Compared with reading a book by Professor Habermas, going
to the dentist is a pleasant experience. He has made his career as a torturer –
not of people, but of language. The esteem in which he is widely held is to me
mysterious and itself of sociological and psychological interest, worthy of
further research. Audiences have been known almost to swoon at his Teutonically
polysyllabic vaticinations. He is largely incomprehensible; where he is
comprehensible, he is either banal or wrong, or both. He is often funny, but
not intentionally.
Let us take his banality first. At the bottom of page
69 of this short but frivolously dense book entitled THE CRISIS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION: A Response , we read with respect to his scheme for a world
body that will deliver universal justice (modeled more or less on the
triumphantly successful European Union):
“But any design for a world order aiming at civilizing the exercise of political authority, no matter how farsighted it might be, must take account of the fact that the historical asynchronicity of regional developments and the corresponding socio-economic disparities between the multiple modernities cannot be erased overnight.”
Do we really need a professor of philosophy –
indeed, do we need anyone – to tell us this? Professor Habermas tries to
squeeze significance out of truisms, as a constipated man tries to squeeze
stools out of a reluctant colon, by the use of locutions such as ‘multiple modernities’
and the printing of the word ‘overnight’ in italics. But is there a single
person in the world who thinks that all economic differences between
individuals and nations could be ironed out overnight, and who either needs to
or would be disabused of this notion by Professor Habermas’s contradiction of
it? Academic vacuity can go no further.
Let us now turn to the Professor’s almost comic
error-proneness. According to him, the United Nations could and should be a
quasi-judicial body, wielding military force, but subject to a higher court
whose constitution, make-up and source of authority he does not vouchsafe us,
that would intervene wherever national governments abused whatever happened to
be the human right du jour. Let us, partly from charity towards the
Professor, disregard the question as to whether this would be a recipe for
permanent peace or permanent war; let us, rather, examine one of his empirical
claims:
A fortunate consequence of the [UN’s] restriction to legal, but fundamentally moral matters is a deflation of the demands on legitimation of the world organization. For the relevant principles of distributive justice as well as the negative duties to refrain from justiciable human rights violations and wars of aggression are rooted in the core moral contents of all the major world religions and in the cultures they have shaped.
On what planet, we may ask, has Professor Habermas
been living for the past few decades? Not on Earth, surely? Does Frankfurt
University, where he is professor emeritus, not receive news from the rest of
the world’s surface? Has it escaped his notice that there seems to be some
conflict over, inter alia, the limits of free expression, for
example about the Prophet Mohammed, and that this conflict is actually over
quite fundamental principles, the differences between which are not easily
reconcilable? Is he not aware that the principles of what he calls ‘distributive
justice’ are far from settled, and that even if it were true that the ideals of
the welfare state (which he much favors) were indisputably just, which of
course they are not, it is a matter of empirical fact that many people do not
accept them as just. Elections such as the current ones in the United States
may not in practice change very much, but that does not mean that they are
about nothing of fundamental importance.
Underlying Professor Habermas’ platitudinous but
mistaken verbiage is actually something rather sinister: the communist, fascist
and Nazi dream of the abolition of politics, in favor of mere administrative
decision-making by a supposedly enlightened elite, armed with indubitable truth
from which their decisions follow syllogistically. The world should be free of
Jews or economic exploiters so we kill them; the world should be free of human
rights abuses so we topple the governments that commit them. Complexity of
vocabulary and syntax apart, life is really very simple.
With regard to Professor Habermas’ obscurity, however,
one is spoilt for choice. It is true that even at his most opaque, one
sometimes glimpses a meaning, or at least a connotation, as one might glimpse a
giant panda in a bamboo forest; and it is this dialectic (I surmise) between
incomprehensibility and meaning that has given him a reputation for profundity.
His thoughts lie too deep for words, at least those that we can grasp at a
first or subsequent reading, and the fault lies with us, not with him.
At the risk of being accused of the very fault with
which I tax him, I should say that he Habermasizes language.
He uses locutions to hide rather than reveal meaning to the educated reader
(only the educated could possibly be under the misapprehension that they ought
to read him). Here is a relatively mild example: “A political integration
backed by social welfare is necessary if the national diversity and the
incomparable cultural wealth of the biotope ‘old Europe’ are to enjoy any
protection against becoming levelled in the midst of rapidly progressing
globalization.”
A biotope – hardly a word on everybody’s lips – is ‘a
small or well-defined area that is uniform in environmental conditions and in
its distribution of plant and animal life:’ a combination of Lebensraum and Gleichschaltung when
you come to think of it, which is rather unfortunate in the political context.
The passage hints at, has the connotations of, but does not quite mean,
protectionism, winding up the drawbridge against the barbarians assembling
beyond the walls. How this sits with the Professor’s world government I am at a
loss to understand: I suspect that there is a special kind of dementia that is
caused by having read too much Hegel in one’s youth.
There are passages in this book, short though it is,
that would make strong men – or, in the politically correct language preferred
by the translator, persons – scream. “One need not share the associated
evaluation in order to appreciate the descriptive force of freeing the concept
of the ‘political’ from the fog of a mystified counter-enlightenment and
restricting it to the core meaning of a democratically juridified
decision-making and administrative power.”
This might be the translator’s fault, but I doubt it.
Nevertheless, let me try to extract some of Habermas’
main points, in so far as I am able. He thinks there is no inherent problem in
the creation of a pan-European democracy, complete with a proper parliament
with real powers. (He does not descend to such petty problems as the simultaneous
translation of Estonian into Portuguese, Croat, Greek, Danish, German, French,
Spanish, English, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, etc. and vice versa, such that
jokes become apparent only 30 seconds after they have been made, and laughter
breaks out when the speaker has moved on to, say, the question of Greek debt or
genocide.)
Habermas thinks that the transfer payments between
countries that he deems necessary, especially from Germany, and indeed which
might be imposed on Germany if his scheme of a genuinely powerful European
parliament came about, would pose no problem once a European mentality had been
‘constructed.’ Why he should think this is a mystery to me; transfer payments
between nationalities are already threatening to break up well-established states
such as Belgium and Spain, and one of the hopes of the Scottish nationalists
must be that they will get more transfer payments from Europe than from
England, and larger rents from their own political activities.
Habermas is unequivocally in favor of majoritarian
democracy and sees no need for a countervailing principle in defence of
liberty:
Democratic self-government means that the addressees
of mandatory laws are at the same time their authors. In a democracy, citizens
are subject only to those laws which they have given themselves in accordance
with a democratic procedure. The legitimizing force of this procedure rests, on
the one hand, on the inclusion of all citizens in the political decision-making
process (however this is realized) and, on the other hand, on the coupling of
(if necessary qualified) majority decisions with deliberative will-formation.
One is tempted here to adapt Edmund Burke slightly: In
the groves of his academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the
gallows. But of course, the hangings would be coupled to majority decisions
with deliberative will-formation, so they would be all right.
Habermas, to be fair, supports human rights, but in
the full Soviet sense of the term. The concept of human rights, in his view,
derives from that of human dignity (his essay on this subject in this book is
considerably better written than the rest, though not less wrong-headed), with
the right to an equal amount of which every human being is endowed at birth, ex
officio as it were. But no one can retain his human dignity if he is
homeless, hungry, lacks a 72-inch flat-screened TV, etc., and therefore it is
the duty for the state, in the name of human rights, to ensure that he is
provided with them. In Habermas’ view human rights evolve and extend: when
96-inch flat screens become available, possession of them will be a human
right, too. That all this involves a very considerable coercive apparatus,
often arbitrary and frequently unjust, is quite beyond him to recognize.
Professor Habermas is an old man and respect is due to
age. He came to consciousness in the Hitler years and lived through the war; I
have little doubt that he is motivated at the deepest level by a genuine desire
that Europe should avoid any such catastrophe again. Alas, his ideas, if
implemented, would lead to something rather like it.
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