NYU's Stephen Lukes: "How Right We Are!"

Liberals & Cannibals: The Implications of Diversity By Steven Lukes Verso, 180 pages, $25 When Nietzsche said "they are no philosophers, these English," he was talking about people like Steven Lukes. In the 13 slight, chatty essays that make up this book, Lukes, an English sociologist who teaches at NYU, takes up the traditional project of conservative British philosophy, trying to ground the prejudices of his own cultural context in universal, rational moral laws. Taking it for granted that the reader shares his own horror of local moralities, Lukes casts himself as the defender of "Enlightenment rationalism" against "relativism" and "nihilism."

Odd, then, that Lukes seems to know so little about Enlightenment philosophy. Above all, Lukes seems to possess a willed ignorance of French Enlightenment thinkers, who were far more radical in their attacks on "universalism" than their English counterparts. One would expect a book like this to deal rather seriously with Montesquieu, for example. Yet he is mentioned only once, in passing. More radical philosophes such as Holbach, Diderot and Sade are not mentioned at all. Only by this cultivated ignorance of the wilder philosophes could Lukes dare to say that ""[a]nti-universalism has remained half-hearted until very recently," a claim which is simply historically wrong. In reality, the latter half of the 20th century was a tame intellectual era in comparison with the latter half of the 18th?as Lukes should know, since his book is a perfect example of the contemporary impulse to draw back from the cliff-edge to which Enlightenment ethical philosophy took the West.

Rather than reading Enlightenment sources on his own, Lukes simply takes Isiah Berlin's disingenuous claims on trust: "I am sure that Berlin was right when?he observed that cultural relativism was unknown to the eighteenth century?." As it happens, Berlin was wrong?but what is more shocking than Berlin's untenable claim is the fact that Lukes apparently didn't bother to check for himself. Though he says "Isiah Berlin is a challenging thinker," it's clear that for Lukes and many another middlebrow conservative, Berlin is just the opposite: a reassuring figure, a consoling figure, who delved into all that dangerous, morally suspect Continental philosophy and returned to testify that the moral order was still intact. Hence the fawning adjectives ("magisterial," "felicitous") Lukes bestows on Berlin in nearly every essay in this book.

If Lukes has read Nietzsche, it certainly doesn't show in these essays. In one of the most fatuous assertions in the book, Lukes claims that "Nietzsche, for all his talk of the illusory nature of truth, sought the assent of his readers to timeless truths about human history and psychology?."

As far as this makes any sense, it is simply false. Nietzsche's whole philosophical enterprise was devoted to destroying the notion of "timeless truths," which he attributed to the "mummifying" urge of philosophers like Lukes. The contrast between Nietzsche's historically grounded philosophy and Lukes' timeless commonplaces is summed up by Lukes' claim that "moral matters are not like matters of hygiene." One of Nietzsche's historical insights was that in many cultures, the idea of the "good man" originated precisely in matters of hygiene: The good man was one who avoided certain foods, performed certain cleansings at the prescribed time and avoided "unclean" persons. It's Lukes, not Nietzsche, who spouts "timeless truths" that are, in fact, neither timeless nor true.

Rather than take on the real sources of relativism, Lukes cites trivial, belated "relativists" like Ruth Benedikt and Melville Herskovits. He admits that "?neither anthropologists nor philosophers any longer read Herskovits yet strong anti-universalism survives?" Indeed it does?because, as Lukes knows very well, "anti-universalism" was not created by or dependent on obscure straw men like Herskovits, but rather on figures like Sade, Nietzsche and Foucault?none of whom are quoted even once in this book.

In essence, then, this is a book written in bad faith, to be read in the same bad faith. As Nietzsche said, the philosopher's desires precede and create the philosophy itself. For all his cant about the rational bases of moral judgments, Lukes begins with a sentimental impulse to defend moral orthodoxy, only then finding arguments to support it. Treating the whole intellectual history of ethics as little more than a source of helpful quotations, Lukes pursues an impossible project: "?defend[ing] a pluralism of values that preserves the central message of the Enlightenment while firmly rejecting the nihilism and relativism of its past and present detractors."

Since it was the Enlightenment that developed the concept of "nihilism and relativism," this is a bit of a long shot. Whether we call it by nice names like "pluralism" or scary ones like "nihilism," the dethroning of local mores' claim to universal validity is a fact for everyone not living in Pyongyang or Texas. Writers like Lukes are fighting a hopeless rearguard action, but they can still count on readers eager to hear their simple message reassuring the ignorant that our values are somehow more than local, ephemeral phenomena. There's always a market for flattery, no matter how shoddily written or implausible it is.