YOU BELIEVE/I KNOW

Was 9-11 an Autoimmune Disorder?: a review of Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida By Giovanna Borradori (Gregory Fried, Village Voice)

For Habermas, 9-11 is the result of a fundamentalism born of the clash of pre-modern and modern societies. Pre-modern societies ground their way of life in a faith or tradition whose coherence depends on core beliefs that remains unquestioned. Modernity rejects tradition in favor of reason to make sense of the natural world and human society. The pluralism of views unleashed by modernity need not result in chaos, according to Habermas, so long as we remain committed to one another as rational beings engaged in a constitutional process designed for the structured resolution of differences. But some traditionalists may reject the modern world, and potentially violent fundamentalist countermovements may result.

Habermas emphasizes that the modern-pre-modern conflict happens at any point in history in which reason seriously threatens tradition, although he acknowledges that globalization has radically exacerbated the modern-pre-modern divide and that between a callously prosperous West and a desperately poor and disenfranchised third world. A modernist himself, Habermas believes these problems to be soluble, but only through a global commitment to international institutions such as the UN, a will to repair gross economic inequalities, and a willingness to intervene in the internal affairs of sovereign nations. [...]

Both Habermas and Derrida remain heirs to the Kantian project of strengthening our international institutions and enlarging the spheres of human rights and economic equality. And so both--even Derrida--remain moderns. We may still be able to save ourselves, not by relying on the crutch of science, but by reinvigorating the political universalism of the Enlightenment and by radically rethinking the limits of law, nationality, and international relations.

There are grave obstacles to such an endeavor, and while Habermas and Derrida note some potential challenges, they sometimes seem smug in the view that Europe or the UN is somehow better adapted to global responsibility than the arrogant United States. For example, why should the U.S., or any nation, give up any of its sovereignty in favor of a UN that failed so dismally to protect the Tutsis of Rwanda or the Bosnian Muslims of Srebrenica? And wouldn't a more muscular UN risk becoming a planetary dictatorship? And doesn't a stronger system of international laws imply a far more aggressive, and thereby potentially imperialistic, mandate to interfere in the domestic affairs of wayward nations?

Note that for Habermas pre-modernism means you don't question your faith while modernism means you don't question reason. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 11, 2003 7:47 PM