The trouble is that Podhoretz has a great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often. —Allen Ginsberg, 1958
Fortunately [Ginsberg’s] ideas are not for the moment especially fashionable among the middle-class young. And yet there is enough resemblance between the current situation and the cultural climate of the 50’s to fear that his siren song may yet find its insidious way into the ears of yet another generation of restless kids, misleading and corrupting them as it did so many of their forebears in the all too recent past. —Norman Podhoretz, 1997
***
The young literary critic and editor Norman Podhoretz was at home one evening, in the fall of 1958, when he got a phone call. On the other end of the line was a woman who said she was Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend.
“I’m here with Allen and Jack who would like you to come see them tonight,” she said.
For a brief moment Podhoretz thought (hoped) it was a practical joke. Over the past year he had written three essays on the Beats, each one arriving at more certainty than the last that they weren’t the literary redeemers he’d been searching for. They weren’t the ones who would carry his generation, and the culture, out of its Eisenhower-era doldrums.
His culminating piece, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in the spring issue of Partisan Review, had been brutal. Not only were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the rest mostly bad writers, who’d written bad stories and books and poems, they were bad people, champions of dangerous impulses.
“The spirit of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes me,” he’d written, “as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amok in the last few years with their switchblades and zip guns. … Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac’s books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.”
A powwow with Ginsberg, with whom he’d been friendly back in college, and Kerouac, whom he’d abused in print, was such a perfectly awful thing to contemplate that it seemed to Podhoretz it almost had to have been cooked up by a friend.
“But then Ginsberg got on the line,” wrote Podhoretz in his memoir Ex-Friends, “and the minute I recognized his voice and realized that this was no joke, practical or otherwise, I caught myself desperately fishing for some graceful way to avoid what was sure to be a very unpleasant encounter.”
He was unwilling to be the coward, however, and Ginsberg was insistent. So he agreed. He’d make the trip down from his place on the Upper West Side to the Village, and hear them out. Before he went, though, he had to contemplate the state of his person. He needed a shave, and his clothes were all rumpled and ratty. No good. He couldn’t show up to the battlefield kitted out like the enemy.
So he shaved, looked around at what else was available to wear, and remembered one of the lines from Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a poem Podhoretz had actually found quite impressive when he’d first encountered it back in 1956. Ginsberg had written, of the best minds of his generation, that they were:
From the moment Podhoretz got to the apartment, the two men went at each other. First they argued over whether Podhoretz would smoke pot with Ginsberg. Podhoretz had smoked it a few times before, but he wasn’t into it, and in any case he wanted his wits about him. So he refused. Then they got to the meat of the matter.
“All night long he hectored and harangued me for my stupid failure to recognize both Kerouac’s genius and his,” remembered Podhoretz, “and the more I fought back, the harder he tried to make me see how insensitive I was being. It was I, he kept railing, who was the know-nothing, not they.”
The argument they had—for four hours, by Podhoretz’s later reckoning—was a multileveled one. It was literary: Podhoretz had no time for the style of the Beats. He thought they’d fallen victim to a spurious notion that the way to evoke the feeling of spontaneity and vitality on the page was to write spontaneously, from the gut, without care or precision.
Ginsberg thought Podhoretz had shit for ears—had no feel for language himself so naturally was unable to perceive that Kerouac, in particular, was using spontaneous-seeming language to achieve subtle lyrical effects.
The argument was also sociological. Podhoretz granted that the Beats had perceived, correctly, the torpor of 1950s America, but rather than rigorously applying their literary imaginations to the project of generating new sources of vitality, they had simply rejected it all, thrown in with “primitivism, instinct, energy, ‘blood.’ ”
At its worst, by Podhoretz’s lights, this was a kind of proto-fascism, the glorification of violence for the sake of its dynamism and clarifying force. At its least bad it was a celebration of the infantile and adolescent in American culture.
Ginsberg saw in Podhoretz just another defender of the bourgeois status quo, afraid of the liberatory id of the American psyche. He was also a herd-minded member of a literally intellectual establishment that had been too stodgy to give Ginsberg his due as a poet.
The argument was also very personal. Podhoretz’s first piece of published work, a long undergraduate poem, had been edited and published by Ginsberg when they were both at Columbia. Podhoretz had been Ginsberg’s successor in the role of favored student of Lionel Trilling. After college they’d run in many of the same literary and intellectual circles, and had remained aware of each other. More than anything they were both vastly ambitious, rather narcissistic, moderately insecure Jewish-American young men of the same generation bent on using words not just as a vehicle with which to understand themselves but, if at all possible, as the hammer and chisel with which to carve out spaces in the culture that corresponded rather precisely to their particular projects. And those projects, because they began from such similar origins before going off in such different directions, couldn’t help but bring the two men into a kind of intimate conflict with each other.
And so they went back and forth, back and forth, for hours. Ginsberg was for homosexuality; Podhoretz was against. Ginsberg said that middle-class values should be exploded once and for all. Podhoretz thought they were in need of moderate revision. Ginsberg was a drug experimenter; Podhoretz liked to drink (too much, as he would later realize), but was suspicious of drugs. Ginsberg was a literary rebel who craved acceptance from the establishment. Podhoretz had been anointed by the establishment but feared that its approval was more of a curse than a blessing. Ginsberg was a poet, Podhoretz a literary critic.
Ginsberg, though he was older by a few years, was spiritually at home on the far side of the radical cultural break that was coming. Podhoretz, it would turn out, was born both too late and too early. He heard the call of the sixties, but he would never be at home there. In his heart he was a child of the 1950s. At his most adventurous he would be a creature of the early sixties, whose vision of the good life was some kind of fusion of New York intellectual–style depth, moderate Left politics, and Rat Pack insouciance.
“Inevitably, then, and along with everything else, it was myself I was defending,” remembered Podhoretz. “… As against the law-abiding life I had chosen of a steady job and marriage and children, he conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by such grim responsibilities. It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life. God knows that as a young man full of energy and curiosity, and not altogether averse to taking risks, I was tempted by all this. God knows too that there were moments of resentment at the burdens I had seen fit to shoulder, moments when I felt cheated and when I dreamed of breaking out of limits I had imposed upon myself. Yet at the same time I was repelled by Ginsberg’s world.”
With the stakes so high, no quarter could be given, and on they went, past midnight, until they ran out of things to throw at each other. As Podhoretz left, Ginsberg threw out one last sally: “We’ll get you through your children!”
A decade later that threat would prove one of the fulcrums around which Podhoretz would execute his hard pivot to the right. At that moment, though, in the fall of 1958, Ginsberg just sounded grandiose to Podhoretz’s ears. The Beats, after all, weren’t the problem. They were an overreaction to it, a symptom of it. They didn’t want to just take a swim in the Plaza fountain at midnight (Podhoretz’s metaphor for the cultural loosening up his generation of conformists needed to explore). They were so consumed by emptiness they felt they had to have sex in the Plaza fountain, with other men, while high, in order to approximate the feeling of being alive.
Podhoretz’s encounter with Ginsberg and Kerouac did nothing to change his mind about the basic absence at the center of American culture and society, which was of an authentic vitality and passion, tempered by intellect. If anything the encounter highlighted just how challenging an equation he was trying to solve. The Beats were too hot. The New York intellectuals were too cold. But what was just right?
***
Excerpted from Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster) by Daniel Oppenheimer. Copyright © Daniel Oppenheimer 2016.
Fortunately [Ginsberg’s] ideas are not for the moment especially fashionable among the middle-class young. And yet there is enough resemblance between the current situation and the cultural climate of the 50’s to fear that his siren song may yet find its insidious way into the ears of yet another generation of restless kids, misleading and corrupting them as it did so many of their forebears in the all too recent past. —Norman Podhoretz, 1997
***
The young literary critic and editor Norman Podhoretz was at home one evening, in the fall of 1958, when he got a phone call. On the other end of the line was a woman who said she was Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend.
“I’m here with Allen and Jack who would like you to come see them tonight,” she said.
For a brief moment Podhoretz thought (hoped) it was a practical joke. Over the past year he had written three essays on the Beats, each one arriving at more certainty than the last that they weren’t the literary redeemers he’d been searching for. They weren’t the ones who would carry his generation, and the culture, out of its Eisenhower-era doldrums.
His culminating piece, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in the spring issue of Partisan Review, had been brutal. Not only were Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and the rest mostly bad writers, who’d written bad stories and books and poems, they were bad people, champions of dangerous impulses.
“The spirit of hipsterism and the Beat Generation strikes me,” he’d written, “as the same spirit which animates the young savages in leather jackets who have been running amok in the last few years with their switchblades and zip guns. … Even the relatively mild ethos of Kerouac’s books can spill over easily into brutality, for there is a suppressed cry in those books: Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause.”
A powwow with Ginsberg, with whom he’d been friendly back in college, and Kerouac, whom he’d abused in print, was such a perfectly awful thing to contemplate that it seemed to Podhoretz it almost had to have been cooked up by a friend.
“But then Ginsberg got on the line,” wrote Podhoretz in his memoir Ex-Friends, “and the minute I recognized his voice and realized that this was no joke, practical or otherwise, I caught myself desperately fishing for some graceful way to avoid what was sure to be a very unpleasant encounter.”
He was unwilling to be the coward, however, and Ginsberg was insistent. So he agreed. He’d make the trip down from his place on the Upper West Side to the Village, and hear them out. Before he went, though, he had to contemplate the state of his person. He needed a shave, and his clothes were all rumpled and ratty. No good. He couldn’t show up to the battlefield kitted out like the enemy.
So he shaved, looked around at what else was available to wear, and remembered one of the lines from Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a poem Podhoretz had actually found quite impressive when he’d first encountered it back in 1956. Ginsberg had written, of the best minds of his generation, that they were:
burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality.Podhoretz wasn’t certain that Ginsberg had been thinking of him, in speaking of those sinister intelligent editors, but he thought he might have been an inspiration. And the poem wasn’t quite saying that such editors would be wearing flannel suits. But it didn’t have to be precise if you already had a taste for self-dramatization, not to mention the necessary suit. So he suited up, three-piece Brooks Brothers suit, tie, and everything, and headed downtown.
From the moment Podhoretz got to the apartment, the two men went at each other. First they argued over whether Podhoretz would smoke pot with Ginsberg. Podhoretz had smoked it a few times before, but he wasn’t into it, and in any case he wanted his wits about him. So he refused. Then they got to the meat of the matter.
“All night long he hectored and harangued me for my stupid failure to recognize both Kerouac’s genius and his,” remembered Podhoretz, “and the more I fought back, the harder he tried to make me see how insensitive I was being. It was I, he kept railing, who was the know-nothing, not they.”
The argument they had—for four hours, by Podhoretz’s later reckoning—was a multileveled one. It was literary: Podhoretz had no time for the style of the Beats. He thought they’d fallen victim to a spurious notion that the way to evoke the feeling of spontaneity and vitality on the page was to write spontaneously, from the gut, without care or precision.
Ginsberg thought Podhoretz had shit for ears—had no feel for language himself so naturally was unable to perceive that Kerouac, in particular, was using spontaneous-seeming language to achieve subtle lyrical effects.
The argument was also sociological. Podhoretz granted that the Beats had perceived, correctly, the torpor of 1950s America, but rather than rigorously applying their literary imaginations to the project of generating new sources of vitality, they had simply rejected it all, thrown in with “primitivism, instinct, energy, ‘blood.’ ”
At its worst, by Podhoretz’s lights, this was a kind of proto-fascism, the glorification of violence for the sake of its dynamism and clarifying force. At its least bad it was a celebration of the infantile and adolescent in American culture.
Ginsberg saw in Podhoretz just another defender of the bourgeois status quo, afraid of the liberatory id of the American psyche. He was also a herd-minded member of a literally intellectual establishment that had been too stodgy to give Ginsberg his due as a poet.
The argument was also very personal. Podhoretz’s first piece of published work, a long undergraduate poem, had been edited and published by Ginsberg when they were both at Columbia. Podhoretz had been Ginsberg’s successor in the role of favored student of Lionel Trilling. After college they’d run in many of the same literary and intellectual circles, and had remained aware of each other. More than anything they were both vastly ambitious, rather narcissistic, moderately insecure Jewish-American young men of the same generation bent on using words not just as a vehicle with which to understand themselves but, if at all possible, as the hammer and chisel with which to carve out spaces in the culture that corresponded rather precisely to their particular projects. And those projects, because they began from such similar origins before going off in such different directions, couldn’t help but bring the two men into a kind of intimate conflict with each other.
And so they went back and forth, back and forth, for hours. Ginsberg was for homosexuality; Podhoretz was against. Ginsberg said that middle-class values should be exploded once and for all. Podhoretz thought they were in need of moderate revision. Ginsberg was a drug experimenter; Podhoretz liked to drink (too much, as he would later realize), but was suspicious of drugs. Ginsberg was a literary rebel who craved acceptance from the establishment. Podhoretz had been anointed by the establishment but feared that its approval was more of a curse than a blessing. Ginsberg was a poet, Podhoretz a literary critic.
Ginsberg, though he was older by a few years, was spiritually at home on the far side of the radical cultural break that was coming. Podhoretz, it would turn out, was born both too late and too early. He heard the call of the sixties, but he would never be at home there. In his heart he was a child of the 1950s. At his most adventurous he would be a creature of the early sixties, whose vision of the good life was some kind of fusion of New York intellectual–style depth, moderate Left politics, and Rat Pack insouciance.
“Inevitably, then, and along with everything else, it was myself I was defending,” remembered Podhoretz. “… As against the law-abiding life I had chosen of a steady job and marriage and children, he conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by such grim responsibilities. It was a world that promised endless erotic possibility together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life. God knows that as a young man full of energy and curiosity, and not altogether averse to taking risks, I was tempted by all this. God knows too that there were moments of resentment at the burdens I had seen fit to shoulder, moments when I felt cheated and when I dreamed of breaking out of limits I had imposed upon myself. Yet at the same time I was repelled by Ginsberg’s world.”
With the stakes so high, no quarter could be given, and on they went, past midnight, until they ran out of things to throw at each other. As Podhoretz left, Ginsberg threw out one last sally: “We’ll get you through your children!”
A decade later that threat would prove one of the fulcrums around which Podhoretz would execute his hard pivot to the right. At that moment, though, in the fall of 1958, Ginsberg just sounded grandiose to Podhoretz’s ears. The Beats, after all, weren’t the problem. They were an overreaction to it, a symptom of it. They didn’t want to just take a swim in the Plaza fountain at midnight (Podhoretz’s metaphor for the cultural loosening up his generation of conformists needed to explore). They were so consumed by emptiness they felt they had to have sex in the Plaza fountain, with other men, while high, in order to approximate the feeling of being alive.
Podhoretz’s encounter with Ginsberg and Kerouac did nothing to change his mind about the basic absence at the center of American culture and society, which was of an authentic vitality and passion, tempered by intellect. If anything the encounter highlighted just how challenging an equation he was trying to solve. The Beats were too hot. The New York intellectuals were too cold. But what was just right?
***
Excerpted from Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century (Simon & Schuster) by Daniel Oppenheimer. Copyright © Daniel Oppenheimer 2016.
(Illustration: Tablet Magazine; original image: Shutterstock)
Recent events have once again highlighted the problem of trying
to talk about the relationship between Jihadism and Islam. The
incapacity of the Democratic candidates to even discuss
what may have led to the mass murder at San Bernardino, coupled with
the controversial Republican responses by Donald Trump and others,
illustrate a dysfunction that poses a broad and continuing threat to
life and liberties in the West. Current U.S. policy is based on a
broadly held consensus that: 1) We should not use the term extremist or
radical or violent to modify Islam (“religion of peace”): e.g., ISIS is
not Islamic. And 2) we should not make any connections between the
behavior of violent extremists who claim to follow Islam, and the vast
majority of Muslims who do not approve of their deeds.Any public figure who moves too far along the lines of an inquiry into the links between radical Islam and the larger Muslim community, runs the risk of being called an Islamophobe, whose hurtful comments insult moderate, peaceful Muslims, who might therefore turn into extremists.
The illogic here might normally arouse some suspicion. If extremist violence “in the name of Islam” has nothing to do with the actual religion of Islam, why would peaceful Muslims become so offended by the discussion that they would suddenly embrace murderous extremism? Yet this argument has become so widely current that some specialists even urge that we should never use terms like jihadi or radical Islam to designate terrorists, because that grants these mass murderers too much legitimacy. On the other extreme we find people who argue that there is no difference between Islam and coercive Islamism.
In place of such elaborate deference or sweeping dismissal, I suggest we look at a matter not so much of theology, or even exegesis, as of “religiosity”—a particular “style” of living one’s religion, the way one’s religious convictions affect the way one treats others, both co-religionists and outsiders. Religiosity goes a long way toward understanding how any given believer reads his or her sacred and legal texts, and to what theological principles they will find themselves drawn.
Different religiosities “live” the teachings of sacred scriptures in varying ways. Some flee the company of humans entirely (hermits), or seek the company of the co-disciplined (monks, communes), some treat others with the same dignity they want for themselves (communities of faithful, citizens of civil polities), some feel that the best way to teach is by example, others testify to, and share their “truth” (missionaries), and still others feel that by dominating non-believers, they prove the “truth” of their religious faith.
I would like to call this last religiosity, “triumphalist.” Triumphalist religiosity, which makes claims to truth subject to contests for dominion, is fundamentally hostile to the modern democratic project, this ongoing experiment in human freedom of speech and faith. In focusing on this style of religious life, we can identify the site of the debate that needs to occur between Islam and modern democratic societies the world over, and hopefully turn a clash of civilizations (which I believe that the West is currently losing), into a productive thrash.
***
If “religiosity” designates a religious style, a way of “living” one’s religious beliefs, then “triumphalist religiosity” designates believers who need to assert their own dominance as a visible sign of their superiority, as a proof of God(s) “favor.” Put somewhat differently, “because we rule, our god is the true god.” In monotheism: “We are God’s chosen because we rule.”
Many tribal peoples worshiped triumphalist gods, certainly those warrior tribes like the Scandinavians, the Germans, the Romans, the Greeks, etc. At a basic level, triumphalism is a natural human, indeed mammalian impulse, most visible in the behavior of dominant alpha males. All the ancient imperial gods—including their (semi-) divine earthly rulers—reflected this triumphalist ethos. We are victorious and rule because we worship the most powerful god(s). In monotheism, this kind of triumphalism leads to religious imperialism: One God, One Rule, One Faith.
Triumphalist religiosity places great importance on a visible deference paid to true believers. It both demands that others pay it respect and, to varying degrees depending on circumstances, disrespects others as a matter of principle. Triumphalists find public criticism unacceptably disrespectful, and interpret blasphemy laws aggressively in order to silence dissent. Intolerance, disdain, violence, repression, intimidation—all of these deeds and attitudes, reflect triumphalist religiosity in its crudest forms. Historically, then, triumphalists exercise power in an authoritarian manner, and, when insecure, tend, domestically, toward inquisitorial persecution of dissent (heretics, apostates) and humiliation of non-believers, and internationally, towards holy wars (Jihads, Crusades) and the massacre of those who resist.
There is a close correlation between triumphalist religiosity and tribal warrior, honor-shame culture: When he found out about the [salvific] crucifixion, the triumphalist tribal war chief, Clovis, exclaimed: “If me and my men had been there, we would have avenged this wrong.” When the Parisian clergy demanded redress for the Chevalier de la Barre’s refusal to doff his cap at their Corpus Christi procession, they were asserting their rights to public deference, and the state made good on their outrage by torturing and beheading the insulter.
When the U.S. Constitution separated Church and State, it formally renounced triumphalist religiosity. Every citizen of the democracy, and all the religious groups therein, have full freedom to believe that they are special, the one and only true faith, the exclusively chosen of God—in their own minds and hearts, in their own community of conviction. But they cannot use the state (i.e. coercive power) to impose that perception on others. This involves a collective deed of renunciation so rare, that the U.S. Constitution (1789) represents the first time in the 1750-year history of Christianity that tolerance of dissenting faith became a “winner’s creed.”
Indeed, this separation of church and state causes great psychological pain to triumphalists, since visible dominance plays so central a role in their sense of certainty about the truth of their beliefs. Modern freedom and the “public sphere” as a “marketplace of ideas,” as a (self-)critical public discourse in which one cannot use force to “win” an argument, constitutes a major insult to triumphalists, whatever the faith they proclaim. The ability of American Christians to accept the pain of giving up their triumphalism represents a major step forward in the career of modern democracy.
And yet, today, many of us take this painfully acquired principle of (post-)modern discourse for granted and assume triumphalism is a dead letter. When we say in response to the return of holy war, or of public slavery, “but it’s the 21st century, for crying out loud!” we mean precisely that: such behavior is completely out of place in today’s world. As a result of this cognitive egocentrism, however, not too many people in the West predicted that the 21st century would see the global rise of an aggressive triumphalist religious movement, nor predict that those most targeted would hesitate to even identify the (nonexistent) problem.
***
Historically, religious triumphalism played an important role in shaping Muslim attitudes towards infidels. When Muslims came to rule a society, as they did frequently in Islam’s first centuries of rapid, global expansion, they developed the
dhimma, a term often translated as a contract of “protection.” In theory, given the practices of rulership at the time, it was a good deal: live by Muslim rules and you can live in peace. For some Christian “heretics,” living under “orthodox” triumphalists, it was a definite improvement.
In practice, however, the dhimma meant largely that Christians and Jews (later Zoroastrians and Hindus) who refused to convert to Islam bought their safety by their compliance with the demands of their “protectors” to show them the honor they felt they were due. Compliance assures peace, defiance brings retaliation. Not all Muslims availed themselves of the power to treat dhimmi with contempt; but the more triumphalist, the more the need for visible superiority.
In other words, the laws of the dhimma legislated the degradation of those “chosen” infidels considered “people of the book”: stigmatization (dress codes), servility (cannot ride horses, must step aside in street), legal inferiority (in bearing witness, in bringing accusations), tributary status (jizya), and religious inferiority (restrictions on sites of worship). Triumphalist Muslims designate infidels who are (not yet) dhimmi, that is, independent and autonomous infidels, as harbis, those destined for the sword (hrb). They live in Dar al Harb (Realm or Abode of the Sword or of War).
Right now, the core element of the jihadi impulse is triumphalist: “We are the warriors who, in conquering for Islam, prove that Allah is the most high God and Muhammad his true prophet.” The greatest appeal that they exercise on the larger Muslim Ummah is precisely in terms of this assurance that Islam is destined to rule the world, this psychological comfort that Islam is the true faith, despite its apparent lowliness in the modern world. And when people speak of the radicalization of mosques in the West, they mean the introduction of an aggressive triumphalist Islam.
The triumphalist Muslim motto: Where there was Dar al Harb, there shall be Dar al Islam. This religiosity informs a wide range of attitudes, particularly visible in the widespread acts of contempt and disdain that triumphalists show for infidels. This behavior runs the gamut from everyday forms of intimidation and scorn, to the programmatic rape of infidel women, and the slaughtering those who “insult” the prophet.
In Paris in 2015, jihadis began with attacks on blasphemers and Jews and ended with attacks on the nightlife scene. Some puzzled about why. Whence this hostility? It seems less incomprehensible when one realizes that triumphalists find any independent infidel, especially those who are enjoying their (immoral) freedom, intolerable. While different believers have different thresholds at which they will become violent, all triumphalists are susceptible to the Jihadi temptation. When people warn of the negative impact of insults on moderate Muslims’, they refer, often without acknowledging it, to this tipping point at which triumphalists find the behavior of insufficiently deferential infidels unbearable.
Culturally, triumphalism is at the intersection of two powerful social forces: a tribal warrior ethos that appeals especially to the youth, and an imperial, millennial ethos that mobilizes the drive for world conquest. Together they constitute a powerful recruiting device urging hormone-riddled young people to join the apocalyptic global battle to implement Allah’s plan for a global Caliphate. And as victorious warriors, to them go the spoils of holy war.
***
The ability to identify this behavior and the attitude underlying it, constitutes a critical element in the defense of free and tolerant societies. One of the most significant dimensions of this problem manifests itself in a key dimension of the triumphalist Muslims’ war on the West: the matter of honor, disrespect, and hurt feelings. By insisting on the hurt feelings of the community, Muslim triumphalists have pressured Western harbis into making extensive concessions on the cognitive battlefield.
In the world of victimization discourse so prevalent on campuses today, for example, triumphalist Muslims have learned that, when attacking the West, they can lead with their glass chin: How dare you offend us so? They can, thereby, maneuver a conflict-averse Western culture into conceding and placating them. The widespread consensus that one should not hurt the feelings of “marginalized and underrepresented minorities,” has been an enormous boon to triumphalist Muslims.
As a result, there’s a significant and troubling overlap between Western sensitivity to minority feelings, and Muslim triumphalist attitudes toward infidels. When our intellectuals distance themselves from Charlie Hebdo, insisting on the importance of not offending Muslims, or our publishers reject things Muslims will find provocative, they insist that this is a show respect and consideration. But while westerners think they’re being generous, triumphalist Muslims see them complying with their demands, behaving as proleptic dhimmi, who submit without even being conquered.
And when Westerners committed to these displays of “respect,” attack as “Islamophobes” fellow infidels who do criticize Muslims as “Islamophobes,” they are, from the perspective of the triumphalist Muslim, behaving like dhimmi leaders have always behaved: silence any dissent within the ranks before it goes public and brings retaliation to the whole community. In modern parlance: stigmatize critical discourse about Muslims as “essentialist … racist …
By failing to ask for even minimal reciprocity, we have systematically diminished our own democratic public sphere, where we now see a wave of tragi-comic mobilizations of this culture of offense that have strange and (should be) unwelcome echoes of both brown shirts and Maoist “struggle sessions.” These represent the epitome of what a modern, free and tolerant society cannot abide, and they offer triumphalist Muslims an ideal opportunity to demand submission to their insistence that their sensibilities not be offended. Until we understand the magnitude of triumphalism’s deep atavistic wells of desire, the libido dominandi from which it draws its strength on the one hand, and the magnitude of the accomplishment that democratic polities have achieved in pruning it back on the other, we cannot begin to deal with the challenge we face.
And yet, by confronting it, we might begin to figure out what to do. Among other things, an appreciation of the power of raw, pre-modern triumphalism in Islam allows us to grasp how small the differences that separate the “right” from the “left” in Western democracies. The split between progressive and conservative that looms so large in the current public sphere, becomes nearly indistinguishable when mapped on terrain that includes open triumphalist religiosity. Only when “left” and “right” leave off our narcissism of small differences, and start to act in coordination in the defense of our common values, can we begin to defend democracy and freedom. Only then can we begin to shape substantive citizens capable of tolerance, of granting others the dignity we wish to receive, but also capable, in return, of demanding basic reciprocity, which begins with the struggle against triumphalism. Only that way, can one imagine a relatively peaceful and tolerant 21st century.
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