“[I]n the West, Christianity not only fulfilled the initial cognitive conditions for modern structures of consciousness… Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in the light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.”
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Pulled from the tail of Jürgen Habermas’s book-length interview Time of Transitions. There’s been some controversy about this quote, but the above is the real thing. The word he uses in German is erbe — heritage or legacy.
Bill Moyers: How does a liberal democracy deal with Islamic preachers who get up and preach violence against the country that protects them?
Clive James: Make them do it in English. America does a fine job. It’s easier in America, because all the Muslims that are living in the area of Detroit — that’s the biggest Muslim community outside the Islamic countries — sing the Star Spangled Banner every morning. You know, American patriotism is much easier to induce.
Australia does a pretty good job, better than Britain, and it’s largely for a single reason: because in Australia, a government spokesman — actually the Deputy Prime Minister — had the strength to get on television and say to all Muslims, ‘You’re welcome here. Of course, you are. You’re citizens. But your young people must give up the dream that this will ever be an Islamic republic. Australia will never have Sharia law, so forget about it. What you’ve got here is law. And you must obey the law.’
He actually got up and said it. This made it easier for moderate Muslims. The top Muslim imam had been preaching radical hatred for years, and he really dissed himself when he said that women deserved everything they got if they took their clothes off. Australian women take their clothes off very easily; it’s a hot country. And he said every woman in a bikini was a message from the devil. And he wanted them all treated as if they were enemies. And his own fellow imams managed to force him to step down.
What gave them courage to do that is they realized the state was unequivocally on their side.
Terror has the advantage. For example, terrorism wants to destabilize your justice system. The minute you get people proposing new laws where people can be detained forever or tortured, it means terrorism is winning. That’s exactly what terrorism wants. That will recruit more terrorists. It will turn the jails into Al Qaeda universities which is what is going to happen in Britain unless we’re very careful.
Bill Moyers: This barbarism we see today, the rise of radical elements of Islam. What good is humanism against it?
Clive James: Well, the constant message of my book is that you must pursue humanism for its own sake. A utilitarian view won’t work. You’ve got to know and love these things for its own sake.
There’s no guarantee that civilization will continue. It’s always shown fairly robust signs of being able to overcome any kind of totalitarian organization. The interesting thing about World War II was that the Nazis were quite well organized and the Japanese were quite well organized — compared with, say, the U.S. and Britain at the start of the war, which weren’t organized at all. I mean, the U.S. had a smaller armed forces than Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s.
But within a very short time the democracies organized themselves better. There’s something about the creative force of liberal democracy which gives you hope that it can overcome any challenge including terrorism.
I’m sure terrorism can punch very large holes in western civilization and probably will. Let’s be fatalistic: yeah, it’s very hard to stop a bomber who’s ready to kill himself — very hard. But there’s every reason to think that civilization is simply too strong to be brought down by terrorist activity. But I don’t want to foist on you any false hopes; and it would be a false hope to say that if you learn enough, if you love Botticelli enough, if you listen to Beethoven enough then the enemy will retreat. It’s not going to happen.
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Clive James and Bill Moyers, talking on Bill Moyers Journal on August 3rd, 2007.
“I talk at a lot of campuses, and I was at one last night in London where a student got up and started protesting because I had said that an Islamist government was of itself a bad thing, which I think it is. I replied to this student — and it’s not a hard question to ask — ‘Well name one Islamist state that you would want to live in.’ And this is a serious question, ladies and gentlemen. It is also a personal question…
One of my best friends, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is in hiding again tonight because of what she says, and she would be killed if she went into any Muslim country. And I think that matters… We have the great blessing of living under this system. And we take it for granted. And we spit on it. And we can because we’re living in that freedom. But I beg you ladies and gentlemen not to pretend that that means that we shouldn’t assert the superiority of that system, because that is what it is. It is a superior system…
And if we do not stand for our values, ladies and gentlemen, who will? Who will assert them across the Muslim world? Who are the reformers in the Muslim world going to look to when they want to see, and desperately need, separation of church and state? If we do not say that we believe this is the best way to live, who is going to do it elsewhere? As Irshad Manji said a few weeks ago when she was in London: ‘If you give up on us, people like me are dead.’
And ladies and gentlemen, I think we should take that call seriously. To assert the superiority of Western values is to state the obvious. It is to have faith in ourselves and it’s to have faith in other people.”
I’d never heard of Murray until I was just sent this video, and I have to note that it’s one of the strongest short bursts of public speaking I’ve seen in a very, very long time.
In related news: Last week, I wrote an open letter to Brandeis University about the imperative to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali
SPEAK, MEMORY—
Of the cunning hero, The wanderer, blown off course time and again After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.
Speak
Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,
The suffering deep in his heart at sea
As he struggled to survive and bring his men home
But could not save them, hard as he tried—
The fools—destroyed by their own recklessness
When they ate the cattle of Hyperion the Sun,
And that god snuffed out their day of return.
Of all these things
Speak, Immortal One,
And tell the tale once more in our time.
By now, all the others who had fought at Troy—
At least those who had survived the war and the sea—
Were safely back home. Only Odysseus
Still longed to return to his home and his wife.
These lines were composed in the 8th century BCE. Other than the Iliad, the work which these words set off is the oldest extant work of Western literature.
As a reminder to those who’ve forgotten their 10th grade English curriculum, the Iliad is the story of the final few weeks of the Trojan War. The Odyssey is the decade-long tale of its hero, Odysseus, as he returns home to his wife and son in Ithaca, where he is king. Odysseus is noted for his brilliance, perseverance, and cunning; he devised the Trojan horse, the winning ruse which, after ten years of warfare, led the Greeks to “plunder Troy’s sacred heights”.
The larger narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey is an immortal one, vibrating with harsh and immediate lessons for our own age. Philosophically, it relates the pitfalls of pride, the capriciousness of fate, the pulls of romantic love, and the truth of Oscar Wilde’s great dictum to be careful what you wish for — you may get it. On a practical level, however, it tells of war’s horrors and pities, its moments for heroism and glory, and the fact that, oftentimes, the settling of the dust marks only half the battle, because it’s the return home that often proves most perilous. It was true in the day of Patroclus, and true in the age of PTSD. As Chris Hedges noted, in his New York Timesreview of the Lombardo translation, “every recruit headed into war would be well advised to read the Iliad, just as every soldier returning home would be served by reading the Odyssey.”
Some brief notes about SPEAK MEMORY:
The opening words are essential. Homer’s poems would not have been codified on tablets or parchment; instead they were orated to an audience and set to some form of rhythmic music, such as the slow beat of a griot’s drum. For this reason, it’s important to try to hear his words spoken, either by yourself or by a performer such as Stanley Lombardo, who penned the above translation and reads them in the video below.
“Speak Memory” is also crucial because although we don’t know whether Homer was an actual person, folklore tells us that he was real and that he was also blind. So the “memory” part was something he would have only been able to express through his tongue. What’s more, like Shakespeare, he may never have existed; like Milton, he may never have actually seen the works over which we now pore.
Third, “Speak Memory” is notable because it is also the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir. In a strong field, one of the most compelling titles I know of for an autobiography.
Watch Lombardo perform this portion of the Odyssey, as well as an extended discussion about the work, here:
