Kant: Enlightenment or Negation

As per our post-class discussion, In this blog my reading of Kant's Perpetual Peace will informed by Spivak's "enabling violation."* Sorry that this post is so long, but the Kant discussion touched on a lot of things that have been bothering me.

OK, so, in this post, I am going to lay the case that Kant's "Perpetual Peace," creates an "enabling violation" for the negation of populations both in body and identity. I will then try to relate this reading of Kant to my activist/NGO experience in Washington--kinda of a large undertaking for a blog, so I have decided to break it up into subject headings for easier understanding.

Perpetual Peace and Religious Tolerance

Kyle and Monica both touched on Kant's belief in one universal religion--"differences in religion: an odd expression! Just as one spoke of differences in moralities."(125n)-- and asked the question of how Kant's universal religion should be defined. Although they both had interesting insights, I think they both missed the more important question of how does Kant NOT define universal religion.

According to Kant, universal religion is not defined by "different religious books (Zendavesta, the Vedas, Koran and so on)."(p125n) later on in the paragraph Kant continues "Those [faiths and books] can thus be nothing more than the accidental vehicles of religion and can only thereby be different in different times and places."(p125n) So this universal religion is clearly NOT defined by the texts of Zoroastrianism, Islam or Hinduism. Notably, the Christian Bible is not mention in his list of misguided texts. This may be because he believes that Christianity is the universal religion or it may be because he did not want to offend his Christian audience.

Regardless, Kant further agues that these differences in religion "dispose men to mutual hatred and the pre-text for war." Luckily, Kant believes that humanity is progressing toward "universal agreement." But, what is the peace minded policy maker to do with those that are not progressing...those who choose to remain Hindu or Muslim?

For Kant, nature is on a progression to negate the Hindu and Muslim identities. What are the implications for policy makers in the civilized world who are now aware that the uncivil identities are on the road to negation? Though Kant does not provide an answer to this, he does provide some simple policy recommendations for those who choose to remain in the state of nature.

Perpetual Peace and the State of Nature

Kant finds a positive function for military build-up and war when dealing with those in the state of nature.

Even if a people were not constrained by internal discord to submit to public laws, war would make them do it, for according to the natural arrangement explained above, every people finds itself neighbor to another people that threatens it, and it must form itself into a nation so as to be able to prepare itself to meet this threat with military might. (120)

Kant's assertion that military might, when employed against those in the state of nature, can have a positive function for those in the state of nature, and for world peace, has obvious implications for the policy maker.

Benevolent Negation

OK, I feel like one could read the blog thus far and think that I am accusing Kant of enabling genocide. To do this would be to take the above listed comments out of the context of Kant's narrative. Kant does not advocate extermination, only negation. On page 119 he adds this caveat.

…the human race can gradually be brought closer and closer to a cosmopolitan constitution. Compare this with the inhospitable conduct of civilized nations in our part of the world, especially commercial ones: the injustice that they display toward foreign lands and peoples (which is the same a conquering them) is terrifying. (p119)

Kant continues to describe behavior by imperialist entities that incited wars amongst nations, "famine, rebellion, treachery, and the entire litany of evils that can afflict the human race." Here Kant is again criticizing the conduct of the civilized world toward the uncivilized. However, Kant does not withdraw is broader argument that peace necessitates negation of the uncivilized.

Bush and Beyond

At this point, the easy thing to do would be to relate the "enabling violation" reading of Kant to George W. Bush's "War on Terror," George H. Bush's "War on Drugs" or Woodrow Wilson's war on Nicaragua, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. I wont bore you with such obvious applications. Instead, I will write about my work as a "Human Rights" and "Economic Justice" activist.

My current job

The day of our class lecture, the NGO that I work for to sent me to a lecture on the effects of global warming on Africa. A Yale-PhD had done a regression model that showed that global warming would make many crops that are currently being grown in Africa not be sustainable in the future. Though the lecture was very good, the entire audience and the lecturer only had one prescription for the Africans, to avoid loosing all from global warming, they should be given donations from the west to develop industrail economies.

OK, I’m not argueing that this is a bad idea. Just that it totally ignores the possibility that Joe African Farmer wont just wake-up one morning and think, “hmm, my cattle are all dying-off, better breed more goats.”

How is this not granting of agency to indigenous knowledge related to Kant and the Enlightenment? I think, that, if I had fifty pages and a totally free schedule for the next six months, I could trace the Yale PhD’s regression model that did not grant any agency to Africans back to the Enlightenment's supposition that enlightenment reason is superior and will liberate the ignorant or negate them.

In sum, although this probably requires a much longer, well developed, essay to convince you, The Bush Administration, Amnesty International, the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and nearly every NGO headquartered in Washington plays a role in the project that I have chosen to call "Enlightenment or Negation." This is because, as professor Jackson stated in his Hobbes Pod-cast, we still very much live in the world that the Enlightenment created. The intellectual community has not provided the practitioner other tools with which to understand the world. Even Foucault, who claims to have over come the normative values of the enlightenment, can not help but rely on them (see Derida's critique of Foucault).

So, as practitioners of International Relations that wants to work toward peace, we are left with a choice, either we work toward peace through Enlightenment Reason or don't work at all.

Unfortunately, peace though enlightenment reason will always leave the problem of what to do with those that the enlightenment defined as unreasonable, the practicers of sati, the practitioners of witchcraft, the students who would rather stand in the doors of WTO meetings then try to appeal to the negotiators "reason."

What is to be done?

As Dr. Jackson alluded to, the resolution to this problem can not be found in your years in the peace core, the day you sold your soul to the department of state, or the summer you spent in Guatemala helping indigenous people find pure water--although it may be informed by these experiences. The academy is the only intuition that I know of that can provide the space to develop the needed shift in discourse.

I know that I left a lot of whole in this post—but hell I’ve been writing for long enough and I think I was at least provocative.

*As many of my earlier post have been informed by this article as well, I thought that some of you would like to check it out and see why a friend of mine and I once woke up at 5am to drive 4 hours to Princeton to hear Spivak lecture (true story)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty "Righting Wrongs"The South Atlantic Quarterly - Volume 103, Number 2/3, Spring/Summer 2004, pp. 523-581 Its availble electronically through the database "Project Muse"--You can access it through the American Univeristy Library