Berman on Rationalist Naivete
June 19, 2006
Here is a long, interesting interview with Paul Berman at Democratiya, where “democratic radicals” flog leftists who have “backed themselves into an incoherent and negativist ‘anti-imperialist’ corner, losing touch with long-held democratic, egalitarian and humane values.” Here’s a nice stretch from Berman:The ‘rationalist naiveté’ is built into liberal civilisation and the liberal idea. It’s a very deep thing. Liberalism proposes that people should act rationally and that we want to act rationally. Liberalism’s first step is to agree that we want to make a division in our own minds and imaginations between the rational and the theological. We agree to say, ‘well, we may have religious ideas, we may believe in divine revelation, we may believe anything we want, in one corner of our minds, but in another corner we are going to try to think things through rationally, according to criteria that can be judged and evaluated and contradicted’. We agree to make this division in our own mind. Then we agree to make this division in society as a whole — the church will stay in this corner and the state will remain in that corner, and each institution will try to remain independent of the other. And we hope that by doing this the state will be able to make rational decisions no matter what the advocates of divine revelation may say. The advocates of divine revelation are free to say what they want but they will say it in the church. The state will operate, hopefully, on the basis of rational discussion, analysis, and free and open debate. The whole presupposition is that by allowing there to be a sphere of rational thought and behaviour we will be able to have a more successful society. And, on balance, the ways this has worked out well have outweighed the ways in which it has worked out badly.
The liberal idea makes us very reluctant to believe that anyone is acting in a non-rational way. In the most naïve version it is imagined that really nobody acts in an irrational way. There are two aspects of this kind of naiveté that are worth commenting on.
First, this kind of naiveté is itself one of the sources of the rebellion against liberalism. There is something appalling, or at least deeply unsatisfying, in the idea that men and women are strictly rational. So people are always tempted to rebel against it. The romantic writers were the first modern people to see this and to want to rebel against the rational calculations of liberal society. They rebelled in the form of literature, which is the right way to rebel, but they saw something, and they were right to see it and to rebel.
Second, the liberal idea comes at a terrible cost in political understanding. In the pre-modern age the rational and the irrational could both be understood. It was possible to think and to speak about such things as the soul in political terms, and to think about distortions and perversions of the soul. This became impossible after the rise of liberalism. Political language became impoverished. If you read Plato, his idea of tyranny is very different from a modern liberal idea of tyranny. For Plato, tyranny is not a system based on bad institutions. It’s a perversion of the soul. The tyrant is someone who has lost the proper discipline over his soul and so is lost to his appetites and desires. There is even a fleeting passage or two where Plato mentions the tyrant might succumb to an appetite for cannibalism. This is amazing to see because it means Plato has already identified a cult of death as a temptation, one of the possible perversions of the soul that can take place. This is exactly the kind of thing that—after the rise of liberal ideas—it became harder for people to understand. We took all the questions of the soul, and of virtue, and of the perversions of the soul, and removed them to a corner reserved for religion or psychology. In a different corner we assigned political questions. In the political world, just as in the economic world, we wanted to accord everyone rationality, so we took all the questions of irrationality and put them in a different place entirely. It became very difficult to conceive that people might be behaving in irrational ways or might have succumbed to the allure of a cult of death.
This is Berman on Rationalist Naivete in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: On the Illusion of Thinking as Acting | Next: Evan-Jello | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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