All Too Human. - Review - book review

In the Name of Humanity: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Judith Friedlander (Columbia, 133 pp., $24.50)

Americans are of two minds about humanism, the view of the world that prizes human independence above all else and places human dignity, capacities, and beliefs at the center of life. While we admire the humanistic learning and insight of our founding generation, many of us also suspect that the humanism taught in our public schools and universities today is indistinguishable from godless immorality. We cling unquestioningly to our human rights and insist that secular and religious authorities respect them as inviolable. Yet we worry that weakening the power of traditional authority will result in relativism and nihilism. It seems, then, that we are finally suspicious of ourselves, troubled by the possibility that the very humanistic impulses that have led to what is best about America might also lead, when taken too far, to what is worst.

There are many reasons to read Alain Finkielkraut's In the Name of Humanity, but perhaps the most important is that its argument can be interpreted as a powerful and thoughtful vindication of American ambivalence about humanism. According to Finkiel kraut, the brutal and bloody events that convulsed so much of the globe in the last century resulted mainly from attempts to impose various forms of radical humanism. Furthermore, he makes the case that the unfocused humanitarianism that has recently led the United States and Western Europe to intervene ineptly in local conflicts from Port-au-Prince to Pristina, while less harmful, is actually a tempered version of that same drive.

This is an audacious argument, but Finkielkraut pulls it off through a stunning combination of erudition and moral seriousness-the same qualities that have led his earlier books to stand out among the many others produced by the impressive group of politically moderate intellectuals currently enjoying notoriety in France. As a Jew in a historically Catholic country, Fink iel kraut has focused on the problem of how attachment to particularistic identities can be reconciled with a devotion to universal principles-and he has done so without ever resorting to the fashionable and facile pronouncements that so often prevail in Europe and America. In The Defeat of the Mind (1987), for example, Finkielkraut gave us what is still one of our most profound and uncompromising critiques of multiculturalism, as well as an impassioned defense of enlightened reason against its many postmodern detractors. If his latest book is occasionally marred by the elliptical formulations, impressionistic argumentation, and somewhat pedantic name-dropping that are the perennial temptations of French intellectuals, he makes up for it with his singular capacity to uncover the pathological humanistic urge in the unlikeliest locations.

Surely the least likely of these is the ideology of National Socialism. The murderous Nazi regime would seem unambiguously antihumanist in both intent and deed. Yet Finkielkraut, expanding on the insights of Hannah Arendt and others, claims that Nazism embodied an extreme, though perverted, form of humanism. The Nazis equated the Aryan race with humanity as such, and understood their genocidal policies to be the most efficient way of ridding it of subhuman impurities. In this way, they considered themselves to be exalting humanity while murdering millions of human beings. The Nazis were also completely atheistic: For Hitler and his followers, there was nothing whatsoever above humanity- spiritual, moral, or natural-that could impose limits on their actions. Nazism was thus a veritable apotheosis of humanism.

In this regard, Communism was indistinguishable from its fascist counterpart; both found it necessary to overthrow the heavens before conquering the world. But where Nazism sought to differentiate between the human and the subhuman, Communism treated all differentiation-by class, race, intelligence, nation, region, or religion-as fundamentally arbitrary, and thus worthy of being eradicated in the name of an ideally homogeneous humanity. Un der Communism, man would achieve complete dominion over the world and at the same time over himself. Humanity in the plural would be replaced by the humanity of the undifferentiated mass.

Although few remain explicitly committed to the Communist ideal, its homogenizing impulse lives on (albeit in vastly weakened form) in the humanitarianism that increasingly dom i nates the foreign policy of the world's liberal democracies. Finkiel kraut is at his blistering best when he exposes the cowardly and mawkish stance of those who embrace easy and ineffective "causes that can do no wrong" as a way of avoiding real moral complexity. Weary of making difficult choices, today's ideologues of sentimentality prefer to "fall back on the indisputable truth about human suffering"-namely, that it's bad and should be diminished. The proper course of action therefore seems obvious: We should avoid putting our soldiers in harm's way and inflict the least possible damage on those with whom we fight. We are thereby able to "express a sense of extreme moral urgency while enjoying the comfort of great moral security." No D-Days or Dresdens for us. Only sanctions and smart bombs, empty threats and threadbare diplomacy.