No fault political theory versus the odious comparison

With "current events" remaining current for 15 minutes, max, it is no easy thing to sustain a seamless argument in a bi-monthly column, but I am not the only journalist facing difficulty. Ten days ago, as I raked leaves, I listened to Daniel Schor, the Ancient Mariner of lugubrious punditry, opining in a funebrial voice that the war was "going very badly," that we were in a "quagmire," a situation displaying "all the earmarks of another Vietnam." As a collector of clichés I have occasionally pondered just how many earmarks "all the earmarks" are, a single earmark invariably proving sufficient in my youthful life as a farmboy; but that topic with several others was left behind when, the next day, we won the war. It is probably too much to hope that next Saturday Dan Schor will be lamenting that we are hopelessly mired at the gates of Baghdad, but he is a flexible, seasoned professional and will come up with something. After all, he always has John Ashcroft.

I have only the fugitive remarks on this page of my fellow columnist Nicholas Guyatt GS, who taxes me with dazzling insensitivity for claiming that some economic and political arrangements are better than others. Allow me a final attempt. Certainly the "ranking of societies" is otiose if undertaken in the spirit of a British football chant or of triumphalist jingoism. But awkward realities should not be eschewed merely in deference to empty-headedness confusing itself with open-mindedness. Among numerous possible purposes of the political institutions of civilization, or "government," are the nourishment of the general welfare, the implementation on earth of a supernatural revelation or the material enrichment of an oligarchy. Now even if it should prove impossible, in the dense fog of cultural relativism, to discern relationships of superiority or inferiority among social orders in terms of their intentions, one still cannot escape the classical task of criticism (the word means "judgment") with regard to their performance. Evil itself is variable in its scope and efficiency. The superior status of America as the "greater Satan," and the superlative status of our president as the "greatest criminal who ever lived," for example, requires the existence of other, comparatively less-impressive iniquities.

If there is no canon for judging between material want and material sufficiency, between human bondage and human liberty, between enforced ignorance and subsidized enlightenment, if it is a matter indifferent whether a man lives in a house or a hovel, or whether a woman may own property or be owned as property, then of course there are neither superior nor inferior societies. It follows that political activity designed to advance any particular ideas or policies is a subjective matter of taste; hence, non disputandum est. I do not subscribe to any such doctrine of social indifference, and I doubt that Guyatt actually does either. It seems highly likely to me, indeed, that the vast majority of people throughout the world, however molded by their cultural traditions, their religions, their "experience" and "perceptions," actually aspire to a common core of social goods including peace, security and material sufficiency — "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," as our secular Scripture puts it. The question of how to achieve such ends remains urgent.

I did not invent the phrase "the Islamic world." It should be obvious that I am troubled by a political identity wedded to religious hegemony, whether in Louis XIV's "France toute catholique" or in Omar's Afghanistan. But the phrase is invoked as a term of weight by leaders of "Islamic countries" in the Middle East and Africa, in Pakistan and in Indonesia. The stated fantasy of "extreme" Islamicists — the restoration of an ancient caliphate over a vast geography in which Islam and the "state" would be coterminous — is not unrelated to such terminology. The inseparability of state and religion, however unpromising for social modernity or economic prosperity, does offer the Islamicists a polemical advantage, since all political criticism instantly becomes religious defamation.

It is perhaps good news that these people do not tend to do well in the elective contests in which they are tested, but it is bad news that the tests are so infrequently allowed. It is good, in my opinion, to have a society that honors the rights of Mennonite women in Pennsylvania to cover their hair and of Mennonite men to sport prophetical beards. It is less good to have laws mandating corporal punishment for any bareheaded woman or insufficiently bearded man. Alternatives have significance. An awful pretty dress is not a pretty awful dress. Social syntax, too, has consequences. A woman in Lancaster County may choose not to drive a car; a woman in Saudi Arabia may not choose to drive a car. The political arrangements that allow the former circumstance are superior to those that compel the latter. Since I published my last column I have read several Muslim writers, not all of them Westerners, who have been saying something similar. I make no claim of cause and effect. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu.