The politics of moralizing the nation.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Curthoys, Ned
• Date: 01 January 2003

Thinking is ... creative as well as representative, and its creativity is aided by the fact that the process of thinking is not entirely controlled by the agents of thought. (1) William Connolly, Neuropolitics, 2002 The late Edward Said remarked that we live in a post September 11 epoch of 'warring monotheisms'. It is a world threatened by reactionary moral agendas at once insular, punitive and cynical. Two recent books thoughtfully critique such prescriptive moral platforms and the reductive conceptions of history and identity that accompany them. One is Jane Bennett and Michael Shapiro's The Politics of Moralizing (2002), and the other Ghassan Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003). These books share a pluralist temper suspicious of moral norms. The introduction to The Politics of Moralizing interrogates the deliberative complacency that results when the moralizer 'presents her substantive positions as having a high degree of internal coherence and purity', presenting the world 'as if its contingent parts could be reconciled, its paradoxes solved, its tragic dimension erased'. (2) Against Paranoid Nationalism questions the prevalence of the friend/enemy distinction in the moral discourse of nationalists and proposes that critical intellectuals reject certainty and judge each other 'according to how thoroughly, ethically and interestingly they can keep questioning everything'. (3)

The inclusive and critical ethic of both books is timely and welcome. They share a desire to maintain democratic spaces for dialogue and multifarious forms of political praxis. Both seek to promote a pluralist ethos open to doubt and contestation. Both also seek to explore the particular genealogies of socialization, as well as the theological energies, that inform our moral vocabularies. In this essay I explore their common critiques of self-aggrandizing moral judgements but also focus on the revealing differences between them when they come to propose ethical alternatives. A contrast between the two books, one largely American, the other Australian, enables us to consider how common concerns about reactionary nationalisms are discussed by participants in two distinct though related intellectual spheres and cultural traditions. In brief, while post-liberal American political thinkers represented in contributions to The Politics of Moralizing seek to extend democratic practice beyond the imaginative confines of the nation-state, they do not consistently think through the cognitive and ethical implications of the legacy of colonialism and genocide in the United States and other settler societies. Against Paranoid Nationalism, on the other hand, is skeptical of all expressions of moral anxiety about the nation in the context of a settler colonial state. Inheriting the ironic anti-colonial lens of a Frantz Fanon or Aime Cesaire, Hage embeds the claims of Western humanism in the history of colonial violence and remains suspicious of post-colonial conversations that assume a consensual political agenda or definitive ethical relationship to the legacy of colonialism. I compare and contrast these schools of political thought and remark on their implications for a political ethics. In particular, I examine the role that interdisciplinary breadth, narration and genealogy, and arts of interpretation and persuasion, can play in twenty-first century political theory.

Post-liberals

A school of what I term 'post-liberal' American political thought that is interdisciplinary, speculative and philosophically experimental has developed around theorists like William Connolly, Jane Bennett, Wendy Brown, Michael Shapiro and Bonnie Honig. These thinkers feel that the anxious moral defence of universal principles and categorical imperatives for justice and human rights by secular liberal theorists such as Immanuel Kant and John Rawls should be complemented by a political ethos. By ethos they mean a disposition towards pluralism, reflexive arts of the self, and a reconfigured 'imagined community' that is ethically obliged to diverse constituencies. By critiquing the narrow intellectualism of moral programs, these political theorists prefer unpredictable moments of creative political initiative to abstract principles. Drawing attention to the importance of a densely acculturated sensibility, post-liberals evince suspicion of 'thin' and purely secularist conceptions of deliberative rationality, as exemplified in the intellectualist bias of Jurgen Habermas's theory of rational communication. (4)

Post-liberals interpret the problem of greatest concern to the political Left in the United States as the demise of participatory democracy. In this, post-liberals would seem to share with prominent twentieth-century political theorists such as Hannah Arendt, and contemporary commentators such as Gore Vidal, a nostalgia for Alexis de Tocqueville's image of the nineteenth-century American Republic in his two-volume Democracy in America (1835, 1840). De Tocqueville described a thriving democratic civil society where 'Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations', getting excited together, and bringing their desires into execution without intermediaries. De Tocqueville's America is a thriving public sphere in which knowledge of how to combine with one another is the 'mother of all forms of knowledge' and 'on its progress depends that of all others'. (5)

De Tocqueville's America is a vision of democratic derring-do and dynamic contingency. It affords post-liberals a model of civil society which is rhetorically dynamic and ethically energized by fluid forms of active association and interaction with fellow citizens. Post-liberals posit their version of democratic civil society against the present malaise of representative democracy--its susceptibility to ideological coercion, the influence of wealthy elites, and procedural rule through the party system. The post-liberals also heed Alexis de Tocqueville's warnings about American materialism and majoritarian tyranny. They are mindful of his alarmingly prescient discussion of Americans' scorn for the theory of permanent equality of property, the unwillingness of elected legislators to deviate from populist policy, and the iniquitous social conditions of African Americans. Post-liberals therefore insist on the relevance of creative philosophizing and ethical arts to the project of democracy. These democratic theorists argue, in Jane Bennett and Michael Shapiro's words, for a commitment to 'politics in the broadest sense'. Political action that can make a difference, according to this credo, requires not only intellectual codes such as principles and programs but also 'an embodied sensibility' that organizes affects into a style, generating the ethical energy to pursue moral renewal while recognizing the singularities that political orthodoxies exclude. (6)

The introduction to The Politics of Moralizing recommends 'micro-politics', detailed ethical practices which can enhance democratic initiatives. (7) Micro-political arts are combinative in the manner de Tocqueville discussed, prioritizing sociality over the punitive dogma of Truth and Virtue. Bennett and Shapiro's introduction encourages political thought to play close critical attention to the relationship between affective disposition, presentational styles, and collective identities and practices. The idea is to regain a sense of contingency and collective excitability in human affairs by recognizing that mood, sensibility and aesthetic preference are also the pragma of politics, 'infecting' the society around us in complex ways. (8) Alan Keenan remarks to this effect in The Politics of Moralizing when he suggests that the moralist, preoccupied with his or her own earnest authenticity, has abandoned the 'work of identity transformation' necessary to identify with a larger, more inclusive political community. (9) Challenging the standard liberal-democratic imaginary of autonomous responsible subjects means recognizing the self as 'a bundle of contradictory habits, resistances, gaps, tendencies, and possible developments' which can be transformed by skillful rhetorical and environmental interventions. (10)

The antecedents of this debate with moralistic antagonists are clear. Post-liberals are revisiting the ethics of Desiderius Erasmus. He was the polymathic humanist and rhetorician who, in his debate with Martin Luther, remained committed to Christianity as a generous ethical disposition inspired by the polysemic persona of a Christ who envisioned faith as a non-judgemental ethical praxis, rather than a legalistic code of morality. Erasmus, committed to the social bonds which he felt were the essence of Catholicism, found himself in opposition to a dogmatic opponent whose single-minded search for doctrinal truth ignored the consequences of the theological schism and communal violence that his actions generated. (11) Jane Bennett's opening chapter, 'The Moraline Drift', crystallizes the temperate Erasmian sociability of the post-liberal agenda. She calls for 'onto-stories' which render more explicit the theorist's background sense of how the world and its occupants work. (12) Onto-stories, according to Bennett, require the theorist to perform a combination of qualities, to be pragmatic and speculative, modest and adventurous, challenging what goes for commonsense and imaginatively re-describing the order of things. (13) Bennett's version of affirmative theorizing seeks to defend itself against Richard Rorty's recent injunction to the American academic Left to directly intervene in public culture on the shared basis of a moderate patriotism and commonsense commitment to social justice. Bennett's onto-stories, rather, are more redolent of the political theorist Hannah Arendt's famous commentary on the political significance of friendship: 'humaneness should be sober and cool rather than...