an example Nussbaum does not mention, we might note that Nineteenth Century English public schools and Oxbridge turned out many men who had an excellent education in the classics, but who went on to administer a brutal Empire. In short, it is unclear that exposure to the arts and humanities is sufficient for crafting good citizens. In response to such concerns, it might be suggested that it is not exposure per se, but the right kind of teaching which suffices for good citizens. However, if this is Nussbaum’s thought, then it is unclear how useful her arguments are for practical purposes, given that, as she herself sometimes seems to acknowledge, there is a huge gap between actual current educational practice and her proposals; even if the curriculum set out in this volume would create a new kind of citizen, we might worry that this does not represent a practicable ideal. 

An alternative way of reading Nussbaum’s arguments would be as claiming that some exposure to the arts and humanities is necessary for maintaining democratic societies; in a rousing phrase, we read that “knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour”. In a nearby passage, we also read that in the absence of humanistic education human interactions are “likely to be mediated by the thin norms of market exchange in which human lives are seen primarily as instruments for gain”. Leaving to one side the complicated issue of why Nussbaum assumes that we are faced with a stark choice between markets and democracy, the general thought she expresses here may seem plausible. However, they are exceptionally hard to pin down once we recognise that the vast majority of the world’s population has had little education; either Nussbaum must think that most of the world’s population are likely to engage in “bad behaviour” or she must think that the merest touch of a humanistic education can avoid “bad behaviour”. Neither of these claims strikes me as particularly plausible (furthermore, the claim that the particular form which the bad behaviour of those not educated in the humanities must take is a tendency to see others as instruments for economic benefit seems completely implausible: to return to some of the issues mentioned above, whatever else went wrong in Gujarat it was not that Hindus saw Muslims in merely economic terms). 

It is a favourite trick of philosophers to say that X is neither necessary nor sufficient for Y, and, therefore, that there is no interesting relationship between X and Y. This is a bad trick, and not one I want to play here; there might well be a relationship between humanistic education and democratic citizenship, even if that relationship is not simple. Intuitively, such a claim seems plausible – how could people educated in the arts and humanities fail to be better at arguing over policy? – and politically appealing – what even minimally enlightened policy-maker could disagree that strengthening democracy is an important end? My worry is that Nussbaum provides no way of spelling out such concerns. Furthermore, to raise a final worry, it also seems that one aspect of Nussbaum’s approach is likely to be particularly problematic in this regard: her insistence that all education from the kindergarten to undergraduate study should be understood in terms of the creation of better citizens. 

This strategy is, unfortunately, rather ambiguous. It is unclear whether Nussbaum believes that the needs of democracy demand that all citizens receive at least an undergraduate level education (with a strong focus on the humanities, and so on) or that the needs of democracy demand that all those who receive a University education are trained in critical thinking and so on. The first claim seems excessively utopian; were Nussbaum engaged in what political philosophers call “ideal theory”, then the claim that democracy requires that all citizens be educated until 21 might be a valid claim. As a basic assumption in what is essentially a polemical work, however, the claim seems, at best, to engender despair. Even in a developed country such as the UK, fewer than 50% of 18-year-olds attend University. Matters are, of course, even worse in Nussbaum’s beloved India, where female literacy is about 54%. Not only do such facts make the normative claim that all must be educated to University level seem excessively utopian, but they also make it difficult to understand the precise relationship between education and democracy; clearly, if democratic citizenship requires a University education (with a stress on the humanities), we are, and always have been, a long way from democracy. 

Maybe, then, Nussbaum’s argument is intended to be that, for as long as citizens are educated, their education should stress humanistic and humane virtues. This strikes me as a pleasant enough claim, but deeply problematic if the value of such virtues is because of the ways in which they equip citizens to function in democracies. After all, if some do not receive the training in democratic virtues accorded to others, then it seems all too easy to argue that, under real world conditions, it is the well-educated (specifically, those well-educated in the humanities) who should hold greater power in political debate. It is undoubtedly true that in modern societies, it is the well educated who tend to hold real power, and, as such, it may well be true that it is they who most need critical skills and the virtue of tolerance. However, to make such an argument is, in effect, to acquiesce in a form of oligarchy, where what really matters is that decisions made in Whitehall or Wall Street or the World Bank are reasoned and humane. (In this regard, it is a striking feature of Nussbaum’s argument that she thinks that it is a good thing that many US Universities rely on private funds from alumni who appreciate their “liberal arts” training, and a bad thing that UK Universities must rely on government funding. She is also keen to stress how enlightened businesspeople appreciate their humanities education, and employ others with a similar education. A strange undercurrent of the book, then, is that the real dangers to the humanities are posed by small-minded policy-makers and close-minded parents, rather than by big business.) Were Nussbaum asked to clarify her position, I have no doubt she would deny that it has such oligarchic implications. However, it strikes me that there is an important distinction between viewing the ends of compulsory primary and secondary education in terms of the promotion of democratic capabilities, and also viewing University, non-compulsory education in the same way. Even if there is a plausible argument that humanistic training needs to be part of the curriculum all the way through the education system, it seems that we need to be careful that this argument is compatible with the values of democracy more generally. 

This book has an important message: if we think that a good society is one characterised by relationships of democratic equality, rather than merely by the maximisation of GNP, then this should be reflected in debates over educational policy. In turn, such a framework seems to suggest that we should value the arts and humanities, as they can play an important role in shaping citizens’ capabilities. Unfortunately, what Nussbaum fails to provide us with is a clear sense of how we should develop this argument, who opposes it, and how we should respond to such opposition. Furthermore, in failing to do any of this, this book leaves an unsavoury impression that its contents belie its conclusions. 

Martha C. Nussbaum: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4008-3422-8
Hardcover, 177 pages, US$22.95 

(c) 2010 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Mohammed Khallouk

Recent polls conducted by a number of polling institutes indicate that, in the minds of Germans and Europeans, Islam – more than any other religion – is associated with negative feelings. The phenomenon of resentment towards Islam, which is widespread in society, has been ignored for a long time and has recently begun to attract some attention; in particular, there have been efforts to investigate, and publicly debate, its origins, heterogeneity, and repercussions, by a number of prominent representatives from various academic disciplines. One such effort has resulted in the present volume, edited by Thorsten G. Schneider, under the title “Islamfeindlichkeit – Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen” (roughly, “Islamophobia: When the Limits of Criticism become Blurred”), which draws a line from the slander of the Prophet Muhammad in medieval Europe all the way to contemporary internet-based incitement against Islam.

As the first chapter of the book, about the historical evolution of the European perception of Islam, makes clear, large parts of the European population have tended to stigmatise the dominant religion of ‘the Orient’ – in spite of the, at times, significant anticipation of cultural achievements in the Near East. From the mid-20^th century onwards, due to the increase in encounters with Muslim immigrants and ‘guest-workers’ (as well as, more recently, the acceleration of globalisation), these sentiments have again surfaced more prominently.

However, as the first of the contributions by the theologian Thomas Naumann shows, by reflecting on the supposedly ‘darkest chapter’ in European-Islamic history – the age of the Crusades –  the direct encounter with Islamic culture sometimes also made it to possible to overcome feelings of resentment. When viewed from this angle, the present volume can also be understood as a manifesto for cultural dialogue with Muslims, with the goal of finding a consensus on values.

Since negative reports tend to have a stronger emotional impact on a non-expert audience than positive reports, some pundits with an, at best, reserved attitude towards Islam, have succeeded, time and again, in reviving historical legends about Islam, even in the context of what are essentially modern contemporary problems – thereby bringing outdated historical ressentiments back into public consciousness.

This might also explain the observation, well-documented by Werner Ruf, an emeritus political scientist, in his contribution based on an analysis of official NATO documents, that both the scenario of an ‘imminent threat’ from the Muslim world (a familiar trope in medieval and early modern Europe) and a feeling of cultural superiority (which has its roots in 19^th-century imperialism) are enjoying renewed popularity in some political quarters and certain mass media.

The second chapter in the volume analyses the deep repercussions of the resentment that persists in European civil society towards the Muslim faith and its adherents. In particular, it creates barriers for the – politically desirable – integration of Muslim immigrants into German society, and for the recognition of legitimate religious demands, as far as the educational system, professional life and legal system are concerned.

The contribution by Navid Kermani, the Iranian-German scholar of Islamic studies, emphasises that the prejudice-laden image of Islam in parts of German society is, to a large extent, fuelled, and perpetuated, by the use of selective quotations from the Quran, which are taken out of context and then related to specific social problems or developments. As a result, any negative occurrences may then be blamed on Islam itself, whereas other attendant circumstances, such as political conditions, educational backgrounds, or the immigrant status of those involved are often ignored.

The role of the media in perpetuating and cultivating negative connotations of all things Muslim, is analysed in detail in chapters 3 and 4 of the book. What is especially problematic is that some, originally left-leaning, liberal intellectuals, have adopted a tone of wholesale criticism of Islam and ‘the Muslims’. The contribution by the editor, Thorsten G. Schneider, a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies, unmasks the unsavoury methods by which some of those intellectuals (many of whom have never pursued degrees in Islamic studies or Orientalistik) pass off their warnings against an undifferentiated Islamic threat as an exercise in ‘casting light on the nature of Islam’.

In addition to these mildly depressing findings about the attitudes and behaviour among German civil society towards Muslims – who, after all, by now have become an integral part of it – the papers in the volume also present some reason for hoping that Islam might one day be recognised as on an equal footing with Christianity and Judaism. Several contributors point to the painful, but eventually successful, path towards equal treatment that, historically, was part of the Jewish experience in Christian societies and which might now serve as an inspiration for Muslims.

Even though the number of papers included in the volume – the total of which runs to 28 – might seem a little daunting to the layperson and casual reader, the diversity of disciplines and approaches represented by the contributors shows clearly the relevance of the phenomenon of “Islamophobia”, and its consequences, across society as a whole.

Thorsten G. Schneider (ed.): Islamfeindlichkeit. Wenn die Grenzen der Kritik verschwimmen
VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-3-531-16257-7
Softcover, 485 pages, EUR 39.90

Mohammed Khallouk was born in Morocco and works as a political scientist and scholar of Islamic studies at the Phillips University of Marburg. His work analyses Islamic fundamentalism in Northern Africa and the Middle East, as well as the history of the Jewish community in Morocco. He also works as a translator of German contemporary literature into Arabic.

The German version of this article first appeared in Gazelle Magazin; translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books. All rights reserved.

by Daniele Archibugi

Anyone who thought that the history of piracy was now something out of a Hollywood movie has had to think twice. The events in the Gulf of Aden lead us to wonder what differences there are between ancient piracy and the modern version. Perhaps if we examine the piracy that reached its peak between the end of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth century, and preyed on the major trade routes, we may get a clearer understanding of modern piracy. However, opportunity makes men thieves and the cleverly written and witty book by Peter T. Leeson, The Invisible Hook. The Hidden Economics of Pirates (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2009), enables us to do so.

U.S. navy capturing suspected pirates in the Gulf of Aden, May 2009. (U.S. Navy photo, public domain)

According to Leeson, pirates applied economically rational principles aimed at obtaining the maximum result with the least effort and above all minimum risk. They too, in other works, apply the rules of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, or rather the invisible hook. Pirates were not cruel out of sadism but simply because by spreading terror they were able to increment their booty. Flying the infamous “Jolly Roger” served the purpose of generating what economists call the “announcement” effect: the potential victims were warned that any attempt to stave off the attack by a pirate vessel would lead to ferocious reprisals. If, on the other hand, the vessel attacked surrendered without any resistance, everything of value on board would be seized but the crew would be spared. The same applies to the pirates’ widely publicized ruthlessness against prisoners: many of the latter were tortured, others forced to walk the plank. Also in this case the pirates’ intention was to create what economists call the “reputation” effect. Prisoners might try to conceal information about valuable goods or about the routes followed by other trading or navy vessels and would be induced to reveal all their secrets by the terrible reputation enjoyed by the pirates.

Leeson gives credence to the economic interpretation of the pirates’ behavior: mutineers were certainly attracted by high profits; in the early 18^th century a sailor of a merchant vessel earned no more than 25 pounds a year, and a courageous pirate could earn as much as 300. But as well as borrowing from the trappings of economic theory, Leeson does not disdain also casting a penetrating glance at the social and political motives of these odd outlaw communities. Life on board ship, whether a merchant or a navy vessel, was regulated in an authoritarian and hierarchical fashion (and it might be added that things have not changed much since those times). The ship’s commander had the power to inflict very severe corporal punishment, stop crew members’ pay without good reason and demand that the crew perform work not envisaged in the original contract, and more besides. On board the captain had the power of life or death without any checks or balances. It is true that the sailors could sue for justice in the courts on returning home, although the latter usually sided with the commanders, also because the judges came from the same social class.

It is thus not surprising that, far beyond the reach of the dominant authority on land, sailors should set up a completely different social organization. And it is striking to see the extent to which this was based on principles of equality. In the first place, political equality. “Every Man has a Vote in the Affairs of the Moment” runs article one of the Code of Conduct on board the private vessel of Captain Bartholomew Roberts. Furthermore, it was the crew members who elected their own captain. Furthermore, the commander could be deposed by the pirates themselves if judged to be inadequate, corrupt or not bold enough, as happen to the famous Captain Edward England. In the rudimentary system of checks and balances characterizing the pirate republics, also a quartermaster was elected to look after the ship’s management, and who had the power to avoid individual crew members being unjustly punished. Nor must it be overlooked that, in an era in which the European nations were getting rich from the slave trade, many pirate ships granted equal rights also to colored men.

The pirate communities were in other words far from being anarchic: indeed, they developed a democratic system opposed to the autocratic system prevailing in the other vessels. Pirates had even too many rules: their codes of conduct prohibited sailors from gambling and smoking on board, from drinking after sunset and from keeping lamps alight late at night. They were also prohibited from bringing women on board to avoid causing jealousy.

The distribution of the rewards was much fairer than the pay on merchant or naval vessels: the pay of the captain and the quartermaster was only twice as high as that of ordinary pirates. Moreover, in the case of accidents in the “working place”, the pirates’ republics had a much more highly developed welfare system than that applied on the other ships: they meticulously specified how much was due to any crew member who had lost a hand, a leg or an eye. On the other hand, desertion during a boarding operation was punished by death or marooning on a desert island.

If piracy offered so much more to its members than was available to other sailors, the question is not so much why there were so many (it is estimated that there were two or three thousand in the early 18^th century) but rather why so many sailors did not become pirates. Perhaps it is because when captured they were almost always hanged: a count of executions between 1716 and 1726 indicates that about 400 were hanged, about 40 per year on average. But if we consider the high death rate among law-abiding sailors it must be concluded that the “announcement” and the “reputation” effects worked more for the scaffold than for the Jolly Roger.

Peter T. Leeson: The Hidden Economics of Pirates
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-0691137476
Hardcover, 296 pages, US$24.95

Daniele Archibugi is director of the Italian National Research Council (CNR), and professor of innovation, governance and public policy at Birkbeck College.

This article first appeared on openDemocracy.net ; it is here republished under a Creative Commons Licence.