It’s always flattering, of course, to get a letter and learn that someone wants to adopt your ideas.  When someone represents a political party, however, the first thing you ought to do is check who they are.   Before I accepted this invitation, I wrote a quick note to my publisher to ask if you were ok – he said yes – and then I read the information about your program that was printed in English, kindly sent to me by Frank de Mils.  I was happy to say that I’m in agreement with nearly all of it – particularly with your very detailed suggestions for improving education, which is the basis of any serious Enlightenment-based view.  Given that you have worked out in detail what ought to be done in all kinds of areas, from education to energy, what can a philosopher do that might be useful?    My intention is to add some moral and metaphysical backbone, for I believe that the language we use to describe our views, and convince others of them, is profoundly important.  It is particularly important for those of us who make up what used to be called the left.  Let me begin with a few words about that word itself.  When I wrote the first edition of the book I’ll be drawing on, I was reluctant to let go of the word LEFT; however outdated it may seem as a way of describing our current political predicaments, it does describe a commitment to universalism – to what one legal scholar called a “presumption of innocence, a generosity of spirit which sees the best, not the worst, in every stranger”.  It also expresses impatience at the way the world is, and a commitment to bringing the world closer to what it could be.   After many discussions, and after the Obama election, I’ve decided to let it go.  First of all, LEFT means something completely different in London and Vienna, different again in Chicago and Shanghai.  Secondly, it carries more baggage, and raises more problems, than anyone who wants to be politically active needs to put up with.  And thirdly, the very word itself is an accident – based on the seating arrangements at the French parliament in 1789.  PROGRESSIVE, by contrast, suggests a philosophical view:  that the world as it is can be moved closer to what it should be through the actions of men and women working together.  To be sure, it is often used by those who are simply too timid to use the word LEFT; even worse, as I’ll discuss, it is often used by people whose positions seem to deny the possibility of progress at all.  But I think the chances for putting power behind the word PROGRESSIVE are better than the chances of recycling terms like RIGHT and LEFT – especially since both contain elements of views most of us want to embrace.  Traditionally, for example, the right has emphasized individual responsibility, while the left has insisted on paying attention to individual rights.  To say we have both may sound bland or banal, but it is nonetheless true for all that. So what I am going to defend is a progressive view based on the Enlightenment.  I hope it is a question less pressing in Holland, where the Enlightenment first took wing, but I suspect it is not, for Enlightenment-bashing has become an international sport.  It is no accident that those who reject the Enlightenment turn either to premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake.  A defense of the Enlightenment is a defense of the modern world – including, please note, all the modern possibilities of self-criticism and transformation.  In discarding the Enlightenment, progressives – here the problems of political labels again – have handed all the weapons to the right.  I was stunned to read that what calls itself the Progressive Party in Norway is a right-wing party opposed to immigration, foreign aid, and taxes, and there are a number of American groups invoking the word PROGRESS to mean simply neo-liberal economics.   Before you decide that all these debates about terms are simply pointless, think about how many political assumptions are packed into them.  (It’s simple but sinister:  progress, the conservatives imply here, can only be made through unbridled and global free-market capitalism.)  I decided to write a book with the title MORAL CLARITY in 2004, out of rage:  for it was claimed that many voters chose to give Bush a second term because he, unlike John Kerry, represented moral clarity.  I needed to answer the question:  how could a government which had lied its way into a criminal war, brought back torture, and laughed about it all,  be seen as representing moral clarity? 

In fact, both in Europe and the U.S., most of the voices willing to speak in universal moral terms at all now consider them¬selves conservative. Often, as I’ll discuss, those terms are simply sleazy – rhetoric that covers the very immoral actions like those of the Bush administration.  But to dismiss the right wing’s appeal to values as phony is to forget what it offers. However shabbily its partisans may behave in private, they offer a public conception of goodness progressives no longer know how to defend. Right- wing talk of moral clarity and honor and heroism is often empty, but that is not the same as being meaningless. Empty concepts remain concepts, in search of an ap-plication. Many progressives, by contrast, have deated the concepts themselves.

Conservatives also lack something that may be even more important than what they have. They lack embarrassment. They may abuse words like evil and hero, but they aren’t ashamed to take them in their mouths. Wary of simpli
cation, and even more afraid of kitsch, the left tends to reject not only words like true and noble, but even words like legitimate and progress, which were meant to replace them. If used at all, such words are subject to quotation marks— sometimes called scare quotes—that express the speaker’s discom¬fort in the ultimate postmodern gesture,
ngers wiggling beside ears in a little dance that says: I can use it, but I don’t go so far as to mean it, and it all matters so little anyway I can make myself look silly to boot. What matters is the idea that nothing matters too much.Before talking about how progressives lost their way, I want to say a few words about how conservatives took it over, by taking over the language of universal ideals.   The timing has been pretty suspicious.  Did Christian Democrats across Europe really care about the ideals of the French Revolution until Turkey looked set to join the European Union?  Suddenly they discover feminism, and concern for women’s rights, just in time to keep Muslims out of the EU?    Similarly, Enlightenment language was amplified in America as it became clear that the Iraq war was propelled not by ideals but a stinking mess of interests: in regional supremacy, oil, and distracting attention from what was already emerging as the worst presidency in U.S. history.   As British author Dan Hind has argued, the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington did much to obscure the history of the preceding decade:  after the spectacular attacks, the defenders of the established order could once again consider themselves enlightened. Advocates of neoliberal, corporate-friendly globalization seemed almost relieved that the accumulating evidence of their own intellectual bankruptcy suddenly belonged to a previous era. “In this way, Enlightenment provides cover, and perhaps comfort, for a ruling class that no longer feels able to function in conditions of peacetime democracy and requires instead the resources of an ongoing emergency”.

 Taking Hind’s suggestion seriously doesn’t require that we view the recent conservative embrace of the Enlightenment as a deliberate ruse.  Self-deception is always an option; many conservative policy makers’ use of Enlightenment rhetoric was doubtless sincere. But in politics, subjective states count for little; whatever ideals the neocons meant to be pursuing, their efforts trampled on most of what the Enlightenment managed to achieve. Your belief that you are saving the world for democracy may be perfectly genuine, but if you legalize torture, suspend the right to habeas corpus, withdraw the limits on surveillance of your citizens, and undermine the balance of state power, you have recreated the world that Diderot and Voltaire fought to extinguish.

 This rhetoric worked particularly well in America, which was always the country of the ideal—a place where people went for a reason, rather than a piece of turf on which hordes of wanderers happened to land. Being American meant being part of an idea, not part of a tribe, and it’s telling that while the millions of slaves who were dragged to its shores hardly chose the idea of America, the vast majority of their descendants did. Rather than rejecting the ideal, African-Americans worked long and hard to force America itself to live up to it.  Facts like these distinguish the American experience from its European counterparts:  Europeans may have told themselves they were beneficently carrying a heavy burden, but their empires were built on principled beliefs about their own biological superiority.  America’s progress towards realizing itself is far from complete, or even steady.  But its founding conception as a nation held together by common principle rather than common ancestry had influence far beyond its borders, and was crucial in reducing racism in international affairs. Seen from afar, liberty, equality, and fraternity are things that come naturally to Americans, and they needn’t be bought with the bloodshed that accompanied European attempts to establish the same notions. Americans were neither a chosen people nor one thrown together by happenstance; being American was itself a choice. All that was what made it a new world. If our idealism has often been a
gure of fun, it has often been an object of admiration as well.  So recently the philosopher Bernard- Henri Levy could describe French anti-Americanism as the fruit of a narcissistic wound, born of resentment over the fact that the New World fulfilled so many of the dreams of the old. It’s a world in which hierarchies are at most natural ones of intelligence and energy - all you need to change the realities into which you were born. It’s a world that wasn’t given, but made. Even when they do it with more than a touch of skepticism, millions still look to the United States as the place where liberty, equality, and possibly even fraternity are matters of deep instinct, not institutions.

     Significantly, contemporary European institutions reflect Enlightenment aspirations far more than American institutions do.  Measured in hard terms, Europeans live in as Kantian a set of structures as the world has yet devised.  The most conservative  European government will not demolish the social democratic frameworks that keep gaps between rich and poor within limits, and consider housing, health care and education to be not benefits but rights. This is not just a matter of protecting equality but democracy itself.  Anyone who needs more than one job to guarantee her family‘s basic needs, or regards two weeks‘ vacation as a prize to be cherished after years of service, is unlikely to have much energy to ponder her society’s political arrangements.  By sponsoring culture, and the time to appreciate it, European governments support not just rest and pleasure - worthy enough things to support - but the groundwork for active citizenship.  Across the ocean, the mess of malnutrition and homelessness, of children with guns and without healthcare, of rising rates of imprisonment and sinking standards of living does indeed make large pockets of the U.S. look like more like Hobbes‘ state of nature than anything the Enlightenment sought to establish.

      Kant, and many since him, were convinced that democratic powers don‘t start wars.  Even if the connections between domestic and international policies are less direct than he hoped, they influence each other powerfully. If you live under warlike conditions you will come to believe they are normal.  When a Baltimore lawyer casually asks if the streets of Europe are as safe as they were twenty years ago he betrays an unstated assumption:  things naturally deteriorate, and get scarier every day. Those kinds of assumptions prevent Americans from asking questions about social relations or gun laws that could be fixed or changed or varied.  And once you believe the only thing that can be altered is the tempo of decline, you have accepted a world in which perpetual war is part of the framework, to be kept – at best - perpetually at bay.  The lawyer who asked me this question is no neoconservative – as a matter of fact, he’s my younger brother -  but his query revealed a worldview which concedes  Hobbesian premises  from the start.  No wonder: if you live in a place where economic differences divide the world into the blocks that are safe for your children to play in and the blocks that are not, it‘s hard to imagine another one.  American domestic violence thus prepares the road for American violence abroad, making both look like unfortunate but unavoidable pieces of a world where Hobbes‘ principles hold sway.  Nevertheless, seen from the world of Hobbesian contracts and Machiavellian ne¬gotiations, the American Revolution was nothing short of miracu¬lous. “We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal” was, philosophically speaking, an astounding move. In the eighteenth century the idea that even all white men were created equal was anything but obvious; most of the world thought it patently false. In 1776 a band of colonials had the audacity to declare the idea self- evident—and thereby began to make it come true.

       Since the second World War, the institutional realities of the two continents have indeed grown very different.  Remarkably, the ideas driving each remain quite stable.  Americans still believe in most dreams of the Enlightenment and their own ability to realize them; Europeans believe in the glum calculations of Realpolitik.  Americans may seem bent on creating a Hobbesian jungle, but they see themselves as serving ideals of justice and rights.  Europeans may have constructed a Kantian garden, but they take pride in underselling their own achievement. 

     Doubtless some Europeans refuse to describe their world in idealistic terms in pursuit of self-criticism. They know their commitment to social justice remains only partially fulfilled at home, and barely begun abroad.  It takes no more than a cheap vacation in India to see that the European paradise depends on international purgatory, and the recent photos of Africans braving Sahara and submachine guns to scramble into the gated community on the Mediterranean affected nothing but the occasional conscience.  Thus if a European tells you that she lives in a world that is as far from Kantian ideals as Mars is, she may be affirming those ideals themselves: keeping faith with an ideal means being honest about how little your world contains it.

      Should we conclude that each continent simply suffers from an absence of self-knowledge? It’s true that many American expressions of idealism are self-deluded, and much European self-deprecation is a matter of honesty. But a different suggestion may illuminate more: in Europe, democratic institutions are far ahead of the instincts; in America it‘s just the reverse.  Americans are democrats in their sinews and nerves, while Europeans are singing a song they have studied. I have nothing, of course, against studies; but if they start too late they may not go deep,  as anyone who ever watched a European socialist beam and bow the moment he spots a government minister will know.  (Or a minister‘s deputy.  The level of floating obsequiousness in European capitals is very high.)  Americans live under conditions Europeans may consider nearly feudal, but they do it with a poise that can put Europeans to shame. A true progressive vision would combine the best of each, embracing the European institutions that provide the infrastructure for democracy and equality, while igniting the American civic culture that keeps them alive.

        It must be the influence of that culture which led the 1998 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court to invoke the Declaration of Indepen¬dence as a source for the ideals that established it – and it’s a national shame that the U.S. has yet to recognize the court.  And even after eight years of watching American dreams turn rancid, European papers clamoured for their return.  In 2008, Germany’s Die Zeit insisted that Obama “should lead the world”, because “the new powers of Asia have more power than ideas.  The world needs America.”  Britan’s The Times argued that how the world sees America matters to the world, for America represents an idea of nobility that is still not entirely hollow.

      This may begin to explain the strange consensus that began to emerge during the Bush administration’s second term.  For most European as well as American commentators, an excess of idealism was the source of what went wrong.  In other parts of the world, the claim that the invasion was driven by idealism raised little but eyebrows and laughter; but within the transatlantic alliance, the Hobbesian tones that dominated the earlier Bush years were charitably forgotten.  In their place was the later appeal to universal values that were said to drive not only the war in Iraq, but conservative foreign policy in general.  Reluctance to sanction the use of military force became known as realism, while the willingness to wage war was suddenly idealistic. Even those public intellectuals who hadn’t supported the Iraq war itself rushed to give it a noble pedigree by defending, at the least, the intentions they said were behind it.

    Now I don’t believe that intentions are the key to actions.  If good intentions can lead to hell, they are never enough to excuse.  What you do in the world matters more than the reasons why you do it.  Still what you say about your actions reflects them profoundly.  Men who joke about bombing countries or finding mass weapons cannot be idealistic, merely grotesque. Since the publication of the Downing Street memo at the latest, we know that Bush’s government was determined to go to war whether or not connections between Iraq and Al Quaeda, or weapons of mass destruction, were ever found – the first two justifications that were offered for bombing Baghdad.  The spectacle of a government publically groping for some reason or other to wage war should have led the world to suspect the one reason they finally lit on that was impossible to challenge directly – namely, idealistic pursuit of liberation and democracy. (Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Andre Glucksmann, Adam Michnik, and Paul Berman)

      The overly charitable view of the Bush administration stems, I think, from the fact that most of us would rather be gullible than cynical.  It’s nicer to believe we were led into a deadly disastrous war by simple-minded men of good intentions than by sinister unprincipled rogues. Acknowledging that so much devastation occurred with so little reason means confronting a world that’s very much worse than it should be.  For Britons, it would mean the final shattering of all the hopes that attended the rise of New Labour. For the French, it would mean consigning the nation that liberated them at Normandy to the lower reaches of purgatory.  For Germans, it would mean the corrosion of the nation that  served as the model of democracy while they dug themselves out of the ruins of the second World War, hence a reason to doubt what those principles guaranteed.  For Americans, it would mean confronting a heart of darkness deeper than anything Vietnam had revealed.  Rather than facing the consequences the more squalid reading of the war entailed, many preferred to lay the blame on an overdose of idealism – even at the cost of discrediting idealism itself.

    It’s important to recall that before 2004, U.S. foreign policy was defended with Hobbesian rhetoric; as the world’s most powerful nation, declaring something to be self-defense was all the justi
cation required to do anything at all. After 2004 this form of bravado was replaced with talk of remaking the world according to universal ideals.  Most conservative politicians slide between the two standpoints as easily as their intellectual shock troops.   But neither sincerity nor consistency matters much here. Conser¬vatives have two distinct metaphysics—one in which the only reality is material reality, and another in which ideas move mountains, or anything else that gets in the way. It’s a double strategy that allows the right to claim both hardheaded intellectual supremacy and moral high ground. Progressives, by comparison, are empty-handed. Stuck between traditional conservative appeals to the hard facts of reality and the fake idealism of governments prepared to ignore the empirical world, we have no metaphysics to offer at all.

      Now the more right- wing rhetoric appealed to ideals that its actions un¬dercut, the more progressive suspicion about ideals in general seemed con
rmed. Passionate speeches about the need to fight tyranny, wherever it occurred, had once driven George Orwell, or the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, to fight the Spanish Civil War.  Perhaps Saddam was as seemly a target as Franco. But Bush and Cheney were not the volunteers in Republican Spain, and with its traditional language assumed by the right, and without a coherent alternative of their own, those leaning to the left had little to demand but a return to realism. The left could accept the idealistic declarations of those who supported the war at face value, or they could retreat to what was called realism; few were inclined to articulate an alternative course of action that was based on universal values.

    The war in Iraq only exacerbated a situation that has been growing among progressives, internationally, since the end of the 60s. In the interest of being effective, the left decided to for¬sake utopian visions, and often political theory in general, for what looked like the solid ground of interest- based pol¬itics. It was a fatal mistake, for it meant jettisoning the moral compass that had guided the best efforts of the sixties—the civil rights move¬ment, the opposition to the war in Vietnam, the demands for women’s equality. While many left-wing activists were taken up with identity politics, many left-wing academics were caught up in argu¬ments about postcolonial concepts. The arguments that not only right and justice, but the self and the world are constructed by interest and power, were too abstruse to bother many people outside the acad¬emy, but they took up no end of the energy of those within.

     Meanwhile, the right went off to build think-tanks, and spent a lot of time reading philosophy, while the left was facing conceptual collapse. The end of the Cold War revealed how much the dreams of socialism had transmuted into nightmare. The crisis that was already growing through the seventies as the new left failed to produce a better revolution than the old left came to a head with the revelations of how awful the old one had really been. The end of the Soviet Union revealed an empire that – perhaps only this once – must make the most committed progressive agree with Ronald Reagan. What else could the arbitrary, cold- blooded murder of millions of men and women be, if not evil?

Arbitrary imprisonment, famine, and murder were not new, though the scale seen in the twentieth century was. What was dev¬astating about Soviet crimes was that they were committed in the name of principles most of us hold dear. The rebuttal to this is easy enough: Theoretically speaking, Stalin’s gulags no more undermined the legitimacy of socialist ideals than the Inquisition undermined Christian ones. But after all was said and argued, what was left at the end of the century was less a rejection of particular principles than the very idea of acting on principle itself. Stalinist ter-ror killed off its bravest citizens; what survived in the East was a bleak, bitter culture wracked with cynicism and envy. If that was the outcome of struggle for the ideals of freedom and justice, wouldn’t the world be better off if we sat on our hands?

     Even before 1989, a suspicion of morality had permeated much of the left.  This was not, of course, without cause: postwar crumbling of colonial empires laid bare the ways in which simple greed, dosed with racism, underlay much universalist rhetoric. But many went further than exposing particular hypocrisy, to embrace the idea that moral concepts are at best self-deluding, and at worst hypocritical hype designed to keep people in power.  It’s an old idea, going all the way back to ancient Athens. But though such assumptions are rarely stated, they fuel cultural and political discourse from the center to the left.

      Instead of an argument for such assumptions, you are likely to get history: So many claims to universal virtues have proved to be justi
cations for partic¬ular violence and injustice that any such claim must be contaminated. Better to correct, if you can, some small local injustice, than to lose yourself in false hope and hype about universal values. Or you may hear something more hard- bitten: If so many claims to justice have proved rotten, why retain claims to justice at all? The language of power is ugly, but it’s honest—perhaps the last remaining virtue in a world rank with deceit. As one literary theorist told me, “I grew up in fascist Spain, where the appeal to traditional values was hammered in to cover up the death and torture that went into the Civil War. For me the language of morality is dishonest; I don’t trust it. The language of economic interest and class just feels cleaner.” Though the Communist Party is partly responsible for the death of Republican Spain, its materialist vocabulary survives in those who mourn. In Western Europe, the language of value was most often used by the same church that had failed when confronted with fascism. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, any reference to notions of the common good, or heroic self-sacrifice, seemed inevitably debased by communist appropriations.  As exiled Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov noted, dissidents lacked an original vocabulary; all the good and noble words had already been used by the communists.  Thus even the project of emancipation, so long the goal of idealistic endeavours however differently understood by the right and the left, was declared to be “always situated beyond good and evil…Morality is a residue of the old world”, concluded French philosopher Alain Badiou.

       The belief that justice can only be local found expression in the attack on universalism that characterized left- wing thought from the early 1970s. The unity of purpose that made the civil rights movement an American beacon was lost in a struggle for the interests of each group:  instead of songs like “All men are slaves till their brothers are free”, written to commemorate the murdered civil rights leader Medgar Evers, the only honest struggle was thought to be for the rights of your tribe. The civil rights movement began as a demand to realize Enlightenment principles:  All men have equal rights to justice if all men are cre¬ated equal. The women’s movement began by extending the same argument, pointing out that women had been effectively excluded from the universal rights proclaimed by men. Both these movements are part of a struggle for human rights, in the service of ideals that had been proclaimed, but imperfectly realized, centuries earlier. But when demands for justice become little more than scrambles to insure that my tribe gets no less than yours, we are no longer talking about justice, but about the pre- Socratic idea that justice means no more than helping your friends and hurting your foes.

       As I’ve discussed in MC, some of the problem for progressives goes back to the roots of classical Marxism:  not only the practice, but the theory was brutal. Marxism’s main attraction was its moral fervor, its com¬mitment to slash through liberal hypocrisy and defend the hitherto defenseless with something more than mere words. Marx drew followers who hoped to realize the moral ideals of justice that the Enlightenment had formulated but had left dangerously unsup¬ported. Perhaps the Enlightenment guar¬anteed freedom of speech, but the freedom of those who could buy a printing press was clearly not equal to that of those who stood on a soapbox—or those who had no leisure to do either. It was a pow¬erful, progressive critique. Yet the ideals that fueled the movement were undercut by its allegiance to a view of reality that had, at bottom, no moral foundation:  Justice is doing good to your (class) comrades and evil to your (class) enemies, and everything else is just bourgeois ideology. For Marxists, all ideas are ideology— rationalizations of real bases. Whether through philosophy, art, or re¬ligion, all are produced in order to obscure the real (that is, economic) relations that determine our lives. And however long Marx himself, and a host of others struggled, to explain the relation between ideas and economics, you cannot coherently maintain a commitment to justice if you suspect that moral terms are just superstructure.

      Marxism was unable to escape the contradictions between its cynical basis and the hopes it expressed; but postmodern theorists express no hope at all.  Here we need to say a few words about Michel Foucault, the most interesting and influential of postmodern thinkers, and the greatest modern theorist of power. Just to take his most famous example:  Through its shrewd discussion of ways in which punishment became more repressive while be¬coming more gentle, Foucault’s best- known book, Discipline and Punish, inuenced movements for prison reform. Foucault himself was active in some campaigns, but insisted that his goal was nothing so trivial as to improve prison conditions, but “to question the social and moral distinction between the innocent and the guilty.” this isn’t a distinction prisoners them¬selves would deny. They may point out that innocent people are wrongly convicted, and that criminal justice systems are racist and arbitrary. They may point out that unjust social structures encour¬age crimes that wouldn’t be committed under different circum¬stances. But all such demands rest on the distinction between guilt and innocence, which is basic to any conception of justice, a concep¬tion Foucault—sometimes—longed to undermine. In a televised discussion with Noam Chomsky he made this explicit: “If justice is at stake in a struggle, then it is as an instrument of power; it is not in the hope that
nally one day, in this or another society, people will be rewarded according to their merits or punished according to their faults.” Nor did he inch from implications: When the proletariat takes power, as he expected in 1971, it may exert violent, dictatorial, and bloody power toward the classes over which it has triumphed. “I can’t see what objection one could make to this,” he told Chomsky, who described him afterward as the most amoral man he ever met.  (Dutch television)

     The end of real existing socialism, and the failure of so many Marxist predictions, might naturally have led to a turn toward ideal¬ism. Historical materialism had reached a dead end. Anyone who still doubts that human beings—or what passes for them—can turn the course of history need only imagine what the twentieth century would have looked like had Stalin or Hitler been replaced by other leaders. Even more recently, anyone contemplating the impact that 535 Florida ballots had on world history must allow that history is made by individuals.  Anyone who still wonders if ideas have force need only con¬sider the power of nationalism at midcentury, or religion at its close. But few on the left took such directions.     If Marxist politics had undermined the reality of justice in the act of trying to realize it, post- Marxist politics were even bleaker. Reasonably enough, the left was radically unsettled. The hopes of the sixties had blossomed, not into an adult progressive movement, but into a choice between cultural reaction and consumer excess. Eastern Europe didn’t morph into democratic socialism, but threat¬ened to crumble into bitter nationalistic ruins. And where major changes occurred, they seemed to combine the worst features of cap¬italism and communism, nourishing wildly unequal economies while mowing down students in Tiananmen Square. All these produced deepest disappointment, and self- doubt on the left made good sense. Minimal honesty (and the ever- dimming hope of getting it right next time around) meant asking where things went wrong. But dis¬tress made many easy prey for the view that what went wrong was not in the theory, but in the very appeal to theory at all. Suddenly the fail¬ure of Marxism seemed easily explained: Politics that appeals to theory instead of reality will always go wrong. It’s a claim that Kant found trite and stale in 1792, but two centuries later most were too weary to argue. In abandoning historical materialism, they kept the culture of suspicion and discarded the hope of radical change. Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater! As the philosopher Richard Rorty concluded, “The Foucauldian academic left is exactly the sort of left that the oligarchy dreams of, a left whose members are so busy unmasking the present that they have no time to discuss what laws need to be passed in order to create a better future.” Noth¬ing promotes inertia like cynicism.    

       Now you may ask:  Can’t we do good without theory? Thousands of political ac¬tivists are working today to renew a progressive vision without pay¬ing much attention to de
ning it. They are busy teaching abandoned children, rebuilding crumbling neighborhoods, lobbying against war, building businesses committed to global fair trade. Does it matter that their theoretical bases are scant? Richard Rorty was one philosopher who thought it did not; we could still, he ar¬gued, uphold commitments to progressive politics without clear com¬mitments to principle; he says that if they lived in the same country, he and philosophers as different as Jürgen Habermas and Slavoj Ç ZiÇzek and John Gray and Jacques Derrida would vote for the same candidates and reforms. This may be true – though I am not sure about John Gray. No American philosopher of his generation spoke so clearly or openly as Rorty did about contemporary politics.   To do this, he needed no clearcut commitments to any principles at all; as he wrote, he came from a thoughtful, politically active family, in which critical engagement was a matter of habit. But in many
elds with practical bearing on how lives are led—like law, and psy¬choanalysis, and the arts—the metaphysical questions Rorty dis-missed are of great concern. For habits are just habits, and those that require any effort tend to succumb to inertia in the absence of prin¬ciple. Neither Rorty nor his ironist colleagues suf
ciently appreci¬ated the effects of those styles of thought he summarized perfectly: “This distinction between the theoretical and practical point of view is often drawn by Derrida, another writer who enjoys demonstrating that something very important—meaning, for example, or justice, or friendship—is both necessary and impossible. When asked about the implications of this paradoxical fact, Derrida usually replies that the paradox does not matter when it comes to practice.”

Here Rorty and Derrida were wrong, for this kind of writing often leads to disillusionment with the process of thinking itself. If it comes to nothing but contradictions its leading lights say have no practical consequences, why not spend your time elsewhere? Lots of things are more fun to play with than paradoxes. Wouldn’t you rather read Toni Morrison than Derrida—or for that matter, listen to music, watch a movie, or take a nap? Absurdity breeds hopelessness without content or passion. Where outrage itself is exhausted, even despair is impos¬sible. The resulting inertia is not just the result of an ideology, postmod¬ern or otherwise. But anyone who wants to oppose it must oppose an ideology that makes inertia the most rational response.

        There is more than one reason why the left has failed to win contemporary hearts. Many thoughtful writers are working to understand them. Here I have emphasized the role metaphysics has played in that failure: our views of what is real, what is possible, and how hu¬mankind can mediate between them. For we are indeed torn. We want a worldview that doesn’t blink when confronted with reality, that doesn’t wish away what it doesn’t wish to see. This is not just pragmatics but pride: Grown- up men and women look the world in its face. At the same time, we want a view that allows us not merely to resign ourselves to the reality that’s shaping us, but to play a role in shaping it.

We have moral needs, needs so strong they can override our in¬stincts for self- protection, as any hero will show.  They  include the need to express reverence and the need to express outrage, the need to reject euphemism and cant and to call things by their proper names. They include the need to see our own lives as stories with meaning—meanings we impose on the world, a crucial source of human dignity—without which we hold our lives to be worthless. Most basically and surprisingly, we need to see the world in moral terms. These needs are grounded in a structure of reason. While they may be furthered by religion, or emotion, that is not what keeps them alive. As I’ve argued in MC, they are based in the prin¬ciple of suf
cient reason we use as a compass. Moral inquiry and political activism start where reasons are missing. When righteous people suffer and wicked people ourish, we begin to ask why. De¬mands for moral clarity ring long, loud bells because it is something we are right to seek. Those who cannot
nd it are likely to settle for the far more dangerous simplicity, or purity, instead.

Western secular culture has no clear place for moral lan¬guage, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable. But Barack Obama’s ability to address moral needs was the key to his improbable 2008 victory.  When the first edition of this book went to press that January, I had already done a bit of canvassing for his election– much to the amusement of my savvier friends, who insisted that only an intellectual who’d lost touch with America could give Obama a fighting chance.  Reading his book Dreams had refired my own:  that a man of deep intelligence, palpable integrity and quiet passion might actually become president of the U.S.A. Almost superfluous to mention the fact that it would fulfil aspirations of the civil rights movement, which had formed my own political consciousness.  Born in the South half a century earlier, I’d heard men and women of nearly superhuman patience sing lines like “I’m gonna be a registered voter one of these days.”  However high our hopes may have run in the ‘60s, no one imagined any African-American coming so far. Nor need one rely on childhood memories: I hadn’t begun to envision, one short year earlier, that someone running for the American presidency could regularly end campaign rallies with lines like:  “OK, Pennsylvania, let’s go change the world.”  It’s a line he delivered with the hint of coolness that undercut possible pathos, while running the best campaign organization in recorded history.  Talk about grown-up idealism! 

      But not twenty-four hours after the election, there was ready analysis:  it was the economy, stupid. Critics who pride themselves on their ability to cut through cant insisted that the fall’s financial crisis left voters so desperate they were willing to ignore their other hopes and fears.  Those inclined to providential explanations called the Wall Street meltdown an act of God.  (I heard this argued by a black Southern Baptist nurse as well as by a Jewish fair-trade entrepeneur.) Within a month such claims began to harden into conventional wisdom:  Obama’s unlikely victory was the result of an even less likely event, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Indeed, some said, the crisis was so deep that Republicans didn’t want to inherit it – and were thus willing to forego some of the dirtier tricks that had brought them victory in the past.  A small flurry of cartoons suggested Obama was just another black man hired to clean up the mess white folk leave behind.

      Hard on the heels of the economic explanations were the demographic ones that stalked the election.  Graphs and charts gave them the air of hard science.  It was inevitable, some said, that the Republicans lost the election, because their position on immigration undercut the Hispanic vote.  Long analyses that broke down the American population by category felt no need to defend their most basic assumption:  when all is said and done, what counts is tribal loyalty.

     Perhaps from a distance such analyses looked sensible, but they made no sense of the facts on the ground. Millions of Americans across races and classes and generations spent time and money they didn’t have to participate in the process with everything they did; the wit and creativity that studded the campaign were at least as impressive as the numbers.  What tribal impulse moved the 45,000 lawyers who stood at the polls from dawn to dusk to make sure no votes were stolen this time?  Like the steel workers and housewives and doctors who registered voters and knocked on doors across America, they were seeking the common good – the Roman res publica that formed the basis of the word republic.  They were too different on every matrix to reduce to statistics.      It’s always easier to reach for familiar explanations than to acknowledge a truth that challenges them.  You could see such truth in the faces gathered in Chicago on the night of November 4 to celebrate what everyone knew would be a moment of history.  Call it what it was:  nobility. When the Wall fell in 1989, Berliners watered their gray streets with champagne.  Obama’s election, by contrast, streamed sheer sombre joy.  These were the faces of those inspired as we should be – by ideals that, in the person of Barack Obama, have a chance of coming closer to realization than we had long dared hope. No doubt the state of the economy played a role; economic changes often produce political ones.  But what got people onto the streets in the right kind of way – instead of simple mob rage, or crowds demanding fascism – was not economic anxiety, but the right kind of ideal.   If we do not understand why that election was won, we will have little chance to realize its promise.

     This is even clearer in view of the international reaction to Obama’s victory, which cannot be reduced to any particular interests at all.   Wave after wave swept in with a force that wasn’t explained by simple relief: that the most powerful country in the world would no longer be run by men nobody trusted.  In Germany, the newsweekly that had spent the year making jaded references to the candidate’s supposed messianic pretensions suddenly proclaimed Obama’s victory to be nothing less than a second American revolution.  From Kuala Lampur to Cape Town, leaders joyfully demanded that America resume its title as leader of the free world. Israel’s lowbrow daily ran a two-word headline:  Hatikvah, which was stunning for those who know that the words, which mean The Hope, are also the title of the haunting Israeli national anthem that serves as a secular hymn.  Nobody was surprised when Kenya declared the day after Obama’s election a national holiday.  But who could predict that an Irish group would write a song with the chorus “O’Leary, O’Reilly, O’Hare and O’Hara/There’s no one as Irish as Barack Obama”?  Or a Beduin tribe in the Galilee hurry to claim him as member?  The Israeli paper Ha’aretz concluded “The day of his election wrought a change in the entire world, and will grant those living there a reason to look forward to the future with hope.”  The headline of the national paper The Scotsman put the same thought more bluntly:  ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE.  

     These words are all risky, and Barack Obama has managed to disappoint many people in a short span of time.  Even his own victory speech warned that disappointment is inevitable, given the height of the hopes that were raised.  Yet we are still living in a long moment to be savoured, whatever turns out to follow.   To be sure, good news is hard to savour.  Like many things, from airplanes to the enfranchisement of women, Obama’s election went from seeming impossible to ordinary in very short time. International elation was succeeded by a general rush to worry, for counting the ways it might go wrong felt familiar.  Lingering in the moment was disorienting:  outside of the movies, we’ve come to expect that the good guys lose the fight, or lose their souls. 

      Two centuries ago, Immanuel Kant sought signs of progress in human history.  As I have argued, neither he nor any serious Enlightenment philosopher thought progress inevitable.  Kant saw so many reasons to doubt it that he was willing to settle for very little:  the hope people felt, all over the world, when they learned of the French Revolution was sign enough that the human race could be moved by a vision of a better world – and hence had the chance to progress towards it.  He was writing in 1794, when the French Revolution already displayed clear marks of moral rot.  Yet the collective hope and joy that attended its onset was enough to sustain Kant’s faith in humankind’s future.   The “Yes, We Can”  t-shirts printed in Korean and Hindi and Russian suggest that Obama’s election was another such moment, which will have meaning whatever happens next.

     Obama’s election was an empirical proof that idealism can work wonders, for nobody listening that night had reason to expect, twelve months earlier, that this candidate would win.  hose who had supported him were not calculating that the average donation of $93 in 2008 would bring them a tax reduction in 2009.  Identity politics might have motivated the African-Americans shouting tearstained prayers of thanks that they had lived to see the day (though one dreadlocked young man in Grant Park that night assured me that his tears were “not because he’s black!”) But why were so many white people crying? We wept because the ideals we were taught as children, and had grown to view as hollow, had suddenly been realized.  It was bigger than getting rid of the Bush gang, or electing a black man to the world’s highest office – wonderful as those things are. It was about virtues like intelligence and integrity, hard work and decency actually doing what they’re supposed to:  triumphing over their opposites. 

      Obama’s positions, it’s often noted, are not traditionally left.  But this is not a matter of pragmatic centrism, the recognition of  compromise as a necessary part of political bargaining, but a genuine belief that more ground is common than we think.  Philosophically, this means giving up the notion of class struggle central to Marx and returning to the notion of community central to Rousseau.  Rather than attacking wealthy people as malevolent and exploitative, Rousseau wrote with depth and feeling about the ways in which great extremes of inequality make all of us wretched:  the rich man who is forced to barricade himself against robbery and kidnapping lest his property or his life be taken just as much as the poor man who is forced to grovel in the struggle for basic needs.  Neither is living with the dignity he deserves – and which could be ours if we structured our societies to serve both of them. A restructured society could be the expression of what Rousseau called the general will – so long as it was produced not through fiat, but the efforts of good grassroots organizing.  Obama’s own metaphysical commitments were displayed, among other places, in his criticism of influential community organizer Saul Alinsky.  “”Alinsky understated the degree to which people’s hopes and dreams and their ideals and values were just as important in organizing as people’s self-interest,” Obama told one reporter.  “Sometimes the tendency in community organizing was to downplay the power of words and of ideas when in fact ideas and words are pretty powerful. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, all men are created equal.’  Just words. ‘I have a dream.’  Just words.  But they help move things.  And I think it was partly that understanding that probably led me to try to do something similar in different areas.”

     This is a long step away from either Hobbes or Foucault.  While the right has tended to lean toward one, and the left toward the other, their metaphysical bases are not very different. All such arguments depend on the view that if religion doesn’t tell us to be moral, something else has to do so; self-interest and order look like the sort of hard- nosed bases to which unsentimental souls can appeal. And it is certainly true that much—perhaps most— moral behavior is to our own and our communities’ advantage. Hon¬esty is often the best policy, kindness is often reciprocated; even observing traf
c rules creates a measure of order and safety that ben¬e
ts us all. Hence a great many rules that are both ethical and useful have been shared, and internalized, throughout different times and cultures, so that we are socialized—perhaps hardwired—to do the right thing with astonishing frequency. But sometimes ethics and interest part company, and when they do neither Hobbes nor Foucault are much help.  Both are missing something crucial:  a philosophical basis for understanding the difference between the actual and the possible, and a framework for getting from one to the other. Although it’s a distinction he insists on, Obama, like any politician in office, will fall short of what progressives must hold to be possible.  It is up to all of us, internationally, to limit how far is the fall.  What is certain, for now, is that language shapes our beliefs about possibility, and Obama’s use of language has already been important in shaking up international political assumptions – the reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize.  Whether we can move from changes in moral language to changes in moral realities depends very largely on what the rest of us do next.

 This opens up ways to to think about 21st century political categories that would give us a real progressive standpoint.