Foucault argued that the “real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” This was the focus of his life’s work. Yet Foucault did not recommend that power be reconstructed on the basis of justice. He considered “justice” itself to be an illusory idea. For Foucault, it was all about power and the only way to fight power was with power. In a discussion with fellow leftist Noam Chomsky, Foucault acknowledged that the strongest force motivating a proletariat is envy. Envy, said Foucault, leads not only to the desire for power but also to the desire for revenge. “The proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power… . When the proletariat takes power it may be quite possible that it will exert toward the classes over which it has just triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one can make to this.” Chomsky was so disgusted that he later termed Foucault the most amoral man he had ever met.7
Foucault’s enthusiasm for violent dictatorship went beyond the retaliatory repression of the Western proletariat. In the late 1970s, Foucault went to Iran to witness the pro-American Shah being ousted by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Foucault met Khomeini and praised him lavishly. He also rhapsodized about the Iranian revolution, insisting it would not result in a theocracy. “By Islamic government,” he wrote, “nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.” Iran, Foucault insisted, would be a fount of liberty. “With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others; minorities will be protected… . Between men and women, there will not be inequality with respect to rights. With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority.” Overall, Foucault found the Khomeini revolution a spontaneous eruption of moral passion. He called it “spiritual politics,” in contrast with ordinary politics. His point was that Iran was pushing the normal limits of what could be achieved through political action. “Pushing limits” was something Foucault considered a necessary antidote to Western oppression.
Foucault seemed unaware that the Ayatollah Khomeini had been giving sermons for decades outlining what type of Islamic government he favored. These ideas had been assembled in a book, Islamic Government, that Khomeini published a few years before he came to power. Upon taking control, Khomeini moved swiftly to implement his program, unleashing a reign of terror. At first, Foucault delighted in the execution of former officials and supporters of the Shah. Revolutions, Foucault said, should be expected to do such things. It was only when the Khomeini regime started executing liberals, leftists, and homosexuals, using the very technologies of surveillance, propaganda, and force that Foucault condemned in other contexts—only at this point did Foucault lose his enthusiasm. He stopped talking about Iran, moving on to other topics. Never, however, did he apologize for backing a tyranny far worse than that of any American institution. Instead of warning about the dangers of Islamic tyranny, he continued to warn about the dangers of liberal democracy.8
Why did Foucault find himself attracted to Khomeini in the first place? I suspect the reason has little to do with Iran. Sure, Foucault visited Iran a couple of times, but he seems to have seen Iran through the lens of his prejudices. In this Foucault was simply one in a long line of Western intellectuals who visited totalitarian countries and praised their system of government. Over the course of a century, progressive intellectuals visited Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and Ortega’s Nicaragua and found themselves entranced by the peasant paradise they supposedly encountered. Somehow the repression was invisible to them—the information was available, but they ignored it. Evidently they projected their own discontents with the West onto these other countries and saw them for something quite different than they actually were.9 So too Foucault somehow converted his hatred for America and the West into admiration for America’s deadly adversary. From Foucault’s perspective, Khomeini was commendable for calling America the “great Satan”; after all, that was pretty much Foucault’s view also. Foucault’s blindness can be summed up in Saul Bellow’s remark, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Foucault’s anti-Americanism might have remained undiluted if not for some of his actual experiences in America. Those experiences actually convinced Foucault that, at least in one crucial respect, he was wrong about America. Previously Foucault had considered Europe to be the center of sexual liberation, and America to be a relatively uptight, puritanical country. (This is still a view held by many.) Foucault’s experiences in San Francisco completely changed his mind. Instead of seeing America as the epicenter of control and repression, Foucault came to see it as offering a new type of liberation.
Foucault’s work focuses on the distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal.” In his early work Foucault wrote about madness. Madness, he wrote, was once considered normal in the West, as madmen freely roamed about during the Middle Ages, but now the West institutionalized mad people, criminalizing them for simply being different. Foucault proceeded to examine the prison system, and here he arrived at the startling insight that people are thrown into prison merely for being “abnormal.” For Foucault, the prison system was a metaphor for modern life, in which we—who consider ourselves to be free agents—are in reality subjected to various forms of subtle institutional control. This control makes us conform to what is normal, expected, and obligatory, and avoid what is abnormal, eccentric, and forbidden. From madhouses and prisons, Foucault generalized that pretty much all institutions—schools, banks, factories, retail stores, healthcare centers, and military barracks—resemble madhouses and prisons. Foucault’s work was devoted to unmasking these hidden and not-so-hidden forms of power, and to championing transgression and deviancy as mechanisms for breaking down power systems.
One may have guessed by now that this rigmarole was basically Foucault’s lengthy apologia for homosexuality, and arguably in his case, also pedophilia. Foucault, you see, was a homosexual who liked to have sex with teenage boys. He devised an elaborate theory about how Western civilization had made a bogus distinction between heterosexual and homosexual, and also between adults and children, and how in reality everybody is sexual from birth and has the ability to fluidly move from heterosexual to homosexual inclinations, leaving nothing out—not even pedophilia. Foucault praised the way homosexual culture manipulates the male-female distinction, and repudiates conventional morality, replacing it with what Foucault termed “laboratories of sexual experimentation.”10
Foucault’s biographer James Miller reports that Foucault spent his days teaching, and his nights plunging into San Francisco’s violent sadomasochistic culture. Here was a guy who was in slacks and tweed in the morning, and leather in the evening—complete with jockstrap, tit-clamps, handcuffs, whips, paddles, riding crops, and cock-ring. (I am not making this up; Miller is very specific.) Foucault liked to get drugged before sex. He said in 1975, after first trying LSD, “The only thing I can compare this experience to in my life is sex with a stranger.” In San Francisco, he discovered he could have both. Foucault especially enjoyed sadomasochistic sex, including master-slave routines, which he saw as a kind of game. “Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master… . This stragic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting.” Foucault viewed S & M as a “limit experience” that suited his general philosophical affinity for breaking rules and testing boundaries. At one point, Foucault lamented that heterosexuals were missing out. While a good deal of heterosexual energy was “channeled into courtship,” Foucault remarked that gay s
ex was “devoted to intensifying the act of sex itself.” Of the gay bathhouse culture, Foucault wrote, “It is regrettable that such places do not yet exist for heterosexuals.”11
Foucault knew he was taking health risks. Even as late as 1983, when Foucault knew that AIDS was devastating the gay neighborhoods, he declared, “To die for the love of boys—what could be more beautiful?” Miller writes that Foucault may not have recognized, until the very end, that he had AIDS. Foucault’s longtime companion Daniel Defert denies this, reporting that Foucault had a “real knowledge” he was infected. The point, however, is that he didn’t seem to care. It’s one thing to risk your own life, but Foucault seems to have been willing to risk the lives of others as well. Apparently he felt that others too should enjoy “limit experiences” even if those experiences killed them.12
Tocqueville and Foucault—two very different men, separated not only by different temperaments, but also by a century and a half. Tocqueville visited a very different America than Foucault did. In a way they each celebrated a certain type of freedom. Tocqueville celebrated the spirit of 1776—a spirit of enterprise and voluntary organizations and religious freedom. Foucault celebrated the spirit of 1968—not freedom of enterprise or America as a force for freedom in the world, but rather pelvic freedom, freedom from traditional moral constraints. What is the difference between these types of freedom? Which is better? To answer these questions we must probe deeper the roots of 1776 and the roots of 1968.
CHAPTER 3
NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM
Great Britain hath no more right to put their hands in my pocket without my consent, than I have to put my hands into yours for money.1
GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1774
In 1978 I left India as a teenager. I left because I was weary of the nepotism and corruption in India, the ignorance and venality of the politicians, the bribes one had to pay every day. In India, as in most countries, your destiny is to a large degree given to you. It depends on what kind of family you are born into, whether you are male or female, and what caste you are. I wanted to be the architect of my own destiny, a virtual impossibility in my native country. Most of all I was frustrated by the lack of opportunity even for someone bright and willing to work hard. Basically there was no future for me in India; I had to look elsewhere. I wasn’t alone: pretty much everyone I knew was trying to get out. To Canada they went, or Australia, or Dubai, or to sea.
For me, there was really one place to look. America, I had been told, was a place big enough to take me in and to give me a chance to realize my aspirations. In India, as in most places, life happens to you; in America, I came to believe, life is something you do. “Making it” doesn’t just mean succeeding. It means making your life. I came to America alone, without family or relatives here, and without money. In America I have not only achieved my ambitions; I have outpaced them. I originally intended to become a corporate executive of some kind; instead I found my true vocation as a writer, speaker, and filmmaker. I came to discover America, and here in America I have discovered myself. In this country I have not only found success; I have also been able to write the script of my own life. In America your destiny isn’t given to you; it is constructed by you.
My story may be unusual in certain respects, but it is also part of a larger American narrative. Over the centuries, tens of millions of immigrants have come to America, initially from various parts of Europe, now mostly from places like China, Korea, Sri Lanka, Haiti, and Mexico. Why do all these people come? First, they want to escape the places they are from. Something about those places suffocates their aspirations or undermines their dignity. Second, they come because they know America is different. America doesn’t just offer them a more prosperous life; it also offers them a fuller and better life—a life that is unavailable elsewhere in the world.
Consider the Irish peasant of the mid-nineteenth century, living in a village where scarcity is the norm. The family lives in a tiny cottage, wears tattered clothes, and seldom has enough to eat. The structure of society is basically feudal. Large landowners direct the lives of those who labor on their property. They in turn are answerable to local aristocrats, who kowtow before even more powerful aristocrats, who are ultimately subservient to the English throne. As a peasant, you learn to play by the rules—rules that regulate your work, your food, and your family life. If you prove recalcitrant, the big men will beat and break you—at best, they will throw you off their land, and then you must find some other landlord before whom to bow and scrape. This bowing and scraping is humiliating, to be sure, but you aren’t alone in this: even people in the highest quarters of life must learn the courtier virtues, which means bowing and scraping before others even higher and mightier than they are.
And so it goes, a way of life that seems impervious to change. You might even have regarded it as eternal, but then came the potato famine, a famine worse than any before it, and now you are threatened with death by starvation. You grow tired of eating insects and roots, and soon even these are scarce. You look into your children’s eyes, and you know death lurks nearby for them and for you. Your family somehow gets out, on a boat, leaving behind everything you have, and the only life you know. This is how you come to America. Future generations will say you were an immigrant, and you came voluntarily. Your fate will be contrasted with that of African Americans who were brought here involuntarily, in chains. The distinction is a valid one, of course, and yet it is only technically true that you came of your own accord. In fact you were pushed out of your own country, driven abroad by hunger and desperation, and you found America not because you had a dream but because you were fleeing a nightmare.
Even in America, nothing is easy. No one invited you and your fellow Irish to come here; no one is especially excited that you are here. Everything is unfamiliar—the landscape, the way people talk, the food, the work. To add to your woes, there is overt discrimination. Jobs are posted with signs: “No Irish need apply.” When there is work to be had, it is strenuous and sometimes dangerous, there is no insurance if you get sick or hurt, and you can be fired or replaced on a whim. The word among the immigrants is that the slaves down South have it better, because they are looked after in old age and sickness, while you must solve those problems for yourself. At times you are so disheartened you wish you could go back, but there is no going back—there is nothing to go back to. So you push on, enduring rather than prospering, surviving rather than thriving. Yet gradually your situation improves. Slowly—and it could take a couple of generations—your family and the other families who have settled in the new country win the long hard battle against necessity. Now you have “arrived,” and in a sense you are an “insider” poignantly viewing the new immigrants who come after you. You know exactly the travails, and also the opportunities, that await them.
In Ireland you were a native; in America, you are a foreigner. You cling to your old ways, even when they don’t work very well, and you search for others who look and talk like you, who know the old Irish songs. In time, however, you realize you must attempt to become part of the new country. This is not an option; it is something you must do. You have lived long enough in America that you are no longer fully Irish; yet neither are you fully Americanized. You are like a man walking a tightrope from one building to another, and now you are precariously between the two structures. You nervously look back—you are tempted to retreat—but at this point the distance you have already traveled is more perilous than the one in front of you. So intrepidly you push forward. In a manner your ancestors in the old country would have thought impossible, you resolve to stop thinking of yourself as Irish; instead, you “become American.” And to your amazement you realize that you can do this. If you thought about it, you would realize how strange it is. No one can move from some other country to Ireland and “become Irish,” any more than they can move to India and “become Indian.” To be Irish you need Irish ancestors and Irish blood. To be Indian you need brown skin and Indian parents. By contrast with I
reland, India, and other countries, America is defined not by blood or birth but by the adoption of the nation’s Constitution, its laws, and its shared way of life. That’s how the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, and today the Koreans, the South Asians, and the West Indians, can all come to this country and in time “become American.”
This chapter is about the spirit of the American founding, the spirit of 1776. I intended to begin with a brief discussion of the history of immigrants coming to the United States, but soon I realized that the history of the United States is the history of immigration. Decades ago Franklin Roosevelt was invited to speak to the Daughters of the American Revolution. This is a conservative group whose members claim to be descended from the country’s earliest settlers. Even so, President Roosevelt began by addressing the group, “Fellow immigrants.” With the exception of African Americans who were brought here as slaves, all Americans are immigrants or descended from immigrants. Even the native Indians came to America from somewhere else; most likely they came from Asia and crossed the Bering Strait over a land bridge to the North American continent. Strictly speaking, they too are immigrants.
What is the relevance of America’s immigrant heritage? It is that America has been from the beginning a special type of country. It was a country originally uninhabited and then settled by people who inevitably came from somewhere else. Immigrants are different from the normal type of person. First, they tend to be, by disposition or circumstance, restless people—people who are not content with the given order of things. Second, they tend to be risk-takers; they are willing to leave almost everything behind to make their lives over anew. Third, by necessity they become improvisers, people who can adapt to new conditions and learn what is necessary to survive and prosper. Fourth, immigrants are self-reliant folk. They leave behind the old social supports—of caste or family—to make a new life dependent on their own efforts. These are the types of people for whom America was made, and these are the people who have made America what she is today.
Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her Page 4
