The Paradox of National Liberation: India, Israel, and Algeria

welcome everybody it's a great pleasure for me to have the opportunity to introduce Michael Walzer to give the for the Stimson lectures here at Yale in 2013 my name is Ian Shapiro as some of you know and now you all do I'm not known for my long introductions but I will have to say a couple of personal things about Michael before I allow him to to start but I should just say that the Henry L Stimson lectures are named for Henry Stimson class of 1889 who was Secretary of War during World War two and otherwise a distinguished statesman the lecture series was actually named for him and funded by some anonymous donors and they have been very distinguished lectures given in the series in the past including by Samuel Huntington Thomas Schelling and more recently John Donne and we're really delighted to have Michael Walzer here to give his four lectures on the general subject of what happened to national liberation nobody is here to listen to me and I will just say a few things and then and and then disappear but I do need to say that many people here know of Michael's enormous distinction and influence in the world of political philosophy he's his Revolution and the saints which put him on the map at a very young age and his work on just and unjust Wars when I when I came of age as a young obnoxious political theory graduate student in the 1980s is when Michael was writing about justice and there was virtually no political philosophy at Yale in those days and he had made the move from Harvard to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton a few years earlier and I was this kind of floundering graduate student about 23 or 24 years old and the worst thing about being a 23 or 24 year old graduate student is that you're in great need of advice and completely unwilling to listen to it and I certainly I think had both those traits although Michael probably too nice to two to have dwelled on them but he took me on long distance he had no obligation to do that and actually saw me through my my graduate student years and I will always be grateful for that I don't think I'd be standing here today without the help that Michael gave me in those years so it's really a distinct personal pleasure and great honor for me to be able to invite Michael for the first of his lectures today thank you well it's obviously true that I would not be standing here were it not for Ian I am I am committed to four lectures and I hope that they hang together my project in these lectures is to describe a recurrent and to my mind disturbing pattern in the history of national liberation I will be discussing a very small set of cases the creation of three independent states in the years after World War two India and Israel immediately after and Algeria roughly fifteen years later and I'm going to focus on the political movements that achieve their independence in this first lecture sketching the the general argument I will refer to all three movements the Indian National Congress labor Zionism and the Algerian FLN the National Liberation Front but chiefly to the FLN I will also refer because it's been a general reference for Western writers about revolution and national liberation and also because I've written about it to the exodus of the ancient Israelites from Egypt which is arguably the earliest example in literature if not in history of the liberation of a nation from foreign rule in my second lecture tomorrow I will examine the recurrent pattern in detail in the case that I know best the Zionist movement and the state it created in the third lecture I will consider an alternative view of the three cases defended primarily by Marxist writers and also especially in India by scholars in post-colonial studies and in the fourth lecture I will ask whether National Liberation has a future looking first and most extensively at India and then again at Israel I won't pretend that the pattern I'm going to describe is universal or that it is precisely the same in all its iterations I follow the maxim about political life that nothing is the same as anything else but some things are similar to other things and comparisons can help us understand both the similarities and the differences my aim is understanding not scientific explanation the three case pattern can't be expressed as a set of covering laws because there are many cases that the laws wouldn't cover and even these three can each be described in ways that would greatly complicate my schematic account but my account will enable me to raise some large questions about the cultural reproduction of the secular liberationists left and about its encounter with religious fervour initially at least National Liberation is a success story the three nations were indeed liver from foreign rule at the same time however the states that now exist are not the states envisioned by the original leaders of the national liberation movements one difference is central and I will keep coming back to it all three movements were secular committed indeed to an explicitly secularists project and yet in the states that they created a politics rooted in what we can call fundamentalist religion is today very powerful this unexpected outcome is part of what I mean by the paradox of national liberation consider the original Enterprise National Liberation is an ambitious and also from the beginning and ambiguous project because the nation has to be liberated not only from external oppressors in a way that's the easy part but also from the internal effects of external oppression one of these effects is the power of traditional elites the mediators of foreign rule I mean the men and women mostly men who move back and forth between the subject nation and its rulers negotiating with the rulers bribing them when necessary accommodating their demands when that seems necessary making the best of a difficult and often humiliating relationship the figure of the court Jew has parallels in every nation ruled by foreigners and one of the aims of national liberation is the elimination of that role and the defeat of the people who made it their own but there is another even more important effect of external oppression that has to be overcome and that is the passivity the quietude the deep lethargy of the dominated people no nation can live for long under foreign rule or like the Jews in exile without accommodating to its condition and making its peace with the powers that be the accommodation will be more or less profound depending on the severity of the conditions that have to be accommodated and the number of years or decades or centuries during which those conditions prevail in the sphere of politics accommodation takes a variety of forms fatalistic resignation withdrawal from political activity to familial or communal concerns even an acceptance of the political superiority of the foreign rulers in this latter case the local culture is reconceived as somehow unsuited to politics devoted to higher more spiritual pursuits they the British the French Europeans generally have a talent for politics they have the ruthlessness necessary for imperial domination we submit because we are focused on more important things ruthlessness is alien to us even liberationists like Gandhi who don't want to imitate the ruthlessness of Imperial rulers as many others do believe nonetheless that it is necessary as Gandhi wrote to train the masses in self-consciousness and the attainment of power his constructive program was aimed at producing men and women who did not yet exist in the India he knew who were fit for independence capable of managing their own affairs this was a task that should rightly have preceded national liberation but was in all my cases unfinished at the moment when independence was one from the beginning it encountered difficulties once people have settled in and adjusted themselves one way or another to a particular version of foreign rule the men and women who suddenly appear and offered to liberate them are likely to be regarded with suspicion as Moses was when he tried to explain to the Israelites that they were about to be delivered from Egyptian slavery here the biblical text tells a classic story which is repeated again in the when young and enthusiastic liberators first encounter the people they mean to liberate and find them frightened and reluctant the liberators quickly discover that they need in in modern terms to raise the consciousness of the people before liberation is possible and what can this mean except to oppose the people's already existing consciousness which has been shaped by oppression and accommodation raising consciousness is a persuasive enterprise but it quickly turns into a cultural war between the liberators and let's call them the the traditionalists this can be a very tense business it's possible for a casual charismatic leader like Gandhi to adapt the traditional culture to the needs of national liberation but adaptations of this sort are likely to encounter fierce opposition their success may well be brief Gandhi was deeply opposed to many aspects of Hindu culture the fate of the Untouchables most importantly he was assassinated by someone committed to a more literal or narrow or perhaps fundamentalist version of Hinduism I've taken this example and all my examples from the history of nationalism but I want to stress that national liberation is a subset of that history a piece of it not the whole of it indeed the liberationist project seems somewhat at odds with Webster's definition of nationalism which goes like this a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations there are certainly men and women with this sort of consciousness in all the national liberation movements but the primary emphasis of the movements leaders is doubly different first they aim to achieve political independence and equality with other nations and second they aim to liberate their own nation from longstanding traditions of authoritarianism and passivity liberation is actually closer to revolutionary politics than to national aggrandizement like the liberationist militants revolutionary set themselves in opposition to establish patterns of submission and accommodation and what they call false consciousness and they aim at a radical transformation social revolution requires a struggle against the actually existing society national liberation requires a struggle against rather than an exaltation of the actually existing nation it is also often an anti religious struggle for religion as jawaharlal nehru wrote teaches quote a philosophy of submission to the prevailing social order and to everything that is Nehru is repeating here the standard liberationist view which follows from the fact that the accommodation to foreign rule commonly takes religious forms in part for the obvious reason that other worldliness offers comforts that are always available but the secular militants of national liberation are mistaken if they describe the comforts of religion as nothing more than pie in the sky religion also generates fantasies of a reversal and triumph and then intermittently revivalists and millenarian movements which are sometimes tumultuous but always ineffective millenarianism looks like opposition to foreign rule and maybe that briefly but over the long run it is another form of political accommodation for it doesn't produce a persistent oppositional politics and the millennium never arrives there is also another more concrete form of religious accommodation which doesn't look forward to apocalyptic events most religions prescribe a this worldly regimen that cannon should be established right now which requires submission from ordinary believers and assigns an authoritative role to traditional religious leaders who are often already officials and judges appointed by and submissive in their turn to foreign rulers but neither a millenarian nor traditionalist politics invites ideological commitment or long-term activism nor does it promise individual freedom political independence citizenship democratic government scientific education or economic advance it's for the sake of all these that the National Liberation Astoria Lucien Airy militants need to transform the people in whose name they are acting and that means to defeat the people's religious leaders and overcome their customary way of life VS Naipaul writing 30 years after indian national liberation perfectly captures the attitude of the liberators toward the religion of their people and I'm quoting now Hinduism has exposed us to a thousand years of defeat and stagnation it has given men no idea of a contract with others no idea of a state it has enslaved one quarter of the population and always left the whole fragmented and vulnerable its philosophy of withdrawal has diminished men intellectually and not equipped them to respond to challenge it has stifled growth national liberation by contrast is a secularizing modernizing and developmental Creed it is its opponents rightly say a Western Creed and to the nation about to be liberated it is entirely new indeed newness is the mantra of the liberators they offer the oppressed people a new beginning in new politics a new culture a new economy they aim to create new men and women thus David ben-gurion the most important contribution that the labor Zionists movement has made is not the new ideology but the creation of a new kind of man and similarly Frantz Fanon there is a new kind of algerian man the power of the Algerian revolution resides in the radical mutation that the Algerian has undergone of course this newness encounters resistance which begins as a stubborn allegiance to the way things have always been but soon becomes ideological and therefore also new fundamentalism and ultra-orthodox er both modernist reactions to attempts at modernist transformation the slogan of Jewish ultra orthodoxy everything new is forbidden by the Torah is itself a new idea it would have made the historic accommodation to exile impossible Jewish survival required a lively adaptability and a readiness for innovation but the slogan works well against the temps to bring the exile to an end and one can find similar examples of opposition to the newness of national liberation in India and Algeria what is more surprising is the reappearance of this opposition after the achievement of political independence when the defenders of traditional religion themselves renewed and modernized begin the construction of a counter revolutionary politics I had better tell a particular story now so as to avoid to schematic an account I will begin with the Algerian case because it is in some ways the outlier among my three the commitment to secular liberation though it finds an avid spokesman in Frantz Fanon is weaker here than in India and Israel the dominant movement in the Algerian struggle was the FLN whose most visible leaders who were indeed secular and Marxist or at least socialists in their political commitment but the initial manifesto of the FL read over Cairo radio in 1954 called for quote an Algerian state sovereign democratic and social within the framework of the principles of Islam there were many people in the FLN who took this framework seriously and who demanded after independence that it be put in place in the early years however FLN militants displayed little interest in Islamic principles and the Summa platform of 1956 the work primarily of the internal FLN and its Berber leaders actually left the principles of Islam out of its description of the movements goal the birth of an Algerian state in the form of a democratic and social Republic and not the restoration of monarchy or of a theocracy in a French prison Achmed benbella the future first president of Algeria read the leftist publications of the Paris publisher Maspero and studied the works of Lenin Sartre and malreaux Ramadan a B'nai one of the ephah lens leading intellectuals and later a defender of terrorism spent five years in prison where he applied himself I'm quoting from a historian of the Algerian revolution - a voracious reading of revolutionary studies Marx and Lenin and even mine Kampf he had already gained his baccalaureate he must have done all his reading in French many of the FLN militants and a larger number of the intellectuals were francophone the establishment of the provisional government of the republic of Algeria was announced in French by Herod Abbas then the head of the FLN the FL enters were certainly committed algerian nationalists it's not with you but against you that we are learning your language declares a character in a novel by an Algerian writer who wrote in French at the same time many of these nationalists were culturally Francophile or better yura file ho scene 8 ComEd a Berber and along with benbella one of the historic nine founders of the FLN concentrated in his prison ears on English novels though they aimed at ending foreign rule militants like Ben Bella and Achmed were remarkably at ease in a foreign culture by contrast Muslim moderates called upon the French to allow the imposition of Islamic family law in Algeria but given that had no further difficulty with French rule there already were Muslim officials in Algeria who according to the Summa platform were domesticated chosen and paid by the colonial administration these were some of the immediate opponents of the FLN militants whose political agenda included as the writings of Fannin made clear not only ending French rule but also overcoming the colonial mentality and the Algerian past FLN radicalism helps explain the highly visible role that women were given in the movement not in the leadership a sign of things to come but on the ground in military and terrorist activities compare the role of women among among Zionist militants especially in the Hagana the military arm of the Zionist movement putting women forward in the FLN was not an affront to the French oppressors it was directed against the internal oppression of Algeria's religious tradition fanon in his portentous way makes this a central theme quote the militant man discovers the militant woman and jointly they create new dimensions for algerian society and again the freedom of the algerian people is now identified with women's liberation with her entry into history and again in the movement the woman ceased to be a mere complement of the man indeed might be said that she pulled up her roots through her own exertions this uprooting succeeded brilliantly for a time but as contemporary algerian politics attests it ultimately failed alas Alastair Horne wrote in his 1977 history of the Algerian war the promissory notes issued to women in the heat of battle have yet to be fully honored as of 2013 it seems fair to say that they have hardly been honored at all though the political standing of Islam in Algeria today is contested its cultural Authority is unquestionably greater than FLN militants would have predicted after 50 years of liberation and the social standing of women in Algeria today though also contested is far short of the Equality that those same militants promised their sisters in the 1950s the FLN was a revolution in the making resurgent Islam is the counter-revolution truth to tell the retreat from revolutionary feminism began soon after the FLN victory in 1962 as horn suggests and it was confirmed in the family code adopted in 1984 despite the fierce opposition of many female veterans of the liberation struggle the new law made it a legal duty for Algerian women to obey their husbands institutionalized polygamy and denied wives the right to apply for a divorce unless they gave up all claims to alimony still the Islamist zealots who terrorized Algeria in the 1990s demanded many more restrictions on the everyday lives of women with regard to dress mobility and employment one track of the Islamic Salvation Front warned women against using quote the Jewish word emancipation to attack the Islamic values of your ancestors emancipation was of course one of the central concepts of the early FLN radicals it was central also to the program of Indian national liberation where it required a direct attack on the religious culture and social practices of both Hindus and Muslims when the Indian Constitution was being debated Rajkumari Amrit Cour one of the founders of the All India Women's Conference urged the drafting committee can make sure that the religious liberty clause in the new constitution did not prohibit the wiping out of religiously sanctified evils like porta child marriage polygamy unequal laws of inheritance the ban on inter caste marriage and the dedication of girls to temples tower who became Minister of Health in Nehru his first cabinet had been educated in the Sherbourne School for Girls in Dorset England and at Oxford University she was in many ways a modern Western woman and at the same time an Indian nationalist and an early feminist there's nothing unusual then in a francophone and even a Francophile Algerian militant the organizations that came together in 1885 to create the Indian National Congress were dominated by Anglophone and Anglophile lawyers journalists and officials the architects of oppression have a lot in common with the the architects of liberation have a lot in common with the architects of oppression who were according to Marx's famous articles on India the first revolutionaries in Indian history the liberationists have often gone to school with the oppressors who commonly claim to represent a more advanced culture materially intellectually and of course militarily Moses in Egypt is the classic example raised in the palace of the Pharaoh and certainly more at ease with the Egyptian elite than with the people hope to lead the training of the liberator in the home country and culture of the oppressor is a common theme in the history of national liberation Nehru spent eight years in British schools Harrow Trinity College Cambridge and the Inns of Court and as a young man was more conversant with the history and politics of Britain than with the history and politics of India late in his life he told the American ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith I am the last Englishman to rule in India BR Ambedkar the untouchable lawyer neighbor was first minister of justice studied for the bar at Gray's Inn and did his PhD work at the London School of Economics tea rehearsal was another in typical nationalist leader with a very good Austrian education and no Jewish education at all who knew far more about other nations than about his own and who was at home with the idea of Jewish statehood because he was at home with people who already had a state Franz fanon received his medical and psychiatric education in France and also studied literature and philosophy there none of the other leaders of the FLN went to school in France but they attended French lycée in Algeria and many of them served in the French army another kind of education benbella received Frances highest military honour and a kiss on each cheek from Charles de Gaulle himself often the leaders of the oppressed identified with an oppositional ideology in the Imperial country like the Marxism of some FLN errs or another example the communism of Ho Chi Minh also learned in Paris or the Fabian socialism of Nehru and the Indian National Congress or again the East European social democracy of David ben-gurion and ma Pi but the fact that a doctrine was oppositional in say England the make it familiar in India here to the militants of National Liberation are the carriers of ideas that are utterly unknown to the people or the greater number of people to whom they are carrying them what can they say to those people they tell them that they are oppressed because they are backward passive mired in superstition and ignorance unexposed to modern scientific rationality to quote Nehru again led by men who are the accomplices of oppression the militants raised the hope of newness as I've said and give it body in one of the modernists ideologies nationalist liberal socialist or some combination of those three they promised enlightenment scientific knowledge and material advance but perhaps more importantly they promised victory over the oppressors and equal standing in the world they appeal especially to the young they're usually very young themselves and often urge a radical break with family and friends they demand total commitment to the movement or perhaps a physical move to an all-encompassing community like the Zionist kibbutz or a Gandhian village cooperative the old ways must be repudiated and overcome totally but the old ways are cherished by many probably by most of the men and women whose ways they are and that is the paradox of liberation still the liberators do win they lead a genuinely national struggle against the foreign rulers of their people once a vanguard of militants has demonstrated that victory is possible many men and women who don't share the ideology of liberation nonetheless join the struggle the traditional political and religious leaders are pushed to the side or they withdraw about passivity is their style or they go along with the liberators accepting a marginal role the odd man out in this schematic story Gandhi who succeeded in turning traditionalists passivity into a modern political weapon there's no comparable figure in Zionist history or in or near the FLN or in any other national liberation movement that I know about even when he openly opposed Hindu beliefs and practices Gandhi spoke to the people in a religious language that was largely foreign to the other leaders of the national liberation movement in 1934 for example he suggested that an earthquake in Bihar was divine punishment for the sin of untouchability Nehru who would one day help abolish untouchability was shocked by what he called this staggering remark anything more opposed to the scientific outlook would be difficult to imagine the two men managed to work together but it was crucial to their cooperation that Gandhi conceded the political succession to the secularists and modernist Nehru still secularists and modernists blame Gandhi for the surprising strength of religious nationalism in liberated India thus VS Naipaul the drama the drama that is being played out in India today is the drama that Gandhi set up 60 years ago Gandhi gave India its politics he called up its archaic religious emotions he made them serve one another and brought about an awakening but in independent India the elements of that awakening negate one another no government can survive on Gandhian fantasy and spirituality the solace of a conquered people which Gandhi turned into a form of national assertion has soured more obviously into the nihilism that it always was that was written in the late 1970s leftist intellectuals in India these days are even more critical of the Gandhian legacy I will come back to their arguments in the third of these lectures in Israel and Algeria the transition from national liberation to religious revival was accomplished without the mediating role of a Gandhi figure so perhaps Gandhi in India was less central than his critics believe perhaps Hindutva Hindu nationalism would be a powerful force in Indian politics even if he had never inspired and led the liberation movement still the story is harder to tell without him or without anyone like him I don't mean that other liberationist leaders were unwilling to speak in religious terms Zionists writers could hardly help but invoke the sacred geography of the biblical texts their hope for an ingathering of the exiles was a secularized version of a messianic promise in Algeria the FL ins first magazine was called el Mujahid this was an embarrassment for Fannin who told his readers that this phrase originally meant a Muslim holy warrior but now meant nothing more than a fighter it was the common tie of Islam under the pressure of colonial occupation writes John Donne in his modern revolutions that United Arab and Berber in their rejection of the path of assimilation still neither the strategy and tactics nor the long-term political agenda of the militants was significantly influenced by their people's religion so what happened the traditional seemed to be defeated or marginalized the aura of liberation didn't attach to them they didn't have much influence in shaping the constitutional arrangements the economy or the educational system of the new States they didn't make much of an appearance in the new political elites the story is more complicated in Algeria where the radical left regime of benbella lasted only three years who re boumedienne who overthrew benbella in 1965 was certainly no Francophile he had been educated in Muslim schools in Algeria and had studied at El Azhar University in Cairo but the political leaders he most admired were Castro and Tito he ran a socialist economy which had always been the promise of the FLN and sustained a form of politics that while socially conservative on issues like the status of women would appear to the next generation of Algerian Muslims as radically secular how then was political Islam how were the political versions of Hinduism and Judaism sustained or invented in the new world of liberation in all three countries religion remained a force in everyday life during the years of liberation and it's aftermath and nationalist leaders often found religion useful for their immediate political purpose which was to sustain the unity of the anti-colonial struggle in the new state though a few of the militants might have liked to mount the Bolshevik style attack on religion the new rulers did not dare do that and in any case they believed they all believed that decline was the destiny of all religions what Nehru called the scientific outlook was bound to triumph secularization did not require radical coercion and it allowed for temporary compromises because it was an inevitable historical tendency here is Nehru writing in the Diskin in his book the discovery of India in the 1930s some Hindus dream of going back to the Vedas some Muslims dream of an Islamic theocracy these are idle fancies for there is no going back to the past there is only one way traffic in time the zionist perspective was strikingly similar as the historian a hood Lewis writes the assumption that their Jewish religion was destined to pass from the scene sooner or later because it contradicted the needs of modern life was accepted by practically all the zionist intelligentsia and that's more or less what we all believed in those years and for many years after or it's what almost all of us believed my my friend and colleague Clifford Gertz of the late Clifford Gertz who studied nationalist movements in both Indonesia and the Arab world thought otherwise writing about religion in Bali in the new Indonesian state in the early 1960s he argued that religious belief might be swamped by modern materialist ideas but probably not for quote such overall drifts when they do not turn out to be mirages altogether often pass over deeply rooted cultural configurations with rather less effect upon them than we would have thought possible he went further suggesting that today in Bali some of the same social and intellectual processes that gave rise to the fundamental religious transformations of world history seemed to be at least well begun in other places to the drift or perhaps we should call it the storm of national liberation passed over ancient societies and reborn nations with rather less effect than the movements militants expected and the processes that would eventually lead to religious revival were already begun under the eyes of the militants but out of their sight the old ways were sustained in temples synagogues and mosques but also more importantly in families in lifecycle celebrations where the sustaining behaviors were hardly visible to secular militants busily at work on the big projects of modernization indeed the coming revivals were fueled by the resentment that ordinary people pursuing their customary ways felt toward those secularizing and modernizing elites with their foreign ideas they're patronizing attitudes and their big projects they were fueled even more by the authoritarian or paternalist politics that were forced upon the new a leets in their war against the customary ways the authoritarianism of the algerian state was particularly brutal indeed the internal politics of the FLN before liberation was already murderous reflecting deep tensions between arabs and berbers as well as between Francophile revolutionaries and more locally based militants between the exterior and the interior movements by contrast the Indian National Congress and the labor Zionists were committed to democracy and mostly managed their internal tensions in nonviolent ways but even the leaders of these movements when they exercise political power did so with a sure sense that they knew what was best for their backward and often recalcitrant peoples and then the backwardness came back and the democracy that the liberation is created even in Algeria briefly in 1990 and 91 was the chief instrument of its return the present crisis of liberal democracy in India rights the political theorist Rajiv Bhargava is due in large part to its own success religious men and women previously passive and inarticulate entered the newly created public domain bhargava says in numbers that greatly exceeded the tiny upper crust that led the national movement democratic politics encouraged ethno-religious political mobilizations and the mobilised men and women did not come he says from a cultural background with a liberal or democratic character but it wasn't the old backwardness that these people or the politicians they followed brought back religion appeared now in militant ideological and political forms modern even in its anti modernism its protagonists claim to embody the ancient traditions the faith of the ancestors even to represent a pure authentic version of it coldness is their mantra and though the claim is false the sense of old nastain they connect the liberated people to their own past they provide a sense of belonging and stability in a world rapidly changing but what happened to the Indian the Israeli and the Algerian newness where are the new men and women each the equal of the others standing straight tall and smart I'm not sure how to answer that question there are of course a lot of people like that National Liberation did reach beyond the thin upper crust but nowhere near as many as the liberationists expected it appears that the culture of liberation was too thin to sustain these people and enable them to reproduce themselves the radical rejection of the past left as it were too little material for cultural construction the liberators did generate a set of holidays a set of heroes a set of commemorative rituals they made up songs and dances they wrote novels and poems compare the French Revolution with its new calendar it's neoclassical revival its FETs and pageantry for a while at least enough people seem to engage with all these so that it was almost possible to believe in the new beginning but it was all too artificial too recently constructed and after a couple of generations that heroes lost their aura the commemorations lost their charm young people began to drift away moving toward the excitement's of global pop culture or turned toward the fervency of religious revival the attraction of pop culture is no doubt a disappointment to the aging militants of national liberation but their biggest disappointment their biggest surprise is the large number of young men and women who are drawn to the ideologies of Hindutva Messianics and ultra Orthodox Judaism and radical Islam and aren't they right to be surprised isn't it in fact unbelievable that so many daughters of the women who self uprooting and uncelebrated are willingly rhe rooting themselves returning to religious faiths that are at least to this secular I as misogynist as ever I suppose it isn't unbelievable it's just the sort of thing social science claims to explain Marxist writers who are committed to scientific explanation search for the social class whose material interests religious revival might serve a recent study of left discourses in contemporary India finds the rise of Hindutva attributed by different writers to the petty bourgeoisie the classic Marxist candidate but also to the rich peasants the poor peasants the limp and proletariat the urban workers the old brahmanas and the new capitalists I have some sympathy with a despairing comment that appeared in the leftist magazine economic and political weekly in 1993 quote whatever the analytical difficulties of reducing an ideology to its material base unless one posited such an epistemological relation one will be left with a politically debilitating agnosticism but the reduction doesn't seem to work or at least it needs more work two years later the same writer in the same magazine wrote that Hindutva isn't only quote an instrumentality protecting a material interest over and above that it is a set of values attitudes and norms of behavior that can only be countered with the aid of alternative values and norms that seems to me the beginning of understanding I wouldn't give up on the search for a material base Marxist writers a right to look for the people most likely to benefit from what the political theorist VP Varma identifies as the central goal of Hindu revivalism the restoration of the Vedic principles that require the functional organization of society the old elites the upper castes new capitalists patriarchs everywhere these seem the obvious beneficiaries still it's necessary to acknowledge the populist appeal of revivalism the staying power of the old religion up and down the social hierarchy without that appeal the religious revival would be of no use to the brahmanas the capitalists and the patriarchs countering the revival with a set of alternative values and norms is not so easy doing it X Neil Oh seems pretty much impossible but perhaps the militants of national liberation like all revolutionaries had to insist on radical cultural negation and then on radical newness perhaps that is the necessary character of their project years ago many years ago when I was writing about the Puritan revolution in England I came upon a sermon preached in the House of Commons in 1643 that expresses a sentiment common to revolutionaries everywhere take heed of building upon an old frame the preacher told the MPs an old frame that must be all plucked down to the ground take heed of plastering when you should be pulling down the difficulty is that such a radical pulling down doesn't have enough appeal to the people living in the house they are too attached to it even if they complain about its discomforts maybe what is necessary is only a partial demolition and a renovation of the rest there actually were intellectuals in the national liberation movements who aimed at a critical engagement with the old culture rather than a totalizing attack upon it I like to think that had they won out the story might have turned out differently the liberators might have made their peace with at least some part of their nations past fashioned a set of beliefs and practices that were new indeed but also familiar and thereby avoided the extremism of religious revival maybe I will want to argue something like that but it's best to begin with skepticism some commentators insist that engagement was never possible and then place their hopes in the dialectic first comes the politics of radical secularists rejection then the politics of militant religious reaffirmation and then as the OED says the contradictions merge in a higher truth that comprehends them both but the dialectic doesn't seem to be working these days the way it used to I don't see many signs of the coming synthesis in India Israel and Algeria and probably in other places too the struggle that the liberationist thought they had one still has to be one it's going to continue for a long time and its outcome is as uncertain as it was at the very beginning like the ancient Israelites the modern militants thought they had reached the promised land and then discovered that they had carried Egypt in their baggage you

Channel: Yale University

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Keywords: Michael Walzer, The MacMillan Center, Israel, and Algeria, Yale University

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Length: 52min 50sec (3170 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2013