September 21, 2002

Utopian Fantasies of the Therapeutic

Utopian Fantasies of the Therapeutic Culture

. The central idea undergirding the position of those who argue for giving Saddam another chance is: reason must prevail. After all, Saddam is a clever survivor who must realize that unless he submits to real disarmament he will lose power and possibly his life. This touching faith in reason is an integral part of our therapeutic culture in which 'empathy' for those who hate us and want to kill us, is a higher virtue than eliminating them. How can people possibly hate us simply because we exist? Yet Bernard Lewis points out that we are indeed the targets of hatred simply because our existence constitutes an intolerable injury to the pride of a failed culture. Utopian ideologues from Hitler to Stalin to Osama bin Laden have needed a scapegoat to blame for the failure of their utopias. The Jews are the ideal scapegoats. So too for those with a utopian faith in reason. These are the children of a therapeutic culture that asserts that understanding the feelings of the aggrieved will have a healing effect. And if caring doesn't work and reason doesn't prevail it must be the fault of someone. First, of course, it must be our own failures of empathy, our inability to truly appreciate the grievances of the oppressed 'other'. Thus an alliance forms between the self blaming left and the religious utopians like the Muslim clerics who assert (Memri) "Allah Decreed that Jews be Turned into Apes and Pigs "...Allah decreed that the Jews would be humiliated; he cursed them, and turned them into apes and pigs. Every time they ignite the fire of war, Allah extinguishes it. They disseminate corruption over the face of the earth, and fight the believers [i.e. the Muslims] only from fortified villages or from behind walls..."(5)
Anti semitism unites religious and secular utopians. It should not come as a surprise that the Susan Sontags, the Noam Chomskys and the ayatollahs share a loathing for Israel, a flourishing democracy built by Jews upon arid desert left to rot by nomadic Arabs. Nor is it surprising that the greens, the anti globalists, the German socialists (Safire} agree with the anti-semitic ravings of Saddam, whose letter to the UN admitting inspectors makes the point that "In targeting Iraq, the United States administration is acting on behalf of Zionism, which has been killing the heroic people of Palestine, destroying their property, murdering their children and seeking to impose their domination on the whole world, not only militarily, but also economically and politically. " In truth, the therapeutic approach to murderous tyrants inevitably leads to appeasement, and those who don't share the utopian assumption that everyone really wants to hold hands, and sing 'We are the World' have blood on their hands. What they still retain is their own self flattering sense of moral superiority as apostles of peace.What purports to be a cure to the ills of the world is really a symptom of a degenerative disease that could prove fatal. The war against terror must be fought in the realm of ideas as well as on the ground.

Posted at 05:03 PM by