TEACHING FREEDOM

During the course of this morning’s events here in Colorado Springs, I reflected back to fall of 2005, to the day I spent in a coffee shop in Doha, Qatar. I had been introduced to a Saudi Arabian gentleman my age. We engaged pleasantries for about 45 minutes; and then he turned to me with great earnestness and said, “You know, Professor Mitchell, you need to understand what has happened in the Middle East. There were three 1960s generations: yours, the one in Europe and my generation in Saudi Arabia.” 

And he said, “Your generation was involved in all sorts of experimentation, and you clearly went off the track; but you came back. You took risks in your society. And because Americans are a practical people concerned with well-being, you built a world, and have created tremendous wealth.”

“In Europe,” he went on, “the 60s generation was still haunted by the memories of World War II; and they were a bit more frightful than you were. So instead of expanding outward, they closed in and decided they were not going to have any more struggles like their father’s had endured and they built the EU.”

“And then there was our generation in Saudi Arabia. Our teachers told us something had gone horribly wrong; and we, too, had this deep sense that our fathers had betrayed us. And the story that kept being repeated over and over and over and over again was ‘if we could just get back to Islam in its original form, everything would be fine’.”

“And so while your generation built the world, and while the Europeans built the EU, our generation turned back to Islam. This is why we have the problems we have today.”

I spent the next 18 months in Qatar, teaching the history of Western political thought. It was an extraordinary experience, which forced me to evaluate and defend positions that here in the United States I can often take for granted. (Many of my students there believe, for example, that constitutional monarchy, and not democracy, is the best form of government.) 

Yet that day in the coffee shop is still etched in my mind. There are three different ‘60s generations, which took three different directions. The speech given by Frank Hanna, at this same conference confirms what finally emerged out of the ‘60s generation in America. We have pushed ahead, we have taken great risks, we have built the world, and we have the rule of law. Yet in the Middle East the ‘60s generation has suffered disappointment, setback and disillusionment.

Now the question before us at the beginning of the 21st century is how should we understand what is happening in the Middle East. There are a lot of terms that are bandied about, most notably Islamo-Fascism and fundamentalism. I am not fully satisfied with either one of the terms, or any others that have had shorter shelf lives.

Take the term, “fundamentalism,” for example. It is a term that actually emerged with the publication in 1917 of a book called The Fundamentals, in Los Angles, by Biblical literalists who felt under attack and endorsed a return to what they called the fundamentals. So the term itself emerged out of the American experience, not the Middle East.

Islamo-Facism, for reasons which I will explain in a few minutes, gets a little closer but is too diffuse to be helpful, really.

First, however, let me give you a quick sketch of my background.  In 1969 my father, Richard Mitchell, wrote what is still the definitive work on the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers. In the shadow of him and his work, I somehow made my way through college and followed roughly in his footsteps, focusing on politics and religion, though in my case, in the West. 

It took me six-and-a-half years to get through college. After that, I was for a few years a country musician on the road. I finally found my way at the University of Chicago and with God’s help, not my own, received my Ph.D. in 1989. I landed at Georgetown in 1993. From 2002 to 2005 I was chairman of the government department—and then had an opportunity to join the startup team in Doha, Qatar, for Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where I lived for almost two years. 

I will be returning there again for the spring semester, and probably for any number of other semesters for the foreseeable future, teaching the history of Western political thought and Western political economy.

Interlaced in the courses I teach, needless to say, are long discussions about Christianity. My students, who are almost entirely Muslim, know almost nothing of Christianity. But they listen—more so, in fact, than do my students at Georgetown’s main campus in Washington. Over the course of almost two years I have been able to gain their trust, and we speak very candidly about Islam and about Christianity.  They know I am a Christian. 

They are very curious about Christianity in America. They are very curious about Christianity in general. The whole affair has been quite remarkable, and has left me with little patience for the platitudes and scripted conversations that pass for “Inter-religious Dialogue” in America. Real exchange is possible, but it is hard-won and cannot be orchestrated in advance.

A large portion of my course on the history of Western political thought involves the teaching of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I have taught that book now for 12 years. And I have taught it around the globe. For three summers I taught it in Argentina. I taught it one summer in Lisbon. 

I have also had the good fortune of teaching it now for three years through The Fund for American Studies. In those classes I have had students who are far left, students who are deeply conservative, and a great many international students as well. I do think, as you might guess, that Tocqueville has more to say than any thinker alive or dead about what we face in the 21st century. 

When I teach Tocqueville in Doha, the demography of my class is mostly Muslim. Many of the girls are in abayas and many of the men are in thobes. You will not be surprised to learn that one of the things that I have encountered is a deep suspicion of America amongst my students. The nature of that suspicion is what I want to convey to you today—not in my capacity as a political analyst, but rather in my capacity as a teacher of Western political thought around the globe, who has some sense of what is going on in the minds of my students.

One of the most remarkable things that I have discovered is that the kinds of suspicions they have do not vary in accordance with what part of the globe they are from. The suspicions of America that my Argentinean students have are the same as the ones that my Portuguese students have, which were the same ones that my students in Qatar have.

In the last several years it has occurred to me that there is actually one commonality between all of these students, and that is that they have an ongoing connection to Europe. Part of their intellectual heritage is European, often times because of the colonial history in which they are all still implicated.

I should tell you that the univocal critique of America I heard from my students around the globe is something I have heard before—or, rather, I have read it before. And the people in whose writings I have read it are the great European anti-modern intellectual figures: Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger. 

No matter where I have gone—the Middle East, Argentina, Portugal—I have heard only small variants of the anti-modern sentiments that you can find in Rousseau and the rest.

The most important reason I spend more and more time introducing Tocqueville to my students these days is because he understands the anti-modern critique and answers it. 

You must understand to whom Tocqueville was writing. Europe in the 1830s was moving haltingly into a democratic age from the aristocratic age. Young Alexis de Tocqueville went on a voyage to America and came back to Europe and said, ‘You know what, my friends; there is a new way. There is a way forward out of the polar alternatives that we Europeans read in Rousseau—ancient virtue or modern self-interest, natural authenticity or socially induced alienation, prior greatness of soul or modern mediocrity.’ 

Rousseau—the first great anti-modern thinker; the deeply disturbed figure who longingly looks back to an aristocratic past that is more fabricated than real. A hater of commerce and of the man who would engage in it, Rousseau was unable to see that man can be charitable, philanthropic, and a good neighbor who is willing to sacrifice for the community in which he is a member. 

In short, while Rousseau could anticipate what was worst in the modern world, he could not see—as Tocqueville could 80 years later—that in America the unfolding of modernity need not be pathological. Yet it is Rousseau’s vision of modernity, and not Tocqueville’s, that has been deeply set into the minds of young people around the globe.

In 1989 I finished my dissertation; and taught in the University of Chicago’s common core that year. While I had read fragments of Tocqueville in my doctoral years, I had never really read him as a whole. So, before teaching him, I dutifully sat down and began reading the Author’s Introduction toDemocracy in America. After I had finished it, I closed my eyes and said to myself quietly, “I am going to spend the rest of my life reading this brilliant man’s work.” 

He understood. He really understood: there is a way to move beyond the crisis into which the European mind fell, and Democracy in America shows us how.

One hundred and seventy years after the publication of that amazing book, Tocqueville is, I think, the last man standing of all the political theorists of the last two centuries. 

Marx, of course, would have been the obvious contender. More than fifty million lives lost over his ideas was a high price to pay, however, for an experiment in social engineering that rested on a foundation of sand. 

The other obvious contender, for a decade or so anyway, was Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis, which gave us a triumphalist version of liberalism at Cold-War’s end. Interestingly enough, Tocqueville on occasion sounds that call as well. 

There are parts of Democracy in America, however, that ring alarm bells for those willing to listen. The reason why so many readers have been unable to listen is that the reading of Tocqueville has been twisted and torqued by two significant geopolitical events: the first was the Cold War, and the second was 1989.

Let me briefly give you an overview of  how Tocqueville was read during those two periods, so that we can perhaps see our way clear to viewing a new Tocqueville, one for our own age—for we have arrived at a new geopolitical moment, one that should prompt us to read Tocqueville in his fullness. 

So read, I believe, he shows us a way to comprehend what is happening in the Middle East. He does not give us an easy way forward, I will admit, but he does warn us about a very challenging period ahead. 

In a word, Tocqueville tells us that the 20th century re-enchantment movements we today identify as national socialism, fascism and communism were not a historical anomaly; and that the 21st century will see more of them, though perhaps in different guises. 

In parts of the Islamic world today, I submit, we are seeing just this attempt to re-enchant the world. But because we have only been able to see Tocqueville’s writings through the lens of the Cold War or the post-1989 period, we have neither been able to see his chilling prediction for the future nor infer how we should posture ourselves towards it.

Let me turn first, then, to “The Cold War Tocqueville.”  In 1955, at the zenith of the Cold War, Louis Hartz published a book called The Liberal Tradition in America. Many of you are old enough to remember the Marxist threat and Marx’s theories.  Marx’s theory was that there would be world-around-communism.  Not just a nation here, a nation there; the whole world. 

This made a lot of American intellectuals very, very nervous.  Hartz used this quote from Tocqueville: “The emigrants who colonized America at the beginning of the 17th century in some way separated the principle of democracy from all those other principles against which they contended when living in the heart of the old European societies.”  Later in Democracy in America, Tocqueville explains what he means by this: in America there is great wealth and there is poverty; but there is no landed class of the sort that you find in Europe.  

That makes all the difference. You only have real class differences when you have landed property that is handed down generation to generation to generation.  In America, by virtue of the soil itself, the existence of the frontier, or the laws by which land was distributed, father to son, there is no landed aristocracy to speak of.

So, basing his thinking on Tocqueville’s analysis, Hartz argues that the category of class—the very idea of class—could not make sense to the Americans.  To the Europeans, yes; but not to the Americans.

Incidentally, every time the Democratic Party starts to talk about class warfare, I think to myself, “They have just lost another election.”  Ever since 1968, when the Democratic Party was commandeered by a generation that turned to Marx for its social teaching, it has flirted with the rhetoric of class. American political rhetoric, however, is not the language of class. This was what Hartz was saying in 1955. This was what Tocqueville was saying in 1835.

Marx, of course, did capture the imagination of every place around the globe where there had been landed property—China, Russia, Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, to name only a few of the hot spots. 

Tocqueville would have predicted this.  But Marx could not capture the American imagination because the Americans, at bottom, were Calvinists.  With what were Calvinists concerned?  They were concerned with purity and stain, with salvation and damnation, and with the inner perspicuity that was needed to tell the difference. 

To invoke a shorthand: in the 20th century Marx captured the imagination of Europe, but Freud—for whom self-searching was the highest virtue—captured the imagination of America.

The case for Hartz’s Tocqueville was only further buttressed by remarks Tocqueville makes about the coming titanic struggle between the Russians and the Americans—some 110 years, I remind you – before that struggle in fact occurred.

The post-WWII period, then, gave us “The Cold War Tocqueville,” the Tocqueville who had noted that class would not take hold in America because landed property was not a durable institution. 

I think Hartz was right. When the Cold War ended in 1989, people started scrambling around in the academic and philanthropic worlds, wondering what do to next.  The ‘end of history’ had come and now it seemed the only thing left to do was figure out how to make democracy take root around the globe. 

Not surprisingly, Tocqueville gets reinvented. This time by another Harvard professor, Robert Putnam, who in 1992 writes a book called Making Democracy Work. 

Here you have a new Tocqueville.  I will call it the “Tocqueville of Mediating Institutions.”

To make this point clearer, let me give you a quick sketch of Tocqueville’s argument about the problem of moving from the aristocratic to the democratic age. In the aristocratic age you have the king, the nobles and the rest of us, in a three-tier system. In the democratic age you have the state and you have the citizens, in a two-tier system. 

The great question for Tocqueville is what would stand between the lonely isolated individuals and the powerful state—what would mediate between the one and the many, as the nobles once did. 

Tocqueville thought that the great problem of the modern age would be the problem of withdrawal and isolation, and loneliness. There are whole books written about this—David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and Robert Bella’s The Habits of the Heart come immediately to mind. Tocqueville’s argument was that in the aristocratic age you had a way of drawing people out of themselves—a set of reciprocal obligations to those above and below you.  When that system begins to crumble, when people begin to get “de-linked,” the great question for him is how we can be re-linked.

When I teach The Fund’s Institute on Philanthropy and Voluntary Service (IPVS) class in the summers, which consists almost entirely of reading and talking about Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, I tell my students that when they are doing their philanthropy internships, they are doing much more than “just” philanthropy. They are saving democracy. Voluntary service, in Tocqueville’s account, is the basis for keeping democratic liberty alive.

Tocqueville saw well into the future. In the 1830s his contemporaries were saying that democracy is revolutionary, it unleashes energy and chaos and disorder. Tocqueville, however, said that in the long-term democracy is not revolutionary at all; democracy invites quietude. The democratic social condition is one in which people are alone and isolated. His answer to this grave problem was voluntary associations. 

It is this Tocqueville—“the Tocqueville of Mediating Institutions,” as I called it a moment ago—that get discovered after 1989. How are we going to make democracy work in Eastern Europe and elsewhere now that the Soviet Union has fallen, people asked? Through voluntary associations and civil society, they replied. 

Indulge me for a moment, for I want to set Tocqueville against the backdrop of the looming crisis of 19th century Europe. As the 19th century unfolded in Europe there was a dawning sense that Europe’s ascendancy was coming to an end. Tocqueville, as we know by now, thought that the way to revitalize Europe was to decentralize political power (as the Americans had done) in order to encourage local political participation and to develop strong civic associations. Only by drawing citizens out of their solitary worlds could civilization be renewed. 

A passage that my students can all recite by memory—because I cite it to them ad infinitum—is this: “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.”  The great problem of the democratic age, for Tocqueville, is the problem of isolation and withdrawal. And his argument is that the Americans figured out a way to solve this: through the decentralization of power, through voluntary associations, through this robust commercial enterprise that brings people together and gets them out of themselves.

Tocqueville, then, says the way forward for Europe is through the decentralization of power and the development of voluntary associations. His answer to the European crisis was not the only one, however. Another answer—a much more dangerous one—was provided by Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw the European problem in similar ways, but who provided a radically different solution. 

Nietzsche’s solution was the destruction of the Old Tablets, by which he meant Judaism and Christianity, and the development of a new kind of cruelty and a new kind of aristocracy. His book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was carried by tens of thousands of German young men to their deaths during World War I. Where Tocqueville defends political decentralization, commerce and voluntary associations, Nietzsche gives us the Übermensch, the Higher Man. 

Now, as I have already said, 9/11 marks the beginning of a new geo-political moment, which has muted the post-1989 concern and fixation with civic associations.  It has not yet penetrated into the inmost workings of the academic mind, but I think that in the philanthropic community 9/11 has already begun to reconfigure the way funding is being allocated. 

Much more attention, for example, is being given to “Inter-Religious Dialogue” than is to bolstering civic associations. I am not sure that much can be expected to come of such “Dialogue,” but it does give an indication that the geo-political landscaped has indeed changed. 

For the remainder of my time, I would like to give you some hint of what Tocqueville might have to say about that new landscape.

Tocqueville, as I said, was a remarkable thinker. In some ways he is the high-water mark of Liberal—that’s capital “L,” Liberal—thinking, by which I mean he gives the clearest voice to some of liberalism’s deepest assumptions: that modernity amounts to the taming of the passions and the redirecting of them towards commerce; that blood loyalties are anathema to liberty; that the rule of law is superior to traditional authority; that governmental transparency and accountability are good things; etc., etc. 

Those who have sought to defend what is best in America by turning to Tocqueville have been well rewarded for looking there.

The problem, however, is that Tocqueville is such an extraordinary thinker and writer that it is possible to extract ideas from part of his work without consideration for the whole of which they are but a building block. What have we missed by doing this—what, in other words, have we ignored this past half-century because either the “Cold War Tocqueville” or the “Tocqueville of Mediating Institutions” satisfied the needs of the geo-political moment? 

Let me identify three distinct themes: honor, religion and what I will call memory. Tocqueville writes about these in very serious ways.

First, honor. The general liberal thesis is that honor, which is associated with the love of glory and war, will dissipate as the world moves toward commerce. And, in fact, democracy in America contains this idea. Tocqueville, however, is too smart for the theory. There are passages, especially those on the American military and on the American Indians, where he hints that the notion that honor is merely an historical anachronism that will disappear as commerce comes to prevail is not quite right. 

There is something in the human soul that longs for honor, and Tocqueville knew it.

This insight—that honor is not expunged by commerce—is a terribly important one for the purposes of our dealings with the Middle East. Anyone who has traveled to that region knows that the culture there is largely an honor culture, a face-saving culture. 

Were we not incredulous when American soldiers entered Baghdad during the second Gulf War and Saddam Hussein’s spokesman kept telling us, “no, no; there are no troops here; Baghdad is safe”? 

In an honor culture what matters is not truth-telling, but rather face-saving. And truth-telling may well require, among other things, a religious disposition which involves relentless self-searching, of the sort that, say, St. Augustine evinces in City of God, when he suggests that suffering ought to be the occasion for asking, ‘how am I, the sufferer, implicated in what has befallen me.’ It short, truth-telling, may well flourish best in a guilt culture of the sort that Christianity provides.

The Middle East is not a truth-telling, guilt culture; it is largely an honor culture, a shame culture. Worth considering, in this regard is how the Quran portrays what for Jews and Christians is the Book of Genesis 3:7-8. Christians, especially, read the account of Adam and Eve hiding their nakedness from God in terms of guilt. For Muslims it is a story about shame. This is a huge difference. Whether the root of honor culture in the Middle East is Islam may well be debatable; that the Middle East is an honor culture cannot.

Tocqueville, as I said, understands that the easy account of the disappearance of honor as commerce spreads is not quite right. In his finest moments he understands that honor will not simply go away. We would do well to attend to this insight, for in vast regions of the globe honor is alive and well, not least in the Middle East. 

The second theme that we would do well re-read in Tocqueville is religion. Tocqueville has number of beautiful passages about religion. I will just mention one:

“18th century philosophers had a very simple explanation for the gradual weakening of beliefs. Religious zeal, they said, would die down as enlightenment and freedom spread. It is tiresome that the facts do not fit the theory.” 

He writes this, I remind you, in 1835!  What is his argument? One of the ideas that every college students gets saturated with is the theory of the secularization of the world: religion dissipates as modernity progresses. Tocqueville suggests that this notion is a peculiarly European one, which emerges as a consequence of an unholy alliance between the Roman Catholic Church and politics in the aristocratic age. 

As it turns out, the greatest theoretician of secularization was Max Weber, a German writing at the turn of the 20th century, who influenced generations of social scientists in America, and is still at the core of social science thinking today. But what happened in Europe to give rise to this idea?

On Tocqueville’s reading of European history, during the aristocratic age—we would call it the medieval period—the church gained some of its power by political means. When the old political arrangements based on landed property began to falter as commerce and fraternal politics developed, the church held fast and defended the old aristocratic order.

Those who fought for freedom saw the church aligned with the old aristocratic order and therefore sought to repudiate religion altogether. This phase of European development we know by another name: the Enlightenment. Thus, Kant’s famous dictum: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage”—by which he meant, among other things, man’s release from doctrinal Christianity.

For the European mind, then, modernity must involve the repudiation of religion. And that is what the theory of the secularization of the world tells us.
Tocqueville writes that the Americans have not lost their religious zeal because they never had the European problem to overcome. Let me be clear about this. Tocqueville wants the complete separation of politics and religion; but he also says that religion is “the first and foremost political institution.”
Why? Because religion shapes character; it gives rise to charity and fellow-feeling; it teaches us that the material world is not our home, but rather the place of our pilgrimage. When character is formed around these insights, then and only then can you have broad political experimentation of the sort that you have in America.  Tocqueville praises the Puritans because he thought they had come to understand what we might call bounded freedom: man can only use his political liberty well if he is morally circumscribed.

Religion is the first and foremost political institution, then, not because there are religious doctrines embedded in political laws, but because religion shapes character is such a way as to allows us to use our freedom well. Liberals are right to insist that religion should not directly intervene in politics—but conservatives are right to warn that true liberty cannot long thrive without religion.

European secularization was for Tocqueville, then, an accident of history. Religion, he writes, is the permanent condition of human life. It will always be there. The question is not whether we are going to have religion, but whether we are going to have good religion or bad religion. To put it in slightly different terms, the question is not whether we are going to have the religion, but rather what form it will take—revealed or pagan. 

Europe is illuminating in this regard. As it becomes less Christian it is becoming more pagan: bizarre sexual practices (Christianity preached chastity because it well knew the pagan alternatives); tattoos and body piercings (both pagan rituals); body painting at sports rituals (war preparations undertaken by pagan tribes)—these are disturbing but predictable developments of a Europe that is returning to its pre-Christian roots. 

What Tocqueville understood—what we must now fully come to grips with in the academic and policy world—is that religion, revealed or otherwise, is a permanent fact of human life. 

Let me raise a third theme in Tocqueville’s writing that we can no longer overlook, namely, memory. This, I think, is the most important insight that Tocqueville has for us at the dawn of the 21st century. 

I mentioned earlier that Tocqueville argued America was a new beginning. The Americans did not have a long memory of an aristocratic past. Tocqueville’s larger point (which the “Cold War Tocqueville” literature completely ignored) was that if a nation has a long memory of an aristocratic past, it was going to be exceedingly difficult for it to enter into the modern world.

About the Europeans of the 1830s, for example, Tocqueville says: “Carried away by a rapid current, we [Europeans] obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the ruins still in sight of the bank, which the streams whirls us backwards—facing towards the abyss.”  

Tocqueville’s worry was that his fellow Europeans would bounce back and forth between longingly looking back to an enchanted past and trying to strip the world of all of the vestiges of that past. They would be torn, in other words, between trying to re-enchant the world and trying to disenchant it entirely. 

I do not think Tocqueville would have been surprised at all by what happened in the 20th century. The three great political catastrophes of the last century in Europe—fascism, national socialism and communism—can be seen as misguided attempts to re-enchant the world, using ultra-modern scientific and organizational methods to do so.

Why should we call these catastrophes re-enchantment movements? Because in one way or another each sought to avert the increasing individuation that the democratic age brings by forming communities that purported to be organic unions, of the sort, I might add, that reality does not allow. 

The symbol of fascism, for example, was the facses—a bundle of sticks that in pre-Christian Rome was understood to signify that the group is stronger than the individual. 

In the case of national socialism, a great deal was made of the German Volk (People) and of the songs, dances and clothing that unified the German nation. 

Not to be outdone was communism which, in its own way, is an attempt to replace the alienated, lonely, isolated world that “capitalism” causes with a supposedly pure organic community—this one not being one found in the past, as fascism and national socialism were, but rather in the post-revolutionary future.

I believe that Tocqueville would have seen these catastrophes coming. When a nation has a long aristocratic memory, it is going to move haltingly into the modern world, and be tempted along the way by re-enchantment movements.

I want to suggest to you now that we need to think of what is happening in some parts of the Middle East as an attempt to re-enchant the world, an attempt to return to a kind of organic union. 

Unlike the European catastrophes of the 20th century, however, no states in the Middle East are placing their entire apparatus in the service of these movements, which makes confronting them with conventional military means quite difficult. 

What makes these movements especially difficult to destroy is that they purport not to be political movements, which are malleable and subject to the warp and woof of interests, but religious one rooted in Islam itself. The re-enchantment movements we are witnessing, then, are based on religion, which is unlike what we saw in Europe in the 20th century. 

How is this so? A quick comparison between Christianity and Islam begins to reveal the problem.

The singular event in Christianity is the incarnation. An ancient practice stipulates that the birth of a new king resets the calendar; in the case of Christians, the birth of the new king, King Jesus, marks year one of the Christian calendar.  

Following Athanasius (who wrote On the Incarnation less than a century before Augustine wrote City of God), the incarnation was necessary because there was a divine dilemma: man had turned so from God that he could not by himself turn back. And, so, God had to send Himself in order for man to be returned to Him. 

In short, the good news of the Gospel is that the bad news of original sin is not the final word on man’s condition. Original sin is, as you know, a much maligned doctrine these days. It does, however, make it impossible to even dream of re-enchanting the world. In the world of time, man’s existence can never be complete; at best we live in faith and in hope. Organic union is not man’s lot. 

We live, as Augustine said, enveloped in a fire of suffering that “purifies the gold and burns the chaff.” Not by accident did the Europeans who sought to re-enchant the world turn to pagan tropes. Christianity would never have provided what they were searching for.

With Islam it is otherwise.  The Quran’s account of the advent of Islam allows or invites a reading of what is possible for human communities that is less likely to be elicited from the Old and the New Testaments, taken together. What Islam allows or invites is an enchanted view of the world, an organic union that today goes under the seemingly harmless phrase, “an Islamic way of life.”

I once thought that the dating of the Islamic calendar occurred in roughly the same way as it occurred for Christians. That is, it corresponded to a divine irruption—in the Christian case, Christ; in the Islamic case, the revelations given to Mohamed. But that is not true. Islamic revelations occur before and after Mohamed moves from Mecca to Medina to establish a purportedly pure Islamic community there. 

In Islam, year one is the establishment of that pure (let us say enchanted) community in Medina. Christians, on the other hand, insist that after the fall of man, no such community has or can ever exist until Christ returns.

But what I have described is not enough to fully enkindle a re-enchantment movement in the Middle East. The fuel that gets added to this fire comes from Europe.

More precisely, it comes in the from of the anti-modern tropes that the founders of The Muslim Brotherhood, of Al Qaeda, and of other pernicious movements learned when they studied our European friends, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger. 

From Rousseau they learn that ancient virtue is superior to modern self-interest; from Marx they conclude that “capitalism” produces only alienation; from Nietzsche and Heidegger they learn that modern liberals are weak and lack the ability to act with conviction. The fascists and national socialists of the 20th century made the mistake of thinking that Nietzsche and Heidegger were right on this last point; so, too, has Osama Bin Laden, I believe. 
Convinced that the Americans are weak, he clearly has not understood his Tocqueville: Americans may be a bit sentimental; but when pushed, they will defend their country.

The basis of the re-enchantment movements in the Middle East, then, is not Islam, simply. Islam may enkindle the problem, but the fuel is provided by European anti-modern thought. 

That is why the term, “Islamo-Fascism,” is not entirely wrong, since it suggests that the European experience of the 20th century is somehow pertinent. But it is an inflammatory term as well, which obscures the deeper fact that we are witnessing yet another attempt to re-enchant the world in a region of the globe that is haltingly moving from the aristocratic age to the democratic age, as Europe did from the 17th to the 20th Century.

In other words, fascism was a species of the genus, not the genus itself. 

The passage from Tocqueville I cited earlier now bears repeating, so that its meaning can be more fully grasped: “Carried away by a rapid current, we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the ruins still in sight of the bank, which the streams whirls us backwards—facing towards the abyss.” 

Memories of an aristocratic past that collide with a dysfunctional present send the mind dreaming of a re-enchanted world. 

Americans do not understand this temptation because they have no memory of an aristocratic past—and this, for the reason Tocqueville gave, namely, that America was a new beginning. 

To be sure, a vast majority of Muslims do not think in the way I have just rehearsed; but those who profess to do us harm do think that way, and it is time we see them as they are—as men who dream of re-enchanting the world with a hybrid scheme that overtly invokes Islam yet covertly relies on European anti-modern thought.

If Tocqueville is to be trusted, the problem we face is far more broad-ranging than just the Middle East, however. I mentioned at the outset that my students in Argentina, Portugal and the Middle East all view modernity, and therefore America, through the eyes of Rousseau, not Tocqueville. That is, they come from a world with long historical memory of an aristocratic past, struggle with modernity, and dream of re-enchanting the world.

Under these circumstances, America is for them a proxy for modernity, an external reference point that serves as a projection of all that they most fear about their own bumpy entrance into the modern world. That is, in my estimation, no small part of the answer to the question, “why do they hate us?” 

In 1984, George Orwell writes of the “Two Minute Hate.”  Rather than address the internal problems of their society, Orwell has their leaders deflect built-up frustrations onto some external object—a couple with deliberately Jewish names. In our world today America (and in the Middle East, Israel) are the objects of the global “Two Minute Hate.”

Nothing has surprised me more than the misperceptions of America I have encountered around the world. But this is to be expected from citizens of other nations who are haunted by memories of an earlier aristocratic age who see in their own image of America a haunting spectre of their future. Memory matters in ways that Americans can scarcely understand. Absent a deeper reconsideration of the power of memory to entice many around the globe to dream of a re-enchanted world, Americans will fail to understand that the 21st century will offer challenges as difficult as those faced in the 20th century.

The picture I have given you here today is of a world that is in many places still agonizing over its entry into the democratic age, as Tocqueville called it. A more complete reading of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America allows us to understand that the optimistic account of history that many liberals have given is misguided. Honor, religion and memory will complicate how events unfold in the 21st century. 

We should not, however, yield to pessimism about the future. There is hope that the arguments of Tocqueville—not of Rousseau and the other European anti-modern thinkers—can prevail. 

I tell my students in the Middle East that America, not Europe, is their greatest ally. When the European colonists came through the Middle East in the 19th century they instituted systems of government based on their conclusion that religion was anathema to modernity. The people of the Middle East now wrestle with that horrendous choice, a legacy of their Colonial past.  In America, I tell them, you can be both religious and modern. 

Indeed, then, there is hope. I teach now in the Middle East for one semester a year because I believe that the greatest asset America has in the world today are her universities, troubled though they may be. 

To this I would add that my appreciation of The Fund’s IPVS Program and the other international programs that The Fund for American Studies runs around the globe has deepened with each passing year. 

Quietly and without fanfare The Fund draws in students from all around the world and presents them with a vision for the future that, I would submit, would have made Tocqueville quite proud. 

Americans must now deepen their defense of their country and what it stands for. There is no better place to begin than by turning to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, a book “[not for] tomorrow,” he says, “but for the whole future.”