That the gay thing is the biggest news to come out of the Ahmadinejad thing is quite revealing in both directions. Mad Mah opened himself to the loudest and most deprecating laughter by denying the existence of homosexual Iranians. And, via Sullivan, the Columbia Queer Alliance opens itself to the same by revealing everything I ever need to hold up on a placard when trying to explain cultural libertarianism:
Our cultural values and experiences are distinct, but the stakes are
one and the same: the essential human right to express our desires
freely.
Andrew may be right that the closet drives a significant number of people to despair, but this central fantasy of cultural libertarianism marks the walls of the closet by the bounds of social order. The very language used to try to describe this uber-right with a universal adapter must maximize abstraction and formlessness. Important nouns that once were political ends (freedom) become adverbs that now are social means (freely). Just as the right of 'the pursuit of happiness' has been corrupted (by Cadillac) into the right to 'the pursuit,' political rights of nouns (life, liberty) become replaced by social rights to verbs (to express).
In a schema in which mere consistency of behavior creates by definition an impediment to freely expressing desires, rights must primarily be 'action words,' indeed must resolve into the broadest of all action words, the verb 'to express.' 'To act' itself became obsolete when we discovered psychology; actions which are not expressions cannot fully express desires, and regimes that grant even full rights to political action fail to throw open the doors to freely expressive social action.
Tocqueville recognized that the seeds of this move away from the political and toward the social -- toward a cultural libertarianism which fantasized, as Foucault's heirs do, over absolute rule in politics and absolute license in society -- in the nature of democracy itself. (Tocqueville, like any reasonable person today, was capable of pointing out the most dangerous and troubling tendencies of the democratic spirit while also judging that spirit to be ineradicable and, understood properly, to the good.) At the beginning of the chapter entitled "What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Toward Pantheism," Tocqueville beheld that
as conditions become more equal, each individual becomes more like his fellows, weaker, and smaller, and the habit grows of ceasing to think about the citizens and considering only the people. Individuals are forgotten, and the species alone counts.
At such times the human mind seeks to embrace a multitude of different objects at once, and it constantly strives to link up a variety of consequences within a single cause.
The concept of unity becomes an obsession. Man looks for it everywhere, and when he thinks he has found it he gladly reposes in that belief. [...] If one finds a philosophical system which teaches that all things material and immaterial, visible and invisible, which the world contains are only to be considered as the several parts of an immense Being who alone remains eternal in the midst of the continual flux and transformation of all that composes Him, one may be sure that such a system, although it destroys human individuality, or rather just because it destroys it, will have secret charms for men living under democracies. All their habits of mind prepare them to conceive it and put them on the way toward adopting it. It naturally attracts their imagination and holds it fixed. It fosters the pride and soothes the laziness of their minds.
So despite the radical difference that cultural libertarians constantly seem to promote, the doctrine of the essential human right to express desires freely expresses most of all the obsession of the democratic imagination with a great unity of particles/particulars -- what Bulwer-Lytton called "all blended, yet all distinct" and what I have been calling for several years (the category of posts is to the right) Smithereens. Bulwer-Lyttons characterization of psychological pandemonium matches up, as Rieff helps us understand with one of his marathon footnotes in Fellow Teachers, to Burke's description of the sublime terror of the spectacle.
And as Rieff points out, the spectacle that transfixes psychological man in the age of the therapeutic is the realization that if everything and everyone is a particular without predicates, the only organizing principle is the totality of Nietzsche's teeming abyss, the totality of all power that looks right back at you, and into you. There is no choice but to fling yourself in, because there are no choices, no anything, outside. As Continental Airlines puts it so glibly in its latest ad campaign, transgressively inverting and profaning one of the last interdictory folk tales standing in the American memory: "There's no place like everywhere. There's no place like everywhere."
So our cultural libertarians seek to have their present and eat it too, partaking of the unity of all power as both its slave and its executor. "Thus," Tocqueville writes, "he oscillates the whole time between servility and license." What a temptation it is to channel servility, security, unity, and the voluptuous gratifications of the slave relationship into politics, leaving the social radically open for freely expressing our desires for license, luxury, licentiousness, diversity, division, and the exploitation of a consensus to enter a sort of state of nature where social power moves are permitted and rewarded and refined to capture the pleasures of personal domination.
Thus the very creepy and revealing case of the Jewish lesbian with just a tiny little crush on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; she can run away from the underlying desire until the legs of her irony fall off, but she cannot hide. Cops and queers, Marilyn Manson reminds us, make good-looking models: thus the fantasy of the pink police state [see "The Dope Show" video at the 2:06 mark, watch through to the 2:47-2:50 mark]. Remember too Rieff's no longer strange-sounding remark that the Nazi uniform was the most erotic ever devised.
Anyway, it all seems to me to make very plain what are the stakes of the cultural libertarian challenge: political servitude and social license, a model now underway, in varying forms and to varying degrees, in Russia, China, and the UAE. Such a devil's bargain can take root in any type of regime -- totalitarian, despotic, authoritarian, monarchic, socialist, or democratic. And it, not religious extremism, is the truly dangerous enemy we face in the 21st century. Nobody worries that Osama bin Laden really has it right; nobody in the West worries, as they used to with Communism, that sharia law really might be the wave of the future. Our imagination is transfixed elsewhere.
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