Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists [Hardcover]

"I was stunned by the claim that voters chose George Bush because they cared about moral values. Either they had been bamboozled or the left had dramatically failed,"

Neiman analyses how the Right has seemingly managed to lay claim to traditional moral values. "Western secular culture has no clear place for moral language, and its use makes many profoundly uncomfortable." In the process "...concepts have been abandoned to the right: good and evil, hero and dignity and nobility."

While the post-60s Left abandoned high ideals and became preoccupied with identity politics they lost ground to an increasingly impassioned and intellectual Right that has gained the moral high ground: "Through organizations like the Olin Foundation, Midwestern businessmen who made their fortunes producing chemicals and telephones were sponsoring seminars in the mountains of Hungary on the nature of evil, or flying scholars to Chicago to discuss law and virtue... As the right was completing its study of the classics, the left was facing conceptual collapse."

Neiman offers a way forward - or at least a part - by calling upon Liberals to reread the classic texts. She gives retellings of the The Book of Job and The Odyssey (which are worth buying the book for in themselves - certainly for someone like me who never read them in the first place!) and shows how these classic moral tales demonstrate that alongside the Left's virtues of tolerance, ecumenism, universalism, justice as equality, and the rights of individuals we should include resoluteness, stoicism, loyalty, dignity, nobility and heroism, and not just yield these to the Right (and to the increasingly worrying NeoCons).

An excellent and very readable book (if a bit long) that wins top marks from me for its original approach to a traditionally dry subject. She's someone to watch. Here she paraphrases Kant: "Not pleasure but justice can move human beings to deeds that overcome the strongest of animal desires, the love of life itself. And contemplating this is as dizzying as contemplating the heavens above us: with this kind of power, we are as infinite as they are."

Susan Neiman delivers as promised an accessible text and a great read in which she vigorously defends the Enlightenment against all comers including counter-Enlightenment's Isaiah Berlin, post modernism's Michel Foucault (the most amoral man Noam Chomsky ever met!) and evangelical Anglicanism's bishop Tom Wright. According to Neiman, the Enlightenment was holistic in preserving emotion and metaphysics as well as establishing reason. It never claimed human progress was inevitable. Kant is her main Enlightenment hero. Neiman's Enlightenment stood against superstition, torture and inherited privilege, and offered a metaphysic of happiness, reason, reverence and hope. She indulges her passion for Bush-bashing extensively which is OK but sometimes a distraction to her more positive themes.

She succeeds in her mission if measured in terms of conviction writing. Her chapter 9 on Hope is particularly inspiring and deserves selective reading for those who want to cherry pick. Here she trounces the negative view of humanity shared by religion's original sin and evolution's selfish gene and follows primatologist Frans de Waal in claiming altruism as a fundamental human characteristic feeding distributive justice in human society, and neurologist V S Ramachandran in observing `mirror neurons' in the human brain which means we are `wired up for empathy and compassion'.

Two weaknesses are i) that she often states what the Enlightenment said and thought without any specific quotation as though it were a single source rather than an expression spread widely over contributors, ideas and time and ii) that she follows the common assumption that reason establishes virtue which it sadly doesn't - ethics are in fact arbitrary. Reason does not necessarily lead to reasonableness. Reason explains what is and virtue says what ought to be, but these don't converge. Neiman glosses over this crack between the twins of the Enlightenment.

But Neiman raises the potential for humans and humanity. She triumphs the hero from the myth of Odysseus. Generosity is heroic, heroism is an available alternative to resignation. `Progress is possible' she says, `and it is up to individuals to make it happen'. This may overlook the question of whether the institutions help or hinder this pursuit but it is undeniably a refreshing optimism for humanity.

I really enjoyed this book. It was very sprightly written (more like a newspaper columnist than an academic) and is a very easy introduction to Enlightenment thought. It has surprising angles on a whole host of the usual suspects - Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau etc - but particularly Kant, who is a bit of a hero to her (and, now, to me). It sets out to give heart to "liberals" by showing that their concerns - or indignations - are based on the very idea of reason, which in turn depends on seeing the difference between how things are and how they might be. She uses Kant to look at the difference between how things are and how the should be, and indicates this is a liberating, essentially human capacity. It was great. My only criticisms are (a) she too obviously follows an American "party line" (all the usual check boxes - Iraq, climate, healthcare) - there are surely many public moral issues that do not concern Americans (b) her reading of the Enlightenment is basically that it was what America was all about (c)she sometimes continues chirping along when the point is already well made. Good fun, though.