Terry Eagleton, ‘Postcript’, After Theory ( New York: Basic Books, 2003) pp.223-227

Postscript

Since September 11, a number of anti-theoretical terms have been in vogue in the United States. They include ‘evil’, ‘freedom-loving’, ‘bad men’, ‘patriot’ and ‘anti-American’. These terms are anti-theoretical because they are invitations to shut down thought. Or indeed, in some cases, imperious commands to do so. They are well-thumbed tokens which serve in place of thought, automated reactions which make do for the labour of analysis. Such language is not necessarily mistaken in suggesting that some events are evil, or some men are bad, or that freedom is a capacity to be prized. It is just that the force of these terms is to suggest that there is absolutely no more to be said. Discussion must at all costs remain on the level of the ready tag, the moralistic outcry, the pious rejoinder, the shopworn phrase. Theory – which means, in this context, the taxing business of trying to grasp what is actually going on – is unpatriotic. It is the prerogative of soft-spoken, long-haired intellectuals, most of whom are no doubt in cahoots with al-Qa’ida.

This is a pity, since unless the United States is able to do some hard thinking about the world, it is not at all certain that the world will be around for that much longer. This would certainly save us all the unpleasant necessity of hard thought, since there would then be nothing to think about; but there are probably less drastic ways of making thinking less rebarbative. It is true, of course, that some Americans have never quite grasped this eso-

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teric concept of ‘the world’, believing as they do that it is situated somewhere just south-east of Texas. There are those Americans who have no idea of how others see them; those who have no idea but do not care anyway; and those who have yet to hear that there are other people out there in the first place. For some of them, to be sure, the world is indeed solidly out there: it is what you see through a video-camera or as a flicker on a radar of a bomber plane. For most of the USA’s current leaders, as for Dr. Johnson kicking the stone, there can also be absolutely no doubt that the world exists. It is a place where international agreements are to be violated, treatises wrecked, other people’s land poisoned, and military bases to be positioned. Those who are understandably reluctant to accept such bases, thus becoming military targets in the defence of other people’s interests, can forget about the aid that was promised to them for that vital irrigation system.

For yet others, in the White House and State Department, the world consists among things of an obscure, downtrodden species known as ‘allies’, which means those who are to be arm-wrestled on board when you need them to help you kill people and pay for rebuilding their shattered cities, and ditched when you don’t. It is also that assortment of foreign nations who are to be bullied, bribed and blackmailed into abandoning their own supremely trivial interests and falling docilely into line behind the self-appointed Messianic saviour of the globe. A Messianic saviour, oddly enough, which regards the giving of aid to the destitute and desperate as a sordid, embarrassing burden rather than a cause for national pride, and which in any case drains far more from the impoverished world by its grossly unfair economic practices than it would ever dream of bestowing upon it.

Yet it is an elementary rule of warfare that you must understand your enemy if you are to defeat him; so one would have thought that sheer naked self-interest, to which the current

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United States government is scarcely a stranger, might have inspired it and its supporters to work out, as the saying goes, ‘Why they hate us so much’. It is, to be sure, a signal advance in intellectual enlightenment for some Americans that this question has even occurred to them. It is a pity that it took an appalling tragedy for them to wake up to the fact that not everyone enjoys being hectored about democracy by a nation with a fraudulently elected president, as well as with an electoral system which means that you need to have the financial resources to buy up Niger, Chad, the Cameroons and the Central African Republic if you are to become a democratic representative of the popular will. (Perhaps some enterprising US businessman will get round to this in the fullness of time).

Not everyone, either, relishes being lectured about freedom by an American political establishment for which such freedom means lending military and material support to a whole range of squalid right-wing dictatorships throughout the world, while maiming and destroying the citizens of other regimes which dare to threaten its own geopolitical dominance, and thus its profits. One is not over-impressed by governments which prate of human rights and announce that the prisoners whom they are busy torturing in their Cuban concentration camp are ‘bad’ even before they have been put on trial. The desire to rule the world used to be considered the paranoid fantasy of sad, emotionally retarded men with inadequate love lives and dandruff on the shoulders of their jackets. Nowadays, it is the declared aim of a nation which regards itself as God’s gift to anti-imperialism.

Meanwhile, the craven overseas lackeys of United States power, most prominent among whose ranks is an off-shore US aircraft carrier once known as the United Kingdom, are rather more coy and hypocritical about the whole affair. Americans have always been renowned for their candour, which means nowadays that the gang of predatory, semi-illiterate philistines who rule

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them is growing more and more insolently explicit about the fact that it doesn’t give a damn for much in the cosmos beyond Texan oilmen. The British are characteristically more two-faced and soft-soaping about the whole matter. Whereas the Americans blunder with all guns blazing, only to discover as usual that they have made the situation grotesquely worse than it was before, the British exercise their dominion in soft caps rather than hard hats, taking pains to learn the names of those they may later find themselves knocking around the head with a rifle butt.

It can be said in Europe’s favour that it retains some vestiges of a free broadcasting system, at least at the time of writing, which is increasingly in doubt in the Land of the Free. US politicians can rest assured that the censorship of capital will ensure that they will not be asked by TV interviewers why they have been lying through their teeth, as they might still be in Europe, but whether they agree that prayer is a powerful source of spiritual consolation. The United States has an exalted image of itself, and would be a far more morally decent place if it did not. A touch of scepticism and self-debunkery would work wonders for its spiritual health. The very impulse which drives it to stand tall and feel good about itself is the one which is in danger of tearing it apart. Not to speak of the tearing apart of others, who never felt particularly good about themselves in the first place. It is its demented refusal to limit and finitude, its crazed, blasphemous belief that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, which lies at the source of its chronic weakness. Nations or individuals which cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the realities of frailty and failure – that this is what we all start from, and where we all return – are feeble indeed. Intoxicated by their own self-image, they can perceive nothing beyond themselves, and will thus find themselves in the most dreadful danger. They will become the enemies of civilisation in the very act of seeking to preserve it. Like the protagonists of tragedy, they are caught up in some inex-

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orable self-undoing, as their very strength comes to prove their most disabling defect.

Few prospects could be more admirable in this respect that that of the millions of Americans who, in the face of this reckless, world-hating hubris, continue steadfastly to speak up for humane values, with the spirit of independence, moral seriousness, sense of dedication and devotion to human liberty for which they are renowned among the nations. If it is unAmerican to reject greed, power and ruthless self-interest for the pitiable frauds that they are, then millions of Americans must today be proud to call themselves so. It is this authentic America – these political friends and comrades –that I would wish to share the dedication of this book, and whom I wish well in the dark times that doubtless lie ahead.

T.E.

Dublin, 2003

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