Will The Terror In Boston Challenge Our Open Society?

    On a nearly perfect spring afternoon in Boston, the city's civic celebration of Patriot's Day and the 117th Boston Marathon were marred by a violent terrorist attack. In addition to identifying and bringing to justice the anonymous perpetrator(s) of this carnage that has killed three people so far and maimed hundreds of other innocent and defenseless citizens, the attack again raises the troubling question of how we should respond collectively, as a democracy, to this violence.

War-on-Terror-Signs
 
    In 1945, Karl, Popper, a professor of philosophy at the London School of Economics, published a two volume work entitled The Open Society and Its Enemies. In his work, Popper criticized the writings of Plato, Hegel and Marx. Popper argued that their political philosophies were based upon a teleological historicism which falsely asserted that the movement of history was governed by universal laws. Popper also claimed to detect in the writings of Hegel and Marx, in particular contained the seeds of 20th century fascist and communist ideology.

    However mistaken Popper was in his understanding of the writings of Plato, Hegel and Marx, his work was an emphatic endorsement of liberal democracy. Popper insisted that liberal democracy was the only form of government that permits continued political evolution without revolution  or violence.

     Although Popper's choice of the phrase "the open society" has sometimes been narrowly interpreted by right-wing admirers of his writing to apply only to liberal democracies such as the United States and Switzerland, there is no doubt that the non-Western world clearly understands that the social democracies of Western Europe are equally open and tolerate wide ranges of dissent and argument within the context of robust, secular democratic institutions.

      Unfortunately,  Popper himself did not fully recognize that sometimes the most ardent advocates of liberal democracy might simultaneously be among its enemies. Within the liberal democratic project, there exists a profound sense of insecurity that liberalism has fostered,  predicated as it is upon individualism. Liberalism's emergence from the Protestant Reformation seems to have instilled within it a permanent sense of anxiety and apprehension.

    Although Luther's insistence that personal salvation could be gained by one's one receptivity to the Word alone released the self from the bonds of obedience to the universal church and its magisterium, the penalties for personal emancipation have continued to exacted a severe psychological toll. As Hobbes observed, the severance of man from nature - the natural order, natural law - estranged man and left him alone and afraid. Fear and a sense of personal isolation, and therefore personal vulnerability, in turn, can lead to panic and hysteria.

    So, too, Locke's emphasis upon the self was the obverse of his fear of the exercise of traditional political authority. With the gradual demise of the Great Chain of Being came also the demise of the imperium - the traditional authority of the magistrate to bind his subjects and his power to command. Even the ascension of the Protestant William of Orange to the throne of England was effectuated not by the right of succession, but by an invitation from the Parliament.  

     Thereafter, the power to command would depend upon the need to receive formal, legislative consent which, while a significant advance for democracy, was not without its downside. Since political institutions were, in Locke's view, of dubious legitimacy and should exercise only limited, arbitral, transitory authority, there has always dwelt within the corpus of the liberal consensus  of thos country a sense of the fragility of social and public institutions because they were created in the American Republic by an act of covenanting.

    This toxic brew of fear, anxiety, vulnerability, and concern about the fragility, and hence, stability, of political and social institutions, has contributed to the periodic eruptions of extremely ugly incidents in American politics. Harvard historian Louis Hartz in his justly famous study of The Liberal Tradition In America characterized this phenomenon as "irrational Lockianism."

     The Salem Witch trials and the frequent preemptive forays into Indian territories by colonial settlers who feared Indian insurrections (which, in turn, lead to the extermination of countless numbers of the aborigines) were precursors to the kind of hysteria that gripped the newly-independent United States after the French Revolution. The XYZ and Citizen Genet affairs were the precipitants for the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the administration of John Adams.

    Later, recurrent fears of slave insurrections in the first half of the nineteenth century prompted the enactment of ever-more punitive laws in the slave-holding states to punish "run-aways," abolitionists, and anyone who tried to educate a slave. In the 1840s, the Native American Party -the Know-Nothings -emerged in the Northeastern United States in response to a climate of intolerance and fear that had been preceded by the burning and sacking of an Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834, and by frequent attacks upon Irish and other Catholic immigrants.

    In the twentieth century, the imprisonment of war critics, such as the socialist Eugene Debbs during World War I, and the aggressive acts of Attorney General Palmer's "Red Raids" after the Bolshevik Revolution exemplified the kind of war frenzy and jingoism to which Americans have so often succumbed. Two decades hence, after the isolationism espoused by Father Coughlin and the America First Committee proved to be delusional, the attack on Pearl Harbor made palatable the confinement of thousands of American citizens--citizens of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast of the United States were forced into internment camps, without trial or any evidence of personal guilt, for the duration of World War II.

    Justice Black's infamous decision in Korematsu v. United States, 321 U.S. 760 (1944) excused this mass imprisonment. His decsion is stark evidence - which has been confirmed on countless other occasions throughout American history - of the timidity of the federal judiciary within this putatively liberal democracy to defend the most basic civil liberties whenever the courage to decry public hysteria is required.  Instead, the courts have, with few precious exceptions, routinely deferred to the executive branch's claims of a national emergency even where the evidence has showed that the alleged emergency - such as the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 - did not threaten or imperil the continued existence of the United States.

    An exaggerated fear of vulnerability and danger was continually fueled by politicians during the Cold War after World War II. Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and a cabal of professional fear-mongers and political opportunists successfully inflamed the worries and concerns of ordinary citizens about the evils of socialism and the purported Communist infiltration of American institutions and now the threats of terrorism.

    Later, this lamentable penchant to induce and to pander to the most base fears and anxieties of ordinary Americans for purely partisan political purposes was honed and perfected by the administration of Bush-Cheney and by their Svengali, Karl Rove. Equally appalling was the unsuccessful attempt by Rudolph Guliani to win the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination by running, as then-Delaware-Senator Joseph Biden remarked, "on a noun, a verb, and 9/11."

     Sadly, even President Obama has acquiesced to the emergence of the "Homeland Security" state with his continued endorsement of extra-judicial imprisonments in Guantanamo , wiretaps and other forms of extensive surveillance that strike at the very heart of all notions of legitimate privacy.

    The root of this exaggerated fear on the part of the courts and our elected political leadership can be directly traced to the liberal ethos of our politics: Because we have accepted the proposition that our institutions and even government itself are fragile because they are mere creatures of contract, we fear that all of our institutions are vulnerable to dissolution and disruption, particularly when subjected to outside stresses.    

    This country's legacy of individualism has contributed to the sense of social isolation, fear, and vulnerability that so many Americans harbor. It poses a danger and a challenge to the American body politic, our sense of who we are, and how confident we are in our ability to confront the challenges of the future. The attendant fear - that forces more powerful than the self pose a threat to personal autonomy - may, in large part, explain the anger, frustration, and vitriol exemplified by the Tea Party movement which first came to prominence in the summer of 2009.

    As Erich Fromm observed in The Escape From Freedom, "The individual became more alone, isolated, became an instrument in the hands of overwhelmingly strong forces outside of himself; he became an 'individual' but a bewildered and insecure individual." Hence, as Fromm notes, "Once the primary bonds which gave security to the individual are severed, once the individual faces the world outside of himself as a completely separate entity, two courses are open to him since he has to overcome the unbearable stage of powerlessness and aloneness. By one course he can progress to 'positive freedom'; he can relate himself spontaneously to the world in love and work...he can thus become one again with man, nature and himself, without giving up the independence and integrity of his individual self. The other course is to fall back, to give up his freedom, to try to overcome his aloneness by trying to eliminate the gap which has arisen between his individual self and the world."

    If we heed Fromm's sage advice, in the midst of our adversity, we will discover an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to remain an open society in which all of us accept our obligations to look out for one another. We will also not to be cowed by the forces of evil or the advocates of repression, but rather will choose to respond rationally and proportionately to every single incident of terrorism. As Franklin Roosevelt reminded us, as Americans we have nothing to fear but fear itself.
 


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