In a perfect world, someone with the power to stop the imminent pre-emptive military strike against Iran would find the time to pick up a little pamphlet published by the Prickly Paradigm Press and spend a few hours considering the intellectual stakes in the Great Satan’s latest confrontation with the Axis of Evil. Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran by Danny Postel, an editor at the website Open Democracy, offers a very different view of the “fundamentalist Iran” so casually discussed in Washington, and it underscores the dangerous simplifications which are becoming a habitual liability of the Bush administration. The pamphlet contains an e-mail exchange with the philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo who has been held in solitary confinement at Emin prison since April 2006, even though no formal charges have been brought against him. In the course of a remarkably wide-ranging survey of the political discussion which has been taking place in his country, Jahanbegloo gives the following vignette of contemporary intellectual life in Iran.
In June 2004, an audience of 1500 gathered to hear a philosophical debate at the House of Artists in Tehran. The philosopher Daryush Shayegan began by arguing that secular democracy seemed inevitable in the Islamic world now that revolutionary politics had demonstrably failed to create a better society. He also suggested that a ‘human rights culture’ -based on the aspirations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights-would be a defining force in Iran’s future, because it offered an attractively non-ideological approach to politics to a public exhausted by ideology.
Shayegan was followed by George McLean, Emeritus Professor from the Catholic University of America, a leading authority on Thomas Aquinas, Vatican II and the role of religion in public life. McLean discussed democracy and the uses of inter-faith dialogue. Then came the real star of the debate, Stanford’s Richard Rorty, a leading light in postmodernist thought, and a most attractively contrarian spirit in the rather sober world of academic philosophy. (One of his recent books claims that “truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with”). Rorty spoke about the demise of the golden age of liberal democracy and warned that the current political climate made societies willing to trade in their traditional freedoms for ‘homeland security’ against terrorism. He argued against ‘democratic universalist’ claims for a culture of human rights, and maintained that less ambitious approaches could still yield valid ethical claims.
The meeting ended with a speech by Jahanbegloo. He championed ‘democratic universalism’, but worried that the diffusion of democracy, at least in its current forms, ran the risk of being understood as a form of political imperialism, an imposition of naively universalized Western ideals, rather than the sort of enlightened dialogue it was meant to be.
All of this occurred less than three years ago. A similar gathering in Europe or America would probably pass unnoticed, but Western stereotypes of post-revolutionary Iran leave very little space for an intellectual elite who are as conversant with the thought of Kant, Hegel, Arendt, Habermas and Derrida as any of their Western counterparts. In fact, Iran, a nation of nearly 70 million people has lately been reduced in most broadcast media to little more than the personal idiosyncrasies of president Ahmadinejad-wildly unpredictable, Holocaust-denying, raised in a culture of terrorism and so on.
Extrapolations about the American character from the ‘known knowns’ of President Bush, Vice-President Cheney and their fellow Vulcans are usually given short shrift by serious commentators. Why then, is Iran being discussed in such two-dimensional terms? Surely the Byzantine power struggle which has developed in Iraq has taught Washington a lesson about naively idealistic approaches to the Middle East? Someone at the White House must know something about hard and soft ‘democratic universalism’ and the ‘non-imitative dialogical exchange’ which secular intellectuals like Jahanbegloo have called for. Someone must understand that a military strike is far more likely to silence these democratic voices than it is to strengthen them.
Towards the end of their discussion, Postel asks Jahanbegloo what outsiders can do to help advance a culture of dialogue in Iran. The philosopher’s reply is worth quoting at some length: “I think liberals around the world can join Kant and say with him that the global public sphere is the place in which the private interests of members of global civil society can be reconciled with the universal moral obligations of membership in a “kingdom of ends,” a kingdom in which individuals and relationships are treated as ends in themselves, and not simply means to other ends. That is to say, no one can pretend today in America, Europe or the Middle East to believe in liberal values and not have a sense of solidarity with individuals who are fighting for their dignity. We need to think hard about the meaning of solidarity. Solidarity is not about supporting those who share your precise view of politics. It’s about supporting those who struggle against injustice and violence and who fight for democracy. The real hope for democrats in Iran is that this sense of the word “solidarity” be understood by humanists, liberals and cosmopolitans around the world.”
Unfortunately, in American politics today, Rorty’s scepticism seems much more appropriate: truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with. Four years ago, Saddam Hussein and Iraq were turned into a clear and present danger that had to be confronted. Increasingly it seems as though the Bush administration intends to attack ‘nuclear Iran’ on similar grounds. A surgical strike this time, none of the fuss and complexity that has dogged the mission in Iraq. Even though dialogue seems to be working with North Korea, talking to Iran appears to be out of the question. After all, what would they know about serious political discussion? More than the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, you might reply, but that wouldn’t be saying much.
