Not the World Habermas Hoped For

Mark Beeson argues that we’re a long way from a rational exchange of views about the best ways of saving humanity.

Events may shape the world we inhabit, but sometimes their juxtaposition illuminates the social forces and ideas that define reality. These days, we are more than ever responsible for our own fate. While the natural world is capable of inflicting increasingly frequent disasters, the most immediate threats to our collective security are all man-made by one man in particular: Donald Trump.

Given the growing array of real and aspiring megalomaniacs, authoritarians, populists and theocrats that make life and death decisions around the world, this may seem an outlandish claim, but Trump has ultimate control of the world’s largest and most potent military forces and is displaying an increasing enthusiasm for using them. More than that, of course, Trump is happy to flout international law to do so.

It’s not necessary to be an expert in contemporary strategic policy or the complex history of the Middle East to recognise that things are not going according to plan—even supposing Trump and his hyper-aggressive Secretary of War, Pete Hesgeth—actually had one of course. That these events and the impulsive irrationality that shaped them are becoming even less predictable and chaotic at the very moment that Jürgen Habermas has died, would be almost comic if it weren’t quite so tragic.

So much for progress

Growing up in Nazi Germany and having the chance to observe an alarmingly well-organised totalitarian regime at close quarters would undoubtedly affect your view of the world. It is to Habermas’s credit that he became one of the foremost defenders and theorists of Enlightenment rationality and the concomitant idea of progress in human affairs.

If there is one thing we can be confident about it is that neither Trump or Hesgeth will have ever heard of Habermas—or even the Enlightenment, for that matter. Even if they had, they are more than likely to dismiss reasoned debate about complex issues of war and peace, public policy and morality as a form of weakness, to which the European Union is especially prone.

This is not what Habermas expected. Indeed, it is difficult to overstate just how far we are from some of the principles Habermas believed were essential if a moral social order was to be realised. Habermas laid out a complex system of ‘discourse ethics’ which could and should be universalizable based on reasoned argumentation, which is ultimately designed to reach a ‘rationally motivated agreement’.

Even Habermas conceded this was ‘improbable’, and he was writing in the aftermath of the Cold War, when history was supposedly ending and the much-maligned European Union was at the height of its powers. His claim that valuable ‘communicative freedom…exists only between actors who… want to reach an understanding with one another about something and expect one another to take positions on reciprocally raised validity claims’ looks strikingly at odds with reality, especially in an era or pervasive ‘fake news’.

In any case, given the widely noted concerns about his possible cognitive decline, it’s likely Trump wouldn’t understand this idea, and would be contemptuous of its assertion about the possible validity of a range of competing views even if he did. Trump is, after all, the man who has been responsible for curbing the media’s freedom of expression and even forcing universities to reflect his ideological preferences if they want to be sure of receiving government funding.

It’s not just the United States where universities are bending the knee, either. In Australia, a famously uncritical and obliging ally of the United States and supporter of, and participant in, all of America’s foreign and strategic policies, universities have been rushing to ingratiate themselves with the defence industry and the money-making possibilities they promise.

Brainless new world

If it was only universities supposedly crucial role in developing ‘critical thinking’ and the capacity to understand and even act on Habermasian ideas that was at stake, perhaps we might be tempted to relax. After all, no one seems to take much notice of academics unless their ideas align with, and/or give a veneer of legitimacy to whatever policymakers were habitually intending to do in the first place.

It’s testimony to how much has changed in Trump’s continuing evisceration of the foundations of American democracy and his contempt for ‘experts’ that all the so-called ‘adults in the room’ that exercised some influence over his more fanciful or unhinged ideas during his first term have all left. In their place Trump has appointed flunkies and sycophants who have come to constitute a kleptocracy motivated by self-interest.

Not only is the much-invoked ‘national interest’ a flexible signifier subject expedient revision in such circumstances, but even the most flagrantly self-serving and amoral proposals are immune from criticism. The inability of the Democratic Party or the Supreme Court to recognise, much less respond effectively to, some of Trump’s excesses is a telling illustration of just how much has gone wrong in a nation that owes its existence and foundational principles to the European Enlightenment.

Habermas was also a product of European history, both at its best and worst. Perhaps he stands as an illustration of what the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci described as the ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Given Gramsci’s unexpected, renewed prominence courtesy of Mark Carney, perhaps such ideas and attitudes will catch on as more countries come to see the United States as the problem rather than the solution to global insecurity, be it strategic, economic or environmental.

This would, of course, require an unprecedented effort from the rest of the world to persuade the US to behave differently. Paradoxically, the so-called ‘rules-based international order’, especially with European characteristics, is as close as we’ve come to realising some of Habermas’s more Utopian ideas. To be sure, there are still some prominent exponents of Enlightenment idealism and the possibility of progress, but they look startingly at odds with an international system gripped by a ‘polycrisis’.

That’s probably another idea President Trump is unfamiliar with, despite—arguably—having done more than any other human being on Earth to bring it about. The question that consequently confronts humanity, including Americans is: what do we do if the most powerful man in the world becomes the greatest threat to our collective security? 

If starting destructive, counter-productive wars of choice and enacting policies that literally add fuel to the fire of environmental destruction don’t count as avoidable security problems with potentially civilisation-ending problems, it’s hard to know what does. Clearly, humanity needs to take them seriously.

As I’ve suggested in an earlier contribution, perhaps it really is time for the American military to step-up, think the unthinkable and refuse to obey orders that are clearly likely to do (much more) harm than good. Alternatively, they might take a more proactive approach, enforce the fabled Constitution, and eliminate the possibility that ‘the law will be instrumentalised for the strategic deployment of power’, as Habermas feared. 

Clearly, we’re a long way from a rational exchange of views about the best ways of saving humanity, much less making collective progress. Nevertheless, Habermas remains a beacon of hope and idealism. Whether he can provide a route to a more secure future for humanity is, unfortunately, another question.

Mark Beeson, Adjunct Professor, Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney.

Photo by George Milton