Staying power

National Review, Sept 1, 2008 by Victor Davis Hanson

Defending Identity: Its Indispensable Role in Protecting Democracy, by Natan Sharansky with Shira Wolosky Weiss (Public Affairs, 304 pp., $26.95)

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WHAT kept Natan Sharansky alive in the Soviet gulag, he tells us in his moving, against-the-grain new meditation on democracy, were two constants. One was his Jewishness: his notion of spiritual transcendence that he shared with other Jewish dissidents, his family, and his ancestors. Such distinctions made Sharansky a unique, rooted, and confident individual--a man with responsibilities to family and community beyond himself, a man capable of withstanding torture. But the other touchstone was his belief that there is a shared human desire for liberty: his intuition that in every man rests an innate need to express himself freely, protected by democratic institutions and constitutional government.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Sharansky became a member of the Israeli Knesset and sometimes a government minister--but he also became increasingly depressed at the course of contemporary Western society. Identity and democratic freedom, far from being complementary in serving universal human aspirations, were greatly misunderstood, and seemed to be at greater odds than ever before: "What I did not know then and could not foresee was that even after the Soviet Union collapsed, this tension would remain. I could not imagine that these two forces, identity and freedom, which were allies in the struggle to resist the world of fear that the Soviets had built, would become the bitterest of enemies in the free world."

In this sequel to The Case for Democracy (2004), Sharansky revisits his imprisonment in the Soviet Union and recounts his subsequent political career in Israel, attempting to explain why his own maverick stances so often have angered his former supporters in the liberal West, who have turned on him as much as they once did on the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He argues that his opposition to Yasser Arafat's primordial Palestinian Authority is perfectly consistent with his fight against the shapeless, valueless uniformity of the Soviet Union: Democracy can be destroyed when subjected to tribalism of the Middle Eastern sort, just as it cannot survive unless human beings transcend their own place and time and believe in freedom as a universal virtue. Sharansky defines identity as "a sense of life beyond the physical and material, beyond mere personal existence. It is the sense of a common world that stretches before and beyond the self, of belonging to something greater than the self, that gives strength not only to community but to the individual as well."

For all the political punditry about what went wrong over the last decade in the Middle East, Sharansky sees this antithesis of identity and democracy as fundamental to the conflict and a key to fathoming the dimensions of the struggle. The Israelis are increasingly giving up on their distinct Western-Israeli-Jewish identity that makes them endure and sacrifice for their principles, while the Palestinians cannot evolve beyond loyalty to the tribe, and thus perennially fail to channel their ethnic, religious, and national pride into a shared commitment to democratic government:

   The so-called Oslo peace process took
   place between two societies moving in
   directly opposite directions in terms of
   identity. Israeli society was being pushed
   in the direction of cosmopolitanism. Palestinians,
   under Arafat's corrupt dictatorship,
   were going through a crash course
   in hatred of Jews, Israel, and Zionism and
   making the rejection of Jewish-Israeli
   identity the basis of their own. The hope
   for peace became predicated on a rejection
   of Israeli identity and a rejection of
   Palestinian democracy.

Postmodern Westerners, of course, won't like all this, because they believe that familial, tribal, religious, and national allegiances are always replacements for reason, and ultimately lead to the ghastly sectarian slaughter that we see on our television screens in Rwanda, the Balkans, Iraq, and Darfur. Thus the European Union, the United Nations, and the very notion of the "world citizen"--which Barack Obama recently claimed as his own beneath the Victory Column in Berlin-are all predicated on this notion that we should identify only with a fuzzy, generic brotherhood of man.

None of this is particularly new, of course. There is little recognition by Sharansky that his themes of tension between tribal identity and universal freedom have been discussed at length in the Enlightenment, and were of concern to both Plato and Aristotle. Socrates pondered being a citizen of the world rather than of Athens, and the German philosophers, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Spengler, likewise worried about postmodern Western "men without chests" who believed in nothing other than getting along and satisfying their appetites. There is no mention here either of the more contemporary debate between Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" thesis and Samuel Huntington's worries over a "Clash of Civilizations": Central in that discussion were cases in which tribal identities were at odds with globalized notions of uniformity and democracy.