(Warning: this post is not much use for those who don't read Dutch).
I recently found some of my old poems while rummaging through my papers. I thought I had lost them all during a hard drive crash. As it is, quite a few are lost unless I re-remember them, but a few have been salvaged.
I started writing poems in my first year at university in the mistaken belief that writing poetry would help me get girls. I apologize to any girl I accosted at the time - most of them were pretty cool and polite about it, only occasionally advising me to get help. My poetry at that time was pretty mad. I read a lot of Heiner Mueller at the time and was impressed with his unforgiving, hammering use of language. And I tried to imitate that. The result was a very cacaphonous, heavy-metal kind of poetry. I think that it saved that from being too pathetic. Or at least, I like to think that. But aside from a few good metaphors which I may be able to salvage in the future, it was pretty bad.
During the year 2001-2002, I worked as a teacher of Dutch in Georgia (Republic of, that is). No television, no computer, no research literature, absolutely gorgeous surroundings, and the books I had access to was the Dutch literature collection from our library. It did my writing a lot of good: what I wrote at that time was a lot more subtle, with metre and rhyme. Occasionally overwrought, but some of it was quite good.
The following two verses were from a poem that was never finished, but perhaps they can stand on their own. I'm not that happy with the first one, but the second I quite like:
Ik hoor je voetstap in mijn hart,
en in mijn hoofd je ademtocht.
Je sluipt door mijn herinnering
- zachtjes, maar ik hoor je toch.
En voel voorjaar, onrust
en regen in de lucht.
In mijn oog verslagen ijs,
in mijn borst een zwaluwvlucht.
One of my favourites was a poem that just seemed to present itself in near-complete form. It's about surrender and sacrifice, and the feeling of loss and powerlessness in those left behind. The religious references are obvious, but were not intentional at the time. Writing it, I must not so much had Christ in mind, but the messianic figure from Dan Simmons' novel The Rise of Endymion.
Ik zie hoe je je beker leegt
en schoonveegt aan het tafelkleed.
Je zoent me vaarwel, en ketent me.
Ik weet hoe daarvoor de hemel zweeg,
slechts de wind die met de takken streed
je zacht zei: ”Nooit vergeet ik je.”
Je kalme stem breekt mijn verzet,
je woord doet mij een knevel om.
”Waar ik ook ga, ik ga alleen.”
Je breekt je lichaam, opent het.
Ik zie de bergen. Ze staren stom.
Ik wil hier weg, weet niet waarheen.
Reading my old stuff with a religious eye, I see references (both Biblical and mythological) brimming just about everywhere - the "you" most of my poems were directed to may have originally been a more or less specific girl, but ends up being much more than that. As I may have mentioned at some point, I'm not a very social person. I guess it takes something for me to develop an interest in another person, and being female definitely helps developing that interest. With few exceptions, most of my close friends have been female. I suppose that also my religious feelings have, at first, developed through female archetypes. But it's interesting to note how all of that was brimming under the surface, so to speak, before becoming obvious to myself.
The following pretty sharply outlines my problems in meeting "the other" (other people, God) - one of fear and longing, a tendency to retreat behind high walls I built around me and a desire to surrender and open up:
Spiegels en muren. Ik verberg mijn gezicht
in handen van steen en stenen van vlees
en dromen en as. Hun taak onverricht
keren duiven en raven van het glas van mijn geest.
En van het puin waarvan mijn geheugen is
bouw ik torens, waar ik met verzegelde mond
steeds jou, die mijzelf en een vreemdeling is
vermink en omhels en zoen en verwond.
Nu wordt het nacht. Ik zie je kamp in het veld,
je huid neemt de kleur van het verdwijnende licht,
en ik wens mijn muren geslecht, mijn vonnis geveld,
je hand en je adem op mijn ontsloten gezicht.
I have sometimes considered translating some of them into English. Particularly because I haven't lived in a Dutch-speaking environment for such a long time. But translating the best ones - the ones adhering most strictly to form, metre, etc. - is quite hopeless.
One that I can translate, because it's quite simple and very prosaic, is unusually bitter. The lovely double meaning in the "depends" is better in Dutch, however (dat hangt ervan af). Anyway, I must have been in a pretty dark mood at the time:
You lean on me
- I support you like
a rope supports a hanged one.
Like now you're swaying above the crowd,
with the birds and the big grey sky,
I'm the only friend you have.
And, dangling from the rope, you ask me:
"My rope, I love you dearly,
will you stay with me forevermore?"
And the rope answers:
"That depends, beloved,
which one of us breaks first."
zaterdag 27 oktober 2007
Gay marriage, liberal consensus and the corruption of power
Currently, a reform of the Swedish marriage law seems underway, and the law seems to be set to be redefined as gender-neutral - that is, in principle inclusive of gay marriage. A coalition of Catholics, Evangelicals and Pentecostalists have set up a counter-campaign under the title of "Bevara Äktenskapet" (preserve marriage). Among other things, the coalition has bought advertising in the Stockholm subway.
Response to the campaigning poster - which I, even though I travel the Stockholm subway almost daily, have not seen but which I understand depicts a little heart and the words "Father Mother Child" - has been astonishing. The union of subway drivers and personnel have complained about the offensive posters, as have the Left and Environmental Parties. Also, the RFSL, the Swedish foundation for the Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered, have been wondering out loud why such offensive, hateful and discriminating behaviour such as disagreement with them is even allowed. Unsurprisingly, supporters of tolerance and inclusiveness have taken to hacking the websites of the offending Catholics and Evangelicals and tearing the posters down. Perhaps that's why I didn't see any around.
I'm not surprised by the actions of the Swedish Left, which has very strong censorious tendencies. The Left has been in power for most of the past sixty years, and has gotten too used to representing social consensus - which, in Sweden, is still largely social-democratic with a very odd mixture of social liberalism and moral conservatism (the moral conservatism of the Left mainly directed at non-politically-correct expressions of sexuality). It tends to respond with rage to views that fall far outside its own. If Swedish politics is to develop into the same direction as Dutch, Belgian and French politics - where all icons have been torn to the ground and smashed - the liberal-left political consensus here in Sweden is living on borrowed time. Which is not wholly a good thing (political discourse in the Netherlands has its own set of problems).
I'm more disappointed in the stance of the RFSL. I really expected something better of them. Power, it seems, corrupts - even the best.
I'm not against gay marriage as such. I would tend to strongly oppose any inequalities between gay and straight partnerships - such as those dealing with inheritance, and even adoption. This said, legal redefinition of marriage is not something merely abstract, not something that happens in a political vacuum. The family is the primary social institution where the next generation of citizens is socialized - and the piecemeal dissolution of that institution over the past thirty years or so, with increasing divorce, one-parent families, the obsolescence of such family rituals as having dinner together at a table, and all that, may have bad consequences as well as good ones (such as the growing economic and social independence of women). And the issue of gay marriage is not independent of such concerns.
And I, for one, would like to listen to such concerns, and be able to make up my mind about them, without the unions, or the Left party, or the RFSL intervening to shield me from such views! The freedom of the Evangelicals and the Pentecostalists is my freedom as well. And, sadly, it seems the RFSL is its enemy.
My advice, however, for social conservatives and Christians opposed to gay marriage is this: withdraw. You're fighting a rearguard fight, to retain a legalistic remnant of a religious society which has long ago passed into oblivion. Let the state call "marriage" whatever it wish. Meanwhile, resacralize marriage in your own communities, in your own churches, and treat it as your faith tells you to. Be like the Christians under the Roman Empire, pay your taxes to the Emperor and go on building a society within a society. My advice would be the same to Christians not opposed to gay marriage, or to other religious and non-religious groups who regard marriage as something worth saving, whether it is for straight, gays, polygamous unions, etc.: do not fight for your religious or ethical footholds in secular society from the outside. Instead, work in the interstices of secular society, fight for your values from within.
Response to the campaigning poster - which I, even though I travel the Stockholm subway almost daily, have not seen but which I understand depicts a little heart and the words "Father Mother Child" - has been astonishing. The union of subway drivers and personnel have complained about the offensive posters, as have the Left and Environmental Parties. Also, the RFSL, the Swedish foundation for the Gay, Lesbian and Transgendered, have been wondering out loud why such offensive, hateful and discriminating behaviour such as disagreement with them is even allowed. Unsurprisingly, supporters of tolerance and inclusiveness have taken to hacking the websites of the offending Catholics and Evangelicals and tearing the posters down. Perhaps that's why I didn't see any around.
I'm not surprised by the actions of the Swedish Left, which has very strong censorious tendencies. The Left has been in power for most of the past sixty years, and has gotten too used to representing social consensus - which, in Sweden, is still largely social-democratic with a very odd mixture of social liberalism and moral conservatism (the moral conservatism of the Left mainly directed at non-politically-correct expressions of sexuality). It tends to respond with rage to views that fall far outside its own. If Swedish politics is to develop into the same direction as Dutch, Belgian and French politics - where all icons have been torn to the ground and smashed - the liberal-left political consensus here in Sweden is living on borrowed time. Which is not wholly a good thing (political discourse in the Netherlands has its own set of problems).
I'm more disappointed in the stance of the RFSL. I really expected something better of them. Power, it seems, corrupts - even the best.
I'm not against gay marriage as such. I would tend to strongly oppose any inequalities between gay and straight partnerships - such as those dealing with inheritance, and even adoption. This said, legal redefinition of marriage is not something merely abstract, not something that happens in a political vacuum. The family is the primary social institution where the next generation of citizens is socialized - and the piecemeal dissolution of that institution over the past thirty years or so, with increasing divorce, one-parent families, the obsolescence of such family rituals as having dinner together at a table, and all that, may have bad consequences as well as good ones (such as the growing economic and social independence of women). And the issue of gay marriage is not independent of such concerns.
And I, for one, would like to listen to such concerns, and be able to make up my mind about them, without the unions, or the Left party, or the RFSL intervening to shield me from such views! The freedom of the Evangelicals and the Pentecostalists is my freedom as well. And, sadly, it seems the RFSL is its enemy.
My advice, however, for social conservatives and Christians opposed to gay marriage is this: withdraw. You're fighting a rearguard fight, to retain a legalistic remnant of a religious society which has long ago passed into oblivion. Let the state call "marriage" whatever it wish. Meanwhile, resacralize marriage in your own communities, in your own churches, and treat it as your faith tells you to. Be like the Christians under the Roman Empire, pay your taxes to the Emperor and go on building a society within a society. My advice would be the same to Christians not opposed to gay marriage, or to other religious and non-religious groups who regard marriage as something worth saving, whether it is for straight, gays, polygamous unions, etc.: do not fight for your religious or ethical footholds in secular society from the outside. Instead, work in the interstices of secular society, fight for your values from within.
woensdag 17 oktober 2007
Scientism and "antiscience"
Something struck me while casually surfing some of my favourite ScienceBlogs today. Namely a phrase by John Wilkings after defending the ridiculous decision to award Al Gore the nobel peace price:
Of course, the MSM is also spinning in their mental graves on account of the fact that there were supposedly nine errors in An Inconvenient Truth, according to a British judge. James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt shows that there were two and a half errors, and all were justified at the time of the making of the film. But don't expect that to stop the slathering pitbulls of antiscience...
There's an eerie echo of some of the less savoury versions of religions (or secular ersatz religions like Marxism) in that last phrase. Now, of course John Wilkings may have been engaging in humorous hyperbole here - but a quick googling of the term "antiscience" shows the attitude is alive and well. I posted about the use of the loaded term "denialism" before.
Chesterton at one point remarked something to the extent that when people stop believing in God, the problem is that they'll start believing in everything else. And in some ways "science" in the Scienceblogosphere is mutating precisely in some kind of surrogate religion. It's seen as a source of values, a guide to political action, and most importantly, a tribal epithet distinguishing allies from enemies (nefarious Republicans, suspiciously francophone intellectuals and the like).
One could make the provocative point that, rather than arguing whether religion can even co-exist with a scientific attitude, religious beliefs (of the classical rather than the fundamentalist variety) may actually be of great benefit to a working scientist as they force her to distinguish values and metaphysical beliefs from science as a method.
Of course, the MSM is also spinning in their mental graves on account of the fact that there were supposedly nine errors in An Inconvenient Truth, according to a British judge. James Hrynyshyn at Island of Doubt shows that there were two and a half errors, and all were justified at the time of the making of the film. But don't expect that to stop the slathering pitbulls of antiscience...
There's an eerie echo of some of the less savoury versions of religions (or secular ersatz religions like Marxism) in that last phrase. Now, of course John Wilkings may have been engaging in humorous hyperbole here - but a quick googling of the term "antiscience" shows the attitude is alive and well. I posted about the use of the loaded term "denialism" before.
Chesterton at one point remarked something to the extent that when people stop believing in God, the problem is that they'll start believing in everything else. And in some ways "science" in the Scienceblogosphere is mutating precisely in some kind of surrogate religion. It's seen as a source of values, a guide to political action, and most importantly, a tribal epithet distinguishing allies from enemies (nefarious Republicans, suspiciously francophone intellectuals and the like).
One could make the provocative point that, rather than arguing whether religion can even co-exist with a scientific attitude, religious beliefs (of the classical rather than the fundamentalist variety) may actually be of great benefit to a working scientist as they force her to distinguish values and metaphysical beliefs from science as a method.
vrijdag 12 oktober 2007
Nobel peace prize
I know the Nobel peace prize has suffered a credibility problem ever since they handed it out to Henry Kissinger, but... Al Gore? Who's next, Bono Vox? Bob Geldof? Michael Jackson? Enough aging celebrities with a messiah complex out there.
The bitter irony is of course that Al Gore was vice-president in one of the more warlike U.S. administrations in recent decades - which presided over bombing Yugoslavia, blowing up a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and the starvation embargo against Iraq, punctuated regularly by bombing raids. Whatever one can say about George Bush, at least he gave the Iraqis a chance to fight back (one which they have taken up enthusiastically).
Of course, this is all forgotten, as global warming and the war in Iraq are all too useful sticks to beat the Republicans with. The American liberal political memory is very short.
The bitter irony is of course that Al Gore was vice-president in one of the more warlike U.S. administrations in recent decades - which presided over bombing Yugoslavia, blowing up a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, and the starvation embargo against Iraq, punctuated regularly by bombing raids. Whatever one can say about George Bush, at least he gave the Iraqis a chance to fight back (one which they have taken up enthusiastically).
Of course, this is all forgotten, as global warming and the war in Iraq are all too useful sticks to beat the Republicans with. The American liberal political memory is very short.
donderdag 11 oktober 2007
More on socialism and religion
Had a phone conversation with my father, where we discussed the points where Christianity and socialism touch. A very important one is of course the centrality of alienation in both Marxism and the Biblical narrative - especially the Creation account. Where the alienation of the worker from the product of his work is precisely that which Marxian socialism seeks to overcome, the Creation account magnificently describes the alienation between man and his natural surroundings, no longer a luscious garden but a field to be laboured upon, controlled and fought against:
Cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken.
(Gen. 3: 18/19).
But the big question is of course what went wrong between the Communist Manifesto and the Gulags. Ultimately, there were tendencies towards historicism - the notion of historical necessity, and the subordination of individuals and groups of individuals to historical necessity - right there from the start, even though Marx may have been much more subtle concerning questions of historical determinism on the one hand and mankind as the master of his own history on the other.
But I guess these tendencies came to the fore much more starkly when Lenin attempted to lead a socialist revolution in a country with a very small working class. Bolshevism of course endorsed an ideology of the Party as the vanguard of the working class - the working class being by itself only capable of attaining a broadly reformist, trade-unionist consciousness. So essentially the working class became a project for the Party rather than a needed corrective influence upon the Party. After the revolution, of course, Stalin undertook industrialization, collectivization and the creation of the Soviet proletariat (and rural proletariat as well) at breakneck speed and at the cost of millions of lives - the original Russian proletariat having died in the Civil War, absorbed by the growing Party bureaucracy or returned to the fields. Man, humanity, and human life became a project of the future to which present generations were subordinated to and sacrificed to; rather than a present and concrete ultimate in our ideologies.
Back when I lived in the Netherlands, I used to devour the texts of the East German playwright Heiner Mueller - the chronicler of the GDR, who started as a loyal socialist but became increasingly sceptical towards the end of his life without ever totally abandoning his ideals. One of Heiner Mueller's plays, Mauser, magnificently presents the question of "What is a human being?" The play itself reads like a comment/excerpt of Brecht's Die Massnahme. In Brecht's play, a group of agitators on a secret mission in Northern China decide that they should execute one of their own for the good of the collective. Mueller's Mauser is a dialogue between the Party, the firing platoon, and its victim, set perhaps during the Russian civil war. There is a certain merciless rhythm in the text - that of concrete stakes being rammed into the ground by cold and not at all benevolent machinery, and at the same time biblical turns of phrase (In Vitebsk as in other cities) are not hard to find.
Unfortunately, I haven't got the text right here, but I found an excerpt which I tried to translate below. There's no way this does justice to the text, but it might give you an idea:
Your assignment is not to kill men, but
enemies. For man is unknown.
We know, that killing is labour
but man is more than his labour.
Not until the revolution is finally victorious
in Vitebsk as in other cities
will we know what a man is.
For he is our labour, the unknown
behind the mask, the one buried in crap
his history, the real one behind the growths
the one living in the fossizilations,
because the revolution will tear down his mask,
will erase the growths, will cleanse the dried crap
from his history, from his image. The man, with
claw and tooth, bayonet and machine-gun,
rising from the chain of generations,
tearing his bloody umbilical cord
in the flash of the real beginning knowing himself
and others, each according to their difference.
Excavate, root and all, man out of man,
what matters is the example. Death means nothing.
Cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken.
(Gen. 3: 18/19).
But the big question is of course what went wrong between the Communist Manifesto and the Gulags. Ultimately, there were tendencies towards historicism - the notion of historical necessity, and the subordination of individuals and groups of individuals to historical necessity - right there from the start, even though Marx may have been much more subtle concerning questions of historical determinism on the one hand and mankind as the master of his own history on the other.
But I guess these tendencies came to the fore much more starkly when Lenin attempted to lead a socialist revolution in a country with a very small working class. Bolshevism of course endorsed an ideology of the Party as the vanguard of the working class - the working class being by itself only capable of attaining a broadly reformist, trade-unionist consciousness. So essentially the working class became a project for the Party rather than a needed corrective influence upon the Party. After the revolution, of course, Stalin undertook industrialization, collectivization and the creation of the Soviet proletariat (and rural proletariat as well) at breakneck speed and at the cost of millions of lives - the original Russian proletariat having died in the Civil War, absorbed by the growing Party bureaucracy or returned to the fields. Man, humanity, and human life became a project of the future to which present generations were subordinated to and sacrificed to; rather than a present and concrete ultimate in our ideologies.
Back when I lived in the Netherlands, I used to devour the texts of the East German playwright Heiner Mueller - the chronicler of the GDR, who started as a loyal socialist but became increasingly sceptical towards the end of his life without ever totally abandoning his ideals. One of Heiner Mueller's plays, Mauser, magnificently presents the question of "What is a human being?" The play itself reads like a comment/excerpt of Brecht's Die Massnahme. In Brecht's play, a group of agitators on a secret mission in Northern China decide that they should execute one of their own for the good of the collective. Mueller's Mauser is a dialogue between the Party, the firing platoon, and its victim, set perhaps during the Russian civil war. There is a certain merciless rhythm in the text - that of concrete stakes being rammed into the ground by cold and not at all benevolent machinery, and at the same time biblical turns of phrase (In Vitebsk as in other cities) are not hard to find.
Unfortunately, I haven't got the text right here, but I found an excerpt which I tried to translate below. There's no way this does justice to the text, but it might give you an idea:
Your assignment is not to kill men, but
enemies. For man is unknown.
We know, that killing is labour
but man is more than his labour.
Not until the revolution is finally victorious
in Vitebsk as in other cities
will we know what a man is.
For he is our labour, the unknown
behind the mask, the one buried in crap
his history, the real one behind the growths
the one living in the fossizilations,
because the revolution will tear down his mask,
will erase the growths, will cleanse the dried crap
from his history, from his image. The man, with
claw and tooth, bayonet and machine-gun,
rising from the chain of generations,
tearing his bloody umbilical cord
in the flash of the real beginning knowing himself
and others, each according to their difference.
Excavate, root and all, man out of man,
what matters is the example. Death means nothing.
maandag 8 oktober 2007
Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Hitchens is outraged at the Dutch government's decision to discontinue funding Ayaan Hirsi Ali's bodyguards while she is in the US, mentioning it in the same breath as the events at Srebrenica in 1995 and calling on readers of Slate to register their feelings with the Dutch ambassador.
I personally don't see why the Dutch state should pay for the security of the American Enterprise Institute's personnel. I don't give a damn about the American Enterprise Institute. It can go to the moon for all I care. I don't expect any constructive suggestion from it to deal with the issues the Netherlands - and Europe in general - are currently facing.
If Hirsi Ali had stuck to her guns in her political fight with immigration minister (now turned right-wing populist bulldozer) Verdonk, and stayed in the Netherlands and stayed in the parliament, she might have provided some intellectual content (not to mention dignity) to the secularist criticism of multiculturalism. Probably wishful thinking, to be sure. And we'll never know. Because Hirsi Ali didn't stick to her guns, didn't stay in parliament but went happily off to America. To work for the American Enterprise Institute or something. Kind of a disappointment, really. And the secularist, Islam-critical discourse in Dutch politics she might have contributed further to is now dominated by a conspicuously fascistoid variety of "secularism".
I recall when as schoolkids in the early to mid-nineties, we would organize demos against Neo-Nazism - which was then a menacing but very marginal phenomenon, mainly restricted to the former eastern part of Germany as well as maybe fifty idiot skinheads in the Netherlands. But what we then considered as discourse on the slippery slope to Nazism seems positively moderate now. With all kinds of degenerate would-be followers of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh out-doing each other in radicalism - going as far as to seriously propose banning the Quran and calling upon Muslims to tear it up to prove their loyalty. Enlightenment values, I guess. Oh, and becoming the second-biggest party in the gallups for it, too.
And this is the dominant political discourse in the Netherlands at the moment. This is what makes the headlines. Forgive me if I am a mite sceptical about the "ongoing attack on our civilization" Hitchens mentions. Let's say that I see it coming mainly from the other side.
As left-leaning youth growing up in the largely white, Christian and monocultural Dutch countryside, we were of course very naive about the very real problems that would eventually lead to the meteoric rise of Pim Fortuyn - and the troglodytes that now want to step in his footsteps. As an ideology, multiculturalism is dead. Our sovereignity has been taken over by a religiously and culturally faceless European Union which our political class doesn't dare ask our opinion about. We simply lack the ideological tools to found the co-existence of ethnically diverse groups in the Netherlands upon some kind of common national identity, national idea, etc. We never did - the previous co-existence of various religious factions in the Netherlands was mainly a "living alongside" one another. And we can't get back to that. So now we're headed to some kind of regressive conflict based mostly on skin colour.
I think we crossed a line when, in 2002, a social democrat politician in Amsterdam used the Dutch expression kutmarrokanen - which does not sound quite as bad in Dutch as the literal translation ("c*nt-moroccans") would suggest, but is not really nice either. Overnight, a racist slur became salonfähig, kind of trendy even, a sign you were not going to be silenced by those muslims threatening our civilization and their spineless Leftist fellow-travellers. Now think of how the second-generation of Moroccans, whose fathers cleaned your schools and picked your fruit and manned your factories, and who are caught between an old culture that is not theirs anymore and a new one that is distinctly unwelcoming, think of how they feel about that. And then tell me on how to get back to solving our problems in a sensible manner.
Fortunately we have Christopher Hitchens telling us what to do.
You know, I am getting slightly annoyed by British and American neocons, "Decent" Leftists and Not-so-decent Rightists telling us what to do. Especially because their own contribution to solving the conflict apparently consisted in bombing the crap of a poor country and then letting it slide into a murderous tribal civil war-cum-terrorist training ground. I mean, that really helped. The lack of political hindsight with people like Hitchens is so brazen as to be almost admirable. I mean, I would hardly dare touch a pen myself after such a blunder.
If Hirsi Ali is in America, working for the American Enterprise Institute, let the Americans pay for her security. If she is in the Netherlands, she can have a small army paid for by the state to protect her, as far as I am concerned. As can Geert Wilders. Or sensible ex-Muslims. Or non-sensible ex-Muslims. Or drawers of racist cartoons - their freedom of speech should be unconditionally protected. As should that of idiots who like to refer to Moroccans by the name of female genitalia, or those who find mirth in making those oh-so naughty and risque allegations concerning Mohammed and paedophilia. If not for a matter of principle, then for the practical truth that the country probably can't really deal with another political murder. But let's not make pretensions about defending our civilization or all that crap. That battle has been fought and lost, far as I am concerned.
I personally don't see why the Dutch state should pay for the security of the American Enterprise Institute's personnel. I don't give a damn about the American Enterprise Institute. It can go to the moon for all I care. I don't expect any constructive suggestion from it to deal with the issues the Netherlands - and Europe in general - are currently facing.
If Hirsi Ali had stuck to her guns in her political fight with immigration minister (now turned right-wing populist bulldozer) Verdonk, and stayed in the Netherlands and stayed in the parliament, she might have provided some intellectual content (not to mention dignity) to the secularist criticism of multiculturalism. Probably wishful thinking, to be sure. And we'll never know. Because Hirsi Ali didn't stick to her guns, didn't stay in parliament but went happily off to America. To work for the American Enterprise Institute or something. Kind of a disappointment, really. And the secularist, Islam-critical discourse in Dutch politics she might have contributed further to is now dominated by a conspicuously fascistoid variety of "secularism".
I recall when as schoolkids in the early to mid-nineties, we would organize demos against Neo-Nazism - which was then a menacing but very marginal phenomenon, mainly restricted to the former eastern part of Germany as well as maybe fifty idiot skinheads in the Netherlands. But what we then considered as discourse on the slippery slope to Nazism seems positively moderate now. With all kinds of degenerate would-be followers of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh out-doing each other in radicalism - going as far as to seriously propose banning the Quran and calling upon Muslims to tear it up to prove their loyalty. Enlightenment values, I guess. Oh, and becoming the second-biggest party in the gallups for it, too.
And this is the dominant political discourse in the Netherlands at the moment. This is what makes the headlines. Forgive me if I am a mite sceptical about the "ongoing attack on our civilization" Hitchens mentions. Let's say that I see it coming mainly from the other side.
As left-leaning youth growing up in the largely white, Christian and monocultural Dutch countryside, we were of course very naive about the very real problems that would eventually lead to the meteoric rise of Pim Fortuyn - and the troglodytes that now want to step in his footsteps. As an ideology, multiculturalism is dead. Our sovereignity has been taken over by a religiously and culturally faceless European Union which our political class doesn't dare ask our opinion about. We simply lack the ideological tools to found the co-existence of ethnically diverse groups in the Netherlands upon some kind of common national identity, national idea, etc. We never did - the previous co-existence of various religious factions in the Netherlands was mainly a "living alongside" one another. And we can't get back to that. So now we're headed to some kind of regressive conflict based mostly on skin colour.
I think we crossed a line when, in 2002, a social democrat politician in Amsterdam used the Dutch expression kutmarrokanen - which does not sound quite as bad in Dutch as the literal translation ("c*nt-moroccans") would suggest, but is not really nice either. Overnight, a racist slur became salonfähig, kind of trendy even, a sign you were not going to be silenced by those muslims threatening our civilization and their spineless Leftist fellow-travellers. Now think of how the second-generation of Moroccans, whose fathers cleaned your schools and picked your fruit and manned your factories, and who are caught between an old culture that is not theirs anymore and a new one that is distinctly unwelcoming, think of how they feel about that. And then tell me on how to get back to solving our problems in a sensible manner.
Fortunately we have Christopher Hitchens telling us what to do.
You know, I am getting slightly annoyed by British and American neocons, "Decent" Leftists and Not-so-decent Rightists telling us what to do. Especially because their own contribution to solving the conflict apparently consisted in bombing the crap of a poor country and then letting it slide into a murderous tribal civil war-cum-terrorist training ground. I mean, that really helped. The lack of political hindsight with people like Hitchens is so brazen as to be almost admirable. I mean, I would hardly dare touch a pen myself after such a blunder.
If Hirsi Ali is in America, working for the American Enterprise Institute, let the Americans pay for her security. If she is in the Netherlands, she can have a small army paid for by the state to protect her, as far as I am concerned. As can Geert Wilders. Or sensible ex-Muslims. Or non-sensible ex-Muslims. Or drawers of racist cartoons - their freedom of speech should be unconditionally protected. As should that of idiots who like to refer to Moroccans by the name of female genitalia, or those who find mirth in making those oh-so naughty and risque allegations concerning Mohammed and paedophilia. If not for a matter of principle, then for the practical truth that the country probably can't really deal with another political murder. But let's not make pretensions about defending our civilization or all that crap. That battle has been fought and lost, far as I am concerned.
vrijdag 28 september 2007
A very short politico-religious autobiography
IN THE BEGINNING
This post is intended for those who read my old weblog and wonder what the hell happened. Or the old friend who e-mailed me a few weeks ago how I was thinking to go about combining Christianity and socialism. My politics are currently a confused mess, and they have been so for quite some time.
In a way, I am following in my father's footsteps. My father was a member of the Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party during the 1970s and later a member of the Dutch Communist Party until it dissolved in the early nineties. He encountered the local Church during the peace movement of the 1980s and slowly approached Roman Catholicism, which led to his conversion and theology studies in the 1990s.
The main difference between him and me is, I think, one of temperament. I was more orthodox as a Marxist than he ever was, and probably will end up being more orthodox as a believer as well. I guess it's because I like intellectual puzzles. Orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on the dialectic, provides a lot of them. So do more orthodox variants of theism. But I'm fundamentally not a people's person. I think this is probably my weakness: both my approach to Marxism and my approaches to philosophy and religion have been very, and perhaps overly, intellectualistic.
In any event, my family background should explain why a combination between Leftism and religion was never something particularly remarkable to me.
FROM MARXISM TO LIBERTARIAN MARXISM
I was involved with mostly Trotskyist groups during my late teens and early twenties, but my sympathies towards Trotskyism were mostly, I guess, a cover for a more deep-lying attraction towards Stalinism - not so much as in the sense of Stalin's politics, but the Eurocommunism combined with a strongly Pro-Soviet attitude of the Dutch Communist Party which was dominant in my home region. The orthodox Trots just seemed to me to be more able defenders of socialism than the Stalinist leadership in East Europe, which caved so easily and sold out in 1990-1991. In any event, this lead to me never feeling quite at home in the Dutch radical-left politics of the late 1990s, which seemed to me to be self-absorbed with a lot of navel-staring, a worrying lack of doctrinal consistency, and an obsession with environmental issues which was pretty alien to me (I was from the countryside. I knew about mud and green stuff and more mud).
An important centre for my political thought was the war in the Balkans and the response of Western governments. It split the Left pretty much down the middle, with groups variously backing the Bosnian-Herzegovinan government or the Serbs. I very much mistrusted the reigning tendency in the Left to regard BiH as some kind of multi-ethnic, multicultural beacon of hope beleaguered by the neo-fascist Serbs. This seemed to me to ignore the notion that the collapse of Yugoslavia was the collapse of a socialist state (or more correctly of course, a "deformed worker's state"). I felt that something was going wrong if socialists were as eager to support the split-off of the new former Yugoslavian republics as the government of (freshly re-united) Germany was.
There were other issues as well. I've never been particularly sympathetic towards (radical) feminism. Obviously, I believed in equality between men and women, within an overall framework of socialism - but the attitude of feminists within the radical left seemed unpleasantly eager towards censorship (pornography, of course - but also the defacing of works of art in the Netherlands), seperatism, etc. I was very much aware that I was a guy, that I liked girls in various states of undress, and didn't feel like apologizing for it.
Anyway, all this lead me to develop politically in a particular direction. I was impressed by the way the Spartacist
League combined an orthodox but very analytical and highbrow Trotskyism with a provocative libertarian streak. The journal Living Marxism, the child of which is Spiked-Online later seemed also inspiring to me (though this time mostly as provocative libertarianism with a trotskyist streak). And when protest erupted against the bombing of Yugoslavia in spring '99, I became aware of some very trenchant right-libertarian and paleoconservative criticisms of NATO, centering around such websites as Antiwar and Llew Rockwell's site. I still think that the fundamental libertarian arguments and the leninist arguments against war are not that far apart: they both center around the role war plays in strengthening the state (something which, of course, is very clearly shown by the climate of fear and authoritarianism that seems to have taken off in the US during 9/11).
Needless to say, I never could subscribe to core libertarian ideology, but I still think libertarian thought on particular single issues can be very worthwhile.
In any event, my interest in political activism as such slowly declined without any particular break in my political convictions. I already said that my attraction to Marxism was a very intellectualistic one.
As for my religious beliefs at the time, I was mostly agnostic with vague leanings towards theism or towards atheism at various points. Though I appreciated the socialist criticism of religion from a sociological point of view, I regarded Marxian historical materialism as fundamentally relational, as saying something about the relationship between consciousness and material circumstances, rather than as asserting the primacy of matter. I never regarded atheism as an implication of Marxism.
My encounter with religion and religious people during my youth (my schools were all religious schools - both RC and Protestant) also, I believe, inoculated me to some of the worst caricatures of religion and religionists I see around the blogosphere.
FROM LIBERTARIAN MARXISM TO ENLIGHTENMENTISM
Anyway, fast forward to 9/11. All the time I am thinking that the slow surrounding and annexation of the former Soviet Union by the West would be the main theme of the coming decade. That Kosovo would be followed up by the bombing and occupation of Belarus, the Balkanization of Russia, etc. etc. Turns out I was a bit wrong about that. Out of nowhere 20 islamists perform just about the most spectacular terrorist attack ever - in both callousness and conspicuous mass murder, and symbolism, striking at one of the big icons of the capitalist West.
The new battle lines confuse me. Though I have no liking for US foreign policy any more than I had before, I tend to regard political islam as representing an ideology much more backwards and barbarous than western capitalism. I am also convinced the US neocons as well as Blair are sincere about their messianistic, universalist bourgeois ideology. The "blood for oil" argument didn't impress me (I heard it before during the Kosovo protests. It didn't impress me then either). I find myself more open to accept ideas as fundamental factors in shaping policy, rather than looking for nefarious economical motives behind the ideas, as the vulgar Marxists do.
My opposition to the Iraq war is considerably more reluctant than to the bombing of Yugoslavia. Part of that might be simple pessimism. Remembered the US flattening the Iraqi forces in '91, then NATO by hook and by crook getting what it wants from Yugoslavia in '99, and now war-weary Iraq caves in again. No-one seems to be able to really withstand the US anyway. Of course, I am proved wrong here when the Iraqi resistance starts to seriously kick US arse - but it kicks other-Iraqi arse even more seriously, in an amazingly nihilistic and bloodthirsty way.
It's a sad and horrifying spectacle. The US, without much political conviction, killing massive numbers of people from afar with jet planes and cruise missiles and all those horrible engines of destruction - and then Iraq erupting in a murderous civil war with Islamist groups seemingly simply intent on killing their Shi'a enemies by the hundreds. It strikes me that most political terrorism hitherto seemed to be restricted and focused on more or less limited political aims. The Islamists on the other hand seemed to be hell-bent on simply killing. Death. Of as much people as possible, and preferably fellow muslims.
Recalling Rosa Luxemburg. The choice before us is between socialism and barbarism. I'm considering that socialism has failed, and it won't get a second chance. And that we get barbarism instead.
My political convictions shift a little bit during the following years. I never was very much anti-Israel, not as obsessively as most of the Left was. Sure, I believe that the occupation should end and the Palestinians should have their sovereign state - but I believe the Israelis deserve to have their state as well. The Marxist discussions about whether the Jews are a nation, whether self-determination applies to them, I answer pragmatically: Whether they were a nation or not, they definitely are now, and they seem to be self-determining just fine.
I move towards a more pro-Israel position. My kheffiye goes into the cupboard, and remains there forever (I took it off when I encountered a march of kheffiye-clad Palestinians brandishing portraits of sheikh Yassin - the murderer ordering young boys to blow themselves up. Much as I try, I cannot fault the Israelis for liquidating him). Eventually, when the war in Lebanon breaks out, I root for the Israelis. It seems to me that no peace is possible as long as the Hizbollah and the Palestinians keep shooting rockets at Israeli territory.
This position of course being incompatible with Marxism without some very serious mental gymnastics, so I guess it marks my break with Marxism on the practical and political plane (the one on the philosophical having preceded it).
I grow more sensitive towards anti-semitism among the Left, but ultimately there's a very deep gulf seperating me from the "decent Left" exhibited by such places as Hurry Up Harry. The gulf basically being their support for military adventurism of the US and Western Europe. Kosovo was their defining political moment just as it was mine - except that we moved in opposite directions.
I spend the years 2002-2003 in Finland, after which I move to Sweden. Around that time, I start adopting what I could describe as a strong pro-science and pro-secularism position. For a long time I believed that the fall of socialism also lead to an attrition of Enlightenment values as well - something exhibited very nicely by the fact that the people taking up arms against a decadent Western capitalism end up making it look good. In the academic domain, I encounter post-modern thought and take an immediate dislike of it.
So in my political ideas, some elements that had always been there (secularism - which I never confused with being anti-religion; a liking for technological and industrial development and a dislike for environmentalism; libertarianism in areas of culture, free speech, etc.) get very much emphasized. I think that the product are the posts on the old weblog.
FROM ENLIGHTENMENTISM TO THE RELIGIOUS LEFT
There's a few factors which have lead to me getting politically and religiously where I am now. My belief in God had, in some vague sense, been there for a long time. But I start to realize just how many different layers of meaning can lie behind the notion "God exists" and start reflecting on them. I get interested in ideas of God slowly coming into existence, as propounded by for example Teilhard de Chardin.
In my academic work, I discover the autonomous, metascientific tradition of the human sciences and of linguistics (Collingwood, Coseriu, Esa Itkonen, etc.) which makes me distrust the unity-of-science notions that seem to be implicitly held by so many on the pro-science/pro-reason side of the "science wars". I still don't understand a whit of post-structuralism, but I am not as eager to call it nonsense as I used to be.
I start getting interested in philosophy as well. I realize that the materialist idea I quietly held about man - that basically, we are all chemistry and that our thought and feelings somehow arise from that chemistry - is less universally accepted and less obvious than I thought. Philosophically, my main waypoints are Whitehead and Peirce, and they have been for some time.
But philosophical theism may defend the idea of God as a philosophical category, but not as an object of religion. But I may have been in some sense religious before I became a theist. My attraction to Marxism may have had a religious element in it. What got me specifically interested in Christianity was reflecting on two key Biblical event. The first was of course the story of Isaac and Abraham. Which is not so much about the obedience of Abraham as of the faith of Abraham, who tells his son specifically that God will provide for the offering. By doing so, God proves himself not to be just one more idol demanding the blood of human sacrifices: He proves himself to be a trustworthy God. Years ago, when I started reflecting on the story, I told myself that were I a Jew or a Christian, I would be able to justify my religion by just pointing to that story, to the internal logic of it. I can't quite explain the sensation involved - let's just say that there was a creeping sense that what I was reflecting on was more than just myth with a morale.
Of course the story of Abraham seems to be strangely in contradiction with that of Jephta. The warrior Jephta swears that, if God grants him victory, he will sacrifice the first thing that comes to meet him when he gets home - which cruelly ends up being his daughter (and the daughter duly gets sacrificed). I interpret Jephta's story as a warning: Jephta tries to manipulate God, to get him to do him a favour in return for something later. He basically treats God like He is some kind of idol who can be manipulated. There's an enormous contrast between Jephta's manipulativeness and Abraham's unconditional trust.
The other Biblical event is, of course, that of the Gospel. Reading on Jesus, he seemed to me to defy the categories I would put him into. He was not just a great moral teacher, rather, his central command (love God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your soul, and love your neighbour as you love yourself) transcends morality. He also was not just a social radical, rather, his notion of the Kingdom of God moves beyond the worldly notions of social radicalism, the idea of matching worldly power with worldly power. To me, there seems to be this strange out-of-time quality about the gospels. The same I had with the story of Abraham, something that both in its literal and symbolic meanings is more real than any other sign or story could be. That Jesus somehow combines the concrete and the universal. It's hard to explain, and I lack the notions to explain myself here.
I was of course very much struck by the notion that, through Jesus, God partakes in the universal fate of mankind: to live, to suffer and to die. Which implies just about the only answer to the problem of evil which I find acceptable. That evil - both natural and human-caused - are implicit in the finitude of God's creatures and beyond God's capabilities to intervene. But that God is not only transcendent, but at the same time omnipresent in the universe, in every human being and every small creature, and that He has joy with their joy and suffers with their suffering.
Isaiah 42 has a beautiful passage, which is quoted by Matthew (12: 15-21):
Behold, My Servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen one in whom My soul delights
I have put My Spirit upon Him;
He will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry out or raise His voice,
Nor make His voice heard in the street.
A bruised reed He will not break
And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish;
He will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not be disheartened or crushed
Until He has established justice in the earth;
And the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law.
The God speaking here is a God who does not break into the universe from the outside, but who accepts and loves his creatures despite all their imperfections and their finitude. Note that He did not become incarnate among the philosophers of Athens or the emperors of Rome, but instead as a carpenter at the ass-end of the Roman Empire, and that he decided to associate with the publicans and the sinners, rather than with the pious and notables of his time and place.
My ideas about the trinity are vague and probably marked by at least three or four historical heresies. Suffice here to say that I do believe that in some way, God became incarnate in the man Jesus: that Jesus was both wholly divine and wholly man. This also means that God, through Jesus, experienced suffering and death. Contrast this with Socrates, a wise and virtuous man, who died with dignity surrounded by his friends. Or Seneca, who wrote about the humane treatment of slaves, and on how we should treat ceramics as if it were gold, and gold as if it were ceramics (but who was richer than the emperor, and to whom the idea of giving up on his earthly possessions would sound very quaint). To compare this with Jesus, who rather than preaching on how to live virtuously told people to lose one's life for his sake; who rather than elucidating morality showed how the laws of his day were subverted and transcended by love, and who died the death of a common criminal, in utter abandonment and loneliness, only to arise as a sign of hope to all of us who must face their own crosses and their own deaths. There is a kind of truth here, which to me seems to go both beyond literal truth and beyond the symbolic truth (in the sense that myths, great literature and great poetry can be symbolically true). The Word has become flesh.
But the notion of Jesus' message transcending morality does not make morality invalid, and the notion of the Sermon on the Mount transcending somehow social radicalism doesn't vitiate the need for social radicalism. Rather, I think that the way God in the New Testament aligns with the suffering and struggling and sinful part of nature and mankind, rather than with the virtuous and materially wealthy part, as well as the notion of the "Kingdom of God" as a community of people both marked by love for each other and love for God (and to me, the omnipresent God primarily manifests Himself in the love between human beings) makes some kind of Christian socialism very much possible.
WHERE I AM NOW
As I mentioned, I reject Marxism as a philosophical doctrine, which is to say, I reject philosophical materialism. I'm not sure about the dialectic. I never understood it when I was a Marxist, I actually came to understand it when, during my Ph.D. studies, I came to understand a certain phenomenon as fundamentally identical and non-identical with itself. I think Peirce's three basic categories essentially restates Hegel's dialectic, and as such, I believe it to be very useful in making sense of stuff.
I no longer believe that the crimes of Stalinism can be simply explained as an outgrowth of bureaucratization and thermidorean reaction, as the Trotskyists like to do. There was too much wanton bloodshed going on under Lenin and Trotsky's command for that to be a sufficient explanation. I think the anarchists may have been correct about Kronstadt after all. And I cannot escape the notion that the rather callous attitude the Communist regimes have taken towards human life and the value of the individual - as something to be sacrificed for the good of future generations - is not wholly unconnected to its historical-materialist philosophical base.
At the same time, it would be unfair to focus on the tremendous bloodshed of the Russian Civil War and Stalin's reign while forgetting what the Bolshevik revolution responded to: the obscene slaughter of the First World War. The twentieth century may point out very clearly the tragedy of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but it also points out the moral bankruptcy of the capitalist powers which they encountered in the trenches at WWI, and the ideological exhaustedness of Western liberal capitalism, which has seen itself beleaguered not only by socialism, but also by Fascism and now by Islamic fundamentalism. People need a transcendent ideal to fight for, something they can put their lives on the line for. If a society cannot give it to them, it is ultimately doomed. Socialism provided a transcendent ideal for millions and millions of people during the last century. But Fascism and theocratic movements can play the same role. The Americans have held out pretty long precisely because their nation provides Americans with some kind of basic ideology with capitalism at its very core. But liberal capitalism has long died out as a vital political ideology in Europe. Trotsky was wrong about many things, but he was right about this one: the time for capitalism to be overcome by a new system has not only come and gone, but capitalism is starting to smell funny.
And this is where the secularists and the pro-Enlightenment "decent leftists" are wrong. People (with perhaps some courageous exceptions) aren't going to die for secularism. They seem very prepared to die for Islam. Michael Corleone would know where to place his bets. Without incorporating Enlightenment values and secular values such as freedom of religion, universal human rights, equality between the sexes and all that into some kind of ideology which can make people feel part of something much bigger than themselves - as communism like nothing else could - Enlightenment values are dead.
So I'm rooting for some kind of socialism to re-emerge which might avoid the tragedy of the Soviet Union. I believe that to do this, it probably must incorporate some religious or quasi-religious values at its very heart (notably involving the sanctity of human life, etc.).
Otherwise, my politics haven't changed very much. Except maybe for the following:
- I modified my opinion on environmentalism a lot. I still don't believe in Global Warming. But I'm very much in favour of conservationism. I believe the weevil and the vole and the mole and the beetles and the millipedes deserve their place on earth as well, as fellow Creatures. I'll probably end up making some lifestyle changes as I don't believe the industrialized cattle-farming of the West is morally defensible.
- I'm still a libertarian on free speech issues, pornography, sexuality in general, etc. That doesn't mean I think sexuality is all hunky-dory. I stared into too much private abysses of myself for that. At best, it's a demonic force that needs to be thrown a bone every now and then. I would tend to regard sin as the tragic condition of finite, mortal beings with an intuition of the infinite and the immortal. Basically, whatever that "drags us down" to the level of merely biological creatures, and tempts us to do evil in pursuivance of biological needs. In that sense, I'd pretty much regard sexuality as "sinful" to the extent that I very much understand C.S. Lewis' and Michel Houellebecq's ideas of asexual future supermen. But I believe that sin as a condition must be overcome by love between humans and love between man and God, rather than denied or extirpated.
- My opposition to the death penalty is pragmatical rather than principal. I believe that there are crimes for which death is the only appropriate punishment. It's just that I don't trust anyone to hand it out.
- Retrospectively, my reflexive anti-West position with regards to Yugoslavia, Kosovo etc. was much too simple. The idea of NATO encircling the former East and Soviet Union probably overestimated the coherence of NATO policy a lot. I still think Kosovo was a very bad idea. Not sure about the intervention in Bosnia. I think that the whole policy, alternatingly supporting seperatism (with Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia as state) and opposing seperatism (with regards to the Krajina Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs, and latterly the Kosovars) was hopelessly contradictory.
- I'm tending to conservatism on culture and education issues. But this is not new, and has itself a long socialist tradition. The socialist publishing houses of the 1920s and 1930s spend great effort in making the literature of the world available for workers to read. Because then the idea was that, as a preparation for power, the working class needed to make the cultural heritage of the world its own. The misbegotten idea that political leftism should involve fighting against the cultural heritage of the world arose in the 1970s, and not from within the working class.
- I remain very much on the Left on issues of social security, workers' ownership of the means of production, anti-racism, rights for immigrants, etc. Particularly the last one is a burning issue in Europe these days, where some kind of alliance of secularism and racism has arose against previous excesses of political correctness and multiculturalism. I don't believe in multiculturalism, mind you. But I believe the idea of multiculturalism itself is a product of the ideological death of Western liberalism. But the current wave of xenophobical and raw racist discourse in for example the Netherlands (presenting itself under the excuse of the need to protect our "secular values" against islamic fundamentalism) must be fought tooth and nail. On this, I believe the traditional radical Left, for all its failings, has generally done better than the "decent left".
This post is intended for those who read my old weblog and wonder what the hell happened. Or the old friend who e-mailed me a few weeks ago how I was thinking to go about combining Christianity and socialism. My politics are currently a confused mess, and they have been so for quite some time.
In a way, I am following in my father's footsteps. My father was a member of the Dutch Pacifist Socialist Party during the 1970s and later a member of the Dutch Communist Party until it dissolved in the early nineties. He encountered the local Church during the peace movement of the 1980s and slowly approached Roman Catholicism, which led to his conversion and theology studies in the 1990s.
The main difference between him and me is, I think, one of temperament. I was more orthodox as a Marxist than he ever was, and probably will end up being more orthodox as a believer as well. I guess it's because I like intellectual puzzles. Orthodox Marxism, with its emphasis on the dialectic, provides a lot of them. So do more orthodox variants of theism. But I'm fundamentally not a people's person. I think this is probably my weakness: both my approach to Marxism and my approaches to philosophy and religion have been very, and perhaps overly, intellectualistic.
In any event, my family background should explain why a combination between Leftism and religion was never something particularly remarkable to me.
FROM MARXISM TO LIBERTARIAN MARXISM
I was involved with mostly Trotskyist groups during my late teens and early twenties, but my sympathies towards Trotskyism were mostly, I guess, a cover for a more deep-lying attraction towards Stalinism - not so much as in the sense of Stalin's politics, but the Eurocommunism combined with a strongly Pro-Soviet attitude of the Dutch Communist Party which was dominant in my home region. The orthodox Trots just seemed to me to be more able defenders of socialism than the Stalinist leadership in East Europe, which caved so easily and sold out in 1990-1991. In any event, this lead to me never feeling quite at home in the Dutch radical-left politics of the late 1990s, which seemed to me to be self-absorbed with a lot of navel-staring, a worrying lack of doctrinal consistency, and an obsession with environmental issues which was pretty alien to me (I was from the countryside. I knew about mud and green stuff and more mud).
An important centre for my political thought was the war in the Balkans and the response of Western governments. It split the Left pretty much down the middle, with groups variously backing the Bosnian-Herzegovinan government or the Serbs. I very much mistrusted the reigning tendency in the Left to regard BiH as some kind of multi-ethnic, multicultural beacon of hope beleaguered by the neo-fascist Serbs. This seemed to me to ignore the notion that the collapse of Yugoslavia was the collapse of a socialist state (or more correctly of course, a "deformed worker's state"). I felt that something was going wrong if socialists were as eager to support the split-off of the new former Yugoslavian republics as the government of (freshly re-united) Germany was.
There were other issues as well. I've never been particularly sympathetic towards (radical) feminism. Obviously, I believed in equality between men and women, within an overall framework of socialism - but the attitude of feminists within the radical left seemed unpleasantly eager towards censorship (pornography, of course - but also the defacing of works of art in the Netherlands), seperatism, etc. I was very much aware that I was a guy, that I liked girls in various states of undress, and didn't feel like apologizing for it.
Anyway, all this lead me to develop politically in a particular direction. I was impressed by the way the Spartacist
League combined an orthodox but very analytical and highbrow Trotskyism with a provocative libertarian streak. The journal Living Marxism, the child of which is Spiked-Online later seemed also inspiring to me (though this time mostly as provocative libertarianism with a trotskyist streak). And when protest erupted against the bombing of Yugoslavia in spring '99, I became aware of some very trenchant right-libertarian and paleoconservative criticisms of NATO, centering around such websites as Antiwar and Llew Rockwell's site. I still think that the fundamental libertarian arguments and the leninist arguments against war are not that far apart: they both center around the role war plays in strengthening the state (something which, of course, is very clearly shown by the climate of fear and authoritarianism that seems to have taken off in the US during 9/11).
Needless to say, I never could subscribe to core libertarian ideology, but I still think libertarian thought on particular single issues can be very worthwhile.
In any event, my interest in political activism as such slowly declined without any particular break in my political convictions. I already said that my attraction to Marxism was a very intellectualistic one.
As for my religious beliefs at the time, I was mostly agnostic with vague leanings towards theism or towards atheism at various points. Though I appreciated the socialist criticism of religion from a sociological point of view, I regarded Marxian historical materialism as fundamentally relational, as saying something about the relationship between consciousness and material circumstances, rather than as asserting the primacy of matter. I never regarded atheism as an implication of Marxism.
My encounter with religion and religious people during my youth (my schools were all religious schools - both RC and Protestant) also, I believe, inoculated me to some of the worst caricatures of religion and religionists I see around the blogosphere.
FROM LIBERTARIAN MARXISM TO ENLIGHTENMENTISM
Anyway, fast forward to 9/11. All the time I am thinking that the slow surrounding and annexation of the former Soviet Union by the West would be the main theme of the coming decade. That Kosovo would be followed up by the bombing and occupation of Belarus, the Balkanization of Russia, etc. etc. Turns out I was a bit wrong about that. Out of nowhere 20 islamists perform just about the most spectacular terrorist attack ever - in both callousness and conspicuous mass murder, and symbolism, striking at one of the big icons of the capitalist West.
The new battle lines confuse me. Though I have no liking for US foreign policy any more than I had before, I tend to regard political islam as representing an ideology much more backwards and barbarous than western capitalism. I am also convinced the US neocons as well as Blair are sincere about their messianistic, universalist bourgeois ideology. The "blood for oil" argument didn't impress me (I heard it before during the Kosovo protests. It didn't impress me then either). I find myself more open to accept ideas as fundamental factors in shaping policy, rather than looking for nefarious economical motives behind the ideas, as the vulgar Marxists do.
My opposition to the Iraq war is considerably more reluctant than to the bombing of Yugoslavia. Part of that might be simple pessimism. Remembered the US flattening the Iraqi forces in '91, then NATO by hook and by crook getting what it wants from Yugoslavia in '99, and now war-weary Iraq caves in again. No-one seems to be able to really withstand the US anyway. Of course, I am proved wrong here when the Iraqi resistance starts to seriously kick US arse - but it kicks other-Iraqi arse even more seriously, in an amazingly nihilistic and bloodthirsty way.
It's a sad and horrifying spectacle. The US, without much political conviction, killing massive numbers of people from afar with jet planes and cruise missiles and all those horrible engines of destruction - and then Iraq erupting in a murderous civil war with Islamist groups seemingly simply intent on killing their Shi'a enemies by the hundreds. It strikes me that most political terrorism hitherto seemed to be restricted and focused on more or less limited political aims. The Islamists on the other hand seemed to be hell-bent on simply killing. Death. Of as much people as possible, and preferably fellow muslims.
Recalling Rosa Luxemburg. The choice before us is between socialism and barbarism. I'm considering that socialism has failed, and it won't get a second chance. And that we get barbarism instead.
My political convictions shift a little bit during the following years. I never was very much anti-Israel, not as obsessively as most of the Left was. Sure, I believe that the occupation should end and the Palestinians should have their sovereign state - but I believe the Israelis deserve to have their state as well. The Marxist discussions about whether the Jews are a nation, whether self-determination applies to them, I answer pragmatically: Whether they were a nation or not, they definitely are now, and they seem to be self-determining just fine.
I move towards a more pro-Israel position. My kheffiye goes into the cupboard, and remains there forever (I took it off when I encountered a march of kheffiye-clad Palestinians brandishing portraits of sheikh Yassin - the murderer ordering young boys to blow themselves up. Much as I try, I cannot fault the Israelis for liquidating him). Eventually, when the war in Lebanon breaks out, I root for the Israelis. It seems to me that no peace is possible as long as the Hizbollah and the Palestinians keep shooting rockets at Israeli territory.
This position of course being incompatible with Marxism without some very serious mental gymnastics, so I guess it marks my break with Marxism on the practical and political plane (the one on the philosophical having preceded it).
I grow more sensitive towards anti-semitism among the Left, but ultimately there's a very deep gulf seperating me from the "decent Left" exhibited by such places as Hurry Up Harry. The gulf basically being their support for military adventurism of the US and Western Europe. Kosovo was their defining political moment just as it was mine - except that we moved in opposite directions.
I spend the years 2002-2003 in Finland, after which I move to Sweden. Around that time, I start adopting what I could describe as a strong pro-science and pro-secularism position. For a long time I believed that the fall of socialism also lead to an attrition of Enlightenment values as well - something exhibited very nicely by the fact that the people taking up arms against a decadent Western capitalism end up making it look good. In the academic domain, I encounter post-modern thought and take an immediate dislike of it.
So in my political ideas, some elements that had always been there (secularism - which I never confused with being anti-religion; a liking for technological and industrial development and a dislike for environmentalism; libertarianism in areas of culture, free speech, etc.) get very much emphasized. I think that the product are the posts on the old weblog.
FROM ENLIGHTENMENTISM TO THE RELIGIOUS LEFT
There's a few factors which have lead to me getting politically and religiously where I am now. My belief in God had, in some vague sense, been there for a long time. But I start to realize just how many different layers of meaning can lie behind the notion "God exists" and start reflecting on them. I get interested in ideas of God slowly coming into existence, as propounded by for example Teilhard de Chardin.
In my academic work, I discover the autonomous, metascientific tradition of the human sciences and of linguistics (Collingwood, Coseriu, Esa Itkonen, etc.) which makes me distrust the unity-of-science notions that seem to be implicitly held by so many on the pro-science/pro-reason side of the "science wars". I still don't understand a whit of post-structuralism, but I am not as eager to call it nonsense as I used to be.
I start getting interested in philosophy as well. I realize that the materialist idea I quietly held about man - that basically, we are all chemistry and that our thought and feelings somehow arise from that chemistry - is less universally accepted and less obvious than I thought. Philosophically, my main waypoints are Whitehead and Peirce, and they have been for some time.
But philosophical theism may defend the idea of God as a philosophical category, but not as an object of religion. But I may have been in some sense religious before I became a theist. My attraction to Marxism may have had a religious element in it. What got me specifically interested in Christianity was reflecting on two key Biblical event. The first was of course the story of Isaac and Abraham. Which is not so much about the obedience of Abraham as of the faith of Abraham, who tells his son specifically that God will provide for the offering. By doing so, God proves himself not to be just one more idol demanding the blood of human sacrifices: He proves himself to be a trustworthy God. Years ago, when I started reflecting on the story, I told myself that were I a Jew or a Christian, I would be able to justify my religion by just pointing to that story, to the internal logic of it. I can't quite explain the sensation involved - let's just say that there was a creeping sense that what I was reflecting on was more than just myth with a morale.
Of course the story of Abraham seems to be strangely in contradiction with that of Jephta. The warrior Jephta swears that, if God grants him victory, he will sacrifice the first thing that comes to meet him when he gets home - which cruelly ends up being his daughter (and the daughter duly gets sacrificed). I interpret Jephta's story as a warning: Jephta tries to manipulate God, to get him to do him a favour in return for something later. He basically treats God like He is some kind of idol who can be manipulated. There's an enormous contrast between Jephta's manipulativeness and Abraham's unconditional trust.
The other Biblical event is, of course, that of the Gospel. Reading on Jesus, he seemed to me to defy the categories I would put him into. He was not just a great moral teacher, rather, his central command (love God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your soul, and love your neighbour as you love yourself) transcends morality. He also was not just a social radical, rather, his notion of the Kingdom of God moves beyond the worldly notions of social radicalism, the idea of matching worldly power with worldly power. To me, there seems to be this strange out-of-time quality about the gospels. The same I had with the story of Abraham, something that both in its literal and symbolic meanings is more real than any other sign or story could be. That Jesus somehow combines the concrete and the universal. It's hard to explain, and I lack the notions to explain myself here.
I was of course very much struck by the notion that, through Jesus, God partakes in the universal fate of mankind: to live, to suffer and to die. Which implies just about the only answer to the problem of evil which I find acceptable. That evil - both natural and human-caused - are implicit in the finitude of God's creatures and beyond God's capabilities to intervene. But that God is not only transcendent, but at the same time omnipresent in the universe, in every human being and every small creature, and that He has joy with their joy and suffers with their suffering.
Isaiah 42 has a beautiful passage, which is quoted by Matthew (12: 15-21):
Behold, My Servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen one in whom My soul delights
I have put My Spirit upon Him;
He will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry out or raise His voice,
Nor make His voice heard in the street.
A bruised reed He will not break
And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish;
He will faithfully bring forth justice.
He will not be disheartened or crushed
Until He has established justice in the earth;
And the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law.
The God speaking here is a God who does not break into the universe from the outside, but who accepts and loves his creatures despite all their imperfections and their finitude. Note that He did not become incarnate among the philosophers of Athens or the emperors of Rome, but instead as a carpenter at the ass-end of the Roman Empire, and that he decided to associate with the publicans and the sinners, rather than with the pious and notables of his time and place.
My ideas about the trinity are vague and probably marked by at least three or four historical heresies. Suffice here to say that I do believe that in some way, God became incarnate in the man Jesus: that Jesus was both wholly divine and wholly man. This also means that God, through Jesus, experienced suffering and death. Contrast this with Socrates, a wise and virtuous man, who died with dignity surrounded by his friends. Or Seneca, who wrote about the humane treatment of slaves, and on how we should treat ceramics as if it were gold, and gold as if it were ceramics (but who was richer than the emperor, and to whom the idea of giving up on his earthly possessions would sound very quaint). To compare this with Jesus, who rather than preaching on how to live virtuously told people to lose one's life for his sake; who rather than elucidating morality showed how the laws of his day were subverted and transcended by love, and who died the death of a common criminal, in utter abandonment and loneliness, only to arise as a sign of hope to all of us who must face their own crosses and their own deaths. There is a kind of truth here, which to me seems to go both beyond literal truth and beyond the symbolic truth (in the sense that myths, great literature and great poetry can be symbolically true). The Word has become flesh.
But the notion of Jesus' message transcending morality does not make morality invalid, and the notion of the Sermon on the Mount transcending somehow social radicalism doesn't vitiate the need for social radicalism. Rather, I think that the way God in the New Testament aligns with the suffering and struggling and sinful part of nature and mankind, rather than with the virtuous and materially wealthy part, as well as the notion of the "Kingdom of God" as a community of people both marked by love for each other and love for God (and to me, the omnipresent God primarily manifests Himself in the love between human beings) makes some kind of Christian socialism very much possible.
WHERE I AM NOW
As I mentioned, I reject Marxism as a philosophical doctrine, which is to say, I reject philosophical materialism. I'm not sure about the dialectic. I never understood it when I was a Marxist, I actually came to understand it when, during my Ph.D. studies, I came to understand a certain phenomenon as fundamentally identical and non-identical with itself. I think Peirce's three basic categories essentially restates Hegel's dialectic, and as such, I believe it to be very useful in making sense of stuff.
I no longer believe that the crimes of Stalinism can be simply explained as an outgrowth of bureaucratization and thermidorean reaction, as the Trotskyists like to do. There was too much wanton bloodshed going on under Lenin and Trotsky's command for that to be a sufficient explanation. I think the anarchists may have been correct about Kronstadt after all. And I cannot escape the notion that the rather callous attitude the Communist regimes have taken towards human life and the value of the individual - as something to be sacrificed for the good of future generations - is not wholly unconnected to its historical-materialist philosophical base.
At the same time, it would be unfair to focus on the tremendous bloodshed of the Russian Civil War and Stalin's reign while forgetting what the Bolshevik revolution responded to: the obscene slaughter of the First World War. The twentieth century may point out very clearly the tragedy of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but it also points out the moral bankruptcy of the capitalist powers which they encountered in the trenches at WWI, and the ideological exhaustedness of Western liberal capitalism, which has seen itself beleaguered not only by socialism, but also by Fascism and now by Islamic fundamentalism. People need a transcendent ideal to fight for, something they can put their lives on the line for. If a society cannot give it to them, it is ultimately doomed. Socialism provided a transcendent ideal for millions and millions of people during the last century. But Fascism and theocratic movements can play the same role. The Americans have held out pretty long precisely because their nation provides Americans with some kind of basic ideology with capitalism at its very core. But liberal capitalism has long died out as a vital political ideology in Europe. Trotsky was wrong about many things, but he was right about this one: the time for capitalism to be overcome by a new system has not only come and gone, but capitalism is starting to smell funny.
And this is where the secularists and the pro-Enlightenment "decent leftists" are wrong. People (with perhaps some courageous exceptions) aren't going to die for secularism. They seem very prepared to die for Islam. Michael Corleone would know where to place his bets. Without incorporating Enlightenment values and secular values such as freedom of religion, universal human rights, equality between the sexes and all that into some kind of ideology which can make people feel part of something much bigger than themselves - as communism like nothing else could - Enlightenment values are dead.
So I'm rooting for some kind of socialism to re-emerge which might avoid the tragedy of the Soviet Union. I believe that to do this, it probably must incorporate some religious or quasi-religious values at its very heart (notably involving the sanctity of human life, etc.).
Otherwise, my politics haven't changed very much. Except maybe for the following:
- I modified my opinion on environmentalism a lot. I still don't believe in Global Warming. But I'm very much in favour of conservationism. I believe the weevil and the vole and the mole and the beetles and the millipedes deserve their place on earth as well, as fellow Creatures. I'll probably end up making some lifestyle changes as I don't believe the industrialized cattle-farming of the West is morally defensible.
- I'm still a libertarian on free speech issues, pornography, sexuality in general, etc. That doesn't mean I think sexuality is all hunky-dory. I stared into too much private abysses of myself for that. At best, it's a demonic force that needs to be thrown a bone every now and then. I would tend to regard sin as the tragic condition of finite, mortal beings with an intuition of the infinite and the immortal. Basically, whatever that "drags us down" to the level of merely biological creatures, and tempts us to do evil in pursuivance of biological needs. In that sense, I'd pretty much regard sexuality as "sinful" to the extent that I very much understand C.S. Lewis' and Michel Houellebecq's ideas of asexual future supermen. But I believe that sin as a condition must be overcome by love between humans and love between man and God, rather than denied or extirpated.
- My opposition to the death penalty is pragmatical rather than principal. I believe that there are crimes for which death is the only appropriate punishment. It's just that I don't trust anyone to hand it out.
- Retrospectively, my reflexive anti-West position with regards to Yugoslavia, Kosovo etc. was much too simple. The idea of NATO encircling the former East and Soviet Union probably overestimated the coherence of NATO policy a lot. I still think Kosovo was a very bad idea. Not sure about the intervention in Bosnia. I think that the whole policy, alternatingly supporting seperatism (with Kosovo, Bosnia and Croatia as state) and opposing seperatism (with regards to the Krajina Serbs, the Bosnian Serbs, and latterly the Kosovars) was hopelessly contradictory.
- I'm tending to conservatism on culture and education issues. But this is not new, and has itself a long socialist tradition. The socialist publishing houses of the 1920s and 1930s spend great effort in making the literature of the world available for workers to read. Because then the idea was that, as a preparation for power, the working class needed to make the cultural heritage of the world its own. The misbegotten idea that political leftism should involve fighting against the cultural heritage of the world arose in the 1970s, and not from within the working class.
- I remain very much on the Left on issues of social security, workers' ownership of the means of production, anti-racism, rights for immigrants, etc. Particularly the last one is a burning issue in Europe these days, where some kind of alliance of secularism and racism has arose against previous excesses of political correctness and multiculturalism. I don't believe in multiculturalism, mind you. But I believe the idea of multiculturalism itself is a product of the ideological death of Western liberalism. But the current wave of xenophobical and raw racist discourse in for example the Netherlands (presenting itself under the excuse of the need to protect our "secular values" against islamic fundamentalism) must be fought tooth and nail. On this, I believe the traditional radical Left, for all its failings, has generally done better than the "decent left".
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