Review: Moral Clarity - The Jewish Chronicle

By Susan Neiman
The Bodley Head, £20

In Susan Neiman’s lexicon, idealism is “the belief that the world can be improved by means of ideals expressing states of reality that are better than the ones we currently experience”.

She seeks to reinstate it among the left after so many withdrew from active engagement for a protracted, post-modern sulk following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their reasoning seemingly went: if that’s where political idealism leads, better stay at home reading Derrida or watching the world go to hell in a handcart on TV than try improving it.

That retreat from the moral high ground, argues Neiman, allowed its occupation by the right, happy to drape their imperialistic ambitions and prejudices over the ideals discarded by the left, thereby better to disguise their true, invidious nature.

Thus, after September 11 2001, George W Bush could be extolled on the right for his moral clarity in unequivocally condemning the attack on the Twin Towers. The left, meanwhile, could see only shades of grey.

The result, claims Neiman, was that, when the US invaded Iraq in the name of freedom, all the left could muster by way of alternative were the cautious counsels of realism: America must reduce its expectations and learn to live with evil and rogue regimes.

Neiman wrote her book to provide the left with a more pro-active and optimistic alternative.

She does this by distinguishing two varieties of idealism. One is the specious form adopted by the right. Its distinguishing mark is said to be willingness to derive values unthinkingly from some assumed authority, sacred or secular. Neiman’s preferred alternative is what she calls “idealism for grown-ups”. It involves choosing values on the strength of their intrinsic merits.

Neiman’s favoured form of idealism was the brainchild of the Enlightenment. So, it is there that she takes her readers, believing Enlightenment values will be accepted once divested of several unflattering myths with which they and their progenitors, such as Kant and Voltaire, have lately been encumbered.

The book’s four successive chapters on happiness, reason, reverence and hope — plus a succeeding chapter on Odysseus, presented as a hero for our times — are its best.

This is because they are the least contaminated by the author’s incapacity to let an opportunity pass without loosing a barrage of invective against the former American President. These digressions lower the standard of argument, however cathartic they may be for their author.

A former Yale philosophy professor, Neiman has lately acquired the reputation for making her subject accessible and relevant. To this reviewer, she does little more than package left-wing rhetoric as profundity.

Consider her definition of idealism. Suppose I am thirsty and want a drink. In this desire, have I not formed an idea of how the world might be improved? Have I thereby become an idealist? I don’t think so. Nor, I believe, will the reader.

Neither, I hope, will readers agree they should be asking “why being born in Houston should entitle you to more of everything than being born in Nairobi…” and should therefore “seek to structure the global economy according to… the demand for equal rights”.

If that is the best Neiman can offer by way of renewed idealism, I hope the left decide to stay at home in front of their TVs.