Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents, Ian Buruma
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 132 pp., $19.95 cloth.
In Taming the Gods, Ian Buruma investigates
the tensions that exist between organized
religion and liberal democracy.
Drawing on thinkers as diverse as
Tocqueville, Spinoza, Locke, Hume,
Burke, Jefferson, Voltaire, and Confucius,
Buruma explores the history of churchstate
relations in different cultures. His
focus is on the recent upsurge of evangelical
Protestantism in American politics; the
appropriation of popular religious sentiment
by the political regimes that preceded
modern-day democratic Japan and communist
China; and the current controversy
in Europe regarding Muslim immigration
to secular, historically Christian states.
The book highlights the deep complexities
that characterize national religiosity, and
predicts equally complex obstacles for political
actors who attempt to manipulate
religious fervor to further their own ends.
Throughout, Buruma seeks to investigate
the required elements that hold democratic
societies together and the place of religion
among them.
The book's geographic focal points—the
United States, Europe, China, and Japan—
may seem disparate, but Buruma's argument
benefits from an expansive approach.
By exploring the historical strains of secularism
in each locale, he shows that current
challenges to secularism are not a contemporary
phenomenon, but a continuation of
broader struggles to define secularism in
specific, historically religious cultures.
In the United States, Rush Limbaugh is
the modern embodiment of Elmer
Gantry, the hustling preacher in Sinclair
Lewis's famed novel of the same name,
and their form of showbiz gospel partly
explains the immediate impossibility of a
non-Christian U.S. presidency. In China,
the imposed veneration of Mao and his
Little Red Book recalls, however distortedly,
the country's traditional adherence to
the Analects of Confucianism, a religion
twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals
thought undermined "their twin modern
ideals, which they called 'Mr. Science' and
'Mr. Democracy.'" In France, the banning
of the Islamic veil should be understood
in the context of the country's staunch
ideological commitment to secularism—
itself a product of the revolution's successful
overthrow of Catholic authority and the
development of the notion of laïcité. All of
these places are ostensibly secular, yet
Buruma illustrates how each continues its
struggle to disentangle political and religious
ideologies.
Particularly for European democracies,
the author argues that the only common
faith required for political success is a
strong belief in Enlightenment values and
democratic institutions. "As long as people
play by the rules of free speech, free
expression, independent judiciaries and
free elections, they are democratic citizens,
whatever they choose to wear on their
heads." In order to assuage concerns
about changing cultural values, argues
Buruma, proponents of secularism need
to focus on the long-term cultivation of
liberal-democratic principles.
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Wendy Brown (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Zone Books,
2010), 168 pp., $25.95 cloth.
What do "border fences" between the
United States and Mexico, India and
Bangladesh, South Africa and Zimbabwe,
Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan, and Israel and the Palestinian
territories have in common? According
to Wendy Brown, these walls and fortifications
are reactions to a singularly contemporary
phenomenon: the decline of
sovereignty in the nation-state due to contending
economic and security imperatives.
On the one hand, the globalization of
people, goods, and capital demands an
unprecedented degree of openness across
states and territories—one that, paradoxically,
undermines the sovereignty of the
very states whose power helps constitute
and sustain this world order. On the
other hand, the proliferation of (and perhaps
overreaction to) transnational and
subnational security threats posed by terrorists,
drug smugglers, and other criminal
networks has brought about a retrenchment
at the borders—an attempt by
putatively sovereign states to reassert themselves
against nontraditional threats that
undermine their image as unitary and all-powerful
actors within their territory.
Thus, in an era of increasing insecurity
for the modern nation-state, "the new
walls project an image of sovereign jurisdictional
power and an aura of the
bounded and secure nation that are at the
same time undercut by their existence
and also by their functional inefficiency."
Brown, a professor of political science at
Berkeley, employs diverse modes of investigation
to examine the phenomenon of
walling. Insights from psychoanalysis
(especially Freud père et fille), critical theory
(Derrida, Foucault, and Agamben),
and political philosophy (Hobbes, Locke,
and especially Schmitt) all figure prominently
in her argument. Indeed, Walled
States brims with keen observations about
the current political, economic, and social
tensions and pathologies these walls simultaneously
instantiate and seek to redress,
and provides a vibrant account of a pivotal
phenomenon in twenty-first-century international
politics.
While the force of Brown's argument is
sometimes attenuated by her overreliance
on the technical language often employed
in critical theory, and her overwhelming
focus on the United States and Israel (and
subsequent under-theorizing of wall building
and fortification in the developing
world) appears to be based more on personal
preference than rigorous justification,
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty will
surely appeal to philosophers, sociologists,
political scientists, and critical theorists
alike.
