Norman Geras on contempt for believers and the reductions of the left

Norman Geras has a nice post about Christopher Hitchens' apparent contempt for religious believers.

While we're on the subject of Geras, here is a great article in Dissent on the reductions of the left. Geras considers why, despite all the tinkering with Marxism/socialism that happened among progressives in the post-Stalin period, leftists have descended into the same crude reductionism that characterized the leftist position during Stalin's rule. Geras argues that two traits of current progressive thought are decisive in this regard-- the tendency to blame all of the world's problems on the U.S., and an inability to imagine real evil.

Geras is eloquent on the latter subject:

There is a space of political and moral particularity that the reference back to capitalism or imperialism, and the reference sideways to the United States of America, cannot displace. Structures and procedures of authoritarian or dictatorial or out-and-out murderous rule are just what they are, and they differ-in ways that matter as much as anything in the social universe matters-from democratic institutions and procedures and the protections afforded to individual human beings by the rule of law. These differences have their own specific gravity, and it is mystifying why so many people worldwide, whose central values purport to be about the liberation of human beings from oppression, have seemed to give them so little weight, so little practical, choice-determining weight, in how they have aligned themselves politically in recent times.

The Taliban in Afghanistan; Saddam's Iraq; the reduction of a human being by torture; the use of terror randomly to kill innocents and to smite all those by whom they are cherished; mass murder; ethnic cleansing; all the manifold practices of human evil-to look upon these and at once see "capitalism," "imperialism," "America," is not only to show a poverty of moral imagination, it is to reveal a diminished understanding of the human world. A social or political science, or a practical politics, that cannot rise to the level of what has been understood, in their own mode, by the great religions-and I say this as a resolute and lifelong atheist-and what has also been understood, in their own mode, by all the great literatures of the world, is a science and a politics that can no longer be taken seriously. It should not be taken seriously by anyone attached to the democratic and egalitarian values that have always been at the heart of the broad socialist tradition.

Read the whole thing.