Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic AgeJoshua Mitchell The University of Chicago Press, 2013
The lingering brutalities in Syria, persistent anxiety over the agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and the rise of various Islamist parties and splinter groups in North Africa and the Middle East have turned the Arab Spring into more of a stumble. The once breathless hopes of Western liberals, while far from silenced, are now noticeably wheezy. Why oh why is it proving so difficult for Muslim countries to follow the Western path to that peaceful, liberal, plural, democratic, constitutional settlement that lies just over the hills?
Joshua Mitchell is a professor of political theory, with a career spent teaching the Western political canon, and a deep familiarity with the Middle East having spent years teaching in Iraq and Qatar, helping build up tertiary educational establishments with US-links, whilst maintaining links and teaching responsibilities in America. If anyone is in a position to speak authoritatively into this debate, he is.
That authority is greatly strengthened by his particular area of interest and expertise, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French political historian and theorist who travelled to America in 1831 ostensibly to study its prison system, but ended up writing probably the most acute and far-sighted piece of political analysis in European history, Democracy in America. As its title suggests, Mitchell’s book stands in the shadow of a great rock.
Mitchell does not address why democratic freedom seems to be the destined to be the seed that fell among the rocks in Arabia, sprouting rapidly then dying in the sun; or rather, he doesn’t address it head on. Rather, in an at times personal book, replete with autobiographical details and recollections, he uses Tocqueville’s idea of ‘democratic man’ to tease out why democracy, in the broadest sense of the word, remains challenging and problematic, not just in Arabia but also, in a different way, in America.
Tocqueville thought of democratic man as a new kind of man, homo solus: lonely, “delinked”, “untethered”, “commercial”, a being united to others by common interests rather than through roles, in keen need of voluntarily relinking through freely-chosen civic association, whose entire social existence requires on-going calculation and negotiation. This new man was in direct contrast with what went before, so-called ‘aristocratic’ man, whose life and identity was made up of heavy links to family, land, church, kingdom, empire, and indeed the whole created order. His world, unlike democratic man’s, was marked by solidity, stratification and deference, from which escape was difficult to the point of being impossible.
Mitchell’s contention is that the differences Tocqueville identified between aristocratic France and newly democratic America correspond in large measure to those between contemporary Arabia and America. He makes a good case. In some ways, most obviously technologically, ancien regime France and the contemporary Middle East are wholly different beasts. In other, more relevant, ways they are very similar. Like ‘aristocratic man’, Middle Eastern people traditionally understand – or at least understood – themselves firstly as the bearer of a family name, with concomitant social roles and obligations that are fundamental to their identity, and only then, if at all, as ‘individuals’.
It is at this juncture that the way is open for a self-righteous and blinkered analysis of the current situation. Because, for everyone likely to read this book, this transition from aristocratic to democratic man in European and North American history was so obviously and uncomplicatedly ‘a good thing’, the temptation is to reach for the pre-packed political instruction kit from the shelf: choose freedom, choose light, strike off the chains of tradition and oppression and come join the democratic party. This is not, however, Mitchell’s path and the result is an infinitely more interesting, thoughtful and balanced book.
Mitchell is not blind to the many advantages of Tocqueville’s democratic condition. This has enabled us to become familiar and content with the ideas of the ‘public’ and of ‘common humanity’, both of which struggle in an aristocratic age “where each family, class, tribe or caste is a species of humanity unto itself”. We have a greater sensitivity to global suffering and the question of “social justice” than was once the case, and we take it for granted that natural affection, not social obligation, should prevail in personal relations, especially romantic ones. Much personal and social good has come of our delinking.
However, true to his master’s sensitivity, and alert to the cultural nuance of the various countries in which he has taught, Mitchell is also aware of what our delinking has cost us. His is a “morally ambiguous world”, in which settlements are uneasy and solutions equivocal. His strength and that of his book, is his ability and willingness to recognise the tension.
So, for example, the much-vaunted and much-cherished economic liberty that lies at the beating heart of democratic man undermines the family bonds that run in the blood. “Market commerce is only feasible if it weakens chain of wealth between father and son … so that all men, no matter what their station, rise or fall from one generation to the next largely on their own merits” – a great idea, until you have children yourself.
By dissolving the ties that bind, this liberty breeds a paradoxical loneliness. “My students are more ‘connected’ than any generation in the history of the human race. They nevertheless sense themselves to be alone”. Worse, it undermines our ability to live virtuously. The more Mitchell’s students think of themselves as disembodied individuals, he contends, the more misguided and reckless their relations become.
The democratic age breeds short-termism and a lack of patience, which Tocqueville believed was necessary for market commerce but could only be generated by forms of life beyond market commerce. The severance of sexual intimacy from concrete, stable, sexual identity and from reproduction – this often being seen as a burden – leaves young people especially confused and vulnerable, the feeling of sexual compatibility considered a sufficient arbiter for relationships, sex as “a revocable contract between two disembodied individuals.”
For all their sensitivities to social justice and global inequality, this remains an abstract and distant commitment for democratic man. “Severed from any real social location, most of my American students are capable of sympathy for people elsewhere in the world they will never meet, but too frequently do not even know their neighbour next door.”
This is a heavy charge sheet, not lightened by the democratic age’s contorted attitude to the state. On the one hand, this is the ultimate institution of authority (if you discount God, which democratic man tends to), invading and infringing my personal liberty. On the other, it is the very thing to which we look to secure our liberty and equality. The result is not a happy one. “When citizens only look upward to the visible power of the state, when the neighbour is lost from view, is it any wonder that our national politics becomes a battleground where one fleeing dream of perfection is set against another, and that somnambulant, self-absorbed citizens increasingly die alone, with cats?”
Professor that he is, Mitchell is particularly attuned to the pedagogical impact of all this. Indeed, the classroom is the arena in which the ambiguous benefits of the democratic age are best witnessed, with students’ unwillingness to take things as true simply because they are told it is, commonly shading over into an unwillingness to take things as true at all, or unless they have personally experienced them. With this mentality, not only is any idea of a canon dissolved – every pervious age is seen archaic and irrelevant – but education itself is made impossible, the all-pervasive hermeneutic of suspicion proving entirely inadequate to the task of learning and discernment. Education collapses into solipsism.
All this could degenerate into a witches’ brew of anecdote and jeremiad as the author tells us about another funny thing happened to him on his way to the classroom. It doesn’t. Mitchell is too clear-sighted and fair-minded – too infused with the spirit of Tocqueville one might say – to allow that. What it does do is present us – whether in Arabia or America – with a choice that is decidedly agonistic. If Tocqueville is our guide, Mitchell suggests, two options stand before us. “The first involves an imperfect liberty requiring strength of soul, neighbourliness, and an understanding that perfection is not the lot of man. The second involves a despotic form of equality still without a name, in which docile and delinked citizens look upward to the powerful state rather than outward towards their neighbours for their nourishment.”
Mitchell, it must be said, it not hopeful. Not only does he see the less encouraging traits of delinked, democratic man seeping into Middle Eastern culture, despite his students’ professed desire for “modernisation” not “Westernisation”, but the rejection of those traits, long-established and fully-grown into solipsism and self-righteousness in the West, requires a substantial, root and branch re-evaluation.
Yes, there is need and opportunity for political rhetoric, public policy, taxation, property law, educational establishments, and the like to encourage virtue and character formation but ultimately the reform that is needed is more substantial than any of those, substantial enough to be called spiritual without doing violence to that word. “The more I think about the future prospects for liberty in America, the more I doubt that it can be maintained without an understanding that the final evaluation of our lives must be made with a view to and from Eternity.”
The polemical, of both persuasions, will hear in this the simple cry that democracy needs Christianity, or something like it. Mitchell does not quite say that, and certainly keeps his own religious cards close to his chest. But if that were the conclusion the reader drew from Tocqueville in Arabia, it would be one with which its eponymous hero would agree.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos
Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age is published by The University of Chicago Press
Image by Mohd Azli Abdul Malek from flickr.com under the Creative Commons Licence.
