Dinesh D'Souza - America: Imagine a World without Her (5 page)

Foucault did multiple teaching stints at Berkeley; he first came in 1975, then returned in 1979, again in 1980, and again in 1983—and during this time he lived in San Francisco, regularly sampling its gay neighborhoods. Eventually Foucault got AIDS, and it is during this time that I met him. He came to lecture at Dartmouth while I was a student there. I worked for the press office at the college, and got to take Foucault around campus and to his public event. I recall him as brooding and obsessive, and he had a rancid, sneering laugh that signaled both despair and a personal sense of superiority. He delivered his lecture in a soft monotone, reading from notes, and
when it was finished I had no idea what he had spoken about. One of my friends unkindly remarked, “He’s the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name.” Now I realize why Foucault seemed so fragile and his voice so soft—Foucault had contracted AIDS, and he would die of it the following year.

Foucault spent more time in America than Tocqueville, but he wrote nothing substantial or interesting about this country. Part of the reason could be that he found America dull and vulgar; he would not be the first modern Frenchman to feel that way. But I believe the reason goes deeper. If we read Foucault’s work, we see how he found America to be characteristic of what he considered most repressive about Western modernity.

Foucault hated capitalism and free trade, detecting in ostensibly free exchange a hidden form of oppression. “It is only too clear,” Foucault said, “that we are living under a regime of dictatorship of class which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional.” And what exactly are the symptoms of this class dictatorship? For Foucault, it came down to a belief and a fact. The belief, which happens to be a wrong belief, is that wealth under capitalism is a zero-sum game. The fact, which happens to be true, is that many people in the West are forced to take jobs for money. But so what? Foucault considered capitalism to be cruel and exploitative for making people work to get a paycheck. Foucault insisted that work should promote self-fulfillment. In this he was echoing the early Marx, and proving himself a true child of the 1960s. He was also foreshadowing the recent comments by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the effect that many Americans feel “locked” into their jobs and now can, thanks to Obamacare, quit and write poetry or do nothing at all.
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Foucault also hated American foreign policy on the grounds that it was repressive
and tyrannical. Foucault vehemently denounced America’s involvement in Vietnam, and he participated in anti-war demonstrations organized by the French left in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Foucault argued that the “real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” This was the focus of his life’s work. Yet Foucault did not recommend that power be reconstructed on the basis of justice. He considered “justice” itself to be an illusory idea. For Foucault, it was all about power and the only way to fight power was with power. In a discussion with fellow leftist Noam Chomsky, Foucault acknowledged that the strongest force motivating a proletariat is envy. Envy, said Foucault, leads not only to the desire for power but also to the desire for revenge. “The proletariat doesn’t wage war against the ruling class because it considers such a war to be just. The proletariat makes war with the ruling class because, for the first time in history, it wants to take power… . When the proletariat takes power it may be quite possible that it will exert toward the classes over which it has just triumphed a violent, dictatorial, and even bloody power. I can’t see what objection one can make to this.” Chomsky was so disgusted that he later termed Foucault the most amoral man he had ever met.
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Foucault’s enthusiasm for violent dictatorship went beyond the retaliatory repression of the Western proletariat. In the late 1970s, Foucault went to Iran to witness the pro-American Shah being ousted by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Foucault met Khomeini and praised him lavishly. He also rhapsodized about the Iranian revolution, insisting it would not result in a theocracy. “By Islamic government,” he wrote, “nobody in Iran means a political regime in which
the clerics would have a role of supervision or control.” Iran, Foucault insisted, would be a fount of liberty. “With respect to liberties, they will be respected to the extent that their exercise will not harm others; minorities will be protected… . Between men and women, there will not be inequality with respect to rights. With respect to politics, decisions should be made by the majority.” Overall, Foucault found the Khomeini revolution a spontaneous eruption of moral passion. He called it “spiritual politics,” in contrast with ordinary politics. His point was that Iran was pushing the normal limits of what could be achieved through political action. “Pushing limits” was something Foucault considered a necessary antidote to Western oppression.

Foucault seemed unaware that the Ayatollah Khomeini had been giving sermons for decades outlining what type of Islamic government he favored. These ideas had been assembled in a book,
Islamic Government
, that Khomeini published a few years before he came to power. Upon taking control, Khomeini moved swiftly to implement his program, unleashing a reign of terror. At first, Foucault delighted in the execution of former officials and supporters of the Shah. Revolutions, Foucault said, should be expected to do such things. It was only when the Khomeini regime started executing liberals, leftists, and homosexuals, using the very technologies of surveillance, propaganda, and force that Foucault condemned in other contexts—only at this point did Foucault lose his enthusiasm. He stopped talking about Iran, moving on to other topics. Never, however, did he apologize for backing a tyranny far worse than that of any American institution. Instead of warning about the dangers of Islamic tyranny, he continued to warn about the dangers of liberal democracy.
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Why did Foucault find himself attracted to Khomeini in the first place? I suspect the reason has little to do with Iran. Sure, Foucault
visited Iran a couple of times, but he seems to have seen Iran through the lens of his prejudices. In this Foucault was simply one in a long line of Western intellectuals who visited totalitarian countries and praised their system of government. Over the course of a century, progressive intellectuals visited Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and Ortega’s Nicaragua and found themselves entranced by the peasant paradise they supposedly encountered. Somehow the repression was invisible to them—the information was available, but they ignored it. Evidently they projected their own discontents with the West onto these other countries and saw them for something quite different than they actually were.
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So too Foucault somehow converted his hatred for America and the West into admiration for America’s deadly adversary. From Foucault’s perspective, Khomeini was commendable for calling America the “great Satan”; after all, that was pretty much Foucault’s view also. Foucault’s blindness can be summed up in Saul Bellow’s remark, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

Foucault’s anti-Americanism might have remained undiluted if not for some of his actual experiences in America. Those experiences actually convinced Foucault that, at least in one crucial respect, he was wrong about America. Previously Foucault had considered Europe to be the center of sexual liberation, and America to be a relatively uptight, puritanical country. (This is still a view held by many.) Foucault’s experiences in San Francisco completely changed his mind. Instead of seeing America as the epicenter of control and repression, Foucault came to see it as offering a new type of liberation.

Foucault’s work focuses on the distinction between the “normal” and the “abnormal.” In his early work Foucault wrote about madness. Madness, he wrote, was once considered normal in the West,
as madmen freely roamed about during the Middle Ages, but now the West institutionalized mad people, criminalizing them for simply being different. Foucault proceeded to examine the prison system, and here he arrived at the startling insight that people are thrown into prison merely for being “abnormal.” For Foucault, the prison system was a metaphor for modern life, in which we—who consider ourselves to be free agents—are in reality subjected to various forms of subtle institutional control. This control makes us conform to what is normal, expected, and obligatory, and avoid what is abnormal, eccentric, and forbidden. From madhouses and prisons, Foucault generalized that pretty much all institutions—schools, banks, factories, retail stores, healthcare centers, and military barracks—resemble madhouses and prisons. Foucault’s work was devoted to unmasking these hidden and not-so-hidden forms of power, and to championing transgression and deviancy as mechanisms for breaking down power systems.

One may have guessed by now that this rigmarole was basically Foucault’s lengthy apologia for homosexuality, and arguably in his case, also pedophilia. Foucault, you see, was a homosexual who liked to have sex with teenage boys. He devised an elaborate theory about how Western civilization had made a bogus distinction between heterosexual and homosexual, and also between adults and children, and how in reality everybody is sexual from birth and has the ability to fluidly move from heterosexual to homosexual inclinations, leaving nothing out—not even pedophilia. Foucault praised the way homosexual culture manipulates the male-female distinction, and repudiates conventional morality, replacing it with what Foucault termed “laboratories of sexual experimentation.”
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Foucault’s biographer James Miller reports that Foucault spent his days teaching, and his nights plunging into San Francisco’s violent sadomasochistic culture. Here was a guy who was in slacks and
tweed in the morning, and leather in the evening—complete with jockstrap, tit-clamps, handcuffs, whips, paddles, riding crops, and cock-ring. (I am not making this up; Miller is very specific.) Foucault liked to get drugged before sex. He said in 1975, after first trying LSD, “The only thing I can compare this experience to in my life is sex with a stranger.” In San Francisco, he discovered he could have both. Foucault especially enjoyed sadomasochistic sex, including master-slave routines, which he saw as a kind of game. “Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at the end the slave has become the master… . This stragic game as a source of bodily pleasure is very interesting.” Foucault viewed S & M as a “limit experience” that suited his general philosophical affinity for breaking rules and testing boundaries. At one point, Foucault lamented that heterosexuals were missing out. While a good deal of heterosexual energy was “channeled into courtship,” Foucault remarked that gay sex was “devoted to intensifying the act of sex itself.” Of the gay bathhouse culture, Foucault wrote, “It is regrettable that such places do not yet exist for heterosexuals.”
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Foucault knew he was taking health risks. Even as late as 1983, when Foucault knew that AIDS was devastating the gay neighborhoods, he declared, “To die for the love of boys—what could be more beautiful?” Miller writes that Foucault may not have recognized, until the very end, that he had AIDS. Foucault’s longtime companion Daniel Defert denies this, reporting that Foucault had a “real knowledge” he was infected. The point, however, is that he didn’t seem to care. It’s one thing to risk your own life, but Foucault seems to have been willing to risk the lives of others as well. Apparently he felt that others too should enjoy “limit experiences” even if those experiences killed them.
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Tocqueville and Foucault—two very different men, separated not only by different temperaments, but also by a century and a half.
Tocqueville visited a very different America than Foucault did. In a way they each celebrated a certain type of freedom. Tocqueville celebrated the spirit of 1776—a spirit of enterprise and voluntary organizations and religious freedom. Foucault celebrated the spirit of 1968—not freedom of enterprise or America as a force for freedom in the world, but rather pelvic freedom, freedom from traditional moral constraints. What is the difference between these types of freedom? Which is better? To answer these questions we must probe deeper the roots of 1776 and the roots of 1968.

CHAPTER 3

NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM

Great Britain hath no more right to put their hands in my pocket without my consent, than I have to put my hands into yours for money.
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G
EORGE
W
ASHINGTON
, 1774

I
n 1978 I left India as a teenager. I left because I was weary of the nepotism and corruption in India, the ignorance and venality of the politicians, the bribes one had to pay every day. In India, as in most countries, your destiny is to a large degree given to you. It depends on what kind of family you are born into, whether you are male or female, and what caste you are. I wanted to be the architect of my own destiny, a virtual impossibility in my native country. Most of all I was frustrated by the lack of opportunity even for someone bright and willing to work hard. Basically there was no future for me in India; I had to look elsewhere. I wasn’t alone: pretty much everyone I knew was trying to get out. To Canada they went, or Australia, or Dubai, or to sea.

For me, there was really one place to look. America, I had been told, was a place big enough to take me in and to give me a chance
to realize my aspirations. In India, as in most places, life happens to you; in America, I came to believe, life is something you do. “Making it” doesn’t just mean succeeding. It means making your life. I came to America alone, without family or relatives here, and without money. In America I have not only achieved my ambitions; I have outpaced them. I originally intended to become a corporate executive of some kind; instead I found my true vocation as a writer, speaker, and filmmaker. I came to discover America, and here in America I have discovered myself. In this country I have not only found success; I have also been able to write the script of my own life. In America your destiny isn’t given to you; it is constructed by you.