Some two or three months after September 11 2001 I stopped reading Madeleine Bunting with any kind of regularity. She is the journalist who, on September 24 of that year, gave us this:
And make no mistake, the build-up of military hardware around Afghanistan is about visible revenge. It is designed to generate the television images that will assuage American emotion, it is not about justified self-defence…And on October 18 this:
What makes the humanitarian situation so frightening is the scale. Over 7m people are believed to be at risk. What the war risks doing is turning a desperate, fragile situation into one of the biggest humanitarian disasters of recent decades.And on October 22 this:
Predictably, relentlessly, this conflict shows every sign of becoming the Vietnam of our generation – the graveyard of strategic interests and ideals, as well as lives. And it will divide the west as bitterly as Vietnam did.Then, on Thursday last, I see she has a piece on the issue of banning the wearing of the headscarf in French schools, and, inferring from its headline and subhead that she may say something I’ll find interesting, I begin to read. I’m disappointed. Not because she disagrees with me. No, she is indeed against the banning of the headscarf. But it’s the account she gives of liberalism, as being the root of the difficulty – where I would argue that the banning is itself an illiberal act – which is disappointing.
In a nutshell, Bunting seems to equate liberalism with a militant secularism, rationalism, atheism and so on, consequently with a doctrine which is intolerant of religion, unable to accommodate notions like ‘evil’ and ‘reverence’; where I would say that liberalism, in the meaning of it that counts for present purposes, is about a neutral public space in which all manner of different beliefs can express themselves and flourish. It is not intolerant of religion except in so far as some particular religion sets itself to demolish that neutral public space. Neither is liberalism less able to accommodate any notion at all than are alternative approaches to the desirable norms of public life. On the contrary, by enabling free discussion and enquiry, and a plurality of ways of life, liberalism gives us better possibilities for trying, by our own lights, to come to grips with the varieties of human belief and experience than any other politics does. The link between Bunting’s construal of liberalism and some of the passages I’ve quoted of hers above can be seen in this coda to her most recent article:
From Afghanistan to the American south, religion is resurgent in more violent and assertive manifestations than at any time in history. Liberalism appears blind to its own forms of self-assertion and aggression (economic, military or cultural), and hence to its own part in the generation of this ghastly phenomenon.The root cause – and I use the term here with due deliberation – of a lot of the world’s troubles is liberalism. That’s according to Madeleine Bunting. For my money, the root cause of a lot of the liberal-left’s problems is this kind of idea.