Universal vs. Collective

The difference it makes

Let me start by saying that I’ve had to sweep aside some mental cobwebs on the path to the observations I am about to essay. Let me also admit that the distinctions I will try to make might be old hat for all I know. I say “might be” because I can’t recall these exact distinctions having been made in any text I know of; given that, I realize with every book I read just how much I haven’t read. When you scour academic websites for a subject as seemingly narrow as, say, the status of ontology after Heidegger, the lists of papers are daunting, and you realize as your shoulders fall that you will never, ever be able to read even a small percentage of them. So it is highly probable that someone, somewhere, has already pointed out what I am about to point out.

My little mental journey began with the discovery of a video debate between Bernard-Henri Levy and Aleksandr Dugin from 2019, posted above. It’s quite a conflict between two philosophers who have almost nothing in common except their failure to fully master English. That a Frenchman and a Russian would be expected to debate in English is a mark against English as academic lingua franca; perhaps each debater should heave spoken his own language, interpreted for the other by a translator and captioned in English on the screen. As it stands, there are moments when each speaker seems to reach for what he wants to say, only to utter something commonplace. And unless my ears deceived me, Levy at one point remarked that an event predicted by Dugin had “already perspired.” I assume he meant “transpired.” For this reason and because of the two men’s growing mutual antagonism, I left the video at around 43 minutes in. But by that time the germ of an idea had lodged itself in my tortured brain.

The core of the two men’s opposition is this:

Levy takes the side of traditional Western liberalism, based on the idea that all humans everywhere are entitled to the same rights and privileges as all others, that the world is home to billions of individuals whose search for happiness and fulfillment is a universal desideratum, not to be deterred by religion, race, ethnicity, or any other collectively defining characteristic. In sharp contrast, Dugin famously espouses a collectivist (his word) philosophy in which such things as religion, race and ethnicity matter much more than the rights of individuals, and he furthermore blames individualism for the current chaos of the Western world, pointing to Russia as safe harbor from all that.

As you might imagine, there’s not much wiggle room here. Either/Or applies. And yet, three bridging concepts occurred to me as I heard these two esteemed gentlemen spit at each other through clenched teeth. They are:

1. Both men group people together. Levy gathers folk under one umbrella: that of all humanity. Dugin recognizes myriad blocks of people: Muslims, Christians, Jews, Slavs, Aryans, etc., not transcended by humanity as a whole.

2. Both men admit to the existence of certain rights. For Levy, rights pertain to individuals, while for Dugin they relate to given cultures, i.e, the right to be Muslim, Christian, etc.

3. Dugin and Levy both point the finger (in Levy’s case, literally) at the other as espousing nihilism, a condition they agree is undesirable.

These commonalities are not trivial, but neither are the differences lurking beneath. Taking them in reverse order:

No. 3: Nihilism is the condition in which all meaning disappears. Values, morality, truth itself are declared ungrounded and therefore absent in a society dominated by nihilism. To a traditional mentality such as Dugin’s, values can issue only from already existing belief systems. To strip a Slav or a Muslim of his identity as a Slav or Muslim, replacing it with the abstraction of “human” seems to Dugin the very essence of nihilism. If values are not grounded in tradition, Dugin appears to say, then values cannot exist and meaning evaporates. For Levy, it seems that nihilism is the very diversity of belief that Dugin champions. To the Westerner, nihilism is the chaos of one group slugging it out with another — Muslim fighting Jew, Aryan fighting Slav, etc. If the respective values of these various groups are all grounded in reality, Levy might argue, then why are they so different from one another? Are there truly so many different realities? If so, when one comes up against another, how do we know which one is the truly real? We can’t, because without the concept of humanity as a whole, the nihilism of group vs. group is inevitable! Nihilism can only be swept aside by the recognition of humanity as one race, constituting values grounded in the very nature of humanity itself.

No. 2: Rights are principles of freedom pertaining to belief and action. For Levy, rights belong to individuals. For Dugin, they belong to tribal factions: the “right” to be a Muslim, or a Slav, etc. The two concepts rub against each other like flint against twigs, and the ensuing fire is daily life in the West. “Individuals have the right to free speech.” “No, minorities have the right to protection from speech that violates their values, i.e. ‘hate speech.’” “Women have rights equal to men.” (A theme Levy repeats throughout the debate.) “Not if my religion denies them those rights.” Rights must be one thing or the other. They cannot at the same time belong to individuals and to demographic groups.

No. 1: Until fairly recently, “humanity” didn't exist. Greeks existed. Romans existed. Canaanites and Babylonians and Hebrews and Carthaginians and Ethiopians existed, but…humans? No. The world for most of its history has been tribal. An illustration is the scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Auda ben Canaan names for Lawrence the many tribes with which he is familiar, then adds, “The Arabs? I never heard of them.” It was a stretch for him to see beyond the tribes of the Arab peninsula to the unity of all people living on the Arabian peninsula, let alone the unity of all people living on the earth. A little more than a century later, the Audas of today — Dugin among them — still have not reached the latter understanding. The distinction between the collectives of various belief groups, races, etc., and the universality of humanity is central to understanding the debate between Dugin and Levy, which is also the debate in the Western world between the Woke Left and the dwindling number of people willing to oppose the Woke Left. Dugin may be anti-Western, but so are most Western intellectuals. (Levy, though I take issue with him on many subjects, is not among them.) They reject the very idea of universal rights based on human nature and embrace with grotesque fervor the collectives of race, religion, ethnicity and belief. The alarming support for Hamas on Western university campuses reflects the devotion to tribal “truth” of young people groomed by the Left to love the collective and hate the universal. To the statement, “You have the right to your beliefs,” they answer: “Very well, I believe that you do not have the right to your beliefs.” This is why Karl Popper advocated intolerance of the intolerant.

Here’s the final twist, which has kicked around in my head ever since hearing Levy and Dugin. The idea of a united humanity and of universal human rights issued uniquely from a particular culture and belief system: The Judeo-Christian tradition in alliance with Greek and Roman antiquity; in other words, universal human rights have their source in that hated collective, that feared tradition, that tribe of monsters, white people. The war against the idea of universal rights is a war on whiteness because white people came up with it. The enemies of the West do not see the West as holding up a standard of universal human rights against the tribal claims of various collectives. They do not recognize the existence of universal rights and therefore see the West/white people as just another tribe, one particularly ripe for destruction at this moment.

Thanks to the West’s belief in the rights of all people to their opinions, the tribalists are allowed, even encouraged, to say: “White culture (which posits the idea of universal truth) is just another tribe, but an evil one that must be replaced.” In other words, the collectives may oppose the West as if it is a competing collective. But the West may not defend itself by saying, “White culture gifted you with the ideas of freedom and the universality of human rights,” because a) it would be damned as racist, its truth notwithstanding, and b) by capitulating to the idea that there is a “white” culture, it would open the door to an attack on the universal. “If universality is the idea of only a single culture, how can it be universal? Why didn’t all humans come up with it at the same time?” A counter-argument would need to take the position that European “white” civilization developed a principle the others failed to discover, even though it applies to them as well. And we can’t say that. It is permitted to argue that white civilization is inferior, but not to imply it might be the other way round. That’s why the more radically Woke question even the validity of mathematics, calling it false to claim that calculus, for example, is universally true. Other civilizations didn't come up with calculus, so when the West claims it’s true for people of color as well as for whites, that’s racist. There is no universality. Everything is tribe against tribe, and the white tribe is the enemy because it claims that calculus and human rights and myriad other discoveries should be adopted by the other tribes as “universally true.”

There is no fighting this without defending European (white) civilization and there is no defending European civilization without appearing to advocate the very racism white civilization is accused of perpetrating. Truth be told, it is the Aleksandr Dugins and the Woke of the world who perpetrate racism by feeding the idea that the beliefs of collective groups obviate any claim to truth. But you can’t argue along these lines without tripping the wires of racism, colonialism, etc.

And this, I am forced to admit, is why we are losing.

The way to win is not to give a tinker’s proverbial damn about what is thought by the rest of the world, including bearded Russian philosophers.

+++